Peston Manning: wrong but not stupid

Preston Manning argues that by being honest and transparent vis-a-vis his government's positions on trade relations with China and controlling greenhouse gas emissions, Harper enhanced Canada's international reputation: "surely the modesty, honesty and transparency he demonstrated on these issues is preferable to policies tainted by hypocrisy if Canada truly aspires to be a “moral beacon” on the global stage." Now while I don't mean compare Harper's putative contributions to Canada's reputation with Chretien's -- the primary stalking horse of Manning's article -- I do wish to criticize the claim that being honest/transparent about one's policies is always morally preferable to being dishonest/ opaque about them. One can morally evaluate both the contents of a government's policies and their degree of transparency. In the ideal case, a government will both have morally admirable policies and will be honest about them. But in some circumstances, admirable policies can be successfully implemented only if the government is dishonest about them. And it is, arguably, better to be dishonest about admirable policies than honest about shameful policies. As a result, the Harper government's honesty about their unwillingness to sacrifice trade for human rights in China and economic growth to save the environment count as instances of only the third (of four) best combination of policy transparency and content. And their dishonesty about their (and their predecessor government's) Afghan prisoner transfer policy counts as an instance of the worst combination of the two.

Another right wing canard.

Ah, the annual "war on Christmas" column, right out of the Right Wing Propagandist's Handbook. Of course, it's a bit trickier when there's no particular "politically correct" outrage to appeal to this year. But that Rex is a trooper -- there are always the "PC outrages of Christmas Past" to rail on about. Makes you want to turn a climatologist over to the Afghan authorities for a proper "interrogation," doesn't it Rex? But Rex and I do agree for once: reports of right-wing indignation over retailers requiring employees to say the more inclusive "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" have always at best generated "...wearisome, tedious little controversies."

"Climategate"-gate: Part II

As with most conspiracy theories, the putative inference from "climategate" to the view that all climate science is seriously flawed has a giant gap in it: even if the hacked emails established that all of the research conducted at the East Anglia CRU was flawed (which they don't), they wouldn't establish that all the research conducted elsewhere -- which reaches the same conclusions vis-a-vis climate change -- is similarly flawed. And merely pointing out that "East Anglia is not some way station" doesn't help.

In addition to repeating the same tired lies (as well as the attempt at guilt-by-Mugabe-association), Rex cleverly sneaks in an attempt to fill this embarrassing gap. Amongst the other crimes he takes to be revealed by the stolen (and cherry picked) emails, he finds that East Anglia is acting as a climatology "gate-keeper":"They revealed a pattern of gate-keeping, of (quite non-scientific) hostility to contrary or dissenting opinions, attempts at controlling the much-touted peer-review process, and perhaps most disturbing of all a pronounced tendency to point the data toward the hypothesis rather than the hypothesis toward the data." But what could this gate-keeping consist in? If it is to explain the thousands of peer reviewed articles based on research not conducted at East Anglia, it must involve some kind of control over the editorial boards of the all the journals which published these articles. Or, more ominously, maybe they directly influenced the peer review process itself though their control of all the working climatologists who lent their expertise to it. Vast tendrils indeed. Sorry Rex, as with all conspiracy theories, the number of people that would have to be "in on it" strains credibility.

Rex Murphy: intellectually bankrupt

Rex's latest consists of a two-pronged fallacious attack on the science of global warming and the Copenhagen climate summit. He begins with an insinuation of guilt by association: any political movement that allows Robert Mugabe to participate must itself be morally suspect. Yes, Mugabe is a thug who leads an extremely oppressive regime; but no, that fact that he was allowed to speak at Copenhagen does not impugn the motives of advocates diminishing greenhouse gas emissions. There are a number of different strategies that have been advocated for regimes of this kind: constructive engagement (apartheid era South Africa); international isolation (Libya); and invasion (Iraq). And there are good arguments in favour and against all of them. The organizers of the Copenhagen summit may have made a mistake by advocating a policy of constructive engagement towards the Mugabe regime, but it's certainly a common mistake.

Rex follows this up by repeating the lie vis-a-vis the illegally obtained CRU emails: that they reveal an attempt at subverting the peer review process; that they reveal that primary climate data has been destroyed; that they reveal that the science of climate change has been deeply flawed. But these claims are false -- and the stolen emails show nothing of the kind. No data has been destroyed: all primary climate data is readily available. The peer review process was not subverted: a suggestion was made to the effect that a journal where the peer review process was subverted should be boycotted -- but there is no evidence this suggestion was acted upon. And there is no evidence that the science of global warming was flawed: all the emails show is the gallows humour of a few scientists who were being systematically harassed by shills for (and dupes of) the oil industry.

Repeating the lie is among the most cynical and disreputable strategies for influencing public opinion. Which raises the question: is Rex really dumb enough to believe what he says, or is he simply an intellectually bankrupt corporate shill?

Who's out of step here?

Once again Rex has made global warming and his denial the topic of his Saturday column. What he's inveighing against this time is the fact that the Copenhagen conference has proceeded without taking the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia into account. For Rex, as we've already seen, these emails (actually a highly selected and carefully misinterpreted few among them) are the smoking gun, clear and undeniable evidence that the science of global warming is too entangled with 'advocacy' to be trusted. What they really are, of course, is evidence of the process of science: science is human, not angelic, and scientists work very hard to make the best case they can for their point of view.

As for Rex, well, it's a peculiar thing, but somehow, while demanding that the scientists he disagrees with be paragons of every moderate virtue (even in their private correspondence), Rex forgets to impose the same standard on the gaggle of deniers he looks to for support. Ian Plimer, for instance, is a mining geologist (not a climatologist), who declared in his book (touted by Rex as the 'last nail in the coffin of AGW' before the release of the hacked emails, which now supersede it in that role-- funny how many last nails that coffin seems to require) that volcanoes emit more CO2 than human beings-- false by two orders of magnitude. One could be forgiven for thinking that this should mar Dr. Plimer's credibility. But Rex is far more worried about scientists who are so deaf to decorum as to criticize journals and editors they disagree with in private emails-- God forbid Rex should ever investigate other episodes in the history of science: for example, Lavoisier founded modern chemistry by waging a journal-creating, colleague-recruiting campaign to supplant phlogiston chemistry, rather than playing the milquetoast role Rex envisions as 'proper' to science, and Crick and Watson eagerly seized on other's data as the pursued their dream of a Nobel prize.

But all these rhetorical ploys are merely prologue: the real problem is that Rex continues to distort the record to defend his denial. Rex sums up his misunderstanding of the East Anglia emails in a single paragraph of simple, but false, assertions, declaring that the emails "revealed a pattern of gate-keeping, of (quite non-scientific) hostility to contrary or dissenting opinions, attempts at controlling the much-touted peer-review process, and... a pronounced tendency to point the data towards the hypothesis rather than the hypothesis toward the data." He closes his litany of distortion by repeating the claim that the "primary data concerning the world's temperature over the last century and a half" have been lost.

But the primary data have not been lost-- they were not retained at East Anglia when their computer hardware was replaced, but are available at NOAA; see Realclimate for an immense collection of links to a wide range of climate data. The myth that the data are just lost is widespread in the denialsphere, along with many other falsehoods (that the climate is now cooling, that sea levels are not rising,...). And this points towards a correction to Rex's first complaints: climate scientists are indeed frustrated by these falsehoods, not to mention continual harassment with hundreds of demands for access to information-- fair enough from colleagues who seriously want to look at the data independently, but a nuisance (and a huge waste of time) when each has to be responded to separately by gathering data, explaining why some may not be available, etc. Worse is the challenge of responding to (or just dealing with) reams of hate-mail and even threats from passionate deniers who have no understanding of the science at all. Little wonder then, if scientists get a little irritated at journals or editors who publish work they regard as not just wrong, but so erroneous that it should have been rejected. Science doesn't proceed by publishing anything and everything-- peer review is supposed to be a filter, but sometimes a weak editor (or a slanted publisher) will accept work that isn't up to snuff. Are scientists just supposed to ignore this?

Just a hint, here, Rex, on why Copenhagen proceeded without taking the hacked emails seriously: they do nothing to undermine the evidence for global warming. Your eagerness to seize on any hint of imperfection in the scientists whose work you've dismissed for years while you continue to ignore the falsehoods and PR games of the denial industry reveals you as either dishonest or self-deceived-- and a hack either way, not a serious commentator on an important issue.

Enemies of Democracy

I was listening to The Current this morning and heard Linda McQuaig debating an Ottawa radio shock jock -- Lowell Green -- about the Afghan detainee scandal. The shock jock started by claiming that only extreme liberal-leftists and socialists think this is an important issue. He then claimed that to criticize the government's detainee policies is to criticize/ fail to support the troops and declared, as a result, that that government critics should be ashamed. And he finished with "God bless the troops."

When crap like this voiced on the CBC one can only despair at the future of public discourse in Canada. The CBC, and the Globe, seem to have fallen into the American model of equivocating between objectivity and a lack of bias and, hence, treating both sides of every issue equally -- regardless of the evidence. As a result, they now give a voice to representatives of "each" viewpoint, that is, one from the centre/ left and one from the (sometimes extreme) right. But instead of choosing representatives from the right who engage in reasoned discourse, they give voice to shock jocks who engage in angry (and empty) rhetoric. And as we have seen in the States, when the public discourse is reduced to cheap rhetorical tricks, reason and evidence-based policy is thwarted in favour of policy that largely benefits moneyed interests (despite the populist rhetoric used to defend it).

Now the Globe is a private institution and can give a forum to whomever they like. But insofar as they continue to publish the rants of partisan hacks (Rex Murphy and Margaret Wente come to mind, surprise, surprise) they risk losing their status as Canada's premiere newspaper and becoming a pale imitation of the Sun newspaper group. The CBC, on the other hand, as a public institution has a duty to the country to uphold the quality of the public discourse. Although this means they should not be partisan -- favouring the positions of the "right" or the "left" simply because they are positions of the "right" or "left" -- it doesn't mean they shouldn't be biased. One can be objective and biased if one's bias is based on the evidence. Moreover, although they should continue to give voice to representatives of different viewpoints, they should choose only those who at least attempt to engage in reasoned discourse. The very health of our democracy is at stake.

Note: although I advocate denying right wing hacks a forum at the CBC and the Globe, I am not thereby advocating violating their free speech rights. The distinction between negative and positive rights is fundamental. Rex's negative free speech rights would no more be violated if he were terminated by the CBC and the Globe any more than mine are currently violated by their failure to provide me with a forum. And Rex no more has a positive right to be provided with such a forum than do I.

And then there's Margaret

It's hard to know where to begin with this one. The basic theme is that it's appropriate to be more interested about news stories about Tiger Woods' infidelity than those concerning the Copenhagen climate summit or the torture of Afghan detainees because only the former stories are real:
"I don't think my friend is superficial at all. She's simply conserving her attention for stories that are real." The reason she thinks the latter are unreal is because they have putatively become symbolic stories about morality and virtue:
"Like climate change, the detainee issue has turned into another symbolic story about morality and virtue. " (One might wonder, of course, why she doesn't consider stories about Tiger Woods' infidelity to be about morality and virtue, but that's another issue). Exactly why she thinks the Afghan torture story is merely symbolic is puzzling. She does offer up two reasons for this opinion. First, the problem of the torture of Afghan detainees was solved long ago, and the current story is about "the Harper government's obstructive tactics to hush it up," which "has been turned by all sides into political theatre." Second, most Canadians consider the decision by the Canadian government to allow adopt prisoner transfer policies that allowed detainees to be tortured to be a "snafu" rather than a war crime.

There are a number of responses one might give to her first argument. One might note, for example, that stories about government obstruction often are quite substantial -- remember Watergate -- and that it is the job of genuine reporters to see their way through the political theatre and get to the truth. And to the second argument, one might respond that, even if Margaret is right about the beliefs of most Canadians on this matter -- and I'm sure in a subsequent column she'll cite the relevant polling data -- this does not settle the issue of whether war crimes were committed (it's called the bandwagon fallacy, Margaret -- look it up). And a good reporter might find her way to the truth on this issue as well.

Note: the only people likely to be guilty of any war crime in this case are the politicians who approved the prisoner transfer policies and not the soldiers who carried them out.

...for a change

An intelligent opinion piece in the G&M ...

Not another one

Oh dear, more global-warming scepticism on the pages of the Globe and Mail. What has become of Canada’s National Newspaper? Unlike Rex and Margaret, Lysiane Gagnon doesn’t deny that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is occurring and acknowledges that she ought to rely on the opinions of the experts, but she complains that,
“…the findings of the UN panel would be more convincing if they had rested on an open scientific debate.”
Although Gagnon is right to claim that “doubt and scepticism [are] an integral part of serious research,” she is wrong to suppose that the scientific debate about global warming failed in some sense to be open or that the participants in the debate lacked appropriately skeptical attitudes. She offers three central reasons to suppose the scientific debate is (or was) flawed:

1. Unanimity of thought doesn’t “exist outside of totalitarian states.”

2. “In the highly charged atmosphere surrounding the Copenhagen climate-change summit, scepticism – a healthy mental disposition – has become a negative word.”

3. The supposition that AGW is settled science entails that climatology is “a more exact science than, say, medicine or nuclear physics,” and it’s not.

The problem with (1) is that the scientific consensus is the product of thousands of peer reviewed research papers which overwhelmingly confirm the phenomenon of AGW, and not the product of some kind of conspiracy or threats of retribution by Big Science.
UPDATE: I am assuming, of course, that within the relevant scientific community -- working climate scientists -- there is a consensus and, with few exceptions, the dissenters are not members of this community ... and not because of any conspiracy to exclude them.

The problem with (2) is twofold. First, scepticism is healthy only when it is sensitive to the evidence: if one retains one’s scepticism in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, one has instead an unhealthy conspiratorial frame of mind. Second, Gagnon is confusing the public debate about global warming with the scientific debate. Before the results came in, scepticism in the scientific debate was healthy and was treated as such. Now that the results are in, scepticism in the public debate is unhealthy.

The problem with (3) is that it presupposes that if any questions within the purview of a special science are settled, they all are. But the fact that AGW is a settled question in climatology doesn’t imply that there aren’t lots of other unsettled questions any more than the fact that there are unsettled nutritional questions entails that there is no settled nutritional science.

This is all very basic. “A journalist who worked for many years reporting the news” should know better.

Margaret Gift List

Margaret has very kindly suggested Christmas gifts for environmentally concerned Canadians:

“Gifts for your daughter: Instead of a stuffed animal, get her a real one to donate to impoverished villagers in Africa.”The polite thing to do would be to reciprocate and make some gift suggestions for Margaret herself. So with further ado:

1. A Brain: Margaret’s columns often seem indifferent to the standards of reasons and evidence. Maybe an upgrade in the grey matter would help. www.strawman.brains.com

2. Her Man Friday Research Assistant: in a recent column, Margaret admitted to doing all her research on Google. Clearly she needs help. A research assistant would be the perfect gift, both for Margaret and the reputation of the Globe and Mail.

3. A Sauna: given her opposition to action on global warming, Margaret seems resigned to rising temperatures. A sauna is the perfect gift to help her get acclimatized.

4. A One-way Ticket Back to Chicago: to visit the relatives. We'd spring for a return ticket, but times are tough. And we’ve already gone over budget acting on her gift suggestions.

Something Revealing from Margaret's Pen

Today Margarte Wente decided to return once again to the topic she has mangled so badly so many times before. I refer, of course, to global climate change and the Copenhagen conference. To begin on a positive note, I want to say how very nice it is to see the real concern that motivates Ms. Wente put squarely on the table. But that’s faint praise, as we’ll see below. The nub of Ms. Wente’s worries in this column is the question of what we owe to the developing world over climate change.

Ms. Wente even begins on a reasonable note, remarking “in some ways, a climate fund seems only fair.” And she’s right about this. The developed world has grown rich, in very large part, by burning fossil fuels. The contribution that this cheap source of energy has made to our present wealth is massive. It has been estimated that the energy consumed by a middle-class American does work equivalent to having 200 human slaves. (See EOHT for this figure: it turns out that Buckminster Fuller was the first to propose this kind of analysis.)

But this energy was never as cheap as the price the market placed on it would suggest. There were externalities, costs borne neither by the seller nor the buyer of the energy, from the first. Local air pollution has caused or contributed to the deaths of thousands and even millions. More recently, the environmental impact of acid rain, largely from coal-fired electrical generators, became a serious problem that has since been resolved, largely due to cap and trade arrangements.

Now we’ve come to realize (in spite of an aggressive and continuing campaign of disinformation from fossil fuel interests and self-styled ‘conservatives’) that there is another externality involved in our use of fossil fuels: the long-term, cumulative impact of CO2 that we have added to the atmosphere. (A quick aside here: Rex Murphy declared recently, in an interview with CBC Calgary radio, that no-one could question Dr. Ian Plimer’s qualifications to speak on climate science. To give you an idea of just how good Dr. Plimer’s qualifications are, here is one small factoid: Dr. Plimer declares in his book on climate change that volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans do by burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. This is just plain false. The U.S. Geological survey says that human-caused emissions of CO2 add up to about 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes. See USGS for this figure.)

The climate change already happening poses threats, to low-lying cities around the world which face risks of flooding as ice melts and oceans warm, to wildlife as climate shifts more rapidly than plants and animals can migrate or adapt, and to agriculture as water supplies diminish and growing conditions worsen. These costs will be suffered all around the world. So it really is hard to deny that we owe a debt to the developing world, a debt we can best pay by helping them to cope with climate change as it continues, and to reduce the CO2 they emit in the future with funds and technical support to help their economies adopt alternative energy sources.

But for Ms. Wente, this course is unacceptable. After all, she suggests, we can’t trust those people in the developing world to spend any money we provide as we think it ought to be spent. (And the possibility of negotiating agreements to ensure that the money is used in ways that both groups can agree to is, apparently, not worth mentioning.) In the end (echoing our current Prime Minister’s remarks about global warming in 2002) Ms. Wente declares that this demand for compensation is really just a plan to ‘soak the rich’: “Canada emits far more greenhouse gases than Kenya because we are far more prosperous and successful. And so – no matter how carbon virtuous we are – we're doomed to be cast as global greenhouse villains. And if that sounds like the familiar old morality of socialism, it is.”

If this sounds like a disgraceful piece of self-serving nonsense, it is. “Carbon virtuous,” of course, is the last thing that Canada has been. Our emissions continue to rise, the Federal Government’s declared targets for reduction are among the weakest in the world, and no-one who has seriously examined what is being done believes that Canada will actually meet those targets. Furthermore, “global greenhouse villains” is what we are and will continue to be: even if we invest now to change course, we will have contributed far more than our share to the problem, since CO2 persists in the atmosphere for thousands of years. (Another brief aside: carbon capture and storage, now receiving huge subsidies from both the Federal and Alberta governments, is the most expensive and slowest way to reduce our emissions. The only advantage of CCS is the fact that it allows business to continue as usual in the meanwhile.)

So Ms. Wente’s closing jibe about socialism is very revealing indeed: yes, we’ve been bad, we’ve (innocently at first, but now knowingly) harmed our planet. And we’ve grown immensely rich doing it. But Ms. Wente does not want to pay any reparations: she enjoys her lifestyle too much. To echo Margaret herself once more, if using up a resource that belonged to everyone and then refusing to compensate people whose share we’ve usurped sounds like the familiar old morality of greed and piracy, it is.

Margaret: Offensive but not (entirely) inane

Today's column involved bringing some of her beloved "common sense" to bear on the 20th anniversary of the Montreal massacre:
As always, the day was marked by memorials and candlelight vigils across the country, affecting interviews with families and survivors – and a large helping of overheated nonsense. The target of Margaret's scorn is twofold: that the motivations that prompted Lepine's actions were part of a widespread and tolerated pattern of derogatory attitudes towards women among Canadian men at the time; and that this pattern of attitudes remains to this day. Now Margaret is right to wonder what role familial upbringing and what role broader cultural influences played in generating Lepine's hatred of women, but to simply stipulate that is was entirely the former,
[Lepine] no more resembled ordinary men than Robert Pickton does, simply because that hypothesis better suits her political views, is entirely unwarranted. Moreover, Margaret is probably right that the derogatory attitudes towards women among Canadian men of 20 years ago are both less widespread and less tolerated -- at least among certain segments of the population -- today. But stipulations,Women still suffer far too often from spousal abuse. But social tolerance of it has all but disappeared and cherry-picked evidence,women now make up three-fifths of all university students and most of the PhD candidates do not establish that such attitudes have been eliminated or reduced to acceptable levels. And her suggestion that Canadian women shouldn't complain because they have it better than women elsewhere in the world
In Afghanistan, women are routinely killed for defying men. In South Asia, vast numbers of female fetuses are aborted, and girls are routinely neglected in favour of their brothers.is just patronizing.

The Copenhagen Diagnosis: why you should take it seriously

Here is a very readable update on the state of the science of climate change, authored by 26 climate scientists and including up-to-date references to the scientific literature. It includes discussions of global temperatures, ice caps, sea-level change and other climate-change issues.

Copenhagen Diagnosis

Of course, you can always choose to be skeptical about this, and believe what you read on sites like 'Friends of Science' instead. People who reject the science tend to do exactly that, whether it's a matter of climate change and global warming or evolution and the age of the earth. If you're like Rex and Margaret and you find yourself tempted to take that approach, you should ask yourself what comes first in forming your opinion: if the fact that you don't like the idea of global warming leads you to reject sources that support the idea as 'biased' and to accept sources that reject it, then you're not thinking about the evidence at all-- you're just picking and choosing sources according to whether they agree with your preferences.

This is perfectly human and natural, but it's not rational. Being rational is actually hard and it doesn't come naturally. It requires us to think seriously about points of view we don't accept and to consider evidence that runs against our own positions. We can't ignore that evidence (even if we suspect it's not trustworthy). We have to understand it thoroughly and deal with it. If you take a serious look at a site like Realclimate, you'll see how carefully the bloggers there have addressed arguments from the skeptics and deniers, and how they've tried to explain the science to those of us who can't follow all the technical details. They've also listed extensive links to other sites, including massive amounts of climate data and code.

Compare their efforts to skeptic/denial oriented sites. The contrast is striking. Like the debate between defenders of biology and the creationist/intelligent design crowd, on skeptic/denial sites, you will find brief notes about denialist talking points along with highly selected data-- for instance, you might find references to the fact that 2008 was colder than 1998. But this fact is also noted and acknowledged on Realclimate, where it is placed in a much more informative context: it turns out that 2008 was still the 9th warmest year in the instrumental record. Further, 2008 included a la Nina event, which drives down surface temperatures, while 1998 included a major el Nino event, which drives surface temperatures up. As another example, on Realclimate you'll find serious discussion of the lists of supposedly skeptical 'scientists' often mentioned on climate denial sites--discussion that points out that many people who have been listed have spoken up and asked for their names to be removed, and many others have no qualifications in climate science at all. (This is another strong parallel between evolution denial and climate change denial-- lists of scientists, many not even biologists, who are claimed to be skeptical about evolution, or about natural selection, are a staple on evolution denial sites, but the credibility of those lists has been examined and carefully criticized on sites like TalkOrigins, while those critical examinations don't ever get discussed-- let alone answered-- on evolution denial sites.)

It takes a little work and some careful attention to the back-and-forth, but what you will find if you have the patience to carry through this kind of cross-checking analysis is something quite important: arguments and evidence on the skeptical/denialist sites are actually addressed and thoroughly answered on evolution and climate science sites, while skeptical/denialist sites regularly repeat the same arguments over and over without ever responding to the criticisms and answers given on science sites. So long as that's the way the debate goes, there's only one side of the debate that's actually serious about what it's saying, while the other side is relying on spin, and hoping for an audience with a preconceived attraction to their position. What's especially nice about applying this test is that you don't have to be a scientist yourself to figure out which is which.

Now, journalists don't have time to get a degree in climate science or evolution. But they do have a responsibility to actually look into the issues they're commenting on. In fact, although Rex and Margaret could improve a lot just by reporting on both sides' claims and arguments, journalists have a responsibility to do better than just 'balance' their work by including claims from both sides. A serious journalist actually tries to figure out who's telling the truth-- and in this case, it's not really that hard. So how about it?

Climate Deniers vs. Beavis and Butthead

It's an epic struggle between two witless teenagers and climate deniers: who can do a more ridiculous job of distorting what someone said? Of course, Beavis and Butthead are just doing it for yucks. What's with climate deniers? They seem to have other ends in view...



This is a Climate Change Crock of the Week feature -- for more, see Peter Sinclair's blog.

"climategate"-gate

The real scandal -- Rex, Margaret -- is not a conspiracy of scientists trying convince the public of anthropogenic global warming, but rather a conspiracy of oil company shills trying to convince the public of a putative conspiracy of scientists. As with the debate over evolution, the scientific debate over AGW is over. The only real debates that are ongoing in either case are public relations exercises designed to achieve various political goals. The creationist arguments in the public debate over evolution in the US are designed to get certain religious doctrines taught in American classrooms. And the denialist arguments in the public debate over global warming are designed to prevent policies inimical to oil company profits. Since the science in both cases is settled, neither creationists nor denialists do any real science -- publishing their research in peer reviewed biology or climate journals, presenting it at scientific conferences, etc. Moreover, they attempt to explain away both the scientific consensus and their own refusal to do any real science by appeal to scientific conspiracies of various kinds.

It is, of course, worth noting that not all denialists (or creationists, for that matter) are in on the conspiracy. Some have been duped by the dishonest public debate tactics of the conspirators. Where Rex and Margaret fall I do not know -- I'd guess they are dupes rather than part of a conspiracy designed to increase oil company profits (without regard for the consequences for future generations). But allowing oneself to duped in this way is itself a moral failing.

A calm and careful response

For those who would actually like to learn something about the hacked emails, here's a nice video discussing two of the most talked-about emails in detail, and explaining exactly why they don't constitute evidence of a conspiracy at all.

Margaret: Inane but inoffensive (for a change)

There are three comments worth making on Margaret's latest -- an attack on Google.

1. Google is primarily a search engine and not a content provider. It is the latter, not Google (at least not the core business), that "has already demolished entire industries." But hold it, one of her sources -- or is that her one source -- told her that Google is bad. I wonder what kind of legwork it took to find him [note: see 3]

2. Nice to be ahead of the story on the effect of the internet on traditional media/ businesses, Margaret.

3. Margaret's confession that she does all her research via Google -- "Who needs researchers when you have Google?" -- certainly goes along way to explaining the quality of the research that goes into most of her columns. I wonder if she realizes that "[the] kinds of stories that generate page views are not the kinds of stories reporters want to write. "

Some of the basics

Climatologists around the world agree on some important points: the climate has been warming and continues to warm, human activities (mostly fossil-fuel burning) have increased the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere from about 280 parts per million to almost 390 parts per million, and this ongoing increase in CO₂ causes the earth to retain more of the sun’s warmth. Climatologists can’t explain the recent warming trend without including the effects of this increase in CO₂ (and the resulting increase in water vapour, which evaporates as temperature increases, and amplifies the CO₂ effect). In particular, observations show there has been no significant increase in solar activity. Glaciers and ice caps are in retreat—and, though they have retreated before, the slow orbital changes that have driven those cycles in the past aren’t at work this time. Further, the fact that those orbital changes could drive those cycles depends on a small signal- a slight increase in sunlight in the northern hemisphere- being amplified by the earth’s climate system. CO₂ increase is also small signal- but it’s growing rapidly, and the same processes that turned a slight increase in northern sunlight into the end of the last ice age are already amplifying that small signal.

But many people refuse to take global warming seriously. Rex Murphy recently compared those who argue against global warming to Galileo, likening the vast majority of climate scientists to the dogmatic religious defenders of Ptolemy’s earth-centered astronomy.

Sorry, Rex, but Galileo—a brilliant satirist—would have made mincemeat of you and your denialist crew. It’s true that scientists sometimes get things wrong, but the clerics and dogmatists who opposed Galileo were bent on asserting the church’s authority over science, not defending a scientific consensus. A better example for Rex's purposes would be Newton’s mechanics: for a long while, the best scientific minds thought mechanics was the final word on physics, but now we know that quantum mechanics is needed to understand many phenomena. But even this isn’t much help to Rex. Newton’s mechanics still works as well as ever—it’s still reliable for its former applications and for many more that scientists continue to develop. It’s not the final word in physics, but it’s still effective and reliable.

Rex and other skeptics claim that our inability to predict the weather more than a few days in advance demonstrates just how absurd it is to make predictions about the climate many years from now. But this is just wrong (Wolfgang Pauli would have said it's not even wrong). Climate is average weather, and averages are much easier to predict than the individual events they are averages of. I can’t predict how many games the Flames will win this year, but I can easily predict the average proportion of games that NHL teams will win: 50%. After all, on the present rules every game has a winner (and a loser).

Climate scientists understand the basic processes that drive the earth’s climate—how the light from the passes through the atmosphere, warming the air and the surface, how that energy moves around in the atmosphere and from the atmosphere to the oceans, through convection, winds and currents, and how energy is finally radiated, at lower frequencies, back up through the atmosphere and into space. Carbon dioxide is an important factor in this last process: it absorbs some important frequencies of infrared light, capturing some of the radiation from the surface and warming the air. Some details have to be added based on observations and known correlations, since we can’t solve the fundamental equations across all the scales, ranging from a few meters to thousands of kilometers. But the models that result are very successful.

Today’s climate models use these processes to predict a wide range of features of the climate, including seasonality, large-scale wind patterns , the distribution of surface temperatures and the higher rate of global warming in the arctic, along with the higher intensity of the winds that surround Antarctica and delay global warming in the colder parts of that continent. None of these models can be tweaked to explain the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century without the effect of increased carbon dioxide. (And, by this way, this increase does really come from the fossil fuels we burn—among other things, the depletion of carbon 14 in the atmosphere proves the additional carbon is old, i.e. fossil carbon.)

Could the scientists just be wrong anyway? Yes, they could. But ignoring their warnings is a huge risk. Agriculture, in particular, depends on the weather averaging out over the years. A significant change in the average could easily disrupt food supplies, destabilizing poorer countries and triggering massive, desperate migrations of hungry people. The Pentagon believes climate change could lead to serious security threats even for the United States—with a military that spends about as much as the rest of the world’s military budgets combined. Even if all we can do is slow the changes and prevent a massive shift in climate (one we couldn’t reverse over the coming centuries), the gains of reducing and delaying any crises is almost certain to be worth the price we pay in some reduction in economic growth. Our grandchildren will thank us—instead of remembering us as selfish fools who played chicken with the planet we all depend on.

UPDATE: For a vigourous response to the Climategate spin, see http://desmogblog.com/elizabeth-may-informed-look-east-anglia-emails

Note: This is a slightly extended version of an article first published in the Lethbridge Herald on Friday, November 13. I thank to the Herald for permission to re-publish material from that article.

Read the [cherry-picked, out of context] emails -- Part I

Two can play at that game Rex.
"Climategate ... has gone to bed with ... lobbyists."You said it Rex, clearly revealing the real source of the putative scandal -- oil industry lobbyists. What else could you mean by your words here, Rex? And your being aware of it, while trying to present the putative scandal as evidence of a global warming conspiracy, suggests that you're in that bed as well -- a veritable menage a trois.

Climate Change: Science, Politics, or Rex Murphy Bullshit.

Last night Rex Murphy gave a blog-provoking commentary on what has been called "climategate" about the hacked emails of a few researchers at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University. Here are some highlights:

Let's hear no more talk of "the science is settled", when it turns out some of the principal scientists behave as if they own the very question of global warming - when they seek to bar opposing research from "peer-reviewed journals”, to embargo journals they can't control, when they urge each other to delete damaging emails before Freedom of Information takes hold, when they talk of "hiding the decline”, when they actually speak of destroying the primary data, and when, now, we do learn that the primary data has been lost or destroyed.

They've "lost" the raw data on which all the models, all the computer generated forecasts; the graphs and projections, are based. You wouldn't accept that at a Grade 9 science fair.

Rex Murphy's commentary is an embarrassment both to the CBC and to the profession of journalism. The science on global warming is settled: literally thousands of peer reviewed journal articles have established both that the phenomenon is occurring and that it has been caused by human action. To deny it in the face of such evidence is to place oneself among creationists, flat-earthers, "truthers", and "birthers" as an ignorant crank. A few cherry-picked quotes from the illegally obtained personal correspondence of a few climate scientists will do nothing to change this. To repeat the lies and distortions of those who stole and disseminated the emails in question is at best to be dupe of these conspirators, and at worst to be complicit in a conspiracy designed to deceive the public in a way which could seriously harm our children and grandchildren. Having a forum at the CBC gives Murphy significant power to influence Canadian public opinion, but with that power comes responsibility. To make a commentary so fraught with ignorance is a violation of that responsibility. Murphy and the CBC should be ashamed.

UPDATE: here's a nice Nature editorial which gives the proper perspective on the "controversy."

UPDATE 2: here's a detailed response to the "controversy."