Interesting article. In particular I would like to point out the last part of the article.
Fabricating disinformation is easy – rebutting it is hard
Harris’
first commentary at YourHoustonNews was 715 words long (exclusive of title, headings, and byline). The longest versions I’ve seen to date (at the
Heartland Institute) was 835 words long. I estimate that it probably took Harris between four and eight hours to craft the original commentary and then another four to eight hours total to modify the original commentary enough to fit within word limits, address any copyright concerns, and tune the language to match the readership of each of the other seven media outlets.
By contrast, my five part refutation of Harris’ commentaries contains about 11,000 words and took about 80 hours total to research, write, and publish. That’s about 14x more words and between five and ten times longer than my estimate of Harris’ original effort.
This illustrates another advantage the peddlers of disinformation have – disinformation is fast and easy to generate but slow and difficult to correct. After all, spreading disinformation can be as simple as generating a list of plausible-sounding talking points, choosing the ones that match today’s intended message and audience, and then repeating them over and over again on subsequent days and weeks. Harris (with
Willie Soon and
Bob Carter) did this very thing on February 18 in Westmoreland Times op/ed titled
Scientific fraud underlies global warming scare. This op/ed contains the
extensively debunked “carbon dioxide (CO[SUB]2[/SUB] is plant food” talking point and the (
also widely debunked)”global warming is an artifact of corrections to the temperature measurements” talking point, amon others.
Rebutting disinformation, however, requires someone who understands the difference between fact and fiction to explain a) why the disinformation is fiction and b) what the facts actually are. For example, it took Harris about 30 words to accuse anyone who uses the word “denier” of an
ad hominem logical fallacy, but it took me 80 words – and a reference to a
1,200-word post exclusively on the word “denier” – to correct his disinformation. Refuting his deceptive and unproven assertion that climate science is “rapidly evolving” took me hundreds of words because I had to prove not only that he was wrong, but that I was right. Anytime someone spreads disinformation that has to be corrected with actual proof, the correction is going to take more time and effort than spreading the original disinformation did. And while the original disinformation is being corrected, Harris or someone else like him has generated yet more disinformation to be corrected.
People are inclined to believe disinformation if it tells them what they want to hear
Consider the two following examples:
We all need to drive less and eat less meat. We need to buy expensive LED light bulbs instead of the cheap incandescent bulbs. We need to spend more money on electricity and heating our homes and businesses. We need to tell people who have been flooded out of their homes that they’re not allowed to rebuild and that they have to move to higher ground and away from the only homes they’ve ever known. We need to get used to not being able to ski at our favorite ski areas some winters. If we don’t make a bunch of changes the world our children will inherit from us will be worse than the world we inherited from our parents.
versus:
There’s no need to change your habits – drive as much as you want and enjoy that steak. Only replace your bulbs if you think it saves you money overall. We should keep building coal and natural gas power plants so we can keep electricity cheap. Go ahead and rebuild in that floodplain and along that shoreline – the government can always build more levees and truck in more sand to keep your brand new homes safe for next time. There’s no evidence that your favorite ski areas will ever run out of snow, so don’t worry about that either. Everything’s fine as it is and your kids will be better off when they grow up than you are now.
Which would you rather believe, the first example or the second? The best available science says that the first example is closer to the reality of industrial climate disruption than the second, but most people, including me, would prefer to believe the second example. And this is perhaps the biggest advantage that Harris and his fellow peddlers of deceit have – they’re selling a comfortable and pleasant fiction that people
want to believe, rather than selling an uncomfortable and unpleasant reality that no-one really wants to believe.
—
Harris and his fellow peddlers of deceit have four major advantages working in their favor. The media is biased toward their disinformation, they have lots of both time and money to spend, fabricating talking points is both easy and fast, and the public wants to hear their message. It’s easy to see why the USA and the international community have made so little progress toward addressing industrial climate disruption. The advantages are so significant that I estimate it takes between 10 and 20 climate realists to correct the output of each and every professional climate disruption denier.
But there is one advantage that the peddlers don’t have – physics. Physics doesn’t care about media biases, money, political ideology, personal biases, or even truth. Physics doesn’t care whether we want to believe in it or not. And physics always has the last word. The problem is that, if we don’t stop listening to the peddlers of deceit and start listening to physics, that last word may well be one we don’t want to hear.
Notes
- Industrial climate disruption: the position that climate is changing, that the emission of greenhouse gases by human industry is the dominant driver of those changes, and that the changes will almost certainly be disruptive to human society and global ecology
- Climate disruption denier: someone who denies that industrial climate disruption is supported by multiple independent lines of evidence and is derived from well established physical laws
- Climate realist: someone who accepts the overwhelming data demonstrating that industrial climate disruption is real
