Climate Hustle wants you to believe you just can’t trust climate science

Duane Gish, a prominent critic of evolution, was such a prolific debater that, like Dr. Henry Heimlich, he had a maneuver named after him. (The use of either maneuver at a party, incidentally, signifies that things have become decidedly un-fun.) While arguing, Gish would issue a rapid-fire stream of claims—most of them false—about so many different topics, that it would be impossible for his opponent to respond to them all. This quantity-over-quality tactic became known as a “Gish Gallop.”

On Monday night I took in a new film called Climate Hustle. The title is meant to reflect its central premise: climate change is a scientific con. But I soon realized that it was also a decent synonym for the film’s Gish Gallop style. Climate hustle (n): a fast-paced, uninterrupted delivery of superficial and false claims about climate science.

Do the hustle

Climate Hustle is the product of Marc Morano and the conservative Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). Morano, who has worked for Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), now runs a climate “skeptic” blog supported by CFACT and makes regular appearances on cable news shows. His shift into movies is, so far, rather limited; the film appeared in a number of theaters in the US (and one in Canada) for one night only. The audience for this singular event numbered about 15 at my (admittedly quiet) local theater.

Morano serves as the movie’s host, bridging sections of interviews and video clips with sometimes-corny monologues delivered in front of a green screen and into a correspondent’s microphone.

The movie starts with a demonstration of three-card Monte, a rigged card game designed to lighten the wallets of unsuspecting marks. You’re the mark, you see, and “climate activists” are trying to pull one over on you. The rest of the film is broken into sections purporting to extend the metaphor—“Stacking the Deck,” “The Ol’ Switcheroo,” and so on. The attempt to provide structure mostly fails, though. The sections all run together, with topics appearing multiple times and with no real thread to follow. It’s basically just an 80-minute-long list of all the climate “skeptic” blogosphere’s favorite claims—a Gish Gallop, the eponymous climate hustle.

The movie’s real goal is to hold up an array of speakers as authoritative climate experts, allowing them to deny that humans have any significant impact on the climate. Many are university professors—just not in climate science. I counted six that could fairly call themselves climate scientists, all drawn from the small stable of familiar contrarians that cycle through Congressional hearings when contrarian witnesses are in demand.

We’ve got an expert for that

The rest of the faces were straight out of the Rolodex of the Heartland Institute, the conservative “think tank” that pays denialists to put on an annual climate conference. The key is to dress up people who have no idea what they’re talking about as experts on the subject. An adjunct lecturer who teaches an international policy course becomes a “climate statistician at American University,” for example. The facepalm-worthy comments of 1973 Nobel Prize winning physicist Ivar Giaever become a sufficient rebuttal to decades of scientific research. A guy who used to be in Greenpeace tells you that CO₂ is good for the planet, nullifying what all those silly scientists say.

The parade of claims in Climate Hustle isn’t supported by anything other than the fact that a person is saying them. Most are childish non sequiturs: CO₂ is “just one variable” in the climate system, so it can’t be changing anything. Since the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere 70 million years ago was higher than it is today, there is nothing remarkable about its current rise. Few hurricanes have made landfall in the US in recent years, so global warming clearly has no effect on hurricanes anywhere in the world.

And then there are the statements that clearly run counter to reality: there was less Arctic sea ice in the 1930s than there is today. The polar bear population is booming. The consensus in the 1970s was global cooling. Sea level rise is slowing. Climate models have failed. Ice cores show that temperature controls CO₂ rather than the other way around. On and on it goes.

If you didn’t know that the climate “skeptic” movement disagrees with absolutely every conclusion of climate science, Climate Hustle is here to fill you in. And to bring up Al Gore 10 or 20 times.

You can see the climate from Alaska

At the conclusion of the film, viewers were treated to about 40 minutes of video from a panel discussion at the Washington, DC screening a few weeks ago. The panel featured Morano, contrarian scientist David Legates, and… former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Morano repeated lines we’d just heard in the movie while Legates aired his usual complaints of oppression by the rest of the scientific community.

In her signature style, Palin strung together partially coherent talking points largely cribbed from statements preceding hers. She also warned that parents need to protect their children from indoctrination in their public school science classes. She concluded that the climate science community needs to be “less political” and then broadened her target to science in general, pondering what else scientists are wrong about.

Almost half the panel discussion related to Bill Nye, whom Morano had briefly interviewed before the event. Palin caused a bit of a stir when she opened her discounting of Nye’s views on climate change by saying, “I’m as much of a scientist as he is.” For his part, David Legates called him, “Bill Nye, Anti-Science Guy.”

Both the film and the panel discussion labored to dismiss the idea that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is human-caused. They argued that this particular number is based on flawed studies, and that a scientific consensus doesn’t tell you anything, anyway. If messaging campaigns incorporating the “97 percent” statistic have done nothing else, they’ve given these folks something to do.

Climate Hustle is ultimately a movie made by a small group of activists, for that small group of activists. It’s hard to imagine someone picking it up out of curiosity—unless they’re the kind of person that genuinely wonders whether the next Michael Bay movie will have an explosion in it. While it’s long on supposed concern about the integrity of the scientific method, it’s notably short on any actual scientific information.

All the filmmakers really think you need to know is that you can’t trust climate science. And you’ll just have to take their word for it.