It really does kind of rock my world that Little Green Footballs has gone from what I remember to being the kind of blog that mocks Rush Limbaugh and climate change deniers. Anyway: The Climategate Criminal Conspiracy.

Thomas Friedman has definitely got the pithy sound bite thing down pat. The last few times I’ve seen him on TV I’ve had the same two reactions: 1) Yeah, I think he’s right, but 2) the way he’s selling it is more about memorable catch-phrases than simply speaking the truth.

But maybe he’s on to something. In an era when Sarah Palin can attract significant numbers of supporters who think she’s actually worth listening to, maybe you can’t overestimate the importance of wrapping your message in folksy packaging. We don’t have to convince the scientists — they’re already convinced. We have to convince the people who honestly believe Fox News is a credible source.

I’m not sure how you do that. But Thomas Friedman is giving it a try, as he does in this op-ed piece from the NYT: What They Really Believe.

My argument is simple: I think climate change is real. You don’t? That’s your business. But there are two other huge trends barreling down on us with energy implications that you simply can’t deny. And the way to renew America is for us to take the lead and invent the technologies to address these problems.

His bottom line: Those working to thwart cap-and-trade and clean-energy incentives are not just wrong. They’re unpatriotic.

Mkay. We’ll see how that does in the marketplace of ideas.

Holy smokes; 230 comments? You guys are out of control.

I’ve been busy (he whined… again…), but the least I can do is give you a new wall to tag. Here’s a good one: the video from the Sigur Rós song Glósóli. It was directed by Arni & Kinski, the same pair of directors who did the Hoppípolla video I posted previously.

To me, the video symbolizes some of my worries about the world we’re handing to the next generation. My son attends an amazing school, where they do a great job of preparing children for the future. But are we doing enough? Could we ever possibly do enough?

I don’t know the answer.

At Global Warming Charlatanism, Kevin Drum gives a concise response to those (like George Will) who have been saying lately that “the earth is actually cooling!”

In case you’ve missed it, this is the new favorite talking point in the chucklehead denialist set. The earth is actually cooling! But as about a thousand serious climate researchers have pointed out, it’s not true. Global temps have been trending up for over a century, but in any particular year they can spike up and down quite a bit. In 1998 they spiked up far above the trend line and last year they spiked below the trend line. So 2008 was cooler than 1998.

[snip]

This is idiotic, and only deliberate charlatans who think they have an especially gullible audience bother with it. It’s the trend line that matters, and the trend line has been going up for decades right along with rising CO2 concentrations. Listen to the climatologists, not the charlatans.

So, if you hear someone pushing the “global warming is a myth! the earth is cooling!” line, the only real question is, which of two things is that person revealing about himself: 1) he is dishonest, and thinks that you (or someone listening) is stupid enough to buy it, or 2) he is himself the victim of someone from group #1 who correctly guessed that he could be taken in.

I normally skip about half of Steve Benen’s articles at The Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog; he’s a little too convinced of the rightness of his position for my taste, and suffers in comparison to Kevin Drum, who used to be the main blogger there. I still go there for Hilzoy, though, and once in a while Benen has an item I like. Like this one:  Deniers.

If the left and right disagreed on how best to address policy challenges, that would at least open the door to constructive dialog. But we’re still stuck in a political environment in which prominent conservative voices at high-profile conservative outlets a) don’t recognize the difference between climate and weather; b) find meaningless anecdotes compelling evidence of global trends; and c) are entirely comfortable delaying necessary solutions while an already-completed debate continues.

A trio of pieces to keep you (and me) saturated with tendentious climate change discussion:

The Civil Heretic – from this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, a lengthy profile of Freeman Dyson, and in particular, his contrarian views on anthropogenic climate change. I’m still reading it, but am enjoying it a lot. More after I’ve finished it, probably.

Economy vs. Environment – a New Yorker piece by David Owen that argues that responses to global warming are necessarily constrained by economic considerations. Likewise, still reading.

Paging Elizabeth Kolbert – by my man crush Joseph Romm, in which he fisks the aforementioned David Owen article. As I said, I’m not done reading Owen’s argument, but I’m willing to stipulate that Romm may be going over the top a bit in taking the fight to Owen. I dunno; I’ll see how I feel after digesting all three articles, and will post an update.

Chris Mooney offers a really good response to that recent George Will op-ed in the Washington Post that amounted to a raft of lies about global warming: Climate change’s myths and facts.

A recent controversy over claims about climate science by Post op-ed columnist George F. Will raises a critical question: Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?

As Mooney’s article demonstrates, yeah, actually, we can. I’m happy to see the WaPo running Mooney’s article now. But I’m disturbed by what it says that it took so long for them to do so, after all the high-profile outrage that Will’s original piece produced.

For those on the right who persist in maintaining that global warming isn’t real, remind me again why defending your right to delude yourself is worth imposing a bullshit tax on scores or hundreds of future generations. Because I’m just not seeing it.

Joseph Romm continues to speak the truth about climate change, including in this item about non-coverage in the US media of the results of the recent Copenhagen Climate Science Congress: Conspiracy of silence.

In the last two years, our scientific understanding of business-as-usual projections for global warming has changed dramatically (see here and here). Yet, much of the U.S. public — especially conservatives — remain in the dark about just how dire the situation is (see here).

Why? Because the U.S. media is largely ignoring the story.

Romm goes on to summarize the key messages to come out of the conference, including that worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories for atmospheric CO2 concentrations (or worse) are being realized, and that “inaction is inexcusable.” Romm’s response?

What is inexcusable is US media coverage and the blinkered conservative strategy of scientific denial — what can only be described as a murder-suicide pact with the human race (see here).

Writing for The Guardian, Mark Hoofnagle of the denialism blog covers Climate change deniers: failsafe tips on how to spot them.

At denialism blog we have identified five routine tactics that should set your pseudo-science alarm bells ringing. Spotting them doesn’t guarantee an argument is incorrect – you can argue for true things badly – but when these are the arguments you hear, be on your guard.

I was out of town without net access for a while, which always makes it tough for me to get back into the bloggy swing of things when I return. But it’s also that I’m still wrestling with my reaction to that Gwynn Dyer Climate Wars piece.

Ken Ward, guest blogging at Gristmill, touched on something today that resonated with my current mood. From Why we are going quietly nuts:

In our hearts we know that what we are doing is futile, but we do not know what else we should or could be doing. The constraints within which we work feel so intractable and out of human scale that we cannot imagine how to break them. Despite our best efforts, Americans just dont seem to get it or they dont care, and we are at a loss to explain this. Unable to influence our own nation, we are further dismayed by the far vaster challenge of altering the trajectory of China, India, Brazil, and the rest of the world.

What are we going to do about this? Those of you lucky enough to think this talk is just lefty alarmism have it easy. Those of us who don’t, though, have a tougher row to hoe.

From David Roberts writing at Gristmill: Fred Barnes’ source for climate science.

Barnes gets his information on climate change the same place everyone in the right-wing media world gets it: from Marc Morano, the in-house blogger/agitator for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.).

The echoes bouncing around the echo chamber have to start somewhere, after all. Apparently a lot of them start with Morano.

He’s got a pretty interesting history, according to his SourceWatch bio:

Morano is a former journalist with Cybercast News Service (owned by the conservative Media Research Center). CNS and Morano were the first source in May 2004 of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth claims against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election [1] and in January 2006 of similar smears against Vietnam war veteran John Murtha.

Morano was “previously known as Rush Limbaugh’s ‘Man in Washington,’ as reporter and producer for the Rush Limbaugh Television Show, as well as a former correspondent and producer for American Investigator, the nationally syndicated TV newsmagazine.” [2]

Lovely.

Gwynne Dyer is the guy whose PBS documentary series War is one of the scarier things I’ve ever seen on my bright-and-noisy-babble dispenser. Now he’s at it again, this time looking at the likely impacts of climate change. “Climate Wars”, he calls it. And no, he’s not talking hyperbolically.

You can download and listen to the podcast version of the three-part radio show he recently did for the CBC Ideas series, at Best of Ideas. (Apparently they purge that archive really quickly, though, so get it fast.) That’s the version that scared me, as I did my daily three-hour carbon-footprint-maximization exercise. Or you can get Dyer’s book at Amazon: Climate Wars. Or you can read the comments of a blogger with the unlikely name Yappa, who apparently attended a lecture Dyer gave in March, 2007, and did a really good job of summarizing the scarier parts: Climate wars.

I’d like to believe that Dyer is a raving alarmist who has no real idea what he’s talking about. I’d really like to.

I don’t.

Writing at climateprogress.org, Joseph Romm goes into more detail about that recent poll showing a decline in the public’s belief in global warming (Deniers are still mostly duping only GOP voters…). It turns out that since 2006, more Democrats now believe in global warming — but that shift is more than offset by the number of Republicans shifting the other way.

You can indeed fool some of the people all the time — if those people are conservatives.

Rasmussen Reports made headlines last month reporting that 41% of Americans blame global warming on human activity, down from 46% two years ago. The conservative pollster gleefully noted:

Al Gore’s side may be coming to power in Washington, but they appear to be losing the battle on the idea that humans are to blame for global warming.

It is, however, the details of the poll that are the most telling. In January 2009:

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democrats blame global warming on human activity, compared to 21% percent of Republicans. Two-thirds of GOP voters (67%) see long-term planetary trends as the cause versus 23% of Democrats.

This compares to December 2006 result:

Fifty-six percent (56%) of Democrats say human activity is the cause while 51% of Republicans identify long-term planetary trends as the culprit.

That’s right. Slightly more Democrats now understand that humans are the primary cause of global warming, whereas substantially more GOP voters — a full one-sixth — have been duped into thinking long-term planetary trends are the cause.

Why the growing divergence?

Romm goes into more detail about why he thinks that’s happening. Personally, I see it as a case of the “bullshit tax” our society pays in return for the dubious privilege of having ideologically skewed entertainment that passes itself off as news reporting.

Do those who watch the NFL have an obligation to tell those who watch the WWE that the matches they’re watching have predetermined outcomes? Probably not. If you enjoy watching guys dive off the top rope in a pro wrestling match, I think that’s your business.

Global warming is different, though. Those publicly denying it are doing harm to a lot of innocent people (like, all of them, for the next thousand years or more). That’s immoral. Your desire to be entertained by bullshit artists who cater to your needy ego does not trump my descendants’ right to a livable planet.

Synchronicity is in the air.

Al Giordano, whose opinions on things like this were borne out repeatedly during the presidential campaign, wrote the other day on what Obama has really been up to with the stimulus bill: The partisanship trap:

…Obama’s strategy is to set [Congressional Republicans] up for another rout in the 2010 Congressional elections and to hasten, in the meantime, the process by which they wake up and realize their seats are vulnerable. The President doesn’t need their votes on the Stimulus (therefore, this maneuver is not about the Stimulus, but more akin to a football team calling a running play to set up a later passing play). The truth is that so many Congressional Democrats are so undependable that Obama will need some Republican votes later on other legislative priorities, particularly in the Senate in order to get 60 votes for “cloture” to allow bills to be voted up or down: On the Employee’s Free Choice Act, on Immigration Reform (and now he needs one more to offset the anti-immigrant junior Democratic Senator from New York), on children’s health care and much, much more. To get to that point, he has to make individual Republicans feel vulnerable at the ballot box to Democratic challenge. Today’s events are speeding that process up.

In the end, Obama’s “bipartisanship” is one of the most Machiavellian partisan maneuvers we’ve seen in Washington in a long while, and I use that description in its most admirable context. The Republicans fell right into the trap today. Progressives that urge Obama to be more “partisan” should pay close attention to how the GOP is getting pwned before falling into the same trap themselves.

hilzoy is likewise someone who has emerged from the last few years with many of her interpretations vindicated by subsequent events. She makes a similar argument in Bipartisanship and the stimulus:

If Obama had gone to the Republicans and said: I propose a bill entirely made up of things Democrats really want and you really hate, but please, do join us in supporting it!, that wouldn’t work at all. But he didn’t do that. He went the extra mile. When Republicans protested about particular things, he dropped some of them (though not all: he was not, for instance, willing to compromise on refundable tax credits, and he was right not to compromise on that one.) There’s a fine line between being willing to compromise and being willing to surrender, and I think Obama generally stayed on the right side of it, while being open enough to compromise that he will get real credit for trying.

The House Republicans, by contrast, looked silly. They were carping about tiny bits of the stimulus (the capitol mall?!). They changed the bits they objected to from one day to the next, and looked for all the world like what I take them to be: people who were determined to oppose the stimulus bill from the outset.

This reminds me of a recent bout of Wikipedia editing I got involved in. As always, I came away with the feeling that it’s the people on your own side who are the biggest pains in the ass when trying to craft a consensus on a controversial article. Case in point: user hrafn’s one-man campaign to “win” the evolution/creationism debate for the evolutionists at the Strengths and weaknesses of evolution page. More detail (much, much more detail) about my views on how this runs counter to Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy is available on the article’s talk page, if you’re interested.

I made it a personal challenge to try to do everything “right” in Wikipedia terms. I assumed good faith. I made it about improving the article, not about the personalities. I worked for consensus on the Talk page, rather than getting caught up in revert wars in the article itself. It took a long time, and ultimately, while I think I made some good points and achieved some small, but measurable, improvements in the article, I gave up. Life’s too short, and I’ve got other things I care about. You win, hrafn. For certain values of “win”.

The “big three” core policies of Wikipedia, the so-called Trifecta, are these: 1) Remain neutral. 2) Don’t be a dick. 3) Ignore all rules. Taken together, I think they really do offer hope for building consensus on controversial questions. But it’s not a quick process. Quoting hilzoy, again:

To my mind, it is generally a good idea to act on the assumption that your opponents are reasonable people. (There are, of course, exceptions: e.g., when you don’t have time.) It’s the right thing to do morally. But it’s also generally the right thing to do tactically. I think this is especially true when you suspect that your opponents are, in fact unreasonable. You should always hope to be proven wrong, but if you are not — if your opponents are, in fact, unreasonable — then by taking the high road, you can ensure that that fact will be plain to the world.

Anyway, this is a long way to go to get to it, but I’m hereby apologizing to shcb for losing my cool with him in the comments about global warming science. It’s understandable that people who aren’t climate scientists (which, as far as I know, none of us around here are) are going to have different views on the degree of scientific consensus (or its lack). And while I can have my own opinion on the bad reasons someone might have for elevating the views of people like Joel Kotkin or Larry Summers or James Inhofe over those of the scientific mainstream, it doesn’t buy me much to make accusations in that area.

Evaluating the claims of science is actually fairly hard, in that science asks us to transcend traits that have been baked into us over the course of millions of years of primate evolution. Meanwhile, recognizing whether or not someone is being a dick is pretty easy. Given that, being dickly is a good way to lose the argument, at least in the eyes of a substantial chunk of whatever audience you have. Most people don’t keep score on the basis of journal citations and scientific reputation. They keep score on the basis of who sounds more reasonable. So it’s important to sound reasonable.

One last synchronistic item: I liked the op-ed piece in today’s edition of the Incredible Shrinking Print Media by Deborah Heiligman: The Darwin’s marriage of science and religion.

Although they never were able to see eye-to-eye on the question of religion and God, [Charles and Emma Darwin] were able to reach their hands across the gulf. In the end, each of them accepted and, it seems, truly understood what the other believed.

If it is a sign of intelligence to be able to hold two opposite thoughts or opinions in your head, then it is a mark of a successful marriage to be able to truly see the other person’s point of view. This is also the mark of a successful society.

David Roberts has some very insightful things to say about the next steps in the battle over climate change: Heresy of the day: More science is not the answer.

It pains many geeky progressives to realize it, but science is largely beside the point here. It informs the strategy, but it is not itself a strategy. The relevant realm is sociopolitical, and so the strategy must be values-based, rhetorically savvy, and emotionally resonant. Repeating the facts won’t help.

The actual detail of his argument is right on. It’s not about “raising awareness” about what science has discovered. People are “aware” already, to the extent they’re willing to be. They need to be engaged not with more science per se, but with more detail on just how they stand to be affected by climate change, and how they will benefit from taking action.

Over at The Bobo Files, another blog I don’t actually read under normal circumstances, I was interested to see this passage from The Bobo Carnival of Politics (in a discussion of whether Bush will be seen as one of our best presidents with the benefit of historical hindsight):

As for one of your responses listing scientific reasons why you think he’s one of the worst – global warming denial – I would say you are in denial as it has been proven we have been in a cooling spell for the past 7 years and we will continue to cool for another 3 at minimum. You’re the scientist – you know that this is all natural and cyclical. The top scientists and meteorologists in this country have all come out saying man-made global warming is a hoax.

Um, no, not so much. From the current edition of the endlessly debated, ruthlessly edited, and sourced-to-death Wikipedia entry on global warming:

Global surface temperature increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the 100 years ending in 2005.[1][2] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that most of the temperature increase since the mid-twentieth century is “very likely” due to the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.[3][2] Natural phenomena such as solar variation and volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.[4][5] These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies and academies of science,[6] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.[7][8][9] While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with these findings,[10] the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions.[11][12]

So, what can a reasonable person conclude from this? Well, for one, that BoBo is getting his information from some very unreliable sources, and isn’t bothering to fact-check. In the context of his clearly being Internet-saavy, willing to host a blog carnival, and on familiar terms with lefty sciencebloggers like grrlscientist, that tells me that he’s using this amazing communications technology, the perception engine that has done for research what steam engines did for manufacturing and internal combustion did for transportation, in a very specific manner: actively seeking out information that confirms his preexisting biases, while actively avoiding (and doing a damn fine job of it) information that conflicts with those biases.

Sigh. You know the expression about opinions? How they’re like a certain body part, because everyone has one? In the Internet age, substitute “blogs” for “opinions”.

Good, if depressing, stuff from Joseph Romm: The top 10 global warming stories of 2008.