A long quiet spell

 I've let this space go dark recently, partly because my real job has been all-consuming for the last little bit, and partly because I was thinking about the direction I wanted to take this blog in future.

I started here in a fire of righteous indignation at the politically and ideologically driven science denial propagated -- chiefly across the web -- by those who wanted to sweep the problem of global warming under the rug. On that front, I and many others that took part in the struggle to reveal the true face of climate denial can declare victory, for victory it is when the public recognizes science denial as one facet of the polarized right's assault on American society, and they have.

Sorry, 8%ers, you lose

I can pinpoint the moment I knew we'd won this battle. It was when Todd Akin's theories on pregnancy and "legitimate rape" blew up across the interwebs, claiming his political career as a casualty almost as an after thought. (Quick, what state did he lose his race in?) At that moment, it was crystal clear to everyone with eyes to see (that is, everyone not already sunk deep in this radical right-wing social movement) that a certain portion of the public had decided they could just make up science on the spot. And most people quite rightly recognize this as quackery. Mission accomplished.

Exposing quackery was all I ever wanted to do with this blog, and it stands exposed. Very well, but shoddy thinking in the name of the cause is an immortal enemy, and it will rise up as many times as it can be laid to rest. Nevertheless it still warrants some reflection about how best to go about fighting distortions and misinformation. Clinical psychologist Norbert Schwarz argues that repeating misinformation in order to debunk it may contribute to the problem.

Even if we can avoid reinforcing misinformation, the larger problem with approaching climate change from an attitude of refuting science denial is that, implicitly, it grossly exaggerates climate deniers' importance as an impediment to effective reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Deniers are not the problem. They are not what is standing in the way of effective action. What is standing in the way of effective action is this:

Sixty percent of the public wants Congress to act. Seventy percent want corporations and industry to get busy. But:

It's hard to find questions about climate change with the cost to the responder cooked in. People doing serious surveys of climate change attitudes don't tend to like them, and this question illustrates why: posit a cost of $15 a month, and our majority for climate action falls to a measly 39%.

That's the climate problem, right there. It's not a tiny minority shaking their little fists and demanding Mann be indicted. It's a broad majority that recognize climate change as a serious problem, but not so serious, or so pressing, that they are ready to vote for, and pay for, effective strategies to cut greenhouse gases. What seems like an exciting clash of intellect and science versus ideology and hokum turns out to be something much more familiar and prosaic: voters that see a long-term problem and prefer to procrastinate rather than make tough decisions with real costs. See also, infrastructure. See also, education. See also, healthcare.

It's not clear that dissecting the horrifically ill-reasoned and often just as ill-argued talking points of the climate denial movement helps move forward the ball towards getting the broader public buy-in we need for carbon taxes and such. Since normal, non-blogging people avoid bitter, divisive arguments -- rather than leaning into them -- attacks on climate deniers, however witty, may contribute to the majority's determination to avoid engagement.

I might retort that I do this for my own amusement and those of like-minded people, but that's not true. I want to have a positive impact, however small, on the discourse of climate change. Maybe arguing, provoking, and poking fun are not the best way to go about it. I put it to you, loyal reader, what is?

Climate deniers losing the argument

Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in September 2012

Highlights

• Americans’ belief in the reality of global warming has increased by 13 percentage points over the past two and a half years, from 57 percent in January 2010 to 70 percent in September 2012. At the same time, the number of Americans who say global warming is not happening has declined nearly by half, from 20 percent in January 2010 to only 12 percent today.

• For the first time since 2008, more than half of Americans (54%) believe global warming is caused mostly by human activities, an increase of 8 points since March 2012. Americans who say it is caused mostly by natural changes in the environment have declined to 30 percent (from 37% in March).

• A growing number of Americans believe global warming is already harming people both at home and abroad. Four in ten say people around the world are being harmed right now by climate change (40%, up 8 percentage points since March 2012), while 36 percent say global warming is currently harming people in the United States (up six points since March).

• In addition, they increasingly perceive global warming as a threat to themselves (42%, up 13 points since March 2012), their families (46%, up 13 points), and/or people in their communities (48%, up 14 points). Americans also perceive global warming as a growing threat to people in the United States (57%, up 11 points since March 2012), in other modern industrialized countries (57%, up 8 points since March), and in developing countries (64%, up 12 points since March).

• Today over half of Americans (58%) say they are “somewhat” or “very worried” - now at its highest level since November 2008.

• For the first time since 2008, Americans are more likely to believe most scientists agree that global warming is happening than believe there is widespread disagreement on the subject (44% versus 36%, respectively). This is an increase of 9 percentage points since March 2012.

This is a welcome reminder that the climate blogosphere is a tiny, tiny community, and the irrational, unpersuadable right-wing ideologues who relentlessly seek domination over it do not reflect the broader, disengaged public. Nor is the public responding to pro-science perspectives. If I had to guess, I'd say they are simply responding to the evidence that they are seeing with their own eyes.

Fighting climate denial: the Akin line

Source

Pity Todd Akin. It must seem to him as if the world makes no sense.

One minute he is living the life of a normal House Republican gunning for a vulnerable Senate seat, and the next he's a virtual pariah, with most of his own supporters saying he should drop out of the race. And all for making a comment not substantially different than those he and his colleagues make every day. Here is the line that turned his own party against him:

Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

Instant pandemonium. But why should that be so? What did Akin actually do?

It's a five-step process:

1. You have a rigid ideology that is absolutely opposed to a given action (like abortion).
2. There are empirical facts that make your absolutist position untenable (sometimes women are pregnant not because they chose to be, but because they were raped.)
3. Find a crackpot scientist (one sharing your ideological idiosyncrasies) who will explain away the inconveint fact (Women who have really been raped don't get pregnant!)
4. Ignore the vast scientific evidence to the contrary.
5. Promote the conspiracy theory as scientific fact.

Why did Akin think he was going to get away with this sophistry? Because he and his party have been playing this game, routinely and increasingly blatantly, for years. How would he know that all of a sudden ignoring the scientific consensus and promoting pseudoscience would blow up in his face? Compare his remarks on climate change

AKIN: This whole thing strikes me if it weren’t so serious as being a comedy you know. I mean, we just went from winter to spring. In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that’s a good climate change. I don’t want to stop that climate change you know. Who in the world want to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways? What a dumb idea….
Some of the models said that we’re going to have surf at the front steps of the Capitol pretty soon. I was really looking forward to that….

 His official website trots out some more old canards (h/t Grist):

Although some of the physics and meteorology surrounding climate is well understood, the question of predicting future climate trends as well as man’s ability to definitively influence them is still an active field of scientific research. Moreover, despite our desire for complete certainty, we must understand that global climate is very complex phenomena. No one variable can be taken as the sole driver of climate and there exist cycles within cycles of meteorological variability. Scientists state that the planet has gone through many natural heating and cooling cycles over the last thousand years.

While scientists understand that increased levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases work to trap heat, those gases are not the only variables when it comes to Earth’s temperature trends. For example, the sun itself has variable output, which affects temperature cycles. Currently, scientists are somewhat puzzled by a current-extended minimum in solar activity. Such a long-term lack of solar output in the early 18th century, referred to as the Maunder Minimum, is thought to have contributed to the last mini-ice age. Of course, factors such as solar variability — that could cause a mini-ice age — would probably not afford a man-made solution.

So here's the real question: why does the one public endorsement of pseudoscience spark outrage, while the other gets ignored? What's the difference? Where is the "Akin line" that separates comments like Michele Bachmann's, blaming the HPV vaccine for mental retardation, with these, from Akin's colleagues:

The committee’s chair, Ralph Hall (R-Texas), lumps “global freezing” together with global warming, which he doesn’t believe humans can significantly impact because “I don’t think we can control what God controls.” Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) thinks cutting down trees reduces levels of greenhouse gases they absorb. Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) still trots out the debunked notion that a scientific consensus existed in the 1970s on “global cooling,” which he portrays as a scare concocted by scientists “in order to generate funds for their pet projects.”

Dan Benishek (R-Michigan) strikes that climate-scientists-as-charlatans note, dismissing contemporary research as “all baloney. I think it’s just some scheme.” Paul Broun (R-Georgia) says that “Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human-induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community.”

Watching the Deniers asks: How would you counter the denial movement? And I think the answer is very simple; we need to bring them across the Akin line. We need to gently and truthfully shape the public debate such that outrageous comments provoke outrage, that laughable ignorance provokes laughter, until we reach a point that those that advocate science denial get shunned by their own political allies as liabilities in the battle for electoral success.

So why did Akin and Bachmann instantly provoke national scorn, while Benishek and Broun have not?

A) In each case, there was a simple, testable scientific assertion. Vaccine = mental retardation. Rape = no pregnancy. It's easier to see why that more easily trips up a science denier as compared to "It's all very complicated" or "Climate models are unreliable."

B) The puppet strings are short and colorful -- there is no problem at all reading the minds of Akin and Bachmann and understanding why they are making stuff up. Akin wants abortion to be completely illegal, always, in all circumstances. That women get pregnant from rape is an awkward fact for him, so he tries to suppress it by invoking pseudoscience. Bachmann is against the HPV vaccine because it makes sex a little less dangerous for women, and in her mind, that encourages promiscuity.

In both cases the lies play into the speakers' established positions in culture wars that have been raging for a generation. Even the most low-information voter knows how conservative Republicans feel about abortion and safe sex. That makes it easy to connect the dots.

C) There is a clear scientific consensus, and the audience knows that, even if they don't know the details. Physicians and medical science have a much stronger presence in American life than does climate science or climate scientists. Most people know a physician personally. The science denial wing of the Republican party has not constructed a campaign to slander and defame physicians, attacking them as frauds or incompetent or self-interested rent-seekers. They would not find it easy to do if they tried. But in the absence of such preparation, voters have little reason to reject the scientific consensus. The total rejection by the medical community of these lies ends the debate.

D) These comments were deeply insensitive and hurtful to other Americans. Rape victims were insulted by Akin. People with actual learning disabilities or cognitive limitations and the families that care for them were insulted by Bachmann. This brought anger and contempt into the response to the speakers as well as mockery.

If we go back to the statements by Akin and friends on climate change, it's clear they are missing most of the attributes listed above. Take "Scientists state that the planet has gone through many natural heating and cooling cycles over the last thousand years." It's vague, not clear and testable (A). If you strongly connect Akin to fossil fuel interests, it could be said to meet (B). The public does not have a clear idea of the scientific consensus that the current global warming is orders of magnitude different from natural climate variations of the recent past (C). Those that do know this have also been exposed to a relentless campaign to undermine the scientific consensus by slandering the scientists themselves (C). The comment is deeply offensive to people who understand what Akin is trying to accomplish and what the actual state of affairs is, but they do not have the visceral offensiveness of someone blaming rape victims or the parents of the mentally retarded for their situation (D).

So, if we think Akin's pseudoscience about climate change deserves the same contempt as his pseudoscience about rape and pregnancy, how can we encourage the public to see things similarly?

A) In each case, there was a simple, testable scientific assertion. Focus on deniers' assertions about science. Don't let them get away with vague statements of doubt, and endless one-sided interrogations of others. Encourage them to explicitly state their beliefs.

B) The puppet strings are short and colorful -- there is no problem at all reading the minds of Akin and Bachmann and understanding why they are making stuff up. Highlight the connection between right-wing extremism and climate denial. Make the connection between science denial and other right-wing views. As entertaining as it is to show how climate denial relates to the conspiracy-theory-prone mindset, the critical driver of climate denial in politics is the broader radicalization of the Republican Party.

C) There is a clear scientific consensus, and the audience knows that, even if they don't know the details. The contempt of hardcore climate deniers for the concept of scientific consensus is born of fear. Despite deniers' whining and jeering and embrace of the Galileo gambit, the public knows very well that the consensus of the vast majority of scientists on a given issue is as close to the truth as anything we can lay hands on. And survey after survey shows that even "alarmists" vastly understate the strength of the scientific consensus on global warming -- the meaning the fact of the scientific consensus has not been "priced in" by the public.

So, while sticking to the stuff we clearly know to be true, and not venturing into unsupported speculation, it's important to highlight the contrast: Consensus vs. crackpots on the fringe.  Consensus vs. crackpots on the fringe. Consensus vs. crackpots on the fringe.

D) These comments were deeply insensitive and hurtful to other Americans. This one is hard -- I don't know it is achievable in the short term. It's difficult to "put a face" on global warming. But perhaps, as with "consensus," the deniers are giving us a hint, by vehemently attacking the arguments they most fear. And what is the single most jeered-at, eye-rolling, cliched picture in all of climate change? You know what it is. It's this:

Deniers jeer at what works.

When the deniers deny, they are insulting those that have already been hurt by climate change. They are insulting the other creatures we share the planet with. We have to make those people -- Inuits whose villages are being washed out to sea, elderly people without air conditioning dying in record-breaking heat waves, children in temperate climates suffering with tropical diseases previously unknown there -- we need to make them as real, as familiar, as indisputably linked with AGW as that bear on his shrinking ice floe. 

Compare the argument over gays in the military. While they were theoretical, people could say (and did) all sorts of ignorant and hurtful things, with little political fallout. But as the culture gradually changed, as gay service members dared to speak out more, as the ban was finally ended, gays in the military stopped being theoretical people, and they became actual, flesh-and-blood people with their lives on the line for their country. And suddenly as a social conservative you had to be very careful what you said. This social changed went very slowly, until it reached that critical point where it was hard to attack "gays in the military" as an abstraction without insulting the actual people you were talking about. Then the culture and the discussion changed more in six month than it had in the previous sixty years. And where is that debate today? Gone and virtually forgotten.

Even cuter than polar bears.

I've written about confronting climate denial before, and as before, I find a reasonable approximation of my views is to take all the well-meaning advice of the self-identified "moderates" in the climate debate, the Kloors and the Revkins and so forth, and do the exact opposite of what they recommend.

Don't be a free educational resource to people with no actual sincere desire to learn. Ask them questions -- be skeptical about their skepticism -- put their beliefs and opinions on the record and under the microscope.

Don't waste your time searching for a mythical middle ground. Climate deniers are in this in order to have an ideological battle. It is part of their war with modern life and Western civilization. You will not win them to your way of thinking with a clever compromise, any more than the NRA is going to wake up one morning at say "Wow, we've got all the pro-gun legislation we could ever need! Now, back to regional shooting competitions!" Instead, embrace the polarization of the debate -- among other things, this helps the public understand what motives climate deniers to lie and distort.

Don't try and convey uncertainty. If you have a complex message while your opponents have a simple one you will lose. Plain and simple. Deniers want us to spending our time trying to educate the public to grasp complex scientific ideas. They are delighted when they can provoke us into doing that by accusing us of oversimplifying the story. (They will just be at this little table over here on the other side of the room, saying FRAUD LIES FRAUD TAXES SOCIALISTS GREEDY SCIENTISTS NATURAL NATURE FRAUD FRAUD.)

So find a simple message, well inside the borders of the consensus, and hammer it home relentlessly. Show the people being hurt by global warming. Show them over and over again, until the public gets a visceral sense that deniers are denying not just the scientific understanding of where the climate is going, but of what is happening in the world right now. People are dying while the right-wing fringe lies and defames. When the public understands that -- understands it in their bones -- deniers will find themselves across the Akin line.

A pseudointellectual "beard" for climate folly

Andrew Sullivan, whose taste in climate pundits remains howlingly bad, highlights an online "philosopher's" pretentious right-wing drivel:

The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness. Inevitably deliberation about action gets bogged down in an interminable blame-game about what justice requires - who had their industrial revolution first, etc. Furthermore, the moral duties of different actors do not all point the same way: poor country governments have a clear and over-riding moral duty to help their citizens achieve the high quality of life which the West takes for granted, and which is inevitably energy (carbon) intensive. And then there is the practical economics: the world still has lots of coal, especially in the poor world, that can produce electricity at 3c per kwh (which renewables cannot possibly compete with without radical technological breakthroughs, even with the strongest moral rhetoric). No comprehensive global political solution to greenhouse gases is possible. We need to go back and think again.

Sullivan hat tips to "The Philosopher's Beard" under the heading "The Hazardous Moralization Of Climate Change." The link leads you to "The Philosopher's Beard: Mini-essays in philosophy, politics, and economics" and "Ethics and Global Climate Change." Via the latter, the author gives us a memorable demonstration of how to make a pseudointellectual argument:
   

1. Use academic-sounding terms which appear specific and objective, which are in fact vague, subjective, and implicitly derogatory.

The global climate change debate has a lopsided empirical basis - in the economy of nature but not political economy - and this has contributed to a peculiar moralising trajectory.

You would think, from the fact that the central point of the whole essay is to make the case against "moralizing" climate change, that what "moralizing" the debate means would be clearly defined. It never is. If you search the essay for clues, what you get back is a right-winger's cardboard stereotype of a loony green:

" the debate has induced a kind of millennarian meltdown in which otherwise sensible people have lost all sense of proportion and hope"

" Morality concerns strict but simple universal rules that everyone should follow without regard to personal situations or consequences - on the model of laws [When your behavior harms me or vice versa, we typically make laws about that behavior. As a general rule, laws are made "on the model of laws."] On this model, one's carbon footprint is a crime (against the planet presumably) [says who?] which one should feel guilty about and strive to mitigate. As of course are other people's carbon emissions: they deserve to be shamed or otherwise forced into submission by the righteous ones."

" The moralisation approach undermines itself since it frames climate change narrowly in terms of righteousness. Inevitably deliberation about action gets bogged down in an interminable blame-game about what justice requires - who had their industrial revolution first, etc."

" The moralisation approach contrasts with a fuller ethical thinking in which values are considered and debated explicitly and openly. Righteousness simplifies but it doesn't try to understand."

What the author is attempting to pass off as an objective characteristic of the "climate debate" proves to be just standard climate denier ad hominem – greens are humorless scolds, socialist-secular anticolonialist navel-gazers, self-righteous Chicken Littles undergoing a "millennarian meltdown" in which they "have lost all sense of proportion and hope."
    

He gives no evidence for this slander, merely repeating it in various forms for most of the post. That, too, is characteristic of the pseudointellectual argument. When a straightforward torch-waving rabble-rouser like me makes an assertion about something or someone I don't care for, I have to support it with examples, usually providing a quote or two to illustrate what I mean. By couching his conventional right-wing op-ed in terms of "philosophy" the author evades any question of evidence or proof.

2. Lard up the verbiage.

The global climate change debate has a lopsided empirical basis - in the economy of nature but not political economy - and this has contributed to a peculiar moralising trajectory.

In other words, the science of climate change is solid and conclusive. Do you really need to torture that thought into this "global climate change debate has a lopsided empirical basis"? The case for action is not (he asserts) as strong – which becomes " in the economy of nature but not political economy."
     

3. Offer analysis, but deliver politics. 

The Beard gives us one fact – the population of the earth – and then sets out on what is ostensiby a description of the situation, but which is in fact an almost unrecognizable right-wing fantasy world:

In trying to tackle climate change by directly dealing with the causal mechanism of CO2 levels we face an enormous collective action problem - how to persuade 6.7 billion people to adopt the new morality of carbon rationing (and prevent free-riding). Everyone but the most delusional accepts that this is impossible without enormous government coercion (which explains many climate change warriors' antipathy to democratic principles on this point - easier to persuade 200 governments than all those people). However even the government coercion approach fails - see the failures of every inter-governmental treaty, from Kyoto to Copenhagen - and the reasons are obvious.

Notice how easily we slip into the conventional internet libertarian's assumptions about the world. Government action has become "enormous government coercion" (is a carbon tax more coercive than a property tax or a sales tax, or does he believe all taxation and regulation to be "enormous government coercion"? He doesn't say, but one suspects.) The people or the right side of that "lopsided empirical basis" have become "climate change warriors" – because while denying climate change "is just silly" proposing that we act on what we know is the moral equivalent of making war on our fellow citizens. And then we have this gem of tortured logic: "which explains many climate change warriors' antipathy to democratic principles on this point - easier to persuade 200 governments than all those people."
   

Lobbying the government to act is now undemocratic. International treaties are undemocratic, too. (We are allowed to persuade people individually, provided we don't make them feel bad by "moralising" the issue.) One wonders how democracy ever recovered from treaties that banned ozone-depleting chemicals, or the use of chemical and biological weapons, or child labor, or those that created trade agreements.
    

This is all stuff that would have readers at mises.org nodding along, but everybody else should be confused and startled by a definition of democratic principles that precludes trying to convince your fellow citizens to agree to collective actions for the benefit of all.

4. Include lots of straw men.

I lost count at ten or so. Here's a particularly egregious example:

No-one emits carbon deliberately 'for fun', but rather we engage in activities which are more or less valuable to us - such as flying across the Atlantic to visit grandparents - which happen to emit carbon as a byproduct. To ignore the value of these human activities and see them instead as moral crimes is to do a violence to the very humanness of the lives (including those of future generations) that we are supposed to be so concerned about preserving.

Who "ignore[s] the value of these human activities"? In what way does saying an action has a consequence, and its utility must be evaluated in light of that, imply that the activity has no value? It does not. He is conjuring up an absurd parody of an eco-warrior scold, while ignoring the very simple and pragmatic point that we have to weigh the unintended consequences of our actions in deciding what we will do.

We should be grateful "Beard" wasn't around when doctors discovered that the cholera epidemics of London were spreading via polluted water. Imagine the screed:

No-one uses water pumps "for fun," but rather we engage in activities which are more or less valuable to us - such as cooking dinner or washing clothes - which happen to spread disease as a byproduct. To ignore the value of these human activities and see them instead as moral crimes is to do a violence to the very humanness of the lives (including those of future generations) that we are supposed to be so concerned about preserving.

The whole exercise is so transparent, and the underlying political spin so obvious, that one wonder if the title of the blog "The Philosopher's Beard" carries a hidden meaning: if the author, aware that his proclivities for hard, grinding, right-winger-on-libertarian action are less than comfortable to a mainstream audience, and has chosen to equip his online persona accordingly with a fictitious air of academic enquiry – "The Philosopher's Beard" being just that – a "beard" of airy intellectualism for a closeted right-wing partisan.

4 reasons voters don't demand climate change action: How to frame the debate

Daniel Gilbert

In this classic article in the LA times analyzing public opinion on global warming ("If only gay sex caused global warming") Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, gives four reasons why the threat of global warming -- which 83% of the public knows is happening -- hasn't motivated the public to insist on decisive action to combat the threat.


He finds four critical problems that make the dangers of unchecked global warming a poor fit with our laboriously evolved sensitivity to risk: it's not an intentional action, it doesn't provoke moral outrage, it is a long-term rather than a short-term threat, and it is gradually worsening, making it hard for people to see the new conditions are as different as they are.


Gilbert just lays these problems on the table: he doesn't suggest solutions. But he defines the problem in such a way that solutions suggest themselves. In general, it's safe to presume that Gilbert would agree with the indomitable Michael Tobis, who reminds us that "We must make the invisible visible. We must make the vastness perceptible. We must make the alien familiar. We must make implausible truths obvious."

How do we do that in the context of Gilbert's four points?

1. It's not an intentional action. Except it is.

Understanding what others are up to — what they know and want, what they are doing and planning — has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human. We think about people and their intentions; talk about them; look for and remember them.

That's why we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn't. If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.

Global warming isn't trying to kill us, and that's a shame. If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation's top priority.

 How we fight back: We get personal.

Stress the intentional distortion of the science, by people, the delay, procrastination, and denial, by people, to protect profits and the status quo. Emphasize our agency as it regards to the climate: we are choosing to shove millions of tons of fossil fuel carbon into the air. It wasn't an intentional act when it started, but the world has changed. People are doing this to us -- and while in a sense we're all doing it to each other, we're not all equally responsible. Fossil fuel companies -- led by people -- are both producing the bulk of the emissions and large amounts of money to distort the science, dishonestly sow doubt and confusion, and maintain their ability to damage our climate unchecked. It's intentional. It's personal.

2. It doesn't violate our moral sensibilities. Except it does.

 It doesn't cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively) because it doesn't force us to entertain thoughts that we find indecent, impious or repulsive. When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions are the brain's call to action.

Although all human societies have moral rules about food and sex, none has a moral rule about atmospheric chemistry. And so we are outraged about every breach of protocol except Kyoto. Yes, global warming is bad, but it doesn't make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don't feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning. The fact is that if climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets

 How we fight back: We put the spotlight on the morally outrageous behavior of deniers.

This goes hand in hand with stressing intentionality, and it is uncomfortable to responsible people for the same reason -- we're taught to focus on arguments, not people, and use evidence, not ad homs. And I'm not arguing against that. Throughout, I take it as a given that those supporting action will use sound science, will eschew hysteria and unnecessary personal attacks. But as I've argued elsewhere, that doesn't mean given up our moral outrage at people who lie, cheat, distort and manipulate.

People engaged in this debate have a healthy sense of moral outrage at climate deniers. That's what this blog is founded on. Gilbert's analysis says we need to share that outrage with the public: it's a part of communicating effectively on global warming. CO2 may not be trying to kill us, but people who fake resumes, plagarize scientific papers, lie, cherry-pick and spin the media are recklessly endangering human life by means of manipulation and outright dishonesty to further either their right-wing ideological views and/or their personal profits.

That's part of the message. It's not enough to show that deniers keep getting it wrong; it's time to say why.

3. It's a long-term rather than a short-term threat. Until it's not.

The third reason why global warming doesn't trigger our concern is that we see it as a threat to our futures — not our afternoons. Like all animals, people are quick to respond to clear and present danger, which is why it takes us just a few milliseconds to duck when a wayward baseball comes speeding toward our eyes.

The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That's what brains did for several hundred million years — and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.

How we fight back: we show people the short-term disasters they fear are part of the long-term crisis

This one is simple: we need to show the link -- where it is demonstrated with solid science, without overreaching -- between global warming and extreme weather, global warming and famine, global warming and natural disasters. The right standard for a connection, as I've argued, is increased risk:

The linkage that is meaningful here is one of risk. If you smoke you may not get cancer. If you do not smoke you may still get cancer. Cancer and smoking are still strongly linked, even if a particular case of cancer can never be attributed to any one factor.

Climate models say Texas is going to burn. Texas is burning. That burning is linked to climate change. Climate change made it more likely to happen, it's happening and it will probably happen again. Complex events always have multiple influencing factors that muddy their pedigree. Focus on what counts -- risk.

Programs like ACE (Attribution of Climate Events) will help with this. Once there is a connection -- a connection of risk, not a bullshit, monofactorial, 100% dependent cause-and-effect relationship, which you will never by able to demonstrate for any complex phenomenon in the real world -- once you can say with confidence that an event is either more likely to happen because of global warming, or more likely to be more severe or otherwise atypical, then you can, and should, relentlessly link it to global warming.

When sudden, extreme weather events and natural disasters are linked to climate change -- and science strongly supports such a link in many cases -- climate change becomes a real, perceptible, short-term threat, because people can clearly see how it can change the course of their lives at any moment.

It's been ten years since September 11th. Yet Al Queda is still seen as an immediate, short-term threat, because it's clear that absence our actions, a similar, deadly act of terror could strike anywhere, at any time. When people understand the strong relationship between global warming and escalating extreme weather and natural disasters, it will have the same effect: a long-term threat becomes vivid and striking because of its explosive potential to become an immediate emergency.

4. It is gradually worsening, making it hard for people to see the new conditions are as different as they are. Except it's not gradual where it counts.

The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to changes in light, sound, temperature, pressure, size, weight and just about everything else. But if the rate of change is slow enough, the change will go undetected. If the low hum of a refrigerator were to increase in pitch over the course of several weeks, the appliance could be singing soprano by the end of the month and no one would be the wiser.

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.

How we fight back: Radical changes happening now need to be framed as a taste of the future

No doubt a time machine to 2056 would be the best solution. We have something very like a time machine, however: we have areas of the world that are changing at breakneck speed. The Arctic. Greenland and Antarctica. East Africa. Texas. A hurricaine barreling down on New York and New Jersey. When these things happen, we should not only point out the link to climate change, but stress these events as prologue to the new normal.  We don't need to exaggerate the changes, we don't need to weep and beat our breasts, we just need to communicate that radical changes happening now are a small taste of what's coming within our lifetimes.

So to turn a theoretical risk into something more real and immediate to people, do these four things:


1. Stress our human agency. Carbon polluters -- and especially the leaders of the fossil fuel industry -- are consciously, deliberately, and intentionally injecting millions of tons of CO2 into the air and transforming the climate, at terrible risk to human welfare.


2. Share your moral outrage at those that lie, dissemble, manipulate, and sow confusion.


3. Relentlessly emphasize the proven connection between short-term emergencies -- extreme weather and natural disasters -- and the long-term threat.


4. Underline the radical and destructive changes to bellwether environments as the face of the new normal if we fail to act.


We can make this a threat that the public sees and feels, the way people who really have dug into the science can see it and feel it. To do so we need to be accurate, we need to be right, but that alone is not enough. Without any compromise in integrity, we need to find the language and the images that make the invisible visible to the broader mass of voters who will allocate very little attention to the problem and none to solutions until they perceive (on their own terms) the threat.

UPDATE: Daniel Gilbert lays out his ideas more fully in this presentation -- the guy is an awesome speaker, check it out. H/t Jules in the comments. Thanks Jules!


Nathan Eagle: Global mobile workforce from PopTech on Vimeo.

September 11th, ten years on: What the response to 9/11 can tell us about responding to climate change

I'm not going to link to a big picture of the towers burning, OK? We're all going to see enough of that today.

No one is going to hold up our response to 9/11 as a model of success. In retrospect, we ought to have spent more time pushing the Taliban to turn on Al Qaeda. We ought to have started and finished with ruthless intelligence work/assassination -- the thing that ultimately brought Bin Laden down. But it is a model of what we can do; the resources we command and the lengths to which we can go without sacrificing our first-world lifestyle.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us $2 trillion so far. (Operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya are a statistical flutter by comparison at this point.) We are on the hook for a total of $3 trillion when we include things like veteran's benefits, healthcare, replacing gear and evacuating the two countries.

We did all that without throwing away our smartphones, doing our washing by hand, or living in tents. What would $3 trillion get us in climate mitigation? 

The cost of new nuclear capacity is somewhere between $2,100/kW -- $5,000/kW, depending on the particular project. In 2007 (per wikipedia) the total installed electricity generation capacity in the United States was 1,088 Gigawatts, 20% of which was already nuclear power,  and of which the fossil fuel contribution was 857 GW (1 GW = 10^6 kW). So with a middle-of the road $3,500/kW, replacing the entire fossil fuel base with nuclear power would cost $2.66 trillion. We'd have some money left over for more wind and solar capacity to beef up the grid for our electric cars.

In the real world, we wouldn't go all-in on power generation; we'd get the most bang for our buck by attacking on a number of fronts. We could expand weatherization programs from low-income homeowners to all homeowners, and commercial businesses too (heating and cooling buildings represents about a third of our electricity consumption). We could upgrade our power grid to minimize transmission losses (6% of generated electricity is lost in transmission).

We don't have to spend trillions to get these improvements. A reasonable carbon tax will lead industry and consumers to make these changes on their own dime. But we could. In the last ten years we spent trillions in the service of the "1% doctrine" -- the notion that any chance of an attack on our soil like 9/11 justified massive efforts at prevention. With global warming, the same people who sold us the 1% doctrine on weapons of mass destruction are now advocating the opposite approach to climate change -- that until we are greater than 99% certain of disaster, until the 1% of doubt, not about climate change, but about the scale of the destruction -- is removed, we should not act to prevent it.

And this cynical doctrine is promoted with horror stories of green extremists forcing us back to the living standards of the 17th century to halt climate change. But it is 21st century technology, not Ludditism, that is the backbone of mitigation strategies. Yes, it's going to cost some money. But keep that in perspective. Most of my readers are Americans. You and I have spent $2 trillion in the last decade on the threat of terrorism. Do you see lamplighters and horse-drawn carriages in the streets? No? Then maybe we should take the fearmongering of do-nothings with a grain of salt.

The Dukakis effect

By this time all climate nerds will have heard about Wolfgang Wagner's resignation from the board of Remote Sensing. His resignation letter lays out his shame at having passed Spencer and Braswell's awful "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance" through peer review.

Eli has a growing list of responses:



Big City Lib

Climate Abyss

Climate Progress

Deltoid

Only in it for the Gold

Our Changing Climate

Quark Soup


Stoat



Skeptics are outraged. How dare Wagner resign . . . how dare he.

Adding to the uproar, three of our best pro-science communicators have put their oar in with a fantastic essay. Money quote:

Spencer, a University of Alabama, Huntsville, climatologist, and his colleagues have a history of making serious technical errors in their effort to cast doubt on the seriousness of climate change. Their errors date to the mid-1990s, when their satellite temperature record reportedly showed the lower atmosphere was cooling. As obvious and serious errors in that analysis were made public, Spencer and Christy were forced to revise their work several times and, not surprisingly, their findings agree better with those of other scientists around the world: the atmosphere is warming.

Over the years, Spencer and Christy developed a reputation for making serial mistakes that other scientists have been forced to uncover. Last Thursday, for instance, the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres published a study led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory climate scientist Ben Santer. Their findings showed that Christy erred in claiming that recent atmospheric temperature trends are not replicated in models.

This trend continues: On Tuesday the journal Geophysical Research Letters will publish a peer-reviewed study by Texas A&M University atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler that undermines Spencer's arguments about the role of clouds in the Earth's energy budget.

Needless to say, psuedoskeptics are absolutely furious that somebody would publishing an article at a blog accusing a scientist of making a bunch of mistakes or having a bias. That's the worst thing ever, probably worse than the Holocaust. No, I'm not kidding. No, they don't see the irony. No, I really don't know how that's possible.

The howls of dismay and anger at these fairly cool, collected, and measured contributions to the debate are not accidental. They reflect a double standard that deniers are desperate to maintain -- a set of rules of engagement in which they say absolutely anything about anyone in the most offensive way possible -- chewing the carpet and pounding the table -- but have the expectation that the people they are attacking are not going to defend themselves, are not going to answer back. Scientists are supposed to be above all that, cool, rational, impartial and detached. (That their own lack of such qualities might reflect on their ability to critique the state of the science evidently does not occur to them.)

When scientists answer back, there are invariably people who feel that they shouldn't, that they are damaging their own credibility by descending to their opponents' level. Take this post:

Regarding your opinion piece on Roy Spencer (see posts below) I am very disappointed at your lack of professional conduct. Your polemic politicizes science. You seriously harm the foundations of the scientific method of objective observation, model evaluation and searching for truth.

Similar sentiments here:

It takes a great deal of composure to hold back ones emotions during a heated debate (I call the likelihood or not of CAGW a heated debate). Trenberth, Ray Pierrehumbert, Hansen, Mann, Jones… they all have a far greater responsibility to behave at the highest level because the work they produce and the ideas they promote are viewed at the highest level wrt influencing policy. The common flaw with all of them is their inability to bite their tongue when the pressure is on or when opportunities arise where they are better off being silent. The lack of personal composure ultimately hurts their credibility because it shows they have skin in the game.

This is where Michael Dukakis comes into the discussion. In a debate with George Bush, Sr, he was on the receiving end of a particularly lurid and loaded question:

Bernard Shaw, the moderator of the debate, asked Dukakis, "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis [his wife] were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Dukakis replied, "No, I don't, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life", and explained his stance. After the debate, Dukakis told Estrich he was sorry and didn't realize it was that question.[14] Many observers felt Dukakis's answer lacked the passion one would expect of a person discussing a loved one's rape and death. Many– including the candidate himself– believe that this, in part, cost Dukakis the election, as his poll numbers dropped from 49% to 42% nationally that night.

The failure to show appropriate emotion where a reasonable person would have an emotional reaction does not enhance your credibility, it undermines it. People make judgements about your credibility based on their ability to identify with you, to empathize with you -- a quality PR people call your "relatability." Striving to look and sound and write like Leonard Nimoy on lithum will not lead people to trust you; just the opposite.

Similarly, when someone acts in a biased or incompetent way, and you don't call them on it, or call them on it in a tepid, wishy-washy, Obama-against-Congressional-Republicans sort of way, people are not going to take those problems with your opponents' credibility into account -- if a normal person (like themselves) would have called their opponent out for that crap, and you didn't, people are going to assume it's not crap at all, otherwise why wouldn't you be drawing attention to it?

The same goes when deniers make ludicrous charges of incompetence, corruption, or bias by climate scientists -- a reasonable lay person would fight back against that kind of slander. If scientists' don't, people aren't going to assume they're above engaging with their critics; they are going to assume they have no answer to give.

Sure, if you push back, you may be seen as partisan. But people make that assumption anyway, based on the fact that deniers are screaming the allegation from the rooftops 24/7. At you have to guard your credibility, especially as a scientist, you have to be seen as someone who tells it like it is, not how you wish it was. But that's no reason you have to be a silent punching bag. It's OK to fight back, and it's OK to get a little mad -- deniers have given real scientists treatment that would make anyone mad. To be trusted by people, you have to act like people, and when an asshole loudmouth insults you or sells a line of bullshit far and wide, people get mad.

Let's tell it like it is, and not be afraid raise our voices at the really outrageous parts. Let's let liars be called liars and stand before the public exposed. Let's show the table the card up the grifter's sleeve, and if we're hurting his wrist, too bad. Let's bury the Dukakis effect.

Inside the strange world of the climate dismissives

George Mason University's biannual survey "Global Warming's Six Americas" makes for a fascinating study of the demographics, the thinking and the mindset of global warming deniers -- a group George Mason tactfully calls the "dismissives," as in those dismissive of the theory of global warming or any threat therefrom.

The first interesting finding is that deniers are losing support, not gaining support, as they are wont to claim at every opportunity. Dismissives have fallen from 16% of the population at their height to 10% of the population. No other group has shifted nearly that dramatically, although even that could be simple noise (the margin of error since 2010 is +/-3 percent).

Deniers, as the anecdotal evidence would suggest, are overwhelmingly on the right. People worried about climate change, in contrast, are a far more diverse group (click to enlarge):



Only 2 percent of dismissives consider themselves Democrats. Twelve percent of the alarmed, in contrast, are Republicans. Only 3% of dismissives consider themselves somewhat or very liberal; but 16% of the alarmed consider themselves conservative or very conservative.

Climate deniers who are conservative are essentially a rounding error -- maybe just people who didn't listen to the question. For all that people tend to regard their own views as the sane middle ground, only 12% of dismissives regarded themselves as middle of the road! (Thirty-eight percent of the "alarmed" thought so.

So. Climate deniers mostly range from the hard right to the far right, but the the reverse is not true. This tends to undermine the "you're biased too" deflection that deniers use when their own right-wing chorus line becomes embarrassing.

EDIT: Sorry for the blurry graphs; I'm trying to learn that screen capture thing. Click on the graphs for a clear picture. Whole report is here.

Minor myths: most deniers accept that global warming is happening

Here at IT we've given extensive coverage to the "lukewarmers" -- people who believe global warming is occurring, but don't think it poses any near-term threat to people. This view is not supported by the evidence and does not even make much sense logically.

Lately, though, some lukewarmers, especially Judith Curry, have tried to recast the climate denier movement as prominently or exclusively lukewarmist -- to assert that most climate deniers think that the world is warming and humans are contributing to it. Why they want to pretend this is so is not certain, but if, as I've argued, the position of lukewarmism is basically an attempt to maintain the conclusions of climate deniers whilst jettisoning their more loony conspiracy-theorist, anti-science baggage, then the fact that most of the people that have time for them are unreconstructed deniers must be an embarrassment to them. The unfortunately reality for people like Judith Curry, who has legitimate scientific chops but is now far outside her area of knowledge or expertise, saying truly absurd and easily falsified things, is that serious people find her laughable, and laughable people take her seriously.

In reaction, we find her greatly overstating how many of those that praise her actually agree with her:

7. I think everyone in the room agrees that the climate has warmed over the last 50 years, for whatever reason: we saw plots of land atmospheric temperature, marine atmospheric temperature, sea surface temperature, and (from Prof Svensmark) ocean heat content, all with a rising trend.

JC comment: there should be 100% agreement on the sign of the temperature change, although there is some room to debate the actual magnitude of the increase.

Dr Curry has made similar assertions in other posts and comments.

It's not just Curry, of course, but many people, for example commenters at "the Blackboard," who spread this myth:

That being said, the satellite data, which is purported to be the most reliable, does show some warming. Most likely, SOME of that warming can be attributed to CO2, and SOME of the warming that can be attributed to CO2 can be attributed to the fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere which is emitted by humans.

Most skeptics do not actually doubt this. The thing that many skeptics doubt is the idea that the portion of the warming which can be attributed to not merely CO2, but the fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere which humans are directly responsible may not be all that significant.

And another example from the Blackboard:

Please note that most skeptics agree that there is probably a little AGW, but probably not much, so you are not arguing about their being some AGW.

Jay Ambrose's famous effort to invoke Godwin's Law to protect climate deniers took it as a central premise:

The implication of using the word to describe doomsday skeptics is that they have some deep, dark evil motive — probably money — to overlook scientific data piled so high that no one of ordinary intelligence possibly could. It doesn’t seem to bother them that most skeptics agree that the Earth has been getting a little warmer even if they harbor doubts about an apocalypse arriving tomorrow afternoon.

That's the party line; "Those people behind us with the torches and pitchforks? They're as reasonable as we are -- maybe more so." Let's look at some data.

According to George Mason University's brilliant "Six Americas" bi-yearly poll, 10% of Americans are "dismissive" of global warming -- these are your hard-core skeptics. They are the only group polled where more people thought "The US should not reduce it emissions" (46%) than that we should (26%). Among the next most-skeptical group, the "doubtful" (15% of those polled) twelve times as many people thought we should reduce emissions (59%) versus not (5%!) "Dismissives" are the only group to oppose developing sources of clean energy (45% versus 44%), something that the "doubtful" strongly favor (88% for versus 12% against) and the public as a whole favors 91% to 9%.

"Dismissives," then, represent their own group with distinctive opinions; they are the one the rest of us refer to as climate deniers. Is it true they mostly concede the world is warming?

Nope:

Positive responsive for the statement "Global warming isn't happening":

All responders: 11%
Doubtful: 21%
Dismissive: 60%

Sixty percent of the hardcore deniers think global warming is not happening at all (the rest think humans aren't the primary cause), temperatures are not changing, full stop. The people with the pitchforks are not more reasonable than they seem: I'll be posting more of the amazing findings of the "Six Americas" research anon. But the minor myth that the bulk of deniers have shifted to the lukewarmist position and accept the world is warming, human actions are causing warming, and that "uncertainty" or the cost of mitigation are their primary concerns -- not true, according to the people holding the torches.