Google is My Friend

A search today for "Climate Depot" will place my name above Morano's!


Also, I appear in the sixth listing and am probably nearby in the association network for the third one (follow the "recently hired" link in the Wonk Room story). So it looks like the Google is supporting my candidacy, as prominently mentioned in the first blurb!

Thanks and a tip of the ol' cowboy hat to Professor Ursa for the heads up!

Whole Foods Boycott is a Travesty

Whole Foods chairman John Mackey, speaking for himself but drawing on his experience starting a natural foods empire, made some cogent points against national health insurance.

Of course, it's exasperating to read his opening epigram, quoting Margaret Thatcher that "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." It's cute of course, but running out of planet is a much bigger deal these days than running out of "money", whatever that is viewed as an aggregate anyway. It's dumb and contentious and snide and just slightly funny, just the sort of thing to polarize people.

But his arguments are, while not entirely sound in my opinion, cogently presented and respectfully advocated. The last thing we want to do is punish conservative viewpoints that are coherent as if they were the mouth-foaming nonsense we see on other Murdoch venues. A boycott should be directed at someone doing something unreasonable, like advertising on a program that consistently issues vicious lies about the president. A fellow just speaking his mind has every right to speak it, or what's a democracy for?

You don't boycott somebody because you disagree with them. You boycott somebody because they have acted unethically. Someone honestly speaking his mind in public deserves thanks, not punishment. That's leaving aside the punishment of all the good people who work in the company which, after all, Mackey no longer controls.

The first step in getting others to listen to you is starting to listen to them. Obama is getting a lot of grief for taking it too far, but so many people haven't yet noticed that Obama listens. So I guess he will keep listening. I suggest the rest of us follow his lead.

The problems that this blog addresses are mostly about people closing their minds and their hearts to challenging ideas. This sort of bitter hostility is not unique to one side or the other of the political spectrum, as the Whole Foods boycott makes clear. It's dangerous and it's sad.

I really hope national health care passes, but I really hope this obnoxious boycott fails.

Klotzbach in the Blogosphere

I completely concur with James' summary of the state of play. We haven't yet gotten down to whether the Klotzbach mechanism is or isn't realistic or supported by the evidence. But we do have a misleading headline from R Pielke  Jr,

Well, one thing it does not mean is the main title of RPJnr's post, that the surface temperature trend is overstated. There is nothing in the paper (despite three gratuitous plugs of Watt's photography site) that actually argues for the measured temperature trend being wrong in any way.

Yet the conclusion of a temperature bias is the one prominently displayed as the headline of a blog posting, and echoed on several websites including Watts, which RP Jr is as yet not willing to amend or retract.

I am less than favorably impressed by this trend of writing papers of whatever quality, and then prominently but informally misrepresenting their results in ways to give substantively wrong comfort to one (or the other) side in a political debate. For a man who talks of separating science and politics, I am forced to conclude that RP Jr. sets a very peculiar example.

Note also that RP Sr is piling on at Watts, Pielke Sr. on warm bias in the surface temperature trend "Provides evidence of the significant error in the global surface temperature trend analyses of NCDC" and using Klotzbach as evidence toward the point. Now if that isn't telling the Watts crowd watt they want to hear, especially posted right after Roger Jr's thing, I guess I don't know watt is. Perhaps some judicious hairsplitting can save the latter headline, (like, for instance, "oh, I just meant the analysis is erroneous, not that the trend is actually wrong" and "significant means memorable or important, everybody knows that") but that is not straight talk by any means.

Whether Koltzbach and Pielke Sr. have actually resolved the temperature trend differential or not is something I am keeping an open mind about for now. But if they have, it means that both temperature records are substantially correct. I can't imagine why any scientist would be dissatisfied with a result like that, or what scientific motivation there could be to paint it as something else, and then trumpet the unsupported assertion as a new result on a contentious website like Watts'.

Tamino Rocks!

I rant a lot but so far I only think about producing compelling, precise, accessible expositions like this. Tamino does it.

Denialists love to denigrate computer models of earth’s climate. In my opinion they only do this because they’re in denial of the result, not because of any valid evidence. They also love to make the false claim that without computer models there’s no reason to believe that global warming is real, and is going to get worse.

...

Many of you have seen the graphs (included in the IPCC reports) showing that using computer models, we can reproduce temperature history if we include human factors, but not if we omit them. That’s such powerful evidence that we’re the cause of global warming, it’s no wonder denialists have tried so hard to slander computer models and to insist that without them there’s no solid evidence of man-made global warming. The truth is that you don’t need computer models to show this. Even with very simple mathematical models (and these models are indeed simple) the result is the same. Without human causation, there’s no explanation for the global warming we’ve already observed. With human causation, there’s no explanation for a lack of global warming.

PLEASE if you follow one link of mine this year follow this one. It's an easy read for the scientist, and accessible to almost everyone who can read a graph. Pass it around to people who need to see it.

Update: Or maybe not. See comments. What seems clear to those of us in the field may be obscure to others.

Fire and Ice (Big Badaboom)

As if there weren't enough going on, Yale 360 reports

British and German scientists have discovered 250 plumes of methane gas rising from the thawing seabed off the Spitsbergen archipelago in the Norwegian Arctic, apparently a result of the warming of the West Spitsbergen current. The researchers measured the plumes rising from the seabed at a depth of 150 to 400 meters (500 to 1,300 feet). The methane — a potent greenhouse gas — is being released by frozen methane hydrates on the sea floor, which are thawing as a result of a 1 degree C (1.8 F) warming of the West Spitsbergen current in the last 30 years, the scientists said. Most of the methane is absorbed by the ocean before it reaches the surface, but the gas increases the acidity of the ocean, which inhibits the ability of marine creatures to grow shells. Scientists fear that as the world’s oceans warm, huge amounts of methane will be released. The Spitsbergen researchers said they were surprised by the large number of methane plumes. “Our survey was designed to work out how much methane might be released by future ocean warming,” said one scientist. “We did not expect to discover such strong evidence that this process has already started.”

Yikes!

Update: Lou Grinzo has a related entry, considering what "global warming potential" really means. I'm not sure the analysis is quite right, but the core point seems valid. A sufficeintly rapid release of methane might be worse than the GWP factor of 21 would indicate.

--

Image from Treehugger.

Pielkes all the Way Down

Update 8/21: See my final word on Klotzbach in a separate posting.

---

It's a slippery slope. Once you look into what is being proposed as contrary science, it's hard to avoid Pielke-land.

This starts with the infamous "hot spot" controversy, which I've seen described as a "holy grail" by denialists but which I had little idea about. So I started out trying to make sense of the Klotzbach paper referenced by d'Aleo. Well, I got sort of befuddled in the middle, but RP Jr has piped up, with a very strong informal blog claim that the paper constitutes "Evidence that Global Temperature Trends have been Overstated" which is somewhat more readable, but still confusing.

This in turn refers us to RP Sr, "Why there is a Warm Bias in the Existing Analyses of the Global Average Surface Temperature" which looks like fairly straightforward boundary layer talks. But it starts right out with a reference to a peer reviewed Matsui and Pielke 2005: "Should light wind and windy nights have the same temperature trends at individual levels even if the boundary layer averaged heat content change is the same?" Again, a paper that seems to flicker in and out of comprehensibility for me.

But this last paper refers to Eastman et al 2001, claiming that

As shown, for example, by Eastman et al. [2001] the addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere alters the downwelling long-wave radiative fluxes such that, in their idealized sensitivity experiments, the nighttime minimum temperature was increased, although the daytime maximum (and thus the temperature above the surface in the ‘‘residual layer’’ was essentially unchanged).

So we are basing an argument on this Eastman result. Yet, in the same paragraph 17 in M&P, we have

In the results reported in Eastman et al., a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentrations in the model resulted in a growing season, central Great Plains area-averaged increase of minimum temperature about 0.1 C.

Doubling of CO2 leads to an average temperature increase of only 0.1 C ? OK, I'm trying to be patient, but now my BS detector is ringing pretty loud. Surely this is a typo? I mean, if the whole argument is based on a sensitivity 30 times lower than commonly believed, doesn't it become a circular argument? If everything we know is wrong, then we don't even know anything!

So what is this Eastman paper? Why it's Eastman, J. L., M. B. Coughenour, and R. A. Pielke (2001), "The effects of CO2 and landscape change using a coupled plant and meteorological model, Global Change Biol., 7, 797– 815." Not a single paper in this chain of reasoning outside of the Pielke domain.

Now what is this odd paper, which overthrows all of climate science, yet is published in a biology journal? It's a (wait for it) model study.

What's worse, it is a completely wrongheaded model study. It attempts to get a CO2 sensitivity from a limited area model run over a 14 degree lat x 14 degree lon domain. What's wrong with this picture? (Aside from the fact that its radiation model is the admittedly "rather simple" model of Mahrer & Pielke 1977?) Well the radiative equilibration time of the atmosphere is long compared to the residence of an air particle in a 14 degree lat/lon box. So how the hell are you supposed to set up the boundary conditions? Surely not from observations? That would pretty much, er prevent any warming from happening at all, right?

In order to simulate the 1989 growing season, the model uses a Newtonian relaxation method at the outer 3 grid points of the domain. Newtonian relaxation adds a tendency term to the prognosed quantity that drives it towards the observations from the NCEP reanalysis product (Kalnay et al. 1996).

Not just the boundaries but the outer 3 grid points are dragged back toward observation at every time step on a 26 x 30 domain. That's 38% of the whole domain. Look. This is an experiment guaranteed to do about as close to absolutely nothing as possible. And guess what? It doesn't do anything!!!

Note that we have a chain, Klotzbach Pielke Pielke Christy & McNider 2009 to Matsui & Pielke 2005 to Eastman Coghenour & Pielke 2001 to Mahrer & Pielke 1977.

You can't fool me Mr. Feynmann. It's Pielke's all the way down.

The thing is, the Eastman piece, which seems like it might be crucial to the whole thing, is close enough to what I know that it's not a slog for me to get through it. And that piece is, err, what can I say, obviously wrong. A huge computational effort based on negligible computational skill. (No wonder these people don't trust models!)

(What of Mahrer & Pielke? Amazingly, Google scholar finds a copy. If I read it correctly, here is the actual radiation model used:

That's the whole thing. I doubt that is much good if radiation at the surface is actually the issue as in the present application. So the radiation model is likely inappropriate, but there's no great need to think deeply about it. It's moot.

There are reasons we don't use limited area models in climate studies of this kind. The Eastman result is already badly wrong.

So what are we to make of the whole enterprise? How much does Klotzbach Pielke et al depend on Eastman Pielke et al, and how much similarly confused reasoning is there in the whole stack?

Update: Roger Pielke Jr suggests in comments that

[I, mt] have badly confused "downwelling long-wave radiative fluxes" with the concept of "climate sensitivity." The first has to do with boundary layer meteorology and the latter with the equilibrium consequences of radiative forcing. These are completely separate effects of an increase in CO2 and yet you have mistakenly conflated them in order to try to discredit this paper

It is in fact very difficult for me to imagine myself conflating "downwelling long-wave radiative fluxes" with the concept of "climate sensitivity."

These are concepts I deal with every day, and they aren't even remotely alike. I would call the IR flux an energy density in watts per square meter, mapped to space (not just the boundary layer, of course). I would call the climate sensitivity, a global scalar, degrees C per (unit forcing), most often CO2 equivalent. I'd be interested to see where I might have confused them.

This seems like it itself must be a misunderstanding of something I was saying. I don't see how I could have conflated them. Like chop suey and donut holes, there is some very broad category relationship in my mental map, (foods associated with cheap restaurants, quantities associated with planetary physics) but the possibility of confusion is very small.

Note: RP Jr. also asserts that Klotzbach et al is not dependent on Eastman et al. by way of Matsui and Pielke, and that the relationship should be counted as minor supporting evidence.

Update 8/21: See my final word on Klotzbach in a separate posting.

Web2.0 for Planet 3.0

Following up on Wednesday's thoughts about communicating science, especially on the web.

While science is conducted in the details, policy is conducted in the whole. This is a big part of the disconnect we are facing.

It's clear that I'm not the only person who is ready to expend a lot of effort in pursuit of better approaches to communicating about the climate problem and similar issues. It also is clear that the resources available now are, while substantial, not up to the task. The problem turns out to be less lack of skill than of coordination.

There's a wide variety of ideas that have already showed up at the above-linked article.

One thing that's clear is that we don't have aggregators that are sufficiently effective. This may be a low-hanging fruit to pursue right away. But beyond aggregators we need organization. We have a great wealth of information but precious little information architecture. We talk in circles around each other, extracting no cumulative knowledge collectively, and leaving individuals running in frustrated circles.

We let the bafflegab from the opposition obscure our message and confuse our message. Here is a key strategy which both demonstrates and dominates the way nitpicking diverts form the real issues.

One is commonly presented with something very much like the following:

The questions we face are:
(1) are the current changes abnormal?
(2) if so, is the abnormality caused by man's influence?
(3) are the current changes, on balance, harmful?

One sees three interesting questions and is tempted to engage with them. However, if the purpose was not to engage but to derail policy, to engage is missing the mark. Notice how far the "questions we face" are from a fair representation of the whole picture, which in fact goes much more as follows:

1) Is there a strong basis for expecting anthropogenic CO2 increases to affect climate?
2) Is the scale of such changes likely to become very large and very disruptive, based on the best physical understanding?
3) Do the observations accord with the theory of 1 and 2 above?

(Very confident yes to all three, I believe.)

There is a natural tendency of diverting attention from the broad picture to the minutiae. Of course, the broader picture is made up minutiae, and there are problems with almost every single statement made in the whole picture. This allows people who don't actually see the reinforcing constraints of the whole picture. Geosciences are stuck with messy data: people thereby conclude that "the whole business is a house of cards. Therefore not the IPCC. Therefore emissions are harmless because not proven harmful, so let's party on until they run out!"

The illogic of this path is painfully striking to those of us who understand the situation, but it is invisible to all too many. So, whatever else is missing, once crucially important piece is a top-down view of our quandary, an organizational structure, a way for the outsider to first gather the big picture and then dig into the supporting evidence, rather than trying to claw a way up from the bottom. While it's crucial to avoid focusing on details to the exclusion of the big picture, the tools available for a top-down investigation of global change issues are simply inadequate except at the most elementary level.

What we want to do then is not to create an alarmist counterweight to the Polyannist sites. What we want to do is create tools for a community for top-down thinking in the face of organized bottom-up sniping.

I would like to see, contrary to RealClimate, no effort to separate policy from science.

Anyway, it seems clear there's enough interest to form a mailing list/online group toward the design of this sort of project. This list is publicly readable, but only writable by members.

So far I'm the only member. I'll send out a few invitations tonight. Anyone wanting in, please let me know. If I haven't heard of you please point to some URLs that support the case that you are

I am looking for people with expertise or at least a strong interest in one and preferably at least two of

1) relevant earth sciences

2) environmental journalism or science writing

3) social media

4) software development

5) public policy and international relations

6) management and coordination

who find the current situation in need of improvement, who are comfortable with quantitative thinking, and who are more pragmatic than ideological.

NB It can't be explicitly about advocacy, it has to be about truth. Any advocacy has to emerge from truth and not be written into the mission statement. Otherwise it is nothing new.

MISSION: To discuss, nucleate and facilitate the development of a set of internet based communication tools and sites, including technical and funding models. Once built, these web tools and sites would serve to improve the flow of information between the sciences, the public, and the policy sector, regarding global resource issues including climate, energy, sustainability and food security.

The range of possible information tools under the above rubric is vast, and ranges from individual blogs such as already exist to quite elaborate social media frameworks whose structure is only vaguely imagined.

The mailing list/group is intended to plan and coordinate efforts in these directions so as to maximize the availability and utility of sound information and optimize the efforts put in.

Participants are expected to value the scientific method more highly than any ideological position they may hold in advance. Above all we seek a sound and competent process, rather than any particular predetermined result.

Participation in the list does NOT constitute a commitment or even a declaration of interest to active participation in the development and deployment of the tools. People just seeking to share advice and opinions are very welcome.

I've set it up on Google Groups and called it Planet3.0 . You can apply for membership at the link.

Update: A number (that number is 34) of invitations went out but they're being held up for spam inspection and may not reach you for a few days. Feel free to just put in a request if you're interested. There's lots of people I stupidly forgot and lots of people whose email I don't know, the latter group notably including Tamino.

Note: ground rules for Wednesday's discussion apply. There's an open thread for anybody else with any sort of a bone to fry, an axe to pick or a fish to grind.

Open Thread 4

Open season. Any topic you like.

Maybe

The Age of Stupid

or maybe

the McIntyre vs Jones kerfuffle

or some

comedy from Mr. Carlin.

Yes, that's a grackle on my head.

End-Times and the Anti-Morano

The Anti-Morano?

There is arguably a need for an anti-Morano (or two or more) out there, as was pointed out by Chris Mooney in conversation with Steven Andrew:

Chris pointed out here that climate change denier extraordinaire Marc Morano may be dead wrong, but he’s articulate, well funded, and there’s no one on the science side that competes with him. What specifically can be done to change that?

It’s simple: Things won’t change until the world of science invests in creating counter-Moranos. There are many talented and extremely young intelligent people in science today who could fill that role, but there is little training available for them, and even less of a career trajectory for them to get there.

Generally, young scientists have been exposed to a very traditional academic menu of courses, when instead it would behoove us to offer more interdisciplinary and media skills to those who are asking for it. And that’s not just to create counter-Moranos; it’s fundamentally necessary to address an imbalance in the academic pipeline today.

Just consider: The last assessment by the National Postdoctoral Association reported that only 7% of those who earn a PhD in science will someday achieve tenured faculty status. Not everyone studying science is interested in that, but the reality is that there simply aren’t enough positions in academia for all the scientists that the system is currently producing. Meanwhile, at the very same time, we need better science communicators, better teachers, and more outreach people who are really good at taking science out into our society.

So the answer is simple: We’ve got to offer today’s young scientists more ways to get to very different careers from the standard academic one. And then we will have our counter-Moranos, as well as many scientists engaged in other important tasks to reconnect science and society.

(David Appel thinks the idea stinks, but let's leave that aside. Presumably we are not talking about a counter-liar, but about an equally dedicated and funded counterweight.)

So am I the one? Shall I rise to the occasion?

Me and My Buddy Marc

It turns out that my name has been bandied about in connection with Morano's today. Keith Kloor wrote an article in defense of Morano's role in the climate debate, and his main case in evidence is that Morano occasionally links to me. Far be it from me to divert attention from myself, a favorite topic of mine. And even Andrew Revkin, who has never publicly acknowldeged me (though we've had a couple of minor email exchanges) and my strange disgruntlement with him, sees fit to point to Keith's article in a tweet.

To those of you unfamiliar with Morano's career, here's a rather generous MSM piece from the Times about him and a couple of pieces from Wonk Room, where Brad Johnson has been keeping an eye on the fellow. The latter refers to my prior history with Morano, back when he was still a staffer. If you really want to spend a few hours thinking about the interface of politics and science, the story of my own 15 minutes of fame (or is it infamy) will provide you plenty of grist for the mill.

A couple of nominations have come my way. This is from Anna Haynes:

Can you get a grant to do this? I had a talk with a member of the good-faith public this morning, and she's got opinions and views and qs that need to be addressed (by an Authority) before her understanding can move forward. But there's noplace online that's expressly set up for serving that purpose. IMO you'd be good at it. Basically, to move the public forward I think we need 4 sites: 1. the Climate Dear Abby blog, for questions from the confused public 2. the Denialist kibble-o-the-day debunker (which could just be pointers to where each bit of kibble is _being_ debunked) 3. the "OMG the press screwed up again" shame-the-media blog and 4. the strictly-moving-forward, "here's what's new and how it fits in with what we already know" news blog. and maybe 5. Here's what we _do_ know. It seems to me there's a LOT of duplication of effort online, right now, plus gaps as with the nonexistent Dear Abby blog; the public's need would be better met by a reorg and retrenchment(?) to better cover the need. So a) does it sound like I'm right about what's needed, and b) if so, how do we make it happen? (I ask InIt's host, because InIt is the Churchillian Blog) thanks Anna PS - It's not enough to pull drowning victims out of the river; we need to walk back upstream and find out who's throwing them in.

The second is at least an implicit invitation from Marc Morano himself. He links to me almost every time I mention him, and he has definitely greatly increased my visibility over the months. I think Joe Romm thinks of himself as the obvious contender, and I am surprised Morano doesn't prefer Romm as a fellow polarizer. Perhaps he does. He's never sent me an invitation in the mail to spend more time bashing him directly, but the fact is that he unambiguously likes attention, and like Kloor I find myself developing an odd affection for him. Sometimes his tricks are amusing enough I find myself grinning. I have to remind myself that I am not dealing with a good person.

(Is it true that he has something to do with the Swiftboaters? What an amazingly destructive career!)

So what would the counterweight website to Climate Depot (in my mind it's called Climate Max, by analogy to the almost indistinguishable Office Depot and Office Max chain stores) look like and what would it do?

Where We Stand

Let's think about where we are, and why there is a perception of something missing.

So far there have been a few efforts to compose counter-denialist FAQ's and climate news aggregators. Fellow Canadian Coby Beck, notably, has a hand in perhaps the most successful of each of these. Here's his FAQ, called "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming", and here is H E Taylor's "Another week of GW News" which Coby mirrors on his blog "A Few Things Ill-Considered". Taylor is the true anti-Morano, serving tirelessly in aggregating information and yet in relative obscurity. Perhaps he is too good at what he does! (Don't miss "You Say Tomato", my nomination for headscratcher of the week.)

And of course there is RealClimate, which is what it is. I certainly hope it doesn't go anywhere. Indeed, I hope it gets revitalized a bit. In my current job, I'm really finding it hard to stay connected to the scientific community. (Which is why I tried to import some actual scientists, to no avail.) RC has been able to generate rapid responses to denier pseudoscience, as the recent episode with the McLean/deFreitas publication demonstrates. And RC in turn has an excellent list of resources, including introductory articles and FAQs. Wikipedia, of course, is no slouch either.

Then let me point to a couple of my favorite resources, both unfortunately getting a bit stale. There is GlobalWarmingArt , which has some brilliant examples of graphic art that tell the story well to those with the patience to look, and there is Sparrow's consensus document . I hope both of these will be maintained.

Finally, in addition to news sites like Grist and deSmog and WorldChanging (which occasionally slip into excessive political correctness in my opinion) there is a growing range of excellent news sites and blogs. Ones I consider the old guard by individual scientists (yours truly with an asterisk, Rabett Run, Stoat, Deltoid, Tamino, Maribo, Grumbine and far too occasionally Climate Spin) and others from (I think) nonscientists with an uncanny sense of balance (Thingsbreak, Carl Zimmer, Greenfyre's, Fleck, Ill-Considered, Int. J. Inact., Deltoid, Scruffy Dan). A couple of excellent aggregators, notably Yale Forum, Energy Collective, The Oil Drum, all linked at right, and a special shout-out to Climate Central, pioneering breaking the monopsony and creating several first rate climate resources as a private nonprofit.

And of course, the breakthrough YouTube works of Peter Sinclair and Greg Craven are very promising, and hopefully the beginning of a trend.

So, What's Missing?

Yet, amid all that bounty of information, the perception that "something" is missing persists.

Of course, it's clear that nobody knows the solution to the alternate-news-universe provided by Rupert Murdoch. And in fact if the world doesn't make it through the narrows, Murdoch and his "news" outlets will deserve as much blame as anybody. But there seems to be a hunger for some sort of alternative that is still missing.

One thing an anti-Morano would do would be just to monitor Morano and take advantage of his efforts as an early-warning system for new denialist nonsense. It certainly worked to the advantage of the truth in the case of the McLean noise. But that doesn't constitute an activity.

Anna's suggestion of a site that would make an effort to be responsive to queries is interesting. Google is not about "search" it's about answering questions. Both Twitter and Wolfram Alpha are efforts to answer questions of sorts that Google and its competitors can't. In the end, some sorts of questions require someone with enough expertise to detect good answers from bad ones and enough context to contact the right people otherwise. A somewhat different role than is played

Finally, though, someone needs to have some skills in making the information attractive. Here is where I have some skills that few scientists or, um, counterscientists do. Of course, the design standards of the right are for some reason notoriously low. And I have several projects in mind for display tools. A virtual science museum is a tricky thing. And I have been thinking about how to set up and fund an information business, some of which I'm still going to keep to myself.

I was gratified to see some interest in In It For the Gold t-shirts, though.

Some Questions Intended to Seed Discussion

Anyway, I'd like to open a discussion for brainstorming. For the purposes of this argument, let's agree or at least presume that mainstream earth system science is reasonably healthy and contrarianism as practiced by Morano et al is not. People disinclined to go with that presumption are invited to participate in some other thread; don't expect such comments to appear here. Given that presumption, what exactly is missing and how should we go about filling the gap?

1) What www and other media services are missing from effective communication of actual science, especially earth system science with policy implications?

2) What funding sources would be available for such an effort outside the government?

3) How can best information effectively be aggregated and redistributed?

4) How can the social roots of false paranoia and misleading evidence be identified and revealed? Can we make it newsy enough for what is left of the press or is that an impossible task?

5) How can tools for collective decision making be designed and implemented? The basic idea is crowdsourcing with quality control.

6) Are there any existing funded organizations that might be willing to take on some of these projects?

7) How much would you pay for a nice blue-on-black initforthegold t-shirt, with the space-dawn logo on the front and the URL on the back?

Thanks, all. I will greatly appreciate responses and thoughts, inbound links and retweets.

PS - Let me add that my current circumstances leave me sufficiently isolated from the climate community that I feel my capacity for contributing is at risk. I don't think I should proceed in the current vein indefinitely. Still, relentless heat or otherwise, it looks like Irene and I intend to stay in Austin.

Update: Here's an open thread for people who feel an urgent need to say something off the present topic.

Update: Thanks for the excellent conversation! There's more. I'm trying to maintain momentum and nucleate a mailing list. Any interest?
--
Photo: NASA

Morano Claims It's Over

Marc Morano of Climate Depot has written an article of his own, claiming to summarize the evidence (or pseudo-evidence) that can be brought to bear on the proposition that

"Desperation time has arrived for the promoters of man-made global warming fears. As the science of man-made climate fears continues to collapse, new tactics are being contrived to try to drum up waning public support."

Well, I suppose the final clause has some merit. There are signs that, in the US (as opposed to pretty much everywhere else) the public is lukewarm about climate change as a policy priority.

But why is the public so unconcerned? Is this because the science "continues to collapse"? Or is it because of clever misrepresentations of the increasingly robust state of climatological science and systematic neglect of the direct toxic effect of CO2 on the viability of ocean life?

The last week was a revealing one in the history of American politics. We have seen systematic national deployment of shrill mobs, intended to disrupt public ("town hall") meetings between congressional representatives and the public, intended to portray an impression of a popular trend that doesn't exist. The peculiar ethic of the American press which "represents all points of view equally" makes this sort of representation carry more weight than it ought.

In particular, there's an enormous reluctance to trace beliefs and movements to their roots in rumor, innuendo and misrepresentation, since that would appear to be opposed to the point of view in question. A fine example is in the "neutral" coverage of unjustifiably extreme statements about the currently debated healthcare legislation.

The climate denialists are engaged in a very similar tactic; be as loud and prominent as possible, misrepresent a small angry minority as a growing force, and spin the press.

I think it will be necessary for somebody to take Morano's account apart piece by piece.

For now, let's just take this one example, where he refers to "open revolts" in scientific societies. He links back to a previous piece of his in which he says "dozens of letters" had been written in response to a strongly worded editorial by Rudy Baum in the magazine of the American Chemical Society explaining the unscientific nature of opposition to the concepts of climate change.

Actually, 27 letters were published, of which I count eight as neutral, supportive, or off topic, leaving the number of "dozens" of letters as just over 1.5. That's out of a society with 160,000 members. Since people strongly opposed to an editorial will be more likely to write in than those who find it reasonable, this in no way provides evidence of "open revolt" nor of the balance of scientific opinion. It's just another masquerade.

The letter writers, of course, are entitled to their opinion, but they should be made aware that they are in opposition to the world's leading scientific assemblies. The rest of us, meanwhile, should not be presented with arguments that call 19 letters, perhaps a half dozen of them angry, in an organization of 160,000 at all degree-levels and in all fields of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related fields, to constitute an "open revolt" or anything of the sort.

Of course, that is just one example among many that Morano raises. Most of them that address science rather than policy will not bear up under investigation as anything better than exagerations. (Whether the policies currently being proposed are productive is a separate question that shouldn't be bundled in with the question of whether we have a problem in the first place.)

I am confident that most or all of the evidence Morano musters for "desperation" is equally off-base when it comes to the matter of the intellectual foundations for concern about climate change. There is a simple conspiracy-free explanation for this failure. The science is sufficiently healthy and robust to draw the conclusions that Morano opposes. Morano is wrong.

Of course, Morano doesn't think the debate is nearly over and that the victory of his position (which is ultimately a political and not a scientific one) is at hand. If he did, he wouldn't have set up shop to oppose the scientific consensus as a full-time gig.

If, however, the question is whether a certain desperation is setting in about the politics, that's another question. Can a substantial but small, ill-informed but committed, group in one powerful country substantially damage the prospects for the whole world for centuries to come in the face of overwhelming evidence against them? So far the evidence is that, indeed, they can.

Voice votes are misleading when one side specializes in being loud. In the case of climate risk, the press should take care to represent science in accordance with the actual scientific literature and the actual beliefs of the mainstream scientific community, not in accordance with games and charades put on by a few.

The public, meanwhile, should carefully consider the sources of information, as is explained nicely in the book What's the Worst That Could Happen? by Greg Craven.

PS - I have to give Marc Morano credit for linking quickly back to here. That seems fair. While he and his readership are around, though, I can't resist asking for another bit of fairness. Why isn't the record heat in Texas this summer getting equal time on Climate Depot with all the cool episodes up north?

Update: James Hrynyshyn independently noted the analogy between the health care debate and the climate debate in his article "What health care and the climate have in common: an enemy"

Update August 11: Morano chickens out and unlinks this article. Later: resurgence of incoming traffic from this page but I'm not sure why. No link on the front page of CD. Later still: back on Morano's front page. Strange, but possibly not calculated.

Update August 11: Joe Romm was there first, on the 7th, comparing denialists with birthers.