With a hefty $100,000 grant from a private foundation American University social scientist and media and science policy analyst Matthew Nisbet has written a bracing report he calls Climate Shift. It analyses why worries over climate change have not gotten deep traction in US politics.

It’s long, heavily footnoted, and while it is aimed at explaining the extreme polarization of public opinion over climate change, and discussing how various partisans are seeking to shape it, the report itself instantly generated a big dose of polarization.

It was supposed to have been publicized today. Well-known and uncompromisingly fierce blogger Joe Romm, at his site ClimateProgress, jumped the embargo – a rather weak one, one must say, that just begged to be broken anyway – a few days ago. Romm seems to operate on the principle that climate change is such an existential threat to humanity and life as we know it on Earth that emergency measures ought to be taken now and anybody not on board with that is a fool. And he lambastes the report’s conclusions. Ammunition comes from one professor who reviewed the report in advance for Nisbet, and was so upset at its final result he returned his honorarium and demanded his name be removed from it.

Nesbit’s conclusions, buttressed by piles of footnotes, include that:

• Al Gore and other openly Democrat and usually liberal partisans did as much to polarize and to put the public off from cap and trade as did the conservative forces backed with corporate money.
• The media did not mislead the public, and has not for years now, by engaging (not much anyway) in ‘false balance’ that implies a significant schism exists among scientists over the reality and human causes of global warming.
• Don’t blame evil old-industry capitalist and conservative money. “Green” forces lobbying for cap and trade legislation have caught up with and in some ways exceeded the money spent by climate change contrarian and skeptical forces. That includes notably the piles of cash that the Libertarian Koch brothers have poured into the fray.
• Scientists may well agree that climate change is real and demands action, but they – as represented by AAAS membership -  are so far to the left of the American median that they come off as partisan rather than authoritative.
• The fastest way to get anything done about climate change and greenhouse emissions is to stop talking about it as an environmental issue – saving the climate – and stress the economic benefits of innovation, of moving off a fossil fuel economy,  and away from dependence on foreign oil.

That’s how I read it anyway. There is lots to the report. For one thing, Chapter 3 convincingly demolishes the idea that “false balance” in reporting misled the public into thinking that the science is too uncertain to justify major dislocations in the economy to blunt the pace of climate change. There are many plots of data. Here’s one to the right. Journalists on the beat need to read this chapter.  Fox News is not included in this chapter’s data bases. Fox, Nisbet writes, addresses an audience of fixed vision that would be skeptical of climate change no matter what, so it doesn’t much change the debate (critics, including Romm, disagree). The red parts of that chart represent the portion of news stories in an elite, select group of US news outlets that reflect the consensus, climate-change-is-real opinion among researchers in the field. The other segments represent false balance and open scorn. A lot of those categories ran in the Wall St. Journal’s opinion pages.

One can understand why the report is getting flak from environmental activists. It tells them not to go on and on about climate, but talk about energy independence or the invigorating economic impact of technical innovation.

Here’s liberal me, but just because the people worried most about climate change tend to the left or progressive side of politics is no reason to fudge the truth about the seriousness of climate change, and its primacy among reasons to change the economy fast. The problem here is that if climate change is so serious, its correctives all seem to require concerted, int’l government action. Mandatory stuff ordered by distant bureaucrats will always inspire in the conservative side of humanity desperation to wish the problem away rather than accept a solution so hard to stomach. So it goes. Where’s the intellectual honesty in fibbing about why one thinks we need to burn a LOT less fossil fuel? That is, the conservative-offending nature of plausible solutions is built in to the situation, and is not the result of bad framing of the argument. Changing the subject won’t help. That is, climate change itself must be cast as a non-partisan issue of major significance. Solutions and arguments about them ought to be a different topic (and good luck with that..).

Well-known bloggers and other editorialists, aside from Romm, are all over this.

• Chris Mooney (The Intersection blog) The Nisbet Report on Our Climate Failures, Part I. Mooney says he is troubled. Blame Gore?
• Jocelyn Fond, Fae Jencks (Media Matters blog) Report Glosses Over Media Failures in Climate Coverage ;
• Nature Magazine (Editorial): Home truths ; Says Nisbet’s report does an excellent job.
• Keith Kloor (Collide-a-Scape blog) : Joe Romm Breaks Media Embargo, Kneecaps Nisbet ;
• Bradford Plumer (NPR/New Republic) : Eco-Movement Faces A Hostile Climate ; Xlnt analysis.
• Roger Pielke Jr. (eponymic blog) Analysis of the Nisbet Report, Part I and Part II. It includes valuable background context including this Gallup Survey result.

- Charlie Petit

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