My Fifteen Milliseconds of Fame

A few weeks ago I posted an impulsive, long-winded comment about patterns of climate denialism on the website of Nature that said nothing which did not seem to me painfully obvious (comment #15330 here). I wondered if I was a time-wasting fool to write it at all, and blushed when I realized (too late, it is always too late) that I had repeatedly committed the awful typo “AWG” for “AGW” (anthropogenic global warming, an acronym favored among climate-change denialists). Argggh.

I was therefore surprised to receive an e-mail from Nature staff asking me if I would be willing to abridge the letter for publication in their magazine. Uh . . . well . . . yes! Nature is one of the two premiere general-coverage science journals in the world (the other is Science), and a chance to sound off on its Correspondence page is an honor not to be declined.

Here’s the letter as it appeared in this week’s Nature, with the editors’ heading:

An Intellectual Black Hole

News items on climate change are now regularly flooded with negative online comments (see, for example, go.nature.com/Lfigec). These tend to have certain features in common.

The comment writers struggle to find words that are emphatic enough to express their contempt for anthropogenic global warming and for the 97% or so of active climate scientists who accept its reality. They feel attacked, lied to and conspired against: they are intensely angry. Their comments are often pervaded by heavy sarcasm. In their view, climate scientists are not merely mistaken, but foes of truth and liberty. They see themselves as fighting a powerful enemy — a posture that can be addictive.

These comment authors rarely engage with the original science (in the above example, an article in Geophysical Research Letters). They have unplugged from the scientific discourse because they believe it to be driven by crypto-environmentalist (or crypto-communist) ideology. This conviction characterizes fundamentalisms: a true believer does not need to engage, they already know. The denialists charge that it is the scientists who refuse to consider the evidence; alternatively, scientists know all about it and are lying. The parallels with some creationist rhetoric are striking.

Certain standard fallacies and counterfactuals are held by these commenters as irresistible ‘gotchas’ — any one of which makes the idea of human-induced global warming absurd (and further thought unnecessary). For example, a popular line of argument is that because climate has changed in the past without human input, humans cannot be changing it now. Mistaken beliefs are held that scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate modellers and other researchers ignore factors such as water vapour, urban heat islands and the Sun.

The peculiar danger of any full-blown conspiracy theory is that it can become an intellectual black hole, a one-way trip. Hope lies mostly in keeping people out of the hole, rather than trying to rescue those who have fallen in.

Larry Gilman

Sharon, Vermont, USA

Nature, Nov. 25, 2010, 468:508.

One of the bits I wish I could have retained from my original effusion is the following extended version of the “black hole” idea, which says how such belief systems can swallow a mind whole:

The peculiar danger of any full-blown conspiracy theory — and the belief that scientists are actually conspiring to fake “AGW” is often expressed in these [denialist] comments — is that it can become a sealed-off mind-bubble, an intellectual black hole with no way out. No evidence can convince you that the world is not a dream, if you choose to believe that it is one, because any possible evidence could itself be dreamed: likewise, no scientific facts can change the mind a person who believes firmly enough in a global “AGW” conspiracy because the only possible source of such facts — scientists who study climate — is known a priori by the believer to be corrupt.

Pleasant dreams.

Striking Just the Right False Balance

Over at the New York Times, climate blogger Andrew Revkin has just posted a response from scientist Michael Prather, who has done an astonishing pile of fine work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate (IPCC) over the years. Prather takes issue with two statements from Revkin, the first of which reads: “Environmentalists assert that the reports by the panel are watered down by a requirement that sponsoring governments approve its summaries line by line.”

Such remarks, Prather says, “seem too easy, and I worry that such beliefs and accusations become propagated as facts without some serious evaluation as to their authority.”

I have profound respect for the work of the IPCC. Its 2007 report is an epoch-making, primary resource for anyone wanting to understand climate change. Nevertheless, Dr. Prather’s response seems to me evasive at best. Indeed, the statement he quotes is itself “watered down.” That governments meddled with language in the IPCC’s 2007 report is not simply a claim of “environmentalists” but of participants in the IPCC process, as reported in the mainstream press. See, for example, “U.S., China Got Climate Warnings Toned Down” (Washington Post, April 7, 2007), which begins: “Some sections of a grim scientific assessment of the impact of global warming on human, animal and plant life issued in Brussels yesterday were softened at the insistence of officials from China and the United States, participants in the negotiations said.” Before-and-after versions of specific passages are quoted.

Did these events happen, or did they not? If they did, shouldn’t journalists represent them as fact, not as something that “environmentalists assert”?

This is a case of the journalistic phenomenon of false balance — the casting of disputed questions in an apparently even-handed form that conveys a distorted impression of fact. Climate scientists themselves have been dogged by false balance for decades, as journalists noted demurely that this or that question (on which 90+ percent of scientists doing relevant work agree) is “disputed”—as indeed it is, by a tiny handful of people with scientific qualifications plus Rush Limbaugh. Here, in a turnabout that I do not find refreshing, false balance is deployed to soften facts about the IPCC process, trotting them out as dubious “assertions.” (“Assert” is one of those inherently loaded words. If somebody is represented as “asserting” something, the reader is already three-quarters of the way to dismissing whatever it is they’re saying.)

It is obviously unlikely that powerful and ruthless governments explicitly given line-by-line authority over the IPCC’s final reports would never use that authority. And, if news accounts such as the one cited above are accurate, they do use it — sparingly, cautiously, selectively. The IPCC’s scientific content is strong, but governments don’t care about that. They know that few people, including science journalists, actually buckle down and read the IPCC’s science. They’re afraid of soundbites — quotable passages in plain, alarming language that might go viral enough to threaten business as usual. These are the passages, it appears, that they bestir themselves to censor.

So this is not, I think, about the scientific validity of the IPCC’s conclusions. It’s about spin. Governments spin primarily through censorship, outright lies, controlling access, and spoonfeeding leaks to journalists; journalists spin — usually unconsciously, no doubt, assuming that it is simply how one stays “objective,” above the fray — primarily through false balance and selective omission. And Revkin is one of the good ones.

Whoa, Jim

On April 2, 2009, policy wonk Jason Grumet and climate scientist Jim Hansen spoke on climate change at Dartmouth College as part of the engineering school’s “Great Issues in Energy” series. The video of the happening can be found here. Because I am connected to the Internet through a satellite that has about much bandwidth as a tin can attached to a taut string, I cannot download that video just now, but I was present for the event.

I found it depressing. There was not much news for me on the climate front, which is grim enough, but hearing Grumet — who is funny, flashy, and likeable — riffing cleverly on how there is no hope from democracy, only from the skillful exercise of Jedi mind tricks on semi-retarded US senators (though he didn’t say it that way), was pretty bleak. And although I liked Hansen very much, including his unabashed love for children and his insistence that we act responsibly toward future generations, I got an unpleasant shock during the question-and-answer part of the program.

A questioner mentioned Amory Lovins, well-known energy guru since the 1970s. Grumet disarmingly joked, “Well, Amory Lovins is always right — eventually.”

I am paraphrasing from memory, but Hansen’s follow-up went partly like this:

“Well, at least we’ve finally found a point on which Jason and I disagree. Lovins is not always right. He is dead wrong. He says you don’t need coal, you don’t need nuclear — that you can do it all with ‘soft energy.’ But I’ve had my students graph what he said back in the 70s was going to happen with alternative energy versus what has actually happened. There’s no resemblance.”

(When my tin-can link permits me to download the video of the event, I may be able to substitute a verbatim transcript for that paraphrase.)

The problem? I have read almost everything by Amory Lovins, and I am reasonably certain that he never, in the 1970s or later, made any predictions at all about the shape of the energy future. The only Lovins graphs that I can imagine that Hansen is referring to were not predictions but illustrative scenarios concocted to show where we might go, energywise, if we made certain decisions. Here is the most famous of them, the one, I’m betting, that Hansen has his students debunk:


That is from page 38 of Lovins’s most influential book, Soft Energy Paths (1977). I speculate that it is the one Hansen offers his students because so far as I know, it is the only graph explicitly showing an alternative-dominated future that Lovins ever published. But note its title: this is an “alternative illustrative future,” not a forecast. Nine pages earlier, Lovins supplied a similar graphic showing coal and nuclear power’s possible contribution to gross primary energy swelling and dominating through 2025, with no visible contribution from “soft technologies” (which include, but are not limited to, what we now call “renewables”).

Such charts are not forecasts and so cannot be accused of making inaccurate predictions. Lovins was not predicting that we would make the choices leading to a “soft energy path” future; he was arguing that we could and should. In the event, we didn’t, so there is nothing surprising —or meaningful — about the graph’s non-realization.

A real scientist and a thoroughly likeable chap, Hansen should know better than to treat a scenario as a prediction. That is what depressed me about his response. Hansen has produced charts like this himself, only for greenhouse-emissions scenarios rather than energy-usage scenarios. Here’s one:


So Lovins was doing exactly the same thing with energy supplies in 1977 that Hansen was doing in 2008 with carbon dioxide: not forecasting, but choice-picturing. A perfectly legitimate exercise.

Also, Hansen said during the Q&A that Lovins “says we don’t need a price on carbon.” (This according both to my memory and to a partial real-time transcript that skips over the remarks I’ve paraphrased above.) But that’s simply not true. Lovins said in 2008, “carbon pricing is a good idea and we should do it. Putting carbon in the air should not be free any more.” He does caution that both main ways of putting a price on carbon — a carbon tax and cap-and-trade — could fail if done improperly, but that is hardly a controversial statement.

I am not a mindless Lovins groupie: I think he projects too much optimism about the ability of profit-driven corporate reform and “technical fixes” to preserve our technical civilization while absolving us of any unwelcome changes in lifestyle whatsoever. But when Hansen speaks about Lovins I hear, to my alarm and surprise, the sound of axes being ground against grudges. My guess is that Lovins’s opposition to nuclear power, which Hansen supports, is the nub. But fair is fair. And Hansen, when I heard him, was not being fair to Lovins. And the stakes are too high for someone as important as Hansen to indulge in annoyance-driven inaccuracies.

Whoa, Jim.

Consensus Conshmensus

The Cato Institute is an intellectual stopped clock. When right thinking aligns with dislike for centralized authority, the one clear notion at the heart of its libertarian faith, Cato is right on. If the White House decreed tomorrow that we must all get the Number of the Beast tattooed on our foreheads, Cato would be there for us, man! But when reality doesn’t align with its fixed idea, Cato opts for fantasy.

Case in point, as Rod Serling might say: climate change. Cato is brewing up a full-page ad respectfully telling President Obama that it is just not true that the science on climate change is settled. Why, look at this list of credentialed names we have produced. All these PhDs reject the “consensus.” Isn’t it obvious that there is at least room for honest doubt? That at least some independent thinkers are refusing to bleat along with the rest of the white-coated sheep?

Listen to that word “consensus.” It gives me the willies. We should exile it from the discourse. It has the same leaden ring, the same negative semantic charge long accumulated, as “dogma,” “doctrine,” “orthodoxy,” “party line.” Who or what, except a group of vaguely-imagined New Agers trying to decide where to plant the quinoa without hurting any feelings, works by “consensus”? The word smells of doubts suppressed, of group approval sought. No wonder so many people who know some science, including a few once-brilliant folks like Freeman Dyson (now slipping into a particularly spectacular and public dotage, climate-changewise), are eager to declare their independence from “the scientific consensus on climate change.” I sympathize. Screw the consensus. Speak up for the truth, every time.

The problem: scientifically, in the special sense discussed above, there is no “global consensus on climate change.” That is, there is no touchy-feely global community of scientists all Om-ing together to drive out the vibes of dissent. There is an overwhelming, complex, convergent, stewing, bubbling, ongoing mass of good work done by the best people intimately involved with the data, the uncertainties, and the alternatives. This is not a process of “consensus” in the sense of a show of hands, the adoption of a common view for the sake of happy harmony. This is the largest body of hard-core, peer-reviewed research on a single topic ever done in the history of science. There are mathematical models, ice cores from Antarctica going back 800,000 years without a glitch, measurements of the shrinking gravitational pull of Greenland’s melting glaciers, sludge cores from the bottoms of the oceans, instrumental records, tree rings, sea-level measurements, satellite measurements of land, sea, and air temperature . . . why, just to name the categories of information that have been enlisted to shed light on whether (a) climate is warming (b) humans are the cause (c) the warming will continue and is dangerous would take a whole page of single-spaced fine print. The answers are Yes, Yes, and Yes. Stay tuned for resolution of all details -- but Yes.

The Cato Institute people seem to dislike these answers because they threaten, by implication, to empower governments. If climate change is real, human-caused, and mitigable, then government action is obviously essential to saving our collective ass. Since all government action is disasteful to Cato, from Wall Street bailouts to public schools, it seems clear to them that science cannot be telling us what it seems to be telling us. There must be some kind of mass delusion or fraud afoot. Our libertarian desires are an infallible index of reality, are they not? At least that much is clear!

But climate science's triple Yes (climate change is real, our fault, bad news) is not a “consensus,” a manufactured consent. It is just science. It is exactly the same kind of science that tells us how the Solar System runs, what the stars are, how DNA works, how transistors transist. Some people -- hundreds with science degrees, as Cato shows -- don’t like what science is saying. That is understandable. Science is telling us that we are in a frig of a mess and that we are sliding deeper into it, maybe to a disastrous degree, especially if we don’t make some highly annoying changes to the way we live and make them fast. So they blink. They suddenly conceive of themselves as independent-minded truth-lovers resisting a phony “consensus.”

“Science isn’t democratic!” they bark, while Cato holds out its microphone. “Scientific truth is not decided by a show of hands!” True, very true, although a show of hands is an odd way to make that point. And the science on climate change has not, in fact, been decided by hand-counting. It has been decided the hard way, the old-fashioned way, the scientific way, piece by piece, dispute by dispute, fact by fact. The natural and healthful friction of that machine, that is, the fact-based disputation which is the basis of scientific integrity, is amplified and distorted by the “realists,” as the fantasists like to call themselves, until in their picture there is only friction, no machine. Only uncertainty. No science. No knowledge of the real world. No meaningful -- spit between fingers! -- “consensus.”

I am fascinated by the fact that Creationism operates in the same mode. In Creationist public relations, petitions of this sort -- declarations of incompetence signed by hundreds of dissenters with science degrees (almost invariably opining out-of-area) -- are a tradition. While the Cato Institute is assembling its Roll of Cluelessness for pricey publication in the New York Times and elsewhere, it might wish to check out the competition over at the Discovery Institute, which offers a long list of credentialed people who think evolution is hogwash. Its structure is the same. Its function is the same.

Its value is the same.

Climate Creationism

Recently I wrote a large number of subject-specific articles for a two-volume reference work entitled Climate Change: In Context. Somehow it fell into the hands of a climate-change “skeptic” for review. This person snarked to the publisher:

Most interesting is that the atmosphere reached a peak in 1998 and has been cooling since 2002. I'd be interested in seeing one of your writers response to that.

My pleasure; I’ll respond in full in a moment. But I’d like to note first the rhetorical, gestural kinship between creationism and climate-change denial. Both schools of thought claim that a small, intrepid minority of truly independent-minded thinkers sees an elephant in the living room (e.g., the unreality of climate change, the lack of any evidence whatever for evolution) that most of the world’s practicing scientists dishonestly refuse to see or are mysteriously unable to see. To bolster this vision of a beleaguered prophetic minority they rely heavily on the careful framing of certain facts in isolation from the patterns around them. These factoids, when properly isolated, colored, framed, spun, and cross-linked to other, similarly processed factoids, seem to make a convincing case -- especially to well-meaning people with little or no knowledge of science -- against the mainstream scientific view. This omission of context is a powerful tool for causing confusion and creating the appearance of mass scientific delusion or controversy over basic ideas where none exists.

In this case, the facts or factoids being isolated from their surrounding pattern are global average surface temperatures for the last decade or so.

I have two points to make. The first is general. The second responds to the specific point raised about cooler years.

(1) The reality of human-caused global warming is affirmed by every single US government science agency and by every major non-governmental science organizations in the world. For example, NASA states that “recent observations of warming support the theory that greenhouse gases are warming the world.” [1] NASA attributes these gases’ increase to human agency. [2] The US Climate Change Science Program states that for North America -- which has experienced less warming than the global average -- “seven of the warmest ten years for annual surface temperatures from 1951 to 2006 have occurred between 1997 and 2006.” [3] The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that air temperatures at the Earth’s surface, as well as at higher altitudes, have been increasing and notes that “seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001 and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1995.” [4] Here are the data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [5]:


There are critics of this overwhelming scientific consensus, and some of these critics even have scientific credentials. However, their claims that global climate change is either not real or is not primarily human-caused are almost never defended in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. [6] They are expressed in blogs, media interviews, newspaper articles, speeches, petitions, testimony to Congress, and non-peer-reviewed books -- in a word, outside the scientific process. Creationists, of course, operate in exactly the same fringe zone.

In writing a climate textbook it would therefore be the height of scholarly irresponsibility, akin to advancing Creationism in a biology textbook, to adopt or give serious consideration to any view of climate change other than the only view articulated extensively in the recent scientific literature: namely, that global climate change is real and human-caused. To even pretend that there is substantial scientific debate over the basic reality and human-caused nature of global warming would be to essentially lie to readers.

(2) “Most interesting is that the atmosphere reached a peak in 1998 and has been cooling since 2002.”

I reproduce again the IPCC’s figure:


Note that climate does not warm uniformly, in a smoothly climbing ramp or curve. It bobbles as it rises. Runs of cooling years alternate with runs of warming years. The process is a noisy one. The occurrence of a run of cooling years, either recently or in the near future, is almost inevitable. To point to such a run as evidence against global warming is fallacious, exactly as it would be to point to a cold snap in April as evidence that summer was not coming. Those who argue so misunderstand -- one can hardly help but feel, when the claim is coming from a scientist, willfully misunderstand -- the obvious character of the instrumental record.

In particular, any cooling that has occurred in recent years has done so against the background of dramatic overall warming (unprecedented in at least the last 1300 years) seen in the figure. Taking 2 steps back when you have already gone 30 steps ahead leaves you 28 steps ahead.

The last decade of data can be spun as “a peak in 1998 followed by cooling.” But what the data actually show, in the historical context, is a spike in 1998 followed by a string of some of the hottest years on record. NASA states that the 2008 meteorological year “was the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880. The nine warmest years all occur within the eleven-year period 1998-2008.” [7]

The 1998 spike is clearly visible in the above graph (the lone gray dot floating above the black 5-year averaged line). Both that spike and the “cooling trend” of the years since are noisy squiggles on a very long-standing rising trend. Similar squiggles are superimposed over the entire instrumental record. And it is the long-term trend that matters. Nothing else matters. Nobody is arguing in the real, peer-reviewed scientific literature that anything else matters. All claims to the contrary are pseudoscience.

Our book drew solely upon the most reliable scientific sources, such as the US government science agencies and the peer-reviewed literature (e.g., Science and Nature). It assumed throughout the only responsible educational account of global warming possible, given the state of the science: global warming is occurring, it is significant in magnitude, and it is human-caused. Recent weather has nothing to do with these conclusions because it is too short-term.


NOTES

[1] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/global_warming_update3.php
[2] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/global_warming_update2.php
[3] http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap1-3/sap1-3-final-exec-sum.pdf
[4] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html#q3
[5] http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf
[6] Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science, 3 December 2004, p. 1686. I will send a PDF of this article to any inquirer.
[7] http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/

Oh No!

My old friend Dave, a remarkable combination of short-haired engineering wonk and drug-crazed teenager hopped on 70s glam-rock, recently sent me a Blue Öyster Cult sampler that included the song “Godzilla.” The lyrics are not only a hoot but hard to argue with:

History shows again and again
That Nature points out the folly of men
Oh no Godzilla!

. . . Godzilla, of course, being a product of nuclear hubris gone awry. Surely, we have been warned. But here it comes anyway: geoengineering! And what is geoengineering? Well, the usual population of enterprising technology-worshippers is now proposing to solve global warming by diverting sunlight from the Earth using giant space mirrors, or adding tiny particles (aerosols) to the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, or dumping powdered iron in the oceans to encourage plankton to suck up carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean floor with it, or any or all of these and a number of other schemes.

Now, the New York Times has never seen a big-budget, high-tech extravaganza that it didn’t like, from the peaceful atom to Mars colonization -- its “science” section runs at least one brief for the aerospace industry every week, disguised as journalism -- and its climate coverage is no exception. It prints two regular columns, one, TierneyLab, written by a greenhouse denier named John Tierney (who boasts of having “always wanted to be a scientist,” my emphasis) and the other, Dot Earth, written by a painfully non-militant, center-worshipping greenie named Andrew Revkin. In the March 7, 2008 Times online , Revkin ponders the possibilities of geoengineering and throws out the following challenge:

A question for climate campaigners opposed to geo-engineering (by any name): Why not at least explore (and test on reasonable scales) such options. If you take the threats of global warming as seriously as you say, why not at least pursue some work on this kind of backstop even as work on mitigating emissions continues?

Let’s take the first sentence first. A policy of “keep all options on the table,” as the jargon goes, would require us to give meaningfully lush grants not only to space mirrors and deliberate aerosol pollution but also to iron fertilization, fusion reactors, deep-ocean carbon sinking, microwave power satellites, and more. Most of these technologies cannot be developed -- in the case of anything space-based, cannot even be “test[ed] on reasonable scales” -- without spending many billions of dollars. But Federal energy budgeting is, to a good first approximation, a zero-sum game. Money spent on what might work (geoengineering) would be sucked from what will work (mitigating emissions). We’re shopping with food stamps, not gold bullion: buying all options is not an option. Opportunity costs are real.

The second sentence quoted above is therefore question-begging, because it lays down as a given that “work on mitigating emissions” would proceed along with geoengineering projects. But whether mitigation would continue on a scale that has any hope of being effective is precisely what is called into question by the logic of fund-all-options.

Two other points. (1) All our previous large-scale technical interferences with the environment have produced more secondary problems than they have solved primary problems. Our tippy global canoe is now freighted with the ever-growing burden of all the shifty, fecund secondary problems that our ingenious solutions to primary problems have bred -- and the waterfall ahead is getting louder. Jiggering the sky would almost certainly be dangerous in intractable ways that we do not foresee. The experts paid to do the jiggering would not be motivated to admit the possibility of intractable dangers, indeed of any dangers. “Climate control” is a marketer’s phrase, self-flattering and inherently phony; “climate experimentation” would be a more realistic tag.

(2) If we Fund All Options, every worker on every dubious mega-technical fix will inevitably make inflated claims for the benefits of their own technology. A chorus of reassurances will thus arise from laboratories across the land, publicly funded and desperate to renew their grants, and this chorus will inevitably create the impression that some easy way out -- some high-tech fix far nicer than the scutwork of reducing emissions -- must be perpetually right around ten different corners. This probably-false impression, purchased by funds diverted from mitigating emissions, would undermine our will to mitigate emissions. Indeed, it would be deliberately leveraged to do so by all those who want to preserve business-as-usual.

In sum, experimental megatechnic interferences with Earth’s energy budget would be cripplingly expensive to develop, would likely have unforeseen, intractable side effects, and would certainly be used to divert us from the ugly but sure-fire work of reducing emissions. Oh no, Godzilla!