Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have joined forces to produce an effective and simple snapshot of how our climate is changing. See below for a summary, or download the entire document here. As a key document released by Australia’s two lead climate science agences, this should be front page news for every newspaper around the country today.
This looks pretty cool. I’d love the view from the kitchen. And there is great watersports potential (open ocean kiteboarding!). But having lived at sea on large ships and underwater in the NOAA Aquarius Habitat, I can attest that though very cool, it isn’t the most comfortable experience (think wet, cold, bad food, rough, lots of fungal growth on your body, etc). And would they still be called “skyscrapers”?
Read all about underwater skyscrapers here. 
Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, Middle East expert and high profile blogger has a piece on his site about whether and how scientists should engage environmental skeptics, in particular AGW deniers. His perspective is that we should and that it can be effective if done right but that there can be personal costs, e.g., hate mail and death threats. Also see the discussion at DotEarth about how scientists should respond and communicate. There are well argued points on both sides, or all sides, of the debate, but I am somewhat swayed by Randy Olsen’s arguments. Probably in part because he is a former coral reef ecologist and because I love his short films.
Okay. We’re wading into the core of what my book, “ Don’t Be Such a Scientist,” is about, so I’m going to give you a full reply. What you’ve written here is great, it’s accurate, it’s admirably dispassionate, but it’s also written with the assumption that the general public is a bunch of heartless robots. There comes a point where the public DOES want to see the science community stand up for themselves. My book is about the fact that there is more than just brains inside average folks — they also have hearts, guts and even sex organs. Did you see the “60 Minutes” segment a month ago with magician Ricky Jay who, when asked who would be his ideal audience for sleight of hand tricks, said it would be “scientists and Nobel Prize winners,” because they are the most easily fooled. This is increasingly the public image of the climate science community — a bunch of clumsy eggheads who can’t defend themselves. – Randy Olsen
By Juan Cole, see original post here
Ecologists and environmentalism
Donald R Strong (2008) Ecologists and environmentalism. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: Vol. 6, No. 7, pp. 347-347.
Environmentalism needs serious discussion by ecologists. I was primed on this topic by recent statements made by colleagues to the effect that, “I’m no environmentalist, but… (insert an eminently reasonable environmentalist proposition of your choice here)”, as well as by a plaintive comment in a recent student evaluation, “The instructor is an environmentalist”. Denied the opportunity to reply to the student, I do so here. “This is an ecology course; by necessity, its subject matter deals with the environment. We use science to study the environment, and science provides the rationale and avenue for its preservation.”
The last place that I would have expected to hear negative branding of environmentalism is at an ESA function, so imagine the jolt when, at the Society’s Annual Meeting in Milwaukee this past August, we were told by a prominent ecologist that we are scientists and therefore should eschew environmentalism. There was, of course, ample refutation of the notion of any wall between ecological science and environmentalism throughout the rest of the meeting. Thomas Lovejoy’s opening plenary address demonstrated artful interweaving of science with environmentalism and how the study of biodiverse nature is an essential part of advocacy for its preservation. He finished with a story about Ben Bradlee, the former Executive Editor of the Washington Post, who steered his newspaper toward progressive reporting on the environment despite only a modest appreciation of science, and how his publisher, Katherine Graham, had complained that environmentalists are self-righteous. This was a warning to us not to be shrill, and reinforced the wisdom of doing our science with an eye on the political and social milieu.
Whereas ecology is science and environmentalism sometimes is and sometimes isn’t, the latter is necessary for the former. We ecologists have the same relationship to the subject of our studies as do art historians and archeologists to theirs. There is no opprobrium upon artists and archeologists advocating for the preservation of art and antiquities. Protection of the environment – environmentalism – is advocacy of what we study. Why should we not advocate for protection of the environment in our professional capacity?
The negative branding of environmentalism comes from groups that are part and parcel of the notorious war on science. They are dedicated to denying the environmental degradation that ecologists are documenting every day. Some of the most prominent of these groups are discussed by Jaques et al. in a review entitled, The organization of denial: conservative think tanks and environmental skepticism (Environ Pol 2008; 17: 349–85). The authors document the concerted anti-environmentalism and complete disregard of these groups for anything connected with the environment. Jaques et al. describe the substantial financial backing, broad reach, and scores of authors that have been encouraged to spread disinformation regarding scientific findings – particularly about global warming – by conservative think tanks. The authors argue that these powerful entities seek to interfere with the scientific communication that is the basis of society’s understanding of environmental issues.
Graduate students with whom I raised these issues at the ESA Annual Meeting had little trouble in recognizing the essential, functional connection between basic ecological science and environmentalism for understanding and preserving the objects of study to which they are dedicating their lives. Several pointed out that a substantial number of sessions at the meeting represented scientific environmentalism, including such topics as conservation, biodiversity, environmental justice, and sustainability.
Any accounting of our scientific values should include objectivity and rationality, which ecologists have used to yield facts about the environment. A few of many such facts produced by ecological science are that humans are responsible for global warming, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and profound ecosystem and food-web changes in the Great Lakes through the introduction of invasive species. These are the sorts of facts that anti-environmental forces seek to deny. Defending these facts as the products of science makes you an environmentalist. To separate ecological science from environmentalism to avoid potential negative connotations of the latter affords anti-environmentalists the power of demagoguery; with rhetoric and false claims, they will have achieved prejudice against the subject of our studies.
In short, it is precious and self-damaging to claim a separation between our science and environmentalism. It should be a tenet of our ethics as ecologists to reject and counter the defamation of environmentalism.
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“Environmentalist” label not in our best interests
Indy Burke, Bill Lauenroth (2009) “Environmentalist” label not in our best interests. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: Vol. 7, No. 5, pp. 240-240
We are responding to Donald Strong’s editorial about ecologists and environmentalism (Front Ecol Environ 2008; 6[7]: 347). We think advocating for the role of ecologists and ecological science in environmental decision making is different from what is commonly meant by the terms “environmentalist” and “environmentalism”. We agree that Earth is undergoing major environmental changes, and that the information ecological science can provide is a necessary component that policy makers will require if they are to make informed decisions.
We are concerned that Strong’s usage of “environmentalist” and “environmentalism” is naïve and risks misleading some members of the ecological science community. Environmentalist and environmentalism have lost the meanings he ascribes to them. They have become politically charged terms with the power to polarize conversations. We agree that there has been a “…negative branding of environmentalism…”, but we disagree that this is the sole result of “…the war on science”. We think it equally likely that it is the result of individuals and groups allowing their values to creep into their analyses of environmental problems. Regardless of the accurate identification of the source of the negative connotations associated with the terms “environmentalist” and “environmentalism”, we think that it is important for all of us to be aware and sensitive to this negativism. Equating ecologists and ecology with environmentalists and environmentalism will prove catastrophic to our science. If we are perceived as mixing our politics and our values into our science, we will lose our credibility, and risk our ability to have our science considered in policy setting deliberations of environmental change.
I (IB) am confident that I would not have been invited to recent meetings and interacted with individuals who are in a position to have a major influence on energy policy, if they thought I was mixing my personal opinions into my representations of science as related to the environment and natural resources.
Our strengths – as contributors to current and future environmental deliberations – derive directly from perceptions of the quality of our science. While it is likely that there are few ESA members who are not environmentalists at heart, we urge all members to resist being labeled as environmentalists or to allow what we do as scientists to be labeled as environmentalism.
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Labels and values: a reply to Burke and Lauenroth
Donald R Strong (2009) Labels and values: a reply to Burke and Lauenroth. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: Vol. 7, No. 5, pp. 240-240.
Professors Burke and Lauenroth and I agree on a great deal. First, their assertion that “few ESA members…are not environmentalists at heart” is exactly the point of my original essay. The three of us also agree that one should not shout “environmentalist” in a theater crowded with suits from the energy industry. Even more, the “result of individuals and groups allowing their values to creep into their analyses of environmental problems” is a perfect description of the anti-environmental movement; indeed, such phony analyses “polarize conversations” about the environment.
The authors and I begin to part ways regarding their strictly negative connotation and narrow definition of “values”. The values of basic science are objectivity, rationality, and rigorous empiricism. In the sub-discipline of ecology, values are multifarious. Frontiers melds values of basic science with other values from social sciences. Social science involves more subjectivity than basic science and, in doing so, addresses values that differ among groups. Pertinent to ecology and the environment, values that go beyond those of basic science include utilitarian values (for example, ecosystem services and what the environment can do for humans: where The National Mining Association sees coal profits, others see ecosystem services eroded by global warming), intrinsic values (patriotic, religious, and deep aesthetic feelings about nature: many Americans, and the ESA, see “purple mountain majesty”, whereas an American president is reputed to have once said, “A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?”), and opportunity values(if we don’t burn it now, what would all this fossil fuel – and the land, sea, and atmosphere destroyed by its exploitation – be worth in the future?). In environmental science, we endeavor to understand different kinds of values, not camouflage them.
Finally, there is one point about which I just plain disagree with Burke and Lauenroth. Although they claim that my arguments risk “misleading some members of the ecological science community”, I believe that such members are pretty savvy and will not be swayed by the word police any more than by partisan, ideological claptrap from conservative groups. Will these members dedicate their lives to a science that dare not speak one of its names?
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Speaking out: weighing advocacy and objectivity as a junior scientist
Thomas A Morrison, Matthew P Ayres (2010) Speaking out: weighing advocacy and objectivity as a junior scientist. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 50-5
Thomas A Morrison (graduate student)
Ecologists wear many hats, and some fit better than others. One hat sure to provoke controversy, especially when worn by students, is that of an advocate. Ecologists become advocates when they go beyond objective research and actively champion particular viewpoints. The role of advocacy in science has stimulated considerable discussion over the past several years, particularly among conservation biologists (eg Shrader-Frechette 1996; Strong 2008). I argue here that students have a unique role in this discussion. Our position as junior scientists affords special challenges, risks, and rewards when engaging in advocacy. I highlight these tradeoffs and offer suggestions for how to identify and avoid some of the pitfalls, drawing from my own brief experience as an ecologist-in-training.
What is advocacy, and why is it controversial? Advocacy occurs when, during the process of communicating research results, ecologists use scientific facts to shape an argument relevant to a particular policy goal. Often, this argument reflects some value that the scientist holds: for example, that we should conserve biological diversity. Because ecological research often has a direct bearing on conservation, human health, or land-use decisions that will influence people’s lives, including our own, some scientists believe that we have a right, or even an obligation, to advocate for particular views and courses of action (Strong 2008). However, although these views may be well informed and may even represent the personal opinion of most members of the scientific community, many scientists feel that it is inappropriate to mix advocacy and science (Shrader-Frechette 1996). They argue that this can too easily lead to dogmatism, hidden agendas, and biased interpretations. These “evils”, whether perceived or real, can diminish the credibility of scientists in the eyes of policy makers and the general public. Not surprisingly, most graduate programs in ecology and evolution teach a narrow doctrine of scientific objectivity.
The hazards of practicing advocacy as a student are numerous. Students often have little experience engaging policy makers or communicating science to the public. We also generally lack experience in weighing the strength of scientific evidence for or against particular courses of action (Ludwig et al. 1993). This deficiency in experience amplifies the potential to misjudge a situation or mangle an effort to influence political decision making. It may also reduce our ability to engage in future decision making, so that the original act of advocacy ends up being counterproductive. Without an established track record, advocating a view on our own may quickly call into question the reliability of our data and analyses. As junior scientists, we need to be especially sensitive to this particular risk, as a lack of credibility has the potential to limit our future job prospects and funding opportunities.
With so many potential pitfalls, should students avoid all forms of advocacy? Regardless of where we are in our careers, the principal risk of not engaging in advocacy is that our scientific findings may never reach the proper hands or might be wrongly interpreted. Because methodologies and analyses can be technical and because information sharing can be difficult in some countries, the potential for misinterpretation or lack of interpretation can be great. Indeed, graduate students may actually be in the best position to advocate, because we spend relatively long periods of time in the field and may be especially well informed about the details of a particular policy tradeoff. On a more practical level, practicing advocacy during graduate school may provide real-world experience and help employment prospects by raising the profile of our work. Several young biologists have emerged as influential figures in conservation biology, on account of their willingness to risk advocating controversial solutions to real-world problems (eg Donlan et al. 2005).
I wrestle with these ideas in my own work. I study a declining wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) population in Tanzania. Several general management options are available for counteracting this decline: increasing land protection in the calving grounds, establishing movement corridors between dispersal areas, or increasing the frequency of anti-poaching patrols. As I near completion of my thesis, I feel that I have more and more to say about which option I believe will lead to the recovery of the wildebeest population. While there is political will to conserve the migratory populations in this area, the lack of formal channels for information-sharing reduces the probability that science will play a role in the decision-making process. To counteract this, I feel that I must be vocal about my view of the situation. My decision to advocate is influenced by the urgency of the population decline and the high value that I place on biodiversity conservation, as well as on other ecological, economic, and aesthetic grounds. However, this decision is tempered by uncertainty regarding my research results and my lack of knowledge about the human or economic implications of the different management strategies.
Students who choose to engage in advocacy can use a variety of strategies. One sensible option is to enlist the help of senior scientists and policy makers, who will provide expertise and add credibility to the cause. Their experience can be a fitting complement to our energy and ideals. Additionally, many of the problems that arise from advocacy are simply the result of poorly communicated messages, or messages that are unsuited to the audience. Graduate school offers countless venues for honing these communication skills: departmental lectures, teaching assistantships, graduate workshops, oratory clubs, newsletters, and so forth. Each provides a different context and a new opportunity to practice the art of sharing information and honing your message. Finally, student advocates need to be particularly rigorous in understanding the sources and meaning of uncertainty in their analyses. Although general courses in frequentist statistics lay the foundation for this understanding, several modeling frameworks – namely, adaptive management and structured decision making – now provide model-based approaches for dealing with uncertainty in the context of natural resource management. Few graduate programs offer full courses in these emerging fields, but many workshops and short courses can be found throughout the year, varying in their degree of specialization.
In short, graduate students in ecology must think strategically before engaging in advocacy. Despite the hazards, they have an opportunity to take a leading role in using ecology to inform and shape policy decisions and influence public opinion. As ecological research, and the sources that fund it, become increasingly channeled toward understanding the growing environmental and climate crises of this century, these opportunities will only grow more numerous.
Matthew P Ayres (faculty response)In my view, ecology has become broadly relevant to society, but we remain unsophisticated in bringing our science to practice. I avoid the word “advocacy” because it can imply chaining oneself to a tree, which I cannot recommend as a career move. However, I strongly encourage interested young scientists to be aggressive by bringing powerfully relevant science to environmental decision making.
Powerful science begins with a powerful question. If you seek applied relevance, choose research questions that inform important, malleable decisions, are soluble through scientific inquiry, and address theoretical principles broader than your system. Study the business of those who implement resource management decisions, and the perspectives of those who influence decisions and are influenced by them. Go to their meetings. Read their literature. Cultivate collaboration. Try out your research questions on them and favor those that most interest them. Ensure that your research plans could produce different possible results that would support different decisions. Avoid research plans that can only support one model for management. Be able to justify your proposed research in terms of new basic knowledge and help debunk the misconception of a tradeoff between basic and applied research.
Powerful science is interpreted with clear and strong arguments. Avoid being too cautious in pursuing relevance, in which case the science could be misunderstood and underused by society, but also avoid being too aggressive in pressing tenuous conclusions, which compromises the credibility of the science. Without being either too timid or too forceful, one can express with more or less certainty scientific inferences that are more or less consequential if true. Explore different formulations of statements to maximize the objective leverage of your work for decision making. Embrace decision theory, which considers (1) the benefits of a decision if the premise is correct versus the costs if the premise is incorrect, and (2) the parallel benefits and costs of an alternative decision favored by an alternative premise. Avoid conflating scientific inference with contextual values. Make use of the construction, “If one’s management goal is (contextual value) X, then our results favor decision A over decision B”. Avoid unconscious bias that leads to the omission of inconvenient interpretations; if one result would have had applied value, the alternative must have value.
Disseminating powerful science is founded on publishing engaging papers in top journals. Conveniently, this is also how to succeed professionally and expand your beneficial impacts. Beyond publishing, seek to bring your science to the managers, decision makers, and stakeholders who cannot possibly stay on top of all the potentially relevant technical literature. Send them your papers. Go to their meetings. Have coffee with them. Consider publishing accessible, non-technical summaries and be alert to calls for public input during the development of environmental policy. Finally, I encourage readers to follow Tom’s lead in promoting continuing serious discussion about how ecology and ecologists can meet the challenge of accelerating social relevance.
I read James Hanson’s first book on climate change (“Storms of my Grandchildren” ) over the Christmas break. It is a engaging book which quietly outlines the essential facts for why one of the world’s leading planetary scientists feels we are headed for planetary disaster. Phillip Adams does an excellent job of filling up the story by interviewing James Hansen below:
[https://climateshifts.org/media/ln.mp3]
This awesome essay is by Bill McKibben. It originally appeared here and is being widely circulated. It is from his forthcoming book “Eaarth: Making a life on a tough new planet”. I was in LA (doing my masters degree at CSUN) during the infamous OJ trials. Like everyone else around the world, I was shocked that a jury of peers could find him innocent given the overwhelming evidence against him. (and this is especially jarring given his recent quasi-confession). It was a stunning display of cognitive dissonance. The facts, more or less clearly presented, could not penetrate preconceived ideas and hardened socio-political biases. Doesn’t that pretty much sum up what is going on in the climate change “debate”?
The attack on climate science is the O.J. moment of the 21st century
by Bill McKibben
Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from The Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal. “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.” And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”
I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet. Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil,” and last week the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning “a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome” on a nearly party-line vote.
And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin. If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.
Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.
Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: Fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet. At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress toward any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.
Climate-change denial as an O.J. moment
The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?
The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: It was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack theprocess, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.
If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: In closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.
Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.
Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated — a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: Virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.
Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climategate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.
Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made — that’s what Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) did, insisting the emails proved “scientific fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents “Hitler youth.” Such language filters down. I’m now used to a daily diet of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: “Nazi Moron Scumbag.”
If you’re smart, you can also take advantage of lucky breaks that cross your path. Say a record set of snowstorms hit Washington, D.C. It won’t even matter that such a record is just the kind of thing scientists have been predicting, given the extra water vapor global warming is adding to the atmosphere. It’s enough that it’s super-snowy in what everyone swore was a warming world.
For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website, the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred posts poking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believe in, you know, physics. Morano, who really is good, posted a link to a live webcam so readers could watch snow coming down; his former boss, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had his grandchildren build an igloo on the Capitol grounds, with a sign that read: “Al Gore’s New Home.” These are the things that stick in people’s heads. If the winter glove won’t fit, you must acquit.
Why we don’t want to believe in climate change
The climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks to ExxonMobil and others with a vested interest in debunking climate-change research, their “think tanks” have plenty of money, none of which gets wasted doing actual research to disprove climate change. It’s also useful for a movement to have its own TV network, Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a few right-wing British tabloids that validate each new “scandal” and put it into media play.
That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February when even The New York Times ran a front page story, “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel,” which recycled most of the accusations of the past few months. What made it such a glorious testament to their success was the chief source cited by the Times: one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be called since he is some kind of British viscount. He is also identified as a “former advisor to Margaret Thatcher,” and he did write a piece for the American Spectator during her term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for “the only way to stop AIDS”:
… screen the entire population regularly and … quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month … all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic — and now from above the fold in the paper of record.
Access to money and the media is not the only, or even the main, reason for the success of the climate deniers, though. They’re not actually spending all that much cash and they’ve got legions of eager volunteers doing much of the internet lobbying entirely for free. Their success can be credited significantly to the way they tap into the main currents of our politics of the moment with far more savvy and power than most environmentalists can muster. They’ve understood the popular rage at elites. They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control.
Some of that is, of course, purely partisan. The columnist David Brooks, for instance, recently said: “On the one hand, I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and it is manmade. On the other hand, I feel a frisson of pleasure when I come across evidence that contradicts the models … [in part] because I relish any fact that might make Al Gore look silly.” But the passion with which people attack Gore more often seems focused on the charge that he’s making large sums of money from green investments, and that the whole idea is little more than a scam designed to enrich everyone involved. This may be wrong — Gore has testified under oath that he donates his green profits to the cause — and scientists are not getting rich researching climate change (constant blog comments to the contrary), but it resonates with lots of people. I get many emails a day on the same theme: “The game is up. We’re on to you.”
When I say it resonates with lots of people, I mean lots of people. O.J.’s lawyers had to convince a jury made up mostly of black women from central city L.A., five of whom reported that they or their families had had “negative experiences” with the police. For them, it was a reasonably easy sell. When it comes to global warming, we’re pretty much all easy sells because we live the life that produces the carbon dioxide that’s at the heart of the crisis, and because we like that life.
Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, and given half a chance to think they don’t need to, they’ll take it. Especially when it sounds expensive, and especially when the economy stinks.Here’s David Harsanyi, a columnist for The Denver Post: “If they’re going to ask a nation — a world — to fundamentally alter its economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers’ credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.”
“Unassailable” sets the bar impossibly high when there is a dedicated corps of assailants out there hard at work. It is true that those of us who want to see some national and international effort to fight global warming need to keep making the case that the science is strong. That’s starting to happen. There are new websites and iPhone apps to provide clear and powerful answers to the skeptic trash-talking, and strangely enough, the denier effort may, in some ways, be making the case itself: If you go over the multi-volume IPCC report with a fine-tooth comb and come up with three or four lousy citations, that’s pretty strong testimony to its essential accuracy.
Clearly, however, the antiseptic attempt to hide behind the magisterium of Science in an effort to avoid the rough-and-tumble of Politics is a mistake. It’s a mistake because science can be — and, in fact, should be — infinitely argued about. Science is, in fact, nothing but an ongoing argument, which is one reason why it sounds so disingenuous to most people when someone insists that the science is “settled.” That’s especially true of people who have been told at various times in their lives that some food is good for you, only to be told later that it might increase your likelihood of dying.
Why data isn’t enough
I work at Middlebury College, a topflight liberal arts school, so I’m surrounded by people who argue constantly. It’s fun. One of the better skeptical takes on global warming that I know about is a weekly radio broadcast on our campus radio station run by a pair of undergraduates. They’re skeptics, but not cynics. Anyone who works seriously on the science soon realizes that we know more than enough to start taking action, but less than we someday will. There will always be controversy over exactly what we can now say with any certainty. That’s life on the cutting edge. I certainly don’t turn my back on the research — we’ve spent the last two years at 350.org building what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally” around a previously obscure data point, the amount of atmospheric carbon that scientists say is safe, measured in parts per million.
But it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.
So let’s figure out how to talk about it. Let’s look at ExxonMobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn’t pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.
Right now, there’s a bill in the Congress — cap-and-dividend, it’s called — that would charge Exxon for that right, and send a check to everyone in the country every month. Yes, the company would pass on the charge at the pump, but 80 percent of Americans (all except the top-income energy hogs) would still make money off the deal. That represents good science, because it starts to send a signal that we should park that SUV, but it’s also good politics.
By the way, if you think there’s a scam underway, you’re right — and to figure it out just track the money going in campaign contributions to the politicians doing the bidding of the energy companies. Inhofe, the igloo guy? Over a million dollars from energy and utility companies and executives in the last two election cycles. You think Al Gore is going to make money from green energy? Check out what you get for running an oil company.
Worried that someone is going to wreck your future? You’re right about that, too. Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They’re making the investments that mean future windmills and solar panels, even ones installed in this country, will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not Chicago.
Coal companies have already eliminated most good mining jobs, simply by automating them in the search for ever higher profits. Now, they’re using their political power to make sure that miners’ kids won’t get to build wind turbines instead. Everyone should be mighty pissed — just not at climate-change scientists.
But keep in mind as well that fear and rage aren’t the only feelings around. They’re powerful feelings, to be sure, but they’re not all we feel. And they are not us at our best.
There’s also love, a force that has often helped motivate large-scale change, and one that cynics in particular have little power to rouse. Love for poor people around the world, for instance. If you think it’s not real, you haven’t been to church recently, especially evangelical churches across the country. People who take the Gospel seriously also take seriously indeed the injunction to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless.
It’s becoming patently obvious that nothing challenges that goal quite like the rising seas and spreading deserts of climate change. That’s why religious environmentalism is one of the most effective emerging parts of the global warming movement; that’s why we were able to get thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times last October to signify what scientists say is the safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere; that’s why Bartholomew, patriarch of the Orthodox church and leader of 400 million eastern Christians, said, “Global warming is a sin and 350 is an act of redemption.”
There’s also the deep love for creation, for the natural world. We were born to be in contact with the world around us and, though much of modernity is designed to insulate us from nature, it doesn’t really work. Any time the natural world breaks through — a sunset, an hour in the garden — we’re suddenly vulnerable to the realization that we care about things beyond ourselves. That’s why, for instance, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are so important: Get someone out in the woods at an impressionable age and you’ve accomplished something powerful. That’s why art and music need to be part of the story, right alongside bar graphs and pie charts. When we campaign about climate change at 350.org, we make sure to do it in the most beautiful places we know, the iconic spots that conjure up people’s connection to their history, their identity, their hope.
The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re not completely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove every possible doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocent man in a jail cell is a scandal, but outside of it we should act more conservatively.
In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they’ll be a footnote to history. (Hey, even O.J. is finally in jail.) But they’ll lose because we’ll all lose, because by delaying action, they will have helped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while there’s still time. If we’re going to make real change while it matters, it’s important to remember that their skepticism isn’t the root of the problem. It simply plays on our deep-seated resistance to change. That’s what gives the climate cynics ground to operate. That’s what we need to overcome, and at bottom that’s a battle as much about courage and hope as about data.
Science magazine’s awesome blog, ScienceNow, just held a contest for the best bloggers covering the 2010 AAAS meeting. The third place winner Daniel Stolte, a science writer at the University of Arizona, made two excellent posts on two very depressing aspects of ocean degradation. The first, “Blinded by the Noise”, is on marine noise pollution interfering with whale communication and the second, Oases of Life in Perpetual Darkness”, is about the destruction of ocean seamounts via bottom trawling. Ill excerpt them below, but both are worth reading in full.
Blinded by the Noise
A new visualization reveals the dramatic impact of shipping traffic on Right Whales in New England
Before the invention of the Diesel engine, life was good for the Right Whales living off the coast of Boston. For thousands of years, the calls and songs they produced to keep track of each other over great distances were the only sounds probing the murky depths.
“The place in which these animals live is defined not only in terms of space, but in terms of sound – they live in an acoustic habitat,” says Christopher Clark from Cornell University, who has been listening in on the whales to get a better understanding of how noise impacts their acoustic habitat. “Imagine living in a village where people can’t see each other or where they’re going. They have to rely on sounds and calls to keep track of each other and go about their lives.”
Once a shire shrouded in peace and quiet, the Right Whales’ village has since been drowning in the cacophony of cargo ships’ and ocean liners’ propellers that churn the waters
Using an array of underwater listening devices installed on the sea floor, Clark and his research team have been able to record and monitor the sounds that define the Right Whales’ acoustic seascape over long periods of time.
What the researchers found is alarming: Just like terrestrial habitats shrink in space, the whales’ acoustic habitat is being destroyed.
“Each time a ship passes through the area, the acoustic habitat around the whales basically collapses,” Clark says.
And see our post on the effects of ocean acidification on marine acoustics here
Oases of Life in Perpetual Darkness: Seamounts are being destroyed faster than they are discovered
Unlike on land, where every peak, every mountain, every hill and every valley has been discovered, described and mapped, the deep ocean floor, which makes up the largest portion of the earth’s crust, is mostly terra incognita. Exactly how many seamounts there are and where, nobody knows.
“We estimate there are fifty thousand or more seamounts out there,” says Hall-Spencer, a lecturer at the University of Plymouth in the U.K and a member of the project CenSeam, a census exploring seamounts and the marine life associated with the newly discovered oases beneath the sea. “But less than 0.1 percent of them have been surveyed.”
Only problem: even faster than seamounts are being discovered, they are being destroyed, and with them entire ecosystems that we hardly know anything about.
big threat comes from destructive fishing practices. In the 1970s, fishing fleets struck unexpected riches below their hulls. Whenever they hauled their nets near the slopes of a seamount, chances were they came back on board bursting at the seams, spilling hundreds of tons of deep-sea fish across the deck. Because of their stark topography, seamounts attract large numbers and unusually diverse arrays of marine life.
“Some seamounts are so big that they divert ocean currents upward and send them swirling over the top,” says Hall-Spencer. The resulting vortices trap plankton and other drifting organic matter and concentrate it on the mountain.
“One trawl bulldozes deep-sea coral forests that took more than 4,000 years to grow in some cases,” says Hall-Spencer. “Since most known seamounts are being trawled we have to ask ourselves whether the catches are worth the destruction of seamount habitats?”
His next slide, in the brief and factual language of science states what should give us the only necessary clue to find the answer: “Worldwide catches landed each year: 80 million tons. Estimated total seamounts catch (read: ALL seamount catches EVER MADE, taken together) 2 – 2.5 million tons, a fraction that seems meaningless in the big picture.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rb5HzR26OM&w=640&h=385]
Shock! Somehow that Sei whale meat from Japan’s “scientific” whale hunt has found its way onto the plates of an LA sushi bar! And giving this story an odd twist is the fact that the bust was initiated by hollywood activists that produced The Cove.
From the NYT: Oscar winners try to keep whale off sushi plates
with video cameras and tiny microphones, the team behind Sunday’s Oscar-winning documentary film “The Cove” orchestrated a Hollywood-meets-Greenpeace-style covert operation to ferret out what the authorities say is illegal whale meat at one of this town’s most highly regarded sushi destinations.
Their work, undertaken in large part here last week as the filmmakers gathered for the Academy Awards ceremony, was coordinated with law enforcement officials, who said Monday that they were likely to bring charges against the restaurant, the Hump, for violating federal laws against selling marine mammals.
The sushi sting actually began in October, when the documentary’s associate producer and “director of clandestine operations,” Charles Hambleton, heard from friends in the music industry that the Hump, a highly rated sushi restaurant next to the runway at the Santa Monica airport, was serving whale.
Mr. Hambleton, who has worked as a water safety consultant on Hollywood movies like “Pirates of the Caribbean,” created a tiny camera for two animal-activist associates to wear during a monster session of omakase — a sushi meal in which the chef picks all the dishes.
Video of their meal shows the two activists, both vegan, being served what the waitress can be heard calling “whale” — thick pink slices — that they take squeamish bites of before tossing into a Ziploc bag in a purse.
The samples were sent to Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. Professor Baker said DNA testing there revealed that the samples sent to him were from a Sei whale, which are found worldwide and are endangered but are sometimes hunted in the North Pacific under a controversial Japanese scientific program. “I’ve been doing this for years,” Professor Baker said. “I was pretty shocked.”
Serving unusual fish imported from Japan is the hallmark of many high-end sushi restaurants here, and whale meat is often found in Japanese markets, Professor Baker said. But he said he had never heard of it being served in an American restaurant.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYKNCN1ESZM&w=640&h=385]
Last week I made a post about a new paper on methane seeping from the Arctic seafloor. Since then, there have been several new posts on other sites about the work, putting it into a broader perspective and also taking somewhat contradictory views of the implications of the finding. The fear is that rapid methane release is considered one plausible mechanism that could lead to abrupt climate change via various positive feedbacks in the climate system. As Nick Sundt points out (here)
A report released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Abrupt Climate Change, said in December 2008 (during the Bush Administration) that warming in the Arctic could cause sea levels to rise substantially beyond scientists’ previous predictions and could result in massive releases of methane. The report said that the “rapid release to the atmosphere of methane trapped in permafrost and on continental margins” was among “four types of abrupt change in the paleoclimatic record that stand out as being so rapid and large in their impact that if they were to recur, they would pose clear risks to society in terms of our ability to adapt.”
Also see lead author, Natalia Shakhova, explain the work in this video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD8hU-lbqpE&w=425&h=344]
First, Skeptical Science has a brief but clear explanation of the study (here).
Second, Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a long and very nice post putting the study into the broader context of methane-AGW research and also nicely summarizing the related issue of terrestrial Arctic permafrost thawing.
Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane. Methane is is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!
The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“). Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below). No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.
Third, David Archer made a post at Real Climate about the work, poking at the idea that rapidly increasing methane concentration could be a game changer, arguing that CO2 is still the big kahuna.
Methane is like the radical wing of the carbon cycle, in today’s atmosphere a stronger greenhouse gas per molecule than CO2, and an atmospheric concentration that can change more quickly than CO2 can. There has been a lot of press coverage of a new paper in Science this week called “Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”, which comes on the heels of a handful of interrelated methane papers in the last year or so. Is now the time to get frightened?
No. CO2 is plenty to be frightened of, while methane is frosting on the cake. Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the brake pedal is broken. This is CO2. Then you figure out that the accelerator has also jammed, so that by the time you hit the truck in front of you, you will be going 90 miles per hour instead of 60. This is methane. Is now the time to get worried? No, you should already have been worried by the broken brake pedal. Methane sells newspapers, but it’s not the big story, nor does it look to be a game changer to the big story, which is CO2.
All three posts point out correctly that lacking time series data, there is no way to know whether the this methane flux is new and/or a result of global warming:
What’s missing from these studies themselves is evidence that the Siberian shelf degassing is new, a climate feedback, rather than simply nature-as-usual, driven by the retreat of submerged permafrost left over from the last ice age. However, other recent papers speak to this question. – David Archer
Finally, the National Science Foundation issued a press release and a fact sheet on the paper.
“The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world’s oceans,” said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF’s International Arctic Research Center. “Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap.”
Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova’s research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.
“Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already,” she said. “If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger.”
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters (164 feet) or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth’s history. During the Earth’s coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.
“It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen,” Shakhova said. “Nobody considered this huge area.”
The fact sheet is a nice intro to the role of methane in global warming;
What is methane?
Methane is a naturally-occurring compound that is created when organic material, such as the remains of plants and animals, rot or otherwise break down. Bacteria and other microbes play a large role in processes that produce methane. These methane-producing processes may, for example, occur in landfills as their contents age. And some animals release methane as their bodies digest their food.
Vast stores of methane are trapped in the permafrost of the Arctic–large swaths of land where the ground stays frozen. Because of climate change, some Arctic permafrost is showing signs of thawing. This thawed Arctic permafrost may release methane into the atmosphere.
Why does methane cause so much concern?
Like carbon dioxide, methane is a greenhouse gas. The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere inhibits the Earth’s heat from being released into space. Therefore, increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may cause the Earth’s temperature to increase over time.
Methane may be “stored” underground or under the seafloor as methane gas or methane hydrate; methane hydrate is a crystalline solid combining methane and water, which is stable at low temperatures and high pressure–conditions commonly found in marine sediments. When methane stores are released relatively quickly into the atmosphere, levels of atmospheric methane may rapidly spike.
As a greenhouse gas, methane is 30 times more potent (gram for gram) than carbon dioxide. This means that adding relatively modest amounts of methane to the atmosphere may yield relatively large impacts on climate.
How much methane does it take to increase warming?
There’s no clear answer to that question. However, the Earth’s geologic record indicates that atmospheric concentrations of methane have varied from about 0.3 to 0.4 parts per million during cold periods to about 0.6 to 0.7 parts per million during warm periods.
Professor David Karoly (one of Australia’s esteemed ARC Federation Fellows) wrote to several of us recently in frustration over the recent misinformation in the Courier Mail and on Andrew Bolt’s blog. As usual, Andrew and the News Ltd papers have cherry-picked their way through the truth. Here is what David wrote:
“I don’t like responding to all, and saturating others’ email inboxes, but the misinformation in John’s emails and the Andrew Bolt’s blog is as bad as ever.
Yes, there is more ice in winter than in summer (no surprise).
The long term trend of decreasing Artic sea ice amounts in winter and in summer, as described in the Wilkinson documentary, is continuing (see image below from NSIDC).”
Enough said. The data speak for themselves.
