What happens when ideas presented as science lead us in the wrong direction?

History is filled with brilliant ideas that gave rise to disaster, and this book explores the most fascinating—and significant—missteps: from opium’s heyday as the pain reliever of choice to recognition of opioids as a major cause of death in the U.S.; from the rise of trans fats as the golden ingredient for tastier, cheaper food to the heart disease epidemic that followed; and from the cries to ban DDT for the sake of the environment to an epidemic-level rise in world malaria.

These are today’s sins of science—as deplorable as mistaken past ideas about advocating racial purity or using lobotomies as a cure for mental illness. These unwitting errors add up to seven lessons both cautionary and profound, narrated by renowned author and speaker Paul A. Offit. Offit uses these lessons to investigate how we can separate good science from bad, using some of today’s most controversial creations—e-cigarettes, GMOs, drug treatments for ADHD—as case studies. For every “Aha!” moment that should have been an “Oh no,” this book is an engrossing account of how science has been misused disastrously—and how we can learn to use its power for good.

The story of opium reminds me of that movie, Very Bad Things. Remember that?

Also, I did a podcast, the guest rather than the interviewer (I go both ways), on Geeks Without God, which will be up on the 16h, here. I think that if you are a subscriber you can get it early, like, now. The interview was about the Heartland Institute‘s recent recent mailing of anti-science materials related to climate change, sent out to a very large number of teachers.

This is one of those books that contains political propaganda, is printed in large(ish) numbers, then sent around to teachers, academics, policy makers, etc. whether they want a copy or not; it is a sort of high level form of spam. You may remember Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) or J. Philippe Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior : A Life History Perspective (2nd Special Abridged Edition), also produced by entities with an anti-social (in this case, racist) agenda, with piles of free copies sent out to a gazillion people. This is the same thing, but for climate change. It is a climate denialist book.

I’m not going to critique The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania because my friend and colleague John Abraham has already done a great job of that:

Heartland Institute wastes real scientists’ time – yet again

This spring, I began receiving calls and emails from colleagues about a strange little book that was mailed to environmental science professors around the country. This was a big mailing, in total, a reported 100,000 copies were sent out. What was it about this little book that got us talking? Many things. First….

CLICK HERE to read John’s excellent blog post. You won’t want to miss this. Also, while you are there look at the other posts at John’s new blog, written with Dana Nuccitelli.

Since we are on the subject of books and science denialism, may I recommend that you read, if you’ve not already, Shawn Otto’s excellent book Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America.

Photo Credit: AZRainman via Compfight cc

The Pacific Institute is pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Gleick back to his position as president of the Institute. An independent review conducted by outside counsel on behalf of the Institute has supported what Dr. Gleick has stated publicly regarding his interaction with the Heartland Institute. This independent investigation has further confirmed and the Pacific Institute is satisfied that none of its staff knew of or was involved in any way.

Dr. Gleick has apologized publicly for his actions, which are not condoned by the Pacific Institute and run counter to the Institute’s policies and standard of ethics over its 25-year history. The Board of Directors accepts Dr. Gleick’s apology for his lapse in judgment. We look forward to his continuing in the Pacific Institute’s ongoing and vital mission to advance environmental protection, economic development, and social equity.

“I am glad to be back and thank everyone for continuing their important work at the Pacific Institute during my absence,” said Dr. Gleick in a statement. “I am returning with a renewed focus and dedication to the science and research that remain at the core of the Pacific Institute’s mission.”

You will recall that last February 14th, we were all given an interesting Valentine’s Day present: A cache of documents had been acquired from the Heartland Institute, and these documents revealed important details about Heartland’s effort to interfere with science education and otherwise agitate and lobby to promote climate science denialism. The documents were released to the public by an as then unknown activist, and then redistributed by numerous bloggers including this one.

Heartland is the organization that made itself famous by working for the tobacco lobby in their effort to prove that smoking cigarettes was not really harmful. Over recent years, Heartland has received funds from a wide range of organizations and individuals to support climate denialism. Most recently, Heartland gained considerable notoriety (the bad kind) with their noxious and ill-conceived billboard campaign that equated “believing in global warming” with being a deranged serial killer (Tool Time: Heartland, Ted Kaczynski, and Education).

It turned out that the documents had been acquired by scientist Peter Gleick, who was so incensed with Heartland’s anti-science tactics, which have indeed set back science policy making to the determent of all, that he took steps that some would consider unethical, but that may (or many not) have been within the range of normal activity for investigative reporting. Since he is not a Journalist, Peter probably did it wrong; had he taken a slightly different tactic in acquiring the documents, he would have been doing something investigative journalists routinely do (according to investigative journalists I’ve spoken to privately). However, he seems to have made the mistake a lot of people who are not Journalists seem to make: He assumed that journalistic rules were not arbitrary at some level. Everyone knows that journalists “acquire” secret documents by being somewhat underhanded. What few people know, apparently, is that there are ways to be underhanded that are not acceptable and those that are. Peter may have chosen the former.

In any event, an interesting sub plot developed after Peter Gleick’s reveal of the Heartland Documents. One of the documents, a “strategy memo” had two important characteristics. First, it clearly defined some of the activities that Heartland was engaged in as terribly, horribly, inexcusably unethical and mean spirited. It seemed that Heartland was engaged in an intentional effort to ruin science education in American public schools in order to make it hard to teach real climate science. The memo was explicit and scary. A hit-man, of sorts, was hired to produce fake “curriculum” showing the “uncertainty” and “controversial” nature of climate science, in order to dissuade teachers form teaching science. Click here to see those words in print on the Heartland document.

The second characteristic was that this particular strategy memo was different in many respects from the other documents. It may or may not have been different in writing style and voice, but it was very different in production. For example, the other documents were all word processor files converted to PDF files. The strategy memo was a printed document scanned and then converted to a PDF file.

At first Heartland apologists (climate deniers who are allies with Heartland for various reasons) made the absurd claim that since this document was different from the others, it was therefore fake. It was highly unlikely, they claimed, that a package of documents found together … in this case, assembled to be handed out to members of a board prior to a board meeting … would never include one document that was not produced, processed, printed, and reproduced in exactly the same way. That accusation fell rather flat since it is rather dumb. Then, it was suggested that since the document had a different voice (which it may or may not have had) that it must, therefore, have been faked, and most likely, by Peter Gleick himself. One climate science denier loudly asserted that “science” could be used to test this hypothesis, suggesting that textual analysis software could be used to identify the author.

On that suggestion, Shawn Otto and I independently carried out textual analysis of the memo and we determined two things. 1) There really isn’t enough data to be sure of this sort of analysis in this case, but 2) since the suggestion had been made, and the analysis was done, gee, it looks like the “strategy memo” was not penned by Peter, and was more likely penned by a key staffer at Heartland.

(My analysis: Is the Heartland “Strategy Memo” a Fake? Let’s try using science!; Shawn Otto’s analysis: The most likely author of the Heartland Institute climate strategy memo?; and another item from that time period: Evaluation shows “Faked” Heartland Climate Strategy Memo is Authentic.)

Well, now, there is a new development.

Gleick was a key member of and founder of the Pacific Institute, and that organization launched a review of the question, “Did Peter Gleick fake the damning Heartland strategy memo.”

The answer has not been officially release yet, and may not be for several days, but a leak to the Guardian indicates that the PI has cleared Gleick of faking the document. Gleick …

… has been on leave from the institute pending an external investigation into the unauthorised release of the documents, although it is not entirely clear what the investigation entailed. That investigation is now complete, and the conclusions will be made public.

It was not immediately clear the findings would allow Gleick to make an early return to his job at the Pacific Institute. However, despite the official leave, Gleick has remained professionally active, appearing at public events and accepting speaking engagements.

Perhaps now, Heartland, still bleeding from wounds mostly self inflicted, losing donors and affiliates on a regular basis, will take down it’s web page on “fake gate” in which it accuses Peter Gleick of fraud.

But I don’t think they will. Old climate deniers never die. They just fade away….

^{Photo courtesy of woodleywonderworks}

The evidence seems to suggest that Heartland’s Joe Bast wrote a memo, then he and/or Heartland-symp blogger Steven Mosher sent it secretly to Peter Gleick. Peter Gleick then obtained additional material from Heartland, which came to him at his request but all to easily to be explained as a mere oversight on the part of some administrative or secretarial staff. The only thing missing here is evidence that Bast or Mosher or someone suggested to Peter that he verify the memo by asking for related documents from Heartland. But that would be too easy.

Anyway, it now seems clear that the document, the allegedly faked internal strategy memo with the most damning text in it (but nothing really different from what is shown in other verified Heartland documents) was fed to Gleick, presumably in an effort to engineer his downfall as an incipient board member of the National Center for Science Education.

Brilliant. Heartland: 1 … NCSE: 0

The evidence for this is the analysis just published by Shawn Otto. Shawn does not go quite as far as I do in suggesting the details of this conspiracy, but maybe he’s just a nicer guy than I am. Shawn notes that Heartland did not expect the tables to be turned on them. I’m thinking they did, and that the outcome that occurred … setting the NCSE back in their efforts to address climate science denialism … is what they were looking for, and what they managed to engineer. Shawn Otto’s analysis is here.

(It has come to my attention that even some serious sciency type people who understand climate change, and climate change politics, are taking this conspiracy theory seriously. It is a conspiracy theory, produced for your amusement and, admittedly, as troll bait. If it turns out to be true, of course, I will delete this parenthetical remark! That is all, please carry on.)

Brilliant. Click here for the background on this nice video.

Subsequently, a number of untrustworthy sources, such as Heartland related people and the usual gaggle of Science Haters, have insisted that the original strategy memo is a fake. One set of evidence used to suggest this is that the memo was different from the other documents in several ways: It was a photocopy or a fax with different formatting, etc. This of course is evidence of nothing. There is nothing that requires that all of the documents associated with a particular institution, or even a particular event such as a board meeting at an institution, be created, formatted, and distributed with the same look, feel, and technology. It it obvious to me that if this is the case of Heartland getting caught red handed, they might then be grasping at straws.

However, we can use science to address this question further, and this is exactly what Shawn Otto has done. In a piece posted moments ago (here and soon to be at Huffington Post) Shawn carries out an analysis using a standard and widely respected software system to compare a sample of Gleick’s writing, some samples from Heartland, and the “strategy memo.” In this analysis, the memo is entered as an unknown, and the software shows the difference between that unknown document and the known document. Read Shawn’s analysis to see the details; the conclusion is that the strategy memo was more likely written in house at Heartland than by Peter Gleick.

In order to verify Shawn’s results, and to take this a small step further, I decided to use the same software on a slightly different set of documents. I use three documents from Heartland by authors Pullmann, Lehmann, (these were not used by Shawn) and the Bast document used in Shawn’s analysis. For Gleick, I use a paper he published a while back, which was not used by Shawn. These are compared to the memo in question, with the following results:

Using the strategy memo as it exists:

Canonicizers: none
Analyzed by Nearest Neighbor Driver with metric Canberra Distance
using Word 2Grams as events
1. HeartlandPullman 928.793701231854
2. HeartlandLehmann 1037.8138003775507
3. Bast 1124.7548224327647
4. Gleick 4310.191823786998

Analyzed by Nearest Neighbor Driver with metric Canberra Distance
using Sentence Length as events
1. HeartlandLehmann 25.02741702741703
2. HeartlandPullman 26.36184285751981
3. Bast 27.209481200489734
4. Gleick 42.91967923917308

Using the strategy memo with the sentence “Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist
perspective.” removed as per the suggestion of Steven Mosher:

Canonicizers: none
Analyzed by Nearest Neighbor Driver with metric Canberra Distance
using Word 2Grams as events
1. HeartlandPullman 921.2521372517942
2. HeartlandLehmann 1028.7531365975046
3. Bast 1115.6711036869247
4. Gleick 4302.822829339724

Analyzed by Nearest Neighbor Driver with metric Canberra Distance
using Sentence Length as events
1. HeartlandLehmann 24.956989247311828
2. HeartlandPullman 26.307196401799096
3. Bast 26.952400231347603
4. Gleick 43.03531757495257

The numbers represent distance. The heartland related documents are more like the memo than Gleick’s writing. This result is similar to Shawn Otto’s, but using different source documents.

Had the situation been reversed, there would be a reasonable argument to make that Peter had written the memo in question. As it is, we see that the memo was not very likely written by Peter. This test fails to support the idea that the document is a fake. It does not conclusively prove that it is not a fake, for various reasons, but there is no a priori reason to claim it to be a fake, as far as I can tell. I will continue to assume that the strategy memo is a Heartland document. It is factually aligned with Heartland material. It is the style of Heartland documents, textually. Denial of it’s legitimacy by Heartland is expected and not meaningful.

Methods and Materials

See Otto 2012 for a description of methods.

Documents used for comparison:

• Joy Pullman: Research & Commentary: Louisiana Education Reforms
• Lehmann: Heartland Institute Responds to Misleading Study on Property and Casualty Insurance Rates
• Bast: Statement by The Heartland Institute on Peter Gleick Confession
• Gleick: Roadmap for sustainable water resources in southwestern North America

The chair and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, Raul Grijavla, has initiated an investigation of Indur Goklany, an administrator at the Science and Technology Policy of the US Department of the Interior. It appears that Goklany was being paid by Heartland which raises a significant potential for conflict of interest.

The story broke at Think Progress.

First, let me catch you up. On Valentine’s Day, there was a release of documents from the Heartland Institute documenting their budget and the status of their fund raising, as well as their strategy for protecting corporate interests in light of overwhelming evidence that Anthropogenic Global Warming and other climate change requires us to alter our global energy strategy. Heartland has been involved in science denialsm for some time. They are one of the groups that worked to deny evidence of the negative health effects of smoking, among other things. Heartland, a Libertarian “think” tank is a relatively small player in the overall climate discussion, and the documents indicate that the annual balance of their budget has been diminishing owing to reductions in contributions. Nonetheless, the documents painted a picture of systematic dishonesty. In particular, the documents seemed to indicate that Heartland was launching a bought and paid for effort to interfere with the teaching of good science in our K-12 educational system, replacing honest science with the willful misdirection we know of as science denialism.

One of the documents, a “strategy memo,” was, Sesame Street style, “Different from the others” and seemed not to belong. It was a photocopy or fax, while the others were word processor documents, it seemed to have been written in a different style, and had a different look and feel. This led Heartland-sympathizers to claim that it was faked.

Late yesterday, climate scientist Peter Gleick publicly took responsibly for the release of the documents. Peter is a well respected scientist and spokesperson, MacArthur award winner, and by all accounts an all-round nice guy. He had recently been invited to the board of the National Center for Science Education, and had already embarked on a renewed effort to fold climate science denialism into the broader and troubling movement of science denialims we have known of for years as Creationism.

In his piece in the Huffington Post, Peter told us that he had obtained the “strategy memo” and felt compelled to verify the startling contents of this document. He did so by requesting documents that were being distributed to Heartland board members from the Institute, and they complied by sending them to him. He indicated in his blog post that he had used a false identity to do this, but it is important to note that we know nothing about that identity as of this writing (I’ll get back to that in a moment).

One outcome of this revelation is that the outstanding questions about the authenticity of the strategy memo have now vaporized. It still could be a fake, but there is no specific reason to believe it is. The documents Peter obtained seem to authenticate it at several points.

As you might expect, science denialists and pro-industry shills are now crying foul. Somewhat less expected is that some science writers, bloggers and journalists seem quick to throw Peter under the bus, declaring that what he did was clearly unethical. The incident which served initially to expose the seemingly nefarious workings of an anti-science non-profit has now become a distraction in the important discussion of what we need to do to mitigate against the ill effects of our inefficient and thoughtless energy technology and concomitant policies.

In a recent tweet, Bora Zivkovic notes “… trying to figure out where Gleick fits in the media ecosystem, trying to clarify for myself (and others) his role, ethics.” And that is what I want to talk about for a moment.

Clearly there has been an evolution of the media ecosystem, and it is ongoing. In the old days, there were Journalists and then there was everyone else. Then the blogosphere was born. A couple of years back, I remember being rather annoyed at the prospect that bloggers would automatically be considered “journalists” because, well, we weren’t. Journalists were people who went to journalism school and learned journalism methods, ethics, strategies, and so on. I felt (and I still feel this is true in many cases) that “blogging” was not a thing in and of itself for most people who were blogging. Scientists could blog, but they were still scientists. Who blogged. If a journalist blogged, they were a journalist. Blogging. A cook could blog about recipes, but that did not make him or her a journalist, or even a blogger. And so on.

Underscoring this point was a key difference between scientists (who might be blogging or otherwise writing) and journalists, in how sources were handled. A journalist could use an unnamed source to make a point. A scientist would normally use citations or personal communications, identified. A journalist (according to many journalists that covered my own scientific work) would be wrong to run pre-published copy by a source (who is, say, a scientists whose work is being covered by the journalist) to check for accuracy. This was somehow a violation of journalistic rules, because the journalist is to be independent and is not to share information among sources prior to publication. A scientist writing about some scientific issue would normally cross check statements with the appropriate sources in order to get it all scientifically right. Overall, I saw the role, methods, and ethics of journalists as different from, and sometimes in conflict with, the role, methods and ethics of scientists. At some level, ethics are ethics, but at many other levels, ethics are agreed upon rules of conduct that make sense only in a certain well defined situation. A scientist making a claim by reference to “an unnamed source at a major research laboratory” would be doing something wrong. A journalist reporting a claim by “an unnamed source at a major research laboratory” is protecting a source and may well be doing a great job, as a journalist.

Having said all that, I agree with Bora’s overall theme (developed in much of his writing) that the media ecosystem is not what is used to be, and that it is changing in ways that are mostly positive. So, when Peter Gleick, scientist, starts writing blog posts at HuffPo or elsewhere, it is not at all clear that he is a scientist writing, or a scientist moonlighting as a journalist, or some new thing. Well, actually, it is clear: He is a new thing. But with novelty and evolution of a traditional system comes ambiguity.

Over the last several hours, I’ve had conversations with numerous well respected professional journalists about this, and I learned some interesting things. (Despite being a blogger, I did not osmotically absorb Journalism School!) We all know of famous journalists who obtained secret documents using various methods and in so doing revealed things that needed to be revealed, and thus changed history. From long before the Pentagon Papers through Wikileaks to the present, there have been many moments where someone doing either journalism or whistle-blowing, or something in between, caused the release of secrets that we are now glad to have been apprised of. Wasn’t Peter Gleick also such a laudable conduit of truth? That may well be, and I’m not going to judge him or what he did at this point of time. But it turns out to not be a very simple question to answer.

It turns out that among Journalists, it is not considered ethical to falsify an identity, especially a specific individual’s identity, or an identity of authority over a person who is being fooled, to obtain information. It is, however, considered valid and normal to be thought of as someone one is not. As I understand it, the difference can be exemplified in the following comparison.

Scenario A: The scene is a public lobby of Acme Corporation with a receptionist at a desk. Members of the Acme Board of Directors have been told to stop by at the receptionist desk and pick up the information packet for the upcoming board meeting. Mary Smith, board member, goes up to the receptionist and says “I’m board member Mary, please give me one of those packets” and the receptionist complies. Board member Joe does the same thing. Then, reporter Alice Stravinsky goes up to the receptionist and says “I’m board member Harry’s assistant, he’s in the coffee shop and wants me to bring him his packet for today’s meeting” and the receptionist complies. Reporter Alice absconds with the package and writes up a story about their content.

That was a violation of journalistic ethics. Alice is fired.

Scenario B: Same setting, same circumstances as Scenario A. However, in this case, reporter Alice is simply standing in line behind Mary and Joe. When Alice gets up to the reception desk, she simply puts out her hand, the receptionist figures she’s supposed to get a packet, and hands it to her. Alice takes the package back to the newsroom, writes up a revealing front page story on the nefarious activities of Acme Inc, and eventually gets a Pulitzer Prize for her excellent investigative reporting.

I’m sure many will have problems with this false set of scenarios, others will agree. The point is: If a reporter pretends to be someone she or he is not, that’s bad. If a person thinks the reporter is just some person and says something to the reporter quite innocently, or the reporter without falsifying an identity somehow comes to be in the possession of some document, that’s OK.

Peter Gleick may or may not have followed either of these two scenarios, but it may not matter for two reasons. The first reason, is that even though he blogs, Peter is not a journalist. It is not fair or reasonable to hold him to journalistic standards. As I noted above, journalistic standards are in part situational, and can differ from other perspectives. In addition to that, it is not necessarily fair or appropriate to decide that on Monday, the media ecosystem is evolving and it is not any longer true that the old school is the only school, but on Tuesday, decide that traditional journalistic rules apply as they always have even to people who are not journalist.

The second reason that while the comparison of methods for obtaining information is interesting, it may not apply in this case is the simple fact that Peter Gleick may have decided that falling on his sword for a greater good is what he had to do. Also, putting it a bit differently, he may have thought (as many have) that in an effort to release and publicize the inner workings of an institution that seems to be acting against the interest of all future generations, one does what one has to do. It may be the case that Peter was acting as an inspired and well meaning citizen, rushing past the fire fighters to put out the grease fire, but doing it wrong, because he didn’t know the rules and proscriptions.

We are also seeing, as this drama unfolds, two other Internet-exacerbated phenomena. We are seeing the Watch the Monkey strategy taking hold, both before and after Peter’s revelation, and we are seeing in commentary about Peter’s activities, the Damning and Execution effect.

The first of these is obvious. We have developed, as a species, a technology for doing much of what we do that has the unintended consequence of changing the way the planet’s climate system works. Another outcome of that technology is the rise of a well embedded class of one-percenters who are convinced that they will remain comfortable and in power only if we don’t change that technology, and they have employed all manner of strategy to derail the scientific and political discussion of climate change and energy policy. One method that is used to good (meaning bad) effect is to develop any available means to distract the discussion away from good science and thoughtful policy. It is Johnnie Cochran all over again.

The second and somewhat more disturbing pattern is the all too common human tendency to push our way in the front of the line to throw rotten tomatoes, or worse, stones, at anyone we see as having made a mistake. The reason we have a criminal justice system, and a civil law system, is to thwart this tendency. We have all heard of the not-too-apocryphal societies with vengeance systems. You do something bad to me, so I get to kill you (or a relative). When human reactions are allowed to transform unchecked into social action, hands are cut off for stealing loaves of bread and women who are found in the company of men to whom they are not married are executed. All crimes lead to the maximum punishment. In civilized society, we have learned to mete out punishment in proportion to the crime, and in some cases, maybe a bit less so, to err on the side of reason. But in the blogosphere there is no such regulation of our instincts. If you say or do something wrong you are pounced upon and vilified. Peter is to be vilified for his efforts, no matter what the exact methods he used and no matter what is reasons were. Indeed, we have come to equate as though it was really true appearance with reality when it comes to possible impropriety. This is wrong. Fortunately, it is also often short lived. By next week or next month, the realities of Heartland’s anti-science and anti-education strategies will be an enduring truth while the vilification of specific actors in this drama will have lost its impetus and unsavory luster.

My respect for Peter Gleick is unmoved. He is a great scientist, an excellent communicator, a brave guy and a crappy journalist. Oh well.