Before we get to today’s not-Exxon story, a quick announcement: The Center for International Environmental Law has added over 100 new documents to their Smoke and Fumes website of searchable oil industry documents. So if you have an appetite for investigation, this should suit your tastes.
Speaking of tastes, everyone knows what a blind taste test is. They're a staple of the marketing world, and check whether or not you can really taste the difference between diet and regular soda. Which you prefer, is the consume-ate question that will never be decisively answered and will keep bubbling up again and again.
But blind tests can be useful for delivering refreshingly unbiased answers to questions even more contentious than Coke vs Pepsi. For example, is the ice cover of the Arctic growing or shrinking? And are sea levels rising or stable?
These are two questions posed in a new study that uses the tried and true blind test approach to gauge the reliability of denier arguments. Researchers relabeled climate data as population and economic data and served it up to economists and statisticians. That way the subjects were blind to the true meaning of the data, so no one could accuse them of being biased in their responses.
The results were more one sided than any diet soda commercial could possibly hope for. The contrarian interpretations were judged to be misleading, while the mainstream climate claims were deemed “accurate and policy relevant.” According to the lead researcher Stephen Lewandowsky, the results were stark, with the mainstream claims rated as very reliable and the denier’s incredibly misleading, and the two groups rated “about as far apart as anything I’ve seen.” So in this blind test, the denier claims fell flat and were hard to swallow, and the mainstream science went down easy.
And if your reaction to the fact that a few still takes deniers seriously is that it’s sad, just so da-pressing, this is an encouraging result. In the ongoing Climate Wars, this marks yet another loss for the deniersphere, and a win for the mainstream carbonnation.
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