Rock falls and sea levels

Why do we tolerate abject stupidity in our leaders?

I'm asking this not, surprisingly, because of Donald Trump, but because of Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, a member of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology,who claims -- and I am not making this up -- that sea level rise is not being caused by climate change, but by rocks falling into the ocean.

At the time of this writing, I have been emailed this story five times by loyal readers of Skeptophilia, usually accompanied by the words, "What the fuck is wrong with these people?"  In case you are disinclined to believe that someone can be that big an idiot, here's the actual quote:

What about the White Cliffs of Dover … [and] California, where you have the waves crashing against the shorelines, and time and time again you have the cliffs crashing into the sea?  All of that displaces water which forces it to rise, does it not?  Every single year that we’re on Earth, you have huge tons of silt deposited by the Mississippi River, by the Amazon River, by the Nile, by every major river system — and for that matter, creek, all the way down to the smallest systems.  Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up. You put it all together, erosion is the primary cause of sea level rise in the history of our planet and these people who say to the contrary may know something about climate but they don't know squat about geology... 

Keep in mind I'm talking millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years, erosion is the primary cause of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of cubic miles of sea displacement that in turn forces the sea levels to rise.

It didn't take long for a story to appear in the Washington Post estimating the size of the blob of rock you'd have to drop into the ocean to see what we're seeing (a 3.3 millimeter rise per year).  The answer: 1.19 trillion cubic meters, equivalent to a sphere eight miles in diameter.

Every year.

Put another way, this would be like scraping the top five inches of dirt from the entire United States, rolling it into a ball, and dropping it into the ocean.

Every year.  In case I haven't made that point clear.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Immanuel Giel, White Cliffs of Dover 02, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Brooks went on to say that the polar pack ice is actually increasing, and the tired old story about how climatologists in the 1980s said there'd be "global cooling," and that didn't happen:

What I'm trying to establish is that a lot of these climatologists have no idea what they're really talking about, and it's because we have not had a long enough period time with exact scientific measurement to know what the climate's going to be like fifty years from now or a hundred years from now.   The bottom line is nobody is smart enough to know with the evidence we have and the relatively small time frame we have - fifty years in the history of the planet.  That's just not enough information with which to make accurate predictions.

Of course, we do have more information than that; we have accurate proxy records going back thousands of years, and some pretty shrewd guesses going back millions.  The link between carbon dioxide and global temperature, and predictions of what would happen if we kept burning all the fossil fuels we could get our hands on, go all the way back to Svante Arrhenius in 1896.  At least Brooks has a clear understanding of how someone could be this willfully stupid, ignoring mountains of evidence and the arguments of climatologists (i.e., the people who actually understand what's going on, despite Brooks's pronouncement that they "have no idea what they're really talking about"):

Money.  Money to invest in a certain kind of resources where you might have a financial interest.  There's also politics as you're trying to cobble together the votes to win an election, that's probably part of it, too.

Which is spot-on, even if not in the way he meant it.  The ones getting rich are not the climatologists -- it's not like you routinely see climatologists living in mansions and driving Jaguars.  The ones who are getting rich are the politicians, who are being bankrolled by the fossil fuel interests, to the tune of millions of dollars annually.

Which, presumably, is how imbeciles like Mo Brooks "cobble together the votes to win an election."

The cure, of course, is an educated electorate, but with the disinformation campaign going on right now, there's been so much distrust of the experts sown in the minds of laypeople that you can tell them damn near anything you want.  The first thing that the talking heads and corporate lobbyists do is to teach people to doubt the facts -- to claim that the data itself is wrong, skewed, or deliberately falsified.  The Earth's not warming, the sea's not rising, storms are not getting stronger.  Oh, and even if the Earth is warming up, all that's going to do is make the cold parts of the world nice and balmy.

Don't worry.  We're not doing anything dangerous.  Trust us.

At least one person was willing to call Brooks on his bullshit, and that was Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, who amazingly was asked to participate in the meeting of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology, despite being an actual scientist.  He and Brooks had the following testy exchange:

Duffy: We have satellite records clearly documenting a shrinkage of the Antarctic ice sheet and an acceleration of that shrinkage. 

Brooks: I'm sorry, but I don't know where you're getting your information, but the data I have seen suggests — "  

Duffy: The National Snow and Ice Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 

Brooks: Well, I've got a NASA base in my district, and apparently, they're telling you one thing and me a different thing.  But there are plenty of studies that have come that show with respect to Antarctica that the total ice sheet, particularly that above land, is increasing, not decreasing.

In other words, your NASA is clearly wrong.  There are "plenty of studies" showing that my NASA is right.

The whole thing is profoundly upsetting, at least to those of us who know how to read a scientific paper.

On the other hand, at least we don't have to fret about what will happen if the White Cliffs of Dover collapse.  It'll be upsetting to the people in that part of England, no doubt, but there's no worries about the resultant sea level rise flooding Omaha or anything.

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This week's recommended book is an obscure little tome that I first ran into in college.  It's about a scientific hoax -- some chemists who claimed to have discovered what they called "polywater," a polymerized form of water that was highly viscous and stayed liquid from -70 F to 500 F or above.  The book is a fascinating, and often funny, account of an incident that combines confirmation bias with wishful thinking with willful misrepresentation of the evidence.  Anyone who's interested in the history of science or simply in how easy it is to fool the overeager -- you should put Polywater by Felix Franks on your reading list.

Ignorance, anti-science, and corporate interests

I try not to ring the changes on the same topic too often, but sometimes I simply have no choice.

A few days ago, I described how my most-loathed member of the House of Representatives, Lamar Smith of Texas, had appeared before the members of the Heartland Institute and crowed about how the Trump administration's entire pro-fossil-fuel, anti-environmental, climate-change-denying agenda was about to be realized.  Well, two days ago Smith followed through on his plans to have a meeting with the committee he chairs -- the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology -- to discuss climate change.

With only a single actual climate scientist in the room.

To be fair, the climate scientist they picked is a big name: Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, one of the first researchers to sound the alarm on the direction the global temperature was heading.  But the three other people on the panel with Mann were carefully chosen to be climate change deniers, and Mann was the only one who is a working research scientist.

The tone was set immediately in Smith's opening remarks.  "Much of climate science today appears to be based more on exaggeration, personal agendas, and questionable predictions than on the scientific method," Smith said, ignoring the fact that there is a 97% consensus amongst actual climate scientists about the causes and effects of climate change, and most of the remaining 3% argue only at the level of details.  "Alarmist predictions amount to nothing more than wild guesses."

This was music to the ears of most of the committee, which is overwhelmingly populated with anti-science types.  Dana Rohrabacher of California, who once called global warming "liberal claptrap," snarled at Mann, saying that he had committed a "personal attack on our committee chairman" for saying that Smith participated in a "climate science denying conference."

So we're now in a place where "truth" is called a "personal attack."  Since a "lie" is now an "alternative fact," I suppose that was the next logical step.

Other members took up time asking idiotic questions.  Mo Brooks of Alabama, having never heard of the Law of Conservation of Mass, asked the panel how they knew that sea levels were going to rise, not fall, when the ice caps melt.  Daniel Webster of Florida asked if we know what caused the "Ice Age" (evidently he thinks there was only one), because apparently if that can't be answered with certainty, there's no way to predict that we're not going to be in the middle of a glacier by next Thursday.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Only a few people stood up and called the meeting for the bullshit it was.  Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon said, "The witness panel does not really represent the vast majority of climate scientists who have concluded that there is a connection between human activity and climate.  For a balanced panel, we need 96 more Dr. Manns."

But Lamar is on a roll this week.  He wasn't happy with just creating a farcical excuse for a fair hearing; he went after one of the world's most respected research journals, Science.  Since Science isn't promoting the Trump agenda, he claims that they're biased.  "That is not known as an objective writer or magazine," he said.  Because in his bizarro world, "objective" apparently means "agrees with Lamar."

The problem is, of course, people like Smith almost never bother actually to read what they're lambasting.  The point isn't honest critique, or even honest questioning; it's purely retributive, to punish the resistance of the scientific community to caving in under pressure from political and corporate interests.

If you're not discouraged enough yet, how about the news that the aforementioned Heartland Institute (which is totally not a "climate-science-denying organization," to even insinuate such a thing is a "personal attack") is sending a book called Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming, with an accompanying DVD, to 200,000 science teachers, funded by the $7 million they were given last year by Exxon, Koch Industries, and various other fossil fuel corporations.

Nope.  No biased propaganda campaign there.

Last, let's consider Scott Wagner, a state senator from Pennsylvania, who went on record two days ago as saying okay, maybe the Earth was getting warmer, but it could be from one of two reasons: (1) the Earth getting closer to the Sun; or (2) all of these warm human bodies are hanging around heating up the place.  I wish I was making this up.  Here's the actual quote:

[T]he Earth moves closer to the sun every year — you know, the rotation of the Earth.  We're moving closer to the sun...  [Also] we have more people.  You know, humans have warm bodies.  So is heat coming off?

Afterwards, Wagner admitted that he hadn't "been in a science class for a long time."  No, really?  I'd never have guessed from the fact that you (1) don't know the difference between rotation and revolution, (2) think it takes a year for the Earth to rotate, (3) think we're spiraling inwards toward the Sun, and (4) believe that hot human bodies are causing the climate to change.

I'm beginning to think there should be a requirement that all candidates from public office be able to pass a basic science exam before their name can be put on the ballot.  There is simply too much at stake here.  We can't afford to have leaders who are ignorant of scientific facts, suspicious about the scientific process, and put short-term economic interests (including the immediate economic interest of padding their own pockets by pushing the agenda of their corporate sponsors) before the conclusions of evidence-based research.

Or, put more simply: can we all pinky-swear-promise not to vote next time for immoral, unethical twits and complete fucking morons?