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Contrarians Are Not Always Right

July 12, 2005

A common gambit employed by climate change skeptics is to point out that, throughout history, contrarians have shed important new light on scientific questions. Like Copernicus insisting that the Earth revolves around the sun, their willingness to defy the prevailing consensus led to the identification of fatal flaws in the conventional wisdom, a paradigm shift, and a new, more accurate understanding of the world and universe around us.

It is an enticing argument -- but beware of the logical fallacy snares concealed within it. Contrarians indeed play a valuable role in the advance of science, but outliers are not always right. For every Copernicus, there have been many cranks, now lost to history, whose contrarian ideas failed to withstand careful scrutiny.

As climate research continues, the case of the climate skeptics grows increasingly thin. A few months ago, scientists reported that their detailed analysis of ocean heat content shows that the Earth is absorbing more radiant energy than it is giving off.

An implication of this finding is that there is more warming in the "pipeline," because oceans have immense "thermal inertia." Like a heavy truck that has enormous momentum after it finally gets up to speed, heat stored in the oceans' depths will continue to warm the Earth over the next century -- even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped today.

Even more recently, scientists have found that the oceans' absorption of increased carbon dioxide is turning them more acidic, which has sobering implications for marine life.

Despite the growing evidence, in the funhouse mirror world of politics, climate change cranks receive attention out of all proportion to their standing in the scientific community or the quality of their evidence. In Washington, DC, the funhouse mirror world of politics takes scientific illiteracy to dangerous extremes.

Facts, however, are stubborn things, and not even politicians can dodge the laws of physics forever. In accepting the G8 summit resolution on climate change, the U.S. administration agreed to its language, which explicitly states that greenhouse gas emissions caused by burning fossil fuels are changing the climate.

The G8 resolution wasn't much -- no targets and timetables for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, no commitment to negotiate a global grand bargain among developed and developing nations integrating energy, economic development, and technology transfer policies.

Still, in accepting the resolution, the administration has -- probably grudgingly -- stopped clinging so stubbornly to its threadbare position that the scientific jury is still out on the links between human activities and the rise in global average temperatures.

It was a few pennies' worth of progress, but the price of continued delay in reducing greenhouse gas emissions will only go up.