The Elephant in the Room

Is God off topic?

Well, as I settle down to read Unscientific America, I thought I'd discuss how I think science ought to relate to religion, so I could get my view on the record independent of Chris & Sheril's.

There is a view in which science and religion address orthogonal questions, and in a sense I'm an advocate of that view.

The separation can't be said to be perfect. Certainly, here in Texas as we are besieged by people who are convinced who "don't believe in" evolution, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the belief baggage that religious people carry. As a related point, whatever the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is, it becomes weaker if you make a point of not challenging young earth creationism; all paleoclimate evidence vanishes in a puff of smoke, and really you're left with an incoherent view of the universe.

On the other hand, the Dalai Lama says:

if science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.

Here is a view that by definition can't be at odds with science.

My own interest in religion centers around two facts: the first is the inherent value of the experience of Unity. This appears closely related to the mystical experience as described in many religious cultures, including traditional Catholic Christianity. The experience of God can be so dramatically intense (the word that the more intellectual person can hang onto it is "numinous") that regardless of what theory of the universe you hold, accounting for the experience itself cannot reasonably be considered as beside the point. This in turn draws attention to the phenomenon of experience, and how very feeble and hollow efforts to reduce the phenomenon of experience (formerly, the "soul") to a basis in a physical theory must be.

As theologian Paul Tillich (apparently; I've seen this attributed to others) said to atheists: "Tell me the God you don't believe in, and I probably don't believe in that God either".

So to me, people like P Z Myers and Richard Dawkins who celebrate atheism are celebrating a naivetee as severe as that of the people they criticize for believing literally in implausible miracles. Tangling up religion with superstition is unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable. Most people are not going to be philosophers. But dismissing it is equally unfortunate, leaving the poor adherent of the shallow materialism with no vehicle for spiritual development.

So first and foremost, atheists are very much the wrong people to go after superstition. That is because they don;t understand that there is a baby in among the bathwater. When we allow them to associate their "philosophy" (I use the word loosely because it's a rather shallow philosophy) with science, that serves to discredit science not only among the superstitious but also among the spiritual. It does no good to start to address people's superstitions by attacking God as chief among them.

I started this blog just as Nisbett and Mooney got their paper about "framing" into Science. See also their Washington Post op-ed:

Leave aside for a moment the validity of Dawkins's arguments against religion. The fact remains: The public cannot be expected to differentiate between his advocacy of evolution and his atheism. More than 80 percent of Americans believe in God, after all, and many fear that teaching evolution in our schools could undermine the belief system they consider the foundation of morality. Dawkins not only reinforces and validates such fears -- baseless though they may be -- but lends them an exclamation point.

We agree with Dawkins on evolution and admire his books, so we don't enjoy singling him out. But he stands as a particularly stark example of scientists' failure to explain hot-button issues, such as global warming and evolution, to a wary public.

Scientists excel at research; creating knowledge is their forte. But presenting this knowledge to the public is something else altogether. It's here that scientists and their allies are stumbling in our information-overloaded society -- even as scientific information itself is being yanked to center stage in high-profile debates.

I guess I must have caught the zeitgeist; my first postings here preceded those arguments by just a few days. But I am now and was then convinced that they are raising the right issues.

I've seen some pretty negative comments about Unscientific America, and based on my first gloss of the material I expect I won't fall into that camp. I think some of the hostility has to come from Mooney's discomfort with the shallow and belligerent atheism of Myers.

In fact, I at one time wanted to be part of the SciBlogs list and managed to wangle myself an invitation. I think I was rather rude in ignoring it. After over a year the invitation remains the oldest item in my inbox. I had two complaints about SciBlogs that kept me away. Myers was one of them. (The other was their sense of design. I simply don't want to look at that color scheme every day.)

Anyway, my world view is explicitly theist and explicitly informed by the intrinsic experiential value of religious experience. In the end, if you are so foolish as to offer people a choice between love and reason, you shouldn't be astonished if they choose love.

I wasn't raised in the Christian tradition, and I find the Christian approach to religion confusing. So I'm not the person to do the outreach either.

But we can't proceed to approach the heartland culture by dismissing that part of the culture that they value most, and for perfectly good reasons: the church provides them with a foundation in community, ethics, and appreciation of life. How to approach such people with scientific reasoning is not an easy question, but you shouldn't be surprised if your attempt to trivialize what they consider most holy is not met with a forehead slap and a sheepish laugh and a "what was I thinking?"

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Image: William Blake

Today's Post is an Easy One

on my end, anyway.

Watch.

Some Big Picture Comments

By me, hoisted from the comments, about communicating climate science.

The scientific community has stood firm with climate science throughout, but this fact has had very limited recognition. The preponderance of evidence that CO2 accumulation must be not just slowed but essentially halted becomes more inescapable every year.

Yet many people believe exactly the reverse, largely under the influence of organized PR efforts intended to obscure the evidence.

Scientists have constraints on the time they have to devote to public communication and the ways in which they are expected to communicate. At present the most effective communication seems to come from a few climate bloggers, some anonymous, or from amateurs like Greg Craven or Peter Sinclair. These efforts only arose to fill a gaping vaccuum in professional communication.

However we got to this state, it has to be reversed.

I don't know as preventing the public from having or stating opinions is even possible, and its certainly not a good idea. But people who are not experts should at least keep in mind the possibility that there are other people who understand things better than they do. So that's a shift in the culture that even precedes the shift in consumption habits.

At least it is a shift back to a condition that existed when I was young, when the opinions of scientists really did carry a lot of weight in public discourse, and when real expertise was respected.

The effort to communicate real science in good faith has to be doubled, redoubled, and redoubled again. We really need for people to understand the basic ideas. It needs to be seen as unhip to have your eyes glaze over as soon as argument from evidence begins.

People need to understand that what they "feel" about something is not decisive.

I don't have a single detailed answer for how to get from here to there. I have a dozen ideas, including a couple I am keeping under my hat. I'd be thrilled to dedicate myself to any of them. People I am talking to have dozens more. What we lack is a business model.

Right now, people like Mark Morano or Joe d'Aleo have a career path open to them to muddy the waters. We need ways to create incentives for creative people to make a career advancing, rather than retarding, public understanding of science.

That is not a career in PR as we understand it. There are already environmental advocacy groups out there. I am speaking of something else; the revitalization of conversation between science and the public.

Maibach Public Outreach Talk

John Fleck alerted me and others to this talk by Ed Maibach on public outreach and climate change in DC this week. I managed to round up an anonymous correspondent. (If you know who wrote this, please note that the author wishes to remain anonymous. If you are the author, please let me know if you change your mind!) It all seems insightful but pretty innocuous to me, frankly. Regardless, I sincerely thank the anonymous blogger for the contribution.

Earlier this week, I attended a talk by Dr. Ed Maibach of George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication titled “Climate Change Communication 2.0” in which Dr. Maibach discussed his recent research findings that identify “6 Americas” based on differences in the public’s beliefs, concerns, and motivations regarding climate change (see http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/images/files/GlobalWarmingsSixAmericas2009c.pdf).

Based on this continuum of perceptions and responses to the climate change issue, Dr. Maibach expressed a need to rethink the communication of climate change to engage, persuade and motivate all 6 audiences more effectively. He proposed a shift from what he termed, “Communication 1.0” which focuses on education and persuasion oriented communication aimed at individuals to “Communication 2.0” that is aimed at communities or groups of individuals based on their social ecology and focuses less on education and more on behavior change through the passage of policies that will then, over time, shift attitudes. This, of course, is in contrast to Communication 1.0 whereby education and persuasion are viewed as a means for first altering attitudes that will then result in a shift in behaviors.

To illustrate his proposal, he provided and example from Europe in which both London and Stockholm implemented a congestion pricing scheme to address high motor vehicle congestion in targeted areas of the city. By charging motorists a fee to enter these high congestion areas, the cities sought to reduce said congestion while raising revenue for transportation improvements. Although not popular at the time of passage, politicians went forward with the decision and the citizenry in these areas, who have since had to change their behaviors, are now much more supportive of this change and thus have a different attitude towards the regulation.

Dr. Maibach went on, in the course of his lecture, to propose that many of the current communication strategies (Communication 1.0) that focus on individual actions aimed at climate change mitigation (i.e. reducing your personal carbon foot print) were not fully sufficient for addressing the issue of climate change. Communication 2.0 requires a message that appeals to broader sectors of the public (the 6 Americas) and should be focused on policy-oriented changes that focus on both mitigation and adaptation (and possibly climate engineering). So I’m sitting there, nodding my head thinking, “exactly, your spot on, Dr. Maibach,” when the reality sets in and I come back to the age old question of “but how do we do this, how do we make it happen?”

One means proposed by Dr. Maibach was reframing climate communication as less of an environmental issue and more of a public health and safety issue. Specifically, he noted that all 6 Americas have one value in common and that is the need to save energy and that shifting the dialogue towards energy use may be a more effective form of communication. This, Dr. Maibach noted, would allow for a more singularized, consistent message as he cited the current state of ad-hoc and atomized climate change communication due to a lack of cooperation between varied organizations has resulted in numerous messages and at times, conflicting voices in despite a common goal. In closing, Dr. Maibach recommended that climate change communication focus on changing public policy by engaging both decision-makers and the public to address climate change at the political, not individual levels.

Although there was very little time for question and discussion by the end of the talk I could feel people shifting in their seats with a bit of angst and discomfort. Some felt that shifting communication away from the environment was not appropriate because that was their chief concern and energy alone doesn’t get at the issue. Others expressed concern that Communication 2.0 shifts the focus away from the individual when it’s the individuals who will move the politicians. Many were struggling with this notion of behavior change that leads to attitude changes and one person questioned the scale (local, national, global) at which Communication 2.0 should occur. There were not answers, to these questions, per se in that despite the lack of time, the talk, as described in the beginning by Dr. Maibach, focused more on broad generalizations and less on specific issues such as the ones raised by the audience. My question, which I did not ask, for a number of reasons but would love to hear your comments on are as follows:

How do we reboot the climate change communication system in an effort to shift from Communication 1.0 to Communication 2.0?

I 100% agree with the framework set forth by Dr. Maibach. I’m personally tired of the newsletters, e-mails, and buying books that direct me to reduce my carbon footprint because in the end, I know that we’ll never have the mass shift in behavior at the individual level to address climate change appropriately at the national or global level. So I must admit that I’m biased as I believe that the only way to really enact change is through policy change. This is nothing new, Garrett Harding touted the notion of mutually agreed upon coercion in Tragedy of the Commons over 40 years ago. But how do we get there when in the end, those fighting to address climate change are doing so for a number of different interests and reasons (as noted by Dr. Maibach). Is it possible for those advocating for the need to address climate change to come together with a unified message? Can we shift from touting the “25 E-Z Things You Can Do Around Your House” (a book I was given at the Austin Step It-Up Rally) to instructing people to work within the political system?

The biggest constraint I saw in Dr. Maibach’s talk wasn’t in his proposal, but rather his example of the European congestion charge example when he stated that despite unpopular public opinion, the politicians passed the law anyway because it was the right thing to do. Is or will there ever be that type of political will regarding climate change? I have to think that there will be, we just need to get the right message out, and I think we can, but first, we have to shift to Communication 2.0.

Dr. Maibach replies as follows in email:

Many thanks to the anonymous blogger for this feedback. I realized that I had left some members of the audience a bit uncomfortable with my comments, and this posting helps me understand why.

In my talk I should have directly addressed how "Communication 2.0" can be used to grow and strengthen public support for appropriate policies and other "placed-based" changes.

My use of the congestion pricing examples from London and Stockholm was intended to illustrate how behavior change (based on policy change) can in some instances be a powerful means by which to change people's attitudes in helpful ways. In contrast, we often attempt to change people's attitudes by "educating" them (via communication and outreach campaigns), all too frequently with no effect.

I agree that it is unrealistic for us to expect elected officials to enact smart yet unpopular policies in hopes that the public will soon come around to seeing the wisdom of the change. We need to build public support for smart policies, so that they become political winners instead of political losers.

In the meanwhile, my hat is off to those brave elected officials in London and Stockholm who were willing to enact smart yet unpopular policies. Leadership of that variety is a wonderful thing.

Edward Maibach, MPH, PhD
Professor, Department of Communication
Director, Center for Climate Change Communication
George Mason University

A quarter million

Page view number 250,000 was served by this blog site in the wee hours this morning. 

Sounds impressive, huh? If I had a penny for every hit I'd have $2500. For an hourly rate of pay of about a dollar, I'd guess. 

Which is more than what I got, which is a half dozen books to review. 

And also much less than I got, which is a bunch of new friends, not to mention an old friendship renewed.

Anyway hit number 250,000 came from Auckland NZ, via this aggregator.

Just Food

I just saw local author James McWilliams give a well-attended talk at BookPeople on his book "Just Food", where "just" refers to justice as well as purity. I would definitely consider him a kindred spirit. He ended his research quite unconvinced of the importance of "food miles" (the book is entitled "How Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly") but unexpectedly convinced that meat is unethical. 

The talk was wide-ranging, and a number of interesting points came up. I don't have any central organizing theme of my review of the event, but I thought I'd capture some interesting snippets.

He had been on Ira Flatow's Science Friday just last week as the contrarian intended to debate Michael Pollan. Of course, he cringed. He gave journalists grief for their craving of simplicity and conflict, but he gave the show credit for letting the two of them actually agree on things.

He believes that organic methods COULD feed the world, but that there would be very little room for meat in such a scenario.

He believes that concentrating on localism doesn't work. Some places are better suited for growing food than others. They should specialize. However, the places we grow food are the wrong ones. (California, with imported water.) And what we do with the midwest (feed crops) is incredibly destructive.

He is the guy who wrote a New York Times article a couple years back asserting that New Zealand grass fed lamb bought in England was less greenhouse gas intensive than local feedlot lamb. 

Grass-fed cows emit MORE methane than corn fed ones.  (but lamb also eats grass. contradiction of the previous point?)

General agreement from author and audience that overpopulation is the core problem. In a sense our problems are problems of success.

Energy expenditures for meat don't seem to include "rendering", i.e., disposing of what he called "deadstock", over half the weight of a meat animal that is inedible or unsellable anyway. 

20% of all greenhouse emissions in the US are attributable to meat. Transportation is a small fraction thereof. Giving up meat one day a week has all the global warming benefit of zeroing out food transportation costs.

He believes dairy and eggs are not as bad as beef. I'm not so sure. I hope so.

Soil depletion, groundwater depletion, increased population points to increasing food stress in the future. Meat consumption increasingly an ethical issue.

Food problems cannot be solved on an local level. Systems must be redesigned. Global hunger is a food issue, after all. 

Most of the questions intelligent and polite. But one woman was intense, upset. Going on about the importance of local control, keeping things out of the hands of corporations. McWilliams was careful to acknowledge her point, but couldn't get her to acknowledge that localism, while good, isn't enough. Many people seem very attached to an idea of local self-sufficiency. In Texas! Texas has NEVER supported a significant population on local resources. 

Speaking for myself as a liberal in a land of libertarians, it was nice to see a smart Texan thinking global for a change.

It was a thought provoking evening. BookPeople rocks.

My Craven Rave at Last

OK, so I don't want to discourage people from sending me free books. That means if somebody sends me a review copy of something relevant, I read it and review it. So unfortunately I lost my free copy of Greg Craven's book "What's the Worst that Could Happen".

I finally gave up on finding the free copy. Fortunately, it's an inexpensive purchase at $14.95. And I have to say that I didn't mind paying all that much.

Now I'm not in the target demographic for the book (which will lead into my biggest disagreement with it) so maybe I'm not one to judge. On the other hand, it's easy to see Craven's influence in ClimateSight's writings, and she is off to a terrific start as a climate blogger.

Craven's approach is very much in line with something I've been saying all along. I refer to the idea of a "network of trust". No scientist really knows everything he or she claims to know from direct experience. Most of what we know as individuals comes from two factors: 1) a network of trust and 2) the test of coherence.

Don't get me wrong. What we know collectively comes from observation, experiment, theory and calculation. But what we know as individuals we mostly know because we learned it from someone else. People who don't learn from others don't learn very much.

Now, the nonscientist, the earnest and bright high school student, the wise and yet wisecracking high school physics teacher, your Aunt Maggie, don't have the second way of evaluating science.

The wise and yet wisecracking high school science teacher in question
Click the image for an amusing video demonstrating his style and hawking the book.

That's why Craven's book is about the first way of learning, what I call the network of trust.

Basically "what do you believe" comes down to a question of "who do you trust". Haivng made that point, he weighs the believability of the warmers and that of the no-warmers. Sure enough, when you actually start counting, the number of naysayers turns out to be, well, puny. As I once explained with this graph. While Craven touches on some of the issues in climate science, mostly he is about explaining the scientific culture.

Craven is right to do this. Despite the naysayers' constant harping on "focusing on the science", study of the details is really for the people who have developed sufficient grasp of scientific coherence. Which, I'm sorry to say, isn't guaranteed even for tenured faculty. Never mind high school kids. So how should a kid (or an adult!) who is honest enough not to just go with his or her crowd, who wants to get to the right side of what is obviously an enormously important substantive question, evaluate the competing arguments?

By trust, and trust alone. That's the only way to do it.

A big reason we are having so much trouble these days is because the networks of trust, especially the connections between science and society, but also the connections between any sort of authority and society, are in bad condition. I think if the national science academies of the main science producing countries on every continent unanimously agree on something, if the international body of scientists appointed by every country makes stronger statements every six years every time they issue a report, and if every major relevant scientific body agrees, that ought to be enough. Yet the public remains unconvinced.

Craven decides to look at both teams in detail. He cuts the denialists every inch of slack he can come up with, and they still come up wanting in the trustworthiness department.

That is a great service. (To be sure, he encourages the reader to make their own evaluation.)

All of which brings me to my biggest disagreement with Greg Craven. This is a book out of left field, and so it has statements here and there that strike the climate geek as bizarre, but they are minor points, and I don't feel a need to quibble.

We do have a point of disagreement. Greg says you should check your own conscience for "what would make you change your mind"? He says that if you can;t come up with anything, if that slot is empty, then your mind is closed and that's a red flag for incorrect thinking. But I have argued something that sounds pretty much like exactly the opposite!

But I have a complex and elaborate coherence structure to draw upon.

Consider how I got mixed up with the Klotzbach paper. Prominent naysayer Joe d'Aleo's blog alleged that most warming on land was due to a bias in the land surface temperature record, referring to Klotzbach's paper. Klotzbach's claim was not consistent with my coherence network. Therefore, I resolved to figure out what the unclear claim really amounted to. The deeper I got into it, the stranger it got. Eventually, one of the authors was compelled to admit that the word "bias" did not actually indicate an error in temperature. Further reading revealed many other flaws in the work, although the key one, which appears to have been reported (somewhat at second hand) by James Annan, is something I still don't entirely understand.

This is where the first principle cuts in. Should I further investigate the key claim, still contested by the authors? Well, I know James to be an extraordinarily careful and precise thinker, and it's already demonstrated that his opposition is not. Since boundary layer meteorology is not my forte, and since the rest of the paper is flawed in many ways, I feel satisfied that it's best to put my attentions elsewhere.

The main point for present purposes is that I immediately questioned the result claimed by d'Aleo on the basis of its incoherence with everything else I know. And my questioning turned out to be justified. The publication, though it passed peer review, probably should not have done so. It looks like science from a distance, but up close it looks like nonsense.

It's interesting that the article which violates Craven's principle is one which won me something of a convert. My old college buddy King of the Road, who arrived on this site a skeptic, was not won over by the strength of detailed argument, but by the appeal to coherence. Having a rich enough body of knowledge of his own, he understands how certain claims can be dismissed as nonsense, while others remain within the spehre of possible sense. So while Craven's advice regarding openmindedness is good for people who don't have a richly developed sense of intellectual coherence, it's not good for those of us who, um, have a sufficient body of actual knowledge.

But this is, in fact, consistent with Craven's other point. Which is to trust the geeks. (Some of whom actually are hippies, but that's another story for another time.) Why trust us? Not because we play chess better than you do while you dance better than us. Nor, even, because we really ultimately know what's what.

Trust us because we know what's NOT what. Trust us because we know when something someone says is incoherent with what we already know.

In summary, Craven's book is not enormously interesting to a scientist or science enthusiast. I would not recommend it directly to most of my readers, but we are not its target audience. It does not draw upon mathematical or physical coherence.

It just says, c'mon, it's obvious, this gang is the guys who know what they're talking about. They're not guaranteed to be right, but you're asking me to make a pretty huge bet that they are for sure certainly wrong. Why would I do that?

And that, in a nutshell, is the whole story told the right way. This is the book to give an earnest skeptical high school student, or a busy and disengaged adult. Craven has done us an enormous service in finding a way to address these audiences.

Texas Drought on the Ground

The trees were hanging in there until now. Many trees are suddenly turning brown in the relentless Texas heat/drought. Days which do not exceed 100F have been few and far between for two months now. A few small local storms pop upevery few days, usually missing the spot you happen to stand upon. Most days the skies are clear and even cloudless. There is little sign of remission in the forecast.

Suburban areas around Austin are now trucking in water. (h/t John Fleck) Reservoirs are flirting with historic lows . Domestic water use is not threatened but strict limitations on watering are in effect. Famous springs and swimming holes are threatened.

Trees and shrubs are visibly stressed at last. It seemed sudden to me. Until this week I was amazed at how long they managed to stay green. Now the stress is visible. Juvenile specimens that aren't watered are mostly dying. I'm not sure what that means for fire danger, but I guess it's not good. South Central Texas was tallgrass prairie before fire suppression. There are far more stands of trees than is natural.

Texas remains prosperous, though not very pretty these days. Nobody's starving except wild animals. I saw a four foot wingspan hawk hanging around the city the other day, two doors down from my house, about three miles from the state capitol.
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Photo: examiner.com

Gerd Leipold's Kerfuffle

I don't know where I've been hearing this word, "kerfuffle", but it popped into my head with regard to this bit of disreputable word-twisting on the Investor's Business Daily:

During an Aug. 5 interview with the BBC, Gerd Leipold, outgoing executive director of Greenpeace, admitted that his organization emotionalizes issues to influence the public. At the time, he was admitting his group had made an error in its July 15 news release that claimed "we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030."

"I don't think (the Greenland ice sheet) will be melting by 2030," he said. "That may have been a mistake."

Of course, one presumes that the context, which surely refers to sea ice and not the Greenland ice sheet, was lost somewhere along the way. Let's start off on the right foot by saying that his admission of error was carefully contingent ("may have been") on there actually being an error in the first place.

This whole kerfuffle is immensely revealing.

While it's up, you can see the "HardTalk" interview in question on YouTube . And you can see the original Greenpeace press release here. It says:

A recent NASA study has shown that the ice cap is not only getting smaller, it’s getting thinner and younger. Sea ice has dramatically thinned between 2004 and 2008. Old ice (over 2 years old) takes longer to melt, and is also much harder to replace. As permanent ice decreases, we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030.

Along with a link to this defense. Which points out:

If you Google "ice free summers" and "arctic" you get about 230,000 hits. Oh, and gosh, look what the first article is: a story from the BBC itself talking about the retreat of SEA ice, but what's the headline? "Arctic summers ice-free by 2013"

So what's happened?

1. Yikes! The Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in the fairly near future! This is huge!
2. The press just sloppily says "Ice-Free Arctic", in order to save a little headline space. (Somebody has to do an expose on headline writers someday!)
3. Greenpeace uses the informal form, probably as an ever-so-tiny slipup. Their text would not have lost impact by correctly using the word "Ocean" after the word "Arctic". On the other hand, nobody with half a brain who had any professional interest in climate reading the press release would misunderstand the irrelevance to Greenland.
4. Hard hitting BBC HardTalk reporter who claims to have talked to lots of climate experts asks "you really don't think Greenland will be ice-free by 2030, like your press release says?"
5. Greenpeace leader Gerd Leipold misses the point, since it's so out of left field.
6. Hard hitting BBC HardTalk reporter asks the question again.
7. Leipold, not having the copy in front of him, shrugs, says "I don't read every press release" and "it might have been a mistake", as well he should.
8. Denyosphere runs with it
9. I get wind of it through this IBD article showing up in my feeds
10. I try to do my part to put out another wildfire of bullshit
    

Complete, total, unadulterated bullshit. Propagated by the BBC, which is especially discouraging. Whatever you may think of Greenpeace, they didn't exagerrate anything in this case.

Now comes the ironic part. IBD decides to wheel out the old Stephen Schneider quote. You know the one:

Or maybe it was one of those examples that Greenpeace embellished to stir fear in the public? If so, it wouldn't be an isolated case. Others have admitted they're willing to bend the truth in order to draw attention to the cause.

Twenty years ago, Stanford University environmentalist Stephen Schneider told Discover magazine that it's perfectly fine "to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have. . . . Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

Al Gore noted the power of propaganda when he once told Grist, a magazine for environmentalists, that "it is appropriate to have an overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience."

So, having covered the "bending the truth" item, they duly move on to the "scary scenario" one:

So why all the distortions about global warming? To save the planet, to save us from ourselves? No. To choke economies in developed nations, particularly the U.S.

First of all, it is the BBC and the IBD who have perpetrated the distortion in this case! And now it is the IBD offering the scary scenarios! When someone is being disreputable, they will often accuse their opposition of exactly their own behavior, like disruptive agitators of well-intentioned public meetings calling the progressive politicians who convened them Nazis.

Here's another case. If I've ever seen a better example of bending the truth and offering scary scenarios than this one, I can't bring it to mind.

Steve has gotten a huge amount of grief over the years for this statement. John Quiggin does us all a service by providing more context:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.)

This is the inescapable quandary of us purveyors of inconvenient truth. No amount of wailing and caterwauling by ourselves or our allies will convince the rock to roll away or the hard place to soften up. We are stuck with it, especially insofar as the main media are for-profit industries and insofar as people are too frazzled and frantic to reflect very much on their world.

We can push this question this way or that, but the fact remains that the whole truth is very scary but really hard to put into forms that the press will be willing to feed to the public. The partial truth may get attention but leaves the speaker vulnerable to attack on details. You try to do both, but either half (compelling and complete) is hard enough.

Meanwhile, opponents play fast and loose with the facts all the time. Now, to prove Greenpeace is using scare tactics, the anti-AGW press is reduced to far more vicious, far more egregiously dishonest scaremongering than even the scaremongering they misattribute to Greenpeace.

And then they have the temerity to bring Schneider into it. I have a word for them but it isn't a pretty one, and it's unkind to children of single mothers.

(Brown text: IBD; green text: Greenpeace; blue text: Steve Schneider)

PS: I'm pretty sure Steve Schneider has nothing to do with Greenpeace, and I definitely don't. In a sane world I wouldn't have to say that and it wouldn't matter much anyway. But apparently, that's not the world we live in.

I don't consider myself a Greenpeace supporter, and the purpose of this piece is not to defend them. The purpose of this piece is to focus on a particularly straightforward case of lying among the opposition, and how quickly and effectively the lie spreads. This sort of thing is usually a bit more subtle when directed at science, but it's no more defensible.

Update: The really scary thing about this teapot tempest is that it was conjured up by the BBC, entirely deliberately. But not everything that scares me is mainstream media. For John Fleck, links to sites running this story:

Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice Exaggeration

Greenpeace Leader (Leipold) Admits to Misleading Public on Arctic ...

YouTube - Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice Exaggeration Gerd Leipold | Fuck Bankers Greenpeace Leader Admits Organization Put Out Fake Global Warming Data Greenpeace admits false warnings of Arctic melting? - Yahoo! Answers Stephen Sackur - news Crashing through the phony left-right paradigm - Bakersfield.com ... Greenpeace caught lying. Imagine that. Ice Capades: Greenpeace recants polar ice claim, but ... (Watts Up)

James Delingpole

Re: Lies Revealed — Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice ...

Redfaced Greenpeace insists 'we didn't make it up' - we just ...

Greenpeace Leader Admits Organization Put Out Fake Global Warming ...

Heritage New Media Partners, Inc. - NMA TV

Greenpeace leader admits misleading public about melting arctic ...

Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice Exaggeration - Glock Talk

Global warming takes another hit - Motor Trend The Drive-In Forum

Print Page - Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice Exaggeration

Another warmist lie revealed - Topic Powered by Eve For Enterprise

Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice Exaggeration: Death Blow to ...

"Mistake" Is Another Word For A Warmie Lie - groups.Xorte.com

Sun Online - Discussions - News - Greenpeace liars insist......'we ...

YID With LID: HOAX--Greenpeace Admits That It LIED About Arctic Ice

ENVR Outgoing Greenpeace Leader: "We Lied Big-Time About Melting ...

EXCLUSIVE: Lies Revealed — Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice ...

Is “mistake” another word for a warming lie? | Herald Sun Andrew ...

osint : Message: HOAX--Greenpeace Admits That It LIED About Arctic Ice

A global warming leader admits his lie- - US Message Board ...

Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice Exaggeration... - The Hull Truth

Greenpeace Leader Admits Arctic Ice Exaggeration | The FOX Nation

The Blogosphere - ICECAP

Greenpeace Confesses to Ice Cap Melting Exaggeration ...

Dr. Orly Taitz Esquire

This site may harm your computer.
... which it is stated that global warming will lead to an ice-free Arctic by 2030. ... As the Watts Up With That blog highlights, “Leipold's admission that ...
www.orlytaitzesq.don't_click/blog1/

Had enough? Those are from the first 6 of Google's 94 pages of hits on

leipold "ice free arctic"

Update: I'm truly astonished and dismayed to have a request from regular reader David Duff to add his "contribution" to the list, but very well: A lying liar called Leipold coughs .

I had thought of David as a true Tory, not as a right-wing yahoo, and I find myself deeply disappointed. A gentleman does not resort to straw man arguments, does not falsely put embarrassing words into the mouths of his opponents.

This is not to say whether there is something to the other arguments about Greenpeace one way or the other. It is to say that the claim that anything was "admitted" by Greenpeace about Greenland in 2030 is demonstrably nonsense, and that propagating such nonsense, no matter how otherwise reputable Greenpeace may or may not be, constitutes a malicious lie.

I agree that the "emotionalism" topic is real enough. If someone has another suggestion as to how to break through the wall of indifference and habit, I'm sure many of us would be very interested.

Update: ClimateSight has more on the Schneider quote.

My Final Word on Klotzbach

There is a sort of a weird convention in science that there is a set of things that are known and that they are all about equally reliable. That set of things is by convention what is published in the literature and hasn't yet been refuted, and by practice what has made it out of the "literature" and into reputable textbooks.

About 200 years ago, that body of knowledge exceeded the capacity of the human lifetime to absorb or the human brain to access. So it's always been a pretense. It's a very useful pretense, don't get me wrong, it's essentially a very useful shorthand keeping all the "I thinks" and "maybes" out of the already longwinded and hard-to-read materials, but it's a formalism, not a reality. Nobody, neither humankind nor Googlekind, actually has a grasp on it all.

So when I am asked for a summary of the dialog regarding Klotzbach, Pielkes, etc. I am left with a choice of telling you 1) what I understood and the sequence of how I understood it, which is surely of greater interest to me than to you or 2) pretending to some omniscient voice, saying what is or isn't a legitimate part of the "body of knowledge", which feeds the convenient fiction but isn't justified based on the state of my own understanding.

What I've been trying to do is to elaborate what I am thinking as I go along. This may serve some purposes and not others. At this point it would be too long a story, and too tedious. So I'm forced into omniscience mode. Let me preface all of this with admitting that I have a doubt here and there, but people want to have something succinct to work with.

So with that caveat, usually implicit, made explicit, here is what I think about Klotzbach at this point, expressed in the usual scientific-omniscient style:

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1) The mechanism described in Pielke & Matsui is surely real in this respect: as greenhouse gases increase and global warming proceeds, the strength of extreme nighttime near-surface inversions will decline. If it is faster than other effects it will contribute to making the surface temperature trend go up without affecting the middle atmosphere trends.

2) It is implausible that this effect is large enough in the aggregate (common enough as a fraction of space and time) to account for discrepancies in global trends in GCMs. It would take quite a lot of serious revisiting of boundary layer theory and boundary layer implementation in models to quantify the expected effect to demonstrate this one way or the other, work that the Pielke crowd has not undertaken.

3) The effect is most effective in northern latitudes (where there is a lot of cold land) and can't explain the tropical hot spot, so it's in the wrong place.

4) The word "bias" is used in a rather atypical way and does not refer to measurement errors, despite being reported as such in the blogosphere.

5) The first of the tests proposed in K et al

1. If there is no warm bias in the surface temperature trends, then there should not be an increasing divergence with time between the lower troposphere and surface temperature anomalies. The difference between lower troposphere and surface temperature anomalies should not be greater over land areas.

is peculiarly stated. Applying basic logic (A implies B if and only if not B implies not A) we can restate the first sentence more clearly for consideration. "If there is an increasing divergence... THEN there is a warm bias".) This doesn't seem right. There could be other mechanisms that account for it. In fact, Gavin Schmidt provides a very simple one: the influence of more slowly warming oceans is stronger in the troposphere than at the surface.

6) Applying the same transformation to the second test:

2. If there is no warm bias in the surface temperature trends then the divergence should not be larger for both maximum and minimum temperatures at high latitude land locations in the winter.

yields "If the divergence is larger (in cold conditions) then there is a warm bias" again ignores any alternative mechanism, but this is in fact a much stronger test, since it is relatively far-fetched to suggest an alternative. Remarkably, after listing this test, K et al does not address it .

7) For evidence that the proposed effect is small, one need only go to the remarkable Parker 2004 paper Parker, D. E. (2004), Large scale warming is not urban, Nature, 432, 290 where the proposed effect is strikingly absent. Pielke & Matsui argues that Parker must be revisited in the light of the new results, but this presumes that the new result is quantitatively significant at the large scale. A number of strong assertions are made regarding the large scale amplitude, but the justification of these estimates is obscure.

The fact that the Parker result comes out with this effect pretty clearly pegged to near zero is claimed to "require further analysis", but any quantity other than practically zero would require a precisely balancing bias (and in this case I really do mean bias) in the opposite direction. Here one may appeal to Occam.

8) The Eastman et al paper makes flawed use of limited area model in a climate study. The reference to it in Pielke and Matsui, as well as its very small sensitivity, doesn't build confidence. The enhanced warming under low wind appears in the Eastman model for a reason related to the reason its sensitivity is so small.

The sensitivity in the Eastman model is small because the residence time of a particle in the domain where the enhanced greenhouse effect is active is small compared to the time constant of radiative equilibration. The sensitivity in the Eastman model is larger under low wind conditions because under low wind conditions the residence time is longer, exposing the column to a larger cumulative greenhouse forcing. Therefore Eastman provides no support for a boundary layer mechanism.

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Or anyway, so I think.

That is my summary of Klotzbach. Pending someone doing better, I have no further interest in it.

If someone wanted to pursue it further, I'd strongly recommend they replicate the Parker study. That's a straightforward data analysis problem. If Parker's numbers aren't drastically mistaken, it's very difficult to imagine how the Pielke-Matsui effect can have much importance at a global scale.

The Pielke group uses nomenclature ('bias") peculiarly, happily references weird (Eastman) and marginal (surfacestations.org) results, and in the case of Klotzbach et al, fills a number of pages in a way that is scattershot and does not create a compelling argument. While they are cordial and patient, conversation is time consuming and pedantic, largely because of idiosyncratic use of standard words and ideas. If they really have something to offer, they should polish their presentation technique. Meanwhile, dealing with their work seems an ill-justified expenditure of effort.

This is a big problem with politics mixing with science. If there were no policy issues at stake, if the modest and dubious results of the paper weren't being egregiously overvalued and misrepresented, the scientific community could proceed in the ordinary dignified fashion of ignoring nonsense and focusing on sense. But with the standard Pielke to Watts to Morano to Inhofe play and its like, we are forced to pay attention.

Regarding getting out of this very unfortunate flavor of time sink, one thing I can imagine is to have gradations of "peer review" more complex than "published" or "unpublished". Inhofe shouldn't be waving something like this around in the senate claiming it meets the highest standards.

Even harder, but more urgent, is have a mechanism to dissuade (was "prevent", see * below) authors from promoting public misinterpretations of their publications. That sort of behavior should have consequences. Making a boundary between PR enthusiasm and untruth is perhaps difficult, but then again, there are instances that clearly cross the line; a reader of Watts' site could be forgiven for believing that the Pielkes claim to have provided evidence that the surface temperature trend is wrongly overstated, when they have not done so.

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Update: (aargh) A few minutes before I composed this, RP Sr published an article on his own site entitled exactly "The Global Average Surface Temperature Warming Really Is Overstated"!

Sorry. No.

The only caveat offered is that the bias is due to "measuring the temperature near the ground". This is not to say the thermometer is corrupted by being near the ground. Pielke Sr is saying that the temperature itself is corrupted.

Apparently we should inform all plants and animals and glaciers that global warming is an illusion, and that they should simply stop biasing their existence to be so close to the earth's surface. In fact, if the glaciers and ice sheets would merely move their bases above the boundary layer, the ice melt problem might go away entirely!

Sorry, no. The thing about "surface" temperature is that it's at the surface. So that's where the thermometers go.

Meta-Update: Note that on RP Jr's blog RP Sr is quoted as saying "To emphasize, we are not saying that the surface temperatures trends are not accurately measured at that level. It is just that they are NOT representative of long term trends higher in the troposphere. Their use to characterize a deeper atmospheric layer introduces a bias." (Comment 12. Emphasis added.) As I've said it seems like a dozen times already, that is not the impression being left in places like Watts' or d'Aleo's blogs. And that's a big problem, especially if this ends up as a celebrated publication for reasons completely irrelevant to its contents.

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Update: Both Pielke Sr and Pielke Jr point to this article, much to my surprise. They are unwilling to have me disengage, even though at this point I am happy to leave them alone.

Sr is on about me not doing the quantitative analysis to support my point 2. Stipulated.

Given how difficult it is to extract sense from people who think an actual physical quantity is a biased estimator of a nophysical quantity of interest only to themselves, and given the fact that the Parker result strongly supports my quantitative intuition that any such phenomenon, even if unrepresented in models (an implicit claim unexamined as yet) is going to be dramatically too small to carry the vast weight that is expected of it, I leave it to the Pielke team to provide the quantitative analysis in a form that a reasonably informed person could hope to understand.

My refutation is Parker '04, and anyone hoping to undo my refutation should undo Parker, as I already suggested above. Failing that, I can't imagine why anyone would bother trying to grind through all this at best eccentric and opaque exposition, much less myself.

Meanwhile Jr is on about my plea for "consequences" constituting a "threat" and a pathological one at that.

It's not a threat, it's taking note of a missing feedback on extra-scientific behavior. Sopecifically, I refer to the newfound trend of putting one thing in print and claiming it means something entirely different in public. This is behavior which reflects badly on science and weakens it. It should have consequences for scientific reputation.

Is Pielke Jr suggesting to the contrary that one should be allowed to publicly misrepresent one's results with impunity?

Presumably not. Presumably he will claim that he is not misrepresenting anything. But if he can show that, my wished-for "consequences" wouldn't apply to him.

I stand by my plea for consequences in the general case. If science goes extraterritorial, then reputation should follow. I will have more about this in the context of McLean/deFreitas.

(*) However, to reduce the implication of threat, I have changed the word "prevent" (which implies prior restraint, which I think is not a good idea) to "dissuade".

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Update 8/21: James Annan points to evidence that even the conceded point 1 is overestimated by several orders of magnitude in Pielke & Matsui.