Rules of engagement

One of my besetting sins is being easily frustrated and taking things way too seriously.

Which is why recent developments in government have made me want to punch a wall.  Paul Manafort's softball prison sentence. Trump's demand that tornado-struck Alabama -- a red state -- receive "A-one treatment" with respect to disaster aid, while California -- a blue state -- was told they "should have raked their leaves" when they experienced the worst wildfires in the state's history.  The fact that a bunch of Republican legislators in New Hampshire thought it was appropriate to wear strings of pearls when confronted with gun law activists (ridiculing them by implying they were "clutching their pearls" -- making a big deal out of nothing).

All of those had me grinding my teeth down to nubs out of a sense of impotent rage.  A feeling of helplessness has become endemic in the last two years -- that we're powerless to stop the freewheeling corruption of this administration, the blind eye being turned toward Russian interference in American elections, and the complicity of lawmakers (exemplified by the smirking Mitch McConnell, who just this week said he wasn't going to bring an election reform bill onto the Senate floor purely because he "gets to decide").

So it was a bit of a relief to read a paper that appeared in appeared in Nature last week.  It's by climatologists Justin Farrell and Kathryn McConnell (of Yale University) and Robert Brulle (of Brown University), and is titled, "Evidence-based Strategies to Combat Scientific Misinformation."

Unsurprisingly -- even had I not already told you the field Farrell et al. were in -- is that the specific misinformation they're referring to is anthropogenic climate change.  The authors write:

Nowhere has the impact of scientific misinformation been more profound than on the issue of climate change in the United States.  Effective responses to this multifaceted problem have been slow to develop, in large part because many experts have not only underestimated its impact, but have also overlooked the underlying institutional structure, organizational power and financial roots of misinformation.  Fortunately, a growing body of sophisticated research has emerged that can help us to better understand these dynamics and provide the basis for developing a coordinated set of strategies across four related areas (public inoculation, legal strategies, political mechanisms and financial transparency) to thwart large-scale misinformation campaigns before they begin, or after they have taken root.

Which is packing a lot into a single paragraph.  They are unhesitatingly (and correctly) blaming the doubts in the public's mind over climate change on a large-scale -- and deliberate -- misinformation campaign on the part of the fossil fuels industry and the politicians they're funding.  In a press release from Yale University on the research, lead author Justin Farrell said:

Many people see these efforts to undermine science as an increasingly dangerous challenge and they feel paralyzed about what to do about it.  But there’s been a growing amount of research into this challenge over the past few years that will help us chart out some solutions...  Ultimately we have to get to the root of the problem, which is the huge imbalance in spending between climate change opponents and those lobbying for new solutions.  Those interests will always be there, of course, but I’m hopeful that as we learn more about these dynamics things will start to change.  I just hope it’s not too late.

Farrell et al. describe four realms that need to be addressed to counter these misinformation campaigns.  They are:

• Public inoculation -- presenting the public with refuted arguments (including how they've been refuted) before the disinformation specialists have a chance to launch their campaign, so non-scientists are immune to their effects, and upon hearing them, will say, "Oh, yeah, that.  That's already been disproven."
• Legal strategies -- actively target fossil fuel companies (and their lobbyists) with lawsuits when they libel reputable climate scientists with accusations of bias or outright falsification of data.  The difficulty is that the fossil fuel companies have way deeper pockets than do environmental activists -- but at least the attempt will bring the smear tactics into the public eye.
• Political mechanisms -- focusing on research into how the political process has been subverted by corporate anti-environmental interests.
• Financial transparency -- promoting legislation requiring public disclosure of who is funding political candidates, and encouraging investigation into elected officials whose actions have been compromised by donations from corporations.

Having concrete strategies to approach the problem is good, but the difficulty is, many of these rely on laws being passed by senators and representatives who are already compromised and have every reason to block change.  "We’re really just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding the full network of actors and how they’re moving money in these efforts," said study co-author Kathryn McConnell.  "The better we can understand how these networks work, the better the chances that policymakers will be able to create policy that makes a difference."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Which is an optimistic outlook.  Still, it's frustrating that any efforts in these directions are bound to be glacially slow, and my sense is that we don't really have much time left in which to act.  But the fact that this research is out there is a good first step.  Now we need to make certain that it doesn't simply sink into obscurity like most of the research on climate has done, buried under the sneering climate denialism of Fox News.

What it highlights is that this is a battle we can win.  Not that it'll be easy or quick; overcoming the mountain of misinformation out there, deliberately created by groups whose priority is short-term profit over the long-term habitability of the Earth, won't happen overnight.

But the fact that a team of climatologists thinks it can happen at all is encouraging.  Despite what feels like daily losing battle against succumbing to despair, it's not time to give up.

If they think we can win, maybe we should, too.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Heavy weather

Some days it seems like it would be a good move to get off social media altogether.

This is largely because I'm so easily pissed off.  Fortunately, at least I've learned the "don't argue with people on the internet" rule, but the "just keep scrolling and don't worry about it" rule hasn't sunk in very well yet.  I ran into a good example of this yesterday, with a conversation that showed up on my Facebook feed that left me fuming for a couple of hours afterward.  It started as follows:

This is a good brief overview that explains how and why human emissions of carbon dioxide are not causing catastrophic climate change. I have been also explaining the same points made in the article to anyone who would listen for the past 10 years.

He then included a link to an article by David Legates, professor of geography and climate science at the University of Delaware, called, "It's Not About the Climate -- It Never Was."  In it, Legates makes a variety of points, including that the climate is not sensitive to carbon dioxide concentration, that a warmer Earth will not generate more numerous or intense weather events, and that higher carbon dioxide concentrations (and a global temperature increase) will be beneficial to the human race and the global ecosystem.

To say Legates is a biased witness is a statement of mammoth proportions.  He's affiliated with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an evangelical group known for rejecting claims of anthropogenic climate change which has been accused of being a "front group for fossil fuel interests" because of its ties to Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which is directly funded by Exxon-Mobil and Chevron.  To give you a flavor of the Cornwall Alliance's philosophy, here's a direct quote from one of their publications:

The world is in the grip of an idea: that burning fossil fuels to provide affordable, abundant energy is causing global warming that will be so dangerous that we must stop it by reducing our use of fossil fuels, no matter the cost. Is that idea true? We believe not. We believe that idea – we'll call it "global warming alarmism" – fails the tests of theology, science, and economics.

The fact that they put theology first -- hell, that they included it at all -- should tell you all you need to know.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NOAA]

Anyhow, Skeptical Science and Climate Science Watch did a good job of taking apart Legates's claims piece by piece, and that's not what I'm here to do.  To get back to the original post -- claiming that Legates is correct and he (the original poster) has been "explaining the same points... for ten years," there were the following replies:

Courageous of you, and I say good job, T____, with posting something that flies in the face of the prevailing face of leftist ideologues -- calling anyone, for example, climate change deniers, which is a reprehensible things [sic] to accuse someone of who has a different opinion that the Neo-Puritanical leftist ideologues -- of the West.  Thousands of scientists disagree with Obama and Leftists on this subject.

The Green New Deal ...now that is pseudo science. Stop cow farts and spend 4x a countries GDP.  Outstanding how a 29 year old bartender could have that drafted and ready so quick. 

Kudos T____ for speaking up on your beliefs based in reality.  Even one of the founders of Greenpeace says ita [sic] a sham.

And so forth and so on.

One of the most maddening things about all of this is how the climate change deniers (okay, I guess that makes me reprehensible -- so be it) set up straw man claims and easily identified biased, cherry-picked statistical arguments, and all the people who would very much like us not to have to change what we're doing just go, "Yup.  That's the truth.  I knew it all along."  The thing is, there is consensus among climatologists, notwithstanding what a handful of rogues like Legates have to say.

And being a rogue is not somehow noble, or courageous, or realistic.  Sometimes when you're flying in the face of consensus, you're simply wrong.  Here, there are mountains of data supporting the connection between fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide levels, between carbon dioxide and climate, and between climate change and increasingly violent weather extremes.  I don't see any way that a truly unbiased individual could evaluate the evidence and not make those connections.

So Legates is obviously biased.  Why is a matter of conjecture, whether it's simple confirmation bias or something more sinister.  (If you still doubt this, go back to the Climate Science Watch article that I linked above, which is well worth a read -- and ends with slamming Legates for "uncritical reiteration of tired and discredited criticisms.")

But again, it's not that I didn't know there were climate change deniers.  Hell, the White House is home to one of 'em.  It's the association of science -- based on hard evidence -- with "leftist ideology," as if climate data had a political opinion, that really torques me.  Even more, labeling this kind of biased pseudoscientific diatribe as "courageous" makes me want to hurl a heavy object across the room.

So honestly, I should probably get off social media, or at least severely curtail how much time I spend on it.  Probably good advice for a lot of us, for a variety of reasons.  Right now the chief of which is that I really don't need anything to make my blood pressure higher.  I've got enough to worry about, such as whether Donald Trump is going to open the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse before or after he's indicted.  The last thing I want is to add infuriating Facebook posts to the list.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Aiming for the maximum

In what can only be described as a confluence of terrible news, catastrophically strong Hurricane Florence is now taking direct aim at North Carolina at the same time as the Trump administration has announced its plans to roll back Obama-era methane emission standards.  The reasons for this are the same as the reasons they've done every other damnfool thing they've done; (1) it benefits Trump's corporate sponsors in the petroleum industry, and (2) it allows him to check off another thing that Obama accomplished that he's undone.  Methane is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases known, having a heat-trapping capacity over seventy times higher than carbon dioxide's.

Some methane does occur naturally from decomposition.  This is why thawing of the Arctic permafrost is a grave concern; the anaerobic decomposition of the thick layer of organic matter underneath is feared to create a huge methane spike.  Methane also is present in cow farts, so the beef industry shares some of the blame, here.

But increasing the allowable amount of methane leakage from oil and natural gas drilling makes no sense unless you honestly have a short-term profit über alles attitude toward the habitability of the Earth.  The new proposal is a nasty confection of handouts to the fossil fuel industry at the expense of environmental health.  It includes:

• increasing the time between required inspections on drilling equipment from six months to a year
• increasing the time required for repairing known leaks from thirty to sixty days
• allowing states that have laxer emissions standards to follow those standards instead of the federal ones

Unsurprisingly, the petroleum industry is thrilled by all of this, and projections are that they will recoup nearly all of the $530 million that they'd have had to invest into following the Obama-era regulations.

If that's not enough, last week it was announced that William Happer has joined the National Security Council.  Happer has stated outright that "there's no problem with CO2," and had the following to say about climate change science:

There is no problem from CO2.  The world has lots and lots of problems, but increasing CO2 is not one of the problems.  So [the accord] dignifies it by getting all these yahoos who don't know a damn thing about climate saying, "This is a problem, and we're going to solve it."  All this virtue signaling. You can read about it in the Bible: Pharisees and hypocrites and phonies...  [T]he significance of climate change has been tremendously exaggerated, and has become sort of a cult movement in the last five or ten years.

If a monster storm at the same time as all of this isn't sufficiently ironic for you -- increasing strength of hurricanes, after all, was predicted as an outcome of anthropogenic climate change thirty years ago -- last week a study from the University of Geneva was released that gives us some rather horrifying news about where all this could lead.  The warmest point in (relatively) recent Earth history is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which occurred 56 million years ago and is thought to have been triggered by a double whammy of intense volcanic activity and destabilization of frozen methane hydrates on the ocean floor.  And I'm not talking about a little warm spell, here; the average global temperature shot up by five to eight degrees in a phenomenally short amount of time, and the recent study found that very quickly broad swaths of equatorial regions became effectively uninhabitable.  By the middle of this event, the amplitude of catastrophic flooding events had increased by a factor of eight, and there were palm trees growing above the Arctic Circle.

And I haven't told you the real kicker; once that maximum was reached, it took several hundred thousand years for the Earth's systems to recover.

Scientists are uncertain where we are with respect to the tipping point -- the point where feedbacks (like the thawing of the permafrost I mentioned earlier) begin to amplify, rather than counteract, the effect of global warming.  I'm convinced that the Trump administration doesn't disbelieve in climate change as much as it simply considers the question irrelevant.  So what if the world warms? seems to be the attitude.

We'll already have banked our share of the profit.  To hell with everyone, and everything, else.

Perhaps as of November, we'll see some new faces in Congress -- with luck, ones who not only care about science, but take the time to understand it.  Between now and then, I can only hope that the damage and loss of life from Florence and the other storms currently brewing in the Atlantic is as low as possible, and that maybe -- just maybe -- enough voters will wake up and see where we're headed before it's too late.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a charming inquiry into a realm that scares a lot of people -- mathematics.  In The Universe and the Teacup, K. C. Cole investigates the beauty and wonder of that most abstract of disciplines, and even for -- especially for -- non-mathematical types, gives a window into a subject that is too often taught as an arbitrary set of rules for manipulating symbols.  Cole, in a lyrical and not-too-technical way, demonstrates brilliantly the truth of the words of Galileo -- "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."

The hydra of horrible ideas

For today's post, we will focus our attention on a Skeptophilia frequent flyer -- Representative Lamar Smith, who is narrowly edged out by Senator Mitch McConnell as the world's most punchable face.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Smith is in the news this week because of his appearance as a keynote speaker at the 12th annual conference of the Heartland Institute, a petroleum-industry-funded "think tank" dedicated to casting doubt on climate change science.  Smith has been unrelenting in his attacks on the scientific community, which makes it even more appalling that he has since 2013 been the chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, a committee that also includes not only the virulently anti-science Dana Rohrabacher but Bill Posey of Florida, who believes that vaccines cause autism.

So the governmental oversight of scientific research in the United States falls clearly into the category of "heaven help us."  There's no doubt that Smith is in the pocket of the fossil fuels industry; they are far and away his largest donors, having funded his campaigns to the tune of $600,000.

And no one can say the industry isn't getting what they paid for.  Smith's talk at the Heartland Institute was fairly crowing with delight over the opportunity they have to completely gut any environmental legislation they want, given the appointment by the Trump administration of anti-environmental climate change deniers to damn near every leadership post in Washington.  "I think the president has ushered in a permanent change in the political climate," Smith said, to cheers from the audience.  "And by that I mean I think he’ll keep his promises and that he’ll do exactly what he said.  You’re seeing that in his appointments, like Scott Pruitt at EPA, for example.  So … I don’t think you’ll have any disappointment on any of those issues."

When an audience member suggested that Smith stop using the term "climate science" in favor of "climate studies" and "scientific research" in favor of "politically correct science," Smith agreed with a grin, and said he'd go a step further.  "I’ll start using those words if you’ll start using two words for me," Smith said.  "The first is never, ever use the word progressive.  Instead, use the word liberal.  The second is never use the word 'mainstream' media, because they aren’t.  Use 'liberal' media. Is that a deal?"

More cheers.

Most alarmingly, Smith said he's planning on increasing the pressure on research scientists to publish only results that support the goals of his political backers.  In fact, he spoke at length about his plans to craft legislation to punish federally-funded researchers who publish data that contradicts the party line -- in other words, that doesn't meet his warped concept of peer review, which means essentially having to pass a governmentally-set purity test.  To hell with what the evidence says; science becomes whatever the conservative agenda says it is.

The timing of this meeting is not without irony.  Just this week, research was published in Nature that the amount of warming we've already seen is leading to "devastating" bleaching of coral reefs; that climate change is enhancing the conditions that lead to life-threatening "smog events" in Beijing and elsewhere; that the winter of 2016-2017 showed "exceptional... periods of record-breaking heat" in the Arctic; and that last month was the second warmest February in the 139 years such records have been kept -- the warmest was February 2016.

But to Smith and his cronies, none of that matters.  It's all "politically correct climate studies."

All of this illustrates one rather sobering fact; for those of us on the left-ish side of things who breathed a sigh of relief when Paul Ryan's disaster of a health care bill died on the floor of the House last week, the fight is far from over.  This administration is proving to be a hydra of horrible ideas.  Destroy one of them, and two more appear in its place.

And this time, one of the hydra's heads is wearing the smarmy, smirking face of Lamar Smith, which is a mental image that will haunt my nightmares for some time to come.