By now you’ve probably heard (New York Times, Washington Post, RealClimate). A server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia was hacked; hundreds of emails from climate scientists are now public due to this despicable act. Global warming deniers are having a field day, because in some of the emails, the scientists are acting like, you know, people. They are also acting like scientists under fire, which is what they were and are. The Climate Research Unit is headed by Phil Jones, who has been involved in the highly public and seemingly unending “hockey stick” battle–and so peering into the emails lets the skeptics and deniers once again claim there was some kind of bad science involved in this one particular study, a claim they’ve been making for almost a decade now.
Of course, none of this is at all relevant to the climate issue today. It’s a nasty, ugly sideshow. The science of climate change doesn’t stand or fall based upon what a few scientists said in emails they always thought would remain private. And as for the “hockey stick”; well, fully four years ago, in The Republican War on Science, I explained why the right was using this as a distraction from the real issues:
…although it might create good publicity, the Right’s selective attack on [hockey stick study lead author Michael] Mann’s work ultimately presents a huge diversion for policymakers trying to decide what to do about global warming. Mann points out that he’s hardly the only scientist to produce a “hockey stick” graph–other teams of scientists have come up with similar reconstructions of past temperatures. And even if Mann’s work and all of the other studies that served as the basis for the IPCC [2001] statement on the historical temperature record are wrong, that would not in any way invalidate the conclusion that humans are currently causing rising temperatures. “There’s a whole independent line of evidence, some of it very basic physics,” explains Mann.
That’s even truer now than it was in 2004, when I interviewed Mann, or 2005, when The Republican War on Science actually came out.
The fact is that no matter what a few scientists may have said in emails, we have to go to Copenhagen and deal with our warming, melting planet. That’s what matters. The rest of this is hot air, and–unless it can somehow be channeled to power a few wind turbines–it doesn’t do us or the planet any good.
CM kicked off the day with a post on solar energy. I covered the prospect over a year ago at Seed’s Next Generation Energy:
Storage and back-up systems are going to be very important given the sun doesn’t deliver that much energy to any one place at a time. The solution would be photovoltaic panels and solar heating troughs over huge tracts of land along with a direct-current transmission backbone to send that energy efficiently across the nation..Imagine a future where solar panels pave the desert between Phoenix and Los Angeles and consider whether that be worth the ecological footprint?
We know lot that can be done with the existing solar technology today that would reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. Solar thermal plants are assuredly one part of the solution, but there is the water conflict which cannot be overlooked. In short, this alternative has the potential to create a great deal of electricity–now–and I hope the policy catches up and we integrate it into landscapes in a way that doesn’t add pressure on other limited resources.
Also remember that our energy needs exceed what solar power generates. So while I think we should be powering our cars and appliances on electricity, we must depend on many sources for a more sustainable future. We will still need combustible liquid fuels for shipping and air transportation.
Personally, I continue to be interested in plant based biofuels. There is no better solar panel than the leaf of a plant. Alone it will not be the only answer, but may eventually contribute to a significant percent of our energy budget.
As the House nears a vote on the Waxman-Markey America Clean Energy and Security Act–what the wonks now call “ACES”–my latest Science Progress column explains why we’ve gotta be pragmatists: This bill is pretty good, the best thing we’ve got, and represents the best chance we will have, perhaps ever, to finally start on this problem. To wit:
Yet there’s no question that all the most important pieces are in this bill: A price will, at long last, be set on carbon. Emissions will be ratcheted down over 80 percent by 2050. And the bill contains important requirements and incentives to promote a transition to renewable energy, including a national mandate that electricity suppliers obtain 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020.
Anyone who has paid very close attention to the climate issue, and contemplated what it would really take to solve it, recognizes that we’re dealing with perhaps most tangled scientific and economic hairball imaginable. With the global scope of the problem, the uncertainty inherent in any prediction of the rate and intensity of future global warming, and the magnitude of the economic and energy changes required to bring about real change—well, it remains an open question whether governments of the world are even capable of dealing with something so vast and difficult. And of course any solutions will also have an aspect of the hairball about them.
But that doesn’t mean that if and when we get them, they won’t be stunning achievements.
You can read the full column here.
On the new book website, there’s the most extensive write-up yet of our argument and scope. I’ll repaste it here, as it explains precisely why we’re concerned about the gap between science and mainstream culture, and what we must do about it:
In his famous 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge University, the scientifically-trained novelist C.P. Snow described science and the humanities as “two cultures,” separated by a “gulf of mutual incomprehension.” And the humanists had all the cultural power—the low prestige of science, Snow argued, left Western leaders too little educated in scientific subjects that were increasingly central to world problems: the elementary physics behind nuclear weapons, for instance, or the basics of plant science needed to feed the world’s growing population.
Now, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, a journalist-scientist team, offer an updated “two cultures” polemic for America in the 21st century. Just as in Snow’s time, some of our gravest challenges—climate change, the energy crisis, national economic competitiveness—and gravest threats–global pandemics, nuclear proliferation—have fundamentally scientific underpinnings. Yet we still live in a culture that rarely takes science seriously or has it on the radar.
For every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science; 46 percent of Americans reject evolution and think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old; the number of newspapers with weekly science sections has shrunken by two-thirds over the past several decades. The public is polarized over climate change—an issue where political party affiliation determines one’s view of reality—and in dangerous retreat from childhood vaccinations. Meanwhile, only 18 percent of Americans have even met a scientist to begin with; more than half can’t name a living scientist role model.
For this dismaying situation, Mooney and Kirshenbaum don’t let anyone off the hook. They highlight the anti-intellectual tendencies of the American public (and particularly the politicians and journalists who are supposed to serve it), but also challenge the scientists themselves, who despite the best of intentions have often failed to communicate about their work effectively to a broad public—and so have ceded their critical place in the public sphere to religious and commercial propagandists.
A plea for enhanced scientific literacy, Unscientific America urges those who care about the place of science in our society to take unprecedented action. We must begin to train a small army of ambassadors who can translate science’s message and make it relevant to the media, to politicians, and to the public in the broadest sense. An impassioned call to arms worthy of Snow’s original manifesto, this book lays the groundwork for reintegrating science into the public discourse–before it’s too late.
Once again, you can check out the new book website here.
Want to be frightened? Read this blog post, then this longer New Scientist feature that it partly draws upon. There, you will learn that a threat we barely even bother to discuss–space weather, and more specifically, solar storms–has the capacity to quite literally shut down modern society, to throw us almost back to the Stone Age. To quote:
It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see “When hell comes to Earth”). If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.
The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts….
According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people. From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.
One has to wonder: Are President Obama’s science advisers reading this? I sure as hell hope so. (more…)
A new draft climate change bill is now ready for House markup starting on Monday. See here. Have fun: It is 932 pages long.
There’s no doubt the bill would vastly change our energy system, and for the better. Yet as it’s the result of a compromise between coal-state and more liberal Dems–and because it had to be politically workable–it’s too weak for some environmentalists. The emails and press releases are already flying, with Greenpeace for instance charging that the bill would only reduce U.S. emissions by “4 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.”
And then there’s the issue of emission permit allocations–the bill gives away a large percentage of them to polluters at first. Enviros hate that, too. It’s far less than president Obama hoped for, a 100 percent auction of permits.
But the question is, are enviros being helpful in attacking a bill that is serious, that is the result of compromise, that definitely accomplishes something unprecedented (capping emissions), and that strengthens over time? Is it not better to get started on this problem this year, than to hold out for a kind of perfection that is not politically achievable?
I’m a political pragmatist. So far, no one has convinced me that I should do anything other than to root for Waxman-Markey to pass Congress and eventually become law.
I have not yet heard the full story of how our president went from someone who didn’t seem all that interested in science a year ago to the incredible proponent that he is now. But in any case, these bonafides are yet again on full display in his recent speech before the National Academies (yes, our president actually went to speak before our national science academy). The big applause line:
At such a difficult moment, there are those who say we cannot afford to invest in science, that support for research is somehow a luxury at moments defined by necessities. I fundamentally disagree. Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been before.
(more…)
Even though nothing should surprise me any more, I’m still pretty amazed at some of the Republican attacks on the new Waxman-Markey climate change bill (for details, see a report here from Stacy Morford of “Solve Climate”). First of all, the bill doesn’t take effect until 2012, so to cast it as a dire attack on our sputtering economy makes no sense. Everybody expects the economy to have improved by 2012.
Moreover, there appears to be a habit of just making up numbers about how damaging the bill would be. Republicans are saying, in some cases, that it would cost the average family over $ 3000 per year in energy costs–in short, roughly the equivalent of buying a new car. Of course that’s not correct–not even remotely. The EPA estimates that average energy costs would go up between $ 98 and $ 140 per year, and that’s before any rebate gets paid back to citizens, either through a tax cut or by the direct writing of rebate checks. At this point, pretty much everybody expects the final climate legislation to pay the public back with a significant part of the revenues the government earns through the sale of emissions permits; indeed, this will be one key factor in making the bill popular.
In sum, there’s no economic hardship here–and there is vast benefit. But expect the misinformation to continue, in direct relation to how close this bill gets to passage….
Through email channels, I just came upon this insane exchange between the current GOP House opposition leader and George Stephanopoulos from earlier today:
(more…)
Fully two years ago, in Mass. v. EPA, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Bush administration’s EPA to determine whether vehicular carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act.
The Bush administration essentially ignored this direct order.
Now, FT reports that the Obama EPA is on the verge of doing the opposite–which is an extremely big deal. The EPA already submitted its endangerment finding to the Office of Management and Budget; the next step, as I understand it, would be full administration approval.
Basically, if the EPA starts moving towards global warming regulations, then Congress had better put its weight on the scales quick, or else “unelected bureaucrats” (to anticipate the negative spin) will be determining how we deal with carbon dioxide emissions, a decision with dramatic implications for the economy and the future.
Everybody agrees that it’s better for Congress to pass a new law on global warming than to have regulations go through the administrative process at EPA. And yet if Congress fails to lead–and so far, it’s hard to tell whether there will really be 60 Senate votes–then there’s every reason to expect the Obama EPA will just keep on moving, doing what the Supreme Court said to do.
Members of Congress who oppose global warming legislation this year really ought to keep that in mind. The reality is that global warming regulation is going to happen, one way or another. Any responsible leader in this context would try to get us the best, democratically enacted policy–not to block progress.
