Education environment Politics: denialists scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 7: Don’t Criticize Our Coffee; You May Be Old, Weak and Bitter Yourself Some Day.
I knew all that weird-ass weather was good for something. More on the “Everybody’s getting a clue” story, from the L.A. Times:
After several years of finding that fewer and fewer Americans believed in man-made climate change, pollsters are now finding that belief is on the uptick.
The newest study from the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, which is a biannual survey taken since fall 2008 and organized by the Brookings Institute, shows that 62% of Americans now believe that man-made climate change is occurring, and 26% do not. The others are unsure.
That is a significant rise in believers since a low in spring 2010, when only about 50% of Americans said they believed in global warming, but still down from when the survey first began, when it was at around 75%. The pollsters talked to 887 people across the country.
What’s caused the sudden rise? Mostly the weather.
“People, for good or for bad, are making connections in what they see in terms of weather and what they believe in terms of climate change,” said Christopher Borick, co-author of the survey. He is an associate professor of Political Science and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Pennsylvania. His co-author is Barry Rabe, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a professor at the University of Michigan.
So I wrote this and sent it on March 1:
Learning that more Americans accept the scientific factuality of global climate change is a problematic sort of good news — like watching a cherished friend start to realize that the warnings he’s receiving from his cardiologist are genuine.
Of course, recognizing the seriousness of a problem is a long way from actually doing something about it. Your old friend may have gotten a medical alert, but he’s still smoking two packs a day. Similarly, while Americans are waking up to the dangers of climate change, we’re a long way from changing the way we live.
Because our modern economy developed when energy was “cheap,” it was easier to consume than to conserve. Now that the true cost of all that fossil fuel is emerging, it’s clear that protecting ourselves from the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect is going to be expensive and inconvenient. Unless we consider the alternative.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: belief systems media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 6: Still I Look To Find A Reason…
According to a number of news reports, more Americans have stopped whacking the snooze button, as witness this, from the San Diego Union-Tribune:
The percentage of Americans who believe in global warming has rebounded to the highest level since the fall of 2009, according to a University of Michigan survey released Tuesday.
When the initial poll was done in the 2008, 72 percent of Americans said they believed there was solid evidence that average temperatures on Earth have been getting warmer over the past four decades.
The number fell to 65 percent in the fall of 2009 and tumbled to 58 percent a year later. But the most recent survey shows that in the fall of 2011, the number of climate-change believers rebounded to 62 percent.
A day earlier, the San Diego Regional Climate Education Partnership issued its own countywide survey on the same topic. It showed that the majority of San Diegans believe that:
• Gasoline engines and electricity generation emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (68 percent).
• Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a major cause of increased temperatures (54 percent).
• Worldwide annual temperatures between 1990 and 2010 have been the warmest in recorded history (55 percent).
The highest degree of specific concern (71 percent) was expressed for “future generations,” followed by “children” (69 percent) and “humanity” in general (65 percent) — what survey sponsors said indicated a strong connection between climate change impacts and people.
Good. I was getting bored with bashing Heartland Institute. Sent February 29:
Scientifically literate citizens are delighted to hear that more Americans are beginning to accept the ominous reality of global climate change. After all, you can’t fix a problem until you recognize that it exists. So a survey showing that almost two-thirds of Americans “believe in global warming” is good news — of a sort.
But before we break out the champagne, we should recognize that the greenhouse effect isn’t a philosophy, a theology, a credo, or a moral code; it’s as real as gravity — confirmed by experiment, observation and measurement — not something we can choose to “believe in” or not, but a fact. Extra CO2 in our atmosphere causes the greenhouse effect, which causes global warming, which in turn causes climate change. When politicians, pundits, and pollsters claim that science, like religion, is a matter of “belief,” it’s no surprise that public discussion of climate change has been so muddled and confused.
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
Education environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists Heartland Institute Peter Gleick
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 1: Remixed.
The Silicon Valley Mercury-News, on Gleick:
For the past two decades, Peter Gleick has earned a reputation as a nationally known expert on water and climate issues, winning a MacArthur “genius award,” penning a long list of scientific articles and testifying before Congress.
But over the past two days, the 55-year-old Berkeley resident has found himself at the center of a national maelstrom of his own making: using a false name to obtain confidential documents from a pro-industry think tank known for minimizing the risks of global warming.
The issue has riveted the environmental community and the energy industry, raising questions about whether the damage will extend past Gleick’s reputation and harm scientists’ efforts to convince the public that climate change is real and largely caused by humans.
Gleick, president of the nonprofit Pacific Institute, in Oakland, wasn’t talking Tuesday.
But Monday, he stunned the scientific community when he admitted — via his blog in the Huffington Post — that he obtained confidential fundraising and strategy documents from the libertarian Heartland Institute in Chicago by using someone else’s name, and distributed them on the Internet.
Heartland/Gleick — the gift that keeps on giving. Sent February 24 (putting me six days ahead of the game):
Yes, Dr. Peter Gleick was naughty. Misrepresenting himself to the Heartland Institute in order to verify the provenance of some documents was indeed an ethical lapse — but when measured against the wholesale mendacity of Heartland’s climate-change denialist curricula, Gleick’s offense is about as serious as a parking ticket.
But unlike Gleick, Heartland Institute didn’t have an “ethical lapse.” You can’t lose what you don’t have, and all the evidence suggests that this secretive right-wing think tank never had any ethics in the first place.
Misrepresenting the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change is bad enough when it’s done in politics and the media, for it fosters inaction in the face of a serious (and steadily worsening) global threat. But misrepresenting climate science in our nation’s classrooms is a form of intellectual child abuse; a gross violation of the public trust; a lie so big it beggars the imagination.
Warren Senders
Personal Politics: abortion
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In case anyone wondered, this is the first reason I’m vehemently pro-choice:
This was uploaded to the 1in3Campaign’s website. Please go there and participate as fully as you can.
Thanks.
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility Newt Gingrich
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 24: Narcissistic Nihilist Edition
USA Today covers the varied sources of influence on climate change opinion, with a special emphasis on the role of a certain drug-addled gasbag:
“I’ve come up with a list of at least ten different reasons that people are confused about climate science. It’s different for each person,” says Texas Tech University climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe, author of A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions, written with her husband, an evangelical pastor, Andrew Farley.
Hayhoe has learned a lot about politicians and climate in the last two months. In December, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told an Iowa voter, alarmed by something the voter heard mentioned by radio personality and climate science naysayer Rush Limbaugh, that he was dropping a chapter that Hayhoe had written for a book he planned on environmental topics . Alakazam, no more distracting climate science.
The vanishing act for her chapter by Gingrich came as news to Hayhoe. “I’ve never spoken to him and he has never spoken to me,” she said, this week. (The Gingrich campaign did not respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.)
What came next out of the rabbit’s hat was an even bigger surprise. Hate mail. Threats against her and her child. So much that she told the Toronto Globe and Mail that she had lost count of all the angry messages aimed at her, a mother who happened to be a scientist telling people what all the evidence suggests is the truth about their world.
“There’s a pattern of attacking people who speak out on climate change, by figures in the political elite such as Rush Limbaugh, that is almost rehearsed,” Brulle says. “That’s how it works,” he says. “That’s how public opinion on climate is shaped in our country.”
Almost rehearsed, huh? Sheesh. Sent February 19:
It is a peculiar irony that Newt Gingrich, a self-described “historian,” should find his rhetoric on climate change so completely controlled by the right wing’s loudest and least reflective spokesman. Since Rush Limbaugh’s sense of history barely extends to the beginning of the current day’s radio appearance, it’s no wonder that he derides scientists who are thinking in hundred- or thousand-year time spans.
For Mr. Gingrich to excise Katherine Hayhoe’s chapter on climate change from his book is a pathetic capitulation to political exigency. This bow to the power of a proudly ignorant buffoon is one of the most ignominious moments in a career already jam-packed with low points, but as we face what is possibly the single gravest threat human civilization has yet encountered, it’s not just a personal humiliation. Newt Gingrich’s reversal on climate change ensures that the former speaker is truly “on the wrong side of history.”
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialism Heartland Institute idiots
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 23: Phlogiston!
The New Jersey Star-Ledger goes further on the Heartland papers:
The nation’s leading skeptics of climate change science were dealt a blow this week when hundreds of private internal documents — detailing donors, spending and the group’s anti-science strategy — were leaked to the public.
The documents betrayed the inner workings of the Heartland Institute, the most vocal of U.S. climate change “deniers” who, despite decades of scientific data proving that the Earth’s climate is warming, promote skepticism and doubt.
The leak is the smoking gun that climate scientists have been waiting for — and should be a warning to anyone who buys into the idea that “global warming is just a theory.”
You’re being played.
The Heartland Institute’s key strategy has been to create doubt in the American public by saying that climate change is a controversial, unproven theory.
Fuckers. Sent February 18:
“Teach the controversy” sounds like an excellent idea, doesn’t it? To understand scientific methodology, we should examine areas where scientists disagree; rigorously examining competing theories is surely the best way for students to learn how actual science works…the argument is an alluring one, and the climate-change denialists at the Heartland Institute are betting that America’s school systems will be seduced.
But sometimes there is no controversy to teach. Nobody’s pressuring schools to teach both geocentric and heliocentric cosmologies, and the medieval theory of “humours” has no place in medical training (for which we can all be grateful).
There is no scientific disagreement on the basic facts of planetary climate change: it’s happening, it’s a serious problem, and humans have a huge role in causing it. The Heartland Institute’s cynical strategy is to create an artificial controversy, thereby safeguarding the profit margins of their corporate sponsors for a few more years.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists epistemology Heartland Institute
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 22: More Ultra-Hard Sapir-Whorfianism
More on Heartland Institute, this time from the Boston Globe:
Because Heartland was not specific about what was fake and what was real, The Associated Press attempted to verify independently key parts of separate budget and fundraising documents that were leaked. The federal consultant working on the classroom curriculum, the former TV weatherman, a Chicago elected official who campaigns against hidden local debt and two corporate donors all confirmed to the AP that the sections in the document that pertained to them were accurate. No one the AP contacted said the budget or fundraising documents mentioning them were incorrect.
David Wojick, a Virginia-based federal database contractor, said in an email that the document was accurate about his project to put curriculum materials in schools that promote climate skepticism.
“My goal is to help them teach one of the greatest scientific debates in history,” Wojick said. “This means teaching both sides of the science, more science, not less.”
Googling “david wojik” +epistemologist gets you the self-description in the first sentence of my letter. I am proud of the final sentence in the second graf. Sent February 17:
The Heartland Institute’s point man for climate-change denial in public-school curricula is David Wojik, who has described himself as a “philosopher, engineer and logician.” Note the absence of any training in climate science! Wojik’s doctoral work focused on the history and philosophy of science — surely worthy areas of study, but ones which he’s well paid to misapply in distorting the nature of research on global warming.
While all but a statistically insignificant minority of climatologists agree on the human causes of climate change, many details are yet unresolved: which are the primary forcing agents? How do different feedback loops interact? By highlighting areas of disagreement while ignoring a worldwide scientific consensus, Wojik and his sponsors wrap greed-driven denialism in a cloak of spurious intellectual rectitude.
While Wojik’s employers are no doubt pleased with his work, the laws of chemistry and physics are unaffected by even the glibbest epistemological sophistry.
Warren Senders