The Truth About the Truth About Greenhouse Gases

REVISED

I've been asked to comment on William Happer's "The Truth about Greenhouse Gases", and finding no competent discussion of it anywhere on the first three pages of hits have agreed to take it on.

To give you an idea of the tenor of the document, it starts off modestly, like this:

“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the
most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been
excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to
show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and
gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles
Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular
Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary
moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations
of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous
consequences for mankind and for the planet. This contemporary
“climate crusade” has much in common with the medieval crusades
Mackay describes, with true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry
governments, manipulators of various types, and even children’s
crusades.

Yes, Happer, who holds a named chair in physics at Princeton, is of the paranoiac school of skepticism, the one that would rather believe in a grand conspiracy than to consider for a minute the possible need for collective action on this matter.

After this blistering start, he takes some time to get warmed up. A few pages go on about how plants like CO2 and CO2 is necessary for life, so we shouldn't call it a pollutant until we start suffocating. This, before taking on the climate question, is plainly putting the cart before the horse, but it takes up a few pages. And by now we are convinced that the reason the fellow is not getting around to making a point is that he hasn't got one.

That is to say, William/Belette/Stoat's point is basically the right approach:

So the question is, how can Happer not be aware of this? He is not obliged to agree with the IPCC report, but he cannot but realise that it is the authoritative voice of the position he disagrees with; he is obliged to at least know what it says and (if he is being honest) he is obliged to report (and then, if he can, refute) its arguments. It is dishonest of him to substitute strawmen.

I summarize the case at greater length than William does:

• Most of the constituent gases of the atmosphere are transparent at the frequencies of the earth's thermal radiation.
• Most of the opacity in the infrared ("greenhouse effect") is due to carbon dioxide and water vapor, and clouds (liquid and solid water emulsions) which of course are also opaque to incoming radiation
• Human activity directly increases carbon dioxide, mostly due to fossil fuel consumption, but also through deforestation and chemical processes related to manufacture of cement. Human activity also affects the radiative properties of the atmosphere via a few other trace greenhouse gases, and via increases in aerosol dust.
• Finally, human interference in surface processes over land can have large regional effects.
• As these perturbations increase in rough proportion to economic activity, the carbon dioxide comes to dominate over time because of its long residency in atmosphere-upper-ocean-land system. Though exchanges among these reservoirs is large, that does not reduce the net amount of carbon in the atmosphere. To a first approximation, carbon is removed on the time scale of the deep overturning of the ocean, on the order of a thousand years.
• While of course the sun is by far the dominant energy source for the system, its variability is small (measured in energy) compared to the disruptions due to greenhouse gases and aerosols. Climate forcing is dominated by anthropogenic effects, of which warming is expected to increasingly dominate.
• Water vapor feedbacks are well characterized and are known to approximately double the temperature sensitivity of the system. Cloud feedbacks, which potentially might be ameliorating or exacerbating, remain poorly characterized.
• Various forms of evidence are in rough agreement that sensitivity is on the order of 2.5 degrees per doubling, but the uncertainty has proven stubborn. Probably this is correct within a multiplicative factor of 2, i.e., almost certainly between 1.25 C and 5 C per doubling.
• Simulation of the atmosphere (using GCMs) is a useful tool within science, but its results should not at present be considered as reliable projections of the future, even given emission scenarios. Simulations are tuned to the present day, be expected to understate risks and fail to represent unprecedented configurations of the climate system.
  
• Very little is known about the potential geochemical feedbacks which clearly exacerbated the glacial cycle in the geologically recent past. These could potentially greatly amplify the dangers without actually affecting the sensitivity as usually measured. It is expected and hoped that these feedbacks would take a long time on human scales to appear, but we may be committing future generations to deal with them.

I think all the above is uncontroversial. Happer addresses none of it. What does he come up with instead?

At the bottom of page four we come to the first mention of climate, and we are well into the fifth page before the famous physicist manages to construct the following argument:

The argument starts something like this. CO2 levels have increased from
about 270 ppm to 390 ppm over the past 150 years or so, and the earth
has warmed by about 0.8 C during that time. Therefore the warming is
due to CO2. But correlation is not causation. The local rooster crows every
morning at sunrise, but that does not mean the rooster caused the sun to
rise. The sun will still rise on Monday if you decide to have the rooster for
Sunday dinner.

There have been many warmings and coolings in the past when the CO2
levels did not change.

Yes, after five pages he leads with a version of the "dinosaurs had no SUVs, QED" argument!

What's more , he defends it with the "wine exported from Greenland" meme. I myself am responsible for tracking this one down to an archaeologust who showed that wine was imported into Greenland. A horse of a different color, you'll admit.

So by the time we reach page five we have four pages of waffling, a stunningly weak fallacy, and an incorrect anecdote raised in support of it. Hardly an auspicious start.

Bah. My bad. It was wine "exported from England". I jumped to a conclusion because the whole Greenlandic wine incident tickles me so. I have found lots of evidence, by the way, that wine was produced in the south of England in the middle ages for local consumption, but so far no evidence of any export. But that's a quibble.

But it's all in service of a ludicrous claim. Nobody has ever said that CO2 is the ONLY influence on global climate. This is a childish bit of misdirection, not befitting a scientist.

En passant, it's worth noticing, Happer manages this howler:

Yet there are strident calls for immediately stopping further increases in
CO2 levels and reducing the current level (with 1990 levels the arbitrary
benchmark).

There are no such strident calls. Everybody knows that CO2 will continue to rise for some considerable time. It is emission levels that form the arbitrary benchmark. Again, the whole reason that CO2 is the key to anthropogenic forcing is that concentrations are approximately cumulative, that the residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere/upper-ocean/land-surface system is very long.

Then

another rationale for reducing CO2 is now promoted: to
stop the hypothetical increase of extreme climate events like hurricanes
or tornados. But dispassionate data show that the frequency of extreme
events has hardly changed and in some cases has decreased in the 150
years that it has taken CO2 levels to increase from 270 ppm to 390 ppm.

Hurricanes and tornados have very noisy statistics with components at interannual time scales. There is also contention about the theoretical expectations, particularly regarind hurricanes. It will be some considerable time before we have much confidence in what the trend is.

But do we have theoretical and modeling reasons to expect increased floods and increased droughts in the greenhouse-enhanced world, and here the record is strongly supportive of those expectations. Happer carefully tiptoes around this evidence.

But these records show that changes
in temperature preceded changes in CO2 levels, so that CO2 levels were
an effect of temperature changes. Much of this was probably due to
outgassing of CO2 from the warming oceans or the reverse on cooling.

That the effect goes one way does not preclude it from going the other way. That, in fact, is what "feedback" means. There remains much for the scientific community to learn about the glacial cycles of the geologically recent past. But we are certain that it cannot be explained without the greenhouse effect. The energetics do not add up otherwise. Accounting for the CO2 brings temperatures back into balanace.

During the “Younger Dryas” some 12,000 years ago,
the earth very dramatically cooled and warmed -- as much 10 C in fifty
years -- with no apparent change in CO2 levels, and with life -- including
our human ancestors -- surviving the rapid change in temperature just
fine.

Um. No. The 10C in fifty years was the temperature shift in Greenland. Most life was not affected by it.

Our present global
warming is not at all unusual by the standards of geological history,

No, though it is unusual in human history. But this is not the point. The anticipated rate of CO2 increases, especially in the absence of a globally supported mitigation policy, are unprecedented in geological history (with the possible exception of the disastrous K-T PETM transition which nearly wiped out all ocean life, probably in a burst of ocean acidification). And the rate and duration of the incipient CO2 spike lead to a strong expectation of a very large shift in temperature to be anticipated over the coming century.

The organization charged with producing scientific support for
the climate crusade, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), finally found a solution. They rewrote the climate history of the
past 1000 years with the celebrated “hockey stick” temperature record

This is tendentious nonsense. Research advanced. The graph in the 1990 report was a rough schematic.

[M & M] showed that the hockey stick was not supported by observational data.

They nitpicked. The millenial preindustrial data remains unexciting. The evidence for a global Medieval Warm Period remains marginal and roughly irrelevant. And its removal has negligible impact on any serious estimation of the prospects. It's really not in any way significant whether or not these events occurred. It would merely be incorrect to claim that they are in the global record, though to be sure regional changes did occur on this time scale.

One of the most consistent themes of the e-mails is the need to hide raw data from anyone outside the team. Why the obsession on withholding data? Because the hockey stick lost credibility when it was possible to see the raw, unmanipulated data on which it was based.

This, I am sorry to say, is not just vicious but quite wrong. The reticence is based on a distaste for cooperating with people who had shown themselves to be rude and malicious. There is a long story here with raw feelings on both sides, but one side of it starts with a desire to avoid what was perceived as unpleasant people and time-wasting interactions. But the general outlines of the hockey stick remain. Numerous independent procedural investigations have concluded that no data was altered or misrepresented, and numerous scientific investigations have confirmed the general outline of the result, albeit some with a bumpier "shaft" to the hockey stick, a perfectly ordinary point of research contention.

But finally we come to the central myth of post "Climateg*te" bunk:

Peer review in climate science means that the ”team” recommends publication of each other’s work, and tries to keep any off-message paper from being accepted for publication. Why this obsession with cleansing the “scientific” literature of any opposing views? Because it allows climate extremists to claim that they represent all of science and anyone who questions their message is at war with all of science, except for a few “flat-earthers”, “deniers,” or others scorned with carefully researched epithets, designed to discredit dissenting scientific opinion

This is simply begging the question. If there is in fact legitimate scientific argument that the consensus position is wrong, then it is wrong for people to keep these positions out of the literature. But if the so-called skeptic papers are garbage, scientific flat-earthism, it is the legitimate function of editors to keep them out of the literature and out of the literature review.

This can only be addressed by actually looking at the science, which Happer refuses to do. He simply repeats the usual political talking points, trying to justify doing so by his position and his reputation. But his reputation is as a physicist, not as a politician. He does himself and us no favors by repeating shabby talking points from the political press.


It goes on. Shabby attacks on the models:

John von Neumann once said, “With four
parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle
his trunk.” Climate models have dozens of parameters, not unlike the
epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy.

Yes, but with dozens of parameters, climate models simulate systems with millions of degrees of freedom at the implementation level, and at least thousands at the physical level. This can only be possible with an actual underlying physical model. It cannot be a coincidence.

No model predicted the lack of net warming of the
earth’s temperature that we have experienced over the past ten years

Well, we don't have a date on this publication, or I didn;t find one at least. For a brief moment in 2008-9 one could actually make this case without being blatantly dishonest, but of course even so it is just cherry-picking. In other words, it is at best a truth of a mendacious sort. As has been explained many times, there is unforced interannual variability which can mask the trend over relatively short time intervals. If Happer had any genuine interest in the material, he would know this. And indeed, a later paragraph shows that he does understand how this works, yet he repeats the flawed argument in the very next breath.

All of the proposed controls that would
have such a significant impact on the world’s economic future are based
on computer models that are so complex and chaotic that many runs
are needed before we can get an “average” answer. Yet the models
have failed the simple scientific test of prediction.

etc. etc.

The last several pages are reduced to conspiracy-mongering of the worst kind and make no pretense to engaging the science at all. As with Dyson, the points of actual substance are few, incoherent, and ill-informed. But at least Dyson manages an air of decency and humility. Happer is blazing with anger and contempt, without showing any signs of having listened to the people he is criticizing.

It's true that the intellectual style of earth science is different from that of pure physics. But it's not as if Happer were remotely as intellectually lazy as this empty attack would indicate. Politics seems able to override reason. This is a pile of political talking points, not any sort of engagement with the evidence. It's a shame.

Climate science could well do with competent criticism. It increasingly appears that serious concerns about the science must be impossible, because all the critiques are so spectacularly non-serious.

--
pic: William Happer from his lab's website

And What's Wrong with This Picture?

I accidentally hit a site that is promulgating this graph; not the first time I've seen it.
Note that it's perfectly true, and that the vertical scales and start and end points have been carefully chosen to yield a misimpression. Does this constitute lying? To a political or legal mind, I think it doesn't.

(Update: also note that the two curves have different time filters applied. Consider why this would be so. Hint: it is related to the choice of vertical scale.)

In a blog comment exchange here, I casually mentioned "cherry picking" and "Ted" elaborated:

The summary reference to “cherry-picking” says a lot. What it illustrates, more than anything, I think, is the different sorts of argument that count as acceptable in science and in political discourse.

In science, the assumption is that it’s not okay to treat evidence selectively. You’re supposed to *try* to account for all the evidence.

In political discourse, I’m afraid, the de facto assumption seems to be that it’s fair to pick up whatever data point happens to be handy and throw it at your opponent, while (of course) ignoring and evading the data points they throw at you.

George Will’s recent column was an excellent instance of what happens when you take the norms of political discourse and apply them to science. Will may have thought he was just “spinning” — which is more or less what he gets paid for — but he was spinning a topic where “spin” counts as culpable distortion.

Update: Here's the same data without the three bugs. Consider plotting the above graph for 1996- 2006 instead of 1998-2008.


Stop the presses, huh?

See also How to Tell Different Stories with the Same Data.

More on George Will

Much, much, much more... All tolled, (and not yet all told) this is the first major league blogstorm emerging from the non-denialist climo-blogosphere and is thus a historical event regardless of your position on it.

If there's one thing you should understand about this event it is this one: Jonathan Schwarz tells an old Noam Chomsky story about George Will in an article entitled "So Much Nicer To Be George Will Before The Internet".

So she looked it up and called me back, and said, "Yeah, you're right, we found it there; okay, we'll run your letter." An hour later she called again and said, "Gee, I'm sorry, but we can't run the letter." I said, "What's the problem?" She said, "Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he's having a tantrum; they decided they can't run it." Well, okay.

Of course there's more from Joe Romm. Especially consider this comment from "agog":

The great mystery to me is why in the age of the interweb does anyone bother with US journalism. As disgraceful as these George Will columns have been, after its support for the Iraq war how could any sentient reader of WaPo have credited it with any journalistic or moral integrity? The NYT and WSJ are no better and anything on US television is a waste of time.

For English speakers surely the FT, the Independent, BBC, Channel 4 or Al Jazeera are better alternatives: none of them come close to being perfect but if one consumes critically it is possible to cherry pick the best of them depending on the issue. And, of course, there is the blogosphere where sites like this usefully both contribute and critique.

Americans seem to be living in an information bubble (or is it vacuum?): their own version of The Truman Show. From abroad, the world looks very different. Equally f**ked, but somehow in a way that one can make more sense of.

Then there is Curtis Brainerd on no less than the Columbia Journalism Review. This mostly consists of a clear and cogent history of the episode, but ends with a jawdroppingly muddled piece of journalism-insider blathering:

Revkin quoted American University communications professor Matthew Nisbet, who argues that the wave of criticism of Will “only serves to draw attention to his claims while reinforcing a larger false narrative that liberals and the mainstream press are seeking to censor rival scientific evidence and views.”

There is some truth to that. Indeed, because of the hullaballoo, Will is now writing about climate change for the second time this month. On the other hand, this whole affair raises a number of important questions about how the press, particularly columnists, cover climate change. The most important seems to be: can inference rise to the level of such absurdity that it becomes subject to the same rigors as evidence?

Carl Zimmer

What has kept me hooked on this saga is not George Will’s errors. Errors are as common as grass. Some are made out of ignorance, some carefully constructed to give a misleading impression. What has kept me agog is the way the editors at the Washington Post have actually given their stamp of approval on Will’s columns, even claiming to have fact-checked them and seeing no need for a single correction.

The climax to this part of the story came yesterday, when the Columbia Journalism Review was finally able to get Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor at the Post, to speak directly about the ice affair:

It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject–so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point…I think it’s kind of healthy, given how, in so many areas–not just climatology, but medicine, and everything else–there is a tendency on the part of the lay public at times to ascribe certainty to things which are uncertain.

I’ve heard that line before…the one about how people can look at the same scientific data and make different inferences.

I’ve heard it from creationists. They look at the Grand Canyon, at all the data amassed by geologists over the years, and they end up with an inference very different from what you’ll hear from those geologists.

Would Hiatt be pleased to have them writing opinion pieces, too? There is indeed some debate in the scientific community about exactly how old the Grand Canyon is–with some arguing it’s 55 million years old and others arguing for 15 million. Would Hiatt consider it healthy to publish a piece from someone who thinks the Grand Canyon is just a few thousand years old, with just a perfunctory inspection of the information in it?

At this point, it’s hard for me to see how the answer could be no.

Senator John Kerry makes a sympatico pronouncement on HuffPo:

Let's be very clear: Stephen Chu does not make predictions to further an agenda. He does so to inform the public. He is no Cassandra. If his predictions about the effects of our climate crisis are scary, it's because our climate is scary.

Amen. Even the best of our J-school friends seem incapable of getting a grip on that.

Andrew Siegel has more and a huge supply of links, enough to fill your whole rainy day if you're lucky enough to live somewhere they still have those.

Opinions Expressed by My Employer

My opinions aren't necessarily those of my employer, and the opinions of my employer aren't necessarily mine, either.

My employer, the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas, has invited Fred Singer to give a talk this Thursday to a public lecture series that has required student attendance. The lecture is entitled "Nature — Not Human Activity — Rules the Climate".

I feel rather lucky that I will be out of town and unable to attend. I would be tempted to make a scene. I intend to say nothing further about this event, except for the easily surmised fact that this is not an invitation I would have made.

Any opinions out there?

We Need a New form of Outreach

American Thinker has a particularly compelling and polished version of the usual vile garbage, put together in what starts to look like a coherent argument. Of course it is built on the usual foundation of overvalued nitpicking:

"We can't even believe in "official" measurements, as data sets relied upon to track global temperatures have again been shown to be contaminated and otherwise compromised."

misdirection:

"Remember the sea ice that doomsters warned would soon be gone? It's now at the very same level it was in 1979."

and outright lies:

"this IPCC report, much-hyped-and-hallowed by alarmists and media-drones alike, represents the combined work of only 52 carefully cherry-picked UN scientists"

Unfortunately, amidst all this garbage they score a legitimate political point here. The public's confidence in the scientific consensus as somewhat understated in the IPCC reports is, by various measures getting worse. That part of the article is not lies.

Although Obama is closely enough connected to the scientific community that he understands the tragic dynamic behind this situation, and although he has a lot of power, he is probably not going to make much of a dent in this situation anytime soon. Yes, green jobs will help, and it does help that people see peak oil as real. The alliance between fossil fuel (especially coal) people and an especially malicious and divisive streak among market fundamentalists goes on. They are not going to make our lives any easier, and so the sort of unmitigated nastiness seen in the American Thinker article is not going away or even abating. Worse, as it triumphantly crows, it is succeeding.

We need to reinvent the relationship between science and the public. That is an absolutely crucial step and it needs to happen fast. This is outside the capacity of NSF, which likes to support what it calls outreach but does so in a structurally ineffective way.

New mechanisms for communication between science and the public are desperately needed.

Dr. Chu? Dr. Holdren? Hello?

Update: Churlish of me to complain on a day when Obama takes such strong positive steps. For which I am grateful; I wasn't aware this was coming.

And what do you expect of a country where people don't "believe in" evolution anyway? Still I hate to see these polls headed south and I think it's an important long-term goal to reconnect (or at least connect) science and society.

Update 1/28: Some related points on a comment by Gavin Starks on Tim O'Reilly's "Radar" site:

We're all aware of the emotive language used to polarize the climate change debate.

There are, however, deeper patterns which are repeated across science as it interfaces with politics and media. These patterns have always bothered me, but they've never been as "important" as now.

We are entering an new era of seismic change in policy, business, society, technology, finance and our environment, on a scale and speed substantially greater than previous revolutions. The sheer complexity of these interweaving systems is staggering.

Much of this change is being driven by "climate science", and in the communications maelstrom there is a real risk that we further alienate "science" across the board.

We need more scientists with good media training (and presenting capability) to change the way that all sciences are represented and perceived. We need more journalists with deeper science training - and the time and space to actually communicate across all media. We need to present uncertainty clearly, confidently and in a way that doesn't impede our decision-making.

On the climate issue, there are some impossible levers to contend with;

1. Introducing any doubt into the climate debate stops any action that might combat our human impact.
2. Introducing "certainty" undermines our scientific method and its philosophy.

When represented in political, public and media spaces, these two levers undermine every scientific debate and lead to bad decisions.

A tough nut, indeed.

Not about religion

Back when Irene's Mom used to live in Mississippi and we were in Wisconsin, we'd find ourselves driving through the deep south on occasion. A couple of times I heard some pretty extravagantly strange preachers on the radio. One I'll always remember said something like

"We have nothing against freedom of religion. Everybody should be free to believe whatever they want, and no religion should get special treatment. But when it comes to the Bible, we aren't talking about religion. The Bible is the revealed truth of God."

Based on that, I find it easier to understand evolution denialists than climate change denialists. As far as I know, the Bible makes no specific claims about the radiative or thermodynamic properties of atmospheric trace gases. A pity.

If you find yourself in a position where it is very rewarding to take the Bible literally, though, an unreasonable model of the earth prehistory is pretty much explicitly  included. Once you "believe in" that, it is necessarily the case that great swaths of earth science and biological science are wrong. You are very much seeking the charlatan who will tell you in vaguely realistic terms how and why the science is wrong. It turns out the world has a sufficient supply of shameless and complaint and/or self-delusional PhD's to provide cover for you if you want to "believe in" science and "believe in" the Bible at the same time.

Having achieved that, you will perceive any person advocating evolution as at best mistaken, but likely evil and probably to be damned to hell. This will be reinforced by their arrogant refusal to consider alternatives to their dire mistake in the classroom and in public discourse.

I see this as all about the dichotomy between how things are decided in science vs how they are decided in politics. In science, not every voice carries equal weight. This makes some people uncomfortable as it seems to go against the tenets of democracy. I think the best answer is Daniel Moynihan's: "You are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts." 

Anyway, given the many similarities in tactics, including what seems to us a willful refusal to debate honestly, it's worth it for us in the climate trenches to pay close attention to the evolution nonsense. One thing that all this makes clear is that there really is a quasi-religious, dogmatic belief that it is impossible that restraint on any human economic activity can be a good idea. This belief is, in some circles, as beyond challenge as the Bible is to a fundamentalist. 

It must be; this can account for their approach to evidence and I don't believe anything else could. A small number of them must be lying through their teeth (as must some of those testifying against evolution). The number of consciously bad actors may be very small, though.

The third most important, version 87

I saw the following in comments on Steinn Sigurðsson's blog in his article on the new sunspot minimum:

Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves in cold water and bubbles out of warm water. The equilibrium in seawater is very high, making seawater a great 'sink'; CO2 is 34 times more soluble in water than air is soluble in water.

This seemed oddly familiar. There really is no sensible way to make methane more important than CO2, so it stuck with me. I could swear I had just recently replied to someone making the same mistake.

Specifically, there are 87 occurrences of "most important green house gas followed by methane", an odd rendition (owing to the two words in 'green house' as well as the indefensible position.) Here are the first five:

#
The Warming Earth Blows Hot, Cold And Chaotic - Care2 News Network
Jan 2, 2009 ... Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not ...
www.care2.com/news/member/510010530/1004181 - 106k - Cached - Similar pages -
#
Way of the Woo: The Pandemic vs. The Maunder Minimum
Dec 22, 2008 ... Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not ...
wayofthewoo.blogspot.com/2008/12/pandemic-vs-maunder-minimum.html - 86k - Cached - Similar pages -
#
Sunspots? | Clipmarks
Jan 1, 2009 ... Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not ...
clipmarks.com/clipmark/6E413CB1-C680-4FE8-BCB6-73C24995526B/ - 36k - Cached - Similar pages -
#
insciences.org - Sunspot data vital clue to climate change
Dec 22, 2008 ... Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not ...
insciences.org/article.php?article_id=981 - 27k - Cached - Similar pages -
#
China Encourages Innovation by Awarding Top Scientists - Two ...
Jan 12, 2009 ... Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not correlate ...
news.softpedia.com/news/China-Encourages-Innovation-by-Awarding-Top-Scientists-101765.shtml - 48k - Cached - Similar pages -

and for completeness, the last five:

#
GREENIE WATCH
Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not correlate well with ...
antigreen.blogspot.com/2008/12/worst-climate-predictions-of-2008-2008.html - 91k - Cached - Similar pages -
#
Something about everything: Doomsday-the end of the world on Dec ...
Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not correlate well with ...
survival-of-d-fittest.blogspot.com/2008/12/doomsday.html - 75k - Cached - Similar pages -
#
Western Civilization and Culture: Documenting the global warming fraud
Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not correlate well with ...
westerncivilizationandculture.blogspot.com/2008/12/documenting-global-warming-fraud.html - 170k - Cached - Similar pages -
#
Blame the Sun for a Cloudy Day? - All Scientific
Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not correlate well with ...
allscientific.blogspot.com/2008/12/blame-sun-for-cloudy-day.html?showComment=1229868960000 - 104k - Cached - Similar pages -
#
weather conditions
Water vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane. The third most important greenhouse gas is CO2, and it does not correlate well with ...
ocracoke-island.net/search/more.php?id=20090102022841AAWDw5X&search=weather+c... - 13k - Cached - Similar pages -

Now the idea that someone would post the exact same (incorrect) words on the web 87 times strikes me as odd. Presumably this is a paid agent provocateur. Does this pattern come up elsewhere? Or is someone cutting corners on his work?

But I could swear I had responded to it recently, so I looked again. Sure enough, here it is:

Water vapour (0.4% overall but 1 – 4 % near the surface) is the most effective green house gas followed by methane (0.0001745%). The third ranking greenhouse gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either;

So here is a slightly different version. And there are some other variants like "third important" vs "third most important". And a mispaste "WateWater vapour is the most important green house gas followed by methane."

A couple of sites are so lucky as to get it twice!

Many are anonymous or signed by "Francis" or Francis M" but some get a full name: Francis Manns, sometimes with a PhD claimed.

So the first Google hit on "Francis Manns" will be a bio or a research page? Well, sort of. And, I see he is not new at this technique.

I hope he is getting paid for all this tedious effort since he apparently needs the money.

Theory of Everything

You might have thought our problems originated at least to some extent in the fact that the USA had been run by a tribe of drunken lemurs for eight years, but you would be wrong. No, the cause of our problems, all of them, the wars, the economic collapse, the budgetary problems, the international hostility, the decline of civility, the prosecution of innocent people for political purposes, disease, depression, beach erosion, mercury pollution, the lack of due recognition of the Longhorns as the #1 college football team this year, in fact everything that troubles us, all of it, is entirely due to the IPCC and their vile coterie of nefarious co-conspirators:

The establishment of the Church of Global Warming immediately attracted as acolytes those leftists orphaned by the collapse of the old Soviet Union, those who saw, and continue to see, free-market capitalism and individual liberty as grave threats. So convincing were they developing plausible pseudo-science and both faulty and falsified data that they were able to bring into the church those political leaders — read United Nations — who have long sought the destruction of the one bulwark standing against the encroaching tide of totalitarianism.

The success of Gore’s evangelical fervor can be seen in the apparent commitment of President-elect Barack Hussein Obama to some sort of cap-and-trade program, a program designed by Gore to create a personally lucrative market for a product that will be created by legislative fiat. The legislative fiats already in place, spurred by Gore and his followers, have played a major role in helping to bankrupt the American automobile industry, have driven up the cost of food, have hamstrung domestic energy exploration and production, and are threatening to destroy, through onerous taxation, the American livestock industry.

Even the livestock industry! So says Dan Sernoffsky in the website of the Lebanon Daily News of Lebanon, PA. Fortunately, we can always count on the Russians in time of need:

Despite its best efforts to brand as heretics those who would question the basic tenets of the church — that global warming is man-made, that it is immediately imminent, and that the only salvation lies in the church — there is increasing evidence that those tenets are, and always have been, wrong. A man named Khabibullo Abdusamatov, who heads a space-research laboratory in Russia, has suggested that the world is headed for global cooling, a hypothesis seconded by one of his countrymen, Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, another respected scientist.

God bless Khabibullo Abdisamatov and Oleg Sorokhtin, saviors of the livestock industry!

This is the best bit, here:

Not unsurprisingly, the Church of Global Warming has been quick to claim that the drop in temperatures is simply proof of the basic tenet of their faith, that man-made global warming does exist, hoping, no doubt, that what they have perceived and read about sunspot cycles will enable them to ignore temperature drops when sunspot activity increases and leads to rising temperatures.

Ah, the selective use of evidence. Nobody should tolerate selective use of evidence. Look, here are two obscure Russian fellows who agree that this is all based on selective evidence! Case closed!

You can't make this stuff up. Anyway, at least I can't. But anyway I can share. You're welcome.

Meanwhile back at the ranch

The disastrous trend that got me started blogging is not abating. According to Craig Miller's Climate Watch blog at KQED

Across much of the country (California being a notable exception), recent public polling would seem to indicate an eroding public acceptance of climate science, increasingly divided along party lines. A survey by the Pew Research Center last spring found that 71% of those surveyed accepted the basic premise of climate change but less than half believed it was related to human activity ("Republicans are increasingly skeptical," noted Pew).

Yikes.

The link also fully quotes an especially plausible version of the denialist talking points, well-seasoned with half-truths and distortions and outright Oregon petitions.

We should not fool ourselves. The battle of ideas is being won by the side of untruth, or at best fought to a draw (which is a victory on points for the side of untruth). This is a huge problem not just for the present carbon crisis, but for future crises as well.

The end of Darwinism is nigh

The Darwinist hegemony over our culture has definitely peaked, according to a recent claim. Unfortunately, similar claims have been ongoing for well over a century. This does not bode well for the not-the-IPCC denial crowd going away anytime soon.

I guess we were getting that picture already, but it's grimly interesting to see how long these sorts of things can persist.

H/T to Roger Coppock on the Global Change list for the link.

 

Snippets from the Pseudo-Debate

In looking through all 203 responses to Tierney's anti-Holdren screed to date I came up with some interesting nuggets. Alas, the idea that "global warming" is some sort of conspiracy is not going away. Witness, then,  a grab bag of comments from John Tierney's recent anti-Holdren screed in the NYTimes blogs that I think are sadly representative:

#73, Steven Walser:

none of us KNOWS what the correct response is, should be publicized far more widely.
We must all realize that ALL theories of climate change are just that THEORIES, not FACTS.
The proposed nostrums have very real world consequences. We simply do not have adequate knowledge to be implementing “solutions” that may, in fact, turn out to have unintended consequences far graver than the problems they seek to solve.
The questions of climate science far exceed in complexity the questions in economics which is wholly of human design and creation and yet as we currently see the effects of our common lack of understanding of human nature play out in the economic world many here call for putting more power into the hands of these same, very fallible humans, to craft a future over which they have even less understanding.

You hear this nonsense spun over and over again. It's so confused it's hard to refute but somebody ought to give it a try.

Simply because we don't know exactly what would be best to do is no excuse for doing nothing. We always must act on best available information. Doing nothing (construed as making no changes in extant policies regarding energy) is not even possible in any case, as should be plain to anyone who thinks about it. Something will be done, and the question is what that will be. So this boils down to an argument to discount evidence that the writer finds, well, inconvenient. Yet the writer has no concept that this is the case.

It is interesting that the assertion is made that "The questions of climate science far exceed in complexity the questions in economics". The comparison between the two fields is, I think, both fruitful and thanks to the political power of economists, inevitable. 

I find the above-quoted writer's position nonsensical. Economics, being essentially a branch of psychology, is vastly more complex than climatology; the scale separations and level of detail that make climatology complex compared to other domains of essentially classical 19th century physics are very favorable in comparison to behavioral sciences. If a robust theory of applied economics is possible, the available data is so vastly inadequate to test it that it is hard to see how a correct theory might emerge. Meanwhile, the set of observational and theoretical constraints on the physical atmosphere and oceans are precise and well understood. 

It's really interesting how and why Mr. Walser gets this backwards.

#80 has this old saw:

Can Holdren prove his point? Nope. The only “proof” he has are climate MODELS. That’s not empirical science.

Um, well, what do we mean by MODELS here? This is fodder for a very long discussion; I've seen a couple of stabs at it. I don't actually know how one predicts the future empirically, of course. This also boils down to an argument for celebrating ignorance.

#84 comes right out and gets it very wrong in very few words:

Has Holdren caught on to the fact that CO2 doesn’t cause an increase in temperatures yet?

Heh. What can you say to that? "Does too!" 

It might be wise to avoid that trap and move onto "That's not what I understand. What makes you say that?"

#101 has this remarkable claim:

I think the AGW people are fearful that the earth is cooling. Which means that they have to enact their economic control laws quickly in order to take credit for the cooling.

I don't see how that would be possible; there is little likelihood that the CO2 concentration will be stabilizing, never mind declining, any time soon. The author seems to be unaware that the claims being made are quantitative or what their nature might possibly be. Nevertheless he feels confident in refuting the claims, whether he knows what they are or not.

#114, by Donald Kingsbury, is far more reasonable at first blush:

Holdren is acting as a defense attorney for a complicated mathematical model of climate — which is far more complicated than the current mathematical models of our economy, which have just been proven, by circumstance, to be drastically inadequate.

As a mathematician I can assure you that current climate models — either those “proving” that humans are having a lethally bad effect on climate or those “proving” that the changes are within the normal bounds of the last million years — are not adequate. Obama needs another adviser, a prosecutor who can look at what Holdren refuses to look at, ie those aspects that might be wrong with current theory. That is the way SCIENCE is done.

Kingsbury is only correct in principle. He seems unaware that the trial has already been conducted, many times. Here is the root of our problem. We have to get on to the sentencing, but the sort of noise Tierney is propagating here cause the trial to be repeated endlessly. Is it malfeasance on Kingsbury's part top be wrong about this? Presumably not, he seems a thoughtful enough fellow. Is it malfeasance on Tierney's. Yes indeed. A journalist has the responsibility not to be egregiously wrong. If he is ill-equipped for the task at hand, he should cede the territory to someone who is able to address it correctly.

Which brings us neatly to the claim of Lysenkoism in #62:

Now, I can be wrong but I do see some uncomfortable parallels between Lysenkoism and climate-change alarmists.
In both cases skepticism is not tolerated ( the science is “settled”) and skeptics run the risk of losing their jobs. On top of that, prominent alarmists like James Hansen en David Suzuki want “climate criminals” on trial.

First of all, if willfully lying about matters of this consequence is not criminal, it seems to be a severe oversight in the law. Proving intent will be nearly impossible, but if anyone intentionally lies in either overstating or understating the case here, it's not hard to argue that they are liable.

Let's cpnsider, though, the claim that alternative positions are squelched that is the issue.

People like Joe Romm who go ballistic about articles like this Tierney's are not without justification (though I suspect the display of the anger may be counterproductive we can argue about it). It's easy, on the other hand, to misconstrue this sort of anger as an infringement on free speech by political correctness. Whether it is the one or isn't independent of the substantive evidence, though! The question depends sensitively on how strongly the evidence points in one direction or another. Are reasonable opinions being suppressed? Or are unreasonable opinions being appropriately ignored?

In the present case, the evidence that human impact on the climate system is detectable, growing, and hard to alter on a suitable time scale, is overwhelming. (Whether that time scale is 10 years or 100 is another matter, but the number of arguably informed people who think it's outside that window is very small.)

Unfortunately, the number of people who can evaluate the evidence directly is relatively small compared to the entire world population, though it is not insignificant; probably numbering on the order of 100,000 people; or one person out of every 50,000 in the general population. The rest of us have to operate on networks of trust, and these networks are sufficiently frayed and tarnished that some people find themselves hooking up with the likes of Tierney or Lomborg, themselves inaccessible to the people who really understand what is going on.

It is the task of the general public to evaluate exactly whom the experts are, to weigh the plausibility of the proposed conspiracy against the plausibility of the problem, and to support appropriate action. Significant sections of the public in some countries are failing at this task. It is the task of journalists to provide the public with a fair representation of the balance of evidence. Part of the failure of the public is attributable to a failure by journalists.

Speech must remain free in a free society, of course, but it does the free society no good to indulge in speech that is irresponsible. As long as Tierney is carrying the imprimatur of the New York Times, people will continue to take this stuff seriously. Journalism should endeavor to close debates as well as open them. It's a matter of the merits of the debate.

Peer review does help, of course. When an opinion has currency in the press and not in the journals, one thing the press might do is call attention to the two alternative explanations of why that is. Suppression of valid opinion is one possibility, but a lack of coherence with scientific evidence is another. Science is an imperfect enterprise, to be sure, but an opinion on scientific matters that is not represented within science should typically not garner attention from the press.

The thing about science is that eventually things are decided. It seems the journalistic sector has either lost track of this fact or is afraid to convey it to the public.

Update: Here's a gem from comments to a pretty trivial Newsweek article

When will you and other publications realize that CO2 is a trace gas and has little to do with temperature variations? Temps vary in cycles of approximately 30 years, and have been dropping for about 5 years now, but those like you are hopelessly blind to real science. Global warming has become a tenet of the eco-religious who think a butterfly is more valuable than a baby. Research and report the truth or you will eventually lose what little credibility you have left.

In other words, not only does he know more than you do, but he threatens to ignore you if you don't come around to my (unsupportable) point of view. Indeed, this is what the press is afraid of, the more so now that their business model is in trouble. 

Update: It looks like the bad guys are trying to give the Bill-Ayres treatment to Holdren and thus anyone associted with him. It's a very silly effort because, unlike the attack on Ayres, it sorely lacks for ammunition.

The denialists do not want, themselves, to be the topic of conversation and are trying very hard to punish anyone who brings the topic of who they are and  how they got that way to center stage. Holdren has taken them on directly and this is an attempt at revenge.

It's also another opportunity for the press to take on the real issues. I am not betting they will.

No theory has weaknesses

With friends like this...

Fisher said, "We actually have more evidence for evolution occurring than we do for the law of gravity. ... Something doesn't become a theory if it's got weaknesses. There may be some questions that may yet to be answered, but nothing that's to the level of a weakness."

Uh, right...

Meanwhile the opposition argues thus:

"I'd argue it doesn't make sense scientifically to take it out," Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, the state board chairman, said of removing the "strengths and weaknesses" language. "Evolution shouldn't have anything to worry about — if there's no weaknesses, there's no weaknesses.

Clear? It's all about strength and weakness. Which is why "evolution" has "nothing that's to the level of a weakness" and therefore hasn't got "anything to worry about", which is why it's a "theory".

That all cringingly said, as I read the article in the Austin Statesman, it seems like the strength of the fundamentalists in the current constellation in Texas is a bit less than the ominous picture the Texas Freedom Network presented recently (for instance, in a platform at the Ethical Society of Austin a couple of months back). That at least is good news of a sort.

However, the nonsense you see spouted by the ally of science shows the extent to which the peculiar ideation of the fundamentalists frames the discussion in these parts.

 

Lindzen Diatribe

It looks like Lubos Motl gets credit for the first notice in the blogosphere of Lindzen's astonishing new rant about the state of climate science.

As is often the case with people who are too sure of themselves, he turns out guilty of some of the things he accuses his opponents of. He politicizes and conspiratorializes rather than simply addressing the problem dispassionately. His personal characterization of other scientists is grossly excessive in at least one occasion. I am inclined to extrapolate that his understanding of specific events is similarly skewed.

It's important to acknowledge that there is a legitimate point underneath all this bile. While scientists may be obligated to be advocates in extreme situations, science itself must remain distinct from advocacy if it is to be of any use at all. This is absolutely crucial in matters of public import.

There are definitely signs that the capacity of science to absorb new information is in decline. This may indeed bias the perception in client sciences (which use the output of climate science) of the extent and timing of anticipated climate disruption.

It's essential, for example, that the IPCC not overstate the certainty of its conclusions and that the community remain open to reasonably well-formed criticism. Any evidence that anything else has been happening in the past should be met with something other than emotive defensiveness. This may be hard given the confrontational tone adopted by some of the critics, including Lindzen here.

Science must make judgments, and some of those it finds wanting will always be offended. I am reasonably convinced that Lindzen's "iris effect" is refuted; Lindzen apparently is not. It is hard to know when to close such a debate, especially with a person who has made real contributions in the past.

I'm not softening on Lindzen. Indeed think this particular contribution is rather toxic. Still, it's obvious that (to the extent that he wrote this) he isn't so far gone as to be considered stupid.

I actually think the community has been extremely tolerant of Lindzen, going quite some way to allow his theories into print. It's the unestablished outsider that has a real complaint, as far as I can see.

Any evidence that the publication selection method is based on something other than science is a cause for concern; alas, there is evidence for such. It's not about "politics" in the usual sense though. It's basically that many scientists can't write, many scientists have no time to read, and the entire publication mechanism that is the metric of performance is consequently flawed. The bias is toward papers emerging from established research groups. If this becomes excessive science becomes "academic" in the worst sense.

Which brings us back to Lindzen's diatribe. I am hoping the bizarre snipe at Ray P was ghostwritten. It's inexcusable. I am confident that Ray has never publicly addressed scientific matters other than scientifically, and is in no reasonable sense fanatical. At best, Lindzen "approved the message". As such he is very clearly participating in the degradation of scientific conversation he claims to be bemoaning. As far as I am concerned, this one gross misstatement colors the credibility of the entire article. Perhaps others will find other similarly grotesque mischaracterizations elsewhere.

Crude swipes at the few people with the talent to both read and write effectively at the highest levels hardly seem designed to improve matters.

Likely this paper will be a Palinesque effort, energizing the "base" who have preconceived notions along these lines, and having little effect elsewhere.

It's a shame. We do need to rethink how science is done. This sort of injured and injurious argumentation will do little to advance that prospect.

De Nile

Everybody's favorite river seems to flow in every corner of the world.

For instance, consider how quickly Floridians stop worrying about hurricanes.

Meanwhile, Dot Earth reports that US science agencies shy away from the question of how to deal with the fractured communications between science and the public. I have to say that when I first heard about this issue I had some doubts about Glantz's association with NCAR but he makes a very cogent case.

 

More from Holdren

Dot Earth has a follow-up to the John Holdren op-ed which I referenced a few days ago.

Especially salient in my opinion:

As my original reference to “the venerable tradition of skepticism” indicates, I am in fact well aware of its valuable and indeed fundamental role in the practice of science. Skeptical views, clearly stated and soundly based, tend to promote healthy re-examination of premises, additional ways to test hypotheses and theories, and refinement of explanations and arguments. And it does happen from time to time – although less often than most casual observers suppose – that views initially held only by skeptics end up overturning and replacing what had been the “mainstream” view.

Appreciation for this positive role of scientific skepticism, however, should not lead to uncritical embrace of the deplorable practices characterizing what much of has been masquerading as appropriate skepticism in the climate-science domain. These practices include refusal to acknowledge the existence of large bodies of relevant evidence (such as the proposition that there is no basis for implicating carbon dioxide in the global-average temperature increases observed over the past century); the relentless recycling of arguments in public forums that have long since been persuasively discredited in the scientific literature (such as the attribution of the observed global temperature trends to urban-heat island effects or artifacts of statistical method); the pernicious suggestion that not knowing everything about a phenomenon (such as the role of cloudiness in a warming world) is the same as knowing nothing about it; and the attribution of the views of thousands of members of the mainstream climate-science community to “mass hysteria” or deliberate propagation of a “hoax”.

The purveying of propositions like these by a few scientists who do or should know better –and their parroting by amateur skeptics who lack the scientific background or the motivation to figure out what’s wrong with them – are what I was inveighing against in the op-ed and will continue to inveigh against.

Emphasis added, in the typographical sense. (It seems, at last, that something sufficiently emphatic is at least making it into the orbit of a major newspaper.)

Comments are off for this posting. Please respond at Dot Earth.

 

Ludicrous Article on Slate

Andy Revkin is taking bait set by Ron Rosenbaum in a ludicrous article on Slate.

Here is my response.

---

Well, I've been advocating you cover dissent too, but from a sociological perspective. You should report on Naomi Oreskes' work uncovering the roots of the pseudoscientific footdragging that bypasses the scientific community entirely and goes directly to the press. It's an effective strategy; wearing white coats and looking authoritative takes so much less effort than actually participating in the scientific process. I'd be happy to give their silly argunents their due if the press were to also put a little investigation into who these people are, why they do what they do, and how much they participate in science as actual contributors.

I write, though, mostly to express my bemusement at this astonishing blurt from the Rosenbaum article:

===

It may be that believers in anthropogenic global warming are right. I have no strong position on the matter, aside from agreeing with the CJR editorial that there's a danger in narrowing the permissible borders of dissent.

But I take issue with the author's contention that the time for dissent has ended. "The era of 'equal time' for skeptics who argue that global warming is just a result of natural variation and not human intervention seems to be largely over—except on talk radio, cable, and local television," she tells us.

And of course we all know that the Truth is to be found only on networks and major national print outlets. Their record has been nigh unto infallible.

===

I think the generous term for this is "obtuse". He refers to the bigger publications with a hint of jealousy, and to the scientific community not at all!

Truth, on matters of objective physical reality as opposed to social or political reality, is pretty much the specialty of science. The very fact that slate.com exists is a testament to the capacity of science to find truth.

On matters of scientific fact, the scientific arbiters of what is or is not beyond the pale have not a perfect record, but it is a solid one indeed. At some point, the press owes it to the public to have sufficiently solid communication channels to the scientific community as to stop troubling the public with empty crackpot posturing. That is your job. Your job is not to sell "papers".

The national science academies of all G8 nations along with most of the remaining scientifically active nations all have issued staments regarding the urgency of action to curtail carbon dioxide emissions. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorology Society and the American Geophysical Union have all issued statements concurring with the summaries of the scientific working group of the IPCC.

When exactly will the press give us the permission to treat this pernicious nonsense for what it is? I don't know about you, but my vote is for about eight years ago at the latest.

Update: Here's a related article by P Z "Pharyngula" Myers.

Update: Things Break, tackles Rosenbaum's article with great panache if perhaps in more detail than it really deserves. Many interesting points made along the way, though, and very much worth the read on that account.

 

Mashey on Oreskes (Guest posting)

John Mashey sends along the following. (Note that I am not the farmboy in question. I never roped a steer 'cause I don't know how, and I sure ain't fixin' to start in now...) --mt

Synopsis of Naomi Oreskes:

You CAN argue with the Facts
Full Talk, April 17,2008 - Stanford U

( 40 minutes )

Naomi is an award-winning geoscientist/science historian, a Professor at
UCSD and as of July, promoted to Provost of of the Sixth College there. She
is also a meticulous researcher, as seen from past books, and from having
reviewed a few chapters of the book she mentions in the talk. She unearthed
some fascinating memos, although of course, impossible to replicate the
exhaustive database of tobacco documents.

If you haven't seen her earlier 58-minute video, The American
Denial of Global Warming", you might watch that first. It's first half
is a longer version of the development of climate science, and the second
half is about the George C. Marshall Institute.

This talk has about 10 minutes of background, and the rest is new material
on the Western Fuels Association.]

The video production isn't flashy, but it's good enough. The lecture room
was packed, I had to stand. Interesting people attended.

This, of course, is an informal seminar talk - for the thorough
documentation, you'll have to await the book.

======SUMMARY=====

00:00 Background [fairly familiar, some overlap with earlier talk]

10:30 1988, Hansen in Congress, IPCC starts

11:05 "Tobacco strategy" to challenge science

I.e., use of similar techniques, sometimes by same people

14:50 Western Fuels Association (Power River coal companies)

Sophisticated marketing campaign in test markets

17:20 1991 - WFA creates ICE - Information Council for Environment

ICE ~ Tobacco Industry Research Council (TIRC) -
See Allan M. Brandt, "The Cigarette Century"

21:00 WFA print campaign

23:00 Scientists are more believable than coal people, so use scientists,
create memes

25:30 WFA produces video "The Greening of Earth", provides many copies

The Greening Earth Society (astroturf); more CO2 is good for the whole
Earth Excerpts from video

30:00- Video shows the Sahara turning completetely green

32:20- "Plants have been eating CO2 and they're starved"
Discussion of circumstances under which CO2 does help and illustration of
marketing tactics, cherry-picking, etc. I.e., how does one use a few
tidbits of real science to create an impression very different form the
overview? Are there lessons for scientists?

40:00 end

===

[Speaking as an old farmboy, plants need sun, water, soil, nutrients, and
CO2, and sometimes right climate, i.e., sugar maples need cold. The Sahara
will not be a new cornbelt, no matter how high CO2 goes.]

 

Science, Impartial Honesty, Advocacy, Stridency, Idiocy, Dissembling, Lying Through Your Teeth

Once in a while, I suppose, even lies are necessary. If a person in your surroundings is insane and behaving dangerously it may occasionally make sense to play into their delusion. In my opinion, such cases are extremely rare, although it appears to me that lying to young children about Santa Claus is somehow considered charming. Sorry, Virgina...

In the public sphere, is it ever justifiable to lie? I would say no, never, (not that there aren't slippery slopes about).

Science, Impartial Honesty, Advocacy, Stridency,
Idiocy, Dissembling, Lying Through Your Teeth

I note in passing that if we accept the above spectrum, it is "idiocy", which is less malign in intent, that has no adaptive value in any situation. But detecting idiots is not so hard. Our problem is to detect who is lying, and especially who is lying well.

In the extensive discussions about Lomborg, the question is unavoidable. Indeed, it is hard to think of another person so difficult to place on the spectrum! Is he telling the truth as he understands it, or is he dissembling so vigorously that he is not above ignoring evidence, or is he even consciously willing to skew the evidence when it suits him?

This comes up because the latest skeptic to join our crew disagrees with me (surprise!) about the value of the new or at least new -to-me blog Things Break, which hosted a very interesting rebuttal to Lomborg, to which John Mashey chimed in with some very interesting thoughts as usual.

"Bernie" believes this article is off-puttingly "strident". (See comments here). So in Bernie's eyes, since Lomborg is (to him) among the most credible of the inactivists, this detracts from Things' credibility and puts them toward the bleaker end of the truth-lies spectrum.

For myself I am definitely a believer in immediate action to minimize the risk of "CAGW" and unsurprisingly I find Lomborg intrinsically implausible. On reflection, as I have tried to explain on this blog on occasion, this is for the same reason that I find Stern implausible, that is, its basis on a theoretical platform (conventional growth-oriented economics) whose axiomatic beliefs are not plausible. Therefore I have little interest in the details of his peculiar arguments.

It's not that I don't believe in prioritization. It's that I don't believe anything that begins by deprioritizing the stability of the biosphere is based on useful principles.

But does Lomborg believe his argument himself? Is he being impartial and honest? I think it's hard to say that he's being entirely scientific, in Feynman's sense, that is, I doubt he is treating his own opinions with the greatest doubt. But he may yet aspire to impartial honesty. Certainly he is trying very hard to present such an impression.

In other words, it is of legitimate interest to examine not only whether we think Lomborg's ideas are worthy of consideration, but ultimately when they come up wanting, to consider whether Lomborg himself believes them.

And that is where the question of stridency comes up in "Leebert"'s comments to Things' Lomborg article:

"Really, this is nothing but shrill polemics that can only serve to galvanize the faithful on either side of the debate."

Bernie sees things similarly.

It's a puzzle, knowing how much weight to give scientific balance in such an obviously ill-balanced debate. Science can't function without neutrality as well as self-doubt and openness to criticism. But most nonscientists nowadays are used to such crass self-promotion that any expression of even the slightest sliver of doubt is greeted with derision. The moral obligation to steer the planet in a sane direction now that we are driving certainly can compete with the scientific priority.

In the end, I think Eli is right. Different people will react in different ways, and it's inevitable that a gamut of responses will be displayed. You have to break through the fog however you can. One man's truth is another man's stridency.

Of course, we should not go beyond stridency into idiocy or lies. But I think a great deal of our problem comes from the difficulty in distinguishing between them. If you attack an opinion that is merely misguided as if it were malicious, you come off as arrogant, while if you try to cope with an opinion that is malicious as if it were misguided, you can fall prey to all sorts of polemical gamesmanship. These are rocky waters, but it would certainly help to know who is genuinely if misguidedly trying to be helpful and who is just pissing in the pool.

So as a puzzle, have a look at this, the denialist drivel of the month and decide for yourself: idiocy or lies? Let's play Idiocy Or Lies?

But what does it mean to lie as opposed to spin?

Knowingly using non-facts in support of your position is not mere stridency. Selecting facts that buttress your position and ignoring other facts is a very delicate ethical matter (unless you are an attorney, in which case it is apparently a matter of principle). You can't say everything you know unless you don't know very much. You have to choose what you talk about and what you avoid. That's spin, and for an ethical person spin is a marginal case, sometimes necessary but fraught with dilemmas.

On the other hand, there is brazen misrepresentation of the facts. What I'm trying to do here is call some attention to the difference between selecting facts (morally gray area) and deliberately misinterpreting them (lying). Here's a fine example.

I'm not an unalloyed Obama fan, but he pretty much nails it in this video. "They know it's not true." Look at what the tire guage ploy tried to accomplish. It tried to create a false public perception based on misrepresentation of the nature of a true incident. This went so far as to make it pretty clear that whoever promulgating it must have know it to be false.

People do these things. People are paid to do these things. They lie. They brazenly lie. They try to build their lies on actual facts but they deliberately are trying to present untruths. This is what lying looks like. They say things even though they know those things aren't true.

Fortunately they fell flat on their faces on this particular one, but don't forget that they will try again and again and again.

Which brings us back to how to react to lies. If it is stridency to call a lie a "they know it's not true", so be it. Perhaps that will put off some people already inclined to be put off. And while the spectrum of honesty and dishonesty has nothing to do with left or right, the really talented and well-paid liars are pretty much on one side of the climate story at present.

If you think someone is lying (or stupid, or some combination) in a way that has consequences for the safety of the world, it's hard to see what the problem is with stridency or what the alternative to that might be. Those who have bet so much on the wrong horse that they can't be reached will be angered, but maybe others will notice that there actually is a lot of misinformation about. You just have to say "if this isn't lying it's stupidity". What else could you say? I respectfully disagree? No. At some point the opposition leaves the bounds of the respectable. In such cases it's necessary to say so.

Perhaps we can make a sport of it. Again, try this site for the first round of "Idiocy or Lies?". Do you spot the obvious fallacy? If these are not lies, if the author does not understand that the reasoning is invalid, how did the author spend so much time on the article without noticing?

Is it reasonable to say that it is not just wrong, but either stupidly or maliciously wrong or both? It may be pretty strident, but this kind of wrongness calls for some pretty strong criticism.

I'm still not sure about Lomborg. I don't underestimate the human capacity for self-deception. However, I am not offended by the tone taken by Things Break in taking him down. Your mileage may vary.

Update: Edited somewhat for clarity. See also this prior posting.

Update: A related entry appears on Deltoid. It, with its associated comments, contains some of the best and most useful conversation I have ever seen on a blog. I'm honored to have gotten a link-back from it.

John Holdren On the Climate "Skeptics"

John P. Holdren, professor at the Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard and the director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, summarizes effectively in an op-ed that appears in the International Herald Tribune.

First, they have not come up with any plausible alternative culprit for the disruption of global climate that is being observed, for example, a culprit other than the greenhouse-gas buildups in the atmosphere that have been measured and tied beyond doubt to human activities. (The argument that variations in the sun's output might be responsible fails a number of elementary scientific tests.)

Second, having not succeeded in finding an alternative, they haven't even tried to do what would be logically necessary if they had one, which is to explain how it can be that everything modern science tells us about the interactions of greenhouse gases with energy flow in the atmosphere is wrong.

...

The science of climate change is telling us that we need to get going. Those who still think this is all a mistake or a hoax need to think again.

It's an effective short opinion piece. But for copyright I'd paste the whole thing. There's more here; nothing surprising but very well put.

Update: In comments to this article, Richard Reiss sent along another excellent article by David Sington about the skeptics. An excellent point that I had about given up trying to make, made very well:

In fact, only three factors determine the planet's energy balance: the sun's output, the Earth's reflectivity, or albedo, and the thermal properties of the atmosphere, which are affected by the level of certain trace gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor. Reduced to its essentials, the greenhouse effect is a problem in 19th-century classical physics, and the basic theory was worked out with pencil and paper in the 1890s. To say that increasing CO2 levels leads to more heat trapped in the atmosphere is really no more scientifically controversial than saying you'll feel warmer if you put on a sweater.

The difficulty arises when you try to work out what this extra heat energy will do. Will it lead to increased rainfall, or more cloud, or higher winds? It will raise temperatures, but by how much? This is where the complex computer models and the (legitimate) scientific arguments come in—accompanied by the occasional science filmmaker!

Update: See also the follow-up at Dot Earth.

 

Skepticism regarding "thermodynamics"

It's time the conspiracy of engineers promoting their "thermodynamics" stopped getting a free ride.

It happens I believe in Phlogiston Theory. But so did all the Nobel winners, not just in physics and chemistry but also economics and peace. Without exception. Also Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi not to mention Babe Ruth and Bobby Orr and Joe Namath...

I understand that the contrary "thermodynamic" theory is motivated by economic self-interest on the part of engineers who want to keep getting money for designing their so-called combustion chambers and engines and such, but their pretense that the science is settled is very far from true. Look. Nobel winners. And hockey players.

They agree with me because I say so. Who are they to argue?