These few, succinct sentences appeared on Upworthy.
Scientists resist change too, of course. Conventional wisdom looks sooooo correct until that moment when it becomes completely indefensible.
Cassandra
Archive for the ‘Scientific Method’ Category
Positive Is Negative
21 January 2013Each day brings new bad news about the climate. This news from a German research center–hey, skeptics, nice to know the hoax is global, huh?–announces a positive feedback loop in the Arctic ice: “Melt Ponds Cause Artic Sea Ice to Melt More Rapidly”
Positive feedback loops like this scare the bejeebers out of me since they indicate climate change is speeding up and will likely speed up more. Yippee.
See also the Summit County News version of the German article: Climate: Arctic Ice Melting from ‘the Inside-Out’
Cassandra
Handbasket Report: Come Hell or High Water
20 November 2012
Has anyone else noticed an escalating shift in both coverage of and positions on climate change over the last few months?
When UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller “came out,” he was pretty much alone although he was certainly willing to discuss his findings: “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic”
As a professional scientist, he remains, of course, admirably skeptical. He says,
It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.
I have no problem with that skepticism. It is–or should be–part of the scientific method. Scientists should be wary of stating anything before they are beyond a reasonable doubt. When Sandy hit, for example, most scientists were quite wary about connecting it to climate change because they have no way of linking any specific storm to global climate change.
However, there’s a major difference between being skeptical about claims and being skeptical about verifiable data. And the verifiable data continues to pile up, and, of late, more and more mainstream media have begun to mention at least some of this data and even comments by actual climate scientists.
Some sites are having too much fun with the shifting positions of professional deniers: “Patrick Michaels’ 1992 Claims Versus the 2012 Reality.” Some deniers, trying to dig in, end up sounding, well, like skeptical scientists rather than outright scoffers: “Sandy Leads to Surge in Unscientific Hurricane Profiteers.”
Most likely, denial or spin will become even harder if stories such as these continue to appear.
“In All Probability: Climate Change and the Risk of More Storms Like Sandy”
That one’s from Atlantic, nothing too unusual about that. However, probability is not a typical American interest, except for poker players and such. Probability, however, is big among scientists, and that’s why the news is getting harder to ignore.
“Iowa Scientists: Drought a Sign of Climate Change”
This one’s an ABC News article, mainstream, but hardly typical of MSM coverage of the last few years.
“Global Warming a Factor in Severe Weather, Says NOAA Report.”
Washington Post. NOAA.
“200 Investment Firms Issue a Warning on Climate Change”
This one was originally from the UK Telegraph, but Business Insider picked it up. Business Insider!
“Greenhouse Gases Hit a Record High in 2011, UN Agency Says”
This article relates some worrisome facts:
The World Meteorological Organization says the planet averaged 390 parts per million of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, up 40 percent from before the Industrial Age when levels were about 275 parts per million.
WMO officials said Tuesday there was a 30 percent increase in the warming effect on the global climate between 1990 and 2011, mainly due to carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning.
And this one’s from Fox News.
There can’t be two Fox News organizations can there?
Cassandra
Science: The Facts
29 October 2012Tania Lobrozo’s NPR blog article “Should Scientists Promote Results over Process?” tackles a good question.
Distrust and/or outright hostility to science is close to being a doctrine of faith in America, the post-fact country. Evolution. Climate Change. Of course facts don’t go away. They are merely discovered, examined, evaluated, then reexamined, reevaluated, and revised. Alas, this process is not the way most people want to spend their lives.
As one of the few who does, I worry about any society that rates faith and stalwart belief — and I’m not just talking about religious belief — over observation, experimentation, and the scientific process in all its manifestations. First of all, being absolutely sure of something often bumps up against facts. For example, blind faith in a certain method of baking bread can be as bad as anything else. I still remember the yelling from a fine French chef who was visiting a relative here in the high mountains. Cooking his first meal here, he failed to adjust his recipes to allow for the high altitude, a scientific mistake. One he never made again.
Unfortunately, too many Americans cling to their mistakes. For some it’s laziness or politics or plain stupidity. For a good many though it’s simple ignorance. Ignorance is forgivable and fixable, but too few make an effort to fix their thinking patterns. Too few even realize that thinking is hard work.
Teaching is hard work too, and some educational programs try, but I have strong doubts that many will succeed. Inequality in schools, inadequate or worn down teachers can’t light intellectual fires. Plus, since its earliest days, resistance to scientific thinking has been endemic in America — read Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life – and now, in its waning days, good teachers are rarer and rarer.
Hence, here we are with a nation taught to believe in simple answers, and even though the scientific method is actually quite straightforward, it’s not good at providing simple, absolute answers. So we are a nation where too few people understand what the scientific process is, how it works, and what its results mean and fewer yet have any tolerance for the glorious ambiguity inherent in the scientific method. All black or all white. That’s what too many of us want. Faith is soooo much more attractive with its absolutes.
Absolutes however are the fundamental problem. Philosopher Theodor Adrorno (1903-1969) was correct when he said, “Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.”
To me, this line of his explains a lot about what’s going on in the United States today.
Cassandra
Do Your Research!
16 October 2012I just ran across this headline: “Did Global Warming Really Stop in 1997?
The answer, as anyone who reads widely knows, is NO. At least that’s what NASA, NOAA, the US military, and any number of climate scientists say. But does that stop the Daily Mail from running such a story?
The answer, as anyone who reads widely knows, is NO.
Why? Because they don’t care? Because they don’t do their research–to use the great line from the BBC’s Sherlock? Because they just want to stir up a few more temperatures–among their readers?
The Internet’s a great resource for information. I googled these words: British newspapers political orientation and found a website called Paperboy. Here’s what this site says about The Daily Mail:
The Daily Mail is a British, daily middle market tabloid newspaper. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom’s second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. It is currently owned by the Dail Mail and General Trust plc. The Daily Mail was Britain’s first daily newspaper aimed at the newly-literate “lower-middle class market resulting from mass education, combining a low retail price with plenty of competitions, prizes and promotional gimmicks”. It was the first British paper to sell a million copies a day. It was, from the outset, a newspaper pitched at women and is still the only British newspaper whose readership is more than 50% female. Politically the Daily Mail has a conservative slant. Its frequently sensationalist, conservatively biased headlines often provoke a strong reaction amongst the liberal leaning blogosphere who sarcastically label it the “Daily Fail”. As of May 2011 its online version is the most popular newspaper web site in the UK with around 64 million unique visitors for the month.
So, does The Daily Mail sound like a first rate source for information on climate change? If you read widely–and critically, you know the answer.
Why do I suspect that in a world with greater knowledge, nearly instant communication, and myriad easily cross-referenced facts widely available, the percentage of magical thinkers is rising instead of falling?
Cassandra
Climate Change: Wry Polar Disorder
27 March 2012One of the first things I do every morning is to click up Google News and check my favorite topics. One of them is climate change. Today’s listings provide a neat visual summary of the dichotomous reporting I’m dubbing Wry Polar Disorder.
Here are the listings as I just looked at them:
———————————————————————————-
Daily Mail
Wall Street Journal - 15 hours ago
The lack of any statistically significant warming for over a decade has made it more difficult for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its supporters to demonize the atmospheric gas CO2 which is released when fossil …
Straits Times
Reuters - 21 hours ago
By Nina Chestney | LONDON (Reuters) – The world is close to reaching tipping points that will make it irreversibly hotter, making this decade critical in efforts to contain global warming, scientists warned on Monday. Scientific estimates differ but …
Irreversible Global Warming Nearing, Scientists WarnThe Green Optimistic
—————————————————————————
It doesn’t take a climate scientist to suss out the split here, does it? According to the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and NewsMax stories, everything is fine–cool even. Then below those articles is an article distributed by Reuters and links to that story distributed by some environmental groups. Things look not so fine in these versions of the world.
Now admittedly, Reuters, a major news agency, covers business news, but it’s unlike WSJ, Forbes, and Newsmax in that Reuters is headquartered in London. I’m not sure how their stories like this one fare in Britain, but in America they aren’t as prominent in business publications as stories and op-ed pieces regaling the glories and/or irrelevance of a rising carbon dioxide level. Although I do see the occasional exception, American business publications tend to toss out alarming climate change information in favor of stories–rationalizations? fictions? fables?–indicating things are fine.
Is it surprising that the typical business and corporate types are likely to doubt or even sneer at those who say climate change is not only real but dangerous? Where do you think the people who run businesses are likely to get their information? Environmental websites? Peer-reviewed climate journals? I think not. I suspect they are far more likely to read WSJ, Forbes, and Newsmax. Those are Merkin, true-believing sources. Would they mislead? No! That’s what those environmental sites do. They’re run by lefties, and we all know lefties are into world domination–unlike major American corporations.
Living in a facts-optional, fantasy-lauding country like the current incarnation of the United States alarms me even more than the supported, documented news I read. And that’s saying something.
Cassandra
Doomsday Questions
19 May 2011How many believe that the world will end on Saturday? This Saturday. Hands up, please.
Somehow, I expect few hands in the air, which leads to my next question.
Does anyone else wonder what the few folks whose hands are in the air are doing with their worldly belongings right now? Does anyone else wonder if some people are asking these folks to donate everything?
The thought is tempting, isn’t it?
Good article on this particular Doomsday calculation in Scientific American here.
Did I mention that I have a copy of The End of the World signed by editor-author Lewis Lapham?
Did I ever mention that some high school friends and I held an End of the World Party way, way back when some Tibetan monks did their calculations? Care to guess if we showed up at school the next day?
Happy Saturday, folks.
Cassandra
We Are So Fracked
11 April 2011Fracking, the hydraulic fracking of rock to release oil and natural gas, is, to say the least, a controversial environmental issue. While groundwater pollution has been the main focus, an article in today’s The Hill “Study: Gas from ‘Fracking’ Worse Than Coal on Climate” adds another aspect to the controversy.
Here are the first few paragraphs:
Cornell University professors will soon publish research that concludes natural gas produced with a drilling method called “hydraulic fracturing” contributes to global warming as much as coal, or even more.
The conclusion is explosive because natural gas enjoys broad political support – including White House backing – due to its domestic abundance and lower carbon dioxide emissions when burned than other fossil fuels.
Cornell Prof. Robert Howarth, however, argues that development of gas from shale rock formations produced through hydraulic fracturing – dubbed “fracking” – brings far more methane emissions than conventional gas production.
Enough, he argues, to negate the carbon advantage that gas has over coal and oil when they’re burned for energy, because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas.
Like any serious scientists, the researchers explain the tentative nature of their study and warn that they do not consider it “definitive.” The article also presents counter-arguments from the industry’s experts.
So are the comments posted for this article also “fair and balanced”? Read and and find out.
In case you are unfamiliar with fracking, you might also want to read about the underground concerns already raised by environmentalists and ranchers in natural gas areas such as Wyoming. Keywords fracking wyoming are a good start.
Cassandra
Thanksgiving Preparations
23 November 2010Thanksgiving preparations aren’t all about cooking and decorating. To me, having good conversation is the key element to a successful sit-down dinner. A good many of my usual topics are recipes for T’day fistfights, so I was glad when I ran across Thaler’s Question at Edge.org.
I’ve already sent the link to most of the people in my address book, but I thought I’d post it here along with the lines I included in my email.
If you can’t find something here to spark a good Thanksgiving conversation, you ain’t tryin’ hard.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
Cassandra
Oh, yes, and just not be sound too cheerful, here’s a Thanksgiving video.
Ivory Tower: 97 Percent Sure
28 June 2010Bad–meaning neither good nor funny–joke time.
What’s the difference between Ivory Soap’s purity and the Ivory Tower’s view of climate change?
Answer: 2.44 percent.
Ivory Soap produced one of the most memorable advertising slogans of all time with their “99 44/100ths percent pure” claim. I wonder how many people today know what the point of comparison was. (In case anyone cares, it was ordinary castile soap.)
In comparison with Ivory Soap, the Ivory Tower sorts are not that far behind, percentage-wise, that is. Daily Tech‘s Tiffany Kaiser reports on the results of a recent study in “Stanford Study: Few Experts Support Global Warming Skepticism”:
[T]he university’s team of scientists decided on who the top 100 climate researchers are by determining the “total number of climate-related publications each had.” According to Anderegg, 97 percent of those in the top 100 agree with and/or endorse the IPCC’s assessment. He also says that this result has been “borne out” by other studies that use different methodology.
How did they calculate this 97 percent? Those performing the study used common methodology:
The university came to these conclusions by analyzing the number of research papers published “by more than 900 climate researchers” and the number of times these researchers’ works were cited by other scientists. The expertise was evaluated by citing the number of research papers written by scientists (with the minimum number for inclusion being 20).
In other words, they used academics to vet other academics who published and cited the work of still more academics. Reading this, I remembered an old cartoon of a dog being tried for cat-icide in front of a jury comprised totally of cats. The cats didn’t look like they could be convinced of the dog’s innocence no matter what evidence was offered. I pictured the dog as academia and climate skeptics as the cats.
This paragraph from Kaiser’s story reinforced that dog-cat image:
The scientists at Stanford have mentioned that they are ready to take some heat from doubters of anthropogenic, or human-affected, climate change who “object to their data.” But according to Stephen Schneider, a professor of biology and a coauthor of the paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team “took pains to avoid any sort of prejudice or skewed data in their analysis.” When selecting researchers for the study who either disagreed with statements of the IPCC or signed the petitions, the Stanford team was sure to stay completely neutral in the study by omitting “those who had no published papers in the climate literature.”[emphasis added]
In other words, the researchers omitted the people most often relied on by skeptics. Michaels, Inhofe, various think tanks. Why? Simple. Most skeptics are commentators. Some would say agenda-driven nitpickers and propagandists, but that’s not really the issue. In academia commentators are called secondary sources. In scientific academia, secondary source material generally rates below primary research because secondary work analyzes, interprets, or otherwise comments on some primary source. To scientists, ACTUAL RESEARCH is what counts. Scientists expect criticism in the form of more actual research. Commentary is fine, but there had better be primary data on which to hang it.
Knowing primary from secondary research is vital for most first year college students who want a passing grade in composition. However, skeptic hackles are undoubtedly rising and the hissing and spitting beginning. Most academics put great stress on primary work. Most skeptics do not. Academics tend to put even greater stress on primary work done by well known authorities most of whom live in academia or work for governmental agencies. One guess where skeptics rest their trust.
America has a long history of intolerance for academia. That’s just a fact. Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 work Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” traces the historical details on this. The part about how earlier Americans favored the gritty, traditional farmer over the ag college scientists is, to me at least, analogous to the current favoring of meteorologists over climate science specialists.
Some aspects of America scare me–100 percent of the time.
Cassandra
