Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots James Hansen reality-based community sapir-whorf hypothesis scientific consensus scientific method
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 9: There Is No Word For That In Our Language
John Monahan writes a nice piece in Modern Times Magazine (AZ) addressing climate change denial, with specific reference to the WSJ flap. The whole piece is well worth your attention.
Feb. 3, 2012 — What a crazy seven days it has been for the climate change debate. Scientists from both sides of the issue took to the Wall Street Journal late last week and early this week to opine on the merits of the issue and what should be done about it.
But that’s just putting it nicely. What really happened is one side said the other was wrong — knowingly in an attempt to hide the truth — in pursuit of riches.
To say it even more bluntly, each said the other was the ‘real’ greedy liar.
The most important bit is the part where he quotes James Hansen, who is, as usual, right:
“Public doubt about the science is not an accident. People profiting from business-as-usual fossil fuel use are waging a campaign to discredit the science. Their campaign is effective because the profiteers have learned how to manipulate democracies for their advantage,” Hansen said. “The scientific method requires objective analysis of all data, stating evidence pro and con, before reaching conclusions. This works well, indeed is necessary, for achieving success in science. But science is now pitted in public debate against the talk-show method, which consists of selective citation of anecdotal bits that support a predetermined position.”
Simply, Hansen is saying corporations are using the scientific method to bolster an argument that has little merit only because it serves their bottom line. He also places blame upon the mainstream media, calling their need for “balance” a means to validate bad science and support corporate positions.
“Today most media, even publicly-supported media, are pressured to balance every climate story with opinions of contrarians, climate change deniers, as if they had equal scientific credibility. Media are dependent on advertising revenue of the fossil fuel industry, and in some cases are owned by people with an interest in continuing business as usual. Fossil fuel profiteers can readily find a few percent of the scientific community to serve as mouthpieces — all scientists practice skepticism, and it is not hard to find some who are out of their area of expertise, who may enjoy being in the public eye, and who are limited in scientific insight and analytic ability,” Hansen wrote.
They have a 500-word limit; I took about 225 to try and tie all these phenomena together. Sent Feb 3:
Climate-change denial is part of a larger problem, one exemplified by the anonymous Bush official who told journalist Ron Suskind, “We’re an empire; we create our own reality,” and ridiculed those who lived in the “reality-based community.” Conservative politicians and electoral strategists appear to believe in a post-modern universe where measurable reality is just another kind of fiction. Examples of this are easy to spot.
The anti-evolution politicians whose claim that “science is just another religion” serves as a rationale for their attempts to introduce creationism into public school science curricula; the runup to the war in Iraq, in which facts were manipulated and cherry-picked to support President Bush’s martial agenda; the legislators in some Southern states who seek to have any mention of slavery simply removed from history books — the list goes on and on.
Climate change denial is by far the most damaging of these delusions. Human science has discovered and illuminated the laws of physics and chemistry, but that doesn’t mean that the “we make our own reality” crowd can apply wishful thinking to the greenhouse effect. Given enough time, American culture could recover from forced creationism, historical revisionism, and clueless warmongering — but if we fail to recognize the imperative need to address climate change, we’re not going to have the chance.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: denialists scientific literacy scientific method
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 8: What He Was Doing In My Pajamas, I’ll Never Know
The Tuscaloosa News runs an editorial stating that “Climate Change Should Influence Politics”:
Azaleas are budding and daffodils can be found in full bloom along rural roads around West Alabama. Is that proof of global warming?
Hardly, but that doesn’t mean evidence of sustained, rapid climate change isn’t mounting.
Consider this: Nine of the 10 warmest years in the past century have occurred since the year 2000, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. More of the Arctic Sea is melting.
And now the U.S. Department of Agriculture has changed the map that helps gardeners decide when to plant flowers and which will grow well here. Tuscaloosa, which used to be grouped with much of northern Alabama, now falls in the zone with Mobile.
Even all that isn’t conclusive proof of global warming. No, but the case for climate change has convinced more than 97 percent of scientists actively publishing studies in the field of climatology.
They agree that not only is climate change real, but the rapid rise in temperatures around the world over the past few decades is due to human activity.
Yep. Sent Feb 2:
At the moment, it seems as though science is just about the only element in American public discourse that doesn’t influence politics. Presidential candidates vie with one another for the approval of conservative religious groups, not to mention the various deficit-fixated, abortion-fixated, gay-marriage-fixated ideological factions which have dominated the national conversation for years. Meanwhile, Republican legislators are working overtime to reduce the amount of actual science taught in our country’s science classes, and to reduce the government’s funding of actual scientists who are carrying out research projects crucial to our country’s future.
But has there never been a Presidential “science debate” or anything more than the most anodyne public statements from the candidates about the value of science in our lives — and that’s a tragedy, for scientific method is by far the most accurate and comprehensive way to find out what’s actually happening in the real world — and policies that aren’t reality-based are guaranteed to fail.
And nowhere is this more crucial than in the issue of climate change. The scientific ignorance of our political culture is a disaster in the making.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: idiots NCSE scientific method
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 22: You Can’t Spell “Idiot” Without An “Id.”
USA Today reports on the NCSE’s new project:
A noted science education organization Monday announced a turn to battling climate science naysayers.
The National Center for Science Education, based in Oakland, Calif., is best known for leading charges against creationist efforts to remove evolution from public schools nationwide. But now, the three-decade-old group will also fight efforts to slip incorrect climate science information into school lessons.
“We are seeing more efforts in legislatures and schools to push climate misinformation on teachers and students,” says NCSE head Eugenie Scott. The NCSE plans to serve as a resource for science teachers facing school board or classroom fights over climate science.
Good luck, guys. Sent January 17:
The National Center for Science Education has an uphill battle ahead. Their laudable initiative to spur education on climate change is certain to be turned into a political football by the petro-funded id of American governance, the Republican party.
Over the coming months, prepare for cries of “ideologically biased education!” and “brainwashing our kids!” It’s already happened with the teaching of evolution; several states are now readying legislation forcing science teachers to treat Darwin’s discoveries on a par with young-Earth creationism.
Conservatives will protest that they simply want to “teach the controversy” of climate change. Nonsense; if that were so, they’d advocate a place in the classroom for Marxist economics, geocentric cosmology, and the medieval theory of humours. Global climate change is a fact; an uneducated citizenry won’t be able to cope with the threats it poses, which is why the NCSE’s work is so vitally important for our future.
Warren Senders
Education environment: denialists NCSE science education scientific consensus scientific method
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 21: You Can’t Make An Omelette Without Breaking A Few Eggheads…
The L.A. Times’ Neela Banerjee writes about the NCSE’s decision to address the way climate change issues are handled in our schools:
Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position. South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change. Tennessee and Oklahoma also have introduced legislation to give climate change skeptics a place in the classroom.
In May, a school board in Los Alamitos, Calif., passed a measure, later rescinded, identifying climate science as a controversial topic that required special instructional oversight.
“Any time we have a meeting of 100 teachers, if you ask whether they’re running into pushback on teaching climate change, 50 will raise their hands,” said Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who meets with hundreds of teachers annually. “We ask questions about how sizable it is, and they tell us it is [sizable] and pretty persistent, from many places: your administration, parents, students, even your own family.”
Against this backdrop, the National Center for Science Education, an Oakland-based watchdog group that supports the teaching of evolution through advocacy and educational materials, plans to announce on Monday that it will begin an initiative to monitor the teaching of climate science and evaluate the sources of resistance to it.
Good for them. The NCSE does terrific work. Sent January 16:
The conservative assertion that climate change is a “scientifically controversial” topic offers an example of how their ideologically-driven strategy functions in the public sphere. Since there is no significant scientific disagreement on the basic facts of global warming (it’s happening, it’s largely human-caused, it’s getting worse, the sooner we do something about it the less it will cost), the denialists in politics, media and the corporate sector have manufactured a convenient controversy by misinterpreting analyses, obfuscating results, and all too often simply lying through their teeth.
If all the scientists but a petrol-funded few are on one side of an issue, and a political philosophy with a long history of rejecting inconvenient facts is on the other, does that actually count as a dispute? If we’re supposed to “teach the controversy” of global climate change in our schools, what’s next for our science teachers — the medieval theory of humours?
Warren Senders
environment: Christopher Plummer extinction flora scientific method vegetation
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 13: Bless My Homeland Forever
The Scotsman notes a new study on the impending loss of alpine flowers and plants:
A study, involving biologists from 13 countries, revealed that climate change was having a more serious impact on alpine vegetation than they had expected.
The first cross-Europe survey of changing mountain vegetation has showed that some could vanish within decades.
Michael Gottfried, of the Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments (Gloria) programme, said: “Many cold-loving species are literally running out of mountain. In some of the lower mountains in Europe, we could see alpine meadows disappearing and dwarf shrubs taking over within the next few decades.”
The Gloria team, led from Austria, analysed 867 vegetation samples from 60 different summits across Europe, including in the Cairngorms in Scotland.
They compared results from 2001 and 2008 and found strong evidence to suggest cold-loving plants were being pushed out by species that preferred warmer conditions.
Among species at threat in Europe could be the edelweiss, praised in the song of the same name in The Sound of Music. It is specially adapted to the high-life at altitudes of between 6,500ft to 9,500ft. Its snow white, star-shaped leaves are covered in woolly hairs to protect them from the cold.
Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow, bloom and grow forever.
Sent January 9. My daughter turned 7 years old today; we love to sing that song.
The news comes in from everywhere: climate change is having a significant impact on local and regional ecosystems. While diverse ecological systems are affected by the global greenhouse effect in different ways, there is one thing that all the reports have in common — one phrase that’s universally applicable, whether it’s describing the Arctic or the Amazon, a Senegalese forest or a Scottish meadow.
“More serious than expected.”
Listening to climate-change denialists, one could easily form the impression that because climatologists’ predictions are frequently inaccurate, there really isn’t that much to fret about. After all, if scientists are wrong so often, why worry? But the sleep-wrecking fact is that when the experts err, it’s virtually without exception by underestimating the damage done. The sudden introduction into the atmosphere of millions of years’ worth of buried carbon has triggered a cascade of consequences, all (you guessed it!) more serious than expected.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans scientific method
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 9: Morans.
The L.A. Times runs a story on the Pacific Institute’s “Bad Science” Award, which goes to a deserving cast of characters (Murdoch was runner-up, which will give you an idea):
The 2011 “Climate B.S. of the Year Award” goes to the entire field of candidates currently stumping in New Hampshire for the Republican Party presidential nomination, the Pacific Institute announced Thursday.
The awards, in their second year, are intended to distinguish the most active among so-called climate change deniers.
In this case, “B.S.” stands for bad science, according to hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
“There’s a lot of very serious pushback in the scientific community about bad climate science being pushed by a small group of skeptics,” said Gleick from his office in Oakland. “There’s plenty of formal pushback in the literature. This was an attempt, really, to highlight some of the most egregious examples over the past year in a way that was a little more lighthearted.”
The Republicans seeking the White House won this year’s contest “hands down,” the institute’s announcement says: “Not a single one of the Republican candidates for president has a position on climate change that is consistent with the actual science accepted by 97-98% of all climate scientists and every national academy of sciences on the planet.”
It gave me a chance to use the China Hands reference again. While this letter works fairly well I am not entirely pleased with it; it could be more euphonious if I had more time to devote to its creation. But it’s 149 words. What the hell. Sent January 5:
It is only in the past fifty years that the GOP has made a rejection of science a linchpin of its policies and electoral strategy. Capitalizing on a long-standing undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in American society, Republican politicians have long stigmatized professors, scientists and experts as “liberal elitists.” While they’ve won applause from constituents, these attacks ultimately redound to the detriment of the country as a whole.
The Republican party’s arrogant rejection of the crucial findings of climate scientists is of a piece with the McCarthy-era purge of “China hands” from the State Department, rendering America’s East Asian policy rudderless in the face of Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese nationalism. Ignoring the experts didn’t work out then, did it? It won’t work out well now, either, as GOP presidential aspirants eagerly dismiss scientists’ urgent warnings of runaway climate change. Ignorance may be politically blissful, but it always makes for bad policy.
Warren Senders
environment: biology denialists evolution extinction mass extinctions scientific method
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 8: There Is Grandeur In This View Of Life
The Columbus, IN Republic prints an article from the Hartford Courier on evolutionary processes triggered by climate change:
HARTFORD, Conn. — Numerous species already have enough to contend with as climate changes drive them out of their natural habitats; a new study shows that they also have to compete with each other in outrunning those changes.
The University of Connecticut study, to be published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggests that the effects of climate change on wildlife are a good deal more complicated than previously thought.
Mark Urban, an assistant professor of ecology and environmental biology who led the new research, said many studies conducted on climate change and its potential impact on wildlife feature complex meteorological models to predict changes in climate.
What they don’t feature, he said, are equally complex models of how wildlife will react to those climate changes. Real-world factors — the different rates at which animals migrate, how they prey on each other and how they get in each other’s way — need to be included for a more accurate picture.
Killing two bird-brains with one stone, eh? Sent January 4:
Darwin-deniers are overwhelmingly likely to be climate-change deniers, and vice-versa; both groups can expect significant learning experiences during the coming century, as global warming pushes countless animal species out of their accustomed ecological niches and into intense evolutionary competition with one another.
However, both groups share the habit of ignoring evidence and embracing dogma, so it’s anyone’s guess how long their entrenched ideological positions will hold out in the face of rapid extinctions, extreme weather events, unexpected crossbreeds (like the new species of hybrid shark recently found off the coast of Australia), droughts, floods, and all the other epiphenomena of a runaway greenhouse effect.
Yes, biological evolution makes some people uncomfortable; yes, the notion that a century spent pumping carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere might eventually have some negative effects is disturbing. But “uncomfortable” and “disturbing” won’t even begin to describe the future that awaits us should we continue on our carbon-burning, fact-phobic path.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: biology climate change corporate irresponsibility economics evolution oceans scientific method sharks
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 7: (cue scary theme music)
The Christian Science Monitor, among others, reports on a troubling development: corporations have learned how to swim:
In what is being hailed as the world’s first evidence of inter-species breeding among sharks, a team of marine researchers at the University of Queensland have identified 57 hybrid sharks in waters off Australia’s east coast.
{snip}
“Wild hybrids are usually hard to find, so detecting hybrids and their offspring is extraordinary,” said Ovenden.
Hybridization is common among many animal species, including some fish, but until now it has been unknown among sharks. In most fish species, fertilization takes place outside the body, with the males and females each releasing their gametes into the water where they mix. Blacktip sharks, by contrast, give birth to live young and actively choose their mates, which, as the scientists discovered, can sometimes be of a different species.
Ovenden speculated that the two species began mating in response to environmental change, as the hybrid blacktips are able to travel further south to cooler waters than the Australian blacktips. The team is looking into climate change and human fishing, among other potential triggers.
This is straining a bit for effect, but it was fun while it lasted. Sent January 3:
With the discovery of a new species of hybrid shark in the waters off Australia, we’re getting a glimpse of what the next few centuries have in store for us. In a post climate-change future, Earth’s fauna will respond to extreme weather conditions the only way they can — by adapting under extreme evolutionary pressure. It’s just our luck that the critters involved are vicious, soulless, mindless, predatory killing machines propelled only by the most basic of survival instincts.
Meanwhile, humanity’s attempts to mitigate runaway climate change are stymied by the corporate interests most implicated in causing the greenhouse effect — fossil fuel companies, which could just as easily be described as vicious, soulless, mindless, predatory killing machines propelled only by the most basic of survival instincts. Are twenty-first century mega-corporations the economic analogue to new species of sharks?
Will it ever be safe to go back in the water?
Warren Senders
environment: corporate irresponsibility denialists media irresponsibility Richard Muller scientific method
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 4: Paraphrasing WHO?
Dr. Richard Muller continues to be the gift that keeps on giving, this time with an opinion piece in the Midland (MI) Daily News:
Richard Muller has been quoted by climate skeptics the world over as one of the leading authorities on why we should not take the climate science behind global warming on its face.
This past week, a study that took Muller two years to complete, concluded that climate scientists are right about one thing: The land is 1.6 degrees warmer than it was in the 1950s.
Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, conducted the study by focusing in on two chief criticisms of the skeptics — that weather stations are unreliable and that cities, which create heat islands, skew results.
“The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago,” Muller said in a telephone interview. “And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias.”
How often do I get to evoke Don Rumsfeld? Sent on Halloween:
Stop the presses! A scientist confirms other scientists’ results!
Of course, science is supposed to work like that, with constant checking and cross-checking leading to ever-more-accurate descriptions and analyses of the world. Dr. Richard Muller’s readiness to change his mind when confronted with irrefutable proof of climate change’s factuality is simple responsibility to the norms of his profession.
In a sane world, this wouldn’t be news.
Unfortunately, ours is not a sane world, but one where billionaires push ideologically-driven distortions of the scientific process, politicians are the captives of corporate interests, our media promotes a false equivalency between petro-funded contrarians and genuinely worried climatologists — and the best interests of the American people are betrayed. In a sane world, we’d have started addressing the dangers of climate change long ago. But as Donald Rumsfeld might say, we live in the world we’ve got, not the world we wish we had.
It’s crazy.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots Republicans Richar Muller scientific consensus scientific method
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 3: A Truffle!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution runs another article on Muller’s epiphany:
WASHINGTON — A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.
The study of the world’s surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of “Climategate,” a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.
Yet he found that the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
Notice that this guy was fooled by “Climategate.” He wasn’t paying too much attention, I guess. Sent on October 30:
Richard Muller’s capacity for intellectual integrity will cost him dearly among those who’ve used his earlier stances to bolster their rabid denial of climate change. After an exhaustive study partially funded by two arch-denialist billionaires, he’s concluded that all the other researchers on the issue were right: the earth’s atmosphere is warming. Perhaps in his subsequent research, he’ll tackle the question of whether human beings are responsible for the burgeoning greenhouse effect that is triggering extreme weather all over the planet — and eventually come around to the conclusion already shared by the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists: human civilization is indeed the driving force behind global warming. In the meantime, Dr. Muller is about to learn that his erstwhile sponsors couldn’t care less for scientific integrity; the Koch brothers and their political allies in the GOP only support skepticism when they stand to benefit from it.
Warren Senders