Education environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists Heartland Institute idiots Peter Gleick scientific method
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 28: You Know You Know
More pearl-clutching over the fib heard round the world, this time from the San Francisco Chronicle:
The latest national uproar over climate change science has damaged, if not ruined, the reputation of one of the Bay Area’s most prominent scholars and raised serious questions about ethics during what has become a roiling political and ideological debate.
Peter Gleick, a MacArthur Foundation fellow and co-founder and president of Oakland’s Pacific Institute, admitted Monday that he had posed as someone else and obtained confidential internal papers from the Heartland Institute, a libertarian group that has questioned the reality of human-caused global warming.
I used yesterday’s letter to the WaPo as a model. Sent February 22:
Let’s all shed a few tears in sympathy for Heartland Institute. Massively subsidized by some of the world’s most powerful corporations, these industrial-scale liars have finally been exposed as, well, liars. Who wouldn’t cry victimhood under such circumstances? And who cares that Heartland’s massive misrepresentations of scientific fact have been a core component of conservative obduracy on addressing climate change? It’s more fun to pillory climatologist Peter Gleick, who used a single strategically-targeted misrepresentation to expose Heartland’s mendacity.
Heartland’s plans to teach climate-change denial in our nation’s schools are profoundly unpatriotic. Remember Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a “well-informed citizenry,” and ask yourself: would the Sage of Monticello (a man who loved scientific truth as much as he loved his country) be outraged by Peter Gleick’s fib, or by the institutionalized anti-science pseudo-education that prompted it?
Warren Senders
Education environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists Heartland Institute idiots Peter Gleick
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 27: Because The Water Hyacinths…Had Clogged The River
The Washington Post weighs in on “Denialgate.” Pearl-clutching:
Legislation to fight global warming has disappeared from Washington’s policy agenda, but the battle over climate science continues to escalate.
The latest skirmish culminated in the admission Monday night by Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and author, that he assumed a fake identity to obtain documents that would expose the inner workings of a climate skeptic group.
“My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved,” Gleick wrote in a post on his Huffington Post blog.
Gleick’s admission “is the latest in an escalating spiral of polarizing warfare between self-described ‘Climate Hawks’ and so-called Climate Deniers,” which leaves the majority of scientists and the public “caught in the crossfire,” American University professor Matthew C. Nisbet, who studies the issues, wrote in a blog entry.
What Gleick deserves is pretty far removed from what he’s gonna get. Sent February 21:
Heartland Institute’s claim of victimhood in the wake of the release of its confidential documents is absurd. They are heavily funded by some of the most powerful corporations in the world, with an agenda built around the wholesale propagation of falsehoods in the public sphere. When a single individual (the justifiably infuriated climatologist Peter Gleick) carries out a specifically-targeted sting operation (a “retail” falsehood, if you will) that exposes a massive infrastructure of mendacity, he deserves the thanks of the nation, not a fusillade of obloquy.
Given that climate change deniers routinely distort the truth in grotesque and massively harmful ways, why should Gleick’s fib give us the vapors? Heartland’s “educational” programs undercut the Jeffersonian ideal of a “well-informed citizenry.” Gleick’s actions, conversely, reflect a deep and abiding patriotism that our third President, a man whose love of scientific truth matched his love of country, would surely recognize and applaud.
Warren Senders
Education environment: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots media irresponsibility Peter Gleick
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 26: Won’t Somebody Please Have Pity?
The Kansas City Star reprints the LA Times editorial on Climate Denial In The Classroom.
Fortunately, if we’re about to enter a battle over classroom instruction on climate change, it won’t go on for decades, because the impacts of global warming are already patently obvious. Seven of the 10 warmest years since global record-keeping began in 1880 have occurred in the 21st century. Despite an intense campaign to discredit his work, Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph, which shows that temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century soared to their highest level in 1,000 years, has been validated repeatedly. Last year set a record for the most climate-related disasters in the United States costing more than $1 billion in damage each – drought-fueled wildfires in Texas, Hurricane Irene, and Mississippi River flooding were among the 14 cases.
These are facts, not philosophical or religious dogma. Another fact: Sophisticated climate models show that things are going to get a lot worse. It’s bad enough that we’re gambling our children’s futures by doing so little to fight this problem; let’s not ask their teachers to lie to them about it too.
Now that Peter Gleick has emerged as the whistleblower in the Heartland case, let’s watch the poor bastard get pilloried, shall we? Sent February 21:
When the Heartland Institute claims the mantle of victimhood in the “denialgate” scandal, they are continuing a pattern of cynical manipulation of the media and public opinion. There is no doubt that Heartland’s role in muddying the debate on climate change is a crucial one; the organization has been active in promoting conservative causes across the policy spectrum, and has long done so through the dissemination of half-truths, strategic omissions, and (when necessary) outright lying. Their faux-outrage at finally being caught with their mendacious pants down as laughable as their attempts to undercut necessary action on climate change are deplorable.
Dr. Peter Gleick’s act of courage in blowing the whistle on these heavily-funded hoodlums will, of course, not go unpunished. We can anticipate hearing the morality of his actions debated endlessly in the media, while Heartland Institute’s mendacity and duplicity are ignored and minimized. While the world grows steadily hotter.
Warren Senders
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: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots Karl Rove reality-based community Republicans
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 21: Post-Modernist Science Education: Applying the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis To Atmospheric Chemistry.
More on the Heartland Institute leak, from the New York Times:
Leaked documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming a part of the nation’s culture wars.
Related in OpinionThe documents, from a nonprofit organization in Chicago called the Heartland Institute, outline plans to promote a curriculum that would cast doubt on the scientific finding that fossil fuel emissions endanger the long-term welfare of the planet. “Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” one document said.
While the documents offer a rare glimpse of the internal thinking motivating the campaign against climate science, defenders of science education were preparing for battle even before the leak. Efforts to undermine climate-science instruction are beginning to spread across the country, they said, and they fear a long fight similar to that over the teaching of evolution in public schools.
You know what? I’m sick of people saying “alarmist” like it’s an insult. The news is pretty fucking alarming, all the damn time. If you’re not alarmed (hell, if you’re not absolutely terrified) you’re just not paying attention. Sorry to harsh your mellow, but that’s what’s happening.
Anyway, I like the phrase “nihilistic political solipsism.” Sent February 16:
In the helter-skelter 24-hour news cycle that shapes American politics, the words of officials from the previous administration might as well be written in hieroglyphics; the first decade of our century is already ancient history. But the recent leak of documents from the Heartland Institute describing their plans to foster climate-change denial in our nation’s classrooms call to mind Karl Rove’s comments to journalist Ron Suskind. Expressing contempt for the “reality-based community,” Rove went on to say, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
But this is a dangerous game. Old-style Soviet historical revisionism is only effective when the facts are all in the past; the Heartland Institute is attempting to revise the future by applying their nihilistic political solipsism to actual real-world problems requiring reality-based solutions. The physics and chemistry of the greenhouse effect won’t be fooled by banners and photo ops.
Warren Senders
Education environment: assholes denialists epistemology idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus scientific method
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 20: That’s Not Epistemology, That’s Fouling The Wellspring Of Knowledge
The Christian Science Monitor notes the rare rays of sunlight that recently penetrated into the inner recesses of the climate-denial machinery:
Leaked documents from the free-market conservative organization The Heartland Institute reveal a plan to create school educational materials that contradict the established science on climate change.
The documents, leaked by an anonymous donor and released on DeSmogBlog, include the organization’s 2012 fundraising plan. It lists Heartland Institute donors, from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation (established by Koch Industries billionaire Charles G. Koch), to Philip Morris parent company Altria, to software giant Microsoft and pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.
The climate change education project is funded so far by an anonymous donor who has given $13 million to the Institute over the past five years. Proposed by policy analyst David Wojick, who holds a doctorate in epistemology and has worked for coal and electricity generation companies, the project would create education “modules” written to meet curriculum guidelines for every grade level.
A doctorate in epistemology, huh? That’s like a guy with a doctorate in epidemiology who spends his off-hours shitting in the water supply. Glad this got a bit of sunlight. I’ve been writing to the CSM for years and they haven’t published me yet. Here goes nuttin’! Sent Feb 15:
Between evangelical rejections of Darwinian evolution and petroleum-funded rejections of climatology, it’s amazing that any biology, physics or chemistry gets taught at all anymore. The exposure of the Heartland Institute’s massive investment in fostering climate-change denial in our schools pulls the covers off the continuing conservative effort to undermine our country’s system of science education. David Wojick, Heartland’s paid mouthpiece, has a degree in epistemology, the branch of philosophy which addresses the nature of knowledge. He may not know any climate science, but he’s a virtuoso at clouding the distinction between true and false. Coupled with a complaisant media establishment that has abdicated its responsibility to the Jeffersonian ideal of a “well-educated citizenry,” climate-change denialists have relegated an overwhelming scientific consensus to irrelevancy in the minds of much of the American public. This would be immaterial if the issue did not concern a civilizational threat of unprecedented magnitude and urgency.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 18: Bad Moon Risin’
Inexplicably, the Columbus, Indiana Republic runs an AP article on the Vermont state government’s intelligent approach to climate questions:
MONTPELIER, Vt. — A new report by the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources says flooding from Tropical Storm Irene shows the state needs to be better prepared for future flooding.
The state’s “Climate Change Team” says climate change data predicts that Vermont will get more extreme rain events in the future, so “flood resiliency” may be a critical adaptation to climate changes.
The report shows that Vermont’s river communities, which were hit hard by Irene, are vulnerable to intensive flood disasters.
The report begins to count the costs associated with that vulnerability and asks some of the hard questions our state and communities will need to answer in order to build flood resiliency.
As usual, it’s the Republicans who’ve made a mess of everything. Sent February 13:
Even as the federal government remains paralyzed by Republican intransigence in the face of climate change, state and regional agencies are engaged and active. The report from the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources is a lesson to other states: don’t swallow the denialist’s assertions without thinking.
For make no mistake, the signs are in the offing. Climatologists predicted a drastic increase in extreme weather events as the greenhouse effect intensified, and the data pouring in from all over the world has shown that the only errors these scientists made were in underestimating the force of the disruption. At this stage of the game, it’s undoubtedly too late to avoid billions of dollars of costly and inconvenient damage to our infrastructure, our agriculture, and our security — but by acting promptly, we may be able to avert the most catastrophic of outcomes. The Green Mountain state is leading by example.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 17: Many Tables For One, In A Greek Restaurant
The Lehigh Valley Morning Call (PA) has a nice piece from a local allergist, discussing denialism in general in the context of a textbook dispute:
At a recent Saucon Valley School Board meeting, board member Bryan Eichfeld raised his concerns about a textbook proposed for the 2012-13 school year. The book was not a manual for teaching creationism in the classroom, nor was it a book espousing particular political beliefs. The textbook, “Globalization and Diversity,” simply spoke of the geopolitical, cultural and environmental impacts of — gasp — climate change.
Thankfully, the board overrode Eichfeld’s motion to reject the text, and for that it should be commended. However, the fact that this sort of science denialism is seeping into our schools and possibly hindering the education of our students is troublesome and deserves to be the topic of a healthy public discourse.
As an allergist in the Lehigh Valley, I have seen the health effects of a warmer climate — including an earlier and longer pollen season — firsthand. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international network of climate scientists, first recognized the potential for climate change to impact asthma and allergic diseases in 2001, and I have been deeply concerned about the implications for my patients ever since.
The affects of global warming will extend well beyond my specialization, however, and the implications for everyone will be serious. Climate change will exacerbate extreme weather events, jeopardize the U.S. food supply and drastically alter the landscapes we call home. Educating the public on the science behind these risks and their consequences is the first step to confronting and mitigating this pressing issue.
I’m in kind of a hurry, so this was ideal for a generic “Republicans are idiots” screed. Sent Feb 12:
For more than fifty years, the Republican Party has waged a steady war on expertise and logic. Since the election of Ronald Reagan, the role of actual facts in GOP policy-making has steadily diminished. The eight years of the Bush administration showed us what happens when ideology trumps reality, and it’s not pretty. It will take decades to recover from the damage inflicted during that time.
Nowhere is this more problematic than in the public discussion over the issues of climate and energy, where a group of factually-challenged ideologues have hijacked the conversation. The Tea-Partiers have been cynically manipulated by (to resurrect Teddy Roosevelt’s phrase) “malefactors of great wealth.” Their denial of global climate change serves the temporary profits of a few, while delaying the long-term preparations necessary in the face of one of the greatest threats our species has yet confronted.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists economics extinction idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 15: Problems Of Scale, As Usual
The bigger the political system, the less competent it is to address the problem. The Albany Times-Union:
ALBANY — Seven “hundred-year floods” have hit the Catskills during the last 15 years, and lobsters have grown so scarce in Long Island Sound that lobstermen have given up trying to make a living there.
As a result, it’s time for the humans to start figuring out how to protect the trout, lobsters and countless other species being challenged by climate change.
That’s the problem state and federal environmental officials and scientists are grappling with in the middle of a winter that been virtually snowless in much of New York.
A group gathered at the state Department of Environmental Conservation headquarters Thursday to work on a plan for protecting plant and animal life in the decades to come.
While political pundits may still be debating global warming or the impact of greenhouse gases, a broad consensus of scientists have agreed the climate is changing.
Extinction is bad for the bottom line. Sent Feb 10:
It’s good news that state and local governments are taking action to mitigate the expected effects of climate change. But it is shocking that the federal government remains paralyzed by ideological squabbling in the face of what is arguably the greatest threat human civilization has yet faced. Did I say “squabbling?” Perhaps that’s the wrong word, since all the name-calling, vituperation, and misinformation are coming from one side of the political spectrum.
If Republicans and their financial backers were to consider the implications of climate research objectively, several things would happen. First, they’d stop denying the factuality of global climate chaos, and start working actively to slow it down and to cope with its impacts. Second, they would recognize that preserving the planetary systems on which our culture depends is as important for market capitalists as it is for radical “tree-huggers,” for a profitable economy requires environmental stability to flourish.
Warren Senders