Monthly Archives: March 2014

Climate Science Deniers Are Annoying Because

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It is very hard for me to view the world without my Anthropological glasses, since I’ve been one kind of Anthropologist or another since I was 13 years old. Thinking about climate science deniers, I realized what makes them annoying to me. Let me tell you what I mean.

The ongoing conversation at an archaeological site.
The ongoing conversation at an archaeological site.
When Archaeologists (a kind of Anthropologist, in the tradition I was trained in) dig a site, they are constantly learning about what is under ground at that location, and throughout the process develop a model of what it all means. As an aside I should mention that increasing understanding is not the inevitable outcome. Sometimes more questions are raised than answered. Point is, as more and more earth is moved and more of the structure of the site and its artifactual contents are revealed, the conception among the diggers of what they are working on grows more detailed and often more complex. The archaeologists talk while they work. There will be experts and learners, novices and those with great experience, and as they dig the site speaks to them (a common metaphor in archaeology) and the diggers listen, knowing that what the famous Dr. House always says must not be forgotten: Everybody, including archaeological sites, lies. So at no point do good archaeologists come to a comfortable understanding of what they are uncovering. It is always uncomfortable, shifting, nagging, bothersome, challenging. And most importantly, this process is what archaeology is. The late James Deetz once told me that fieldwork was the most important thing to him and I asked him why. He said, “That’s where I think. I think standing in a hole.” And that is generally true of Archaeology. Archaeologists think standing in a hole, usually in groups, and they talk and between the ongoing results of the digging, the thinking, and the talking, stuff happens in their minds that advances our overall understanding (or complexity of questions about) something in the past. It also feels good. If you are doing that – digging holes in all sorts of weather, spending more time on your knees than a Catholic choir boy, always being dirty but not in a good way, sun burned, tick bitten, knuckle scraped, being mocked by the patch of earth you are busy destroying – and it does not feel good than you should do something else.

So that is what it is like to engage in the process of doing archaeology. Then a car pulls up.

The guy gets out of his car and comes over and asks, “Whatcha doing?” and somebody tells him.

“We’re digging an archaeological site, we’re archaeologists!” an enthusiastic less experienced member of the crew pipes up, walking over to the fence to engage with this member of the public, as we are supposed to do. “It’s an historic site from the early 19th century. There used to be a farm here. We’re tracing out the foundation of the house, and over there, we think we’ve uncovered the place where the farmers butchered their …”

One of the larger round rocks.
One of the larger round rocks.
“I found an artifact,” the interrupting visitor says, interrupting.

“What?”

“It’s in my trunk, let me get it.”

The archaeologist is left standing at the fence. Sniggers can be heard by some of the more experienced crew members, and glances are passed around like some neat, newly uncovered object might be. There is a reason the least experienced person on the crew was the only one to jaunt over to the fence when the guy showed up.

Returning from his car, holding a huge very smooth ovate river cobble, nearly perfect in symmetry, probably quartzite, “This thing,” hefting it over the fence into the waiting arms of the young archaeologist. “I brought it to the museum but they told me it was just a rock. Obviously they don’t know their rocks! I’ve been running back hoe on construction for years. I know this is not just a rock.”

For some reason, smooth rocks and people who know things have an affinity.

The conversation goes on for a half hour. We learn this guy has been carrying around his rock for over two years, showing it to people now and then. He has a number of theories about what it is, but his preference is to link the rock to Celtic mariners who crossed the Atlantic in olden times and wandered across the continent teaching the hapless Indians how to build stone chambers in which to conduct ceremonies. Despite the fact that this rock is clearly very important, representing a trans-Atlantic connection that only enlightened people accept as true reality, he leaves the rock with the young field worker who promises to bring it to the museum and put in a proper storage drawer where it can be studied by future Archaeologists.

So that was one hour the entire crew can never get back, one hour of failed and eventually forsaken attempts to dissuade the guy of his silly misconceptions, one hour of not thinking about the archaeological site, and also, for reasons of security, one hour during which one or two of the diggers found something interesting but kept quiet about it lest the discovery be drawn into the useless and distracting conversation, or worse, prompt Mr. Backhoe to return over the weekend with his big yellow machine to see what he might find.

That’s what climate science denialists do.

At the moment, and this is probably almost always true, there are some very interesting things going on in climate science. Some of the current issues have to do with the effects of anthropogenic global warming on severe weather. Here’s a brief overview of what is going on.

  • We know warming increases evaporation and thus potentially causes drought.
  • We know warming increases water vapor in the air, which further increases warming (but how much is a matter of debate) and increases the potential for severe rainfall.
  • We know sea surface temperatures are elevated, so when major tropical storms form, they have the potential to be bigger.
  • We know sea levels have gone up and continue to do so, which means that storm surges from various kinds of storms are greater than they otherwise might be.

These effects have something to do with the Drought in California, some major flooding and rainfall events of recent years, and the severity of a handful of major tropical storms including Katrina, Haiyan/Yolanda, and Sandy.

  • For some time science has predicted changes in atmospheric circulation caused by warming that would likely alter major weather patterns. In recent years, this seems to have been observed. So-called “Weather Whiplash” is a phenomenon where the weather in a region goes extreme for a bit longer than it should, then shifts to a different extreme. Drought and flood, heat and cold, that sort of thing. We don’t know but strongly suspect “Weather Whiplash” is caused by global warming’s effects on major air circulation patterns. This is a hot area of research right now, and it is fascinating.

  • We argue about the likely effects of global warming on specific kinds of storms, from temperate tornadoes to tropical hurricanes. Numerous analyses of data and models of climate change have suggested that there may be more of these storms in the future, other studies ‘conclude’ that we can’t be sure, and very few studies show that storms will decrease. The most methodologically questionable studies are the ones that predict decreases in storm overall, though there are a few good studies that suggest that certain tropical regions will experience fewer major cyclones.

That is a rough outline running from greater to lesser certainty. Down there in the lower certainty range there is some interesting science going on. One thing that makes the science especially interesting is the unhappy tension between what climate scientists ideally would like to do and the urgency of understanding what will happen with severe weather in the future. On one hand, climate scientists would like to get a couple of decades of excellent data to supplement older, not as excellent data, to see how climate systems responding to warming reshape our weather patterns. On the other hand, we would ideally like to know now not only if we have to worry about increasingly severe weather, but we’d like to know what kinds of severe weather will occur, when, and where.

That’s interesting. Going back to the analogy of digging an archaeological site, this is like digging a site that is of a familiar type, finding mostly what you expect, but knowing you are adding important data to the overall growing body of information about Early Bronze Age Peloponnesian urban settlement, or New England 19th century farmsteads. But while you are excavating the site you find a stain deep in one corner of a test pit you thought you were about to be done with, and there’s an unexpected artifact in the stain. So you open up a larger area and find a homestead that is not on the map and is not supposed to be there, and as you excavate more and more of it you discover it is loaded with exotic unexpected artifacts and represents human activity that was not known to have occurred at this place and at this time. This would be the most fun you can have with your pants on, kneeling, in the field of archaeology.

And then some guy comes along with his stupid rock and takes you away from it all for an inordinate amount of time. But in climate studies, it is not some guy. It is dozens of denialists, who do appear to be at lest somewhat organized, showing up and doing everything they can think of to interfere with your work. When the scientists get together to discuss the very interesting and important uncertainties, to evaluate very recent work, to share thoughts about the interpretation of newly run models or newly analyzed data sets or newly observed phenomena, they have to spend a certain amount of that time dealing with the denialists. They may even have to spend a certain amount of time talking with lawyers. When they talk to the public or to policy makers they have to spend a certain amount of time, sometimes quite a bit of time, debunking denialist myths and explaining the basic science that should have been accepted as premise a long time ago.

Now imagine once again that you are an archeologist and you and your team have finished work on a major project. You’ve put together a symposium to be part of a major international meeting, at which 9 different papers will be read and discussed addressing various aspects of your findings. You go to the conference. But 2 out of 10 of the people in the room are this guy’s friends. They will insist on asking questions about the Celts and the Giants that once roamed the Earth, and Aliens that mated with earthlings in antiquity to form a race of Lizard People. And they are not polite. Only 2 of 10 in the room come to the conference with these ideas, but they are highly disruptive and control much of the conversation at the symposium, at the bar afterwards, at the airport waiting lounges where people going to and from the conference accidentally run into each other, on the twitter stream spewing from the conference venue.

This is why climate science denialists are so annoying. They are sucking a measurable amount of energy and resources from the process of doing the science and understanding the climate system. Another analogy would be this: Every department of natural resources spending 10% of its budget mitigating against negative effects on Bigfoot, and every news report of anything having to do with parks, hunting, bird conservation, etc. having a Bigfoot spokesperson to address bigfoot issues. When you take climate denialist fueled false balance and re-describe it in any other area of public policy or scientific endeavor, that’s what you get. Bigfoot or something like Bigfoot. Cold Fusion experts always included in any discussion of the Large Hadron Collider, Alien Hunters having equal time after every episode of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos 2014, and so on.

There is plenty of uncertainty at the cutting edge of climate science. There is very little uncertainty at the core. This is because it is centuries old science and the scientists pretty much know what they are doing. Engaging in the false debate is a waste of time and effort, and that, I personally suspect, is the main objective of the denialists. They want to slow down progress, though they may have various different reasons to do so. None of those reasons are valid. They are not Galileo, though they want everyone to think they are. One wonders if they believe that of themselves.

That would be extra annoying.

Photograph of Eliot Park Neighborhood Archaeology Project by Jen Barnett.

Photograph of round rock: zphaze via Compfight cc

I want my flying electric car! Forget the jet pack.

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If we, Western Civilization, had started out with electric cars, and a century later someone came along with the idea of exploding little dollops of gasoline mixed with air to propel them, that person would be thought insane.

Depending on price, the cost of energy to propel an electric car a given distance can be about 5% of the cost to propel a gas-explosion style car. The electricity to power the electric car can be produced in any number of ways, some icky some cleaner, but much more efficiently. Some of that energy can be generated where the car is parked, at home or work, under a Photoage, a structure with photo cells that serves as a garage. Since most cars just sit there for much of the day, this can be a significant amount. Meanwhile, the car’s batteries can be part of the smart grid, the top 15% or so being used by the grid to store/use electricity keeping supply and demand closer.

I used to think the inefficiency of making all the volts in big giant plants and sending it out over wires obviated all of this but experts tell me this is not true. Also, as the grid becomes more and more localized, and it becomes more and more normal to fit homes or other buildings with solar and use batteries, etc., the source becomes closer to supply. But really, it may be the difference between generating a magnetic field from available electric potential vs. causing a series of explosions inside a big heavy metal thing that matters most.

(This brief comment was prompted by Don Prothero‘s post of the image at the top of the post on Facebook.)

Climate Science Denialists as Bullies: The Recursive Fury Paper and Frontiers in Psychology

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WTF Frontiers in Psychology Journal? Scientists publish a peer reviewed paper in your journal, a bunch of cranks complain about it, and successfully bully you into taking the paper off your web site? Do you seriously want the rest of the scientific world to take you seriously, ever, from now on? I’m thinking that’s not going to happen. We await a full and unmitigated apology to Stephan Lewandowsky, JohnCook, Klaus Oberauer and Michael Marriott, the authors of Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation

In the mean time, since you felt the need to dispose of any semblance of ethical and professional behavior and remove the paper from your web site, here is a copy of it for anyone who wants it. That should be available until further action is taken to silence these scientists.

Also, I won’t be writing about any papers published in this journal in the future until the above described apology is produced.

Here’s the background for those of you who don’t know it, from Stephan Lewandowsky’s blog post about it:

[Recursive Fury] reported a narrative analysis of the blogosphere’s response to publication of [an earlier paper,] LOG12. The blogosphere’s response bore a striking resemblance to the very topic of LOG12: our finding that rejection of climate science is associated with conspiratorial thinking triggered elements of conspiratorial discourse among those who sought to deny that denial of climate science involves a measure of conspiratorial thinking…

Recursive Fury attracted some media attention…as well as critique. It should come as little surprise that this critique did not involve a scholarly response, such as submission of a rejoinder for peer review, but that it entailed a barrage of complaints to the University of Western Australia (UWA), where I was based at the time, and the journal Frontiers.

While not retracting the paper, Frontiers removed the article from its website in March 2013. The journal then commenced an arduous process of investigation which has now come to a conclusion.

Frontiers will post (or has posted) the following statement on its website today:

“In the light of a small number of complaints received following publication of the original research article cited above, Frontiers carried out a detailed investigation of the academic, ethical and legal aspects of the work. This investigation did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study. It did, however, determine that the legal context is insufficiently clear and therefore Frontiers wishes to retract the published article. The authors understand this decision, while they stand by their article and regret the limitations on academic freedom which can be caused by legal factors.”

In other words, the article is fine but Frontiers does not want to take the legal risk that its restoration on the website might entail.

Go to Stephan’s post for additional links and a much richer context and history of this bone-headed move by Frontiers and the climate science denialists.

And again, here’s the paper.

The Disappearance of Flight 370: One of the most important events ever.

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Aside from its tragic nature and its apparent media value as a mystery greater than who will be the Next American Idol, the apparent disappearance of flight 370 has another meaning, I think, that has been entirely missed as far as I can tell.

The other day I was having a conversation with some colleagues, which led to someone quoting Stallman, which in turn led to noting that Stallman refuses to use a smart phone (or any cell phone, perhaps, can’t remember) because of the danger of being constantly tracked by the authorities. I note that my “smart phone” is dumb as a brick. Whenever I need it to know where the heck I am so it can tell me which way to go, it seems to say “Huh? What? WTF am I?” more often than not. If the authorities are tracking me based on my smart phone, the authorities are badly misinformed. Nonetheless, Stallman is right, this sort of technology is potentially privacy-threatening. But it may be that his thoughts are ahead of his time. Based on my own experience, I’m not sure that anyone is figuring out where I am because I have a smart phone.

(I have noticed the occasional ad show up on Facebook related to something I had recently walked by, but I’m sure I’m being paranoid. Right?)

Several years ago the Soviet Union stood as the world’s largest empire ever, more or less. It included in it’s grasp the majority of of Europe and about half of the rest of the world, plus or minus ambiguous associations with China by various states. Then one day, in a blinding moment of history, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall fell, and Eastern Europe was freed from its grey oppression. Remember that?

Of course, it was not all at once, but nearly so in historical terms. Archaeologically it would look like a discontinuous horizon of concrete rubble containing the occasional Lenin fragment separating material cultures that look similar but that have some important differences. You would not see the individual events at all.

But somewhere in there with all that wall knocking over and statue pulling down and Rose Revolutions and stuff there occurred a single event, before the rest of the events happened, that on one hand was singularly insignificant and on the other hand the most important thing that ever happened in history, and that event was much like the unexplained disappearance of Flight 370.

Surely you have guessed by now the event to which I refer. Mathias Rust’s epic journey.

On May 28, 1987, Rust flew his small single engine plane from Germany to a point next to Red Square, a bit down the street from The Kremlin, via Iceland and Finland. Nobody stopped him. He was noticed here and there but never challenged. Basically, Mathais Rust revealed an amazing truth: You can fly a small air craft from The West to The Kremlin, no problem! The emperor has no clothes, the empire has no air defense. It wasn’t long after Mathias Rust landed in Moscow that all the things we think of as the end of the Cold War happened. They happened for a lot of reasons, but Mathias Rust was far more than a straw placed at just the right moment on the camels’ back. More like a Cessna 172 landing on a bear’s back.

A Boeing 777 is big. One went missing in a heavily populated part of the world with a history of tension and warfare. I don’t expect Southeast Asia to have the same exact level of radar coverage as other parts of the world, but I do expect it to be difficult to have a Boeing 777 go totally missing there. I mean, after all, this is not Subsaharan Africa. Years ago, when I was actively working in Subsaharan Africa, I was contacted by an intelligence agency. They had the zany idea that I might know where a Boeing 737 they had lost track of might be. They were watching it, it was privately owned and being used for … various things, apparently … and one day the guy who checks on these sorts of things at a particular airport went to look, just routine, to make sure the Boeing 737 was in the same place it had been put after landing the night before and the damn thing was gone. It was so missing that they had stooped to asking anthropologists if they had seen the plane around anywhere. But that was then, and there, and this is now, and elsewhere.

Personally, I’m not too surprised this could happen, but the average person on the internet should be, as far as I can tell. Why, for example, does Edward Snowden have nothing to say about this? If the NSA and all those other agencies are able to track our every move, how can a Jumbo Jet vanish without a trace? (I quickly note: They’ll probably find it, but it is too late for maintaining any faith in The Watchers. If it is located now it will be bumbled upon, not found because someone, somewhere, knows where everything and everyone is.)

Flight 370 tells us that they don’t know everything, they being, well, you know. They can’t do everything. Not only are you and I not being tracked, but clumps of hundreds of people all together including engineers traveling abroad, people without passports and, for chrissakes, Chinese People, are able to vanish from the face of the Earth without any agency or government being able to simply point and say “Oh, they’re right there, plus or minus a few hundred meters. We know where everyone is.” Because they can’t do that. They don’t have the technology, the resources, the time, or the inclination. And, most important of all: It turns out that Tom Clancey’s novels are fiction!

So, how do you hide a Boeing 777 from the US’s NSA, Chinese Military and Intelligence, and the intelligence and military communities of all the other countries? You don’t. They don’t know where it is already. Whatever you were thinking the Man was capable of, think again. Flight 370 shows us that the capabilities of Big Brother are highly exaggerated.

Unsure of Climate Science's Predictions? Do it yourself!

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Well before mid century we will probably pass a threshold beyond which we’ll really regret having not curtailed the release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere in the form of Carbon Dioxide. The best case scenario for “business as usual” release of the greenhouse gas is that some of the carbon, or some of the heat (from sunlight) gets taken out of the main arena (the atmosphere and sea surface) and buried or reflected somewhere for a while, and this all happens on a slightly delayed time scale.

The reason we know this is a little thing called science. And, more exactly, physics. And physics is math embedded in reality (or reality draped on math if you like), so there’s also math. And here is the formula:

the formula
the formula

For instructions as to how to use this formula to understand the statements in the first paragraph of this post, including the data you need to do the calculations, visit this new item on Scientific American’s web site, Why Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036, by climate scientist Michael Mann. He’s also got an article in the print edition of Scientific American, which I’ve not seen because I let my subscription lapse.

Tracking Arctic Sea Ice

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A few days ago I made a prediction for this year’s minimum Arctic Sea Ice extent. That’s still valid. Or not. Either way, it’s still my prediction.

But looking at the ice over the last few days, we see that for the first time in a while the extent of ice estimated by the NSICD has stopped hugging the -2SD line and is rising upwards like a chilly Phoenix rising out of slush ashes. In fact, one could even say that Arctic Sea Ice has recovered! Just look at the last eight days of data!

Screen Shot 2014-03-18 at 9.36.20 AM

Think I’m cherry picking? It’s possible, let’s look at the larger picture, over a whole year’s cycle:

Screen Shot 2014-03-18 at 9.37.52 AM

Well, even looking at the data at this scale, the sudden upswing in ice is still impressive. This happens frequently, but actually, not every year. Just now and then. Is there an explanation?

Of course there’s an explanation! But I have no idea what it is and the ice experts are not saying much. I’m thinking this is just part of the normal up and down in either measurement error or actual freeziess of ice. Something like this could have more to do with wind than anything else.

This is the time of year, this week, maybe next week, when the maximum Arctic Sea ice extent is typically reached. We are actually past the peak day for some recent years. So keep an eye on this squiggle, it will start to drop soon.

There are several reasons this is interesting. One is the insight it gives in the psychology of climate change denialism. The extent of Arctic Sea ice is important in relation to climate change, so pretending that there has not been a dramatic drop in minimum extent over recent years is essential in order to keep the lie that climate change is not real up and running. Two years ago the drop in sea ice was extremely dramatic, and then last year, the drop in sea ice extent returned to it’s usual merely alarming level, much lower than most recent years, continuing the downward trend. That caused denialists to scream and yell and dance and throw their arms in the air, claiming that the Arctic Sea Ice has recovered. This is roughly equivalent to watching a crash at a NASCAR race with metal flying everywhere, cars on fire, tires rolling away at high speed, but then one of the cars lands on it’s bottom side instead of its top side and everyone goes “Look, there was no accident, yay!”

The main reason this is all important, though, putting the anti-science crowd aside (where they should be put) is simply the fact that as sea ice diminished from year to year, during the summer, the Arctic Sea warms even more, and the planet as a whole gets to warm a bit as well because of the exposure of the dark ocean waters and lack of bright shiny solar-energy-reflecting ice. This has cause the Arctic to warm faster than other regions of the planet. The differential of heat between the warmer equator and cooler poles drives and shapes our climate system. This “amplification” of arctic temperatures relative to the rest of the globe has almost certainly altered weather patterns, and mostly not in a good way.

So, expect more of that, perhaps.

Any bets on which day will be the maximum extent of Arctic Sea ice this year?

I’m going to say that using to the NSICD chart shown here, it will end up being March 19th, tomorrow.

Climate Science Legal Defense Fund Needs Your Help!

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The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF) was launched in January 2012 by Scott Mandia and Joshua Wolfe to provide valuable legal resources to our climate scientists who are in need. CSLDF needs your help.

CSLDF needs to raise $80,000. The great news is that philanthropist Charles Zeller has graciously offered to MATCH the first $40,000 that is raised and philanthropist Peter Cross has offered to put up the first $10,000. This means CSLDF already has the first $20,000 of the $80,000 goal. We need YOU to help CSLDF reach its goal.

For the previous two years, CSLDF has been managed by Scott and Josh “from their kitchens” They both have full-time jobs and families with small children and neither receives compensation for their time. Scott and Josh have accomplished much over the years on a part-time basis. To date, CSLDF has:

  • Raised litigation fees to help Dr. Michael Mann defend climate science from politically-motivated witch-hunts.

  • Provided resources to legal experts from PEER so they could offer free legal advice to scientists at professional conferences.

  • Offered legal counsel to scientists hit with frivolous Freedom of Information Act requests.

  • Provided legal workshops to scientists at professional conferences.

  • Offered a series of legal education webinars partnering with American Geophysical Union (AGU).

But now it is time to “go professional” and that is where you can help. $80,000 can move the organization to this next level. CSLDF will use your tax-deductible donations to hire a full-time Executive Director who will manage the day to day operations of providing legal help to our experts as well as increasing fundraising efforts. Having the full-time professional helps to assure that CSLDF will be there for our scientists years down the road. After all, climate change is not going anywhere and the sad fact is that neither will the legal attacks on our scientists.

Donations are tax-deductible and can be sent by visiting the CSLDF website at climatesciencedefensefund.org and clicking the Donate button. Donations are sent to our fiscal sponsor PEER but are earmarked for CSLDF. Through PEER, a private non-profit organization organized under Section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue code, your contribution will be tax deductible.

You can also send a check made out to PEER, with Climate Science LDF on the memo line, to support effort to help scientists defend themselves:

Climate Science Legal Defense Fund
c/o PEER
2000 P Street, NW #240
Washington, D.C. 20036

International donors can use PayPal. Send to info@peer.org as the recipient and put CSLDF in the subject line of your payment.

Are the climate science deniers criminals?

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Our future is at risk. The science is settled, in the main, though there are many details to continue to work out and there are unknowns. But no one doubts that business as usual release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere mainly as the greenhouse gas Carbon Dioxide spells big trouble for humanity and the planet Earth, including eventual massive sea level rise and highly disruptive changes in the Earth’s climatology that will make a mess of many things including our food supply. Think failed state. Think Syria. Now, think failed planet, Syria over half the globe, the other half merely a mess. That’s what we are heading for.

We know less than we need to about the timing and severity of various impending disasters, but we already see the beginning. Sea level rise and warmer seas has made for some of the most severe tropical storm systems ever seen. That’s a genie we can not put into the bottle. And these storms don’t seem to always confine themselves to the tropics. Extreme cold and extreme heat, extreme precipitation and extreme dryness, floods, and other catastrophic weather related events are happening with increased frequency. Central Europe, Colorado, Calgary, Great Britain. Some of these weather and climate problems are clearly connected to climate change such as those related to extreme heat, increased drying through evaporation, and increase water vapor. Others, such as those caused by changes in the jet stream, are also probably connected to global warming but the climate scientists are still arguing about the details and extent of this, a normal part of the consensus building scientific process. For the most part, though, almost no one is saying “no connection.”

And we can fix this or at least, ameliorate the effects on behalf of those who shall inherit whatever is left of this one Earth we’ve got, when we are done messing with it.

Unless…

Unless organized climate science denialists, right wing “morans” from the Tea Party, self interested paid-off politicians, and the likes of David and Charles Koch, get their way. Unless they get what they want, which is to interfere with the translation of climate science into science policy. Unless they also get their way by interfering with changes to how we approach and build for clean energy and updated infrastructure.

I once said, and a lot of people (well, bad people, not any good people) got mad at me, that taking away the future of our children and grandchildren was a criminal act. Of course, you know it is. But in saying that, unfortunately, I can only be referring to “criminal act” as a metaphor, or perhaps as wishful thinking. There actually isn’t a law against ruining the planet and ending civilization as we know it, against taking part in the death and misery of countless humans, against carrying out acts of such utterly despicable selfishness and general terror that you will be placed among the ranks of the genocidal once all is said and done, if you get your way. Nope. That’s totally legal.

Or is it? Or, at least, should it be?

What if someone other than me came along with the opinion that “There oughta be a law” or at least, a serious proposal that organized climate science denialism and obstruction against implementation of planet-saving policies and technologies should be considered an act against humanity?

What would happen is this. The very denialists who work so hard to ensure the misery of our grandchildren, for whatever mercenary, psychopathic, demented, or just very badly misguided reason they may have, will instantly spring to life and attack that person. Anthony Watts will sneer and kvetch, and call his minion of eleven or twelve climate science denying winged monkeys (and their myriad sock puppets) to arms. Christopher Monkton will pretend he is someone, pretend he has a functioning brain, pretend to sound smart and legal, and pretend to say pretend threatening things.

Well, that happened.

Lawrence Torcello of Rochester Institute of Technology stepped in it. He called them crooks.

He said, in part,

…critics of the case in L’Aquila are mistaken if they conclude that criminal negligence should never be linked to science misinformation. Consider cases in which science communication is intentionally undermined for political and financial gain. Imagine if in L’Aquila, scientists themselves had made every effort to communicate the risks of living in an earthquake zone. Imagine that they even advocated for a scientifically informed but costly earthquake readiness plan.

If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism.

More deaths can already be attributed to climate change than the L’Aquila earthquake and we can be certain that deaths from climate change will continue to rise with global warming. Nonetheless, climate denial remains a serious deterrent against meaningful political action in the very countries most responsible for the crisis.

At first I was not sure if I agreed with Professor Torcello about L’Aquila. I think the scientists got thrown under the bus, as it wasn’t mainly them who messed up, it morel likely that it was the administrative officials and politicians. But he’s indicated to me that he saw L’Aquila as an example of the importance of science communication, not as a specific precedent. To be clear, Torcello is asking if the funding of science, in this case, climate science misinformation criminally negligent.

But for the present, that is not an important detail; the point is, yes, you can lie to every one and then they fucking die because of your lies. That is for real. That is your fault if you do that. That makes you some kind of crook, even if at the moment there is not a law against your utterly misanthropic behavior. and that is how I see the hard core climate science denialists.

And, of course, Anthony Watts is whining and Christopher Monkton is Mocking, and the Winged Monkeys are aloft.

They are attacking Professor Torcello by demanding redress from his employers at Rochester. I sent a note to them supporting the good professor. If you are friend and not foe send me the secret handshake and I’ll send you the list of individuals I sent the letter to with their emails, and you can do the same if you want.

Image is from The Lorax, which gives a message some people apparently missed.

Crohn's Disease: Which came first, dysbiosis or inflamation?

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Sounds like kind of a technical question.

In Irritable Bowl Disease, including Crohn’s Disease, it may be the case that bad bacteria cause intestinal wall inflammation. Or, inflammation could allow bad bacteria to do better than good bacteria. And, that might be an oversimplification because there could be other factors as well, including genetic predispositions.

Many younger people who present with various abdominal symptoms are treated with antibiotics. These antibiotics could disproportionately favor bad bacteria.

Whether from inflammation, genes, or use of antibiotics, it does seem that “dysbiosis” (having bad bacteria along with the good ones in your gut) is a problem.

The results of a large study are now being released that looks at this problem in a way that might untangle some of these questions. From Science (News):

The research, which involved 668 children, shows that numbers of some beneficial bacteria in the gut decrease in Crohn’s patients, while the number of potentially harmful bacteria increases. The study could lead to new, less invasive diagnostic tests; it also shows that antibiotics—which aren’t recommended for Crohn’s but are often given when patients first present with symptoms—may actually make the disease worse.

…

Some potentially harmful microbial species were more abundant in Crohn’s patients, such as those belonging to the Enterobacteriaceae, Pasteurellaceae, Veillonellaceae, and Fusobacteriaceae; numbers of the Erysipelotrichales, Bacteroidales, and Clostridiales, generally considered to be beneficial, were lower. The disappearance and appearance of species can be equally important, says Dirk Gevers of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who performed most of the work. “There has been a shift in the ecosystem, which affects both types.”

The subjects tended to not have been treated with antibiotics, or at least, not much (yet), but there was variation and those who had received more antibiotic treatments seemed to have more dysbiosis.

The dysbiosis was also more pronounced in patients who had received antibiotics. “This study confirms that these drugs don’t do any good to people with Crohn’s disease,” says gastroenterologist Séverine Vermeire of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, who was not involved in the study. “We knew antibiotic use increases the risk to develop the disease; now we know they can worsen it, too.”

The main outcome of this research may be the development of easier to implement and more reliable diagnostic techniques. But it also seems to advance understanding of Crohn’s. What this study does not do directly, though, is address the strange epidemiological signal whereby Crohn’s seems to be increasing in western populations. Something we are doing may be involved. Most people seem to assume this is dietary, but I won’t bet a dime on that. This could have to do with all sorts of other practices that ultimately influence gut flora, from hand washing and diapering practices to food related but not strictly dietary choice related changes, such as how bacteria is removed from food during processing.

Vermeire says it’s a “missed opportunity” that the researchers didn’t look at the patients’ diets. “That could have helped elucidate why this disease occurs so much more in the Western world than elsewhere.” In 2011, Vermeire’s group published a study showing that healthy family members of Crohn’s disease patients have a slight dysbiosis as well. Vermeire is convinced that even in these families, it’s not genetics but some lifestyle factor that causes the phenomenon. “If we could identify the dysbiosis in an early stage, and we knew the causative factors,” she says, “we could prevent disease occurrence by bringing about lifestyle changes.”

Which is worse, rape threats or lightening up about rape threats?

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Warning, rapey themes and strong language, go away if you can’t handle that.

Which is worse, rape threats or lightening up about rape threats? Since I hardly ever get rape threats and the ones I get are absurd, it is not really for me to say. The question here, is what does a woman who is active on line and gets numerous and scary rape (and other) threats feel about those threats vs. advice from allies(ish) who say “don’t worry about it, just leave that behind.”

This is tricky stuff, because the overt strategy one takes can vary depending on circumstances and there are a lot of valid strategies one can choose, but few strategies one can foist on others.

A person who is outspoken about a particular issue and receives threats over that issue could take those threats very seriously, calling in authorities, hardening defenses, counter-agitating or counter-activating, and so on, while publicly not talking about the threats at all, or perhaps very publicly brushing them off.

Or, the recipient of the threats could do something very different, bringing the details out in the open, making clear to her audience what is happening and why it is wrong, and making the whole thing very public, in order that people know. And maybe that people change. Or, at lest, that social expectations change ands some people shut up.

These two strategies differ in a number of ways. The former strategy may effectively neutralize some of the threats, those from attention seekers who are themselves paying attention, perhaps, but it will do little to stop or slow down threats from your basic miscreant. The latter strategy is likely to generate more threats because, simply, more jerks become aware of a particular target, but the public strategy serves a larger, very important purpose of educating people to the fact that these things happen, and not only that, but they happen commonly and are rather severe to say the least.

It is really up to the person who is at the receiving end of this horrible stuff to make that decision. One thing can be said, though: because of the dynamics of interaction on the internet, the woman who calls out the harassers in order to move us all forward, in the general direction of civilization (which is slowly being reinvented on the Internet) and widespread social justice, is ultimately hurting herself for the benefit of others. When a man does that sort of thing, Internet society calls him a hero. When a woman does that sort of thing, Internet society at best questions her motives, but commonly does worse. She is labeled as a cunt.

Here is my friend and colleague Rebecca Watson laying out her position on this issue in her most recent YouTube vlog, “Dear Guy Who Wants Me to Stop Talking About Feminism“. She addresses the question that is the title of this post.

I’m not embedding Rebecca’s video here because I want you to GO TO HER YOUTUBE CHANNEL and watch the video there. That way, if you feel like leaving a comment, you’ll be there. I assume most, perhaps all, readers of my blog will be supportive and thoughtful. Otherwise go fuck yourself, OK?

Thank you very much that is all.

What is causing the California drought?

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Peter Sinclair has tackled this difficult topic with an excellent video and informative blog post. The blog post is here, and I’ve pasted the video below.

This is a complicated issue. The water problem in California is obviously made worse by increased demands from population growth and expansion of agriculture. Under “normal” (natural) conditions, California and the American Southwest is fairly dry and can undergo extra dry periods. But climate change seems to be playing a role here as well. It appears that recent lack of rain in the region is the result of changes in atmospheric circulation that can be linked to anthropogenic global warming. Warm air also increases evaporation and decreases snow pack. When rain falls it tends more often to be in the form of heavy downpours, and thus, more runoff (not to mention landslides).

Peter also talks about Jacob Sewall’s model, ten years ago, that predicted the current situation as an outcome of reduced ice cover in the Arctic. Over at Significant Figures, Peter Gleick also talks about the California drought: Clarifying the Discussion about California Drought and Climate Change.

Photo Credit: Fikret Onal via Compfight cc

Other posts of interest:

Also of interest: In Search of Sungudogo: A novel of adventure and mystery, which is also an alternative history of the Skeptics Movement.

How much will the Arctic Sea ice melt this year?

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We are reaching the point where Arctic Sea ice tends to max out, in terms of extent (I will not be talking about volume here, though that is vitally important). Using data provided by the National Snow and Ice Data Center, I ran an informal “Science by Spreadsheet” analysis and came up with a prediction for the minimum extent of sea ice this year, which would be some time in September.

This is mostly a seat of the pants analysis and don’t take it too seriously, but feel free to put your bets in the comments section.

The data over the last few decades shows a generally declining extent of sea ice, especially at the minimum in September. But the maximum extent (where we are now, typically) seems uncorrelated to the minimum extent. Different processes are involved at different times of the year. Also, the shape of those data indicate to me a shift form a slower annual decline to a faster annual decline, happening some time around 1995 or 1996. So, I used September data only from 1996 to last year. I ran a simple regression analysis and from the model it produced I calculate that the AVERAGE September value of sea ice (an odd number that no one ever uses, but I have it anyway) will be 4.1 million square kilometers.

Using the minima for September for this range of years, the MINIMUM sea ice extent for 2014 is predicted to be 3.9458 million square kilometers.

This places this year’s minimum above the extraordinary year of 2012, which to cherry picking denialists will mean a “recovery” (though it isn’t) but below any prior year. The value will be somewhere in the crudely drawn box on this chart:

Screen Shot 2014-03-12 at 11.50.42 AM

We’ll see.

The other thing going on right now, obviously, is the shift from adding ice to removing ice that happens as the seasons shift. It looks like the ice may be starting its seasonal decline now, but in previous years, the squiggly line representing sea ice extent has continued to squiggle up and down for a few more days. In a week or so I think we’ll have a better idea. But it is quite possible that the highest value was reached over the last few days. Again, we’ll see.