Monthly Archives: April 2017

Minnesota March For Science

Just a little video and some pictures from today’s March for Science, Minnesota.

This one from the march route on the way to the capitol. Skip ahead to about 1:12 go get the best chant:

PHOTO_20170422_111658

Another video, this one from The Hedge:

You don’t see this sign at many protests:
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Mammals were welcome at the march:PHOTO_20170422_115032

And, now, Here is my extraordinarily well timed Facebook Live post

What do you think about the death penalty?

We just had an execution by lethal injection. Everything went fine. If, by “fine,” we mean a guy died as a bunch of people watched emotionlessly.

The execution was carried out so late in the process that only a few minutes passed between the pronouncement of death and and the expiration of the court order to kill.

What if the execution had taken twice as long? With the order expired, would it be stopped during the final minutes? Would someone dial 911, get EMTs in there, try to save the guy’s life?

I’m against the death penalty. I think it is time we recognized that this is the 21st century, and that we have this whole civilization thing. But, if we are going to execute someone, this absurd idea that somehow modern medicine can do a better job than the old methods is crazy. Perhaps our reluctance to use tried and true methods like hanging, beheading, and firing squad, all modern methods developed to replace the ancient horrible methods like crushing to death, burning to death, and stoning to death, is an indicator. Our preference to pretend that this is all very scientific and clean may be an indication that not very far below the surface we find the whole thing abhorrent. By pretending it is a medical procedure, painless, controlled, etc., we also pretend it is a civilized act to take the life of a person already imprisoned for life.

I’d rather live in a society where the argument “these people will not feel good about the horrible death of their loved ones until another horrible death has been carried out” is reserved for the anthropology textbooks, in the chapter on vengeance based societies.

By the way, I lived for years in a vengeance based society, a society in which all deaths, including from disease, or even being killed by a wild animal, were considered homicide, and the homicide should always be avenged. There were many deaths during my time there. Never once was a death avenged. The process of adjudication, of finding the party who caused the death (most likely by which craft) was very carefully done. The guilty party was always identified, but strangely, it always seemed to be an individual that lived very far away, that no one quite seemed to know well enough to find, or even bother looking for. So please don’t think that a tribal vengeance society is necessarily less civilized than our Western society.

But I digress. What do we do about the Death Penalty in America?

Once again, the Mystery of the Tsavo Lions Solved

I’ll never forget my first lion.

A colleague and I had just arrived in the Semliki Valley, in the Congo, to a part of that valley then known as the most predator-rich region of Africa, with loads of lions and heaps of hyenas. Lots of leopards too. We arrived at the main base camp for a large expedition that I was to join a year later (this was a brief visit) and were told to find the satellite camp, out in the bush.

“Ten clicks that way, then a left on their road. Good luck finding the road.”

Good luck indeed. Took us forever. And, at one point, after night fell, we had the brilliant idea that we could stand on the hood of of the Land Rover and maybe see lights in the distance (this turns out to have been totally worthless, as the camp was down in a valley, very far away, they mainly had candle light, and by this time only a single hurricane lamp would be burning, invisible from this distance).

So, we stopped, and I got out of the Land Rover, climbed up on to the hood, and just before the driver switched off the headlights, a giant lioness walked up to the truck, right in the headlight beams, looked at me, sniffed at the grill of the truck, and wandered off into the blackness of night, now invisible to us.

She was was about ten feet tall, fifty feet long, and had fangs about a foot long.

OK, I’m exaggerating slightly, but here’s the thing. You see a giant cat, like a lion or tiger, in a zoo, in the enclosure, and that’s one thing. You see a giant cat in the wild, a wild giant cat, not a tame one, and it is close enough to reach over and take your leg off without going anywhere, and that’s a different thing.

That was not to be my first close call with lions, nor the closest in fact, over the next year and a half. And, though I was not eaten by a lion, something like six people were, right near that spot.

Between this short trip and the later, much longer visit to this site, a lion, it is said, started eating people. It was local villagers, living in the usual wattle and daub grass-roofed huts who were being eaten. Lions tend to go for the head region when they kill, but they usually attack much more robust prey, like a large antelope or a buffalo. So, when the take a human, they may crush the head in such a way that an eye ball or two pops out. I was told that in a few of the locations where the lion ate someone, all that was left was an eye ball or two, and that freaked the freaken heck out of the people in those tiny villages.

I was told this by a local Greek merchant named Andre, who happened to be the guy with the biggest and most accurate firearm in the region, who, with his brother, took out the lion. Andre was wearing a nice neckless he had made himself, using one of the canines of the lion. His brother, he told me, had a matching neckless.

So, what about Tsavo? You may remember “The Ghost And The Darkness,” which was a book and a movie, or you may have heard about them from another source. It is an old story.

Back when the British were building a railroad across what is now Kenya, during much of the year 1898, two lions took to dining on the mostly Chinese rail workers. The number of victims they are said to have eaten ranges up to 135 people (see: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures), and the lions were said to be mysterious and demonic. The reality is a bit different. They are known to have eaten 28 railway workers, and they were just regular lions, but of the mainless variety found in that region.

Lions, like cats generally, tend to be specialists. The way to find, trap, and kill (and sometimes, to process or eat) a particular species involves a lot of important detail. They way a Zebra vs. a Buffalo can kick you to death if you are a lion matters. The way to entrap a Ugandan kob vs. a wildebeest are not even close to the same thing, if you are a lion. Lions, therefore, tend to hunt a particular prey, or a small number of possible prey type, for a long time, possibly their entire lives.

Putting this a different way, the list of prey lions are known to have fed on is long. The list of species you actually observe a given pride of lions to feed on, if you watch most of their kills for many months, is very short. Humans are totally on the long list, and of all the wild mammals that kill humans in Africa, lions kill the most. But humans are rarely on the sort list. Why? Because they taste bad to lions, right? That’s what everyone says. Unfortunately, that is not true. We taste just fine, if a bit stringy. But we are bad prey for other reasons. First, we are rare. Yes, yes, seven billion is a lot, but in lion country, we are rare. Second, we live inside hard to get into nests much of the time, so it is not really worth it. Third, lions are not idiots. We have sharp weapons and sometimes guns, so even if a lion can easily sneak up on a human, some other human is going to stick or shoot you. In any event, once a lion starts to eat humans, it does not live too long. The Tsavo lions probably lived longer than the average man eater. The Semliki man eater emerged on the scene, ate some people, and was dispatched between my visit in late August and my return the following June.

But there is some new research telling us a few cool things. Here’s the paper:

DeSantis, L.R.G. and B. D. Patterson. 2017. Dietary behaviour of man-eating lions as revealed by dental microwear textures. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 904 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41598-017-00948-5.

Here is the abstract:

Lions (Panthera leo) feed on diverse prey species, a range that is broadened by their cooperative hunting. Although humans are not typical prey, habitual man-eating by lions is well documented. Fathoming the motivations of the Tsavo and Mfuwe man-eaters (killed in 1898 in Kenya and 1991 in Zambia, respectively) may be elusive, but we can clarify aspects of their behaviour using dental microwear texture analysis. Specifically, we analysed the surface textures of lion teeth to assess whether these notorious man-eating lions scavenged carcasses during their depredations. Compared to wild-caught lions elsewhere in Africa and other large feliforms, including cheetahs and hyenas, dental microwear textures of the man-eaters do not suggest extreme durophagy (e.g. bone processing) shortly before death. Dental injuries to two of the three man-eaters examined may have induced shifts in feeding onto softer foods. Further, prompt carcass reclamation by humans likely limited the man-eaters’ access to bones. Man-eating was likely a viable alternative to hunting and/or scavenging ungulates due to dental disease and/or limited prey availability.

You need to know that at Tsavo, at that time, the prey was very reduced in frequency because of a drought and the rinderpest. So some lions were probably desperate. In the case of Tsavo, one lion had a tooth problem, which may have made killing larger and more formidable prey difficult, and the other lion was apparently its friend and went along with it. (Male lions do form such small teams.) Other research at Tsavo indicated that these lions had eaten more people than recorded by the railroad, so they may have been eating humans for a while, though not their entire adult lives.

There are two other writeups on this work you will want to check out:

Virginia Morell, “Why did these lions eat 35 men?

Bem Giaromp “Why did the Tsavo lions eat people?

See also: Michael Torrice, “A body count for two man-eating lions

The Mystery of the Carl Vinson

<li>On September 11th, 1640, a Dutch armada preparing to attack the New World Spanish settlements was lost to a storm, thus changing the course of Dutch, Spanish, and New World history. </li>


<li>On January 2nd, 1678, an entire fleet of French naval ships was lost off the Venezuelan coat, changing forever the history of France.  And Venezuela.  <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060198184/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0060198184&linkCode=as2&tag=grlasbl0a-20&linkId=b83eba754ac7216967259cba5ee67675">*</a><img src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=grlasbl0a-20&l=am2&o=1&a=0060198184" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></li>


<li>On or about April 19th, 2017, the United States lost the battle group running with the USS Carl Vinson, somewhere in the Pacific.  This altered forever the credibility of the American Military around the world.  </li>

The Russians are Hacking Us Again

I remember like it was yesterday, the anti Hillary rhetoric flying around during those final weeks of the election. People were making statements that seemed to be based on actual sources, though the sources themselves were not crossing my path. The attitude of those repeating the stories was very similar across the board. Breathless, gut-punch angry, visceral, mean. They were talking almost as though Hillary Clinton had stepped on their baby’s heads. That kind of thing.

And it turns out that this was the Russians. The people doing this were not the Russians. Rather, the Russians, either working for Trump or working in parallel with him (we shall eventually find out) were isolating vulnerable individuals, individual who fit a certain discernible pattern of attributes, and psychologically manipulating them to rage against Hillary.

Looking back, it is now pretty clear that this vitriolic wall of hate, rising up unexpectedly and looking a certain way, was an anomaly. Yes, yes, there was all this Hillary Hate before, but that was from a different demographic, had a different look, and a different feel. This new thing was a different thing, and looking back, one can see it clearly.

And now, it is back. The statements being made that, when you run them down, are not based on reality. The vitriol, almost threatening way it is put. The logical conclusion of the rhetoric being self defeating and damaging to the Democratic Party and progressive idea.

But this time it is about Bernie. I will bet all my bagels and muffins against all your donuts that the Russians are hacking us again, but this time, instead of manipulating Bernie-favoring people to hate bigger and better on Hillary, they are manipulating Hillary supporters to bash Bernie.

It is the same level of vitriol, the same badly sourced accusations, the same direct link between accusation and a final solution of leaving or tearing apart the Democratic party, etc. It appeared in the social networking world instantly, and it is suddenly everywhere. Have you seen it?

I’ll give yo an example. Perez gets up in front of an audience and all the Bernie Bots boo him. That is what is being said. What really happened is that Perez got Bernie to do a talk in a place where Bernie was very popular, to shore up Democratic support, and a lot of Bernie people cheered the heck out of Bernie. There was not moment of booing Perez, though there may have been one moment of mixed hemming and hawing. The actual non-false, real thing that happened is that Perez gave a speech that had the audience cheering and on their feet, then Sanders gave a speech that had the audience cheering and on their feet. If you don’t believe me, you can watch it yourself, below.

But this was converted into a false accusation that Bernie was trying to ruin the Democratic Party. The vitriol is intense. He’s a socialist, run him out. He’s an independent, run him out. He lies all the time. Etc.

The result of this falsehood laced vitriol is to split anti-Republican and anti-Trump forces and to throw the grassroots of the Democratic Party in to chaos.

OK, I do not know that this is Russian Hacking. But it looks exactly like the Russian anti-Hillary hacking. It has the same form, the same technique, some of the same rhetoric, and is exploiting a similar set of vulnerable individuals. If this is not Russian hacking then, indeed, you can have all the muffins and bagels in the land for yourself.

Tom Perez Was Not Booed; that is a pernicious lie

How many Democratic events have you been to? This was a pretty typical one, but slight bit more raucous. There is a heckler yelling something in the beginning, I have no idea what. Hecklers could be paid operatives, or just crazy people, or just people who are not fully in control of themselves.

The so called “booing of Perez,” which was not booing of Perez, happens at just after 6:18. Perez is not on the stage, therefore he is not booed. The speaker asks the audience if they are there to hear about the future of the Democratic Party and the new chair. This is an audience of people who came to hear Sanders. It is a light hearted, fun, charged up rally. If you say to them, “you are here to see ______” where the blank is filled in with anything at all that is not the keynote speaker, they will boo. So, some booed, some cheered, it was pretty ambiguous, and most importantly, UTTERLY MEANINGLESS. It is this moment of alleged but not actual booing of Perez that is among the items being used to bash Bernie and create this unnecessary division.

Now, watch Perz at just after 32:00 . He gives a great speach. He is cheered and loved. there is not Perez hate here.

The people who are being manipulated by this latest round of psychological warfare are unlikely to be convinced that they are wrong. Assuming this is manipulation, the psychology is immune, laced with paranoia and preformed hatred of disagreement. What needs to happen is this: People need to realize that the hacking that happened before can happen again and, probably, is happening again now. The other thing that needs to happen is that the individuals who are doing this hacking, who can’t find their center, their rational self, and slough it off, need to be isolated. Don’t engage, don’t follow, just … well, just do this:

Because that is what your friend’s facebook page looks like.

Minnesota March For Science

In which I interview Geoffrey Rojas, an organizer for Minnesota March for Science:

Books mentioned in the interview:

The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It by Shawn Otto.

The Meetup Information for the Atheists Bus is here. The bus is currently full!

The Minnesota March for Science facebook page is here.

I think the wether is going to be perfect marching weather.

On a related topic: Evidence for Democracy – Katie Gibbs on Science Resisting

Donald S. Beyer Letter to Lamar Smith on Climate Change Hearings of March 2017

Behold the following letter from Representative Donald S. Beyer in reference to the recent House Science, Space, and Technology hearing “Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy, Implications, and Scientific Method” held last month (Warning Big File):

Beyer Fact Check – Submitted April 11

Here is a smaller, much abbreviated and much less fun version of the letter, sans the extensive appendix:

Letter Only

Global Warming Is Warming

The latest data from NASA GISS has come out, showing a surprise result for the month of March.

Hat tip to Jeff Masters of Wunderground for sending this info. He’ll probably be blogging on it soon.

The surprise is that March, while expected to be warm due to human caused greenhouse gas pollution, turned out to be very warm globally. This is a surprise because the Earth supposedly just experienced a minor cooling La Niña event that ended in January. March 2017, it turns out, is the fourth warmest month since 1880 expressed as an anomaly from a 1951-1980 baseline (that’s a bit tricky, more on that below).

Here’s the current list of warmest months:

February 2016, 1.32°C
March 2016, 1.28°C
January 2016, 1.13°C
March 2017, 1.12°C
February 2017, 1.10°C
December 2015, 1.10°C

The key thing to notice here is all those years being very very recent.

The ranking of months is on a month by month basis. In other words, Feb 2016 is not necessarily the warmest month of all the months over 120 years. Rather, it is the warmest of all the Februaries over this period of time. This may seem like a strange way to do it, but it actually makes sense. Even though these are global values and thus integrate northern and southern seasons, there is a potential for intra-annual variation in global temperatures, for a number of reasons (including the uneven distribution of land and ocean between the northern and southern hemispheres). For this and other even more esoteric reasons having to do with how to track anomalies, we compare months to months (Januaries to Januaries, Februaries to Februaries, etc.).

Democrats: Do these things

A lot of people are offering free advice to the Democratic Party these days. This is natural in the wake of a resounding defeat, especially a defeat that was snatched so clumsily from the jaws of victory.

I gave some advice a while back (see: Why Trump Won And How To Fix That For Future Elections). Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time with a lot of those folks who appeared on the scene, often as members of Indivisible groups, after the election. I see a lot of frustration with the Democratic Party (and our local DFL, which is what we call the Democratic Party in Minnesota). Here are my new suggestions inspired by what I hear people saying out there in the libraries, public meeting rooms, and town halls, at least in suburban Minnesota.

Be A Party

Remember when a judge ruled on an issue regarding voter suppression during the 2016 election? Well, there were a few such rulings, but one had to do with a consent decree against the Republican Party, forcing them to not actively force African Americans and other non-whites away from the polls using intimidation, fear, and misinformation. The concern was that the Trump campaign was doing this, therefore the several years old consent decree should be continued.

The court ruled against extending the consent decree. Why? Because the Trump campaign wasn’t threatening voters? No. They were. Because threatening voters can’t actually change an election’s outcome? No. It can. Because we decided it is OK to exclude minorities from the democratic process officially, not just by default? No. That was not decided.

The consent decree was not extended because the Trump campaign and the Republican party are two different things. Extending the consent decree on the Republican Party because of what the Trump campaign was doing would be like the police arresting you because I rob a gas station.

Crazy, isn’t it? Both major parties have a national organization, plus an organization that helps fund but otherwise has nothing to do with Congressional races. Then, each state has a separate iteration of the party, not quite fully connected to the national party. And, a given candidate’s campaign may or may not have various legal connections with other party entities.

This is actually very complicated, and varies across the landscape.

The point is, regular normal people who are not party insiders can’t really relate to a political party without frequently getting burned or being confused because there is not a political party.

Now, I’m not saying that there should be one entity to serve all the needs of the party across geography and at every level of government. I have no idea if the multi-headed hydra approach is a good thing or a bad thing. I’ve not analyzed that. Perhaps an expert or two will weigh in below, in the comments section.

But I do know this: A sense of oneness, simplicity, and therefore, accessibility to the inside of it, could be engendered to the benefit of the party. The way it works now, individuals can sidle up to what they think is the Democratic Party, then an entity one might easily think is the same entity does some bone-headed thing, and that’s when the regular normal person finds out that their friend, the Democratic Party, has a built in way of making excuses instead of taking responsibility for its actions.

The party asks for unity among its supporters. Fine. But the party should also develop some unity and coherence within itself, so that people can understand it better, and know, that if they are involved at the Congressional District or County level somewhere, that their voices are being clearly heard by the national party as well as the presidential campaign and all of that.

Early Endorsements Stifle

This is an example of what I want to expand on a bit below, but I want to get this near the top of the post because it is a very current issue. I’ve written about this recently. See: A plethora of early endorsements does not endear the new Democrats to the DFL in MinnPost and Collin Peterson, RT Rybak, and David Wellstone Play Inside Baseball? at Minnesota Progressive Project.

Go read those posts to get the details, but essentially, this: We are experiencing endorsement creep, especially by individuals but also organizations. The creep is towards the early date. Insiders, like elected officials or former elected officials, and key organizations, are starting to give Democratic candidate endorsements before many people have even heard which candidates are running. That is a clear message to the voters and would be party participants: Don’t bother, we’ve got this. Please, please, please, Democratic party activists and operatives and sympathetic organizations. Stop this. You are damaging the party, and forcing people to make what suddenly seems a very justified decision to walk away from the party and consider themselves independent. Or worse.

Again, read those articles to get more details.

Try To Act Alive Even While You Are Resting

Meanwhile, as endorsements are too early, other activities are too late. Many of the Indivisible activists I so frequently encounter are wondering where the Democratic Party is. Well, the Democratic Party is there, and they are having various meetings and such, but they are not very visible and the meetings are generally over rather esoteric stuff. A political party has seasonality, because elections are periodic. So, this makes sense.

But right now, people are scared, angry, frustrated, and are trying to do something about the current horrendous situation in American government and politics. Seasonality be damned, get into action!

Several months from now, the seemingly asleep Democratic Party will lumber out of its cave, look around, and try to decide which Republicans to eat. But by that time the rest of the people will have already killed several awful bills, made a large number of elected representatives rethink their strategy of ignoring the voters in their districts, and generally changed the mode and tenor of politics at several levels across the country. Without help or involvement of the Democratic Party.

The party will turn to those activists and ask for their help. The activists will look back at the party, and say, “Who are you? Oh, right, you are the political party that lost all those races. Don’t worry, we’ve got this.” then turn back to their work. I don’t think the Democratic Party wants that.

Political parties change their modus operendus and culture about every 30 years, a major exception being Tammany Hall, which, as a tightly run organized crime organization, kept going for much longer. Sometimes that turnover is accompanied by the disappearance of one party or the emergence of a new one. Seriously, Democrats, you are facing an existential crisis, and you don’t even know it.

Put People Choosing Candidates Above Other Party Business

A detail, but an important one. Please, at conventions and caucuses, do this. If there is a point at which people are expected to vote on candidates, do that first. I have never been to a DFL convention at which the time given to candidates to speak and the time given to participants to vote or caucus isn’t crunched by party business, at least a little, sometimes a lot. Do the esoteric party business last, even if that means doing it at a different meeting later on. (Fact: All DFL conventions are held in rooms that are available only up to a certain hour, at which time everyone has to be out of the room.)

Make Primaries Easier, Caucuses More Engaging

There has been quite a bit of discussion about this, and I have previously offered a solution, not too different from one being considered. (see: How to fix the Minnesota Presidential Caucus). The bottom line: The caucus is what people really need, and the primary is what the people really want. There is a way to have both, we sort of already have both. We just need to adjust a few things to make everyone whine less, which is about as good as it is going to get.

Acknowledge The Waking Giant

I’ve already said this above, in a different way, but it is worth repeating. I was at an Indivisible Event a couple of months ago at which several thousand people spontaneously showed up to yell at a Republican. The Democrats have never managed that, by the way. I was speaking to a woman who had previously never been involved in politics but who suffered through a major traffic jam and was now standing outside in the breezy cold to make her point. She said to me, “They have woken a sleeping giant. And she is pissed.”

I have yet to see any member of the Democratic Party, in any form, acknowledge this phenomenon. WTF, man? Fail to do this at your peril.

Screen-Shot-2016-11-10-at-12.09.04-PM

Don’t be a brat, eat a brat

Have more events that get people together. The party tends to have certain events and they tend to do a lot of work at these events.

Indivisible has a lot of events and they do a lot of work at those events. When people walk away from the Democratic Party events, they feel like they’ve been involved in something that could be important. When people walk away from an Indivisible event, they feel like they’ve just left a gathering among friends at which they started to figure out a way to survive an uncertain future.

The Democratic Party should start hosting community meetings of its own, inviting everyone including Indivisible to show up, not to have a candidate listen to the people but to have the people listen to each other.

See you at the Tax March, which was not organized by and seems to have nothing to do with the Democratic Party even though it is an event necessitated by the Democratic Party losing bigly at the national level.

The New York Times Bites It With New Climate Denier Columnist

The New York Times has a history of supporting a certain degree of climate change science denial, while at the same time supporting some very good journalism in this area. Just now, the Times jumped over one big giant shark by adding Bret Stephens to its opinion page staff.

Stephens comes to the Times from the Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch anti-science rag you are all familiar with.

In 2011, he wrote,

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

“OK,” you say, “That was like six years ago. Maybe he stopped being a jerk since then.”

Nope. According to Joe Romm,

…in 2015, he wrote that climate change?—?along with hunger in America, campus rape statistics, and institutionalized racism— are “imaginary enemies.”

“OK,” you say, “That guy is even more of a jerk now than he was then!”

Indeed.

Romm also quotes climate scientist Michael Mann on Stephens’ hiring.

“sadly, the New York Times itself seems to have fallen victim to this malady, hiring one one of the most notorious climate change deniers, Bret Stephens, to promote climate denial propaganda on the once-hallowed pages of the Grey Lady.”

Media Matters has assembled a number of examples in which Stephens mislead readers on a number of matters including climate science. For example:

So global warming is dead, nailed into its coffin one devastating disclosure, defection and re-evaluation at a time. Which means that pretty soon we’re going to need another apocalyptic scare to take its place.

[…]

As for the United States, Gallup reports that global warming now ranks sixth on the list of Americans’ top 10 environmental concerns. My wager is that within a few years “climate change” will exercise global nerves about as much as overpopulation, toxic tampons, nuclear winters, ozone holes, killer bees, low sperm counts, genetically modified foods and mad cows do today.

Something is going to have to take its place.

The world is now several decades into the era of environmental panic. The subject of the panic changes every few years, but the basic ingredients tend to remain fairly constant. A trend, a hypothesis, an invention or a discovery disturbs the sense of global equilibrium. Often the agent of distress is undetectable to the senses, like a malign spirit. A villain—invariably corporate and right-wing—is identified. [The Wall Street Journal, 4/6/10; Media Matters, 4/6/10]

My friends at DeSmog Blog, a central clearing house for information on climate science deniers, will probably do something as well. I’ll link to it here should that happen.

Hitler, Assad, Trump, Spicer, Godwin, Sarin, Zyklon B, Chemical Weapon, Termites

Why Hitler is Different

Hitler is not entirely different from Pol Pot, Stalin, and the other mass killers. He is not entirely different from other fascists. But there is a short list of people, with Hitler on that list, who have this characteristic: They were so bad that we can not and should not compare their badness to each other outside of certain limited academic contexts, and they were so bad that any comparison made between them and their works to anyone not on that list, or to their works, threatens to devalue their badness.

We can not devalue the evil of Hitler or his kind. Historically, Hitler is our contemporary. His Holocaust was horrible and it could happen again. Oh, and this: It really happened. “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”*

The third or fourth most common fallacy on the Internet is that Godwin’s Law prohibits making references to or comparisons with Hitler or Nazis. This is untrue. Godwin is not a law, but an observation, that among certain sorts of internet denizens, given enough time, someone would make a Hitler or Nazi comparison. And, it was a joke. It was Godwin’s Joke.

But, that fact that Godwin’s Law does not actually exist does not mean blithe comparisons to Hitler or Nazis are not frequently unwise. However, the fact that such comparisons are frequently unwise does not mean that they are always unwise for the same reasons.

When people compare Donald Trump to Adolph Hitler appropriately (meaning, in a defensible manner helpful to understanding current events by reference to history) they are potentially doing a good thing. Making that comparison to Hitler that devalue Hitler’s badness is always bad, even though that is usually not the intent of the comparison. Simply saying that Trump and Hitler are the same is an example of that. The comparison that I’ve seen that does potentially make sense, and that does not devalue the horrors of the past, is really one comparing the people and politics now to the people and politics then.

Here is the argument for that.

If we regard Trump as a demagogue who has never shown one iota of respect for the democratic process, then we may be very concerned that when push comes to shove, he’ll push the Constitution and the law out of the way and shove whatever he wants down our throats. He has said many things that indicate he is capable of this, and has even said things suggesting that he may be planning this. Since we can’t tell the difference between Trump’s purposeful bloviating and his incidental ignorance, we must assume that when he tells us that his popularity would go up if he murdered someone, that Trump murdering someone is on the list of possibilities. When he tells us that he intends to make Mexico pay for a wall, and since we know that the only way to force another country to pay for something they refuse to pay for is to take over their government, then the possibility that an invasion of Mexico is in fact on the table, as outrageous as that sounds.

If Trump is heading in the direction of tossing aside democracy, which as I’ve argued elsewhere would not be difficult in our system, given the fact that he is in charge of the most powerful country in the world, the possibility of a Hitler-resembling result has to be considered. Trump is a democratically elected leader of a country with elections. Hitler was too. Hitler became a fascist dictator. Trump talks like a fascist dictator, like a person who wants to be a fascist dictator. It is said that Trump’s followers feel dispossessed and that is why he won the election (I do not fully subscribe to that but it is said…) Same with Hitler’s supporters. Polls have indicated that many of Trump’s followers disdain democracy and would be OK with a dictatorship as long as it is their guy in charge. And so on.

The comparison between any rising leader with fascist tendencies supported by people who are not appalled by fascism, on one hand, with any or all actual historical fascists, is not only acceptable but necessary. “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1” becomes “As the prospect of a fascist taking over the country grows larger, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1.” No longer a joke, is it?

Spicer’s Sin

Sean Spicer, the hapless presidential press secretary, made that Hitler comparison the other day, and outraged people. Then, of course, the Internet got it all wrong.

Spicer said,

We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II … You had someone as despicable as Hitler didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons. If you’re Russia, you have to ask yourself if this is a country and regime that you want to align yourself with…When it comes to sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing…In the way that Assad used them where he went into towns and dropped him down on innocents in the middle of town was not the same.

The Internet, in response, said,

Of course Hitler used chemical weapons on his own people, that’s what the Holocaust was, stupid! Zyklon B is what Hitler used, and that is a chemical weapon!

And, references to Zyklon B have increased dramatically. Zyklon B was one of the killing tools used during the Holocaust, the preferred gas chamber chemical.

The Internet is wrong about his in two important ways.

First, Spicer’s reference was not a sin because he messed up the chemical weapons problem (we’ll come back to that in a moment). His reference was a sin because he totally messed up history while at the same time equating Assad with Hitler. Now, nobody likes Assad, and it is quite possible (if not likely) that this jerk would be just as bad as Hitler if he was in Hitler’s boots. But he wasn’t, and therefore he didn’t. Hitler was Hitler because of what he thought and what he did, and whom he cultivated and surrounded himself with, and the historical contexts of his time allowing him to get away with certain things, and so on. Assad in a Tardis, replacing Hitler in 1938, might have even been worse than Hitler. But that didn’t happen. The comparison devalues Hitler simply because Assad, in the big historical pictures, is a real jerk, but in fact, a minor jerk. Hitler, by comparison, and Hitler’s Holocaust, is on the list of the worst things that happened ever.

Spicer was, however, trying to make a valid point but because a) he is ignorant of history and b) insensitive to the Hitler problem, totally screwed it up. Or at least, I think he was trying to make a valid point. Here is how I might have said it, subject to revision:

Assad’s use of chemical weapons goes against a global disdain for such things, that has been embodied in international law for decades. The Hague made them illegal at the end of the nineteenth century, and their occasional use has universally been regarded with disdain.

By the way, Hitler produced chemical weapons and had artillery shells armed with them, but never used them. There were plans for significantly expanding their production, never finished by the end of the war. While the Japanese used chemical weapons during that war, the Germans did not really do so. The reasons are not clear and this is a point of controversy among historians. The Germans relied a great deal in some theaters on horses, and despite their efforts, the Germans were not able to make an effective equine gas mask. The allies were known to have large stockpiles of chemical weapons, despite them being illegal, and Hitler was sufficiently afraid that they would be used in retaliation of German use that he never allowed armed munitians to be near front line officers, who might go rogue and fire them off.

What the Germans did do, in the war theater, was to use chemically produced gasses to clear mainly Russians out of underground bunkers, and in one or more cases, to kill large number of people hidden underground, in Odessa and various locations in the Crimea (See: “Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War”).

The second thing the Internet got wrong was the seemingly innocent but in fact very dangerous conflation of the idea of gassing people on the battlefield using a chemical weapon and gassing people in death camps as part of the Holocaust. The word “gas” is used in both places, but there is a nearly complete (see below) and critical distinction between the two. This may seem like an academic nitpic, but it is not.

At some point in the future, the future version of Colin Powell is going to explain to the UN, the US government, Congress, the American People, etc. that we need to invade a certain country because they have weapons of mass destruction. But it might be a lie, like it was last time. And, following our most recent bout of self inflicted ignorance, that lie could rely on the conflation of killing gasses used in warfare with killing gasses not used in warfare.

The former are restricted by international law and highly monitored. The latter are routinely produced in numerous factories around the world and used in agriculture and other areas. Zyklon B was an insecticide, then it was used to kill about 1 million people in the Nazi death camps. Then it was an insecticide again, and it still is. It is not the most commonly used insecticide, but it or a close version of it is still produced in various countries, and a wide range of roughly equivalent gasses are produced widely and used widely. If we want to say that these are “chemical weapons,” which is exactly what the Internet is insisting that we say right now, then we are handing Future Colin Powell Clone an argument to invade.

Now, I need to add an important detail. Even though Hydrogen cyanide (which is what Zyklon B delivers) is primarily an insecticide these days and not generally useful as a weapon of war, dropped on enemy troops or people and the like, it has been used for this. Zyklon A (called just “Zyklon” before “Zyklon B” came along) was actually used (not extensively) during World War I (called “The Great War” before “World War II” came along). So called “blood agents” using Hydrogen cyanide are among the chemicals listed as “chemical weapons” but they are not considered very effective or useful on the battlefield. Also, note, while Zyklon B was used to kill more people in the Holocaust other gasses were used that would have made even less effective chemical weapons, such as CO.

Screen Shot 2017-04-12 at 9.29.53 AMIt is not sufficient to say, as some will I’m sure, “it is too a weapon because it was used to harm or kill therefore it was a chemical weapon therefore shut up.” But that is simply wrong. Again: someday someone is going to argue for an invasion of some place because of WMD’s and the WMD’s are going to be pesticides manufactured in a legal and normal factory in that country for use in agriculture or other legal contexts. That’s going to happen no matter what. Let’s not lay the groundwork to make that easier.

The other part of Spicer’s remark that is clearly wrong is the idea that Assad attacked his own people last week, but Hitler “did not use gas” against his own people. The difference between using real chemical weapons vs. some other kind of gas on his own people is in this context a pedantic point. That it is pedantic in this context does not mean it is also pedantic in the context of what a Weapon of Mass Destruction is. It is partly because of Spicer’s ham handed treatment of the discussion that we might end up making this mistake where making the mistake has significant material and life threatening consequences. Yes, of course, Hitler attacked his own people. No, it really wasn’t using “chemical weapons” as they are defined by treaty and conventions of warfare. But no, it does not matter in understanding the idiocy of Spicer’s remarks — not the remarks but the idiocy. Never mind the additional complexity that the Jews and others were not Hitler’s own people according to Hitler, or that the Syrian “rebels” are not Assad’s own people according to Assad.

My advice to Spicer: Don’t ever make any references to history, because you know nothing about history. Try, generally, to say less because you almost always screw up whatever you say. Consider a different job, like the job you formerly had in the White House, as shown in the illustration to the right. And just, well, shut up.

Righting America: An odd book that you may like but that made me squirm

Righting America at the Creation Museum (Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context) is a strange book and I do not fully approve of it, even though I’m mentioned in it (not in a bad way).

Here is the write-up of the book provided by the publisher:

On May 28, 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Aimed at scientifically demonstrating that the universe was created less than ten thousand years ago by a Judeo-Christian god, the museum is hugely popular, attracting millions of visitors over the past eight years. Surrounded by themed topiary gardens and a petting zoo with camel rides, the site conjures up images of a religious Disneyland. Inside, visitors are met by dinosaurs at every turn and by a replica of the Garden of Eden that features the Tree of Life, the serpent, and Adam and Eve.

In Righting America at the Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., take readers on a fascinating tour of the museum. The Trollingers vividly describe and analyze its vast array of exhibits, placards, dioramas, and videos, from the Culture in Crisis Room, where videos depict sinful characters watching pornography or considering abortion, to the Natural Selection Room, where placards argue that natural selection doesn’t lead to evolution. The book also traces the rise of creationism and the history of fundamentalism in America.

This compelling book reveals that the Creation Museum is a remarkably complex phenomenon, at once a “natural history” museum at odds with contemporary science, an extended brief for the Bible as the literally true and errorless word of God, and a powerful and unflinching argument on behalf of the Christian right.

So, having read that, what do you think the book is about? What do you think the motivations of the authors are? Do you think this book is pro or con on the museum, on creationism, on evolution, on science, on science education?

Can’t tell, can you?

I am going to guess — and this is just a guess but an educated one — that the authors have intentionally made the position on creationism and evolution as ambiguous as possible in order to allow themselves to carry out, or to appear to carry out, a truly dispassionate and fair analysis of an interesting phenomenon, as academics with expertise in certain areas.

That sounds like a good thing, right? Well, it sounds like a good thing because I made it sound like a good thing. Let me try again.

It seems to me that these authors have carried out a real act of damage against the integrity of the academic enterprise, and against education and society in general, by failing to take a reasoned and fact based stand against what is widely recognized and easily proven as a huge stinking pile of dreckory. (We are open to suggestions on the spelling of “dreckory.”)

The Mennonite News review of this book says:

The book is not a defense of evolution but a comprehensive critique of the museum and the movement behind it. The writing is measured, devoid of bombast and bile, which makes the book effective as the authors rely on facts and cogent arguments. They describe exhibits that don’t adhere to stated principles, opportunistic applications of Scripture and dubiously employed uses of theology, history and science — all in a facility that douses visitors with a flood of information in a fast-paced environment that obscures the shortcomings. The Trollingers “slow it all down” so readers can more fully understand the Creation Museum.

But when we read these parts of the book, we do not see the authors describing exhibits or other aspects of the museum in a negative way, but rather, almost perfectly neutral.

One conservative Christian reviewer wrote:

At the outset let me say that this is not a book that I would recommend for your bedside table. It is neither enjoyable as a reading experience nor does it present a convincing argument. However, for Christians, especially conservative Christians who aim to take the Bible seriously, this book is important. I chose to read and review this book because I believe that it is vital for Christians to be aware of how liberal Christians and unbelievers talk with each other about us, conservatives. We need to know what arguments they find convincing. Don’t be mistaken, this book was not written for conservatives; it was written by two liberal Christians for liberal Christians and unbelievers.

… but when I read the text, while I don’t see apologetics, I see very little negative about fundamentalism (though Ken Ham himself takes some criticism).

Another review:

This is a thorough book, a measured book, a calm and reasonable book. It examines the young Earth Creationism of Answers in Genesis from both a social and a historical perspective, pointing out the gaping flaws in its own internal logic (for instance, placards warning that the physical process of the Flood was unlike anything else in history and placards comparing it to rain washing out a gully are about ten feet away from each other in the same room) and rounding things off with a mild admonition about how far such lunacy strays from the true essence of contemporary Christianity…a comprehensive, you-are-there overview of the center of what Ken Ham clearly hopes to be a network of such faux museums.

This reviewer finds lunacy in the flood myth, but if you didn’t know about the flood myth, fundamentalism, creationism, all that, and read large passages in Righting America, you would not find a reference to lunacy, and it would be hard to find an argument against the flood myth’s veracity.

People are seeing what they want to see in this book. I’m seeing balance and restraint. I don’t like balance and restraint when it comes to vicious, well funded, and coordinated attacks on education and society, and on science.

Here’s some more text from lay readers (not professional reviewers) to give more of a flavor:

This excellent book provides insight into fundamentalism, creationism and Ken Hamm’s “Answers In Genesis” organization. The book describes in detail the contents and informational structure of the Creation Museum and examines both the museum itself and the arguments presented within. The book presents analysis of the space as a museum, the arguments as they pertain to science and the Bible, and the overall movements of fundamentalism and creationism as they impact America’s political landscape.

This is an incredibly informative read for anyone curious about fundamentalist Christianity and the baffling arguments of young Earth creationists. I’m incredibly proud that the book’s two authors are faculty of my alma mater, the University of Dayton!

The Trollingers take their subject at hand seriously. After visiting the Creation Museum several times, thoroughly examining their literature (journals and elementary education pamphlets), discovering influential individuals’ histories, they spend several chapters simply laying out a comprehensive picture of the Creation Museum. They compare it to evolutionary natural history museums, then compare the museum with their own stated goals. The whole book is thoughtful, does not come to conclusions easily, and is respectful of the whole evolutionary/creation debate throughout. Highly recommended

And here’s another:

But Susan and William Vance Trollinger, married scholars (of English and history, respectively) at the University of Dayton, 70 miles from the Petersburg, Kentucky museum, do not ridicule this cultural phenomenon (as, for example, A. A. Gill did in Vanity Fair: “It is irredeemably kitsch…This cheap county-fair sideshow – this is their best shot?”). Perhaps the Trollingers assume that we readers will supply such disparagement ourselves. But their academic detachment and methodical critical assessment offer the best way to penetrate the topic. “As bizarre as the museum may seem to many Americans,” they write, “what happens inside its doors matters to all of us.”

I think you get the point.

I regard this aspect of the book as either a conceit of the academic, and that annoys the bejesus out of me, or a smoke screen. I’m pretty sure it is the former but I can not be sure, and that is the price one pays for this approach; uncertainty about motivation and intended meaning.

Other than all that, it is an interesting book and an interesting analysis. But, marred by what seems to be a motivated encasement in an unnecessarily ambiguous framework.

I know what you are thinking. An excellent piece of academic work should be dispassionate, should be ambiguous about taking sides, or avoid taking sides at all, bla bla bla.

To that I respond that for one, a piece of academic work that appears to not be taking sides is always taking sides. For two, this is not an issue in which one does not take sides.

I do think most people interested in the issue of creationism and evolution will find Righting America at the Creation Museum (Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context) to be an interesting read. But I did not want to let this particular fastball go by the plate without smashing it with a bit of reality.

How the IPCC becomes a climate change denial tool

About once a day, someone tells me that human caused climate change is not real because this or that thing in the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contradicts something I, or some other scientists or science writer, has said.

I’ve noticed an uptick in references to the IPCC report by those intent on denying the reality of climate change. This even happened at recent congressional hearings, where “expert witnesses” made similar claims.

How can that be? How can the flagship scientific report on climate change, the objective source of information about the science of climate change, be used so frequently to argue that scientists have climate change all wrong?

Obviously, one way this can happen is if the information is cherry picked or misrepresented. That, certainly, happens and is almost always part of the recipe. But there is another only barely less obvious reason, and this is a reason that becomes more and more relevant every passing year. What is it? Hold on a sec, first a bit of context.

As a scientists and writer-about-science I often have access to temporarily secret information. Also, I make it a point to keep track of opinions held by trusted experts in the field, as they change and adapt to new findings. This secret information is, of course, peer reviewed research that isn’t published yet, and is under embargo.

To be embargoed means to be held in secret, but distributed to a small number of trusted individuals or agencies (often news outlets and science writers), with an “embargo date and time” after which the information is no longer secret. There are a few reasons this is done. One is that many scientific outlets rely on the splash factor to get readership, and having a paper that changes how we think about the world be released at a particular planned moment helps with that. Related is the idea that publishers, research institutions, and the scientists themselves want the paper published alongside other products to help the press and the public understand the material better, such as a press release, selected graphics, maybe a nice video. This all requires production time and effort, and it is pretty much wasted effort if it does not become publicly available at the same exact moment the paper becomes available.

A few papers exist as early drafts long before publication, and those are passed around for the purpose of getting some preliminary feedback, and to get the conversation about the topic going among experts. That is less common because many journals don’t like it, and how often this happens depends on the field of study. Indeed, there are entire “journals” that started as and still serve as semi-formalized outlets for early drafts of appers, academic theses, or reports are routinely published, sometimes years before a final peer reviewed product comes out, representing for example that year’s output from a long term grant. (NBER and BAR come to mind as examples of this.)

Authors and publishers send me embargoed papers they think I might want, or more commonly, ask me if I’d like to have a copy of an embargoed paper, giving me a chance to say yes. Often, I know of a subset of scientists who also have the paper (typically, the co-authors) and I can ask them questions about the paper before hand. Most outlets will provide a science writer with this sort of contact information. This is how all those fully formed news reports come out in the media the moment a paper is released. Days or even weeks of work has already happened, quietly and in secret, before the paper’s release.

Other research is available in other ways. I have colleagues who are always working on certain things, and they’ll say things like, “well, we don’t have it finalized yet, but this thing you said is probably wrong because X turns out to be larger than Y, even though we previously thought the opposite … we’ve got a paper coming out probably next summer on this…” or words to that effect.

All this is, of course, why I write the blog posts and you read them. You could do this too; You could have foreknowledge of the developments on the leading edge of a particular scientific field as well. You just have to become a credible quasi-journalistic outlet (I am not now nor have I ever been a journalist) and develop a pertinent Rolodex, and gain the trust of everybody. Takes a few years.

I mention all this because it makes this happen now and then: I have a concept of some aspect of climate change research that is not yet generally understood outside a limited range of experts. Then, of course, the dissemination of information catches up and everybody knows the same thing, and the revised, updated view of that bit of science is now added to general knowledge. Close behind, perhaps, follows a shift in, or refinement of, consensus. This is how science works large scale.

The scientific understanding of an active area of research is dynamic and requires currency. Six months old is old. A year or two old is ancient.

I’ll give you three examples.

A while back the generally understood consensus of sea level rise was that sea levels were going up at a certain relatively low rate, on average. However, that estimate was faulty because of a lack of integration of a full understanding of how water moves between fresh water reservoirs and the sea, and certain really cool research on ocean warming, gravitational effects, etc. had not yet been published. Also, some time was missing; there had been a couple of strange quirky sea level related events that turned out to be outliers, so data sets needed to be full updated, and a couple of years added over the passage of time. For this reason, what was generally known at one point in time was different from what came to be understood a few years later. People in my position saw it coming, people who were not tracking the literature held the old and incorrect view.

Second and related example: There was a set of estimates for how fast glaciers in polar regions (Greenland and Antarctica) would melt with global warming, and how much this process would contribute to sea level rise. However, there was some new research coming to bear on the issue that was starting to change that. Glaciers don’t just melt, but they also structurally fall apart, big chunks ending up in the sea and melting there. Some increase in understanding how that happens emerged. The upper limit of how fast that could probably happen, in the general publicly available knowledge base, was modest. But over a fairly short period of time, a previously highly speculative and closely held thought that the upper limit on how much ice could deteriorate was higher, and a similarly unexpressed thought that the lower limit on how soon that might start to happen, began to make its way into the more public discussion. This is still very much an area of uncertainty and very active research. Look for big changes and many surprises over the next 24 months. But today, the best informed experts have a very different view of what might happen, and what is likely to happen, than widely held a few years ago, because of this shift. Polar glaciers will likely fall apart and contribute to sea level rise more and sooner than the best guesses would have suggested five years ago.

A third example just went through a major change. A few years ago it was generally thought, and often repeated, that it was difficult to attribute human caused climate change as a reason behind any particular bad weather event. That has shifted dramatically over time. A set of studies a few years back failed to find any clear association in a majority of weather events. A year later, a similar number of studies, of new weather events, either attributed the events to climate change or resulted in “we can’t say one way or another.” The most recent papers are generally showing a likely connection. Meanwhile, certain research linking certain climate phenomena to a large set of bad weather events was developing. Note that the previous studies were conducted mainly ignoring this new and emerging research. I was a little like saying “We don’t know why so many more people are falling on the subway tracks these days” while ignoring a growing set of observations of bad people showing up at the subway stations and pushing people off the tracks on purpose. In the absence of consideration of this nefarious and willful behavior, one could not say that the increase in untoward events was anything other than a random uptick in numbers. Seeing and acknowledging an actual cause makes it impossible to not link the cause and effect.

This happened, as noted, slowly and in the background in the literature, and suddenly, just a few days ago, a crowing paper took that likely cause of severe weather, ran it in highly sophisticated and reliable models, and demonstrated that this is a thing. Humans release fossil carbon in greenhouse gasses (and do some other bad things), certain things about our climate system change unambiguously because of this, this causes an important but heretofore not fully understand change, which then causes additional droughts and floods across the globe.

Five years ago, that would have been regarded as speculation, worthy of consideration but nothing that could nail down our understanding of the greenhouse gas – severe weather link. Today, the link is sufficiently established to regard it as scientific fact rapidly becoming consensus, though there will certainly be a bit more fighting about it, and much refinement of the theory and data.

All of these examples can be rephrased in relation to the last IPCC report.

The most recent IPCC report was published nominally in 2014. It was restricted to existing peer reviewed literature, thus not including the pre-embargoed material (though there was an effort by many scientists to get stuff out in time to be employed in that process). The report took time to produce. The physical science basis part of the report, on which the rest is based, actually dates to 2013 nominally, though it includes some 2014 material.

It is now April 2017. A claim that “The IPCC Report said bla bla bla therefore you are wrong” is the same as “in or before 2013, at least 4 years ago, the best we knew was bla bla bla therefore your are wrong.

Let’s return to the sea level rise example and consider the thinking of how fast and how much glacial melting, and other factors, would cause sea levels to rise in the future.

There were several studies used in the IPCC report, mostly dating to or before 2011. I would regard the science in the IPCC report to reflect the thinking primarily of the first decade of the 21st century on this subject. The last 2 years, or even one year, of research on sea level rise contrasts remarkably with that early work, suggesting a faster rise and more of it. That is just what is published. I don’t happen to know of any new work coming out shortly, but I can promise you that the summaries, the estimates, and the graphics that would be produced by an IPCC-like agency working on a summary of the physical science of sea level rise as it stands right now would be significantly different than what the last such report by the actual IPCC provided in 2014.

Two IPCC reports back, it was estimated that global sea level could rise between 18 and 59 cm by 2100. The subsequent report, the most current one, estimated that sea levels can rise between 29 and 82 cm by 2100. A recent and well regarded paper, dating to early in 2016, and using the best available information and methodology, estimates that the global sea level could rise by more than a meter by 2100 from just the melting of Antarctic, not counting Greenland.

Longer term sea level rise estimates have also risen, with a key paper published in 2013 suggesting that we may be in for as much as two meters over the next few centuries, and the aforementioned most recent report suggesting “more than 15 metres by 2500.”

(I hasten to add that an estimate of between 8 and 15 meters has been on the table for a long time, coming from palaeoclimatologists, who have always seen higher levels because in the past, similar conditions today produced such high levels, indicating that current levels are actually unusually low.)

Climate science is progressing very rapidly, especially in some areas. There are things we know now, or that we feel fairly comfortable asserting as pretty likely, that one year ago, and certainly four years ago, were fairly uncertain or in some cases inconceivable.

Citing the most recent IPCC report about a climate change relate issues tells me two things:

1) You don’t read the literature or talk to climate scientists; and

2) You are not especially interested in an honest conversation about this important scientific and policy issue.


The recent work on sea level mentioned above is here, the IPCC report is here, and a summary of the IPCC and other sources is here.