Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots IPCC scientific method
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 3: But They’re So Un-Serious
The Laredo Morning Times runs an AP article by Seth Borenstein on the most recent IPCC report, headlined “Mumbai, Miami on list for big weather disasters”. Heh:
WASHINGTON — Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of climate scientists said in a new report issued Wednesday.
The greatest threat from extreme weather is to highly populated, poor regions of the world, the report warns, but no corner of the globe — from Mumbai to Miami — is immune. The document, by a Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists, forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges and droughts.
The 594-page report blames the scale of recent and future disasters on a combination of man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, founded in 1988 by the United Nations, has generally focused on the slow inexorable rise of temperatures and oceans as part of global warming. This report by the panel is the first to look at the less common but far more noticeable extreme weather changes, which lately have been costing on average about $80 billion a year in damage.
Watch the denialists rise up in outraged hordes to smite algore! Sent March 28:
It’s certainly possible that the climatologists in the IPCC have it wrong in their predictions of extreme weather and heavy storms. Scientific errors have happened in the past; they’ll happen again. But let’s make a few comparisons.
Science has a built-in error-correction mechanism. When scientific results are published, people everywhere around the planet try to reproduce the experiments, searching for errors or misinterpretations. Scientific method has become the most potent truth-finding tool in humanity’s arsenal, steadily enhancing its predictive accuracy; the storms of today were forecast by climate scientists decades ago.
By contrast, those vehemently disputing the IPCC’s findings have time and time again been proven wrong. They were proven wrong about Iraqi WMDs, proven wrong about tax cuts on the richest 1 percent — and they’ll eventually be proven wrong on climate change, too.
Perhaps it’s time to pay more attention to the people who’ve been proven right.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes creationists denialists idiots morons
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 1: Do You Know Where Your Fools Are? I Do.
Three actual scientists are heard in the pages of the Tennesseean, arguing against the newly introduced legislation that would require all kinds of silly-ass nonsense to be taught equivalently in science classes:
Almost 90 years ago, Tennessee became a national laughingstock with the Scopes trial of 1925, when a young teacher was prosecuted for violating a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution. With the passage of two bills, House Bill 368 and Senate Bill 893, the Tennessee legislature is doing the unbelievable: attempting to roll the clock back to 1925 by attempting to insert religious beliefs in the teaching of science.
These bills, if enacted, would encourage teachers to present the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of “controversial” topics such as “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” As such, the bills are misleading, unnecessary, likely to provoke unnecessary and divisive legal proceedings, and likely to have adverse economic consequences for the state.
It is misleading to describe these topics as scientifically controversial. What is taught about evolution, the origin of life, and climate change in the public school science curriculum is — as with all scientific topics — based on the settled consensus of the scientific community. While there is no doubt social controversy about these topics, the actual science is solid.
This one was a bit long, but they had a 250-word limit, so I let myself go a bit. Maybe there’ll be another paper with the same article tomorrow, and I can cut things down. Sent March 26:
The difference between social and scientific controversy is simple: the former is based on opinion, the latter on facts. Since opinions change with each successive generation, we can safely say our species will keep generating new social controversies for millennia to come.
Science, on the other hand, builds knowledge incrementally through a process of rigorous testing and analysis. A scientific controversy is created either by a new fact that doesn’t fit the accepted consensus understanding (as J.B.S. Haldane famously said when asked what could falsify evolutionary theory, “Fossil rabbits in the Pre-Cambrian”), or by a new theory that offers a more robust explanation for the facts that already exist.
Neither of these criteria are met by the arguments of climate change denialists. Their cries of “teach the controversy” are disingenuous; shall we teach the medieval theory of humours, phlogiston, or the “luminiferous aether”? These were all controversial in their time, and all have been disproved and relegated to the scrap heap of history.
Rather, the individuals fighting genuine education on climate change do it for simple and selfish reasons: they don’t wish to be inconvenienced. The corporations funding elaborate misinformation campaigns about global warming do it because they don’t wish to surrender their profit margins.
The scientific consensus is unambiguous: if we continue our profligate consumption of fossil fuels our CO2 emissions will trigger a runaway greenhouse effect, with consequences including rising sea levels, droughts, and extreme weather. Unless we change our ways, our descendants will indeed inherit the wind.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 28: Inhofe Is INHERENTLY Unconstitutional
The Bradenton Herald (FL) runs the same piece on Inhofe to which I responded yesterday.
The real hoax is the claim that a scientific debate exists about the reality of climate change. It is promoted by organizations that benefit from our current energy choices and groups that are opposed to any regulation whatsoever, even the most sensible safeguards that help protect our children’s health.
The hoaxers claim climate scientists are “in it for the money,” a ludicrous proposition as pointed out by Jon Koomey. Dr. Koomey used his expertise in mathematical modeling to study the economic impacts of climate change for two decades at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. If Koomey and his colleagues were in it for the money they would have taken their analytic expertise to Wall Street long ago, where their salaries would have been five to 10 times what they can make working for the government.
The hyped rhetoric around this issue is an attempt to convince Americans that accepting the scientific evidence will require taking actions inimical to our shared values of liberty, freedom, community and entrepreneurship.
But one need look no further than the studies of America’s military and intelligence officials who understand how disruptive human-caused climate change could be to our nation’s interests both at home and abroad (in 2009 the CIA established a Center on Climate Change and National Security). Putting our head in the sand about climate change is a sure way to undermine American liberty, economic prosperity and national security. Of all the alterative paths before us to address this problem, doing nothing to reduce the threat of serious climate change is a dangerous and expensive option.
There’s a climate change hoax all right, but it is Sen. Inhofe and his science-denying associates who are trying to do the fooling. We are all going to pay a price if we don’t call-out their campaign of misinformation and get down to the real work before us. The question now is what will be the cost of inaction to our health and our pocketbooks? The longer the hoaxers can prevent serious action, the higher the price we will all pay.
The guy is a disgrace to idiots everywhere. Sent March 22 (80 degrees outside):
Oklahoma senator James Inhofe is egregiously ignorant about basic science. His approach to climate change is equal parts stout denial and hippie-punching; apparently mocking environmentalists and rejecting the existence of the burgeoning crisis is enough to make the problem go away. Inhofe recently stated (on MSNBC) that he used to accept the conclusions of climatologists until he figured out how much it would cost to address the problem, demonstrating that the power of wishful thinking trumps reality every time — in the U.S. Senate, anyway.
Anywhere else? Ignoring your cardiologist’s warning doesn’t mean an automatic heart attack, and driving drunk doesn’t always mean a crash — but your insurance company and the arresting officer know: reality wins.
Mr. Inhofe’s thinking is so steeped in the apocalyptic wishful thinking of Biblical end-times theology that his involvement in climate policy should probably be forbidden under the Establishment clause of the Constitution.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 27: More Like This, Please
The Kansas City Star offers a platform to some scientists who have a few words about James Inhofe:
We are scientists who agree with critics such as Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., that there is a climate change “hoax” being perpetrated on the American people.
We just don’t agree on what the hoax is and who is being fooled.
Sen. Inhofe and his associates want us to believe that the science of climate change is the contrived “hoax.” Their claims cannot withstand even the most cursory scrutiny. Does this “hoax” date back to 1896, when Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius presented his findings that human activities releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could change Earth’s climate? Did it start when scientists Charles Keeling and Roger Revelle demonstrated in the 1950s that a large part of the carbon dioxide released from the burning of coal, oil and gas was remaining in the atmosphere because the oceans couldn’t absorb it fast enough? Did an evil cabal of “warmists” trick a science advisory panel into warning President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 of the dangers of adding greenhouses gases to the atmosphere?
In 2009, the National Academies of Science of the world’s major industrialized nations (including China, India and Brazil) issued an unprecedented joint statement on the reality of climate change and the need for immediate action. Do those who claim climate change is a hoax expect us to believe this was a put on by an international bunch of con men with doctoral degrees? The U.S. Evangelical Environmental Network tells us that global warming is one of the major challenges of our time, and Pope Benedict XVI has called for coordinated global action to address dangers of climate change – have they too joined the conspiracy?
Of course not.
Always fun to mock one of the biggest idiots in American politics, which is really saying a lot, these days. Sent March 21:
Senator Inhofe recently admitted on national television that he once accepted the scientific consensus on global warming — until he learned how much it would cost to deal with it, at which point he became the go-to guy for climate denial. The idea that ignoring a costly problem will make it disappear is bizarre, to say the least, but entirely typical of much twenty-first-century American politics. The Oklahoma senator has certainly made it pay; he’s handsomely funded by extractive industries apprehensive over the prospect of shrinking profit margins in a sustainable-energy economy.
Mr. Inhofe’s recipe for environmental and energy politics? Equal parts of big oil’s obscene greed and the apocalyptic imaginings of dominionist Christian sects, liberally flavored with hippie-punching and wacky conspiracy theories.
Although addressing climate change now will save trillions of dollars in the future, the Senator’s position has hardened. Don’t burden him with facts; his mind’s made up.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes cowering before the apocalypse denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 24: Dangerous Lack Of Minds
The Springfield, MI News-Leader runs another version of the fact-check on Rick Santorum:
Santorum’s “tell that to a plant” crack begs the question — how dangerous can carbon dioxide be? Too much is definitely a bad thing. Exposure to high levels of CO2 can cause “headaches, dizziness, restlessness, a tingling or pins or needles feeling, difficulty breathing, sweating, tiredness, increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, coma, asphyxia to convulsions,” warns the Wisconsin Department of Health, “and even frostbite if exposed to dry ice,” which is solid CO2. Poor air circulation in buildings and high carbon dioxide in soil seeping into basements can lead to high levels of the gas.
Plants do, in fact, absorb CO2. But even plants might not like too much of it. A 2008 study conducted at the University of Illinois found that instead of increasing organic matter in soil, higher carbon dioxide levels actually led to less organic matter. Increased CO2 also may limit plants’ ability to cool the air. A 2010 article in Science Daily said that a study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science found that carbon dioxide’s effect on vegetation was causing some of the earth’s warming.
Santorum is entitled to his own opinion, of course. But voters shouldn’t be misled into thinking carbon dioxide isn’t a problem, or that climate scientists don’t overwhelmingly agree that global warming is real and human activities are making it worse.
So I wrote another version of my “Rick Santorum is a dangerous idiot” letter. Sent March 18:
Rick Santorum’s words on climate change demonstrate what happens when American anti-intellectualism gets carried to ludicrous extremes. The former Pennsylvania senator no longer has any need for facts, for the worldview held by his core constituency is entirely conditioned by ideology. No reality need apply.
These hard-line denialist conservatives are eager to believe any rhetoric that reinforces their preconceptions, which makes them easy marks. Let’s look at those preconceptions briefly, shall we? On the one hand, Santorum’s followers are addicted to the convenience of cheap fossil energy; on the other hand, they are fervently awaiting the Biblical apocalypse. In short, they’re a demographic group for whom conservation and long-term thinking are not just pointless, but actively evil.
If Mr. Santorum believes his own words, then he’s just another mark — as gullible as his followers. If he doesn’t, he’s a con artist. Either way, he has no business leading America.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialism Greenland ice melt media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 20: Dry Ice! We’ll Sprinkle Dry Ice All Around, And It’ll Freeze Everything Up Again!
The Boston Herald apparently had an empty spot on one of their pages, so they ran an article about climate change and ice melt:
LOS ANGELES — The Greenland ice sheet has a lower melting point than previously thought, with scientists saying not only that it could melt completely at a lower temperature than once believed, but also that the melting process could soon become irreversible.
“Once the process of melting the ice begins, it is very hard for it to change course even if we can lower temperatures in the future,” Alex Robertson, lead author of a new study, said in an interview by email with the Los Angeles Times on Monday.
“So even though melting the whole ice sheet could take a really long time, we will essentially decide the fate of Greenland within the next century.”
The study was published Sunday in Nature Climate Change.
How to criticize them without hurting their fee-fees? Sent March 14:
In a culture dominated by scandals du jour and the rapid-fire programming of a 24-hour news cycle, it’s no surprise that our nation seems to have a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder. When electoral politics is carried out in sound bites and bumper-sticker slogans, our civilization’s long-term future is invariably trivialized.
Nowhere is this more problematic than in the intersection of scientific research and public policy. By its nature, science requires rigor, attentiveness, and patience — three qualities notably lacking in our political and media environments. The most recent study on the likely fate of the Greenland ice sheet is the result of many years of concentrated study and inquiry — and its findings likewise require more than superficial attention. Politicians and pundits, however, will do their best to ignore its implications for our nation and our planet; it’s far, far easier just to mock what you don’t understand.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots Peter Gleick
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 10: (Facepalm)
Meet a denialist clod at the North County Times (“serving North San Diego and SW Riverside Counties” — CA), named Steven Greenhut. He mouths off about Gleick, and about climate scientists in general:
When it comes to global warming, the ends apparently justify the means. People from all political persuasions do stupid things to advance their cause, but what bothers me most are respectable people who justify behavior they would never tolerate from their foes. That type of ideological fanaticism is corrosive of our democratic society.
It’s easy to chide the hypocrisy of Gleick. He had been the chairman of an ethics committee for a scientific association. His column blasting dishonesty still sits on his institute’s website. It’s harder to explain away his deceit as a mere aberration in the climate-change drama.
In the “Climategate” scandal in 2009, “Hundreds of private email messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change,” according to a New York Times report from the time.
The emails showed that the scientific community is so invested in this climate-change ideology for financial and ideological reasons that it would rather cook the numbers than level with the public about the reality of the threat. A follow-up release of emails in 2011 provided even more evidence supporting skeptics’ claims.
Blah, blah, blah.
The whole thing could have been written by a robot, and probably was. But my response was written by a human, and mailed on March 4:
Let’s stipulate in advance that Dr. Peter Gleick shouldn’t have impersonated a staffer at the Heartland Institute in order to authenticate some documents purportedly originating at the secretive right-wing think tank. But the arguments Mr. Greenhut builds on this fact are specious, and reveal that he has swallowed the denialist message — hook, line and sinker.
For example, he cites the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia without noting that multiple separate investigations cleared the scientists involved of any improprieties. Mr. Greenhut cites “a New York Times report at the time,” but ignores the paper’s subsequent coverage acknowledging that “climategate” was a “manufactured controversy” (editorial, July 10, 2010).
The Heartland Institute documents revealed a carefully crafted agenda for undermining science education in America. Under the guise of “teaching the controversy,” Heartland planned to supply curricula which covered climate science inaccurately, in a way consistent with the profit-driven motives of the Institute’s funders. It’s analogous to a tobacco company funding health and fitness curricula downplaying the link between cigarettes and cancer.
Whether retail or wholesale, lies have no place in science. But those on the denialist side of the climate change argument have far more to answer for than Peter Gleick.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots Michael Mann Peter Gleick
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 5: Kill, Kill, Kill For Peace.
Time Magazine, on the war-on-science:
The climate war — the public opinion battle between skeptics of man-made global warming and those who believe in the scientific consensus — escalated to a new level of ferocity this past month. First a series of memos allegedly from the Heartland Institute — a libertarian think tank that has long supported climate skepticism — surfaced on the Internet, detailing the group’s previously anonymous corporate funding and outlining its plan to fight action on global warming. Then came the news last week that the Heartland memos had been fraudulently acquired by the environmental advocate and scientist Peter Gleick, who — after allegedly being sent an initial memo by a person he identified as a Heartland insider — impersonated as a Heartland board member via email in order to obtain several additional internal documents. Worse, Heartland now claims one of the memos was doctored — while nonetheless confirming that it plans to push global warming skepticism in the nation’s schools, opening up one more, very impressionable front in the seemingly endless climate war.
If there’s anyone who knows how nasty the climate fight can be, it’s Penn State climatologist Michael Mann. Mann, who has been involved with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for over a decade, gets regular death threats at his office. He’s been the target of a lengthy — and, critics say, politically motivated — investigation by the attorney general of Virginia. His private emails to colleagues have been hacked and published, and he’s become a major public target for Heartland and like-minded groups. “I guess over the years I’ve experienced quite a few adventures,” says Mann, who is about to publish book on his experiences, called The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. “It’s given me not just a solid understanding of the problem of man-made climate change, but also the campaign — largely funded by the fossil fuel industry — to deny that science.”
They go on to talk more about Gleick. I’m very tired and this letter was interrupted by family stuff repeatedly during its composition….but I feel pretty good about it anyway. Sent February 28:
It’s very easy to deplore Peter Gleick’s ethical lapse. After all, even the MacArthur-winning climatologist himself agrees that impersonating a Heartland Institute employee in order to verify documents was a bad idea. And all over America and the world, pundits are chiming in that this misdemeanor will ruin the credibility of climate scientists everywhere.
Lost in the squabbling over Gleick’s actions is the fact that Heartland and similar organizations have worked for years to ruin the credibility of climate scientists everywhere. They have used ample sources of corporate funding to impugn the veracity of dedicated researchers and misrepresent a worldwide scientific consensus. Consider the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect over the next century, and add to them the consequences of inaction today — a paralysis the Heartland Institute actively supports — and ask yourself: would you tell a lie to save a single life? A billion lives? A civilization?
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots quacks
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 4: Goat Glands!
The Philadelphia Inquirer speaks sooth:
Recent revelations are highlighting the corrosive nature of our national dialogue about climate change.
Bloggers recently published what appear to be internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a group that has long sought to undermine public understanding of climate science. The documents detail the organization’s plan to introduce misleading information about climate change to science classrooms as part of a larger campaign to constrain the American response to the problem. And last week, a highly regarded climate scientist revealed that his frustration over continuing attacks on climate science led him to trick Heartland into sending him its documents.
Sadly, stolen documents and e-mails, opaque corporate financing of interest groups, and a simple lack of civility have come to define the public discourse on climate change.
There is a better way.
The truth is that the scientific community has reached a consensus on climate change. The buildup of heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels and clearing forests is changing the climate, posing significant risks to our well-being. Reducing emissions and preparing for unavoidable changes would greatly reduce those risks. That is the conclusion of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the world’s leading scientific societies, and the overwhelming majority of practicing climate scientists.
I’ve just been reading Pope Brock’s book on John Brinkley. Go ahead, read about him; I’ll wait. Sent February 27:
While fleecing the rubes is a long-standing American tradition, there’s a big difference between the Heartland Institute and old-fashioned con artists like “Doctor” John Brinkley, who crippled thousands and made millions selling “rejuvenation” treatments to the gullible and needy in the 1920s. Brinkley and others of his ilk peddled nostrums they knew to be spurious, and countless anxious individuals believed their lies.
While Heartland’s agenda is not so much about selling lies as it is about devaluing the truth, the charlatans and quacks who sold snake oil and goat glands would feel right at home with the Institute’s science-denying curriculum salesmen. Funded by corporate interests whose astronomical profit margins are threatened by any sort of regulatory action on climate change, this secretive conservative think tank distorts and denies the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, fostering public confusion and ignorance. And all for the basest of motives: money.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 3: Dumber-est-est-est…er.
The Washington Post wonders:
IS THE FIGHT against global warming hopeless? It can seem so. The long-term threat to the climate comes from carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, locking in higher temperatures for generations. After decades of effort, only about one-tenth of America’s energy mix comes from renewable sources that don’t produce carbon dioxide.
But two policies can buy the world more time to allow carbon-free technologies to catch up. One is aimed at greenhouse substances that clear out of the atmosphere after a few years, months or even days. Cutting back the emission of soot and ozone gases such as methane would reduce the world’s warming by as much as a half degree Celsius over the next few decades, according to a study in last month’s Science. Adding hydrofluorocarbons — another class of short-lived pollutants — to the list would help even more to delay the approach of temperature thresholds beyond which global warming could be catastrophic.
Reducing these emissions is relatively cheap, especially when the benefits to health are factored in. For example, primitive cooking stoves in developing countries produce much of the world’s soot; using more efficient ones would prevent perhaps millions of deaths from respiratory illness. Methane, meanwhile, is the primary component of natural gas — a commodity that pipeline or coal-mine operators could sell if they kept it from escaping into the atmosphere. Researchers have even concluded that global crop yields would rise.
Global warming will be easy to conquer, compared to stupidity, against which the gods themselves contend in vain. Sent February 26:
While the struggle against runaway planetary warming is not completely hopeless, the outlook for the next few centuries can seem pretty bleak. The unifying thread in climatologists’ forecasts of the likely impact of climate change has been that they’re far too conservative; virtually without exception the environmental consequences have been worse, and earlier, than predicted. It’s hard to look at the accumulated evidence and remain cheerful — unless, of course, you’re a climate-change denialist, in which case all that extreme weather everywhere around the globe is proof of a giant conspiracy to bring about a New World Order (don’t forget compulsory re-education camps for SUV owners!).
It’s an unfortunate irony that those conspiracy theorists are the ones stymieing the revamped energy economy and upgraded infrastructure that would bring hope to the fight. The ignorance of climate-change deniers may be blissful, but it carries grave consequences for the rest of us.
Warren Senders