Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin

Real Climate is a popular blog that advocates action on climate change. Its authors often uses bullying tactics to enforce a view that their views on science are the sole authoritative basis for judging political action. In turn, here at Prometheus I’ve occasionally used the actions of Real Climate as excellent illustrations of how climate science becomes so politicized and partisan by activist scientists. In this way the skeptics and the activist scientists engage in a dance that requires both to participate to reinforce the belief that science provides the basis for political action. So both have an interest in keeping debate on matters of science, rather than more explicitly on the far more important questions of policy and politics.

Lucky for us, the best example yet of these dynamics can be found in the post that that Real Climate have put up today on Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The Real Climate post seeks to elevate the importance of skepticism in the climate debate (yes, you read that right) so that it can knock it down, while at the same time ignoring far more meaningful issues related to climate policy, like whether a cap and trade program has any chance whatsoever of actually succeeding. In this way Real Climate serves to politicize climate science, make climate policy an even more partisan issue, and draw attention away from the policy questions that really matter most. (read on . . .)

First, it is worth pointing out that Real Climate has no qualms violating their own blog policy:

The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.

Well, this is nothing new and it is of course their blog and they can write about whatever they wish regardless of their stated intent. But it may also be that they simply don’t see themselves talking about politics when they are critiquing the views of a vice presidential candidate. They may think that they are just talking about the science. If so, then this of course is part of the fundamental problem that happens when scientists enter into debates over policy and politics. There is no such thing as sticking to the science. To suggest otherwise is either to be really naive or just disingenuous.

Now on the substance. I claim no ability to discern the meaning behind Sarah Palin’s convoluted and undiagrammable sentences — on global warming or anything else (and while I’m at it, a shout out to the 3rd graders at Wasilla Elementary, extra credit for reading this post — wink!). Further, in my view she is unqualified for the position she is running for (an understatement), but that is not the point of this post. Lets start with Real Climate’s interpretation of Palin’s remarks at the VP debate in response to a question about the causes of climate change, which is that Palin’s statement reflects

“a nod in the direction of acknowledging (tentatively) the possibility of a human influence” on climate in Alaska and/or worldwide

Lets contrast that with Joe Biden’s response to the same question,

“I think it is manmade. I think it’s clearly manmade,”

which Real Climate applauded as, “direct, straightforward, and simple.”

Palin’s acknowledgment of a human role, while expressing some serious doubts about the magnitude of that role, was clearly contrasted by Biden who expressed no doubt. Whose views are right? Well the IPCC says that at least 50% of the global temperature increase since 1950 can be attributed to human causes. Presumably that leaves as much as 50% of the increase due to non-human causes. So it probably is fair to say that there is a mix of human and non-human sources for change. Further, understanding climate changes at the regional level is of course much more difficult than at the global level which is why the IPCC calls such changes “complex and perhaps even counter-intuitive” and observes that “even continental-scale averages contain much greater variability than the global mean in association with planetary-scale waves and events such as El Niño” (p. 240 of Ch. 3 of WGI here in PDF).

So if I’m grading the debate performance of Palin and Biden on this particular question, I give them both pretty poor grades. Climate change, whether in Alaska or globally is not commonly understood within the scientific community to be entirely human-caused, but at the same time there is evidence of a significant human role. But if you are Real Climate you excuse Biden’s incorrect answer by saying,

Well, maybe he left out the kind of caveats and qualifications you’d attach to the attribution of the recent loss of (North) polar sea ice if this were an AGU talk instead of a vice-presidential debate.

It is as if Real Climate is saying that it is OK to be wrong, so long as you are wrong in a politically acceptable direction. And in a bizarre sort of circular logic Real Climate seems to use Palin’s political views to reinforce their impeachment of her views on climate science:

One can moreover doubt even Palin’s commitment to dealing with the consequences of climate change. Surely, that would include doing something to save the polar bears, yet the State of Alaska (against the advice of its own wildlife biologists) is suing the Interior department over its decision to list the polar bear as “threatened”

Well, it is not clear to me that viewing Alaskan climate change as 100% human caused leads one to accept a particular ESA designation on polar bears. There are probably a few other factors involved.

And this gets us to the nub of the matter, and that of course is policy. In this election, while it is true that both John McCain and Barack Obama have strongly endorsed a national cap and trade program to achieve emissions reductions, exactly what they propose remains murky. In its effort to maintain a focus of attention on skeptical views of science, Real Climate gets the basic facts of these policy commitments wrong when they assert that:

it has been encouraging that both John McCain and Barack Obama favor mandatory action to reduce US carbon emissions

They both favor action, but how mandatory is open to question. In fact, both Obama and McCain leave plenty of wiggle room in their plans for a cap and trade approach to reducing emissions, such as indicated in their replies here. In fact, a clear-eyed view of the evolution of the debate over cap and trade as well as its performance in Europe and elsewhere would suggest that there are important questions to be asked about whether or not such an approach can ever meaningfully reduce emissions. This is a debate worth having.

But hey, why ask such questions when we can spend time cheerleading against Sarah Palin’s failure to reflect certain scientific views and take sides in the presidential contest. Because we all know that if we could get everyone to accept a certain view on science — or more accurately, an erroneous view coupled with the right political views — then climate problem would be solved. Right?

Wrong. The fact is that neither campaign has outlined an approach to reducing U.S. emissions that has any chance of working. The fact that both Obama and McCain seem to agree on this issue simply means that neither sees a political advantage in it — with the economy and wars, and now Reverend Wright and the Keating Five, there are plenty of other wedge issues that are at the focus of attention. Anyone thinking that candidates views on climate are meaningfully important in this election is not paying attention. However, the candidates views on climate policy will matter come January when the new president outlines a plan of action, and it currently looks like both platforms are pretty weak. While it is surely a lot of fun to pile on, serious efforts to reduce emissions and adapt to climate variability and change are going to require much more than a deconstruction of Sarah Palin. Self-professed climate experts should leave that to the professionals — like Tina Fey.