Monthly Archives: Dec 2009

Remind You of Anything?

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The BBC reports that the Russian government is working to divert an asteroid that has a 1 in 250 000 chance of hitting the Earth in 2036.

“People’s lives are at stake,” Mr Perminov reportedly told the radio service Golos Rossii (Voice of Russia).

“We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people.”

Remind you at all of Daniel Gilbert’s analysis of climate change psychology?

“Because we barely notice changes that happen gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly. The density of Los Angeles traffic has increased dramatically in the last few decades, and citizens have tolerated it with only the obligatory grumbling. Had that change happened on a single day last summer, Angelenos would have shut down the city, called in the National Guard and lynched every politician they could get their hands on.

Environmentalists despair that global warming is happening so fast. In fact, it isn’t happening fast enough. If President Bush could jump in a time machine and experience a single day in 2056, he’d return to the present shocked and awed, prepared to do anything it took to solve the problem.”

What Comes Next?

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I’m not really sure how I feel about Copenhagen.

In a way, I was pleasantly surprised that anything happened at all. I had been following the feeds from DeSmogBlog and U of T throughout the conference, and it was after midnight on the last evening before any agreements were actually made.

Obviously, Copenhagen didn’t progress to the stage it was supposed to. However, I feel that the stage that was reached was successful. For unsubstantiated, unexplained goals to simply “take note of”, they’re certainly very good goals.

I’m also pleased that it was China and the US who finally sat down to get something done. As the the largest emitters and largest economies in the world, all the other countries are going to follow whatever they do. And I’m glad that the senior leadership (if not the legislative assemblies) from both countries seems to be pushing in the right direction.

It ended up better than I expected. But it still isn’t enough. We really should have reached this stage 20 years ago. We’re far behind schedule, and we don’t seem willing to catch up.

Michael Tobis Takes Part 3

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I was going to write a Science and Communication, Part 3 post that examined what ClimateGate actually tells us vs what the popular press says about it, and why this chasm between the two exists.

Then Michael Tobis wrote a brilliant post discussing that very topic:

What Was Actually Revealed

  • a rehash of a well-known controversy about how to present tree-ring data
  • frustration about too much attention to substandard scientific papers slipped into the literature by marginally qualified people with nonscientific agendas, and discussions about how to handle that
  • frustration about opposition by filibuster via freedom of information requests
  • a single suggestion about “deleting emails”, without any context, which plausibly does not refer to deleting emails from a server (scientists are probably aware that end users cannot really do this) but rather to deleting them from a response to one of many FOIA requests
  • some sloppy code and a pretty sad but perfectly typical lack of understanding of the advantages of dynamic programming languages
  • a couple of fudge factors explicitly labeled as such probably used in testing, commented out
  • some older data for which CRU is not the originator or primary repository is not in any known dataset at CRU
  • about 985 emails and 1995 other files of no apparent interest to anyone

In other words, (withe the possible exception of the email deletion incident, which I imagine the lawyers are fretting about) the only things remotely unusual here are a direct consequence of the existence of a politically rather than scientifically motivated opposition.

Read the whole post here.

Science and Communication, Part 2

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I like to think of science and communication as a bridge.

On one side of the bridge are scientists, who are studying and discussing and debating their respective fields together. On the other side of the bridge is the public, who watch the scientists from a distance to get a sense of what’s going on.

Problems can occur quite easily. The scientists can stand too close together and talk too quietly so the public can’t work out what they’re saying. The public can get bored and forget why watching the scientists is important. And, most effectively, people can stand right in front of the scientists, blocking the public’s view by waving signs and shouting. Even if the scientists try hard to be seen, and even if the public tries hard to watch, it’s next to impossible.

What we need, in my opinion, is more traffic on the bridge. We need more people constantly crossing back and forth between the two sides.

We need some scientists who take time out of their work to walk across the bridge and talk to the public directly. To accurately summarize their work and answer questions, all from a place where the sign-wavers can’t get in the way.

We also need some members of the public to cross over the bridge. They are in a unique position – they have an insider’s perspective of what the public knows, what still needs to be clarified, and what degree of complexity is appropriate for communication. They’re also not busy doing science (which can get fairly addictive).

These people, the few that have sufficient interest and stamina, should cross over the bridge for a time, observe the scientific discussions more closely, and then report back to the public. They should do this often, so they’re sure that they actually understand what the scientists are discussing. It shouldn’t be a different person every time.

We need communicators of both types – the first to ensure accuracy, and the second to ensure understanding and effectiveness. And somebody really needs to deal with the sign-wavers who are blocking the view.

A Thought

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If our world leaders cannot cooperate enough to stop dangerous climate change in the scant time we have left…..how do they expect to be able to cooperate enough to adapt to the kind of world they’re committing to with their inaction?

If we can’t figure this out, how do we expect to able to get along in what we’re choosing instead?

Science and Communication, Part 1

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Usually books about climate change take me some time to read. As fascinating as they are, they’re not the kind of literature I would read to relax. They take far more energy to get through than something like Twilight.

This wasn’t the case for Science as a Contact Sport, the new book by Stephen Schneider. I couldn’t put it down – I absolutely whizzed through it. The narrative wasn’t about explaining scientific processes as much as describing what it’s like to be a climate scientist, and how that has changed since the early 1970s. Perhaps my enjoyment of the narrative was due to the fact that I think I like memoirs – although the only other memoir I’ve read is Memoirs of a Geisha (and wasn’t that fictional?) In any case, Science as a Contact Sport was a memoir of the kind of person I want to follow in the general footsteps of: someone who studies climate change, particularly modelling and radiative balance, and has a good sense of how to accurately communicate science to the media and the public.

Schneider has been studying climate change for a long time – he’s literally one of the pioneers of climate modelling – so his story was able to begin in the 1970s. There were quite a few familiar figures in the early narrative, including James Hansen as a PhD student (there was even a photograph!) and Richard Lindzen, who was brilliant but had unusual views on how to communicate uncertain science to the government and the public.

I was fascinated by the insider’s account of the 1970s radiative forcing debate – which would win out in the end, aerosols or greenhouse gases? As Schneider was the co-author of one of the few papers that predicted a cooling, he was able to explain the problems with that paper and why it was quickly discredited. Firstly, the climate model used for the paper didn’t have a stratosphere, so the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 was underestimated by a factor of 2. Secondly, the paper incorrectly assumed that aerosols would evenly disperse globally, like greenhouse gases do. It was very early on in the study of both aerosols and climate modelling, so Schneider’s mistake wasn’t a big deal to the scientific community – but it sure keeps coming up in editorials and YouTube comments these days.

The thesis of the book was that being a climate scientist in the 1970s was very different to the way it is now. In the early 70s, Schneider and his colleagues pounded away at the frontiers of their fields and filled their minds with purely analytical questions. Those who talked to the media about their work were reprimanded, and some scientists even questioned the integrity of creating assessment reports for the government.

Today, however, climate scientists create major international assessment reports every few years, while politicians try to sabotage the process. They are morally obliged to talk to the media, unless they’re happy with the media talking to Fred Singer instead. And even so, editorials and Fox News segments are all too happy to twist whatever they say in hopes to damage the credibility of their field.

Science used to just be about science. Now, as scientists studying an area that is socially and politically important, Schneider and his colleagues have to be adept at both science and communication. The book provided some great suggestions for improvement. One of my favourites was to take the first half hour of each conference to summarize what was known in that field, so that the journalists present wouldn’t witness only the cutting-edge discussions and come away thinking that climate science was uncertain because the scientists all disagreed.

Science as a Contact Sport was a fantastic book that had a lot to say about the nature of science, scientific literacy in the public, and the state of science journalism. A lot like Chris Mooney’s new book, Unscientific America, but specific to climate change. It really got me thinking about the vast chasm between scientists and the public and how we should address it, to the point where it’s inspired a whole series of posts. Keep your eyes open for part 2 – coming soon.

A ClimateGate Video

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Potholer54 just posted a video investigating whether or not the CRU emails actually show faked data/deliberate manipulation/a socialist conspiracy. Enjoy.

If you’re interested in an explanation of all the papers and theories the CRU emails are discussing, RealClimate does a great job.

I hear Peter Sinclair is also working on a CRU video – I’ll embed it here as soon as it’s posted.

Climate Cover-Up

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I’m fairly new to the issue of climate change, and even newer to the politics surrounding it. I’ve spent the past two years reading about climate change causes, impacts, projections, myths, media blunders, and public misconceptions.

I knew that vested interests, such as the fossil fuel industry and political lobby groups, had played a part in the widespread public confusion. However, I naively assumed that they had simply taken advantage of said confusion – that the public was already unsure, so the vested interests decided to jump in and prolong it.

How wrong I was. How very, very wrong I was, as Jim Hoggan and Richard Littlemore proved to me in their new book, Climate Cover-Up.

Example after example, and story after story, showed that vested interests didn’t just take advantage of public confusion surrounding climate change. They created it. They deliberately constructed the so-called “debate” in an effort to – what? Earn more money? Fight socialism?

Take the Information Council on the Environment, one of the first climate change lobby groups. They were established in 1991, right after governments first started to respond to climate change – Thatcher, Bush Sr, and Mulroney all made promises to reduce emissions. The ICE flat-out stated that their objective was “to reposition global warming as a theory (not fact)” and “to supply alternative facts to support the suggestion that global warming will be good”.

The American Petroleum Institute was even more blatant. A leaked email contains a list of objectives for their PR campaigns:

Victory Will Be Achieved When

-Average citizens “understand” (recognize) uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the “conventional wisdom”

-Media “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science

-Media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of the validity of viewpoints that challenge the current “conventional wisdom”

-Industry senior leadership understands uncertainties in climate science, making them stronger ambassadors to those who shape climate policy

-Those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.

Everything that we’ve been bemoaning for years now. Misplaced public doubt, artificial balance in the media, Bush and Harper’s ties to the oil industry. It didn’t just happen by accident.

The email goes on to discuss strategies to achieve these objectives, including plans to produce and distribute “a steady stream of op-ed columns and letters to the editor” doubting climate change. So all those skeptical editorials in the popular press might not be written by journalists that have been taken for a ride. They might actually be by people with ties to lobby groups like the American Petroleum Institute.

You could look at Frank Luntz’s plans to capitalize on uncertainty. Or the American Enterprise Institute’s offer of $10 000 to any scientist who wrote a critique of the IPCC. Or how The Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary oft-cited by YouTubers, creatively took statements from its interviewees out of context.

Climate Cover-Up made me so angry. I remember not being able to fall asleep the night I finished it. Then telling everyone I could about it. I had been immersed in the issue of climate change for two years, and yet I had failed to grasp the scope of vested interests’ influence on the public.

Many of our readers, who have been following this issue for years, are probably familiar with the stories and examples in the book. There isn’t anything in it that will be new to everyone.

But that wasn’t the book’s purpose, and climate scientists aren’t the book’s audience. Rather, Climate Cover-Up is aimed at those just becoming interested in climate change politics. It’s aimed at people who are unaware of the near-constant misinformation thrown at them, who are new to the immense power of money and industry over science and truth, who wouldn’t think to check the citations of editorials. It’s aimed at people like I was, two years ago.

I must also note that Climate Cover-Up is substantially easier to read than most books about climate change. The prose is witty and easy to follow. It doesn’t talk about science. It feels nothing like a textbook.

I’d like everyone in the world to read this book. But truthfully, I’d rather that it hadn’t needed to be written at all.