A Difference That Makes a Difference

A lot of people who'd like to consider themselves middle-of-the-roaders seem determined to treat two different but related issues as if they were the same thing. If only they were! If they were, our difficulties would, indeed, be smaller.

The idea seems to be that if we were to make enough progress on things everybody agrees to, we wouldn't have to address our disagreements, and we could bury the debates between science and pseudo-science under a rug. But if that were really possible, we wouldn't have the pseudo-science at all, would we?

The image is lifted from a UK site called Econometrica which has a brief report backing up the cartoon here.

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112

On Waiting for Catastrophe

Keith Kloor approached me this weekend with a question.

According to Robert Stavins, Keith noted,

“It’s unlikely that the U.S. is going to take serious action on climate change until there are observable, dramatic events, almost catastrophic in nature, that drive public opinion and drive the political process in that direction,” Stavins, director of Harvard’s Environmental Economics Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said today in an interview in Bloomberg’s Boston office.

And with reference to that, he asked:

So my two questions are: Do you agree with this, and if so, then for people who are concerned about climate change and want to stay engaged and help in some way to reduce greenhouse gases, what should they be doing?

Try to keep your answer at modest length, and I definitely would appreciate you not blogging on this Bloomberg article until after my post appears on Monday.

You can see Keith's resulting article on his new blog at Climate Central; it's a short piece, so most of what I said in reply wasn't quoted. I had thought about it long enough that I figure I might as well share my entire response which follows, which I have expanded a bit for clarity.

---

The first time I heard something resembling Stavins' claim was in the early days of internet conversation, from the keyboard of the renowned computer scientist John McCarthy. We were participants in the usenet discussion group sci.environment before it was taken over by ill-tempered and immature partisan sniping. You might argue that we had polite and intelligent partisan sniping instead.

My first thought in regard to this sort of observation is that it is obviously correct, given that the expression is "unlikely" rather than "impossible" or "violation of an iron law". I strongly object to the latter formulation, as it somehow makes politics a matter of inevitability, rather than of human agency. Still, one must admit that on present evidence it would be surprising if America rose to the occasion any time soon.

It nevertheless is a matter of great urgency to resist this likely outcome. I suggested to McCarthy that there was an important difference between a description and a prescription. What will most likely happen is not necessarily what ought to happen, and not what we should endeavor to encourage, though we must be prepared to face it.

We probably won't act any time soon, but we are foolish and shortsighted for failing to do so.

The very long time scales of the climate make the likely outcome severely suboptimal. Between recognizing the necessity for a policy, the replacement of the required infrastructure, and the net impact on the cumulative nature of the carbon dioxide forcing in particular means that the gap in time from the moment we decide to take the matter seriously to actually stopping its further deterioration is perhaps forty years. The problems we see now are, roughly speaking the ones we bought in 1970, not the ones we have acquired since. Nothing we do now will have much effect until 2050 or so. If catastrophes really start in 2050, we will be looking at things getting still worse until 2090 or so.

Consequently, the long-term prognosis, in the likely scenario of inaction or inadequate action, is quite alarming. The resulting quandary has a strong ethical component. Many of us who understand the balance of evidence of the situation conclude that there is a moral necessity to try to find a way to a more benign albeit less probable outcome.

I'd also like to point out that the framing of Stavins' assertion, about what America will do, is itself inappropriate. The problem is global and any meaningful solution requires global cooperation. This in practice means cooperation from the main power and population centers, America crucially but not solely among them. Asking what America will do about it is like asking what Nebraska will do about fiscal policy. The problem requires nothing less than a global consensus.

As for what individuals can do, the sad answer is, very little. Becoming engaged with the science and the politics of global sustainability is the most important action in my opinion. After all, arguably the first serious substantive policy step is to abandon the use of coal, but hardly any individual purchases coal anymore.

The playing field is political. Individual sacrifices are of relatively minor importance.

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718

An Iconic Shape in Orange

Most of you won't recognize this shape instantly, but to those of us who do, the color scheme is nothing short of astonishing.

It is a shame about the polarization of Canada, but the reunification of Montreal is something to celebrate just the same.

I hope Mr. Harper doesn't turn out to be the Canadian equivalent of Scott Walker now that he has pretty much unchecked power. I am not confident of this, though.

While waiting for the axe to drop, you can still have some fun with Canada via the CBC here.

Monthly Record Cold Day?

I think today may end up with the lowest high temperature recorded in Austin in May. (Previously 56 F)

It is 4 PM on May 2 and conditions are currently 53 degrees and (!) drizzling. It's substantially warmer in Edmonton than in Austin.

This cold outburst is widespread. They had a freeze last night in Dalhart, which admittedly is barely in Texas.

Does this count as "global warming"? Hell no. Should it count as climate change?

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76

Lost in the Ozone Again

So Andrew Dessler forwarded comments from Ted Parson on the history of the Montreal Protocol, in response to a point in the recent Nisbet opus.

Parson's key claim (repeated here, on Deltoid, and recently on Grist) is:

Yes, the claim that Montreal Protocol was easy because there was a substitute in hand is simply wrong, and the detailed evidence showing why and how it's wrong is in my ozone book. (Protecting the ozone layer: science and Strategy, Oxford Press, 2003) This is one of the half-dozen major things that “everyone knows” about the stratospheric ozone case that are simply erroneous.
...
The crucial technological advances that demonstrated the viability of alternatives all came after, not before, the political decision to impose 50% CFC cuts -- and the effort to generate these advances was motivated by the imminent threat of these regulatory restrictions -- not the reverse. This is widely misunderstood and misrepresented -- not just by those who are careless with the truth, but also by many who have read or heard the contrary claim and remember it because it just makes sense given people's priors about regulation and corporate strategy.

Roger Pielke Jr. responds:

It is my view that Parson claims are way overstated. Consider that DuPont, the world's major producer of CFCs at the time with 25% market share had patented a process for manufacturing HFC-134a (the leading CFC alternative) in 1980 after identifying it as a replacement to Freon in 1976 and had applied for more than 20 patents for CFC alternatives immediately before and after the signing of the Montreal Protocol. Du Pont saw alternatives as a business opportunity, e.g., its Freon division head explained in 1988: "''there is an opportunity for a billion-pound market out there.'' The fact that ozone regulations focused on production, and not consumption, meant that there would still be a market for conventional CFCS into the 1990s, slowing down the deployment of substitutes, and making the transition easier for industry. Du Pont's decision to back regulation was motivated more by economic opportunity -- an opportunity that existed solely because of substitutes -- rather than exclusively about scientific arguments, though there is no doubt that the science played a role in the process.
...
If we are to believe this, then we must also conclude that the chemical industry, notably DuPont, started working on technological substitutes no earlier than 1986 and within 3 years had not only demonstrated their viability, but had done so in a manner that began to allow rapid deployment displacing conventional CFCs (see figure at the top of this post). If this was the case then the ozone issue was even more tame than we have argued in The Hartwell Paper -- it was in effect technologically trivial. If Parson's history is correct then it leads one to conclude that the ozone case is even less relevant to climate change than we have argued (unless one wants to advance the fantasy that decarbonization of our economy is technologically trivial, awaiting only the regulatory magic wand).

The most interesting response further muddies the question, if anything. Roger Jr. relays:

Received by email by a reader who wishes to remain anonymous:

"Parsons' account of the non-existence of an alternative to CFCs prior to the mandate would be news to those of us who had to lobby those issues back then.

Within the broad automotive industry lobbying groups, (I was an attorney working for an aftermarket trade association in 1987) it was widely known prior to the Senate vote on the Treaty that (a) CFC substitutes existed (b) they would be more costly and (c) probably would not perform quite as well in AC devices but that our industry would be able to tool up to handle the change, albeit without enthusiasm.

There was some talk of trying to seek a delay in order to improve the quality of the alternatives but that dissipated once Reagan decided to lead on the issue and support the measure.

If there were no viable CFC alternative known to industry (with catastrophic consequences for any and all economic activities that required refrigeration or cooling in the event of a ban) there is no way in hell the Senate would have voted unanimously to put the Montreal Protocol requirements into effect right away and, I suspect, no way Reagan would have moved so unequivocally to endorse the Montreal Protocol.

The idea that the technological substitutes only materialized later in response to a legislative mandate is utter fantasy. Dupont had already made them and their customers (manufacturers) knew about them and what was required to adapt to their use. Trade groups representing the aftermarket guys who fix auto air conditioning already had a dollar figure estimate for the impact on consumers and the industry well before the treaty was signed. The Senate knew precisely they were voting for not-quite-as-good but serviceable, still affordable alternatives when they voted for the treaty."

My observations?

• 1) Unsurprisingly, public corporations always act solely in the perceived financial interest of their shareholders.
• 2) Had it been the ozone layer vs refrigeration, refrigeration would have won.
• 3) It wasn't.
• 4) CFCs were very satisfactory. Replacements wouldn't be developed without political pressure driven by environmental concerns. Replacements wouldn't be implemented without regulation.
• 5) At first, the replacement was expensive and inferior.
• 6) Everyone seems to agree that there are lessons in the CFC story for the CO2 problem. The substantive disagreement seems marginal.

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140

Spinning Tornados

Adopting Andrew Sullivan's methodology I point you to interesting stuff elsewhere.



There's a huge kerfuffle about attributing severe weather in Alabama to climate forcing. Kevin Trenberth and Peter Gleick among others proclaim "this is the sort of thing"-ism.

Trenberth:

It is irresponsible not to mention climate change. … The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences.

David Appel, who gets far too little credit as a pioneer of climate blogging, is, perhaps surprisingly, appalled.

You don't have to look very far to disprove this -- in fact, you don't even have to look farther than the Drudge Report, which today links to this story:

TuscaloosaNews.com
5 P.M. UPDATE: Hundreds treated at DCH
"The loss of life is the greatest from an outbreak of U.S. tornadoes since April 1974, when 329 people were killed by a storm that swept across 13 Southern and Midwestern states."

When are activists going to learn that they will never make their case by falsifying the science, and that, in fact, they only harm their cause when they do so? You cannot draw conclusions about climate based on weather. You can only do it via long-term (decadal or more) statistics.

Please tattoo this on your foreheads, so you don't ruin this for those of us trying to communicate actual, real science, with all its inconvenient unknowns and uncertainties.

Judith Curry, who has many good links, is somewhat more predictably appalled.

I think that we are seeing another instance of excessive attention to "attribution" in a statistical sense. The climate is changing with increasing rapidity. Some of the changes will be anticipated, some not. We shouldn't presume that changes will be locally monotonic. They won't be. Under the circumstances, we'll get extraordinary runs of just-the-sort-of-awfulness-we-get-around-here in various places as the system wobbles about. I mean, what did you expect?

On that basis, +1 Trenberth

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h/t for Tuscaloosa F5 tornado video Dan Satterfield. This is right on Dan's turf. Check out his report.
==137

More on Belief Formation; Mooney & Kay on MSNBC

I don't usually care for the intellectual bandwidth of audio and video chats on commercial media but here's an impressive exception, about conspiracy thinking and denialism, following neatly on some of my observations about belief formation yesterday.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Another related article, via David Brin's Facebook: "Belief in Conspiracies Linked to Machiavellian Mindset" by Tom Jacobs on the Miller-McCune Magazine site.

“At least among some samples and for some conspiracy theories, the perception that ‘they did it’ is fueled by the perception that ‘I would do it,’” University of Kent psychologists Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton write in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

“These studies suggest that people who have more lax personal morality may endorse conspiracy theories to a greater extent because they are, on average, more willing to participate in the conspiracies themselves.”

Energy Information Administration Press Release

H/T KoTR, who asks "does anybody see a problem with this?"

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Immediate Reductions in EIA's Energy Data and Analysis Programs Necessitated by FY 2011 Funding Cut

WASHINGTON, DC - The final fiscal year (FY) 2011 budget provides $95.4 million for the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), a reduction of $15.2 million, or 14 percent, from the FY 2010 level.

"The lower FY 2011 funding level will require significant cuts in EIA's data, analysis, and forecasting activities," said EIA Administrator Richard Newell. "EIA had already taken a number of decisive steps in recent years to streamline operations and enhance overall efficiency, and we will continue to do so in order to minimize the impact of these cuts at a time when both policymaker and public interest in energy issues is high," he said.

EIA must act quickly to realize the necessary spending reductions during the present fiscal year, which is already more than half over. The changes in products and services identified below reflect initial steps to reduce the cost of EIA's program. Additional actions are being evaluated and may result in further adjustments to EIA's data and analysis activities in the near future.

Initial adjustments to EIA's data, analysis, and forecasting programs include the following:

Oil and Natural Gas Information

• Do not prepare or publish 2011 edition of the annual data release on U.S. proved oil and natural gas reserves.


• Curtail efforts to understand linkages between physical energy markets and financial trading.


• Suspend analysis and reporting on the market impacts of planned refinery outages.


• Curtail collection and dissemination of monthly state-level data on wholesale petroleum product prices, including gasoline, diesel, heating oil, propane, residual fuel oil, and kerosene. Also, terminate the preparation and publication of the annual petroleum marketing data report and the fuel oil and kerosene sales report.


• Suspend auditing of data submitted by major oil and natural gas companies and reporting on their 2010 financial performance through EIA's Financial Reporting System.


• Reduce collection of data from natural gas marketing companies.


• Cancel the planned increase in resources to be applied to petroleum data quality issues.


• Reduce data collection from smaller entities across a range of EIA oil and natural gas surveys.

Electricity, Renewables, and Coal Information

• Reduce data on electricity exports and imports.


• Terminate annual data collection and report on geothermal space heating (heat pump) systems.


• Terminate annual data collection and report on solar thermal systems.


• Reduce data collection from smaller entities across a range of EIA electricity and coal surveys.

Consumption, Efficiency, and International Energy Information

• Suspend work on EIA's 2011 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), the Nation's only source of statistical data for energy consumption and related characteristics of commercial buildings.


• Terminate updates to EIA's International Energy Statistics.

Energy Analysis Capacity

• Halt preparation of the 2012 edition of EIA's International Energy Outlook.


• Suspend further upgrades to the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS). NEMS is the country's preeminent tool for developing projections of U.S. energy production, consumption, prices, and technologies and its results are widely used by policymakers, industry, and others in making energy-related decisions. A multiyear project to replace aging NEMS components will be halted.


• Eliminate annual published inventory of Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States.


• Limit responses to requests from policymakers for special analyses.

In addition to these program changes, EIA will cut live telephone support at its Customer Contact Center.

The changes outlined above and the additional actions that may be required to align EIA's program with its FY 2011 funding level are undoubtedly painful for both users of EIA energy information and EIA's dedicated Federal and contractor staff. We will work with stakeholders to minimize the disruption associated with the changes identified above and will issue specific guidance to affected survey respondents soon. We remain committed to maintaining the bulk of EIA's comprehensive energy information program and strengthening it where possible, consistent with the available level of resources.

EIA Press Contact: Jonathan Cogan, 202-586-8719, Jonathan.Cogan@eia.gov

EIA-2011-07

What to Believe and Why

OK, forgive me, this one's a bit philosophical. It starts with why we believe what we believe, and ends with a justification for science outreach, not despite the fact that people's belief structures are stubborn, but because of it. (As usual, just a first pass.)

And it refers to a brewing argument about which "side" of the climate "debate" is most dogmatic and quasireligious. In fact, beliefs are beliefs. I claim that idea that anybody is entirely rational about anything, the idea that some of us form our models of the world entirely on evidence, is excessive. The question is how to deal with reality knowing that these biases exist.

I refer you to this argument by Prof John Stackhouse, about as intelligent a person as you can imagine being a Bible literalist; the resurrection, the loaves and fishes, the whole nine yards, if I understand correctly. I have been following him to try to get insight into how the thought process of dogmatism works, and it's presented an interesting challenge:

I think we share a lot of common ground here. We agree, for example, that one ought to have good reasons for what one believes or, at least, be able to reply adequately to challenges to that belief. We agree that if one cannot adequately defend one’s beliefs, including one’s premisses, one ought to change one’s beliefs, or premisses, or something. One shouldn’t just keep believing things that one cannot adequately defend.

But let’s stop there for a moment. Why shouldn’t I be entitled to keep believing things that I cannot adequately defend?

Suppose, for example, I believe something because I have believed it all my life and it seems to make good sense of whatever it is it is supposed to describe or explain. It seems to fit the facts. Perhaps it is, in fact, true. So when someone comes along and offers apparently strong arguments against my belief, I could certainly accede to those arguments and give up my belief. But couldn’t I also decide that, while the arguments against my belief certainly seem sound for the moment, perhaps they are not as sound as they appear? Perhaps, in fact, they are not sound at all, and I am just not sophisticated enough to see immediately why they are not sound. Indeed, since my belief has seemed to me to be true for quite a long time and over quite a number of relevant circumstances, wouldn’t it be rather reckless of me to drop a belief simply because I can’t defend it well right now? Wouldn’t such an attitude dispose me to credulity and even abuse at the hands of magicians or charlatans or con men or preachers of false doctrines?

When I think, furthermore, that lots of apparently capable people hold to that belief also, it would seem reckless indeed to drop that belief simply because I can’t defend it adequately, for perhaps some of them can. Indeed, isn’t it very likely that some of them can, since it is exceedingly unlikely that I am now encountering a brand new, devastating argument never before encountered and handled well by any of my fellow-believers? So perhaps I might ask around a bit, do some reading, get some expert counsel, before I drop my belief at the first sign of serious trouble.

That’s what a scientist ought to do. That’s what a scholar of any discipline ought to do. That’s what any rational person ought to do.

Now, if you follow the rest of his argument, you will see he takes it to a place that is (not just to an atheist or an agnostic, but to someone like me who finds value in religion but constructs a religious view on evidence rather than defending an inherited and outdated package) transparently ridiculous.

The argument, though, is not easy to dismiss.

Indeed, this is why we tend to eschew debate with denialists. It is not hard to construct a single argument that to somone unprepared for it seems logically coherent. Take the "tropospheric hot spot". Assert that all GCMs produce a feature that no observations reproduce (without noting that this isn't a complete refutation even of the predicted feature). It is best if the scientific community is not especially interested in this contradiction, so that the innocent debater has nothing in his or her arsenal to refute it. Conclude that climate models are flawed (stipulated) and allow the audience to infer that this flaw amounts to a warmING bias everywhere. (The denialists themselves seem incapable of distinguishing between a warm bias and a warming bias, as we see by their squawking about underrepresentation of "cold" (rapidly warming) polar data.) Claim that all predictions are BASED ON these "flawed", implicitly biased models. Conclude that there is nothing to worry about.

An argument like this is convincing coming from an unibased investigator. But nobody is unbiased about the climate question anymore. We want our juries ignorant of the case at hand for a reason, which is why jury trials of celebrated cases are difficult. However, everyone, regardless of background, claims to be the genuine self-questioning scientific party.

How do we react to an argument of this sort? Much as we'd like to say we are not swayed by prior beliefs, nobody is innocent in that way, on either side. We take the argument and slot it into 1) how credible other arguments we have heard are 2) our social connections to other people that we respect and 3) how coherent it is with our "priors", i.e., our pre-established beliefs.

So when I say, come on, if a deity capable of inserting itself into the womb of a virgin existed, why would it choose to spend nine months sweating in a moist sack and a dozen years suffering the indignities of childhood? Why would it not just show up from the sky, a far more impressive performance? I mean, the whole story just doesn't add up, what does the literalist Christian answer? First, that they have heard many arguments form incredulity in the past that have been unconvincing. Second, that most everyone they most love and respect believe exactly the contrary. Third, that their well-being corresponds closely to their perceived relationship to the deity in question, reinforcing their prior (and in fact, reinforcing my own interest in religion, which is ultimately about the nature of the subjective, not about the nature of the objective).

How is this different from out belief in climate science, and in particular, to its not especially subtle conclusion that we are doing a lot of damage with our current rate of greenhouse gas emissions? Presented with a challenge, we note that past challenges have all been defeated. We point to the impressive list of institutions that support the consensus (somewhat ignoring that the list is not compelling to our interlocutors). And we point to the broad coherence of evidence.

Is there some way that this set of "beliefs" really is qualitatively different from the beliefs of our opponents, or form the beliefs of religious dogmatists? Yes, there certainly is, but the answer doesn't lie in the oversimplification of Popperian refutation. As I have said before, the sensible scientific belief in the nature of our problem is not about a hypothesis, but about a set of estimates. There must be a sensitivity of the climate system to greenhouse gases. There must be an impact function from that system to dependent systems. There must be a threshhold rate of change, and a threshhold absolute change, that exceeds the cost of avoiding it, and another that is intolerable and must be avoided at all costs. What those numbers are is what we should be discussing.

But we are still left with the question of whether these estimates are based on a legitimate evidence-based framework or a constructed dogma. By becoming associated with "environmentalism", we allow ourselves to be tainted by the excesses, real or imagined, of the environmentalist movement. The denialist frame sees claims made by climate science as being of the same ilk as intuitive claims made by environmentalists in the past, some of them established as sloppy and excessive, and others attacked as such. Make no mistake, paranoid excesses of environmentalists have damaged essentially innocent economic activities in the past. So what we see as physics they see as politics, making it easy to slot into a category of doubt.

So from the deniers' frame, the position we espouse is packaged with a whole bunch of other positions (cancer from transmission lines, e.g., or autism from vaccines) that are not well-supported. Our social connections are perceived to be with dubious social elements who are perceived as superstitious and wantonly destructive. And our recommendations are grossly incoherent with their beliefs about economics.

This last, of course, is head-vise territory for us. How could your economic theory falsify an analysis in physics, chemistry and biology? But explaining why physics, chemistry and biology have to be mutually coherent and economics slave to the others is actually not all that easy, given that people really believe economics is a "science"! How often do we hear "this can't be true because..." followed by an argument from economics or politics. We dismiss these arguments out of hand. We are like the dog, these arguments are "blah, blah, blah, Ginger" to us. But we need a way to counter them.

We believe what we believe based on a whole set of inputs. Those who want us to believe things that are not true (e.g., a literalist interpretation of the English translation of the Bible, AGW denial, non-native birth of President Obama, etc.) must replace the set of inputs which we receive from the environment around us with a contrary set.

So what makes arguments from physical science different from arguments from other bases? We know that it is because of a far higher level of coherence than any other human activity has achieved. Some of our opponents know this too, but they haven't had enough experience with it to take their hard knocks.

But others, notably the engineers, get it. They understand about coherence. And they are leaders of the opposition precisely because of the importance of social connections in forming beliefs.

They just don't understand the depth of our fields, nor the social context in which it emerges. That is why, despite what journalistic professionals and people like Randy Olsen say, despite the fact that the number of people who really will roll up theior sleeves and study is small, it is crucial to present information in depth and in a cognitively accessible didactically sound way.

And speaking as someone who has taken graduate level classes in both engineering and in climate science, I assert from experience that we have a more difficult task, but also that we do it quite badly.

So that's why, for all my other disagreements with the naysayer squad, I agree that we need to make the science visible. They think they can just look in our notebooks and figure it out, though! That just shows how badly they underestimate the maturity of the field. That makes the visibility all the harder.

There is still plenty of room for climate research, but it will be quite some time before the predictive capacity of the field improves substantially. We probably have to settle for the very coarse picture of the future we already have, and make decisions based on that. The main practical role for climate science now is didactic. And no adequate institutional support exists.

To connect reason to policy discourse, reason has to be made accessible. This isn't just about openness - that's really a somewhat inadvertent insult. It's about explanation. And at any given level, at any given moment, any given explanation will carry very little weight. We have to accept that. And some people will cling to superstitions or biases. We have to accept that too. But, like the emissions themselves, science is cumulative. And it's beautiful and interesting, but it's unnecessarily obscure. The real task is to make it more visible.

On Waking Up, Or Perhaps Not

Forbes Blogs may not really be the responsibility of Forbes.

An interesting piece there by Rick Ungar, says (in part)

A Bloomberg National Poll of adults 18 and over reveals that 40% of Tea Party supporters are 55 or older. It should, therefore, come as no big surprise that, according to an April 18^th Marist Poll, 70% of Tea Party members strongly oppose the Paul Ryan plan to dismantle Medicare as we know it – a plan which received the overwhelming support of the GOP Congress when put to a vote.

The fog was lifting and the death rattle of the Tea Party movement suddenly grew audible.

As Tea Partiers took a look at their own bank accounts and realized that they were, sadly, not among the millionaires and billionaires who have funded their movement, yet another light bulb switched on. Why, they began to wonder, were they being so completely supportive of continuing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy when the wealthy were leaving it to the rank and file of the movement to actually pay the bill for smaller government while the rich squirreled away another 10% in tax reductions?

While Tea Party acolytes may have been misled, they aren’t stupid. Thus, the previously unthinkable began to appear all too true.

Could it be that it was never the government who was their enemy after all? Had they been used by their wealthy sponsors as some perverse investment in a scheme to lower taxes even further for those who need it the least at the cost of those who gave their loyalty to the cause?

Even worse, supporters had to wonder if the Tea Party had inadvertently -and ironically- created government as the enemy by electing people who would take away Medicare and other entitlements that are a part of our cultural and national covenant that the Tea Partiers rely on every bit as much as the rest of us - and all so that they could allow billionaires and others who can afford high-priced lobbyists to keep more of their money?

Meanwhile, Steven Lewandowsky makes the obvious connection between birthers and climate deniers.

The McGuffin Itself

Lewandowsky:

What motivates people who, based on Republican demographics, likely earn a living in business or dentistry or some other well-paying job requiring at least a modicum of literacy, to take leave of their senses and to subscribe to patent absurdities instead?

On May 19 2010, the US National Academy of Sciences, America's highest scientific body, summarised the current state of climate science particularly clearly: “Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.”

The late Stephen Jay Gould referred to a fact as something that it would be "perverse to withhold provisional assent." Notwithstanding the Academy's clear statement about the existence of global warming and its human-made causes, recent surveys reveal that the majority of US Republicans do not accept this scientific fact.

Indeed, tragically and paradoxically, among Republicans acceptance of the science decreases with their level of education as well as with their self-reported knowledge: Whereas Democrats who believe they understand global warming better also are more likely to believe that it poses a threat in their lifetimes, among Republicans increased belief in understanding global warming is associated with decreased perception of its severity. The more they think they know, the more ignorant they reveal themselves to be.

Will people eventually wake up to how badly their trust has been abused?

James Fallows thinks it will not be soon. On the birther episode (h/t Andrew Sullivan) and the recent release of the infamous "long form" birth certificate, he says:

"Here we have a wonderful real-world test: if 'actual knowledge' mattered, the number of people who thought Obama was foreign-born would approach zero by next week -- with exceptions for illiterates, the mentally disabled, paranoid schizophrenics, etc. My guess is that the figures will barely change,"

Chris Mooney agrees.

Now it can't escape our notice that Fallows' sardonic prediction seems to align with the "facts don't matter" school of communication; the idea that even if we have facts we ought to be communicating "narratives". But I think we should leave the construction of narratives to fiction, and somehow get people to understand that "science communication" by definition is about what is most true, which is almost always interesting, and not about what is most interesting, which is almost always untrue.

Update: Some examples of the denialist mindset hard at work, denying.