You will remember his comment a while back about how sea levels actually went down for a while, but nobody ever talks about that. He was wrong. Sea levels are rising over time, but they do go up and down within that larger framework. His sea level comment prompted me to create the following graphic:

Lomborg’s latest is to make the incorrect claim that the recent and ongoing unprecedented, traumatic, and destructive fires in Australia are just kind of average. Nothing to see here. His claim is based on a misrepresentation of cherry picked data. Australia does have a lot of fire, so it is easy to find a way to describe this year’s as not abnormal. What is different, and worse, this year is where the fires happened, the kind of habitat that burned, and the timing. (See this.) The Twitter thread that Lomborg started, and many others chimed in on, is here.

And, here is the graphic I could not resist making in response. I’ve replaced the Picard Face-palm with the Greta Stern Look. This might be a thing from now on.

The graphic used in that image is a screen shot from this video:

…during an expedition … in December 2013, I spotted a small green frog … Atelopus balios… no populations had been found since 1995, and it was thought to be extinct. But here it was, raised from the dead like Lazarus. My colleagues and I found several more that night, males and females, and shipped them to an amphibian ark in Quito, where they are now breeding safely in captivity. But they will go extinct one day, and the world will be none the poorer for it. Eventually, they will be replaced by a dozen or a hundred new species that evolve later.

Mass extinctions periodically wipe out up to 95 percent of all species in one fell swoop; these come every 50 million to 100 million years, and scientists agree that we are now in the middle of the sixth such extinction…

But the impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency. Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish. …

Climate scientists worry about how we’ve altered our planet, and they have good reasons for apprehension: Will we be able to feed ourselves? Will our water supplies dry up? Will our homes wash away? But unlike those concerns, extinction does not carry moral significance, even when we have caused it….

Yet we are obsessed with reviving the status quo ante. The Paris Accords aim to hold the temperature to under two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, even though the temperature has been at least eight degrees Celsius warmer within the past 65 million years. Twenty-one thousand years ago, Boston was under an ice sheet a kilometer thick. We are near all-time lows for temperature and sea level …

This is how evolution proceeds: through extinction….

Conserving biodiversity should not be an end in itself; diversity can even be hazardous to human health. Infectious diseases are most prevalent and virulent in the most diverse tropical areas. …

And if biodiversity is the goal of extinction fearmongers, how do they regard South Florida, where about 140 new reptile species accidentally introduced by the wildlife trade are now breeding successfully? No extinctions of native species have been recorded, and, at least anecdotally, most natives are still thriving….

If climate change and extinction present problems, the problems stem from the drastic effects they will have on us. A billion climate refugees, widespread famines, collapsed global industries, and the pain and suffering of our kin demand attention to ecology and imbue conservation with a moral imperative. A global temperature increase of two degrees Celsius will supposedly raise seas by 0.2 to 0.4 meters, with no effect on vast segments of the continents and most terrestrial biodiversity. …

First, we don’t practice a general, thoughtless, conservation policy. The author is apparently unaware that our species had developed, in most nations and internationally, a system of identifying conservation problems and addressing them. It is not perfect, but when compared to other systems, such as identifying major health risks, emergent diseases, regional episodes of starvation, or outbreaks of armed conflict, it does as well as other systems, and is probably better than average.

Second, despite the aforementioned attempt to be smart, we are also ignorant. For example, there is a theory that the removal of keystone species has a disproportionately large effect other life forms. Key seed disperses, for example, might be essential for maintenance of important biodiversity in a forest. But, what if there are a dozen species that account for 80% of the dispersal, with one of those accounting for 70%? If that one keystone disperser were to go extinct, would that cause problems for all the other dispersers, since most dispersers also rely on the plant producing the seeds they are dispersing? Or, would one or two of the other dispersers simply and quickly take over the role of the newly extinct keystone species? Answer: We don’t know and neither does R. Alexander Pyron.

For the first of these two reasons, we should not assume we are ignorant and that R. Pyron can teach us something we don’t know. Conservation is clearly not his area of expertise. (I’ve read his resume; It isn’t.) For the second of these two issues, while we can and do make efforts to be specifically smart about our decisions with respect conservation, we also need to have a general principle of opting in favor of conservation-enhancing measures where possible, because we really, honestly, don’t know the ways in which we can screw up. A good principle is to leave stuff alone when we can.

Third, mass extinctions certainly are part of life. They happen now and then. Big giant ones have happened a half dozen times or so, and there have been a larger number of medium sized ones. Mass extinctions have two interesting characteristics. One, when the most severe ones happen, we see that life comes close to getting entirely wiped out. Here is where a form of the Anthropocentric Effect comes into play. We live in the world where mass extinctions of the past have almost, but not actually, ended life on the planet (or, perhaps better stated and more relevant, ended multi-cellular life on the planet). Why do we live on a planet where life almost, but not quite, ends now and then? Because it didn’t. Had it, we would not be living here to revel in how amazing it is that life always survives. In myriad hypotheical alternative universes, the Earth is at present inhabited by slime and nothing else, because the worst mass extinctions were slightly worse than the ones that actually happened here, which is why we are here to tell about it.

The truth is that one of these days we are going to have a mass extinction that does either wipe out all life, or all but perhaps bacteria and one kind of fungus, or something close to that. R. Pyron is fine with that. I am not. He is wrong.

The second characteristic of mass extinctions is that everything gets rearranged and nothing is the same thereafter. My favorite is the pair of events that occurred very close in time at the end of the Permian. Prior to those back to back events, most, or at least a very large percentage, of animals that we were sessile — attached to things — while many, if not most, photo-synthesizers were not. After the Permian, things changed, and most plants were planted and most animals were perambulating by some means. Alexander Pyron wants us to focus on saving humans, and never mind extinctions in general. He lacks understanding of what he writes.

R is wrong about all of the climate change related things he says. He is abysmally wrong, and is clearly repeating standard long disproved, themes of the climate denial, anti science community. Yes, folks, we found another to add to the dozen or so nearly extinct ones we knew about. Like those frogs. A tenured scientist who is a climate science denier!

The current and likely future with respect to sea levee rise is meters, not tenths of meters. The current sea levels are already on the high end for the Pleistocene, not low. Lower sea levels during the last glacial were much lower. The fact that it was warmer 65 million years ago is irrelevant, since our entire ecology, including all of the plants and animals we rely on, are categorically distinct from anything that lived then. R demonstrates in this part of his essay a Middle School level understanding of all things paleo, not what one would expect from a tenured professor of biology who supposedly studies evolution.

His comments about Florida demonstrate a dangerous ignorance. The introduction of what become invasive species is nearly universally bad, and this one kind of event is responsible for more extinction in this world than any other thing. When R. tells us that invasive species are not a problem because of Florida, he is conveying a pernicious and dangerous falsehood. If he understand that he has this wrong then he has carried out a nefarious act in writing this essay, and we need to wonder why. If he does not understand that he has this wrong, then he had demonstrated deep and disturbing ignorance. Maybe there is a third reason, but I don’t see it.

By the way, the pattern he claims for Florida, specifically, might be partly true, but there are reasons for this having to to with the region’s unique bio-geography as a peninsula jutting down into a tropical region, as well as its history as part of an earlier mass extinction event across the Caribbean. This is all interesting stuff that R is apparently ignorant of.

He does seem to be concerned with climate refugees, and he does admit that we might want to avoid some of the effects of climate change. But these ameliorating comments are buried in a larger Lomborgian style argument that we should not be concerned about extinctions, climate change, all of that.

There is an editor at the Washington Post that totally stepped in it.

For context, I provide below links to selected posts of my own about Junior.

This most recent event involves an Op Ed published by the largely anti-science-even-if-it-is-bad-for-the-economy The Wall Street Journal, by Pielke Jr. In it he attacks Michael Mann, and does so in a ham-handed and factually incorrect way. In other words, just another day in the life of Junior.

Since I let my subscription to the Wall Street Journal expire in 1971, and they hold their cards close to their golden chest, I provide the response, by defender of science Peter Fontaine, as graphic:

The reason this all comes up now is because of THIS dustup, in combination with Junior’s very sensitive skin which stings and develops hives even when people are giving each other stern looks.

Why does Roger Pielke Junior do so well at annoying the community of climate change experts? Among professionals in this area, there is something of a running joke. If you see a number that seems to large, a number that you for some reason don’t like the largeness of, just divide it by the GDP (gross domestic product). Now, there are times when you need to divide a thing by GDP to make sens of it, some measure across time and all that. But dividing the costs of major disasters, or the overall disaster costs for an especially costly year, is crazy because, for one, GDP is forced upward when we spend a gazillion dollars rebuilding all the stuff that was destroyed by a bunch of hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and what have you. Junior shares a philosophical bed with Bjorn Lomborg: Climate change is real, sure, but it isn’t so bad and maybe we should take a decade or two and do other stuff before dealing with it.

I’m sure I’m oversimplifying Junior’s position there a little. Mostly, though, I just divided what he says by the GDP and it got a lot smaller.

Roger Pielke Junior, I forgive you for this one thing
Roger Pielke Jr no longer with FiveThirtyEight?
A Letter From John Holdren Regarding Roger Pielke Jr’s Statements
Mann, did Judith Curry ever get Rogered!
The Inconceivably Bogus Republican Science Committee Hearings
Today’s Climate Change Congressional Hearings

Here are my reactions to the candidates responses for some of the questions.

1. Innovation. Science and engineering have been responsible for over half of the growth of the U.S. economy since WWII. But some reports question America’s continued leadership in these areas. What policies will best ensure that America remains at the forefront of innovation?

Clinton acknowledges and outlines post World War II innovation and its payoffs. She links this innovation to education, and advocates for preschool and good K-12 in every zip code, which implies good schools regardless of socioeconomic status of the local school’s catchment. She seems to imply that one does both applied and basic research, because both pay of. She supports technology transfer.

Trump indicates that innovation is great. He makes the claim that innovation is a by product of free market systems, and claims that most innovation comes form entrepreneurs. He does support maintaining or raising taxes to fund science, engineering, and healthcare, in order to make Americans more prosperous.

Johnson insists that a robust economy precedes innovation. His primary policy recommendation to enhance scientific innovation is to reduce taxes, and calls for the government to step away from meddling with the true innovators, scientists, engineers, buisnes people, and hobbyists. He wants to dramtically reform the granting process, using as the exclusive means of determining grant worthiness the frequency of ideas in given areas at the grassroots level. So, he notes that even if it is apparent that we need research to stop a flu epidemic, if the majority of researchers want to address alcohol abuse then so be it.

He also intends to reform how universities hire and fund researchers, and the universities’ overhead system.

Stein claims that almost every part of her 2016 platform will cause positive effects in innovation. By reducing Pentagon spending, Stein will free up a lot of money for research and development, by transferring that money to millions of currently underemployed people, who will then innovate.

Clearly, Trump and Johnson want a mostly hands off policy, and neither shows much understanding of how research works. Also, Johnson claims he will do something a president can’t do (change the way universities handle overhead and grants).

Stein wishes to use a peace dividend, and that’s great. If we could reduce Pentagon spending and use that money for other stuff, I’m all for that. However, Stein did not appear to address the question of innovation specifically. Also, I’m not sure how transferring funds form the Pentagon to the masses produces the sort of outcome implied by this question.

Clinton demonstrates a nuanced and clear knowledge of the topic at hand, and pretty much wins this debate because of her support for both basic and applied research. First, she knows what they are, and recognizes these issues as, clearly, part of the question. Second, she recognizes the importance of basic research. I personally think we do too much technology transfer, an we’ve fetishized the role of spin-off businesses in research and development. I’d like to see us go back to a somewhat more, but modernized, system of funding public research, and letting the private sector benefit from it without stomping on the backs of private citizens with such chicanery as $600 epi pens. But that may be just me.

3. Climate Change. The Earth’s climate is changing and political discussion has become divided over both the science and the best response. What are your views on climate change, and how would your administration act on those views?

Clinton gives, probably, the best answer because it is both aggressive and reasonably specific and doable. She wants us to get to 50% non carbon by the end of her first term, cut waste, and make larger scale transport more efficient, right away.

She does not address the supply side of energy sufficiently, and needs to do so. In a sense, Clinton is lucky in this debate, because the only other candidate who took the question seriously, Jill Stein, is not one of the major party candidates.

Trump put the term “Climate Change” in quotes. That is an insult to sciencedebate.org, the other candidates, and to humanity. His answer is right out of the Bjorn Lomborg playbook, and deserves no further consideration from me at this time.

Johnson “accepts that climate change is occurring” as though that mattered, or gave him points. Of course he accepts that climate change is occurring. Good for you, noticing that. But seriously, we are far beyond the point, especially in the context of a science debate, of taking positions of climate change being real, bigfoot not being real, evolution being real, aliens not being real, etc. So, no, please. Otherwise, Johnson notes that the things that cause climate change are all good things, and we don’t want to get rid of them. But, the market place will take care of them anyway. And, anyway, other countries are going to be producing more greenhouse gas pollution so we can’t do much about it. So, no, bad answer, about as bad as Trump’s

Stein has a long and detailed list of proposals, mostly funded by cutting the Pentagon budget. The strongest part of her policy is that we need to adopt a major, New Deal level (she calls it a Green New Deal) approach to climate change, and jsut get it done. She ties her climate change policies together with environmental justice programs. She proposes the Paris Treaty, by not by name, but we already have that. She supports organic farming and related efforts which may or may not help with climate change, but are sort of off topic.

A good number of her policies are bogus, a good number are good, many are diluted by great sounding link ups to social justice and democracy and stuff, which I like, but which make the policies not arguable at the national level. I like the fact that she put so much out there, even if I don’t agree with a lot of it.

Only Clinton and Stein took this question seriously. Clinton’s answer is good but not enough, Stein’s answer is weak in many areas but has potential.

7. Energy. Strategic management of the US energy portfolio can have powerful economic, environmental, and foreign policy impacts. How do you see the energy landscape evolving over the next 4 to 8 years, and, as President, what will your energy strategy be?

The candidates’ answers on energy follow the same pattern as with climate change, so this can be brief.

Clinton: Details, doable, fairly aggressive, specific. Doesn’t sufficiently attack key supply side problems like pipelines and fracking.

Stein: Redirect funds and bring it to the people, and that should solve everything. On a more specific level, Stein addresses the supply side aggressively, ending subsidies, banning fracking, etc.

The other two guys: Something something something free market something somethings prosperity.

The same pattern emerges across most of the answers with all of the candidates. Stein is more idealistic, and plans to bring the resources to the masses (free school, everybody gets a job, etc) paid for by stealing form the rich (including the Pentagon) and redistributing to the poor. I fully agree with all of that. No one will win on that ticket. Stein also gave a pretty darn acceptable commentary on vaccines, by the way. The Facebook Memes about her being anti-vax are either overdone, or she’s moderated. Clinton provides the most professional answers, most doable, and consistently demonstrates that she knows a lot about the issues. I would hire her to be president, if that was a thing, but I’d sit down with her to adjust some details. But she would not need any training.

Tump and Johnson put most of their faith on the free market, entrepreneurs, and the mysteries magnetic properties of prosperity. I was not impressed by either of them.

What do you think? Read the questions and answers here.

White Supremacy, Climate Science Denial, Trump, Alt-Right

Peter Sinclair suddenly realized it is all one big interconnected complex hole! (Well, whole, but more like a hole because of what we are throwing into it).

Look at this classic video he made a while back:

Then, check out his post, here.

A lot of stuff about the MadHouse Effect

I reviewed the Madhouse Effect HERE.

Get Energy Smart notes that only a day after the Madhouse Effect authors highlighted nine key deniers (including Bjorn Lomborg) in the Washington Post, that venerable newspaper publishes yet another bogus editorial (YABE) by Lomborg.

Jeesh.

See also:

EcoWatch: Michael Mann’s Hotlist of the 9 Most Prominent Climate Deniers

About an earlier editorial by Lomborg: Bjørn Lomborg WSJ Op Ed Is Stunningly Wrong

The National Academy of Sciences Writes One Of Those Big Letters

On September 20, 2016, 375 members of the National Academy of Sciences, including 30 Nobel laureates, published an open letter to draw attention to the serious risks of climate change. The letter warns that the consequences of opting out of the Paris agreement would be severe and long-lasting for our planet’s climate and for the international credibility of the United States.

Here it is.

And, ScienceDebate.org has had some success. Some of the candidates, at the primary level, have engaged in such a debate, and at the national level, some of the candidates have contributed written answers to citizen-generated questions about science policy.

And now, they’ve done it again.

The four main candidates (two actual main candidates and two “third party” candidates) were provided with several science policy related questions. Three of the candidates have provided answers.

The entire project is to be found HERE. There are 20 questions.

I’m still going through them. If you have comments on any, please post them, I’d love to hear what you think.

Personally, I think Trump’s answer on climate change was probably written by Bjorn Lomborg. Or, cribbed form something he wrote.

(I suppose someone should be running these answers through a plagiarism checker???)

Gary Johnson apparently has nothing to say about science policy. That makes sense. He’s a Libertarian, and Libertarians don’t believe in science policy.

Jill Stein gave an interesting answer on Vaccines.

Trump wants to stop the inflow of opioids into the United States. He may not have understood the question.

The word “wall” does not appear among the answers, though Immigration is asked about.

Interesting answers on space as well.

Go look. Report back!

And, if you’ve not seen this, enjoy:

Mann and his colleagues essentially solved that problem in 1998, with the publication of a study looking at tree ring data, ice cores, and direct measurements of the atmosphere and the ocean surface, to estimate “surface temperature” of the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere. NASA, NOAA, and other agencies already had a temperature record going back into the 19th century, about a century of data. But since human effects started way before that, and since there is a lot of non-human caused variation in the system, the only way the basic pattern of surface warming, and the relative role of human effects, could be ascertained was by extending that record back several more centuries. Mann and his colleagues did that.

What they did was to turn this graph:

Ironically, that first graph is from the oil industry, a report by ExxonMobil to be exact. Scientists generally knew that greenhouse warming was a thing, but these ExxonMobil scientists hid their research in order to … well, you can guess their motivation. (And you thought they were just about oil!)

So, that should have been about it. A major question was clarified and science marches on.

But there were two other things that happened after that. One makes total sense, and is a good thing. The other is mad. Mad as in madhouse.

The first thing was clarifying the science even more. Mann and colleagues worked mainly on the Northern Hemisphere because that is where much of the data lived. They were not using all the proxy data that would eventually become available. The record had to be pushed even farther back in time. The direct surface measurements needed to be reanalyzed a few times by different people, using different approaches, in order to understand it better. And so on.

Also, climate needed to march along a bit, as it turns out. The years since 1998 or so have seen dramatic changes in surface temperature, and dramatic effects of warming.

So that all happened, and our understanding of climate change is much refined and pretty darn good, with a few interesting and important questions remaining. But we know enough to confirm several times over the existential nature of the problem.

But something else happened at the same time.

Your curmudgeonly old Uncle Bob got mad at the climate data because, well, it seemed like it was Environmentalism which is all Hippie and Communist and stuff. Your cousin the developer and your other cousin who works at the power plant got mad because it became clear that modern civilization’s present day technologies for making and using buildings, making and using vehicles, and making and using energy, were the cause of an existential crisis. So they got mad about being blamed, even though they weren’t really being singled out. And all the energy producing corporations, stock holders, and their … well, their wholly owned souls such as members of Congress, Republicans, talk show hosts, and, to bring it full circle, your curmudgeonly old Uncle Bob, all got mad because addressing climate change would ruin the American Dream.

The American Dream, by the way, is this: You are a poor slob living in dirt. Them something happens and the dirt is gone but somehow you are still filthy. Filthy rich! Every American would become filthy rich if only … if only Mike Mann would shut up and go away.

So, this second thing that happened involved intense harassment, often bought and paid for, of climate scientists, active opposition to truthful and honest science, and the organic development of what Mann and his coauthor Toles refer to as a “Madhouse.”

Mann has been in the middle of the conversation about climate science, the needed energy transition, and the denial of climate science, for years now. (See his first hand historical account of the first half of that journey.) He’s also a great communicator of science. So, he’s one of the best people to tell the story of climate change.

Mann has done this before a couple of times (notably, see this DK publication authored by Mann that summarizes the IPCC report). And now he’s done it again.

The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy, by Michael Mann and cartoonist Tom Toles, consists of Mann’s account of climate change, the denailism industry, the fight between science and anti-science, the energy transition, and all the important nuances of the problem. Well written and easily understood, an excellent and very current expose of the whole thing. And, along side all this, the cartoonish stylings of cartoonist Tom Toles.

One of the topics Mann deals with in this new book, that has not been dealt with enough, is the Breakthrough concept, especially as related to geoengineering. To quote from the text:

Many of those who advocate against taking action when it comes to dealing with the underlying problem—our ongoing burning of fossil fuels— have instead turned to possible technosolutions for counteracting climate change that involve other massive interventions in the Earth system: geoengineering. In some ways, for the free-market fundamentalist, geoengineering is a logical way out because it reflects an extension of faith that the free market and technological innovation can solve any problem we create, without the need for regulation.

Unsurprisingly, even many rather level-headed captains of industry, such as Bill Gates, have embraced the concept along with techno-Pollyannas, such as Bjorn Lomborg and the Breakthrough Institute. Price on carbon? Nah, the market doesn’t need it. Renewable energy? It’s a pipe dream. Massively interfering with the Earth system in the hope that we might get lucky and offset global warming? Yeah, that’s the ticket!

One of the important Stages of Science Denial (and there is a whole chapter on the stages in The Madhouse Effect) is to assume that this problem will be solved with one great technological advance.

We might have some helpful technological advances, but most of the key advances have already happened and now need some fine tuning. The laws of physics can’t be broken just because we want them to be. It takes energy to separate Carbon from Oxygen, and we get energy by combining the two (if we start with the right molecules). We can’t suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere and make it solid without either spending more energy, or violating the laws of physics. And at the scale we are talking about here, we can’t store the gas in some safe place. The bottom line: We have to keep the fossil fuel in the ground, and use the widely available, abundant, clean, inexpensive, and by the way, very cool alternative sources of energy that already exist but that don’t happened to be owned by the Koch Brothers.

Check out The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy. It is available for pre-order as of this writing, but will be available for actual reading around Labor Day on line, and in print, ready to ship by mid September.

That was a situation up with which the members of that university community would not put, to coin a phrase, and the public outcry put a quick end to it. This is appropriate, because according to a new post by Stefan Rahmstorf at RealClimate, “… apart from one paper in 1996, Lomborg has never published anything in any field of science that was interesting or useful to other scientists, or even just worth the bother of contradicting in the scientific literature.”

I’ve talked about Lomborg here before. Here I noted,

There is currently a twitter argument happening, along with a bit of a blogging swarm, over a chimera of a remark made by John Stossle and Bjorn Lomborg. They made the claim that a million electric cars would have no benefit with resect to Carbon emissions. The crux of the argument is that there is a Carbon cost to manufacturing and running electric cars. When we manufacture anything, we emit Carbon, and when we make electricity to run the cars, we emit Carbon, etc. etc.

Lomborg is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. But here I want to focus on one aspect of why he is wrong that applies generally to this sort of topic….

We also talked about how Lomborg is wrong on electric cars here. Lomborg has been stunningly wrong on climate change, which is mainly what he is known for these days (being wrong on climate change, that is). And his wrongness on sea level rise and Bangladesh is not only stunning as well, but also, downright dangerous.

Stefan’s post looks in detail at two things (and in less detail at many other things). First, is the question of whether or not Lomborg is an actual practicing academic with a good publication record and all that. He is not. Stefan’s analysis is clear.

Second, is a more detailed look at Lomborg, sea level rise, Bangladesh, and all that. This is especially interesting because Stefan is one of the world’s leading experts on sea level rise. He has two peer reviewed papers on the “top ten most cited” on the Web of Science (which has well ove 40,000 sea level rise related papers), which are heavily cited. Stefan’s post is a must-read because of Stefan’s overview of sea level rise, aside from the stuff about Lomborg. Go read it.

So go read the post, learn about Bjørn Lomborg’s academic qualifications, how wrong he has been about sea level rise, and some other good stuff.

I suspect we are not going to see much more about Bjørn going forward.

Andrew Revkin has a new kind of fan. These are fans that agree with much of what Revkin says, or at least feel comfortable in his community of commenters. These fans feel their views are substantiated by what they read in Revkin’s New York Times column, Dot Earth. They seem to be Libertarian, anti-environment, anti-science, pro-fossil fuel, and frankly, anti-green. Not just one or two of Andrew Revkin’s fans, but a bunch — with numbers possibly growing — are of this mind, and this is very disturbing. If we had the technology to transport these fans back in time and put them in a small room with Andy Revkin back in the days of the Bush administration, the room would melt down. They would not be his fans, and he would be shocked to be told that some day they will be.

Revkin still has his old fans, people who are actively and intentionally green, concerned about the environment, not willing to accept a world run by fossil fuel or other major environment-harming industrial interests. These are often activists, people who take seriously their individual responsibly to be good to the only planet we have, the Earth. And I’m sure there are many ways in which these more traditional Revkin-readers still fit with and relate to the folk singer and former New York Times journalist.

I’ve been noticing this for months. I speak with a green activist about climate change. The activist is very concerned about climate change due to human produced greenhouse gas pollution, can see the effects of it, worries about future generations that will be unspeakably harmed by it. Annoyed, the activist is, with deniers of climate change, deniers of the science, those who incorrectly say that even if it is real we can’t do anything about it, or should not, falsely claiming that curtailing fossil fuel use will be worse than using the Sun’s energy to fuel our lifestyle, or perniciously saying this simply can’t be done.

And right there in the middle of the conversation about how global warming is real, human caused, important, and fixable, and about how deniers of these things are truely some kind of bad guy, I’ll hear something about how Any Revkin is great. Writes great stuff. Says great stuff. And I’m sure that to a certain extent, taking a life long career into account, considering it all, this is true.

But then I look at Dot Earth, and I see two things. First is Andy Revkin’s tendency to occupy that space between serious concern about climate change and acceptance of consensus science on one hand, and questioning of the reality and importance of climate change, on the other. In other words, Andy likes to write, often, in the space between what deniers call “warmists” and what warmists call “deniers.”

There was a time, perhaps, one could argue, and many did, that there was a valid intersection between these space, an overlap, a place where an honest broker could be effective in shepherding those who might be antagonistic towards better solutions to our existential problems in a better direction. But that ship has sailed. There is plenty of room for variation in policy approaches to climate change. But there is absolutely zero room for considering the reality of climate change or its severity. We can honestly argue about thresholds, and which decade will see what severe effects, but we can no longer argue about the existence or overall seriousness of the problem. Within climate science, scientists argue over the relative importance of Arctic Warming vs. Pacific surface warm anomalies in relation to quasi-resonant Rossby waves, about the complex dynamics of transient climate sensitivity vis-a-vis positive feedbacks, or about the order in which to load variables into climate models running on supercomputers. But nobody, really, in climate science is arguing about any of the things that are being discussed in that space between consensus science and denial.

Except Andy and a few other people, and many who call themselves green, because they are honestly and honorably green or at least want to be green, see Andy in that space and think, well, if he’s there, maybe I should be there.

As the gaping maw between good climate science on one hand and pro-fossil fuel activism on the other has grown, almost everybody has moved to one side or another, most moving towards the science unless they have some motive to be on the side that we now understand is clearly wrong. Most green people have moved to the side that prefers to save the Earth and has little interest in saving the Koch Brothers. And as this tectonic event, this rifting, in perspective has happened, Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog has stayed in the widening valley, initially I assume because it seemed like the right place to be, and eventually remained there for reasons I would feel uncomfortable guessing at.

And today, I took a look into that rift to see what was in there and what I saw was disturbing.

Tony Dokoupil of MSNBC produced some commentary about how Dot Earth has degraded to little more than Andy Revkin’s hobby blog. He makes a number of points you can agree with or not, and Andy, much to his credit — he could have ignored this but chose not to — addresses those points. I have opinions and observations I could express about Dokoupil’s commentary and about Revkin’s response, but that is neither here nor there. What I would prefer to focus on is the nature and character of the supportive commentary, a subset of the folks who jumped in to say Andy’s doing it right. The new fans.

Following is a sampling of comments on this most recent post which give a flavor for what I’m talking about. Much of what is repeated below is discredited by current science or misrepresents science. For the most part it isn’t even very skilled denialism. The denialism part is not what bothers me. Well, science denialism bothers me, but that is not what I’m talking about here. What concerns me is the apparent comfort level found among those who really want us to do nothing to address climate change with the middle ground, the honest broker. What might have once been a true middle ground is now a place where the anti-science troops hunker down and from which they snipe, like the various demilitarized zones of past meatspace wars throughout the 20th century. It is a place that should not be groomed for use in the national paper of record, and especially on a green blog.

Laird Wilcox Kansas City is comfortable at Dot Earth and appreciates Andy’s approach:

What may bother some global warmists is that Dot Earth actually opens issues up to comment in an honest way. For ideologues, and especially dogmatic AGW warmists, this is anathema — it’s giving the hated demonic “other” a voice and allowing him a voice to undermine the group consensus that drives dogmatic causes and crusades to greater and greater levels of intolerance of opposition.

To allow skeptics and others who see issues with global warmist dogma that require reconsideration of basic premises, additional testing of claims and declarations, reanalysis of date and perhaps honest and unsparing consideration of what it is that they really fear from open and vigorous debate in the public domain. Why is it necessary that “denialists” are driven from web pages, comments sections of journals and newspapers as well as warmist meetings and conventions? I don’t this this happens because everybody is assured they are full of c**p but rather that they have cogent arguments worth considering.

This tendency to reject the hated “other” with broad campaigns of marginalization, vilification, stigmatization, stereotyping and name-calling is allowing public awareness of what the AGW warmist movement harbors in its ranks – deeply insecure believers drawn to the apocalyptic catastrophizing their movement demands and a deeply dark paranoia toward all who question the dogma, writ and scripture that supports it.

It’s own intolerance and extremism should give it away in normal times.

Trusted Commenter Kip Hansen implies a link between the Dot Earth approach and a well known scientist turned (sadly) denialist:

Dr. Judith Curry, in her opening remarks at the ” Circling the square: universities, the media, citizens and politics.” conference in Nottingham, England, concluded with this:

“In conclusion, my concern is that the scientific community is extremely confused about the policy process and too many climate scientists are irresponsibly shooting from the hip as issue advocates. Apart from the damage that this is doing at the interface between science and policy, the neglect and perversion of uncertainty is doing irreparable damage to the science and to the public trust of scientists.”

I would support the same statement, with the subject being Environmental Journalists, transmogrified to: (this is a paraphrased quote, with substitutions):

“….my (Kip Hansen’s) concern is that the environmental journalist community is extremely confused about the policy process and too many environmental journalists are irresponsibly shooting from the hip as issue advocates. Apart from the damage that this is doing at the interface between journalism and policy, the neglect and perversion of uncertainty is doing irreparable damage to journalism and to the public trust of environmental journalists.”

When journalists no longer question the pronouncements of advocates — political or scientific — then they fail at their sacred trust.

Has Andrew Revkin become *that* kind of journalist here at Dot Earth? Is he “just another advocate”?

Kurt notes:

If I understand correctly, part of the criticism from “Climate Hawks” is that YOU don’t take a strong stand. (For the record, NOT my criticism; im Gegenteil: a good journalist, like a good scientist, should not let his ideology cloud facts or data!). Nevertheless, they probably wonder why you’re not fighting in the trenches like Joe Romm or Susan Goldenberg.

Keep your balance, your open mind and vor allem: keep playing music!

and, in support of Andy Revkin,

it was Revkin himself who posted the criticism on his own blog. Revkin doesn’t make the silly statement that Dokoupil lacks a scientific background; indeed, none of Dokoupils’ arguments are remotely scientific – they are about Revkin’s attention being split between competing interests, his blog style, his interaction with commenters and hosted writers, and regaining his former gravitas: “… quite simply one of the very best reporters to ever push a green noun against a green verb in newsprint.”

Robert disagreed, but wmar has a response to that:

You forgot the most important part of the list:

The Data –

for that is what is primarily on Kip and Kurt’s ‘side’. When Andy notes this it is indeed refreshing and valuable.

Adrian O has a nice example of denial in response to Portia‘s quip “Man walks into a bar in the Kirabati Islands.
Oh. Wait“:

precisely mapped how Tarawa, the main atoll and the capital of Kiribati, has GROWN CONSIDERABLY in surface since 1940.
The study and a dozen others are quoted by the IPCC which mentions that out of ALL Pacific small islands measured, a large majority, 86%, are GROWING IN SURFACE or are stable.

IPCC concludes, in section 29.3.1. OBSERVED impacts on Island Coasts (2014)
QUOTE
Sea-level rise did not appear to be the primary control on
shoreline processes on these islands
END QUOTE
http://tinyurl.com/nb5he7h

So now that you see in detail that when measured the islands are NOT sinking, you have two alternatives

1) You are relieved. You were worried that islands are sinking, but now you know that careful maps and the IPCC show that that is not the case.

2) (sadly much more likely) You feel ambushed by right wing deniers, and you know better than to look at measurements, even official: you always choose propaganda, and think that measured reality is Satan. You want Andy’s blog closed.

This can happen in two cases.
a) You are totally uninterested in those islands, but you NEED to feel desperate in order to feel good about yourself, or

b) You are totally uninterested in those islands, but you have considerable gain if you seed despair, e.g. you have green investments, you are a green CEO, etc.
*
Denver and Kirbati are submerged.
Why Denver?
Why Kiribati?

I’m going to include a comment by Robert to address some of the issues above lest I be repeating a bad message:

i see we’re still not reading the material, AO. well, I’m here to help, though I do think that the masters of science generally do try and do their homework before spouting off.

1. Both the IPCC appendix and the unpublished study you cited agree on two things: a) sea levels generally continue to rise in the Pacific (and have risen approx. 200 mm. over the last 130 years).

2. The rises, together with other natural and “anthropogenic,” events, continue to change islands, reefs and atolls in ways that are not clearly understood.

3. Very generally speaking, Kiribati’s bigger islands have gained in area, while the smaller have lost area.

4. Some of this is wholly natural, in the sense that this sort of geography tends to move, shift, and change a fair amount.

5. However–and your authors are explicit about this–a large part of the reason that the larger islands have tended to grow is that more people live on them, and they’ve been building sea walls, retainers, dredges, etc. like crazy.

In brief, no, these islands don’t just sink. (Actually they don’t really sink at all; they get eroded away, the sea level rises, etc.) The processes involved are complex, just as they are with global warming.

However, the overall pattern is clear.

So read your own material, willya? And grow a sense of humor.

That there are denialist comments on Andy Revkin’s blog is not an issue at all. What he or his editors allow is entirely up to them. My position on blogging comments will be well known to my own readers. There can’t be hard and fast rules. It is entirely appropriate to exclude any and all trolls and at the same time it is entirely appropriate to allow their discussions. There is no free speech issue here (anyone who feels excluded from a given outlet can go get their own outlet). The problem, to reiterate but it probably needs to be said a couple of times, is that Andy Revkin’s approach to many of the climate related issues is to give service to positions that are simply untenable and, very likely, damaging.

Andrew Revkin is not a climate science denialist. But he is occupying a space where, given the evolution of this issue in recent years, few who understand the severity of the problem occupy any more, for good reason. So, as long as people are lining up to advise Andrew Revkin as to what he should do, I’ll add this. Take one of your feet off the dock or the boat, before you fall in!

Update Added June 25

In a response to my post, regarding my assertion that there is zero room for debate about the reality of climate change, Andy Revkin wrote, at Dot Earth:

“Zero room.” That’s scientific.

Yes, it is. There is zero room for debate when an issue has been pretty much settled. In science debate can come up anywhere, you never know, but for all practical purposes we do not debate if the Earth is hollow or solid or flat or round, or that germs cause many diseases, or that frogs reproduce as most other tetrapods do rather then spontaneously emerging from mud.

The Earth is warming. No room for debate there. Many factors affect global surface temperatures. Some are natural, some are human-caused. The sum of the natural effects does not produce the warming we see. The human effects have caused, over the last several decades, a certain amount of cooling (from aerosol pollutants) and a certain amount of warming (from greenhouse gas emissions and related positive feedbacks, and damage to Carbon sinks). So the warming trend is human caused. No room for debate there. Climate change is causing loss of life, damage to property, and threats to food production through drought and excessive rain. Sea levels can not possibly fail to rise over coming decades, wiping out coastal properties including human settlements, harbors, agricultural lands, etc. No room for debate on these effects. Killer heat waves have become more common and this will get much worse. No debate about that. Ocean acidification is happening and will get worse. This is not debated. There is some debate about how much we can adapt to some of these effects, but adaptation will be costly and there are limits. So, yes, there is some debate there. There is no debate that we need to keep the Carbon in the ground. There is some debate (but it is highly questionable) about the idea that we can get energy by releasing Carbon but at the same time use energy to un-release the Carbon. There are serious physical limitations to such an approach. There is a vibrant and real debate about which non-fossil-Carbon technologies we should use to produce energy, given the possible mix of technologies such as wind, PV solar, thermal solar, passive geothermal, tidal, hydro, and nuclear. That’s a real debate. There is real debate about pricing carbon or regulating energy production, about subsidies and incentives, etc.

So to repeat my original post, I said “… there is absolutely zero room for considering the reality of climate change or its severity.” Andy Revkin claimed that this is not true, that there is a debate. Until he said that I had not realized that Revkin was on the fence about the reality of climate change. I wrote “Andrew Revkin is not a climate science denialist,” but I have now been corrected. Apparently that is not true. This comes as an utter surprise to me.

And, in fact, I don’t believe it. I think his “that’s not scientific” argument was not well thought out, something of a knee-jerk reaction, in which you tell the person who seems to be disagreeing with you that they don’t know how to think rationally. (In fact, in his comments, he did that twice. Wrong both times.)

In the comments section (below) Andy wrote:

If you’d asked me about my comment policy and your concerns about my “fans” in that space I might have reminded you that comment contributors — as at most blogs — are a tiny subset of the overall readership. I find it puzzling that someone with scientific training would claim to detect significant trends in such a small and skewed sample (commenters tend to have lots of free time and strong opinions) and then use those “findings” to demean the work of someone whose second National Academy of Sciences Communication Award was for Dot Earth. It’s always imperfect. I don’t have enough time to vet all comments for factual content. Folks can feel free to dive into the conversations there or ignore them. They don’t even appear unless you click.

But I had written in my post “that there are denialist comments on Andy Revkin’s blog is not an issue at all. What he or his editors allow is entirely up to them. My position on blogging comments will be well known to my own readers. There can’t be hard and fast rules. It is entirely appropriate to exclude any and all trolls and at the same time it is entirely appropriate to allow their discussions.

I’m not talking about comments. As Andy and others have pointed out, denialist comments on Dot Earth get addressed by those who disagree. I often do the same thing on my blog.

The point I made in this (original) blog post is that Andy Revkin operates a forum that caters to a middle ground that has disappeared, and that feeding activity in this middle ground is counter-productive, demanding a cost we can’t afford to pay. That is my criticism. I further noted that this is important because of Andy’s cachet with the green community.

Susan Anderson (below) says:

Andy’s promotion of voices from the so-called middle has become a reliable indicator prompting people like me to, for example, look up the credentials and work of Martin Hoerling, Roger Pielke Jr., and a variety of others. I don’t remember if he promotes Lomborg.

Meanwhile, it is very sad, Andy is a fine writer, an excellent researcher, has a reputation deep and wide from his history (he turned around 2008), and is an attractive speaker who gets invited everywhere.

His less popular articles on local ecology and initiatives are more than fine, and it is sad that they are not given top billing by his audience, while the fight goes on … and on … and on … getting nowhere and encouraging apathy.

Well put, Susan.

Metzomagic (below) notes that Revkin brought some standard “middle of the road” questions to bear in his interview with Jeremy Shakun. Yes, he did, but if I was interviewing him I would have asked similar questions to give him an opportunity to address them, which he did. Indeed, Andy points out that the current change in surface temperatures is not so much as hockey stick but rather something much more serious and severe. (In thinking about an alternative to hockey stick to represent the shape of the time serious I keep coming back to various dentistry tools.) This makes me believe that Andy is is on board with the reality of and seriousness of climate change.

And that, really, is the problem as I see it. Andy has one foot on the dock, one foot on the boat, but he really wants to be on the dock. Questioning of the reality and importance of climate change, that boat won’t float. I think it is time for Any to just get himself fully and squarely on the dock.

Another update: This discussion continues with Andy Revkin’s new post: In Weighing Responses to Climate Change, Severity and Uncertainty Matter More than ‘Reality’

Check out: “Seven Nobel Laureates” Behind Climate Contrarian Bjorn Lomborg’s Think Tank Are Not All They Seem, Or Even All Alive

Here is a meme I made to commerate Graham’s efforts:

Click the image to get the full size original.

Click here to learn more about Lomborg.