Left as an Exercise

July 21, 2010

De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est.

Filed under: Commentary — Brian D @ 11:25 am

We lost a hero this week. Dr. Stephen Schneider died unexpectedly on July 19. In addition to much influential work in climatology, Schneider was a talented communicator and a great public speaker - he’s been compared to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Stephen Jay Gould, and even Carl Sagan in that regard. Although I never met him personally, I have long admired him as a scientist and public educator - he was not only the first climatologist I heard speak on the subject, but  his last book is also the most recent one I’d read. (And in light of the discussion brewing over Mich’s Empirical Surrender essay, it’s worth mentioning that although Schneider died of a heart attack, he was also undergoing treatment for a rare form of cancer - a treatment regimen that he helped design.)

This is not going to be a eulogy post. There are many better ones out there, which I suggest you read nonetheless. (The third, from Dan Moutal, also includes a digest of Schneider’s talks, so you can begin to see why I hold him in such high regard.) Instead, I’m going to point out a disturbing trend I’ve noticed in the reaction to his passing.

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March 19, 2010

Postmodernist Conservatism

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , — Brian D @ 3:59 pm

Everyone knows the basic frames behind liberal-conservative stereotyping: the liberal positions are full of wishy-washy flipflopping and the conservative ones are hypocritical. I’d always assumed that this was an exaggeration on a kernel of truth (due, for instance, to message discipline - if a liberal group values freedom of expression then conflicting opinions will appear in the group, while a conservative group values existing authorities leading to an image of infallibility, so admission of a mistake becomes impossible), combined with a healthy dose of political opportunism on both sides (just interpreted in different ways), but now, I’m not so sure.

A few days ago, I saw an interview between Rachel Maddow and J. D. Hayworth, a conservative former Representative currently challenging John McCain from the right. During that interview, something happened that crystallized a thought in my mind, which may actually explain the entirety of the ideological communication gap. Here’s the followup to the video, highlighting the exchange in question at 3:10:

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March 14, 2010

Obligatory Pi Day Remarks

Filed under: Commentary, Personal — Tags: — Brian D @ 8:02 pm

To all science-people (thanks for the heads-up, Steve!): Time variation of a fundamental dimensionless constant is a must-read example of… something. It’s certainly eye-opening.

To all non-science-people:

To all anti-science people (should any stumble upon this): Let me spell it out for you - the previous link was meant as satire. Though, given the cut-and-paste style of pseudoskepticism (illustrated wonderfully by Kate at ClimateSight and Nexus Six), it’d be interesting to try something similar and see if someone bites.

December 11, 2009

Monckton’s Exception

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: , , — Brian D @ 11:15 am

Definition 1: Godwin’s Law
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Definition 2: Unnamed (longstanding tradition re: Godwin’s Law)
After a Nazi or Hitler comparison is made, the thread is over. He who has made such a comparison has just lost.

Definition 3: Quirke’s Exception
Any intentional triggering of Godwin’s Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful. (That is, the exception to Godwin’s Law is intentionally invoking Godwin’s Law.)

Definition 4: Monckton’s Exception
Comparisons of nonviolent activists to the Hitler Youth are kosher, even face-to-face, and especially if the person you’re speaking to is Jewish. (See also: Monckton’s Justification and Monckton’s Solution).

If you’re unfamiliar with this exception’s namesake, pick a random article or two and see for yourself. If he didn’t exist, comedians would have to invent him - but the comedians would have the good taste to keep him locked away and medicated rather than letting him try to influence global policy with his conspiracy theories.

November 11, 2009

Review: Denialism

Filed under: Commentary, Denialism — Tags: , , — Brian D @ 9:53 pm

With a title like Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, how could I resist? I dove right in, expecting an interesting discussion on the subject and hoping it’d be more substantive and useful than Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.

I’ll be brief. Don’t bother. While Unscientific America was vapid and shallow, it at least provided an effective overview of the subject. Denialism, on the other hand, is nothing but case studies of health-related antiscience scares (from Vioxx to GMOs). Even the section on antivaccination is strangely lacking - I’ve seen blog posts and magazine articles that do a better job on the subject (irony alert: That second link is authored by Chris Mooney, who also wrote Unscientific America). Oh, and they do it without citing Gavin Menzies as an authority on Chinese history. (If you’ve never heard of the fellow, he’s as much a Chinese historian as Immanuel Velikovsky is an astrophysicist.)

There’s precious little discussion on denialism in Denialism, except by example - and all of the examples have a narrow focus (mistrust of medical and agricultural science). There’s nothing on your traditional denial movements (a parting shot on AIDS deniers and one mention of moon-landing hoaxers, but nothing on creationism) and, surprisingly, a dearth of information on the most well-known contemporary denial-orchestration movement of our time (the tobacco fiasco), nor the most dangerous (climate denial). There’s nothing prescriptive in it except an even more vapid cry for better scientific communication - in other words, Unscientific America, only even less clear (at least Mooney and Kirshenbaum had the courtesy to discuss the role of journalism here). The only positive thing I can say about it is that it spends ample time reminding us that antiscience denialism is not isolated to one side of the political spectrum - while the majority of the non-antivax denial movements nowadays are predominantly right-wing, anti-health denialism has always had its claws stuck in the left, which is quoted from extensively.

Save your time and money. If this material interests you, Doubt Is Their Product is a far, far better book on the subject, even without trying to be - it actually discusses not only the tactics involved, but the path of information and the methods used by professionals to reshape debate. (It even has a strong medical denialism bias, and it *still* outperforms Denialism as an overview!) I suppose Denialism might have a place on a health policy wonk’s bookshelf, but as for a student of denialism, give it a pass.

See also: Tom Philpot: ‘Denialism’ Misses Its Targets.

October 17, 2009

FAIL: Superfreakonomics

Filed under: Commentary, Denialism, Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , , , — Brian D @ 11:50 am

Edit: By request, click here to skip the history and go straight to the links to criticisms.

Contrarian positions can occasionally provide great insight into academic research - indeed, one of my research heroes, Rodney Brooks, is (in)famous for exactly this. However, sadly, contrarianism is more frequently used as a simple bid for attention, and if it’s done irresponsibly by the right people, it can have dire consequences for real people - the antivaccination promoters rallying against “western medicine” (I’m looking at you, Maher) come to mind.

I bring this up because contrarianism was the whole point of the landmark book Freakonomics, arguably the most well-known book in the ‘academics applied to everyday things’ subgenre (one can argue that The Black Swan and Outliers are written for similar audiences, for context). The authors, Levitt and Dubner, took contrary points to conventional wisdom and told their version of the events as just-so stories (not always entirely accurately).  This model sold rather well, so they went for a sequel, not-so-controversially titled Superfreakonomics.

There’s a major problem with it, though - they decided to keep the contrarian position on areas that neither of the authors had any expertise in whatsoever. Chapter 5 is dedicated to climate change, and predictably, they adopt a position very similar to that of well-known arch-delayer Bjorn Lomborg - essentially, it’s not a serious problem, and it’s more cost-effective to geoengineer our way out of it. (Lomborg’s version has an extra facet - essentially “given limited resources, here are other social causes that give us more bang for our buck than climate, we should focus on them (but I won’t)” - but Superfreakonomics likely wasn’t written as an inactivist policy work.) Due to the popularity of the original book, I’m predicting that this book will give new life to zombie arguments that were laid to rest ages ago.

Note that, apparently, people writing on the Freakonomics blog about this issue tend to have their comments quietly deleted (Update: photographic evidence of same.). When the authors eventually did respond, they ignored charges of misrepresentation, called their accusers’ claims “essentially fraudulent” without addressing any of them, and dubbed the Union of Concerned Scientists an “environmental advocacy group” (they link to, but do not name, the group, leaving people who read but don’t follow links to think it’s Greenpeace or something). Levitt also says that they don’t deny AGW, but ten posts earlier, his co-author posted favorably about pro-denialist coverage, and dismissing the pro-science side as “shrill” without looking at their points. This makes the Unscientific America fiasco look patently honest by comparison.

EDIT: 18/10/09: The authors keep the deceptive terminology and nameless linking in their subsequent post, except here they claim that the whole attack on them is a smear. They offer an (unsubstantiated) defense on the misrepresentation claim by saying Romm himself engaged in misrepresentation, but ignore the other substantive critiques.

EDIT: 27/10/09: The Associated Press wrote an excellent piece on temperature trends recently (they sent the unlabeled data to several statisticians and asked them what they’d make of - and surprise, no cooling trend), and as part of it spoke to Levitt on his claims of global cooling:

Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, said he does not believe there is a cooling trend. He said the line was just an attempt to note the irony of a cool couple of years at a time of intense discussion of global warming. Levitt said he did not do any statistical analysis of temperatures, but “eyeballed” the numbers and noticed 2005 was hotter than the last couple of years. Levitt said the “cooling” reference in the book title refers more to ideas about trying to cool the Earth artificially.

(Emphasis mine.) You’re welcome to read the chapter yourself (Brad DeLong links it below) and see if his book purports the idea of a cooling trend in an “ironic” fashion, what with the subtitle of the book being “global cooling” and including quotes like “Then there’s this little-discussed fact about global warming: while the drumbeat of doom has grown louder of the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased.” (Emphasis in original)
(It reminds me of another incident, where well-known Australian denialist Jennifer Morohasy posted these two anti-AGW arguments, which violate elementary thermodynamics, and then tried to save face by posting the definition of Socratic irony.)

For the record, read about their newest form of defense here - it’s changed again.

UPDATE: 16:37/28/10/09: Levitt and Dubner have a new op-ed out. Guess what? They’ve changed their defense again, this time comparing those skeptical of geoengineering to flat-earthers. An acquaintance of mine summed it up adroitly: “This is frantic back-pedaling disguised as elaboration, isn’t it?” You can check this yourself by seeing how their defense tactics have changed over time.
(Minor update: Josh at EnviroKnow also notes this piece’s factual accuracy leaves much to be desired.)

UPDATE: 10:33/29/10/09: Levitt’s been doing the promo circuit (as many authors do). His appearance on the Daily Show took some flak (see below), but I was just informed of another appearance, on the Diane Rehm Show, in which he put forth this whopper. This is significant because it’s the first time either Levitt or Dubner has mentioned ocean acidification, a critical problem with carbon emissions that their favored flavour of geoengineering won’t fix. Levitt’s solution? “Pour a bunch of base into it”. See the link for an explanation on just how fractally wrong this is.

UPDATE: 14:49/03/11/09: Steve Dubner was interviewed by Metro. In it, he claims “I don’t know why everyone keeps calling it the Global Cooling chapter” (hint: you say it yourself on page 186), accuses his critics of being financially motivated, and closes with “We’re heading towards cataclysm and carbon mitigation alone is not enough…there’s no excuse to forget about alternative energy” (hint: See page 186 again, where you start by attacking wind energy and transition to an attack on solar power, page 187 where you claim abandoning coal is “economic suicide”, or indeed the entire climate chapter, where you claim carbon mitigation strategies don’t work because, contrary to your entire earlier book, economic incentives don’t change behaviour in this one case). This, on the heels of Dubner’s earlier lie that ocean acidification was covered in the book, suggests he’s gambling on people either not reading the book or not understanding the issues. Exactly how is assuming your critics are ill-informed going to help address their concerns, Mr. Dubner?

In the same manner that Things Break collects links to responses to George Will, I’ve been collecting people responding to Superfreakonomics‘ climate chapter on a forum I frequent, but I figure I should put this up on the blog, if for no other reason than increasing the chances a search will uncover it. Check below the fold for the links.

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October 13, 2009

Review: Climate Cover-Up

Filed under: Commentary, Denialism, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Brian D @ 5:08 pm

(Click the cover to go to the book’s official page and read the synopsis and blurbs. Pay attention to who’s giving it the best praise.)

Short review: If you’ve listened to me discuss denialism and PR at all in the last two years, consider that a Coles-notes-version of a course on the subject. This would be the required textbook to such a course.

I’ve been waiting for this book for years before I knew it was coming out. Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming is easy to read (my father, who isn’t as steeped in the material as I am and thus isn’t likely to enter the “skim the familiar bits” mode, finished it in two and a half hours, including time for lunch) and covers an incredible amount of territory - from the foundations of public relations itself to the brutal specifics of the modern-day inactivist noise machine. It’s also, in a refreshing change, not entirely American-centric: the authors, based out of BC, spend  a good chunk of time observing Canadian inactivism and the impact it’s had on our leadership. (I’ve certainly cited them before: they’re the main people behind the DeSmog Blog. Oh, and by the way, Ian, the federal Liberals get hit almost as heavily as Stephen Harper here. It seems the accusations of partisanship may only apply to Kevin Grandia.)

For someone like me, obsessed with this very subject (and science communication as a whole), many of the details aren’t new, although seeing them all in one place puts them in a different perspective. However, for people less familiar with the scope of the Denial Machine, this book may be one loud wake-up call after the other. James Hoggan pulls no punches and isn’t afraid to name names - some professional denialists, most notably S. Fred Singer, are mentioned so often that the reader learns to recognize their names, which should prove useful in spotting denialist op-eds.

Content-wise, the book follows a logical organization: After a brief introduction to public relations as a whole (including an often-ignored ‘oath’ of sorts to serve the public interest), it progresses through the inner workings of the Denial Machine not in chronological order (which would only make sense to those familiar with PR in the first place), but rather in chapters based on specific PR techniques. One chapter highlights astroturfing (fake grassroots movements), for instance, while another talks about petitions, another on “follow the money”, another on think tanks, another on SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation - in essence “you can’t afford a legal defense so stop criticizing big business”), and so on. Later chapters focus not only on specific techniques, but also specific lobbies, notably Exxon (a recurring theme in the book) and the coal industry. As I’m fond of saying, a good PR company is invisible (its goal is to promote its client, not itself), so many of the techniques here simply aren’t known about by the general public, and the book does an excellent job in both discussing them and providing illustrations from the Denial Machine.

In brief, this is a must-read book. I’ve read a lot of climate/energy books over the past couple of years (trying to glean how to get the message across to the public); this is one of the two best books on the subject you will find, even if you aren’t involved in the issue at all. (The other, of course, is What’s The Worst That Could Happen? by Greg Craven; sample reviews at Only In It For The Gold and ClimateSight.) Another decent review of the book is from energy policy guru Joe Romm; it takes a monumentally impressive work to get him to refer to something as a “must-read”. As long as I am listing reviews, I should mention John Mashey’s review, which is where I heard of the book in the first place; Mashey is a diligent observer of inactivist strategies as they develop (and his work is cited in the book), and his review goes into more detail than my rather more casual piece.

Consider it required reading for anyone remotely interested in a livable climate, or defending public interest from industry. Although, fair warning: You will probably be angry (or angrier) at the status quo after reading this. It certainly makes me want to take a stronger stand than before… maybe I can find a way to link studies of PR and denialism into my grad studies…

September 25, 2009

Review: The Age of Stupid

Filed under: Commentary, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Brian D @ 11:01 am

The Age of Stupid Global Premiere Trailer

Two of the biggest problems with climate change as a social problem are that it is not immediate, and that it isn’t human - that is, it doesn’t have a face and it isn’t in our face. This, in turn, makes it very easy to ignore.

Before I continue, I’d like to take a moment to remind everyone about the modes of persuasion found in common rhetoric. In a nutshell, logos is an appeal to information favored in science, ethos is an appeal to expertise (for lack of a better term) favored in law, and pathos is an appeal to emotion (which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s using incorrect information, although it’s often abused that way, especially in an appeal to fear). Although a logical fallacy, pathos can be undeniably powerful, especially where logic has failed - I Have A Dream is almost entirely pathos, for instance, and look at what it did to the civil rights movement.

I bring this up for a very good reason: If the IPCC is logos and An Inconvenient Truth is ethos, The Age of Stupid is climate change’s pathos. The three sources share roughly the same relationship as the modes of persuasion. The film is a fascinating attempt to personalize climate change, to illustrate that it’s an ethical issue, and to show how time’s running out. Don’t expect it to be educational in terms of the science (that isn’t its role), but do expect to be moved by it.

As a film, it’s hard to classify: It’s part documentary and part drama. During the film’s creation, the crew traveled to different places looking for human stories relating to climate change. These range from an up-and-coming businessman in India hoping to end poverty by starting a low-cost airline to an ancient French mountaineer affected by retreating glaciers and the traffic of globalization, from a young woman in Nigeria forced to sell diesel on the black market to pay for her medical school to a wind turbine developer in England facing off against the NIMBY crowd, and so on. These stories are compelling, especially when taken as a whole, but the film wasn’t considered marketable with just that approach.

In order to increase the appeal (and, in my opinion, strengthen the message), a framing story was constructed - the year is 2055, we didn’t act, the worst-case-scenarios of climate change came true, and now civilization has collapsed. Alone in an Arctic tower containing an archive of as much of our planet’s history as could be managed, a genial English archivist reviews film clips from around 2008 (the stories above), wondering why we didn’t save ourselves when we had the chance.  The framing story also draws on news clips from the last few years and a couple of expository animations created to move the story along. For something that was literally filmed in a day, it works surprisingly well, in a large part due to Pete Postlethwaite’s casting.

This isn’t a scientific movie. Its opening text card says its science comes from the ‘mainstream’ understanding, but the only scientific claims in the film are drawn from news clips (and we all know how journalists botch science reporting), Mark Lynas (a journalist best known for Six Degrees), and the backdrop of the framing story (a work of fiction). As I understand it, although the speed of the events in the framing story is on the high side, it does still appear to fall within the scenarios put forth by the IPCC - yes, the worst-case-scenarios really are that bad (although, as I suggest, they may not be that bad as quickly).  Still, my focus isn’t on climate science, so I’ll be doing what I can to check this claim in the future.

Really, though, the framing story is just glue holding it together. The point isn’t about the science, it’s about the stories of the people now. Some of the documentary segments really highlight why the title is appropriate - they showcase how even with our best intentions, we seem to willingly blind ourselves to the big picture. The Indian businessman with the low-cost airline, for instance, volunteers at a poverty shelter and is concerned about his people, and even claims to value the environment, but seems oblivious to the impact air travel has on the atmosphere. There’s a man in Louisiana, recently retired from thirty years as a Shell Oil geoscientist, rescuing over a hundred people in the Katrina aftermath (in which he lost nearly everything he owned), but still saying that given the choice, he’d go into oil again. The most blatant example was an anti-wind-farm activist, opposing wind developments because (essentially) it would spoil the view of the English countryside, claiming to be very concerned about global warming. (She’s the lady in the trailer above who acts incredulous when asked that.) Taken on their own, they get the point across to people willing to listen, but I admit, without the framing story, it would be hard to get through all of what they’ve included.

Bottom line: I would recommend it, especially to people who are realistic about the science but don’t see the need to act. The major message is that climate change isn’t an environmentalist issue so much as the defining social issue of our times (a point the ever-insightful Kate just made over at the criminally-under-subscribed ClimateSight); to understand or communicate this issue well, the film gets a glowing recommendation.

I would ESPECIALLY recommend it for people interested in social or reform activism of any sort who are NOT engaged in climate change yet - the local Make Poverty History group in particular comes to mind - because, as I’ve said before, no amount of humanitarian aid can improve the human condition in an unlivable climate. The best long-term humanitarian aid people can give right now is getting a serious global cut in carbon emissions.

I would NOT recommend it as a mode of persuasion for people who dismiss even conservative estimates as alarmist. (Bear in mind how the debate works…) My reasons, again, fall back to the strengths and weaknesses of the modes of persuasion. Remember the civil rights movement again? Pathos didn’t convince the establishment to change, but it did engage the progressives to act - and it was that engagement that brought about effective reform. If the IPCC and every single national and international scientific body on the planet aren’t enough to convince people to act, The Age of Stupid won’t either. However, the film just might get fence-sitters off of their asses and calling for a low-carbon transition.

Is it perfect? Far from it. Is it entirely accurate? You’d only worry about that in the deliberately fictional framing story, since the rest of the film keeps the science to a minimum. Does it need to be? Viewing it as necessary pathos, I don’t believe so. The Age Of Stupid managed to put a human face and personality on climate change, and managed to deliver it in a way to make it both immediate and personal. For that, I applaud them, and do recommend the movie. Just don’t judge it for what it isn’t.

April 17, 2009

DeSmog, the BC carbon tax, and biases

Filed under: Commentary, Environment — Tags: , , , , , , — Brian D @ 5:13 pm

So my friend Ian at Terahertz has some choice words aimed at DeSmogBlog over political bias. For what it’s worth, if you know me personally, then you probably know I share many of Ian’s viewpoints; he’s just much more outspoken than I am (not to mention less shy), and usually ends up speaking for me. However, since I’ve had a history with DeSmog, I’m weighing in.

This started out as a comment on that post, but it grew overlong and overlinked, so it migrated here. Check below the fold for background info and details. (more…)

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