This week, coal baron Matt Ridley took to the Koch-funded UK contrarian site Sp!ked to offer up one of the oldest versions of climate denial, presenting the disinformation-based argument that really “global warming is good for us.” It’s a bit of a snooze-fest, to be honest. By the end, though, he also offers some newer varieties of climate conspiracies, citing Roger Pielke Jr.’s RCP8.5 conspiracy about how billionaires have corrupted climate science.
Hardly surprising for Ridley to lean on conspiracy theories to advance his interests in keeping the money coming from the coal mine on his family’s property, but more entertaining is his response to being called out for being a kook.
It’s always interesting to watch conspiracy theorists respond to being called conspiracy theorists, because their response is almost never to pause, reflect on the situation, and reconsider why their behavior is leading people to having such negative impressions. Instead, they reactively and perhaps instinctively turn to the very conspiratorial thinking they’ve denied.
For example, the latest Scientific American is a big issue on Covid-19, featuring an opinion piece by three interdisciplinary researchers talking about how conspiracy theories make it harder for any real search for truth to operate. Conspiratorial thinking has a “self-sealing” component, they write: “as more evidence against the conspiracy emerges, adherents keep the theory alive by dismissing contrary evidence as further proof of the conspiracy, creating an ever more elaborate and complicated theory.”
When confronted with the reality that disinformation distorts, deniers just pile on more disinformation to make it make sense.
“Lessons from climate science,” they write, “show that failure to demarcate conspiratorial reasoning from scientific investigation results in public confusion, insufficient action from leadership, and the harassment of scientists.”
What’s more, “it even has the potential to impact research itself, as scientists are diverted into knocking back incorrect claims and, in the process, potentially ceding them more legitimacy than warranted.” That’s true whether it’s regarding climate conspiracies getting in the way of climate science or conspiracies about Covid leaking from a Chinese lab, for example, as bank-crasher Matt Ridley has co-written a book about.
Ridley’s co-authored work questioning the official story on Covid-19’s origins came out in November, and at the time we wrote that Ridley’s challenge to the expert medical covid consensus “is placing his trust in randos online taking comments out of context and ‘discovering’ flaws in data that are really just flaws in their competency, and using that to spin up a misleading narrative about an issue of global importance.”
Accidentally proving us right this week, Ridley responded to the Scientific American piece by quoting some old criticism of Steve McIntyre, one of the co-authors. It's a great example of one of Ridley’s incompetent online “sleuths” being little more than exactly the sort of garden variety conspiracy theorist wasting real scientists time that the SciAm piece describes.
As long-time climate denial-watchers know, McIntyre made his name attacking the infamous hockey-stick graph of global temperatures, but in more recent years got into defending Russia against chemical weapon use allegations in Syria and other political conspiracies.
Ironic, then, that Ridley retweeted McIntyre’s attack, because it engages in exactly the sort of conspiracy thinking the piece calls out, accusing one of the co-authors of the Scientific American piece (about the dangers of conspiracies), of engaging in a conspiracy to fake data for a study to embarrass climate deniers.
Ridley was called out for relying on conspiracy theorists to challenge real science, and in response, he retweeted a conspiracy theorist’s challenge to real science. Ridley reacted to criticism that his conspiracy thinking is self-sealing by invoking a conspiracy theory from a fellow conspiracy theorist.
We reached out to one of the co-authors, Peter Jacobs, for a reaction to the reactions. He told us that “from anti-GMO conspiracy theorists inventing non-existent ties to Monsanto, to climate contrarians citing other climate contrarians, there sure are a lot of people telling on themselves. For Ridley it very much seems like a case of "if the (clown) shoe fits…”
In the Scientific American piece, the co-authors concluded, more formally, that “we are not doomed to keep repeating the mistakes of past intersections of science and conspiracy should we choose to learn from them instead.”
Ridley, as someone whose past mistakes include crashing a bank because he bought into a self-sealing conspiracy of profit, doesn’t seem to be particularly keen to learn from his mistakes.