Blogs / The Intersection

After the large volume of climate skeptic/denier comments that came in yesterday disagreeing with my post on the relative insignificance of ClimateGate, I feel that more needs to be said. This time, let me couch my argument in a different format, so that perhaps it will be better understood.

Those of us who think this is all smoke and no fire are starting from the following position: There is a massive body of science, tested and retested and ratified by many leading scientific bodies, showing that global warming is real and human caused. So then we pose the following question: What would it take for “ClimateGate” to significantly weaken this body of evidence in a serious way?

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that all of the worst and most damning interpretations of these exposed emails are accurate. I don’t think this is remotely true, but let’s assume it.

Even if this is the case, it does not prove the following :

1) The scientists whose emails have been revealed are representative of or somehow a proxy for every other climate scientist on the planet.

2) The studies that have been called into questions based on the emails (e.g., that old chestnut the “hockey stick”) are somehow the foundations of our concern about global warming, and those concerns stand or fall based on those studies.

Neither one of these is true, which is why I can say confidently that “ClimateGate” is overblown–and which is why I’ve never been impressed by systematic attacks on the “hockey stick.” Even if that study falls, we still have global warming on our hands, and it’s still human caused.

My sense is that the climate skeptic commenters we’re seeing aren’t actually familiar with the vast body of climate science work out there, and don’t realize how most individual studies are little more than a drop in the evidentiary bucket. It is because of the consilience of evidence from multiple studies and fields that we accept that climate change is human caused, and it is because of the vast diversity and number of scientists, and scientific bodies, who find that evidence compelling that we talk of a consensus.

I don’t see how anything about “ClimateGate” changes this big picture significantly–and again, that’s even if we assume the worst about what the emails reveal.

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.

I’ve been on the road in California all week so it’s been difficult to post, but I’d like to share this wonderful presentation by Elinor Ostrom at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Elinor won the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and I’ve long been a tremendous fan of her work. Take a look:

Watch another terrific talk by Elinor entitled, “Beyond The Tragedy of the Commons” here.

Born and raised in Suffern, NY, pretty much everyone I knew was touched somehow by breast cancer. If it didn’t affect you personally, either your friend or aunt or mother or sister or grandmother seemed to be struggling with the disease. There was the routine of chemotherapy, hair loss, mastectomy, and on… it almost seemed as common as dealing with the removal of wisdom teeth. Just take a look at the incidence in Rockland County over 4 years (click here for the expanded list):

Later in Maine, the wife of a professor in my department was diagnosed with the same condition. Many peers had not encountered breast cancer personally until then and I realized my county was unusual. I also learned the couple coincidentally used to live on the street where I grew up.

So what’s going on in Rockland? Some local doctors wonder about environmental toxins and others suggest that the particular genetic make-up of residents may make the population more susceptible than average. Speculation abounds, but there are no answers.

This afternoon I’m concerned about yet another friend having a biopsy. Meanwhile CNN reports on the troubling new trend of younger women getting the disease. The incidence is still quite low, but we ought to be paying close attention. As National Breast Cancer Awareness month draws to a close, the American Cancer Society (ACS) estimates there were 192,370 new cases of invasive breast cancer in women and 1,910 in men last year in the United States. Rates in this country are among the highest in the world. (Statistics are available to download here).

I’ve been reading a good deal about the effects of cocaine on the human body as I enter the homestretch of composing my next book, which also involves the stimulation of similar pleasure centers of the brain. That said, you can imagine my interest in the topic of Yuegang Zuo’s talk at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society: His research estimates that 90 percent of U.S. bills carry traces of cocaine.

Now don’t be alarmed. Cocaine binds to the green dye in money and a good deal of cross-contamination happens when bills get whisked through ATM machines. So we’re talking about very small trace amounts–not enough to put your health at risk. Still, the findings of this study out of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth cast an intriguing light on how easily we come into contact with drugs, germs, and more as we course about our daily lives.

Percentages of contaminated bills vary by location and Zuo plans investigate whether his data can illustrate cocaine use regionally. Read more at CNN…

Michael Mann’s review of Unscientific America over at RealClimate is the most comprehensive yet! He begins:

Author Chris Mooney (of “Storm World” fame) and fellow “Intersection” blogger, scientist, and writer Sheril Kirshenbaum have written an extraordinary, if rather sobering book entitled ‘Unscientific America’. What I found most refreshing about the book is that it not only isolates the history behind, and source of, the problem in question—the pervasiveness and dangerousness of scientific illiteracy in modern society–but it offers viable solutions. This book is a must read for anybody who cares about science, and the growing disconnect between the scientific and popular cultures (the problem of the so-called “Two Cultures” first discussed by C.P. Snow).

And ends:

If it were up to me, this book would be required reading for all undergraduate science majors, along with Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World”. Only when we begin training scientists to understand the relationship between science and society, and their crucial role in that relationship, will be begin to solve the dilemma so eloquently described in ‘Unscientific America’.

What comes in the middle really captures the spirit of why we composed the book! Make sure to go read Mike’s full review…

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.

Last week in Long Beach, Ed Maibach gave a terrific talk about communicating climate change information to the public.  He uses six characters to represent different levels of concern over global warming.  They include (pictured left to right):

Alarmed Alice, Concerned Claudia, Cautious Connie, Unconcerned Uri, Doubtful David, and Dismissive Dan

Descriptions of each level along with detailed data are available here.  As of 2008, this is how they are represented in terms of total U.S. population:

Notice anything funny about these results? (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.

‘Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one and other and to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.’

~ Carl Sagan