How The Mensa Bulletin Has Abdicated Its Responsiblities Re: Global Warming

                                                                              

It was understandably shocking to many of us some months ago on learning, from a note attached to a letter in the Mensa Bulletin by the editor, that global warming can no longer be a topic for discussion - either in the letters section or as an article.  (One single sentence mentioning global warming did sneak into the last (March)  issue, tied to the "cause of global warming" being the population tripling since 1900,  but this was in connection with an article entitled 'Medical Marvels and Moral Dilemmas' - not on global warming per se. The writer himself, a Mike Irrgang, made no reference at all to the connection of higher CO2 concentrations to more population.)

 This current Bulletin policy can probably be traced to frequently heated exchanges, mostly between those of us with a background in physics and even climate science, and a gaggle of noisy, irrepressible know nothings (who believed their Mensa level IQ alone justified their opinions). Much of this was covered in a blog post of mine from seven years ago ('How Can So Many Smart People Be So Dumb?')  e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-can-so-many-smart-people-be-so-dumb.html

As I noted in the post:

"Three months after The Mensa Bulletin published a letter of mine reinforcing the prevalent scientific view of global warming – that it was anthropogenic and continually exacerbated by increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a whole swatch of attack letters were published in the recent (June) issue. Not one supported me, and this from a society that claims it represents the top 2% of IQs (e.g. > 130 on Stanford-Binet). One person even affirmed that my letter showed Mensa to be just a “propaganda front” for global warming purveyors and so he was quitting! Now, how smart is that?

The others went off on multiple tangents, though there were at least two letters that were somewhat sensible and made cogent points, though many of these points had so many holes it was like trying to parse a message scribbled on Swiss cheese."

I've also specifically rebutted nonsense from other Mensans, including educator Marty Nemko,, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2008/04/ten-answers-for-marty-femko.html

As well as a clown named Evan J. Wright who actually pooh-poohed the idea that the oceans could absorb C02 without "turning into soda pop", see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/04/how-global-warming-deniers-get-better.html

Most of the opposing blabber I traced to the writers being victims of  Agnotology, which  is derived from the Greek 'agnosis' and hence the study of culturally constructed ignorance. This was exposed in research by Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor, who tagged it to the trend of skeptic science sown for political or economic ends - e.g. in imparting ignorance and faux skepticism. We now know almost all of this has been hatched in documents outed from the fossil fuel propaganda mills and exposed by the Union of Concerned Scientists, e.g.

www.ucsusa.org/decadesofdeception

This was even referenced by me in a reply letter to the Bulletin, before the "shut down" but which was never published. In the letter I pointed out that if Mensa truly represents the upper 2 percent of intelligence then it is incumbent on the Bulletin to embrace genuine science and not the pseudo-science of the hacks and purveyors of disinformation.

But clearly the Editor, not seeking to stir up any more heat, took the position (false as I will show) that there existed "two sides to the arguments" and he wasn't about to filter out the warming naysayers, OR give the valid respondents (including scientists) space to make the case.  By refusing to publish any letters from the latter, and in effect totally closing down the information flow via any discussion, he essentially abdicated responsibility and "punked out" in the parlance of some.

The other  problem? A slack, PR-governed media has fallen down on its job and often portrayed global warming as having "two sides". It does not, no more than the existence of the Holocaust has two sides. But in an “argument”/ "Crossfire" culture where polarization and passion naturally dominates reason, most people assume there are inevitably “two-sided” issues. 

As a corollary to this, the general false assumption follows that both sides "deserve hearings" and a balanced presentation is preferred over a “one-sided” one. The latter is always termed “biased”. This leads to the egregious media conviction that presenting "two sides" implies "Objectivity" - which is an abuse of the term.   Denying that the Holocaust occurred could never be "objective" just as denying anthropogenic global warming with its massive scientific evidence compiled over thirty years.

 In effect, there’s a colossal advantage to creating the misperception that a two-sided issue exists. For one, it confers credibility on a specious position that ordinarily would be dismissed at the outset. Thus, human global warming deniers – like Holocaust deniers – earn a gravitas, forum and respect (often via the media) they otherwise wouldn’t have.   Having achieved an essentially unearned credibility, the global warming deniers are at liberty to basically eschew evidence they can’t refute, minimize or spin the projected dire consequences into some ambiguous benefit, or exaggerate the uncertainties implicit in climatic science.

 They need only sit back and nitpick, or criticize the hard won original research without doing an ounce of creative labor on their own. This factors into their plan because they’re not out to create a counter-theory so much as induce enough doubt – via PR – to destroy the existing theory. Hence, all they need do is sit back and cast aspersions and sow seeds of doubt – and let the other side play interminable defense.

But my point is that a forum for the more intelligent in the society ought to be able to rise above this noise level, and given at least many of its members are climate specialists or know a lot more than other members, they ought to have a preponderant voice.

The Bulletin's ostrich act is especially disturbing given that climate scientists have now described February variously as featuring temperatures that were  "astronomical", "staggering" and "strange" (Denver Post, p. 13 A, Mar. 18).  February was the most above-normal month since meteorologists began keeping track in 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In addition, the past three months have been the most above normal months on record  according to Jessica Blunden of the NOAA. Scientists from both NOAA and NASA have noted this departure from norms and warned the climate "may have moved into a new and hotter neighborhood".  This would likely be the cusp of the runaway Greenhouse effect.

For a so-called "high IQ society" to ignore this - as if it doesn't exist - is to act unconscionably, even if it invokes the usual excuse that "Mensa  supports no particular political or religious positions". Well, this is a scientific position, it isn't based on personal opinions. Now, with human life likely in the balance, how can a supposed society of high IQ people remain stone  silent on this critical issue? Only Mensa and its illustrious Bulletin editor, alas, will be able to answer this - but I doubt in any satisfactory way. Because IF you profess intelligence of any degree you ought to be able to recognize objective physical truth - especially when it's burning your ass off and drenching your cities with "thousand year events" from super-heated, moisture-laden atmosphere.

Hopefully, the Mensa Bulletin will rethink its position in the near future. At least Integra, the journal of Intertel, the top 1 percent IQ society, hasn't mutated into this "see no evil" nonsense.....yet.

Is There A War On Reason?

This question was brought up in a recent TIME essay ('American Students and Politicians Need To Stop Waging A War On Reason', Oct. 5, p. 30) and the answer delivered was foursquare in the positive: Yes, there is a war being waged on reason. It doesn't even take a large degree of perspicuity to see that - merely paying attention to the ongoing public discourse of politicians, their assorted hearings and shenanigans (like the 5 hour grilling Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards 2 days ago).

In that case Richards was suddenly presented with a graph from Repub congressman Jacob Chaffetz. The graph made it appear that abortions provided by Planned Parenthood grew to a much greater number from 2008 to 2013 than the number of cancer screenings and breast exam referrals.

The graph (above)  showed a ridiculously rising (high gradient) red line for abortions vs. a 'diving' graph for breast exams. Chaffetz claimed the graph was put together from PP's own data.

But keen observers soon smelled a 'rat' on observing the numbers associated with the abortion graph were far smaller than those for the breast exams. It later become clear it was done by 'Americans United for Life'. Adjusting for the difference, Chris Hayes showed the correct graphs on his Monday night 'UP' show with abortions just trailing at the bottom and with essentially zero slope, and breast exams with at least a sold 50-60 deg slope on the rise. (Adjusted for all screening categories the slope is negative but still far different with more positive outcomes than Chaffetz')

This is one example, but shows how reason can be undermined by faulty numbers, or misused data. The failure of reason is predicated on the fact the data was not decent nor were the facts, to begin with. (As also in the case of the claimed "global warming pause" embraced by deniers.)

Then there is Warren Commission groupie Michael O'Dell, who - in a paper on a known disinfo web site (of John McAdams) -tried to disprove D.B. Thomas Echo correlation analysis of the acoustic data published  in the British journal Science and Justice in 2001.  In his paper, O'Dell made much ado over a "60 Hz hum tone" that had already been repeatedly explained by others as evidence of copying. O'Dell then performs a linear regression analysis which he claims takes this into account. (See top diagram of Fig. 1). The problem is that O'Dell doesn't even present the graph in its proper scaled perspective, choosing truncated scales that make his regression line appear to have more gradient than it really does (see my correction of his line below)

Again, reason is sacrificed because the data are not correctly presented - in each of the foregoing cases with the wrong gradients or slopes.

As the author of the TIME essay puts it:

"The attack on education isn't on training our youth for whatever careers they choose; it's on teaching them to think logically in order to form opinions based on facts rather than familial and social influences. "

As I've also shown, quantitative reasoning can play a huge role in separating wheat from chaff.

Then there is the case of outright denial of empirical and visual facts  even when staring the percipient in the face.  I already noted this example in an April 11 post when in an encounter with John McAdams in 1997, on the Usenet newsgroup alt.conspiracy.jfk, he challenged a FAQ I'd written for the group. McAdams complained about my reference to Jackie “climbing over the limo trunk” in an effort to retrieve part of JFK’s blown out skull fragment (later inferred to be the Harper bone fragment retrieved by William Harper). He insisted "she wasn't climbing over anything" to which I then replied, "Ok, let's say she's moving across it to the rear - which shows a frontal shot".  He tried to "debunk"  this as well but a picture is worth a thousand words. And in the one below (from the Zapruder film - frames 313-14) readers can see the FACT of Jackie's trunk motion for themselves:

Now really, if a guy can't even admit reality when it's staring him in the bleeping face, why would one wish to trust him on anything?  No serious person should because a man who'd deny reality would deny anything . And yet thousands hang on McAdams' every word as if it's gospel. Again, a case of mammoth failure of reason and McAdams' assorted ad hominem jeremiads against "conspiracy buffs" even denote a war against reason - as does the indiscriminate attack on conspiracy thinking by the media in general, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/11/hyper-skepticism-of-conspiracy-phobics.html

Then there is the resistance among some college students to broadening their perspectives on the genesis of 9/11, every bit as misplaced as the elite national, corporate media's resistance to the notion of political conspiracy. The  TIME author (ibid.) cites a student at University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill who wrote m article criticizing a 'Literature of 9/11' course for requiring students to "sympathize with terrorists". He wrote this gibberish despite the fact he hadn't taken the class or read the actual works but relied on his "personal research". This dumbass kid would have benefited from reading Chalmers Johnson's ‘Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire’,  2000) later said to “have seen the September 11 catastrophe coming”.  Johnson’s 2000 book argued that U.S. interventionist foreign policy and military overextension, especially in the Middle East,  would lead to unintended and unpredictable consequences. Reading works such as Johnson's would have informed the punk about U.S. foreign policy decisions made in our name but to which we are not privy to consenting or voting on.

Then there is the woeful war on reason in connection with human induced global warming. In particular, two tactics of the denier must be noted:

1) Distorting and framing Uncertainty:

This is perhaps the biggest tactic in use and has to do with what has been called 'agnotology'.  This term,  derived from the Greek 'agnosis' - the study of culturally constructed ignorance- is achieved primarily by sowing the teeniest nugget of doubt in whatever claim is made (and as we know NO scientific theory is free of uncertainty).  Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor has correctly tied it to the trend of skeptic science sown deliberately and for political or economic ends .

The agnotologist and his ilk succeed once the following trope is emitted and embraced by the power structure:

‘There is still so much uncertainty, we shouldn’t invest money to solve the climate problem,’

But this is egregious on so many levels that it boggles the rational mind. First, any modern scientific pursuit must include uncertainty. Uncertainty is acknowledged every time I perform a measurement - say of the solar diameter- and express it with plus or minus kilometer values. It signifies that final measurement cannot be presumed free of measuring error which is inherent in all our physics, astronomy etc.

The matter of "too much uncertainty" is also the wrong way to look at the issue for any scientific model or measurement, because they can as easily UNDER-estimate a potential threat or occurrence as over estimate it. Let's take the case of city -busting asteroids which were the topic for discussion today on the CBS Early Show,  with physicist Michio Kaku.  Kaku reported that in fact we have had to readjust our estimates of asteroid impacts based on new observations. Where we once expected a city-buster (say one that could take out a city like New York) every 150 years, we now have to expect it such a killer every 30 years!

In a similar vein, the uncertainty attached to climate models could also be in the direction of under-reporting or under-estimating the full impacts. Thus, the uncertainty could well be such that the runaway greenhouse effect could erupt fifty to one hundred years earlier than previously thought. Or the rising of the sea level owing to melting Arctic (and Greenland) ice sheets could incept a 10m rise as opposed to a 3 m one. This is why uncertainties are expressed as plus and minus values at the end of the measurement.

My point is that the trope expressed above doesn't take into account that the uncertainty implies that the problem is more likely to be worse than expected in the absence of that uncertainty.

2) Misrepresenting Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW):

This tactic has worked because too many Americans are not aware of the real consensus among real climate scientists that anthropogenic global warming is a FACT that must be acted upon. Perhaps the first researcher to scientifically and statistically establish this was science historian Naomi Oreskes - who first published an initial survey of global warming literature, entitled  “Beyond The Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.”

Oreskes analyzed “928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords ‘climate change.’” She found that 75 percent of papers accepted the consensus view “either explicitly or implicitly,” while “25 percent dealt with methods or paleoclimate,” and took no position on AGW.  Remarkably, she found that none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.  

Later studies have found a small sliver of dissenting views, but the more the consensus has been studied, the sturdier it appears, while the dissenting literature is dogged with repeated problems. For example, in Eos Transactions, Vol. 90, No. 3, p. 22 , P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman found that (p. 24)

“the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

In their analytic survey for which 3146 climate and Earth scientists responded, a full 96.2% of specialists concurred temperatures have steadily risen and there is no evidence for cooling. Meanwhile, 97.4% concur there is a definite role of humans in global climate change.

A 2010 paper, Expert credibility in climate change, reconfirmed the 97 percent consensus figure, and found that “the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC [or AGW] are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.” A 2013 paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, examined “11,944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011” and found that “97.1 percent endorsed the consensus position,” while a parallel self-rating survey found that “97.2 percent endorsed the consensus.”

Despite that, another Mensan (what's with these characters?) Marty Nemko, in a prominent Mensa Bulletin piece in 2010, actually posed these questions:

- Why does the media imply that the IPCC report reflects the consensus of thousands of scientists, when – as reported by CNN – there are dissenting scientists, like Richard Lindzen of MIT?

- If there’s consensus, why on Dec. 20, 2007, did the U.S.  Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Policy issue a report that 400 scientists now believe the evidence doesn’t support that “consensus"?

Nemko interprets “consensus” in these questions to mean 100% agreement, but this isn’t the case at all.  A consensus in the accepted English definition means the concurrence of an overwhelming majority. We have always known a certain minority hard core of scientists (the contrarians – who probably want more attention than being lumped in with others) have existed. People like S. Fred Singer of the University of Virginia and Richard Lindzen of MIT.  These outlier oddballs will always exist because it's in their interest to object, since either they are part- funded by the fossil fuel industry (Singer) or they are able to carve out a contrarian niche in a field otherwise dominated by concurrence (Lindzen).

But by confusing the meaning of "consensus" they seek to try to make the public believe the issue isn't settled when it is.  It would be analogous to a fundie claiming there's no consensus that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old because a few oddball naysayers, like Jason Lisle and D. Russell Humphreys, choose to differ. This despite the fact that we can actually use radioactive decay to obtain an excellent estimate that puts the Earth's age at 4 1/2 billion years.

As for Nemko's second question, the answer ought to be obvious: it's because the Senate is largely comprised of people who lack any credentials in climate science – and hence are not informed or educated enough to offer a professional scientific opinion – only a political one. Thus, they would not have been able to recognize that most of the 400 scientists "who don't believe the evidence supports a consensus" were not climate scientists.

Of course, we now know all this doubt, this agnotology, has been driven by elite interests in the fossil fuel industry as has been vividly exposed, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/08/union-of-concerned-scientists-exposes.html

The inability to think critically occurs even at the mundane or prosaic political level.  The TIME author, as an example, cites a 2014 poll by Alex Theodoridis of the University of California, Merced, in which 54 percent of Republicans polled believe Obama is a Muslim. When you also press many of them for evidence, they offer up a Youtube video where Obama seemingly admits it, despite the fact the video has been shown to be an edited fake (just like the one done on Planned Parenthood), see e.g.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/truth-on-the-cutting-room-floor/

As the TIME author notes(ibid.)

"Obama has always been affiliated with Christianity and there is not one fact to indicate he's a Muslim"

The author is correct that "embracing reason is an uphill battle for humans" - particularly when one's beliefs and predispositions conflict with others' strong reasoning and actual facts. This also includes facts that can antagonize and make a person uneasy, especially students.

The final words of the TIME author in this context are spot on:

"If you don't want to read the books and develop the skills , don't take the class, don't attend the college. Spend the rest of your life huddled among those who agree with you.  But know that is not thinking - but sleeping. "

Or in other words, remain a "brain- eating zombie" the rest of your days, to use the author's parlance. Because those who attack and wage war on reason and those who use it really are "brain eaters" (at least of functional brains) and as we know that is the M.O. of the zombie.

Bret Stephens - Conservo Climate Skeptic - Gets 'Spanked' on 'REAL TIME'

Conservo author and WSJ columnist-nitwit, Bret Stephens, was throttled so comprehensively on Bill Maher's 'Real Time' last night, it was almost like seeing a whelp eaten by wolves. From income inequality, to taxes, to the Obama State of the Union and the environment, this turkey displayed being lost at sea as Howard Dean then Maher took turns skewering his foolishness.

There isn't the space or time to deal with everything so I will just focus on Stephens' evident idiocy to do with global warming and climate science. In the opening part of the segment Maher noted the recent  NY Times headlines (in the past 5 days)  to the effect that  'Ocean life faces mass extinction'    whereupon Stephens butted in,  saying:  "But also from 1975". As Maher pressed him, he babbled "and in 1935 and onwards".

 Maher pressed him some more, asking:  'So you're saying the oceans are not dying?':

And the twit twittered:

"I am saying we've been hearing predictions of imminent environmental destruction for a very long time."

Bill then put him on the spot, asking: "So you're saying there was a prediction in the New York Times from 1935 that 'ocean life faces extinction'?"

Whereupon Stephens replies:

"What I'm saying is if you look at a Newsweek from 1975 you will see it"

And  Maher moaned, 'Oh no, not the cooling thing!'

To which Stephens responded: "Yes, the cooling thing!"

For those who may not know, global cooling was once all the rage--  briefly! Some popular  'zines picked it up in the mid to late 70s but it was soon left in the scientific dustbin. This was after it was discovered a decade or so later, that it had been incepted by particulates and aerosols in the atmosphere.  After the Clean Air Act and similar bills were passed overseas (e.g. in the UK), those particulates disappeared and the cooling was no longer evident. (Aerosols remained and gave way to the global dimming phenomenon which also concealed the worst of global warming - but when aerosols were also controlled - after similar legislation, global dimming also receded and warming assumed dominance.)

So what Stephens ought to have read was the more recent Newsweek piece on the global warming disinformation industry (Aug. 13, 2007, ‘The Truth About Denial’, p. 21) noting the corporate media has been especially guilty in its misplaced notions of objectivity and fairness since they:

“qualified every mention of human influence on climate change with ‘some scientists believe’ when the reality is that the vast preponderance of scientific opinion accepts that human-induced greenhouse emissions are contributing to warming”.

Maher then noted 2014 as the hottest year ever and hence asked whether the talking point that warming has halted since 1998 "shouldn't die" - since 1998 was an El Nino year so was an aberration. To which Stephens replied:

"No because it was the hottest year ever by a hundredth of a degree so what the people are pointing out is we've had the same high temperatures for the past fifteen years."

Which is bollocks. First, because the temperature actually rose as a global mean by 1.24F not  "one hundredth of a degree"

Also the deniers never claimed the past 15 years were all high temperature years, they claimed warming had ceased from 1998, which is not the same thing.  The fact that 14 of the past 15 years have all been progressively  hotter puts the kibosh on this flatulence. See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/george-will-no-warming-for-last-16.html

When Maher cited work detailing 10,855 peer-reviewed climate papers of which only two rejected the notion of man-made climate change-  2 out of 10,855 - and asked: 'Doesn't that persuade you?' and adding "Don't you think scientists know more about science then we do?', Stephens blurted:

"What doesn't persuade me is that scientists ought to know more about public policy  than we do and ought to dictate what public policy is."

He then cited the example of Bjorn Lomborg "bringing together some of the greatest scientists alive" and  Lomborg had asked them: "What are your priorities?" Stephens testily claimed this lot agreed that the "least amount of resources should be devoted to climate change."

Maher laughed and joked that: "Maybe these were different scientists from the 10,855 I mentioned". He also admitted he was not familiar with "the study"  - but let's provide some contextual  background, in particular first noting it was not a "study" but a contrarian climate convocation and also these were not scientists but economists. According to Wikipedia:

"In 2002, Lomborg and the Environmental Assessment Institute founded the Copenhagen Consensus, a project-based conference where prominent economists sought to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methods based on the theory of welfare economics.   Lomborg campaigned against the Kyoto Protocol and other measures to cut carbon emissions in the short-term, and argued for adaptation to short-term temperature rises as they are inevitable, and for spending money on research and development for longer-term environmental solutions, and on other important world problems such as AIDS, malaria and malnutrition. In his critique of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Lomborg stated: "Global warming is by no means our main environmental threat"


In April, 2008, a fellow Mensan - Marty Nemko - also brought this up in a Mensa Bulletin piece and asked:

Why did the Copenhagen Consensus, a group of 36 experts including four Nobel Prize winners, conclude that, among 17 challenges facing the world, efforts to stop global warming should receive the lowest priority?

To which I replied in an April 10, 2008 blog post:

"The Copenhagen Consensus – organized by longtime skeptic Bjorn Lomborg, and composed entirely of economists- would naturally have rated global warming lowest in its priorities for challenges facing the world. They are not climate scientists, after all! They’ll be vastly more concerned with economic blowback!"

I also showed how these dopes were only able to pursue their economics by discounting the resources of the natural world as irrelevant "externalities". For more on this and economics' other failures as a real science, see:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/02/is-economics-science.html

In the end, the fact that Stephens confuses scientists with economists in the "Copenhagen Consensus"  discloses he's not even remotely qualified to be involved in any climate change-global warming discussion. Hell, he wasn't even aware that global dimming (google!) was responsible for the aberration of cooling in the 70s and the fact that "theory" has long since bit the dust.

But maybe if "Bozo the Clown" ever returns there will be a place for Stephens there! Especially when he claimed at the end of the relevant segment that Galileo was engendering a paradigmatic revolt with  his "heliocentric theory" - "given the consensus of science at the time held the geocentric as true". But Maher had to correct him again noting that Galileo was on the side of real science (known since the time of Copernicus) and was actually inveighing against the religious orthodoxy of the time. (The Pope at the time, Paul V, actually confided to Galileo that he supported the heliocentric theory but was unable to do so because the geocentric view was dogma. Get it? Dogma - i.e. religious belief).

See also:

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/27/wsj_columnist_failed_snow_predictions_mean_we_must_be_wrong_about_climate_change_too/

And:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/maher-rips-gop-on-climate-what-do-you-have-against-listening-to-scientists/

How Global Warming Deniers Get the Better of American Brains

The graphic shown above depicts one of the classic examples of anti-global warming  twaddle I've encountered over the years.  The most incredible aspect is that it didn't emanate from your ordinary clueless, under-educated dummy, but from a member of Mensa. A guy by the name of Evan J. Wright. He firmly believed  I was "writing nonsense" (in one Mensa Bulletin letter) because I noted the much higher absorption of CO2 in the oceans. According to Wright: "That's preposterous! If the oceans absorbed carbon dioxide they'd all turn into carbonated liquid, or soda pop! Does anyone see that? NOOO!"

One wonders how some folks ever got into Mensa! One further wonders how Wright (and his equally know-nothing offspring, Jon Wright, who rushed to his dad's defense, equally uninformed) manage to account for the documented fact of higher acidity of the oceans, arising directly from....tada.....the absorption of enormous amount of CO2 since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. There is now about 30% higher acidity as a result of the chemical reaction: H2O + CO2 -> H2CO3, in other words, the production of carbonic acid.

But the Wright's follies are small potatoes compared to the ways the anti-global warming establishment has used well-defined tactics to attempt to bamboozle the American people. The sad fact is that they actually seem to be working given how 10-12 percent fewer Americans now accept anthropogenic global warming compared to 10 years ago. It is instructive therefore to examine some of these methods:


1) Distorting and framing Uncertainty:

This is perhaps the biggest tactic in use and has to do with what has been called 'agnotology'.  This term,  derived from the Greek 'agnosis' - the study of culturally constructed ignorance- is achieved primarily by sowing the teeniest nugget of doubt in whatever claim is made (and as we know NO scientific theory is free of uncertainty).  Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor has correctly tied it to the trend of skeptic science sown deliberately and for political or economic ends .

The agnotologist and his ilk succeed once the following trope is emitted and embraced by the power structure:

‘There is still so much uncertainty, we shouldn’t invest money to solve the climate problem,’

But this is egregious on so many levels that it boggles the rational mind. First, any modern scientific pursuit must include uncertainty. Uncertainty is acknowledged every time I perform a measurement - say of the solar diameter- and express it with plus or minus kilometer values. It signifies that final measurement cannot be presumed free of measuring error which is inherent in all our physics, astronomy etc.

The matter of "too much uncertainty" is also the wrong way to look at the issue for any scientific model or measurement, because they can as easily UNDER-estimate a potential threat or occurrence as over estimate it. Let's take the case of city -busting asteroids which were the topic for discussion today on the CBS Early Show,  with physicist Michio Kaku.  Kaku reported that in fact we have had to readjust our estimates of asteroid impacts based on new observations. Where we once expected a city-buster (say one that could take out a city like New York) every 150 years, we now have to expect it such a killer every 30 years!

In a similar vein, the uncertainty attached to climate models could also be in the direction of under-reporting or under-estimating the full impacts. Thus, the uncertainty could well be such that the runaway greenhouse effect could erupt fifty to one hundred years earlier than previously thought. Or the rising of the sea level owing to melting Arctic (and Greenland) ice sheets could incept a 10m rise as opposed to a 3 m one. This is why uncertainties are expressed as plus and minus values at the end of the measurement.

My point is that the trope expressed above doesn't take into account that the uncertainty implies that the problem is more likely to be worse than expected in the absence of that uncertainty.

It is for this very reason that one would be more justified in applying Dick Cheney's "one percent solution" to the case of both asteroids and global warming. (Cheney's one percent solution was that even if there is a 1 percent chance of a terror attack we must go all out to defend against it).  The reason for adopting the 1 percent solution to climate change and asteroids is because the consequences - should the event occur - would be so horrendous that the costs of repair would vastly exceed the costs of precautionary preparation.

Uncertainty, especially as the asteroid example illustrates, is therefore a reason to do much more to protect against the occurrence as opposed to delay or doing much less.

2) Misrepresenting Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW):

This tactic has worked because too many Americans are not aware of the real consensus among real climate scientists that anthropogenic global warming is a FACT that must be acted upon. Perhaps the first researcher to scientifically and statistically establish this was science historian Naomi Oreskes - who first published an initial survey of global warming literature, entitled  “Beyond The Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.”

Oreskes analyzed “928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords ‘climate change.’” She found that 75 percent of papers accepted the consensus view “either explicitly or implicitly,” while “25 percent dealt with methods or paleoclimate,” and took no position on AGW.  Remarkably, she found that none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.  

Later studies have found a small sliver of dissenting views, but the more the consensus has been studied, the sturdier it appears, while the dissenting literature is dogged with repeated problems. For example, in Eos Transactions, Vol. 90, No. 3, p. 22 , P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman found that (p. 24)

“the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

In their analytic survey for which 3146 climate and Earth scientists responded, a full 96.2% of specialists concurred temperatures have steadily risen and there is no evidence for cooling. Meanwhile, 97.4% concur there is a definite role of humans in global climate change.

A 2010 paper, Expert credibility in climate change, reconfirmed the 97 percent consensus figure, and found that “the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC [or AGW] are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.” A 2013 paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, examined “11,944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011” and found that “97.1 percent endorsed the consensus position,” while a parallel self-rating survey found that “97.2 percent endorsed the consensus.”

Despite that, another Mensan (what's with these characters?) Marty Nemko, in a prominent Mensa Bulletin piece in 2010, actually posed these questions:

- Why does the media imply that the IPCC report reflects the consensus of thousands of scientists, when – as reported by CNN – there are dissenting scientists, like Richard Lindzen of MIT?

- If there’s consensus, why on Dec. 20, 2007, did the U.S.  Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Policy issue a report that 400 scientists now believe the evidence doesn’t support that “consensus"?

Nemko interprets “consensus” in these questions to mean 100% agreement, but this isn’t the case at all.  A consensus in the accepted English definition means the concurrence of an overwhelming majority. We have always known a certain minority hard core of scientists (the contrarians – who probably want more attention than being lumped in with others) have existed. People like S. Fred Singer of the University of Virginia and Richard Lindzen of MIT.  These outlier oddballs will always exist because it's in their interest to object, since either they are part- funded by the fossil fuel industry (Singer) or they are able to carve out a contrarian niche in a field otherwise dominated by concurrence (Lindzen).

But by confusing the meaning of "consensus" they seek to try to make the public believe the issue isn't settled when it is.  It would be analogous to a fundie claiming there's no consensus that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old because a few oddball naysayers, like Jason Lisle and D. Russell Humphreys, choose to differ. This despite the fact that we can actually use radioactive decay to obtain an excellent estimate that puts the Earth's age at 4 1/2 billion years.

As for Nemko's second question, the answer ought to be obvious: it's because the Senate is largely comprised of people who lack any credentials in climate science – and hence are not informed or educated enough to offer a professional scientific opinion – only a political one. Thus, they would not have been able to recognize that most of the 400 scientists "who don't believe the evidence supports a consensus" were not climate scientists.

3) Conspiracist ideation in science rejection:

To summarize this one: when all else has failed in trying to knock down a scientific consensus, then pull out the conspiracy card.  Indeed, when one looks at the history of science denial, there is plenty of evidence that a firm scientific consensus drives deniers into postulating conspiracy — from the opposition to tobacco and industrial chemicals and contamination (as in the Erin Brockovich case) to climate change.

Thus, for the firm climate change consensus, the rejoinder is : "CONSPIRACY! All the scientists are in it together that's why they agree!"   Of course, these pinheads will then look for any supporting "evidence" to support their whacky claims, and no surprise they found it - or what they wrongly thought qualified - in the leaked emails some years ago at East Anglia, and the Univ. of Pennsylvania, which became known as "climate gate".   (Think of Watergate, as in Watergate conspiracy.)

Fortuitously, a voice of reason soon sounded. It arrived with Myles Allen of Oxford University and delivered in a  public comment (Financial Times, July 29, 2010) that it was clear from the accumulated work of climate scientists that human-engendered greenhouse gases was the problem. and in his words (ibid.):

"Climategate never really brought climate science into question at all."

In other words, a storm in a teacup. No "conspiracy" at all. The product of a paranoid embolism erupting in the brains of the ....paranoid!   The leaked emails themselves were simply attributed to an understandable hyper-reactionist tendency in the scientists - tired of seeing their work maimed and misrepresented by the flat Earthers.


A second reason conspiracist ideation crops up  and is invoked in resisting science is that it has greater explanatory reach than science, because it’s not constrained by “the criteria of consistency and coherence that characterize scientific reasoning.”  The recent news that according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll  51 percent question the Big Bang theory discloses that scientific reasoning is alien to most 'Muricans. Indeed, I doubt that any of those who question the Big Bang theory even took a high school physics course.

Getting down to cases, it's interesting that as one salon.com source put it:

“Deniers will claim in the same breath (or within a few minutes) that (a) temperatures cannot be measured reliably, (b) there is definitely no warming, (c) the warming isn’t caused by humans, and (d) we are doing ourselves a favor by warming the planet. The four propositions are incoherent because they cannot all be simultaneously true — and yet deniers will utter all those in close succession all the time.”

Yet, any such string of statements ought to be obviously incoherent to any critical thinker - even one who's never taken a physics course. For example, if (a) is granted as true then how in the hell can (b) be accepted? If you can't measure temperatures reliably how can you assert "there's definitely no warming"?   And if you grant that statement (c) is true - warming exists but not human-caused, how can you also assert (b) is true? It's total poppycock!

Finally, conspiracist ideation is also  immune to falsification, because contradictory evidence (e.g., climate scientists associated with 'climategate' being exonerated of accusations) can be accommodated by broadening the scope of the conspiracy (exonerations are a whitewash), often with considerable creativity.

Until and unless we can effectively parry these tactics it will become increasingly difficult to get the public to support concerted action.