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Galileo was right, but that doesn't mean his fans are. Justus Sustermans/Wikimedia Commons

The recently elected One Nation senator from Queensland, Malcolm Roberts, fervently rejects the established scientific fact that human greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change, invoking a fairly familiar trope of paranoid theories to propound this belief.

Roberts variously claims that the United Nations is trying to impose world government on us through climate policy, and that CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology are corrupt institutions that, one presumes, have fabricated the climate extremes that we increasingly observe all over the world.

In the world of Malcolm Roberts, these agencies are marionettes of a “cabal” of “the major banking families in the world”. Given the parallels with certain strands of anti-Jewish sentiment, it’s perhaps an unfortunate coincidence that Roberts has reportedly relied on a notorious Holocaust denier to support this theory.

It might be tempting to dismiss his utterances as conspiratorial ramblings. But they can teach us a great deal about the psychology of science denial. They also provide us with a broad spectrum of diagnostics to spot pseudoscience posing as science.

The necessity of conspiracism

First, the appeal to a conspiracy among scientists, bankers and governments is never just a slip of the tongue but a pervasive and necessary ingredient of the denial of well-established science. The tobacco industry referred to medical research on lung cancer as being conducted by an “oligopolistic cartel” that “manufactures alleged evidence”. Some people accuse the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of creating and spreading AIDS, and much anti-vaccination content on the web is suffused with conspiratorial allegations of totalitarianism.

This conspiratorial mumbo jumbo inevitably arises when people deny facts that are supported by an overwhelming body of evidence and are no longer the subject of genuine debate in the scientific community, having already been tested thoroughly. As evidence mounts, there comes a point at which inconvenient scientific findings can only be explained away by recourse to huge, nebulous and nefarious agendas such as the World Government or Stalinism.

If you are addicted to nicotine but terrified of the effort required to give up smoking, it might be comforting instead to accuse medical researchers of being oligopolists (whatever that means).

Likewise, if you are a former coal miner, like Malcolm Roberts, it is perhaps easier to accuse climate scientists of colluding to create a world government (whatever that is) than to accept the need to take coal out of our economy.

There is now ample research showing the link between science denial and conspiracism. This link is supported by independent studies from around the world.

Indeed, the link is so established that conspiracist language is one of the best diagnostic tools you can use to spot pseudoscience and science denial.

The Galileo gambit

How else can science dissenters attempt to justify their contrarian position? Another tactic is to appeal to heroic historical dissenters, the usual hero of choice being Galileo Galilei, who overturned the orthodoxy that everything revolves around the Earth.

This appeal is so common in pseudoscientific quackery that it is known as the Galileo gambit. The essence of this argument is:

They laughed at Galileo, and he was right.

They laugh at me, therefore I am right.

A primary logical difficulty with this argument is that plenty of people are laughed at because their positions are absurd. Being dismissed by scientists doesn’t automatically entitle you to a Nobel Prize.

Another logical difficulty with this argument is that it implies that no scientific opinion can ever be valid unless it is rejected by the vast majority of scientists. Earth must be flat because no scientist other than a Googling Galileo in Gnowangerup says so. Tobacco must be good for you because only tobacco-industry operatives believe it. And climate change must be a hoax because only the heroic Malcolm Roberts and his Galileo Movement have seen through the conspiracy.

Yes, Senator-elect Roberts is the project leader of the Galileo Movement, which denies the scientific consensus on climate change, favouring instead the opinions of a pair of retired engineers and the radio personality Alan Jones.

Any invocation of Galileo’s name in the context of purported scientific dissent is a red flag that you’re being fed pseudoscience and denial.

The sounds of science

The rejection of well-established science is often couched in sciency-sounding terms. The word “evidence” has assumed a particular prominence in pseudoscientific circles, perhaps because it sounds respectable and evokes images of Hercule Poirot tenaciously investigating dastardly deeds.

Since being elected, Roberts has again aired his claim that there is “no empirical evidence” for climate change.

But “show us the evidence” has become the war cry of all forms of science denial, from anti-vaccination activists to creationists, despite the existence of abundant evidence already.

This co-opting of the language of science is a useful rhetorical device. Appealing to evidence (or a lack thereof) seems reasonable enough at first glance. Who wouldn’t want evidence, after all?

It is only once you know the genuine state of the science that such appeals are revealed to be specious. Literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific articles and the national scientific academies of 80 countries support the pervasive scientific consensus on climate change. Or, as the environmental writer George Monbiot has put it:

It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb: a crumb which then disintegrates in the palm of your hand. You must ignore an entire canon of science, the statements of the world’s most eminent scientific institutions and thousands of papers published in the foremost scientific journals.

Accordingly, my colleagues and I recently showed that in a blind test – the gold standard of experimental research – contrarian talking points about climate indicators were uniformly judged to be misleading and fraudulent by expert statisticians and data analysts.

Conspiracism, the Galileo gambit and the use of sciency-sounding language to mislead are the three principal characteristics of science denial. Whenever one or more of them is present, you can be confident you’re listening to a debate about politics or ideology, not science.

Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Royal Society, and the Psychonomic Society.

Snow leopards are just one of the species still threatened by hunting. from www.shutterstock.com

History might judge the Paris climate agreement to be a watershed for all humanity. If nations succeed in halting runaway climate change, this will have enormous positive implications for life on Earth.

Yet as the world applauds a momentous shift toward carbon neutrality and hope for species threatened by climate change, we can’t ignore the even bigger threats to the world’s wildlife and ecosystems.

Climate change threatens 19% of globally threatened and near-threatened species – including Australia’s critically endangered mountain pygmy possum and the southern corroboree frog. It’s a serious conservation issue.

Yet our new study, published in Nature, shows that by far the largest current hazards to biodiversity are overexploitation and agriculture.

The biggest threats to the world’s wildlife Sean Maxwell et al. The cost of overexploitation and agriculture

We assessed nearly 9,000 species listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. We found that 72% are threatened by overexploitation and 62% by agriculture.

Overexploitation (the unsustainable harvest of species from the wild) is putting more species on an extinction pathway than any other threat.

And the expansion and intensification of agriculture (the production of food, fodder, fibre and fuel crops; livestock; aquaculture; and the cultivation of trees) is the second-largest driver of biodiversity loss.

Hunting and gathering is a threat to more than 1,600 species, including many large carnivores such as tigers and snow leopards.

Unsustainable logging is driving the decline of more than 4,000 species, such as Australia’s Leadbeater’s possum, while more than 1,000 species, including southern bluefin tuna, are losing out to excessive fishing pressure.

Land change for crop farming and timber plantations imperils more than 5,300 species, such as the far eastern curlew, while the northern hairy-nosed wombat is one of more than 2,400 species affected by livestock farming and aquaculture.

The far eastern curlew is threatened by farming. Curlew image from www.shutterstock.com

The threat information used to inform our study is the most comprehensive available. But it doesn’t tell the complete story.

Threats are likely to change in the future. Climate change, for example, will become increasingly problematic for many species in coming decades.

Moreover, threats to biodiversity rarely operate in isolation. More than 80% of the species we assessed are facing more than one major threat.

Through threat interactions, smaller threats can indirectly drive extinction risk. Roads and energy production, for example, are known to facilitate the emergence of overexploitation, land modification and habitat loss.

But until we have a better understanding of how threats interact, a pragmatic course of action is to limit those impacts that are currently harming the most species.

By ensuring that major threats that occur today (overexploitation, agriculture and so on) do not compromise ecosystems tomorrow, we can help to ameliorate the challenges presented by impending climate change.

Getting it right

Overexploitation and agriculture demand a variety of conservation approaches. Traditional approaches, such as well-placed protected areas and the enforcement of hunting, logging and fishing regulations, remain the strongest defence against the ravages of guns, nets and bulldozers.

Achieving a truly effective protected area network is impossible, however, when governments insist on relegating protected areas to “residual” places – those with least promise for commercial uses.

Reducing impacts from overexploitation of forests and fish is also futile unless industries that employ clearfell logging and illegal fishing vessels transition to more environmentally sustainable practices.

Just as critical as traditional approaches are incentives for hunters, fishers and farmers to conserve threatened species outside designated conservation areas.

Australia’s Leadbeater’s possum remains threatened by logging. Greens MPs/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

For nations like Australia, our study shows there is a growing mismatch in environmental policy and the outcomes for biodiversity. Environmental programs such as the once well-funded National Reserve System Strategy and Biodiversity Fund were important in that they helped conserve wildlife on private and public land, and were fundamental to defeating the biggest, prevailing threats to Australia’s biodiversity. But these programs either do not exist anymore or have little funding to support them at state and federal levels.

On top of this, land-clearing – without doubt one of the largest threats to biodiversity across the country – is on the increase because laws have been repealed across the country. Any benefits accrued by previous good environmental programs are being eroded.

If we are to seriously tackle the largest threats to biodiversity in Australia, we need to recognise the biggest threats. This means efforts to reduce threats from agriculture and overexploitation of forests and fish must include durable environmental regulation.

This article was co-authored by Thomas Brooks, head of science and knowledge at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Sean Maxwell receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions.

James Watson receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is Director of the Science and Research Initiative at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Richard Fuller receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

California wants to limit the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by belching and farting of 5.5 million cows, but the industry is hitting back with a dose of reality

California’s attempt to curb emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is facing vocal opposition from a dairy industry that fears government meddling in the flatulence of its cows.

The California Air Resources Board (ARB) has set a goal of slashing methane emissions by 40% by 2030, from 2013 levels, and has targeted the belching and farting – known as “enteric fermentation” – of California’s 5.5 million beef and dairy cows, as well as the manure they create.

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The latest “community support” offer from the Treasury (Fracking payouts condemned as ‘bribes’, 8 August) for those areas having fracking rigs installed is truly a Russian roulette gamble for local people. An article in the Washington Post on 10 April last year, headlined “Rise of deadly radon gas in Pennsylvania buildings linked to fracking industry”, reported on a detailed study in the journal Environmental Health Perspective that revealed a “disturbing correlation” between unusually high levels of radon gas in mostly residences and fracking that has become the industry standard over the past decade.

Moreover, this is what Public Health England (the health watchdog) stated in October 2013: “If the natural gas delivery point were to be close to the extraction point with a short transit time, radon present in the natural gas would have little time to decay … there is therefore the potential for radon gas to be present in natural gas extracted from UK shale.” This health trade-off for money is what this offer really asks residents to accept. In light of this clear precautionary approach, it is odd that all ministers seem to be uncritically cheerleading for expanded fracking, despite its possible radon risk.
Dr David Lowry
Institute for Resource and Security Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

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Efforts to address climate change must not overshadow more immediate priorities for the survival of the world’s flora and fauna, say researchers

Agriculture and the overexploitation of plants and animal species are significantly greater threats to biodiversity than climate change, new analysis shows.

Joint research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday found nearly three-quarters of the world’s threatened species faced these threats, compared to just 19% affected by climate change.

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Americans dispose of about 12.8m tons of textiles annually. But a growing number of environmentalists and clothing retailers say it’s time to begin making new clothes out of old items on a large scale, reports Yale Environment 360

Fast-growing, fast-fashion retailer H&M, which has more than 4,000 stores in 62 countries, sold $24.5bn worth of T-shirts, pants, jackets, and dresses last year. It also took 12,000 tons of clothes back. In a glossy, celebrity-studded video, H&M says: “There are no rules in fashion but one: Recycle your clothes.”

Recycling has become a rallying cry in the apparel industry, with H&M as its most vocal evangelist. The Swedish firm launched a €1m contest to seek out ideas for turning old clothes into new, invested in Worn Again, a company that is developing textile recycling technology, and enlisted hip-hop artist MIA. to produce a music video called Rewear It, that aims to “highlight the importance of garment collecting and recycling”. With Nike, H&M is a global partner of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, whose mission is to drive a transition to a circular economy – that is, an industrial system in which everything at the end of its life is made into something new, in contrast to today’s economy, where most consumer goods are produced, used, and then thrown away.

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British nuclear testing on Australian ground: cover-ups, aftershocks and contamination.

After an eight-year study, researchers conclude that history's most infamous fake fossils were made by one man - the prime suspect, Charles Dawson.

China’s floods, Russian wildfires and urban expansion in Delhi were among the images captured by European Space Agency and Nasa satellites last month

Clew Bay in County Mayo, Republic of Ireland, contains Ireland’s best example of sunken glacial drumlins – low hills formed from glacial sediment deposited at the end of the last ice age. The bay is associated with Elizabethan pirate queen Grace O’Malley and Dorinish, a private island purchased by John Lennon.

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John Fasullo and colleagues predict that satellites will detect accelerating sea level rise within the next decade

One of the great things about science is that it allows you to make predictions. Three top climate scientists just made a very bold prediction regarding sea level rise; we should know in a few years if they are correct.

As humans emit greenhouse gases, it’s causing the Earth to warm. That’s indisputable and proven. We can actually measure the amount of extra heat. Since most of it ends up in the oceans, we can also measure other changes in the oceans.

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Shipping noise in the North Atlantic could impact population levels of the whales, new research shows

Increased shipping noise is disrupting the foraging behaviour of humpback whales in the North Atlantic, according to a new study.

Scientists in the US and UK said their findings could impact upon the numbers of humpback whales in the long term.

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Conservation scientist Jo Barker from London zoo takes us on a tour of the greater Thames estuary to see the harbour and grey seal populations. The harbour seal population has largely increased in spite of the episodic phocine distemper virus. There are concerns that the seals’ habitat will be damaged as a result of dredging

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Scientists conducting annual count of grey and common seals warn of potential impact of dredging, a deadly virus and predation between species

Scores of seals loll on the riverbank of the Stour, snorting and bellyflopping as they sun themselves a couple of miles outside Ramsgate’s busy marina.

Far from exceptional, these are just a smattering of the hundreds of seals that the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) hopes to count this week in the Greater Thames estuary. The mammals are sighted as far up as Teddington Lock, and Canary Wharf is a hotspot for seeing them.

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In June 2007, Australia was pummelled by five East Coast Lows. The most significant of them, which struck on June 8-9, is still referred to as the “Pasha Bulker” storm, after the 76,000-tonne bulk carrier that ran aground near Newcastle. The storm caused major flooding, strong winds, high seas and A$1.6 billion in damage, making it Australia’s eighth most expensive disaster in the last 50 years.

East Coast Lows (ECLs) have been important features of the eastern seaboard for centuries, with the first case studies published back in 1954. But by June 2007 it had been ten years since the last serious scientific look at these storms. The damage suffered that month made it clear how much we still didn’t know about these weather systems, let alone about how they might behave in the future.

Instead of a whole bunch of scientists going off and doing their own thing, we formed the Eastern Seaboard Climate Change Initiative, in which local universities and state and federal governments could work together to identify the biggest scientific questions for the eastern seaboard, and start to solve them.

Nine years and a slew of research papers later, we know a lot more about ECLs than we once did. We have built a strong research network that can expand our knowledge still further and put it into practice. Today, a special issue of the Journal of Southern Hemisphere Earth Systems Science highlights some of the things we’ve learned.

What do we know?

There are seven papers in the special issue, covering a broad range of topics.

Danielle Verdon-Kidd and her colleagues look back at the Pasha Bulker storm and reflect on the scale of the impacts, as well as issues for future flood planning, such as improved education about the dangers of entering floodwaters.

A group from the Bureau of Meteorology (including myself) has also developed a new online database of East Coast Lows over the past 60 years, to help emergency managers look back on the impacts of past storms or find out how many of the big events they remember were actually ECLs.

Going back still further, Stuart Browning and Ian Goodwin have looked at what sorts of ocean and atmospheric conditions influence East Coast Lows, as these storms tend not to be as strongly affected by big climate drivers such as La Niña. This research has helped to extend the record of East Coast Lows back to the 19th century and found that the numbers of ECLs can vary quite a lot over decades and longer. Interestingly, the past few decades (up to 2014) have been a period of relatively low activity.

Anthony Kiem and his colleagues have delved into the question of how coastal rainfall patterns and impacts can change, depending on the “type” of ECL that happens. This work, as well as the work by Browning and Goodwin, highlights how important it is to consider the different types of East Coast Lows – a storm that causes heavy rain in the Northern Rivers looks very different to one that brings downpours to Gippsland, and these might also change in different ways over time. This teases out important detail that can be washed out in studies that lump all storms in together.

Before we can use climate models to assess how East Coast Lows and their impacts may change on the eastern seaboard, we need to know whether our models are doing a good job. So Alejandro Di Luca and colleagues have assessed how well the NARCliM regional climate model ensemble is able to represent East Coast Lows. They found that regional models have real benefits over global climate models, particularly for the most extreme events.

Despite these promising results, studies led by Nadeeka Parana Manage and Natalie Lockart found that there is still a way to go before the regional models produce data of the quality needed for simulating river flows and dam levels, and how future changes to storm patterns might affect these.

So what’s next?

We know a lot more than we did nine years ago about things like how the upper atmosphere influences East Coast Lows, and how severe floods and East Coast Lows have changed over the past century. We are also starting to get a handle on how they may change in the future. Climate change is expected to reduce their frequency during the cool months May-October (which is when they currently happen most often), but potentially make them more common during the warmer months.

But there are still a lot of things we don’t know. The papers in this issue are a start, but research continues and our group has many more questions left to answer. These include how ECLs have changed in the more distant past; how sea surface temperatures influence their frequency and impacts; and how changes in ECLs and other climate processes can affect our water security.

A whole bunch of research is also about to start into how ECLs interact with other climate extremes now and into the future, as part of the NSW Government’s Climate Change Impacts and Extreme Climate Events research programs and the Australian government’s National Environmental Science Program.

So read the articles, have a taste and watch this space: there are still many more questions and researchers from around the country are working together to answer them, to help us better understand the special, complex climate of the eastern seaboard of Australia.

Acacia Pepler receives funding from the Australian Research Council. The Eastern Seaboard Climate Change Initiative is spearheaded by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, and involves researchers from the Bureau of Meteorology, the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University and the University of Newcastle. The research was funded in part by the NSW Environmental Trust, NSW Department of Finance and Services, Hunter Water, and the Australian Research Council.

We warmly welcome the decision taken last week by the Brazilian environment agency, IBAMA, to stop the huge São Luiz do Tapajós dam that threatened to wipe out a whole swath of pristine rainforest deep in the heart of the Amazon (Report, theguardian.com, 5 August). This was a day of relief and hope not just for the Munduruku indigenous people, who faced having their ancestral lands flooded, but for everyone who cares about protecting one of the world’s great natural wonders.

The Tapajós river and the surrounding rainforest are areas of unparalleled natural beauty and biodiversity, where new animal species are still being discovered to this day.

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Artists, poets, film directors and musicians call on Brazilian government and European companies to recognise the rights of the Munduruku people

Some 48 musicians, poets, chefs, artists, film directors and other celebrities including Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Mark Rylance have called on the Brazilian government and European companies to recognise the rights of an Amazonian group whose territory is threatened by a large complex of dams.

In a letter to the Guardian, the group says Brazil’s plan to build four large and many smaller dams on the Tapajós river and its tributaries could destroy thousands of square miles of forest and imperil the Munduruku indigenous people.

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Despite having the world’s highest per-capita penetration of rooftop solar – only a tiny percentage of those PV systems are being monitored for performance. So what are Australian consumers missing? And how can they get out of the shade?

Wenlock Edge These tiny creature spend 30% of their energy producing slime so they can travel on a film of lubricant

At first sight, the brown-lipped snails look like buttons stitched on fence posts and nettle stems in a corner of the field. They appear passive and inanimate, yet they are quietly doing what they’ve done for millions of years – adapting.

The rain has brought them out. Although snails have adapted to dry land and to breathing air, they are still creatures of water. Much of their lives are spent conserving water and they spend 30% of their energy producing slime – a mucus membrane that is hygroscopic; it attracts water, allows them to wear a wetsuit and helps them travel on a film of lubricant.

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Sunverge, the US-based company supplying the “brains” for AGL’s virtual power plant, explains how the project will benefit consumers.

AGL sees potential for more solar and battery storage-based "virtual power plants" across its network in Australia. But its enthusiasm for new technologies is still tempered by its need to protect its incumbent business.