Honi soit qui mal y pense

The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy:
[Via Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog]

In 1954, the tobacco industry realized it had a serious problem. Thirteen scientific studies had been published over the preceding five years linking smoking to lung cancer. With the public growing increasingly alarmed about the health effects of smoking, the tobacco industry had to move quickly to protect profits and stem the tide of increasingly worrisome scientific news. Big Tobacco turned to one the world’s five largest public relations firms, Hill and Knowlton, to help out. Hill and Knowlton designed a brilliant Public Relations (PR) campaign to convince the public that smoking is not dangerous. They encouraged the tobacco industry to set up their own research organization, the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), which would produce science favorable to the industry, emphasize doubt in all the science linking smoking to lung cancer, and question all independent research unfavorable to the tobacco industry. The CTR did a masterful job at this for decades, significantly delaying and reducing regulation of tobacco products. George Washington University epidemiologist David Michaels, who is President Obama’s nominee to head the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), wrote a meticulously researched 2008 book called, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. In the book, he wrote: “the industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain”. The title of Michaels’ book comes from a 1969 memo from a tobacco company executive: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy”. Hill and Knowlton, on behalf of the tobacco industry, had founded the “Manufactured Doubt” industry.
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People see what they want to see, especially if they are getting paid. When their goal is deceit and misinformation, it is not surprising they see it in everything. The Manufactured Doubt industry is quite well-funded and I expect it to bring the full weight of its wealth to bear in order to fund its goals.

This post gives some real background to what scientists have been fighting for a long long time. Whether it is cigarette smoking, climate change, evolution or vaccines. The only difference in the individual campaigns is the wealth of the particular industry. Luckily for a biologist like me, the anti-vaxxers are not extremely well funded, do not have large think tanks nor have many lobbyists. They do have several celebrities.

Not so for researchers looking at climate change where trillions of dollars are at stake for the fossil fuel industry, which funds hundreds of lobbyists and think tanks to influence public opinion.

But, money for Manufactured Doubt does not change science. It can only change public opinion. That is the main effort presented by these emails. Not to actually change any of the science but to affect public policy.

Because the law, as it now stands, forces these fossil fuel companies to do everything they can to legally maximize profits, even galvanizing public policy in ways that are destructive to the world and to humanity. There is nothing illegal about lobbying but just remember that is what members of the Manufactured Doubt industry are trying to do.

Not manufacture doubt in the the research community but if the political community. For this goal, almost anything is reasonable to them, even if it involves hacking into computers or paying lobbyists with a PhD (who might have actually been a researcher at some point) to spout the latest talking points of the Manufactured Doubt industry.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

What they mean

by thomas pix

Here is a very nice annotation (Thanks, NonHomogenized ) of the CRU emails that were released. (h/t to a comment by caerbannog). I particularly liked this one:

[Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case)]

I already pointed out the problems with releasing the data, but here we have an illustration of a reason why, even if it were NOT professional suicide, they might not want to release the data: “One of the problems is that I’m caught in a real Catch-22 situation. At present, I’m damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he requested. But had I acceded to McIntyre’s initial request for climate model data, I’m convinced (based on the past experiences of Mike Mann, Phil, and Gavin) that I would have spent years of my scientific career dealing with demands for further explanations, additional data, Fortran code, etc. (Phil has been complying with FOIA requests from McIntyre and his cronies for over two years). And if I ever denied a single request for further information, McIntyre would have rubbed his hands gleefully and written: “You see – he’s guilty as charged!” on his website.”

and

“You and I have spent over a decade of our scientific careers on the MSU issue, Tom. During much of that time, we’ve had to do science in “reactive mode”, responding to the latest outrageous claims and inept science by John Christy, David Douglass, or S. Fred Singer. For the remainder of my scientific career, I’d like to dictate my own research agenda. I don’t want that agenda driven by the constant need to respond to Christy, Douglass, and Singer.”

Now, the latter of these, while I can sympathize with him, is not a good reason to not release data. However, given the descriptions of all the various data that has been requested from the various researchers (which takes huge amounts of time that they could better spend doing productive research rather than digging through old records of their work for whatever minutiae someone has decided to ask for with a FOI request, the former is actually reasonable.

“I have an actual goddamned job to do here, stop impeding my ability to do any real work by pestering me with requests for details that you don’t need for what you’re trying to do” is a pretty good reason to not want to have to deal with such requests, imo. Especially since, the more time they waste, the less research they can do, which means fewer grants, which means they can’t maintain their equipment and staff. Were it not for data confidentiality, this would be a real issue to debate – and I’m not sure where I’d stand on it, though I’d find it hard to fault them for their decision, even if I disagreed with it. However, as it stands, I can see no reasoning by which it makes sense for them to comply with the requests if they can possibly get out of them.

I think this is one of the goals of some of these ’skeptics.’ Not to actually get anything to do science with but simply to harass researchers and prevent them from actually doing any work. By flooding them with a ton of bureaucratic they not only make the scientist’s life miserable, they slow progress.

The researchers do not have a lot of staff who can put all this information together. And even if a request is fulfilled, it only leads to more. Because it appears that getting data to replicate the research is not the real goal here, since it does seem that it has actually resulted in any publications.

SThis is a ploy sometimes used with FOI requests. In fact, apparently the UK FOI Act permits the government to deal with some of these abuses by having a cost ceiling and by being able to aggregate multiple requests.

[Listening to: The Voice from the album "I Robot" by The Alan Parsons Project]

[Listening to: Real Real Gone from the album "Van Morrison - The Movie Hits" by Van Morrison]

‘There’s a smoking gun? Where’s the body?’

by aubergene

CRU Hack, time to hit back … hard:
[Via Greenfyre's]

So Solid CRU

- ride wid us

The Frame
Sun Tzu
Habeas corpus

The story so far:

CRU research computer hacked, many emails copied, claims are made that they reveal broad scientific fraud;
Emails released, much sound and fury told by idiots, claims seem to be all innuendo and speculation;
More and more nothing as people search for something, anything of substance in the emails.

The climate change science community was caught off guard by this for obvious reasons. Initially most were quite understandably not willing to comment until they had at least seen the evidence. Now we have seen the evidence, or all that we know exists.

Aside: apparently what has been released is about 1/2 of the total copied from CRU. We do not know if what has been released is cherry picked and the remaining material fills in the blanks exhonorating everyone of any wrong doing, or if there is more to come. According to RealClimate, whatever is there, it will not be evidence of scientific malpractice such as tampering with data, and that’s good enough for me.*

*[UPDATE: some freepers are using this statement as evidence that I am "Accepting unsubstantiated statements, on faith and faith alone." Yup, and clear about it too ... not pretending that unsubstantiated statements are fact.

I could turn out to be wrong, but at least I am not lying to anyone else about what the basis for my position is. And if there is a subsequent release and it contains actual credible evidence of data tampering, I will say so]

The frame

Since seeing the emails we have been responding by:

pointing out that while some (and only a few) of them sound dubious, there’s no actual evidence of anything;
attempting to point out that in every case there are also perfectly innocuous interpretations;
putting these sorts of discussions in context*

*Carbonfixated’s Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment ‘thinking’” is a brilliant example of this. Many climate bloggers have impressed me, surprised me, delighted me, but this is the first time I have felt actual envy … I wish I’d done that piece.
Sun Tzu
Four problems with this strategy:
1) It’s not a strategy, it’s a tactic, and not even a good one. “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Sun Tzu

2) It assumes that “the problem” is a scientific one. Pretty natural concern for the science community, but it is increasingly clear that the science is in no way affected. The battle going on now is political, not scientific, and we have to fight it as a political battle.

3) To date the Deniers are annotating the emails with “helpful explanations” ie total fictions making outrageous claims about the context. As such they are dictating the narrative and we are responding to them within that frame.

They keep throwing punches and all we do s try to block them. No matter how good we are, some will land; hence Sun Tzu’s dictum.

4) The problem with offering reasonable interpretations is that they are always going to sound apologetic and never quite convincing. Particularly as most of us were not actually there. As certain as we can be that there are perfectly innocent explanations, we do not know for certain that the explanations are innocent.

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There is no there, there. Show us where the data is wrong, which papers are incorrect. Badmouthing a researcher does not alter climate change. Insinuation does not make warming go away.These are lawyer tactics and ones that get used by creationists all the time. Casting doubt may work in a murder case. It has little real impact on scientific facts. From Greenfrye’s here are some good ways to deal with these approaches, not only with climate change denialists but denialists of any sort:

One of the many holes in the Denier narrative is that they take it as a given that the climate science is false and that all that was left to do was to find the culprit. Their language is completely framed in terms of that assumption, hence the histrionics that the alleged “smoking gun” of the CRU emails seals the case.

Quite understandably the climate rationalist response has been to point out that the “gun” isn’t a “gun”, and it’s not smoking. Clearly Jones got hot under the collar at times, and different people were pretty steamed up about certain other people, but no smoking gun. That may be clear to us, but it’s not satisfying to the general public.

I suggest that we have change our response to “smoking gun? who cares? show us the “body!” Of course there is no “body”, or even “bullet holes” anywhere … ie no evidence that anything actually happened.

A great example of confirmation bias. If you are looking for something in particular, it is often easy to make it happen. It is something all humans do. One of the main things that scientists are trained in are processes that help diminish confirmation bias. But not deniers.

We need to switch from seeming to be defending the supposed culprit to demanding actual evidence of a crime, any crime. We need to be asking:

“Which studies were compromised, how? be specific. Cite papers and data sets. What is the evidence? where is it? what work is affected? how? show me the evidence that says so.

This supposed scandal involves perhaps a half dozen people, how does it affect the work of the 3,000+ others who’s work makes up climate science?

How does it affect the work that was done before the alleged culprits graduated from univeristy? the work from before they were born?

Of the 30,000(ish) studies that make up climate science, which ones are undone? where is the evidence? be specific … show us exactly how and why?” etc

Another part of the denialist toolkit, one seen with creationists all the time, is that if they can find something weird in just one thread of the scientific fabric, they can complete unravel the entire thing. But the world, and science, does not work this way. It is more like a building where even if you can turn off one light in one room, the rest of the building continues to be illuminated and still stand.

Because of course another hole in the Denier frame is thier certainty that the CRU hack topples climate science. Naturally they are taking advantage of the bobbhead credulity and the public naivete, which does work, but it also makes them vulnerable to it being challenged on it.

“You are certain it topples climate science? how? where? which studies? what evidence? You don’t know? then how are you certain?

Please run through a list of the studies you believe are affected? Hockey stick? what’s that? please refer to specific papers and studies.You don’t know? then how can you be certain?

Ahhh, Soandso 2004? so just how is it compromised? what part of the work? I thought you were certain?”

We need to hammer that and keep hammering it. Push hard, and not only the Deniers, but the media drones who brainlessly echo the Denier memes. Not hysterically or in anger, but with relentless defiant decency and certitude. Make it clear that they do not understand the science, and in fact have no idea what they think the emails actually mean.

We have to be the ones asking questions and demanding answers!

There’s a smoking gun? where’s the body?

Make them do a little work instead of just lobbing in little smoke bombs.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

Where are these emails?

NASA Fakes Email Leak:
[Via DenialDepot]

A rocket launches from NASA CRU’s GISTEMP headquarters. Can it really be right for such launches be to made in such close proximity to important climate data?

Over the weekend NASA’s University of East Anglia has alleged hackers have “stolen and released” a bunch of scientist’s emails.

However what makes me deeply suspicious is the complete lack of correspondence with Al Gore in these released emails. Where are all the emails showing Al Gore’s involvement? Even more bizarrely there is no plotting and planning on how to raise taxes. I don’t see any mention of the socialist new world order that these scientists are trying to bring about. Not once do they talk about how to best achieve wealth redistribution or world government.

So I have to conclude this this email release is a big con. It has all the hallmarks of a deliberate leak to make these scientists look better and to try and silence skeptics who question their motives. If we are to believe the emails, the scientists don’t actually think their work is in error! But we know they must realize it’s all a big con, so how can these emails possibly be true?

I was expecting something like this:
From: “Michael Mann”
To: “James Hansen”
CC: “Al Gore”, &WorldGovernmentDistributionList
Subject: A good idea!
Date: Mon, 21 October 2008 09:15:31

Hail Comrade,

October temperature release draws near. How about you just reuse the Sept 2008 temperatures? I figure that way it will make it the warmest October on record!

Al says this will be an excellent move for his stock portfolio.

btw I don’t know what to do with all that grant money coming through my door, it is starting to fill up my front hall. I bought 5 more Ferrari’s and a yacht, but it isn’t reducing it much.

In Stalin,

Mike

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Maybe if there had been some emails even remotely like this, then we might have something to talk about. But DenialDepot is always a good place for a laugh.

Technorati Tags: Environment

A nice description of the problem – wasted time

As discussed by DarkSyde, the problem is really not the emails that were stolen from the University, cheery-picked and released without context. Climate change does not go away because of this furor.

The problem will be the huge amount of time required now to put these emails in context and explain what is really going on. This is time that these scientists really do not have and will keep them away from their research.

Thus it is perfect for the denialists. Either they make people think climate change is a fraud or they keep the scientists so occupied that they slow down the rate of research.

And, since we have seen what happens when someone gets in the crosshairs of these fanatics, I would expect that the latter is what will have the greatest effect on our understanding of climate change. I would not be surprised to hear that these researchers have gotten death threats.

Well, if you like conspiracy theories, ask yourself who really benefits from this? It does not stop climate change and it only delays our understanding. It muddies the water but not one email I have seen does anything about changing the data in ways to change the conclusions. And there are thousands of scientists elsewhere whose work is completely independent from these particular researchers.

So who benefits? Well, since the energy companies such as Exxon have already spent million if not billions on muddying the water, in exactly the same fashion as the tobacco companies, I think we have a nice suspect.

SImply pay lots of money to illegally hack into the email server, cherry pick the results and send them on to their denialist friends (Has anyone really looked at the finances of the premier denialists?). It is a great win-win for them.

Aren’t conspiracy theories fun? No need to have any real facts at all. Innuendo and misrepresentation works best. And that is all we have really seen from the stolen emails.

[Listening to: A Time For Everything? from the album "Jethro Tull]

They are doing it wrong

by Alan Vernon.
The CRU hack
[Via RealClimate]

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

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None of the emails I have seen show anything untoward actually happened. It is only by taking things out of either the context of the email or historical context that anything can be made. In particular, worry anytime you see ellipses (…) in something like this. Quote-mining is what denialists do.

The best response I read in the comments was this, which presents reality that these people need to hear:

#430 Intrigue says: “Does anybody think that this is the only compilation that the hacker has? After this little taste, perhaps another two, or three, or twelve compilations will be presented onto the net. Looking forward to the rest of the chapters, after certain folks have explained their way into a deep hole.”

Actually, I have yet to see anything that requires explanation. The picture that emerges to my eye is of people doing science–and I’ve been doing science for more than 20 years. The fact that the denialists are trumpeting this as if it were some scandal merely illustrates how devoid of understanding they are.

I’m going to try to be uncharacteristically nice to all you lower-than-snakesh*t and dumber-than-owlsh*t denialists: Yer doin’ it wrong! You will never make the specter of anthropogenic climate change go away by resorting to personal attacks and trying to discredit science or the scientific process. In the end, we need scientists–can’t do without them when it comes to important issues like climate. In the end, any new scientists will wind up doing science in pretty much the same way as their predecessors, because 1)they’re human, and 2)science works. And they’ll ask exactly the same questions of ol’ Ma Nature, and she’ll give them the same answers. Ol’ Ma Nature doesn’t change her story, and she’ll keep telling us what we don’t want to hear no matter how long we sit there and say, “La-la-la-la, I can’t hear you.” Matter of fact, she’ll turn up the volume on her response!

If you want to make the specter of anthropogenic climate change, the answer is easy: Come up with a theory of climate that equal explanatory power and greater predictive power than the current consensus theory, of which anthropogenic causation of the current warming is an inevitable consequence. Now run along and do that. The adults have work to do saving the planet.

Comment by Ray Ladbury — 21 November 2009 @ 8:06 AM

Creationists think that if they can just find one chink in the theory of evolution it will bring down the whole thing. Same with climate change denialists. But there is a lot more to both theories than just one little debating point worried at by denialists. They both provide better expanatory power than any other approach. They both lead us to knew areas of exploration that help us understand the world around us better. No other theory does as much.

That is why they are used and defended. They work better than any other approach for explaining what is going on in the world around us.

Come up with a better theory and scientists will listen. Simply being destructive with any constructive will not do it. But whining and crying conspiracy is a whole lot easier than actually doing any work.

[Listening to: Walk Don't Run from the album "Gold" by The Ventures]

Overcoming the gut

by kevinzim
The amateur scientist (that’s us)
[Via Seth's Blog]

Many people buy a car (probably their single biggest discretionary purchase) based on slamming a door, kicking a tire and judging the handshake of a salesperson.

We choose a surgeon based on the carpeting in his office and a politician by his hair cut.

During the first week of swine flu vaccines in New York, most parents (more than half!) chose to keep their kids out of the program.

Interviewed parents said things like, “I’m not sure it’s safe,” and “I wanted to see if it affected other kids…”

No mention of longitudinal studies or long-term side effects. No science at all, really, just rumors and hunches and gut instincts.

This gut-instinct approach served people well for hundreds of thousands of years, but it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t work in a complex world. Eating salmon at a wedding feels ’safe’ because we always have, but of course any professional scientist will tell you that farmed salmon is an ecological disaster. You can’t see the problem, so you ignore it.

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I mentioned this the other day. Most people make decisions based on gut instinct, their own personal rules of thumb. Because of this, they are not very accessible through direct intellectual processes.

Marketing professionals use this all the time. But scientists are not only loathe to cloak their understanding of the real world in marketing lingo, they usually see that as as a direct assault on the science itself (I guess this is one of their own rules of thumb.)

That is why scientists who ARE quite good at connecting with regular people and making direct connections are often viewed with suspicion by other scientists. Carl Sagan, who surely did research of the level to get appointed to the National Academy of Sciences, was rebuffed, mainly due to the negative efforts of other members not in his scientific discipline. That is, the ones who were least able to really judge his science kept him out:

In the early 1990s the national academy of Sciences held its annual election to membership. Richard Feynman had already become so exasperated that he resigned his membership, saying that he saw no point in belonging to an organization that spent most of its time deciding who to let in.

But this time the best known astronomer in the world was nominated. Each section of the Academy votes separately on all candidates, and the astronomy division voted the fellow in. But there were negative votes from other divisions, notably the particle physicists. They disliked his public persona, some said. They complained that he was arrogant and an egomaniac, and said he was really not up to caliber, despite his fame. Clearly, envy played some role. Rumors flew.

This served as an object lesson for many other scientists. Do not invade the public realm or you will be flung out of the group.

In my opinion, the real reason for the snub had little to do with his science and much to do with his apparent steps into public policy.

As a young scientist, I was horrified by this event. I had a tremendous respect for Sagan, not only for his Cosmos series but for his current scientific work. He published, in Science, THE key paper on nuclear winter, helping coin the term. He is the ‘S’ in what became know as TTAPS, the first real attempt to model what would happen to our atmosphere in the event of massive nuclear explosions. It was published in December 1983. But not many remember that he had two papers in the same issue of Science, something very seldom seen.

Immediately following the TTAPS paper was one entitled Long-term biological consequences of nuclear war. Here is the abstract:

Subfreezing temperatures, low light levels, and high doses of ionizing and ultraviolet radiation extending for many months after a large-scale nuclear war could destroy the biological support systems of civilization, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. Productivity in natural and agricultural ecosystems could be severely restricted for a year or more. Postwar survivors would face starvation as well as freezing conditions in the dark and be exposed to near-lethal doses of radiation. If, as now seems possible, the Southern Hemisphere were affected also, global disruption of the biosphere could ensue. In any event, there would be severe consequences, even in the areas not affected directly, because of the interdependence of the world economy. In either case the extinction of a large fraction of the Earth’s animals, plants, and microorganisms seems possible. The population size of Homo sapiens conceivably could be reduced to prehistoric levels or below, and extinction of the human species itself cannot be excluded.

The idea of nuclear winter emerged due to the ideas of extinction first promulgated by the Alvarezes just 3 years earlier. If the dinosaurs became extinct because of an impact, one that resulted in the blockage of sunlight by the material blasted into the atmosphere, what would happen with the tons of material blasted into the atmosphere by nuclear warheads. The abstract to their paper, published in Science in 1980, had this to say:

Impact of a large earth-crossing asteroid would inject about 60 times the object’s mass into the atmosphere as pulverized rock; a fraction of this dust would stay in the stratosphere for several years and be distributed worldwide. The resulting darkness would suppress photosynthesis, and the expected biological consequences match quite closely the extinctions observed in the paleontological record.

The nuclear winter papers were derived from solid scientific principles. ‘If the dinosaurs were driven to extinction by the reduction in solar energy by the impact, what would happen today if a similar event occurred through nuclear explosions?’ They used one of the first primitive global models to examine the question. It was a classic science investigation.

The results had severe policy implications, and stirred fierce political debate. I think Sagan’s snub came more from the feeling that he was entering the public realm of policy not just education. In the heat of the final years of the Cold War, writing a paper about nuclear winter seemed more political than scientific.

Too many fellow scientists did not like his popularity. But I also think many did not like the idea of researchers entering the arena of public policy. Maybe they feared that funding would be cut off if the policy conflicted with government leaders. Maybe they just wanted to be left alone in their ivory towers.

Only recently has this old view been changing. Many scientists are now making connections to the community, are advocating policy decisions. But it always has to be in the service of science, of real data. Because if we lose the connection to the world around us, if we do not accurately use our tools to describe Nature to the rest of the community, we fail to remain scientists.</P.

So, how do we market that?

Vito, you’re still blocking

by Yury Cortés
The New York Times Columnist Who’s Helping To Ruin The Future [Monday Hate]
[Via io9]

Why is John Tierney so skeptical, and yet so gullible? The New York Times’ science columnist is one of the most vocal global-warming doubters in the media, but when it comes to Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity and geo-hacking, he’s suddenly wide-eyed.

People often lump Tierney together with George Will, as global-warming doubters at major newspapers who use somewhat specious arguments to downplay the scientific consensus that we’re slow-cooking our planet. But Tierney’s position as the Times’ science columnist gives him more authority than Will’s as a random TV pundit. But also, the thing I find fascinating about Tierney is that even as he goes to great lengths to paint the evidence about global warming as mere hype, he’s also eager to buy into the hype whenever there’s a claim that new technology will deliver us to a beautiful future, without having to make any hard choices. It’s hard not to believe the two things are related.

Reading Tierney’s columns and blog posts on global warming, a few things become clear. He’s a global warming skeptic, rather than an out-and-out denier. (In one blog post, he says he believes there’s “some risk” that global warming will be a danger.) But he’s given tons of exposure and legitimacy to outright deniers, including some groups with ties to the oil industry. And he’s done a lot to paint the scientific consensus on global warming as pure hype and conformism.

In Tierney’s world, the reason the majority of scientists agree that global warming is a worsening crisis is dick-measuring. In a column on Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, Tierney spends most of the column quoting Roger Pielke, a climate researcher who’s been one of the most vocal critics of the idea that the polar ice caps are melting. According to Pielke, scientists present conclusions about global warming as definitive not because the data supports them, but just to boost their own “authority in the political debate” and tarnish their opponents.

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I have noticed this also. People who dispute climate change but accept all sorts of ‘woo’ with very little scientific underpinnings.

Here he ignores a lot of hard data to follow along with one of those ‘theories’ that posits exponential curves continuing forever. That is a fun thought experiment but there is nothing to believe that this particular curve will continue.

But it sure is fun speculating. And that is what attracts some people where actually dealing with real science does not. Science tends to abhor pure speculation because it has to deal with reality.

We saw the same thing in Superfreakonomics, where fun speculation with geoengineering was touted more than the hard facts of climate change. It is the old Tinkerbell Effect, where if we just beleive hard enough,the World, I mean Tink, will get better.

We all know about wishes, horses and beggars. Trying to ignore the hard thoughts of realty with the wistful joys of speculation is not a way to fix things. It just stifles our real efforts to find solutions. It makes for fun comedy but not for good policy. I think someone is blocking their true feelings about the Tattaglia Fami…, I mean climate change.

[Listening to: Something in the Way (Live) from the album "MTV Unplugged in New York: Nirvana" by Nirvana]

Economics ignored by economics professor?

by robstephaustralia

SuperFreakonomics Ignores the Business Case for Sustainability
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s SuperFreakonomics has certainly gotten a lot of people worked up. The point of contention is a chapter about global warming which makes the case that Al Gore and others are getting us way too worked up about the climate problem because the only way to solve it is to convince people to “put aside their self interest and do the right thing even if it’s personally costly.”

The authors go on to explain their solution — geoengineering — which purportedly isn’t going to require us to cut back on our energy use or rethink the way we do business. But what they have completely failed to address — and what the (ahem) lively discussions on the topic have missed as well — is what the benefits of tackling climate change might be, instead of just the costs.

The authors have missed a major economic issue: the process of shifting our economy to a low-carbon one has enormous upsides completely aside from the benefits to climate balance.

I’m not going to try and take apart their arguments or judge the soundness of their climate science as a whole; there are some others who are already doing a detailed job of that. If you like your climate discussions hot and sarcastic (which can be entertaining), see Joe Romm’s posts on his Climate Progress blog. Or if you like the cool, dispassionate analysis, I’d recommend the Union of Concerned Scientists or the well-respected journalist Eric Pooley’s take on how the authors — who he says are friends of his — “flunk” the science.

There’s also been a fascinating back and forth which includes the authors and Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman. In short, Krugman is not pleased and he lays out some devastating concerns about the mental exercise the authors have undertaken (“We’re not talking about the ethics of sumo wrestling here; we’re talking, quite possibly, about the fate of civilization. It’s not a place to play snarky, contrarian games”).

The brouhaha is truly unfortunate on many levels. It’s not that having a discussion of geo-engineering is a bad thing — we should explore and assess many options. But the real problem is that the authors of SuperFreakonomics — and even the big critics who have gotten sucked into it — seem to have taken too narrow a view of the problem. While the authors clearly believe that there is too much climate-change hype, there is some agreement that there’s a warming problem (or why propose a solution — the main point of the chapter — at all?). But the focus of the discussion is entirely on a way to counteract the effects of greenhouse gases, as if there are no other issues related to our reliance on fossil fuels.

Instead, let’s just think about the business benefits of changing our products and processes to reduce carbon emissions, regardless of the atmospheric benefits. How will changing to a lower-carbon economy help companies? Well, there’s real money involved here — energy and other resources are getting fundamentally more expensive over time as demand around the world rises and supply gets harder to find. Oddly, the SuperFreakonomics authors acknowledge this Econ 101 supply problem in passing with the statement: “In just a few centuries, we will have burned up most of the fossil fuel that took 300 million years…to make.” So why wouldn’t we want to move away from a declining resource?

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Steven Levitt is one of the authors of Superfreakonomics and an economic professor at the University of Chicago. Yet according to this article, he seems to have taken off his economic hat in the chapter on climate change. Or at least he decided to wear his hat somewhat askew.

Moving away from fossil fuels has very strong economic implications, particularly since these fuels are a dwindling resource which will become more expensive over time.

The countries and companies that decouple themselves from fossil fuels will slash their costs and increase profits mightily. In fact, as Robert Kennedy, Jr. pointed out in a speech recently, the countries that have already reduced their reliance on fossil fuels — such as Iceland, with its geothermal energy, and Sweden, with a carbon tax driving down energy use as the country grew — have made their economies richer and more stable. (Yes, Iceland then bet its wealth on bad investments at the heart of the financial crisis in 2008 and bankrupted itself, but that’s another story.)

As many have repeatedly argued, we also place ourselves at great risk globally by continuing to pour money into oil markets. We send hundreds of billions of dollars a year to parts of the world that don’t like us very much. And we place ourselves at personal risk — the National Academy of Sciences just estimated, conservatively, that fossil fuels cost $120 billion per year in health costs and cause 20,000 premature deaths (that’s more than six 9/11s if you’re counting).

In their admiration of geoengineering, which only covers up the effects of burning fossil fuels, the authors appear to ignore the benefits that moving away from fossil fuel use engenders.

So, not only did they mess up in several ways when it came to the solutions to climate change, they also missed the economic implications of continuing to burn fossil fuels. I guess being contrarian was more important than fundamental economics. It helps sell more books, I guess.

More on Gore’s book

Al Gore’s Climate Choice

[Via Dot Earth]

Al Gore’s new book finds the core of the climate challenge, and solutions, in the human brain.

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I bought the book and have started reading it. Revkin provides a nice viewpoint but the comments are full of people who are spouting the same drivel that has been shown to be either wrong or misleading.

But it does appear that there are a lot more who agree with Gore’s perspective. Perhaps some day soon we will make some real progress.

[Listening to: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds from the album "Greatests Hits Vol. II" by Elton John]

Senate rules are awesome!

by Hey Paul

Can a GOP walkout really stop the climate bill?

[Via Congress Matters]

No.

I’m posting from the road, on my phone, so this won’t be as comprehensive and link-rich as it should be, but here goes.

It’s been pointed out that there’s a rule in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that requires the presence of two minority side Senators for a markup to go forward. But like most such rules, it’s probably not “self-executing,” meaning that in order for it to have an effect, someone needs to show up to point out that there aren’t the requisite number of minority Senators in attendance. A majority side Senator could certainly do that, but why? The job of protecting minority rights belongs chiefly to the minority. Let them do it. And when they do, you politely point out that if you’re present enough to object, then you’re present enough to count towards a quorum.

Now, this particular rule requires two minority Senators, not just one. That sounds like a rule designed by someone who had been burned by the one-Senator rule before. So technically, one Republican can show up, point out that there aren’t two, and try to invoke the rule. And if that happens, what can the chair do about it?

Well, one way around it is the way the Judiciary Committee traditionally deals with a similar rule. They ignore it.

Another would be to bypass the formal use of the committee entirely, and use Rule XIV to move the bill to the floor when they’re ready. That is, Chairwoman Boxer could convene a meeting of anyone who’s on the committee and who wants to participate in the process, and in effect simply ask them, “If this were a committee markup, what amendments would you offer, and how would you vote on them?” Then she could alter her draft bill accordingly, and either try to move it to the floor under Rule XIV, pass the resulting document on to the next committee of jurisdiction for its consideration, or set it aside for whatever future merger process the leadership may have planned for it.

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I wrote about this the other day.The Republican members of the committee were going to vanish, making it impossible to continue because 2 minority members were required for markup to continue.

But it requires someone to be present to ‘notice’ that the minority members are absent. If no one ‘notices’ then things are fine. What an perfectly diabolic way to get around a rule.

And then if someone from the GOP does show up to ‘notice’ well, the majority just says that this is not a real committee meeting. “We just happened to get together to talk about the bill. Want to join us?”

Parliamentary procedure at its best!

It will be interesting to see the response

by simone.brunozzi
The must-read solutions book — “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis” by Al Gore.:
[Via Climate Progress]

The long-awaited sequel to An Inconvenient Truth comes out Tuesday. If you want a preview, Gore and the book are featured in an excellent Newsweek cover story, The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.

In September, Nature Reports Climate Change asked me (and several others) to suggest three books to read ahead of the Copenhagen conference. Of those, they then asked me to review Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis:

When your last work led to an Oscar and Nobel Prize, anticipation is high on the sequel. And former US Vice President Al Gore’s new book delivers. Our Choice, due out in November, is a wonderfully readable treatise on climate solutions.Whereas An Inconvenient Truth framed the crisis that climate negotiations are tackling, this followup spells out what needs to be done.

Based on 30 of Gore’s ‘Solutions Summits’ as well as one-on-one discussions with leading experts across multiple disciplines, the book aims, in Gore’s words, “to gather in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now”. Gore naturally focuses on energy, the source of most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and discusses many underappreciated strategies such as concentrated solar thermal power and cogeneration. He also devotes a full chapter to soil, a major carbon sink that is gradually degrading. Farming strategies for restoring soil carbon are described, including biochar, a porous charcoal that can potentially enhance the soil sink while providing a source of low-carbon power. And like its PowerPoint-based predecessor, Our Choice is replete with lush photos and simple but powerful charts. This [is] a must-read book for those who want a primer on all the key solutions countries will be considering at Copenhagen.

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Here is a guy who held summits with people from many walks of life in order to gather information for this book, who has altered his opinions as new data emerges, and I bet many people will just ignore him. While two guys who have no background in this issues and really talked to very few people (apparently mischaracterizing those they did talk with) will make the best seller lists.

We shall see but I am just completely amazed at the vitriol that gets thrown at Gore without any real basis. What has Gore every really DONE that makes him such a target? No sex scandals. No financial scandals. A Vietnam vet.

People can disagree with his politics but I just have no idea where the vitriolic disdain comes from. He is used as a scare word, like ACORN or Kennedy. It apparently does not matter that he is right more often than not and that many of the initiatives he sponsored have had huge positive impacts on us all.

I expect his ideas will be more useful and achievable, with lower overall costs , than those of Superfrteakonmics. They will most likely actually be based in reality.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Government, Politics, Science, Sustainability

I love my representative

Rep. Jay Inslee slams SuperFreakonomics: “People are still trying to write books to deceive the American public” on climate science.:
[Via Climate Progress]

This is a repost from Wonk Room.

Yesterday, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) rebuked the authors of SuperFreakonomics for participating in a “continuing effort to deceive the American public” on the science of climate change. During an investigative hearing on forged letters sent by the coal industry to oppose climate action, Inslee condemned the industry’s effort to “hoodwink, defraud, and deceive the American public now to cover up the toxicity to the world environment” of global warming pollution. Inslee then turned to Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, criticizing them for “absolute deception” in their work on global warming:

The second thing I want to note is this is not the only continuing effort to deceive the American public. I want to note a book called Freakonomics, or SuperFreakonomics, that some authors wrote, that basically said or asserted we don’t have to control CO2, we’ll just pump sulfur dioxide up into the atmosphere and that will solve the problem. They purported to quote a scientist named Ken Caldeira from Stanford who’s one of the predominant researchers in ocean acidification to suggest that Dr. Caldeira didn’t think we should control CO2. Which is an absolute deception. Dr. Caldeira I’ve spoken to personally. He’s told me we have to solve ocean acidification. You can’t solve ocean acidification without controlling CO2 and yet people are still trying to write books to deceive the American public. And we ought to blow the whistle on them, we’re blowing the whistle on one today, we’ll continue to do it, because ultimately science is going to triumph in this discussion.

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Deception and mischaracterization of the science are typical tools used by those hoping to obfuscate the debate. It is nice to see Inslee, who represents my district, get a chance to have a few words.

But I guess it all sells books. Capitalism at its best. People love lies and rumors.

Well, at least some people.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Government, Science

More from the party of no

GOP Takes Clean Energy Bill Obstructionism To Yet Another Level:
[Via Crooks and Liars]

From NOW on PBS–Power Struggle. More available here.

This is what I hate having to explain to my relatives and friends abroad in Europe about politics in the US. We know that global warming is a fact. We know that our actions, if they didn’t cause global warming, definitely exacerbate it. We know that we must reduce our dependency on oil, for both ecological and political/strategic reasons. And yet, what we are able to do is hampered so predictably by the Republican party:

Here we go again. James Inhofe, the most prominent climate change denier in the United States Senate, has concocted a new and innovative strategy to thwart the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. To wit, he and his Republican colleagues on the Environment and Public Works Committee have worked up a plan to simply not show up for next week’s markup:

But Boxer cannot hold the markup unless at least two Republicans show up, and EPW ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) signaled that he has unanimous support among the panel’s minority members to boycott the session until they get more data on the legislation from U.S. EPA and the Congressional Budget Office.

Inhofe said he will wait for Boxer to file an official notice of the markup — expected today — before responding with his own declaration of the GOP’s markup strategy.

“As soon as we find out what her announcement is and what she wants to do, we’ll have our response,” Inhofe told E&E last night. “We’ll have our unanimous expression ready.”

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You have to admire their discipline. Ideology is always so much more important than actually doing anything. So minority of a minority can prevent government action. It might almost be admirable if Inhofe was not such a black helicopter denialist. But then, why should he really care about the rest of us? He has his.

I wonder who will play Inhofe in the stirring docudrama about this Profile In Courage?

Technorati Tags: Environment, Politics

A devastating response

by SophieG*
An open letter to Steve Levitt:
[Via RealClimate]

Dear Mr. Levitt,

The problem of global warming is so big that solving it will require creative thinking from many disciplines. Economists have much to contribute to this effort, particularly with regard to the question of how various means of putting a price on carbon emissions may alter human behavior. Some of the lines of thinking in your first book, Freakonomics, could well have had a bearing on this issue, if brought to bear on the carbon emissions problem. I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.

I am addressing this to you rather than your journalist-coauthor because one has become all too accustomed to tendentious screeds from media personalities (think Glenn Beck) with a reckless disregard for the truth. However, if it has come to pass that we can’t expect the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor (and Clark Medalist to boot) at a top-rated department of a respected university to think clearly and honestly with numbers, we are indeed in a sad way.

By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics , but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing. I will take Nathan Myhrvold’s claim about solar cells, which you quoted prominently in your book, as an example.

As quoted by you, Mr. Myhrvold claimed, in effect, that it was pointless to try to solve global warming by building solar cells, because they are black and absorb all the solar energy that hits them, but convert only some 12% to electricity while radiating the rest as heat, warming the planet. Now, maybe you were dazzled by Mr Myhrvold’s brilliance, but don’t we try to teach our students to think for themselves? Let’s go through the arithmetic step by step and see how it comes out. It’s not hard.

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This article, which uses simple math, destroys one of the points from the book. Since many of the other points in the book are also based on just as much ‘just-so science’ , the post serves as a good example of what to look for.

If he was so wrong with his point of view on something that was so easily examined, how far off is he on all the other things he discusses? Why should we believe anything he says about geoengineering if he is misleading on other approaches?

One of the things a contrarian should do is not use misleading ideas. Getting people to look at problems from a different perspective can be very helpful. But forcing a new perspective by using distortions does not accomplish anything helpful at all.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science