From his op-ed piece in today’s WaPo, here’s former New York Republican congressman Sherwood Boehlert: Science the GOP can’t wish away.
What is happening to the party of Ronald Reagan? He embraced scientific understanding of the environment and pollution and was proud of his role in helping to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. That was smart policy and smart politics. Most important, unlike many who profess to be his followers, Reagan didn’t deny the existence of global environmental problems but instead found ways to address them.
The economy of the 21st century will be based on an educated workforce. This will entail a familiarity with science and technology and the ability to recognize that peer-reviewed scientific work is a conspiracy. Employers will be looking for people to compete against foreign workers by having the skills to look online and find a Web site that tells them that entire fields of science are a hoax.
My latest man-crush is Stuart Staniford. He has a PhD in physics from UC Davis and is currently chief scientist for FireEye, a company that develops security software. As a hobby, though, he obsesses about longterm risks to humanity, and in his most-recent bloggy incarnation he writes Early Warning, which I just came across last week when Kevin Drum linked to it.
I don’t always do this when I come across a new blog, but in this case I’ve gone back to the beginning and am reading the whole thing in chronological order. It’s really good stuff. I enjoy following along as Staniford works his way through a problem; he’s logical, intelligent, and has a real knack for conveying the technical details of an issue in terms that neither overwhelm nor talk down to a non-technical reader.
Here’s one item I liked: The Elephant in the Room, in which he reviews the book of the same name. Staniford actually doesn’t think much of the book, but his comments on the subject itself are very cool:
When something is scary, people have an incentive to somehow avoid dealing with the facts, and a variety of creative strategies are available to them.
And in the alternative, if you commit yourself in some way to the idea that a particular risk is a big deal, (eg taking a public position, making career choices based on your assessment), you have a psychological incentive to deny evidence that maybe the problem is not so severe after all.
I think it’s these dueling incentives that create the structure we so often see around major global risks – one side is busy either ignoring the problem, or if that is no longer working, minimizing it, attacking the integrity of the proponents, etc. Meanwhile, the other side is at risk of exaggerating the seriousness of the problem, ignoring countervailing evidence or important context and of course attacking the integrity of the deniers. Both sides are often sincerely convinced of their own rightness (though there certainly can be scope for cynicism and deliberate dishonesty as well, and both sides will be very quick to point to the evidence for this on the other side, and very slow to examine it on their own side).
Staniford has a recent series of posts on the future of drought that were especially good. They basically concern his emotional and intellectual reactions to this graph:
It’s fascinating stuff. Staniford basically freaks out in response to seeing the graph and trying to wrap his head around what it means, then settles himself down and says, in effect, hey, I’m a scientist. I need to engage with this thing rationally. And then he does just that, and takes the reader along with him as he does his research and fits the pieces together. Highly recommended.
If a seven-part series of posts is too much of an investment, here’s a recent piece of Staniford’s that might pique the interest of this site’s readers in particular: A few election throughts.
What I see happening is this: the public is aware, rather inchoately, that things are going badly wrong and that the life they are accustomed to is under threat, but they have no idea what to do. The parties, by and large, have failed to diagnose the roots of the problem, and instead are reflexively proposing to relive their greatest hits of the past. Since the problems of the past are not the problems of the present, these approaches are not working. This is leading both parties into a cycle of over-promising what they can deliver, thus leading to bitter disappointment.
He goes on to detail just how it is that he sees the two major parties failing, and he doesn’t pull his punches. Like Jon Stewart talking to Rachel Maddow, the thing that strikes me the most, I think, is just how refreshing it is to read the take of someone who doesn’t feel the need to be throwing monkey poo at one side or the other, but is willing to stand back and say look: monkeys throwing poo.
I’m posting this item mostly because I know it will be like catnip for shcb. Enjoy! From Stuart Staniford of the Early Warning blog: Climate Alarmism at Science Magazine?
During the presidential campaign, Obama inspired the nation not by delivering a poll-driven message but by telling a story that revealed the person within — within him and within us. In his Philadelphia speech on race, we learned of his gift not only for moral uplift but for “public education” in the deepest sense, bringing us to a new understanding of the albatross of racial politics that has burdened us since our founding.
On assuming office, something seemed to go out of the president’s speeches, out of the speaker and, as a result, out of us. Obama was suddenly strangely absent from the public discourse. We found ourselves in the grip of an economic crisis brought on by 40 years of anti-government rhetoric, policy and practices, but we listened in vain for an economic version of the race speech. What had gone wrong? Who was responsible? What could we do to help the president deal with it?
I enjoyed reading Ganz’s piece, and I think there’s a kernel of truth in it. It may be that now that Obama has a Republican House to deal with, something closer to Obama the campaigner of 2008 will be able to emerge. Going back to the Hillary battles, Obama has always been the guy who played chess while the other side was playing checkers, staying two or three moves ahead, and despite the attempts to portray last night as a referendum on his presidency, the real referendum will be held two years from now.
I actually was pretty gratified by last night’s results. The House fell to the Republicans, true, but again, I think that’s probably a good thing in terms of the larger political picture going forward. Let’s stand John Boehner and an actually-having-to-legislate Republican House up alongside Barack Obama, and let the American people decide whose leadership they prefer.
The Senate remained in Democratic hands, not that that makes a whole lot of difference as long as the party out of power is willing to wield the filibuster like the legislative equivalent of a roadside bomb. But it was gratifying to see Tea Party candidates lose Senate races the Republicans could otherwise have won.
Out here in my state and local races, most of the things I was hoping for came to pass: Brown beat Whitman, Boxer beat Fiorina, and Proposition 23 failed. Locally, all the candidates I supported won, so three incumbents were returned to the Carpinteria City Council, and one incumbent and two newcomers were sent to the Carpinteria Valley Water District board, with all the winning candidates being people I supported.
For me, the big issue going forward is climate change. I strongly approve of the new branding rolled out recently by David Roberts: This fight isn’t going to be won by people who describe themselves as environmentalists. It’s going to be won by climate hawks. More specifically, it’s going to be won by people for whom this issue transcends left-right political ideology. It’s going to be won by Democrats and Republicans who recognize that climate change is real, that it is caused by humans, and that the fight against it will be the defining battle of our generation.
How do we get there? How do we get someone like shcb to come to that realization? I think it has to happen gradually, one brave act of intellectual honesty at a time, and with a steady, careful presentation of the facts. I think we need to engage in the struggle of ideas, but engage in a way that acknowledges the basic intelligence and good faith of those on the other side, and that recognizes that both sides have work to do in terms of getting past our petty differences and facing up to the challenge at hand.
Darrell Issa, the presumptive new chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says he wants to put Michael Mann on the witness stand. I say, good. I realize that Congressional hearings are not a court of law, and that Issa will certainly stack the deck any way he can to make his “ClimageGate” charges seem more credible. But this isn’t the time to whine about the tilt of the battlefield. This is the time to strap on the armor, grab the weapons, and get to it. As Mike Roddy put it in a comment on the Dot Earth blog:
Bring it on, baby. I can’t wait to see televised hearings, showing people like Michael Mann and James Hansen pitted against Issa and Inhofe. Even the average American will be able to figure out who actually knows what he’s talking about if this happens.
I think he attributes too much influence to the right-wing noise machine in terms of eroding respect for institutions generally, but I liked the conclusion of this piece by David Roberts: The right’s climate denialism is part of something much larger.
Consider what the Limbaugh/Morano crowd is saying about climate: not only that that the world’s scientists and scientific institutions are systematically wrong, but that they are purposefully perpetrating a deception. Virtually all the world’s governments, scientific academies, and media are either in on it or duped by it. The only ones who have pierced the veil and seen the truth are American movement conservatives, the ones who found death panels in the healthcare bill.
It’s a species of theater, repeated so often people have become inured, but if you take it seriously it’s an extraordinary charge. For one thing, if it’s true that the world’s scientists are capable of deception and collusion on this scale, a lot more than climate change is in doubt. These same institutions have told us what we know about health and disease, species and ecosystems, energy and biochemistry. If they are corrupt, we have to consider whether any of the knowledge they’ve generated is trustworthy. We could be operating our medical facilities, economies, and technologies on faulty theories. We might not know anything! Here we are hip-deep in postmodernism and it came from the right, not the left academics they hate.
In light of recent discussions we’ve been having about alleged bogus science, I thought this story was interesting. It concerns Dr. Marc Hauser, a “star researcher” from Harvard who is an expert on animal and human cognition, and who has written on the evolutionary basis of morality. It also appears, though, that he may have intentionally fudged research data in order to arrive at a predetermined result: Marc Hauser May Have Fabricated Data at Harvard Lab.
Some forms of scientific error, like poor record keeping or even mistaken results, are forgivable, but fabrication of data, if such a charge were to be proved against Dr. Hauser, is usually followed by expulsion from the scientific community.
“There is a difference between breaking the rules and breaking the most sacred of all rules,” said Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia. The failure to have performed a reported control experiment would be “a very serious and perhaps unforgivable offense,” Dr. Haidt said.
Makes for an interesting contrast, doesn’t it? You could compare it, say, to the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, where allegations of misdeeds following the theft and selective release of emails led to three independent investigations, all of which found that researchers acted with honesty and integrity, and that their results were scientifically valid.
If you can’t accept the conclusions of 98 percent of the scientists whose FIELD IT IS, then why even bother with science? If that high a percentage of field of study is to be discounted ENTIRELY, then we are in deep trouble, which, of course, we are. It would be so simple if it were just a matter of ignoring the yelping commenters hereabouts: “Move on, Mr. Cartoonist! Chill out Tommy! There are more important things to worry about!”
Really? Which would those things be? This may be the only political issue whose results could be catastrophic PERMANENTLY. But the deliberate dust storm thrown up by fossil-fuel-centric interests has succeeded in contaminating and paralyzing the American response. Quite a victory for the deniers! It looks like mass-suicide to me.
I noticed in the comments to the previous item that shcb thinks I’m showing close-mindedness (or something) by virtue of my resistance to the evidence that human-caused climate change is a hoax.
My big sister M’Liz sent me an email the other day. “I am surprised,” she wrote, “that Lies.com has not addressed the oil spill in the Gulf.” I guess she has a point; it’s the kind of thing I would normally say something about. I’ve been following the news (like everyone). The May 11 Senate hearing where executives from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton pointed fingers at each other was certainly a lies.com moment.
Since then there has been a parade of spin and counter-spin, with events in the Gulf providing an ongoing (and depressing) fact-check, culminating most-recently in the “top kill” failure, with Obama pronouncing the news “as enraging as it is heartbreaking.”
I’d like to talk to my brother-in-law Steve (M’Liz’s husband) about all this, partly because he works as a safety engineer for BP, and partly because he’s a really honest, decent, thoughtful kind of guy. But I haven’t had a chance to talk to him.
Joe Romm at Climate Progress reposted an interesting item today (I think it was originally written by Craig Severance, but it’s not completely clear to me which parts are Romm’s and which are Severance’s). Anyway: What will it take to end our oil addiction?
I also enjoyed reading self-described “modern day Thoreau” Barbara Tomlinson’s write-up of the training she received from BP as an oil-spill cleanup worker: Emergency vs. Post-Emergency.
Closer to home, I’ve been working as part of the effort to defeat Measure J, the local oil-drilling initiative placed on the ballot by Venoco. Steve McWhirter, a neighbor of mine and would-be politician (he was narrowly defeated in a run for city council last election, and says he’ll run again in November), forwarded the following video to me. It shows Tim Marquez, the CEO and majority shareholder of Venoco, talking about why Measure J would be such a great deal for Carpinterians:
I think Marquez is probably a more or less decent guy, and that he honestly believes that what is good for Venoco (and himself) is good for Carpinteria. But as with my previous fisking of his ad in the local paper, I think he’s making misleading statements in an effort to get low-information voters to support the initiative.
The biggest issue I have with the video is when Marquez talks about environmental review. He says that even if Measure J passes, his project will still need to undergo “the same environmental review process” it would have faced without Measure J. That’s simply not true. Yes, there are a number of agencies that would need to approve the project either way. But if Measure J passes, the project will bypass the city’s review, as well as any oversight and mitigation measures the city might have imposed. That’s pretty much the whole point of Measure J.
When Marquez talks at 13:10 in the video about the “misperception out there; some of it’s intentional, some of it’s accidental” concerning the effect of Measure J on the environmental review process, he’s being disingenuous. Marquez has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to create the misperception in the minds of voters that Measure J will not let Venoco bypass environmental review. (Other arguments I’ve heard from Measure J supporters: Measure J would merely initiate the environmental review process, the environmental review by the city has already been completed, and the project described in the initiative is the same as the environmentally preferred alternative in the city’s environmental impact report. All untrue.)
I think it’s human nature that the farther away someone is, the less likely we are to rank their concerns ahead of our own. That plays out in various ways: The image of an oil rig burning can be awe-inspiring, even beautiful to look at, except that people were killed and injured in that fire, and for them, and for their families, that image is associated with horrible suffering and pain. Should I not look at it?
Tim Marquez, and Venoco’s contractors (like Steve McWhirter) are just trying to put food on the table and help themselves and their families get ahead in the world; should I really be willing to tell them no, they don’t get to rewrite the city’s planning laws to place their own interests ahead of those of the community, generally?
M’Liz mentioned something else in her email to me. She said that the ongoing disaster in the Gulf might at least contain “some good news for Carpinteria in a small way,” in terms of the impact the story will have on the Measure J vote. I’ve heard the same thing expressed, quietly, by people in the No on J campaign. I confess there is a part of me that, while not actually rooting against BP in their efforts to stop the undersea gusher, takes a measure of grim satisfaction in their failure: See? That’s what I was talking about. You can’t trust these companies. It’s a reaction that reminds me of the emotional response I had while tracking the Iraq war body count: I hated the lies that led us to war, and sympathized with the victims on both sides, but there was still an element of satisfaction in seeing it go so wrong. See? That’s what I’m talking about. You can’t trust these politicians.
I’m not defending that reaction. I’m appalled that I feel it. It’s wrong. But it’s part of me.
I wish the Deepwater Horizon blowout never happened. I know that any impact it has on the politics of a little town 2,000 miles away is completely insignificant compared to the suffering it is causing, and will continue to cause, for those who are closer to it, for many years to come.
Despite the high-profile complaining about the Himalayan-glaciers misstatement, the IPCC’s estimates of the likely impacts of global warming apparently are viewed by most experts in the field as actually being fairly conservative. (In the scientific sense, not the political sense. I.e., the IPCC is tending to be cautious in predicting how severe the impacts of global warming are likely to be.) The main story I’ve been hearing from those who keep close tabs on the actual scientists is that they’ve been freaking out over the last few years because as they get more data, they’re finding that far from overstating the dangers we face, previous estimates look more and more like they have been understating the danger.
But you wouldn’t know that from reading mainstream media coverage. Business-as-usual reporting, as successfully gamed by the fossil-fuel industry and their minions among high-profile conservatives, has focused on the controversy between the deniers on the one hand, and the already-fudged-in-the-direction-of-less-dire-outcomes IPCC estimates. The implication of that reporting is, “There are two sides, two points of view. One side says A, the other says B; the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.”
But that’s not how science works. If you’re a reporter covering science, you need to focus on what the scientists are saying. And that’s a very different picture (as Boykoff’s graph shows) than the one you get from assuming that the truth must lie somewhere between James Inhofe and the IPCC.
The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial…
The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.
If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.”…
Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.
Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated — a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.
Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climate-gate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.
This is the same phenomenon that Sputnik talked about in the Tank Riot podcast about the Zapruder film: Having lots of evidence doesn’t prevent conspiracy theories — it breeds them. The Internet is, or is well on its way to becoming, a universally available, indexed compendium of all the facts ever assembled by the human mind. Paradoxically, that doesn’t make us smarter. Or maybe it does, under certain circumstances. But it also makes us more deluded.
It all comes down to epistemology. If you only seek confirmation for your existing views, you will always succeed. More than ever, we need the methods of science — multiple working hypotheses, repeatable testing, and a disconfirmation bias — to make sense of the world. But the scientific method has always run counter to human nature — even for scientists. It’s hard to be willing to be wrong.
All that assumes that you’re motivated by a desire to learn the truth. In the case of O.J.’s lawyers during the trial, or the fossil fuel industry trying to stave off the changes mandated by global warming, they’re actually trying to obscure the truth, so the scientific method doesn’t really come into play. It’s up to us, though, the would-be consumers of the disinformation they’re peddling, to use a little caveat emptor.
It has lots of neat graphs for those who want pretty pictures, and links you can follow to the actual science for those who want to chew on the details. (You’ll need to click twice, since the first link in most cases is to an earlier item where he summarized a particular study. But from there you can find links to the original papers, some of which are behind paywalls.) The thing I like most about it is how it demonstrates that there are many different reinforcing lines of evidence that the globe is warming. The evidence doesn’t consist of a handful of cherrypicked stolen emails containing intemperate language, or a few carefully selected assertions from a lengthy UN report. It is a whole body of actual science, published in reputable journals, representing research by hundreds of different teams approaching the problem from different directions, using different techniques, all arriving at a similar conclusion. That’s what an actual scientific consensus looks like, and when you ignore it, you put yourself in the same category as toddlers who believe they can wish some unpleasant fact away, that they can cover their eyes and thereby make it so no one else can see them.
We live in a free society, in which people get to speak their minds regardless of the care they have taken in arriving at their conclusions. But free speech isn’t free. As a society we pay what I’ve come to think of as a “bullshit tax” every time someone who is demonstrably wrong publicly proclaims their demonstrably wrong views. When a Fox News anchor crows, “Here’s your 24 inches of global warming, Al Gore!”, we as a society pay a price. When a commenter on a blog constructs an argument that follows some esoteric detail down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole and eventually proclaims, “See? That’s why I don’t believe the science,” we pay a price.
Tea Party activists aren’t the only outraged taxpayers. I’m outraged that we as a society are paying this bullshit tax. I don’t want to do away with free speech, but I am deeply resentful of those who use their freedom to impose this tax on the rest of us.
Joseph Romm is my favorite source these days for insightful commentary on global warming. He links today to a draft essay from James Hansen and the boys at NASA: If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold? (PDF). He excerpts the following graph:
…and quotes the following passage that I find highly relevant to recent discussions hereabouts:
Why are some people so readily convinced of a false conclusion, that the world is really experiencing a cooling trend? That gullibility probably has a lot to do with regional short‐term temperature fluctuations, which are an order of magnitude larger than global average annual anomalies.
As Romm concludes, “Weather isn’t climate.” For people who get their science from Rupert Murdoch’s infotainment outlets, that fact apparently is easy to overlook.
Ah, Information is Beautiful, bringing the clarity that good data visualization provides: Climate Change: A Consensus Among Scientists? They took the numbers provided by petitionproject.org (“31,486 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs”), and attempted to put them in a meaningful context.
Our maths here is somewhat coarse. Some better data suggests the ‘consensus’ figure is around 97.5% of publishing climatologists and around 90% of all publishing scientists supporting the human-induced climate theory.
I also thought this part was interesting:
In fact, when you adjust the PetitionProject’s odd categorisation – they filed ‘chemical engineers’ as chemists and physical engineers as ‘physicists’ – the total number of engineers who signed the petition, by our reckoning, jumps to 49%.
Why so many engineers?
Good question. Ideas, anyone? (Disclaimer: My official job title includes the word “engineer.” And even the word “senior.” Though I’m not sure I’ve really earned either.)
A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two is never sure. — Anonymous
I’m surrounded by conspiracies. There was an excellent Tank Riot podcast the other day: Conspiracies, Part 6, which was mostly about the JFK assassination and the Zapruder film in particular. One point that Viktor made (loosely paraphrased): In the olden days, when some public figure was assassinated we all read the news reports, which were mediated by a professional class of interpreters, and we more or less knew (or thought we knew) what time it was. With the Kennedy assassination, though, where we had a source of objective truth (the Zapruder film), it didn’t make things better; instead, it made things much, much worse, serving as the raw material for an endless parade of conspiracy theories.
If the people that believed the moon landing was staged on a movie lot had access to unlimited money from large carbon polluters or some other special interest who wanted to confuse people into thinking that the moon landing didn’t take place, I’m sure we’d have a robust debate about it right now.
Or there were all those beautiful shots of what surely was an upper stage of a (Russian, presumably) rocket venting propellant over Norway:
…of which Phil Plait in his excellent Bad Astronomy blog had many interesting things to say (Awesomely bizarre light show freaks out Norway), but which prompted a set of blog comments the most memorable of which was this one by user Billy:
Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia all denny [sic] having launched a rocket at that time. Also, for it to be a rocket the spiral is too symmetric. To me this looks like a vortex of a very strong energy force. Perhaps a temporary black hole because of some thing happening to the earth’s magnetic field? I’m 99.9% sure this was not man made; at least not with anything that I know of…
To the above: NO WAY is that a rocket.
See? He’s 99.9% sure. He’s quantified his level of certainty. He’s being scientific.
Sigh. What began with the JFK assassination has picked up steam since we got the Internet. If you’re willing to ignore conflicting data and focus only on finding confirmation for your a priori opinions, Google is perfectly happy to let you enclose yourself in a snuggie of comforting factoids. Meanwhile, real engineers and scientists, people who have to make rockets go up and governments recognize the catastrophe that climate denialists would inflict on our descendants, people who measure their ideas not against what they want to believe, but against what actually is, labor on.
Update: Russia comes clean: Yeah, it was an upper-stage failure of a submarine-launched missile. So, what do you think the chances are that Billy is hard at work recalibrating his estimates in light of this anomalous data? Yup, I agree: Somewhere around 0.1%.
