“If you want to show that A is a fact, you need evidence: But what makes you sure that B is evidence of A? To show that, you need meta-evidence: C. And for the validity of that meta-evidence, you need metameta-evidence- and so on, ad nauseam.” This passage from Douglas Hofstader’s Nobel-Prize-winning novel Gödel, Escher, Bach^[1] has much to say about the epistemological underpinnings of the so-called “debate” on climate change. Instead of dressing this argument in the traditional tired rhetoric, let’s take a look at the core of the climate change imbroglio: the concept of evidence itself. Instead of climate change, which has already reached a scientific consensus, let us look at a phenomenon that we will probably all agree that science has all but abandoned as a legitimate inquiry: extra-sensory perception, or ESP.

As an example of the problem suggested by the opening passage, an “evidence dilemma” is apparent when attempting to research ESP and similar fringe science concepts that disappear when taken inside the laboratory. The hard-line scientific answer to ESP is that it is not subject to scrutiny by way of the scientific method. However, as we all know, there is no shortage of those who claim to have communion with the dead or the ability to read minds. Many believers in such concepts will use a curious method to justify their beliefs; they would say that ESP is a phenomenon that is impossible to observe scientifically—that it is in direct opposition to the scientific worldview. This bold argument has the effect of shunting criticism from the matter at hand to cast doubt upon theories of higher credibility. In this line of reasoning ESP is fully verifiable; the empirically verifiable worldview of science is not. These are the types of arguments often used to find fault with climate change.

There is no debate where climate change is concerned. There is a scientific consensus that human activities are causing the global temperature to rise, and there is a concentrated effort by Big Oil to reframe the issue as a “debate.” This is not a secret. ExxonMobil, the vanguard of climate change denial, funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy groups with a mission to confuse the public about climate change science^[2]. Is there another industry in recent memory that tried to use its considerable funds to falsely assure the public that its products were safe? Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both problems involve smoke. This time, instead of seeking the truth, America has let slick television ads and biased talking heads coddle them the point that many people are convinced the Emperor’s robes are a masterwork of silk brocade.

Merely discussing the facts of climate change are irrelevant—the two camps have differing opinions of what is, in fact, a “fact.” The people on both sides of this circus that Big Oil is glad to provide are not climate scientists, so we have to take the word of the scientific community. Unfortunately, as a society, we have been split into two camps with a rigid ideology. Instead of the open-minded skepticism of science, we have become paralyzed by the hardheaded certainty of belief against all types of evidence. Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” in 2005, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.” ^[3] Doesn’t it have a lot of truthiness that an international cabal of scientists (yes, scientists) want to force an environmental agenda on our God-fearing country? Doesn’t it have a lot of truthiness that if parts of Antarctica were cooling, than surely we have nothing to worry about? How about the ten other “facts” that Big Oil-funded think tanks have pumped into our society? Real, peer-reviewed science has but one conclusion. From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received the Nobel Prize in 2007:

For the global average, warming in the last century has occurred in two phases, from the 1910s to the 1940s (0.35°C), and more strongly from the 1970s to the present (0.55°C). An increasing rate of warming has taken place over the last 25 years, and 11 of the 12 warmest years on record have occurred in the past 12 years. […] Confirmation of global warming comes from warming of the oceans, rising sea levels, glaciers melting, sea ice retreating in the Arctic and diminished snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere.

That doesn’t have much truthiness at all! That would make an awful Hollywood movie—melting glaciers and sea ice? Yawn. All the numbers, detailed reports, and statistical models in the world won’t convince people who are opposed to the very concept of experts telling them what’s true and what’s not. It happens to be a sign of the times.

With a million Wikipedia articles and ten million blogs at our fingertips, many people suddenly feel that they are just as qualified as the experts who are telling us what to do. The question is: will we first Google “climate change hoax” or “climate change.” Which would we start with? That’s all wrapped up in the idea of confirmation bias.

A technical description for something we see every day, confirmation bias is our propensity to seek out and interpret evidence in a way that fits in with existing beliefs or expectations^[4]. In the utopian version of the scientific method, one takes a look at all the evidence available as objectively as one can, and then draws a conclusion. However, this isn’t as easy in a world where we don’t have time to ponder the merits of a hypothesis in a vacuum. Media feed us contradictory images and cry wolf about anything in order to sell newspapers and attract TV viewers. We might be a bit jaded after hearing the parade of doomsday speeches about Y2K, bird flu, and mad cow disease, but we know that at least some of these doomsday scenarios do come true (as we learned on September 11). We never go into making a decision like this without having our own biases, which leads us to interpret the same information in different ways.

While someone like your humble author might cite the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, someone else could say that the IPCC, and the Union of Concerned Scientists are political groups. That is true, although the inverse argument is also true: that climate change denial groups are also political^[5]. However, the crucial difference is that the vast majority of scientists are not beholden to the energy lobby. It’s almost a cliché now to talk about how Big Tobacco manipulated public opinion on the carcinogenic effects of cigarette smoke. Now, as soon as we hear someone has lung cancer, we ask: “did they smoke?” Future generations made homeless by rising seawater, increasingly devastating floods and droughts will surely rue petroleum industry for their role in denying the reality of climate change. The parallels are all there. ExxonMobil is the world’s largest corporation, raking in $477 billion in 2008^[6]. Just let that figure wash across your mind. Four hundred seventy seven billion dollars. For them to dump $16 million to fund some fake grassroots groups and some fake climate change studies is a drop in the bucket to them.

Still, this touches on that fundamental slippery issue of a post-fact world. How do we tell the “junk science” of the ExxonMobil front groups from that of “junk science” of the scientific establishment? We need that meta-evidence. That ineffable quality that makes us think “yes, that is right.” Let’s say you read two studies on, say, the link between HIV and AIDS. One is done by Harvard medical school, the other is conducted by a school you haven’t heard of in Missouri. It’s traditional to give the study by a well-respected educational institution more weight. However, give that to TV news and talk radio for ten minutes: “Harvard is the ivory tower, full of those godless liberal humanists that are destroying our country. We obviously can’t trust anything they produce.” The core of this climate change debate is that we don’t judge facts as being facts any more.

“Facts” are too intellectual for our new age, where truthiness reigns supreme and everything is framed as a “debate.” 24-hour news networks and talk radio love “debates,” but they don’t like facts. Facts are boring and flat. They taste like cardboard. You can’t opine about a fact for a 25-minute news segment. That’s why the oil lobby has had such success, and exactly why Big Tobacco had pulled the wool over the public’s eyes for so many years.

We are clearly living in a new age. If the Enlightenment was also called the “age of reason,” I wonder what moniker future historians will attach to us. This is an age where a petition by people who are not climate scientists published by an institute that received $630,000 from ExxonMobil, printed in the same font and format as the peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, has the same weight as the report of an intergovernmental panel of Nobel-Prize-winning climate scientists created by the United Nations. It’s a good thing there’s no financial incentive to create a “debate” about whether HIV causes AIDS (good thing the PhARMA lobby makes money from anti-AIDS drugs), or whether the sun revolves around the earth (good thing atlas publishers aren’t in the Fortune 500), or where babies come from (thankfully, condoms are profitable too).

It would be forgivable to America if all of this astroturfing and fake-science promotion were anything new, but it isn’t. Big Tobacco did it first, and they did it best. Who did the ExxonMobils of the world go to when they needed something new “disproven?” They Googled Big Tobacco. Steve Milloy worked for PhilipMorris to attempt disprove the negative health effects of secondhand smoke. He’s still a commentator on “junk science”^[7]. Translation: science that can cost multinational corporations money. He is a contributor to Fox News and argues these topics on air, to ExxonMobil’s delight. In fact, they must have been so delighted that they paid his climate change denial organization, the Free Enterprise Action Institute $50,000. If as a society we’ve lost the ability to follow the facts, at least we can follow the money. Has Greenpeace been secretly paying off the IPCC millions of dollars to fake climate change? No. Have the godless liberals at the Nobel Foundation conspired to legitimize the work of “fringe science?” No.

There are two groups of people. One are scientists, one are not. One is bought and paid for by the oil industry, one is not. One says that a problem that could cost the oil industry lots of money exists; one says it doesn’t. Which group are you going to believe? We’ll have to go with the one with the most truthiness.

1. ^[1] Hofstader, Douglas. Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1999. ↩
2. ^[2] “ExxonMobil Report: Smoke Mirrors & Hot Air.” Union of Concerned Scientists. Union of Concerned Scientists, 02 Dec 2007. Web. 24 Mar 2010. http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/exxonmobil-report-smoke.html. ↩
3. ^[3] “Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2006″. Merriam-Webster. March 10, 2010 http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/06words.htm. ↩
4. ^[4] Nickerson, Raymond S. “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises.” Review of General Psychology 2.2 (1998): 175-220. Web. 12 Mar 2010. ↩
5. ^[5] Monbiot, George. “The Denial Industry.” The Guardian. The Guardian, 19 Sept. 2006. Web. 05 Apr. 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2. ↩
6. ^[6] “Yahoo Finance” Yahoo. March 5, 2010 http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=XOM&annual ↩
7. ^[7] Milloy, Steven. “Secondhand Smokescreen.” March 29, 2010. http://www.junkscience.com/foxnews/fn030901.html ↩