‘Peiser refuted Oreskes’–In a poor piece of work that has been retracted by its author

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Sure, Oreskes found no one bucking the consensus, but her paper was refuted by Benny Peiser, who did the exact same survey and found very different results.

Answer: True, Benny Peiser did attempt a similar study and submitted it as a letter to Science responding to the Oreskes study. But for very good reasons, it was not published.

Peiser claimed to find 34 articles in his "reject or doubt the consensus view" category. That's 3 percent of the total, so even taken at face value it doesn't cast much doubt on the consensus. But it is greater than the 0 percent Oreskes found, and serves as ammunition for the "there is no consensus" crowd.

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The one does not get the other

The mainstream media has a bead on the blogosphere. They've got their story.

"The blogs" is now short-hand for "conspiricists, wackos, and (worst of all) partisans." If a nightly news producer needs something slightly outre said, something outside the orbit of polite political dialogue, "the blogs" are happy to say it for them. There are, after all, a lot of blog posts. They're bound to say anything.

This makes the media lazy. Exhibit A: CBS Nightly News did a story on the widespread belief that Bush & Rove are manipulating gas prices in advance of the mid-term elections. We're told the blogs are fairly abuzz with suspicion.

For this, they mustered two blog screenshots:

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Carbon offsets that go to developing world forests rule

Here's an uplifting article by Rhett Butler over at Mongabay. It enables my personal eco-fantasy. It's titled, Avoided deforestation could help fight third world poverty under global warming pact. $43 billion could flow into developing countries:

When trees are cut greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere -- roughly 20 percent of annual emissions of such heat-trapping gases result from deforestation and forest degradation. Avoided deforestation is the concept where countries are paid to prevent deforestation that would otherwise occur. Funds come from industrialized countries seeking to meet emissions commitments under international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol. Policymakers and environmentalists alike find the idea attractive because it could help fight climate change at a low cost while improving living standards for some of the world's poorest people, safeguarding biodiversity, and preserving other ecosystem services. A number of prominent conservation biologists and development agencies including the World Bank and the U.N. have already endorsed the idea. [Even the United States government has voiced support for the plan.]

The article also arrived just in time to support my argument presented here. Don't you just love it when you find people who share your point of view?

Or just a distraction

Adam Stein of TerraPass (a major offset provider) argues in favor of offsets on the basis of additionality. (An offset is a payment by a polluter to somebody else to reduce their emissions so the polluter does not have to. Additionality is the claim that we know how much pollution would have occurred without the payment.) It's very generous of him to contribute to a discussion which will probably lead to a drop in sales of his company's product.

The key points in this argument are that a) measures of additionality are imprecise, and b) that fact matters a great deal more than the same imprecision in other methods of putting a price on carbon.

Let's examine the first point -- that additionality cannot be measured with much certainty or precision.

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