or, Science and Religion: How not to Understand Their Relation.
Saturday’s Globe and Mail (May 22) includes an interview with novelist Marilyn Robinson and a review of her recent book, Absence of Mind, by John Gray, emeritus professor of European Thought at L.S.E. As is typical in the press’s treatment of attacks on atheism and science, there is a striking confluence of attitudes between Ms. Robinson and Dr. Gray: both are desperately eager to criticize science in general, and especially anyone bold enough to suggest that our understanding of the world and ourselves should be grounded in a scientific approach. Both of them might have done better at this if they had a good understanding of science in the first place. Then at least they might have been able to say clearly what they believe religion has to offer us, and how it complements the scientific world view. Instead, their remarks merely reiterate familiar distortions and gross misunderstandings of what science is and what it has taught us about both the world and ourselves.
Science aims to describe and explain the world and its workings. Unlike religion, it does not promise a path to goodness. Yet in her interview Robinson complains that ‘(a)ll the world’s most appalling weapons are the creation of scientists’, as though this were a failure of science. Both weapons systems and the improvements in health, nutrition and comfort that developed countries have achieved show that science works as claimed: it provides descriptions of the world that we can exploit for our own purposes, whether good or evil. Science doesn’t aim at perfecting humans, or even try to tell us what human perfection would be—those aims belong to religion, though it’s worth noting in passing that religion has not been generally successful at achieving them.
In a remarkable display of what must be either ignorance or interpretive legerdemain, Robinson asserts that the creation story of Genesis I is “surprisingly consistent with the Big Bang, with the emergence of life in progressive stages, and with the remarkable phenomenon of speciation.” This is a disgraceful bit of pandering. The Big Bang has nothing to do with waters, separating the heavens from earth, or ‘letting there be light’; if Robinson can connect the language of Genesis I to a high-energy quantum soup in which all the forces were indistinguishable and space-time itself part of the soup, her hermeneutical skills are also, no doubt, more than good enough to transmute lead into gold. Genesis’ ‘progressive’ stages of creation are utterly incorrect about the order of appearance of different forms of life in the fossil record. And what evolutionary accounts of speciation are anticipated in Genesis? Allopatry? Vicariance? Pre-evolutionary scientists like Linnaeus held, in good biblical form, that each sexually-reproducing species began with an initially created pair. Did they miss something in their reading of the Bible? Could a better Biblical exegesis have pointed us towards the truth before Darwin? Or is Robinson just reading evolution into her bible now that science has discovered and documented the evolutionary story of life?
Robinson complains, of the so-called ‘new’ atheists, that ‘(n)ew thinking is precisely what is never found among them’. This is a pretty cheap shot for such a distinguished author, since the label “new atheists” was not adopted by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett or Christopher Hitchens: it was placed on them by others , to mark them as a new generation of forthright atheists who were prepared, as atheists have been (with some caution, given the penchant of religious authorities for torture and execution of heretics) for millennia, to criticize religion’s claims to authority and to defend a humanistic world view that accepts the primacy of science as a source of knowledge about the world (not as a source of values). Robinson is right on the main point, as most contemporary atheists would agree: there is nothing particularly new in the new atheism. But this only makes her distorted account of it the more shameful.
Openness to new evidence is indeed the heart of science—and scientific views of the world have changed and continue to change rapidly, from the introduction of quantum theory and general relativity in the early part of the twentieth century to the emergence of the Big Bang model of cosmology and the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology to plate tectonics and the biochemical revolution that just last week gave rise to the first organism with a wholly synthetic genome. All these developments have been driven by detailed engagement with empirical evidence and the tight constraints that scientific theories impose on evidence by the inferences they license. If we are ever to develop an understanding of the human mind, it will be through the sciences, and real progress on neurological function, psychological development and the evolutionary roots of the complex, layered human central nervous system continues to be made. If science cannot answer every “essential question” (and remember, science does not purport to tell us what is or is not valuable, good and worthy), a harder question for Robinson remains: why should anyone turn to religion, with its chequered and often brutal history, for those answers?
Robinson claims that the new atheists’ argument (whatever she thinks that is) would “fall to the ground if they were to own up to merely proceeding from a clutch of favoured assumptions”. This is an odd criticism coming from someone who describes herself as a Christian: does she really want to go toe-to-toe over claims of the virgin birth or the resurrection? But what are the ‘favoured assumptions’ she thinks these atheists are making? The success of science in illuminating our world is beyond question; grounded in persistent, common-sense observation and the development of theories that allow us to predict and explain so much of what we observe, science has produced agreement on a wide range of questions that were once undecided, from the workings of the solar system to our own evolutionary origins. And it has put that agreement to effective use, from space probes navigating the solar system to the detection of Neanderthal genes amongst some modern human groups. Surely an approach to knowledge that has such a record deserves quite a lot of credit.
Compare this to the record of religion as a source of knowledge, wisdom and moral principles: Genesis includes two obviously conflicting creation stories, neither of which fits the detailed scientific accounts that we now accept; it also includes an impossible flood-legend, and (to quote Mark Twain) upwards of a thousand lies. Far more grievously, the history of religions’ claims to offer moral insight and direction for personal improvement is not impressive. Tradition-bound institutions guard their power and conceal great sins while continuing to claim absolute moral authority. Of course different religions offer differing stories and positions on all these questions—and they demand their followers accept their stories and positions without question, comparison, or efforts to reason out why one, rather than another, is right about the place of women, the morality of homosexuality, the use of birth control, or the proper treatment of apostates.
The scientific model of reasoned persuasion, grounded in evidence and discussion, would be a better starting point for moral inquiry: as David Hume noted long ago, we share many basic moral tendencies, including altruistic concern for others (demonstrated amongst monkeys and even mice in the form of reluctance to press a food-reward lever that administers a shock to a neighbouring animal). Evolution even provides good explanations for how such tendencies could have arisen: kin-selection and reciprocal altruism allow self-sacrificing behaviour that benefits kin or that is responded to in kind by others to be selected for. A discussion of ethics in which human well being and real evidence of what contributes to human well being come first sounds to me like something worth having—and something more likely to lead to agreements and compromises than iron-age doctrines grounded in regrettably authoritarian and misogynistic cultures. Of course it wouldn’t be easy—but it’s something philosophers have been pursuing for a long while, it underlies the enlightenment political institutions that have spread democracy, imperfectly, around much of the world, and it has even made some concern for public welfare and the common good an intermittently effective force in politics. I’ll put that up against the pie-in-the-sky promise of being born again and raised to the kingdom of heaven any day.
As for the review, well, it’s no better. Larding her work with overblown praise—“Absence of Mind is one of the most thought-stirring inquiries into fundamental questions that has appeared in many years” (I can only suppose Gray simply hasn’t read very much)—Gray’s only quibble is that Robinson thinks humans are very special, a thesis he claims is shared by the new atheists: “Dawkins and his followers believe that consciousness makes humans categorically different from their animal kin” He doesn’t document this claim, which is unsurprising since it’s false. And he’s apparently upset that (as he puts it) “these idealogues insist (they always insist) that consciousness emerged without any kind of supernatural intervention.” How else does Gray propose to explain the emergence of consciousness? Does waving the phrase ‘supernatural intervention’ over the process add anything to our understanding of consciousness? Surely studies of phenomena like blindsight, the timing of neurological events in the course of decision making and the cognitive capacities of fish, chimpanzees and other animals offer far more interesting and helpful hints! Or would Gray prefer the Noachian story of the rainbow to the physical facts of raindrops and refraction?
But the weakness of Gray’s own views emerges full-blown in his conclusion: “Before the emergence of complex forms of life, the environments that humans and other animals experience weren’t simply unperceived. They didn’t exist. Will we ever fully grasp the unimaginably strange process whereby the physical universe has spawned these virtual worlds?” It’s hard at first to make sense out of this. Gray’s reference to virtual worlds suggests it is the ‘inner’ worlds of experience that didn’t exist until complex life arose—and that, of course, seems perfectly sensible. But Gray regards the inner worlds of experience as really outer worlds, constitutive of our environments, not merely how we experience them. Hence the superficially outrageous claim that our ‘environment’ didn’t exist until we and other living things came around to experience it. But in the end this is a simple, and simply feeble, appeal to ignorance. Science can’t tell us in advance what we will or won’t understand fully in time. We now understand why the flux of solar neutrinos at first seemed much less than it ought to be. But to know in advance that we’d figure this out, we’d pretty much have to have had the solution in hand in the first place. The status of consciousness and its relation to physical goings-on in the brain is a philosophical perennial—but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a scientific resolution of the problem. After all, philosophers struggled for centuries to give accounts of physical events like the fall of bodies and the motions of the heavens—and now we actually understand them pretty well. Brains are very complicated things, transforming the storm of photons entering our eyes into sight (both conscious and unconscious) and molecules in food and air into tastes and smells. But there is nothing to be achieved by sitting back, marveling at it all, and exclaiming that science can’t ever unravel these processes—and wisely, Gray doesn’t even claim that it can’t. How that sustains his endorsement of Robinson's empty-headed critique of science is the real mystery here.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Two-Tier University System
Like most of her columns, Margaret's latest attack on the Canadian university system is a mishmash of prediction, prescription, and wishful thinking. Her prescription is that Canada move to a two-tier university system consisting of a few elite research-centred institutions and a majority of teaching centred institutions. Her prediction is that Canada will continue to have a one-tier system but with fewer tenured research faculty and more of the teaching load covered by untenured sessional instructors without PhD’s. And her wish is that, in any event, university faculty will get their comeuppance.
Her prediction is based both on (1) the pressure provincial governments are placing on universities to increase enrollments while reducing costs and (2) the public perception -- which Margaret is helping to engender -- that university faculty are overpaid and under-worked and that much of their research (especially in the humanities and social sciences) is of little or no value. Since Canadian universities have already been evolving in this way for a number of years, Margaret's prediction that they will continue to do so is neither particularly controversial nor interesting.
Her prescription that Canada move to a two-tier system does require some comment, however. She presents two separate arguments for this conclusion, neither of which are compelling. First, she claims that the principle job of the university and college system is to efficiently deliver mass undergraduate education to 30 or 40 per cent of the population,” and that the current research model that most universities adhere does this very inefficiently. And second, she argues that the benefits of much of the “marginal” research done on the current system are “remarkably obscure.” These arguments reflect a remarkable ignorance of both the nature and value of universities.
Contra Margaret, universities are not primarily teaching institutions, but rather are centres for the development and interchange of ideas. This, of course, includes undergraduate teaching, but it also involves a whole lot more. The teaching-centred institutions in Margaret's proposed two-tiered system would be universities in name only. What she is really proposing is a vastly reduced university system and a vastly increased college system in which most post-secondary education would occur. Moreover, the value of a university is not ultimately measured by the impact of the research (or teaching) carried on their upon the broader society in which it is located. Centres of the free and unfettered development and exchange of ideas are valuable in their own right. Some of the ideas developed in such an institutions do, of course, have a positive societal impact; others range from downright stupid to even dangerous. But the mere fact of their being places in which such ideas can be freely developed, explored, and exchanged is what gives universities their value.
Canadians may ultimately decide upon a reduced university system. Or they may decide to allow the trend of offloading undergraduate teaching onto sessional instructors to continue. Hell, we even decide might to fund our universities to the extent that all undergraduate teaching is performed by tenured or tenure-stream faculty (with small class sizes and in properly equipped classrooms -- a guy can dream, can't he?) But however we decide, our decision ought to be an informed one. Margaret's not helping
Her prediction is based both on (1) the pressure provincial governments are placing on universities to increase enrollments while reducing costs and (2) the public perception -- which Margaret is helping to engender -- that university faculty are overpaid and under-worked and that much of their research (especially in the humanities and social sciences) is of little or no value. Since Canadian universities have already been evolving in this way for a number of years, Margaret's prediction that they will continue to do so is neither particularly controversial nor interesting.
Her prescription that Canada move to a two-tier system does require some comment, however. She presents two separate arguments for this conclusion, neither of which are compelling. First, she claims that the principle job of the university and college system is to efficiently deliver mass undergraduate education to 30 or 40 per cent of the population,” and that the current research model that most universities adhere does this very inefficiently. And second, she argues that the benefits of much of the “marginal” research done on the current system are “remarkably obscure.” These arguments reflect a remarkable ignorance of both the nature and value of universities.
Contra Margaret, universities are not primarily teaching institutions, but rather are centres for the development and interchange of ideas. This, of course, includes undergraduate teaching, but it also involves a whole lot more. The teaching-centred institutions in Margaret's proposed two-tiered system would be universities in name only. What she is really proposing is a vastly reduced university system and a vastly increased college system in which most post-secondary education would occur. Moreover, the value of a university is not ultimately measured by the impact of the research (or teaching) carried on their upon the broader society in which it is located. Centres of the free and unfettered development and exchange of ideas are valuable in their own right. Some of the ideas developed in such an institutions do, of course, have a positive societal impact; others range from downright stupid to even dangerous. But the mere fact of their being places in which such ideas can be freely developed, explored, and exchanged is what gives universities their value.
Canadians may ultimately decide upon a reduced university system. Or they may decide to allow the trend of offloading undergraduate teaching onto sessional instructors to continue. Hell, we even decide might to fund our universities to the extent that all undergraduate teaching is performed by tenured or tenure-stream faculty (with small class sizes and in properly equipped classrooms -- a guy can dream, can't he?) But however we decide, our decision ought to be an informed one. Margaret's not helping
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Margaret and Diversty Redux
There are two separate questions:
1. Is diversity in the workplace an end in itself or simply a means of combatting unjust discrimination in hiring and promotion?
2. Are hiring and promotion quotas and/or diversity training effective means of achieving these goals?
Re. 1, my own view is that workplace diversity policies should be viewed as a means of combatting discrimination rather than an end in themselves.
Re.2, since hiring and promotion quotas are prima facie unjust, they should be utilized only for groups who continue to be subjected to serious discrimination. Although mildly irritating, there is nothing particularly unjust about being subjectived to diversity training as a condition of employment. But such techniques are, in general, not likely to be particularly effective in instilling non-discriminatory attitudes in the workforce.
Upshot: although the tone of Margaret's column may warm the cockles of the Neanderthal heart, she's not entirely out to lunch on this one.
1. Is diversity in the workplace an end in itself or simply a means of combatting unjust discrimination in hiring and promotion?
2. Are hiring and promotion quotas and/or diversity training effective means of achieving these goals?
Re. 1, my own view is that workplace diversity policies should be viewed as a means of combatting discrimination rather than an end in themselves.
Re.2, since hiring and promotion quotas are prima facie unjust, they should be utilized only for groups who continue to be subjected to serious discrimination. Although mildly irritating, there is nothing particularly unjust about being subjectived to diversity training as a condition of employment. But such techniques are, in general, not likely to be particularly effective in instilling non-discriminatory attitudes in the workforce.
Upshot: although the tone of Margaret's column may warm the cockles of the Neanderthal heart, she's not entirely out to lunch on this one.
Monday, March 29, 2010
One paragraph -- three fallacies
One paragraph, three fallacies -- you go girl:
"[1]In this case, [students are] only repeating what they've been taught. [2] For years, they have been told that discrimination is the highest crime of all. [3] Today, this is commonly interpreted to mean that everybody has the right to be free from any kind of insult, upset, or perturbation that might pose a challenge to their peace of mind ..."
1. On the basis of nearly 20 years of teaching at 3 different universities, I can assure you that that very few students are inclined to simply accept as gospel truth whatever their professors tell them. And most of them would be insulted by the suggestion.
2. I am sure that many professors have told their students that unwarranted discrimination -- i.e., that not based on relevant differences -- is a bad thing. It is, after all, a bad thing. But the "highest crime of all" -- worse than rape, murder, genocide? That's just crazy talk. Even if the odd professor has made a claim along these lines, it would almost certainly be hyperbole.
3. Even if discrimination were the highest crime -- which it isn't -- that wouldn't entail that any insult, etc. counts as discrimination. Issues having to do with the nature of discrimination are simply orthogonal to issues having to do with the seriousness of discrimination. Even if the "common" interpretation is common, it's certainly not well motivated. And, well, probably not very common either.
"[1]In this case, [students are] only repeating what they've been taught. [2] For years, they have been told that discrimination is the highest crime of all. [3] Today, this is commonly interpreted to mean that everybody has the right to be free from any kind of insult, upset, or perturbation that might pose a challenge to their peace of mind ..."
1. On the basis of nearly 20 years of teaching at 3 different universities, I can assure you that that very few students are inclined to simply accept as gospel truth whatever their professors tell them. And most of them would be insulted by the suggestion.
2. I am sure that many professors have told their students that unwarranted discrimination -- i.e., that not based on relevant differences -- is a bad thing. It is, after all, a bad thing. But the "highest crime of all" -- worse than rape, murder, genocide? That's just crazy talk. Even if the odd professor has made a claim along these lines, it would almost certainly be hyperbole.
3. Even if discrimination were the highest crime -- which it isn't -- that wouldn't entail that any insult, etc. counts as discrimination. Issues having to do with the nature of discrimination are simply orthogonal to issues having to do with the seriousness of discrimination. Even if the "common" interpretation is common, it's certainly not well motivated. And, well, probably not very common either.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Museum pieces
Margaret Somerville says, "Legalizing euthanasia causes death and dying to lose the moral context within which they must be viewed." The moral context to which she refers is the presumption of an inviolable sanctity of life; and the slippery slope of legalization she invokes is one wherein this putative sanctity loses its trumping force in moral decision-making. This is, of course, all old hat -- her argument might even be described as quaint but for its often deleterious impact on people's lives and deaths.
Even if life had some such sanctity, contra Somerville, considerations of pain and suffering, social isolation, autonomy, and, yes, even health care costs could provide relevant grounds for overriding it. But the putative sanctity of life is merely a religious relic: a museum piece rather than the centerpiece of serious public -- or even academic -- debate.
Yes, euthanasia legislation is a thorny business. A delicate balance needs to be found between respecting autonomy in life and death decisions, preventing abuse, and protecting lives that remain valuable to those leading them. And uncomfortable as it may be, the costs of sustaining unsalvageable lives may relevant as well. Reverting to a medieval morality, as Somerville would have us do, is unlikely to be of much help here.
Note: now that Rex has gone (at least from the pages of the G&M), I seem to be reduced to criticizing various Margarets. To any charge of sexism that might ensue, I simply appeal to the authority of Margaret Wente when she "argues" that "silent sexism" is a mere chimera created for self-interested reasons by the victimization industry.
Even if life had some such sanctity, contra Somerville, considerations of pain and suffering, social isolation, autonomy, and, yes, even health care costs could provide relevant grounds for overriding it. But the putative sanctity of life is merely a religious relic: a museum piece rather than the centerpiece of serious public -- or even academic -- debate.
Yes, euthanasia legislation is a thorny business. A delicate balance needs to be found between respecting autonomy in life and death decisions, preventing abuse, and protecting lives that remain valuable to those leading them. And uncomfortable as it may be, the costs of sustaining unsalvageable lives may relevant as well. Reverting to a medieval morality, as Somerville would have us do, is unlikely to be of much help here.
Note: now that Rex has gone (at least from the pages of the G&M), I seem to be reduced to criticizing various Margarets. To any charge of sexism that might ensue, I simply appeal to the authority of Margaret Wente when she "argues" that "silent sexism" is a mere chimera created for self-interested reasons by the victimization industry.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Reproductive rights and Publicly Funded Fertility Treatment
Margaret's target this time is public funding of fertility treatments. In particular her concern is with women who hold off on having children until they have established careers only to run into difficulties getting pregnant at their relatively advanced ages. What she objects to is the argument that the government ought to pay for in-vitro fertilization treatments for such women on the grounds that women have a right to get pregnant. While acknowledging that women have such a right -- "Well, sure, of course" -- she denies that this entitles them to public funding for their fertility treatments.
For a change, Margaret is at least onto something -- the distinction between positive and negative rights: the fact that women have negative reproductive rights -- rights to government non-interference in their reproductive decisions -- does not entail that they have positive reproductive rights -- rights to government assistance in achieving their reproductive goals. But the logical point does not establish that women are not entitled to government aid, only that any such entitlement does not simply follow from the right to non-interference.
Now, of course, government resources -- that is, tax dollars -- are limited and have to be divided among competing interests. But insofar as we are genuinely committed to gender equality -- and, hence, don't think women should be forced to choose between career and family -- we are obliged dedicate a portion of these resources to aid women in achieving their reproductive goals. This does not entail that fertility treatments for women who have put off having children need to be publicly funded -- the money might be more effectively spent on programs, such as subsidized daycare, which enable younger mothers to pursue their career goals. But it does entail that women who desire to pursue both career and family are entitled to a share of government resources to help them do so.
For a change, Margaret is at least onto something -- the distinction between positive and negative rights: the fact that women have negative reproductive rights -- rights to government non-interference in their reproductive decisions -- does not entail that they have positive reproductive rights -- rights to government assistance in achieving their reproductive goals. But the logical point does not establish that women are not entitled to government aid, only that any such entitlement does not simply follow from the right to non-interference.
Now, of course, government resources -- that is, tax dollars -- are limited and have to be divided among competing interests. But insofar as we are genuinely committed to gender equality -- and, hence, don't think women should be forced to choose between career and family -- we are obliged dedicate a portion of these resources to aid women in achieving their reproductive goals. This does not entail that fertility treatments for women who have put off having children need to be publicly funded -- the money might be more effectively spent on programs, such as subsidized daycare, which enable younger mothers to pursue their career goals. But it does entail that women who desire to pursue both career and family are entitled to a share of government resources to help them do so.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Settling some Science
Once again Margaret Wente is hyperventilating over hot new talking points in climate-change denial circles. During an interview, climatologist Dr. Phil Jones said that CRU temperature data shows the increase in global temperature over the last fifteen years is ‘less than statistically significant’.
To quote Homer Simpson in a similar state of mind, whoo hoo! A real climate scientist is saying that global warming might not even be happening! It’s all over, this is denialism’s wet dream on a plate (ugh)! Right? Well, no. Dr. Jones said, truthfully, that warming over the last fifteen years falls just short of being statistically significant. Ms. Wente is over the moon about this: “Hello? When other people say that, they’re called deniers”, she proclaims. Not so. This is a trivial result, a product of the short period and the wide year-to-year variation in global temperatures. The warming over this period, as measured by CRU, falls short of being statistically significant.
This means that the possibility of the observed warming being due to chance variation in year to year temperatures is not ruled out with 95% confidence. The rate of warming, at about .12 oC per decade, is slow enough that a chance pattern of year-to-year variation over the last fifteen years that just happened to finish as much warmer as that period did has a probability higher than 5% (in fact, as Dr. Jones pointed out in his interview, this probability is just barely over 5%).
This 5% probability is the standard threshold for ‘statistical significance’—but it’s not a magical line handed down from on high; it’s just a choice about how much evidence we standardly require before rejecting the hypothesis that an observed correlation is due to mere chance. If we suspect there’s a real effect (and we certainly do in this case) then we go looking for more data to check. The larger the sample size, the better your chance of significant results. And, lo and behold, over the last twenty years observed warming in the CRU data is statistically significant! (It’s also worth noting that we are now in a deep solar minimum, but 2009 was still the second warmest year on record—it’s funny how facts about solar output are important to deniers when they might help to explain observed warming, and completely neglected when they don’t.)
Also, if we use the GISS temperature measurements instead (which include wider coverage of the arctic based on correlations between measured temperatures over fairly large regions), the increase over the last fifteen years is statistically significant—that is, the probability of the observed increase being due to chance turns out to be a bit less than 5%. No doubt, this difference between the two main measures of global temperature will soon be a new topic of intense discussion in the denialsphere: how could our two best measures of earth’s temperature disagree on this basic question?
So if all the evidence we had for global warming was the warming over the last fifteen years in CRU data, we would be uncertain (by the arbitrary standard that rules out chance only when the probability of an observation being due to chance is less than 1 in 20). But the balance of probability would strongly favour warming. The odds of the observed increase being due to chance variation are less than 1 in 10, but not less than 1 in 20. Of course we have much more evidence than that, and the odds that the observed warming is due to chance when we look at more data and longer periods are far less than 1 in 20. Finally, on longer scales the warming grows more and more significant, that is, our confidence that it is not a matter of chance becomes higher and higher.
Ms. Wente’s excitement about Dr. Jones’s statement reveals nothing about climate science, but a lot about her ignorance of statistics and probability. Would she also be excited to know that if we consider only a few days in February and a few days in May, the temperature difference between the two months can easily fail to be statistically significant?
Along the way Ms. Wente once more tosses out a brief concession, admitting that anthropogenic global warming is settled. The ‘third position’ she now identifies herself with accepts “the underlying science, which says that climate change is happening and human activity is a factor”. Surely this implies that she does admit the science is settled? Of course not! Having conceded the conclusion she has resisted for so long, she continues to dismiss and belittle the problem we face. The science is still not settled for her, because her ‘third position” (endorsed, she claims, by unnamed experts) says that “threats of imminent catastrophe have been wildly exaggerated,” and “(w)e don’t know much about what might happen in the future, especially when it comes to specifics such as rising sea levels or regional droughts.”
There are indeed still questions about the details of just how much warming will result, and just how bad the consequences will be—and no serious defender of the science of global warming, from Al Gore to David Suzuki to James Hansen, Michael Mann and Phil Jones himself has denied this. But, pace Ms. Wente, this doesn’t mean we don’t know a lot about what might happen: the paleoclimatological record shows that the last time temperatures were just a few degrees warmer than they now are, sea level was meters higher. How quickly that rise in sea level occurred is not known, but nothing we know rules out a rapid rise in the near future: sea levels fall slowly as the earth cools, but they rise much faster during warming, and the resolution of our data doesn’t show a delay. Climate shifts can be dramatic in other ways too, altering rainfall patterns, disrupting life cycles for plants and animals and increasing destructive large-scale weather events. Both models and the past climatological record show that the climate can be very sensitive, and any major changes will be difficult if not impossible for many people and countries to cope with. Further, though the worst consequences may be delayed, our failure to act now can lock in drastic changes later: our descendants will suffer from our reluctance to make changes in our energy systems.
So Ms. Wente is pulling another fast one here—she is moving the goalposts. It wasn’t long ago that she disputed that anthropogenic global warming was happening, eagerly joining in the attack on Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of past temperatures and questioning whether present warming is in any way exceptional. Now she accepts that it’s happening, and that it’s at least partly due to our greenhouse gas emissions. But she demands (before she’ll admit the science is ‘settled’) that we know just how much warming will happen, how soon, and what the consequences will be. But this is ridiculous: there will always be some level of uncertainty about these things: Ms. Wente has picked a reading of what it takes to ‘settle the science’ that implies the science can never be settled. This is a nice rhetorical trick, but pretty silly when you think about it.
Part of moving the goalposts is forgetting the past. Several years ago, Ms. Wente was similarly excited over the ‘Hockey stick’ debate, a short-term obsession of the denialsphere triggered by the prominence of Michael Mann’s reconstruction of past temperatures over the last 1,000 years. Ms. Wente gleefully announced that MacIntyre and McKitrick had shown Mann’s work was wrong and that current warming is not exceptional. But subsequent work by multiple climate scientists and a detailed review by the American Academy of Science have confirmed Mann’s pioneering work and extended it using different proxies and more refined statistical methods. (Worse for Ms. Wente, the Republican-led House ‘investigation’ of Mann’s work that led to the Wegman report attacking Mann’s work has been exposed as a set-up job, manipulated by Representative Joe Barton and others: see DeSmog and Deepclimate.) But it seems Ms. Wente has forgotten all about this episode. Past manipulations and the failures of denialist arguments simply disappear from her story, as she spins the latest ‘defeat’ for global warming science while pronouncing her own views to be moderate, sensible, balanced and wise. Isn’t it funny that her views also keep turning out to be wrong?
To quote Homer Simpson in a similar state of mind, whoo hoo! A real climate scientist is saying that global warming might not even be happening! It’s all over, this is denialism’s wet dream on a plate (ugh)! Right? Well, no. Dr. Jones said, truthfully, that warming over the last fifteen years falls just short of being statistically significant. Ms. Wente is over the moon about this: “Hello? When other people say that, they’re called deniers”, she proclaims. Not so. This is a trivial result, a product of the short period and the wide year-to-year variation in global temperatures. The warming over this period, as measured by CRU, falls short of being statistically significant.
This means that the possibility of the observed warming being due to chance variation in year to year temperatures is not ruled out with 95% confidence. The rate of warming, at about .12 oC per decade, is slow enough that a chance pattern of year-to-year variation over the last fifteen years that just happened to finish as much warmer as that period did has a probability higher than 5% (in fact, as Dr. Jones pointed out in his interview, this probability is just barely over 5%).
This 5% probability is the standard threshold for ‘statistical significance’—but it’s not a magical line handed down from on high; it’s just a choice about how much evidence we standardly require before rejecting the hypothesis that an observed correlation is due to mere chance. If we suspect there’s a real effect (and we certainly do in this case) then we go looking for more data to check. The larger the sample size, the better your chance of significant results. And, lo and behold, over the last twenty years observed warming in the CRU data is statistically significant! (It’s also worth noting that we are now in a deep solar minimum, but 2009 was still the second warmest year on record—it’s funny how facts about solar output are important to deniers when they might help to explain observed warming, and completely neglected when they don’t.)
Also, if we use the GISS temperature measurements instead (which include wider coverage of the arctic based on correlations between measured temperatures over fairly large regions), the increase over the last fifteen years is statistically significant—that is, the probability of the observed increase being due to chance turns out to be a bit less than 5%. No doubt, this difference between the two main measures of global temperature will soon be a new topic of intense discussion in the denialsphere: how could our two best measures of earth’s temperature disagree on this basic question?
So if all the evidence we had for global warming was the warming over the last fifteen years in CRU data, we would be uncertain (by the arbitrary standard that rules out chance only when the probability of an observation being due to chance is less than 1 in 20). But the balance of probability would strongly favour warming. The odds of the observed increase being due to chance variation are less than 1 in 10, but not less than 1 in 20. Of course we have much more evidence than that, and the odds that the observed warming is due to chance when we look at more data and longer periods are far less than 1 in 20. Finally, on longer scales the warming grows more and more significant, that is, our confidence that it is not a matter of chance becomes higher and higher.
Ms. Wente’s excitement about Dr. Jones’s statement reveals nothing about climate science, but a lot about her ignorance of statistics and probability. Would she also be excited to know that if we consider only a few days in February and a few days in May, the temperature difference between the two months can easily fail to be statistically significant?
Along the way Ms. Wente once more tosses out a brief concession, admitting that anthropogenic global warming is settled. The ‘third position’ she now identifies herself with accepts “the underlying science, which says that climate change is happening and human activity is a factor”. Surely this implies that she does admit the science is settled? Of course not! Having conceded the conclusion she has resisted for so long, she continues to dismiss and belittle the problem we face. The science is still not settled for her, because her ‘third position” (endorsed, she claims, by unnamed experts) says that “threats of imminent catastrophe have been wildly exaggerated,” and “(w)e don’t know much about what might happen in the future, especially when it comes to specifics such as rising sea levels or regional droughts.”
There are indeed still questions about the details of just how much warming will result, and just how bad the consequences will be—and no serious defender of the science of global warming, from Al Gore to David Suzuki to James Hansen, Michael Mann and Phil Jones himself has denied this. But, pace Ms. Wente, this doesn’t mean we don’t know a lot about what might happen: the paleoclimatological record shows that the last time temperatures were just a few degrees warmer than they now are, sea level was meters higher. How quickly that rise in sea level occurred is not known, but nothing we know rules out a rapid rise in the near future: sea levels fall slowly as the earth cools, but they rise much faster during warming, and the resolution of our data doesn’t show a delay. Climate shifts can be dramatic in other ways too, altering rainfall patterns, disrupting life cycles for plants and animals and increasing destructive large-scale weather events. Both models and the past climatological record show that the climate can be very sensitive, and any major changes will be difficult if not impossible for many people and countries to cope with. Further, though the worst consequences may be delayed, our failure to act now can lock in drastic changes later: our descendants will suffer from our reluctance to make changes in our energy systems.
So Ms. Wente is pulling another fast one here—she is moving the goalposts. It wasn’t long ago that she disputed that anthropogenic global warming was happening, eagerly joining in the attack on Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of past temperatures and questioning whether present warming is in any way exceptional. Now she accepts that it’s happening, and that it’s at least partly due to our greenhouse gas emissions. But she demands (before she’ll admit the science is ‘settled’) that we know just how much warming will happen, how soon, and what the consequences will be. But this is ridiculous: there will always be some level of uncertainty about these things: Ms. Wente has picked a reading of what it takes to ‘settle the science’ that implies the science can never be settled. This is a nice rhetorical trick, but pretty silly when you think about it.
Part of moving the goalposts is forgetting the past. Several years ago, Ms. Wente was similarly excited over the ‘Hockey stick’ debate, a short-term obsession of the denialsphere triggered by the prominence of Michael Mann’s reconstruction of past temperatures over the last 1,000 years. Ms. Wente gleefully announced that MacIntyre and McKitrick had shown Mann’s work was wrong and that current warming is not exceptional. But subsequent work by multiple climate scientists and a detailed review by the American Academy of Science have confirmed Mann’s pioneering work and extended it using different proxies and more refined statistical methods. (Worse for Ms. Wente, the Republican-led House ‘investigation’ of Mann’s work that led to the Wegman report attacking Mann’s work has been exposed as a set-up job, manipulated by Representative Joe Barton and others: see DeSmog and Deepclimate.) But it seems Ms. Wente has forgotten all about this episode. Past manipulations and the failures of denialist arguments simply disappear from her story, as she spins the latest ‘defeat’ for global warming science while pronouncing her own views to be moderate, sensible, balanced and wise. Isn’t it funny that her views also keep turning out to be wrong?
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Horse Race to Disaster
Margaret Wente has returned to her Saturday spot with a column ("collapse") that reads like a typical, triumphant bit of climate change denial. But it's not; it's a bizarrely triumphant political analysis of the political horse race over whether any serious action will be taken on climate change in the foreseeable future. Ms. Wente argues for the negative, and, sadly, she may be right. But what's most interesting here is that, briefly and rather late in the column, she explicitly declares "None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid." This makes the eager spin of the political discussion that occupies the rest of her column just plain weird: various small 'scandals', blown out of proportion in the press and blown still further out of proportion by Ms. Wente's presentation, are damaging efforts to come to grips with the threat of climate change. Ms. Wente isn't denying that there is a threat. But she's utterly gleeful about detailing and, in fact, exaggerating the damage to the political case for action on climate change.
Since there are so many distortions and exaggerations in the column, this response will be far longer than I'd like. That's the trouble with what we call, in the parallel debate between evolution and creationism, the 'Gish Gallop': a debating technique famously used by creationist Duane Gish to discomfit his opponents, by rhyming off dozens of falsehoods, distortions and exaggerations in a quick few paragraphs, and leaving the other side the unenviable choice between examining and refuting each in careful detail (time's up, and the audience isn't listening carefully enough to follow anyway) or dealing with at most a few (what? you didn't say anything about claim 3 or claim 7 or claim 25). Since this is a blog and I can go on as long as I please (or my family will tolerate) I'll take a (modest) version of the first approach here. Please be patient.
Wente's column begins with the IPCC error regarding Himalayan glaciers, which are indeed melting, but not as quickly as a non-peer-reviewed report cited by the IPCC had claimed. "But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it", Wente remarks-- leaving the impression that a gross exaggeration was deliberately included in the IPCC's last report. This is, of course, false. The IPCC is a massive project, with separate groups examining different aspects of the issue. Working Group 1 addresses the basic science of climate change, Working Group 2 works on "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability", and Working Group 3 studies ways to reduce GHG emissions and otherwise mitigate climate change. The world's top glaciologists are involved in the process, but this claim in the Group 2 report slipped past them-- no expert on the Himalayan glaciers (which are indeed threatened) caught the error.
From this exaggeration, Ms. Wente moves to a quick, cherry-picked evaluation from the "brilliant" Walter Russell Mead, an influential commentator on American foreign policy, a big supporter of the disastrous invasion of Iraq who warned of potential American economic stagnation--in 1992, just before the massive growth in jobs and employment of the Clinton Presidency. Mead claims, to Ms. Wente's approval, that "(t)he global warming movement as we have known it is dead." He may be right, but his track record on actual policy recommendations isn't encouraging. Further, and interestingly, Mead continues by claiming that a major international agreement was never in the cards anyway: his analysis is that the complexity and difficulty of agreeing to share the burdens of action on climate change is too much for the international system to cope with, raising serious doubt about whether there's any blame at all to be laid at the feet of the IPCC and scientists who are trying to warn the world about the consequences of inaction.
From here Wente's whirlwind tour moves on to the East Anglia email hack-- a propaganda success for deniers, perhaps, but no more than that: the only serious matter revealed in 13 years of emails were some inappropriate responses, at East Anglia, to repeated demands for the release of documents that had reached the level of outright harassment-- does Ms. Wente think she could continue to do her job while receiving and responding to tens of formal demands for access to her correspondence, notes and other materials monthly? All the other (widely cited but rarely examined) 'smoking guns' turned out to be quotes out of context and outright distortions of what was in the emails. But she declares her denialist reading of the emails just right: "these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide"-- a grossly unfair non-sequitur. If they did have a lot to hide, surely there would actually be some evidence of this in the emails and the data (pretty well all of it) that's been released?
Then it's on to citations of (small bits of) bad data from Chinese weather stations, in a report by Phil Jones and Wei-Chyung Wang. These data were part of the support, in IPCC 2007, for the claim that warming related to cities rather than climate change was insignificant. While the quality control of those data was apparently not as good as it should have been, similar comparisons have been made elsewhere, for example by the NOAA, and by testing various effects, such as a systematic difference between windy and calm nights in urban temperature records-- and the results are the same: the storied 'urban heat island effect' is negligible.
Another small problem for Working Group 2 is next, a possibly unreliable report on just how sensitive the Amazon rain forest may be to reductions in precipitation-- an article that one expert dismisses as "a mess". But how important is this? Multiple reports in the peer-reviewed literature show that climate change may alter precipitation and dramatically change the nature of the Amazon forest.
Ms. Wente then turns to the latest 'scandal du jour', the debate over Dr. Regenda Pachauri's Energy and Resources Unit, which has received millions of dollars to study the effects of glacial melting in the Himalayas. Pachauri is the current head of the IPCC; Wente claims that these grants are based "on the strength of that bogus glacier claim". But again, this is a tempest in a teapot. That the Himalayan glaciers are endangered is not in question-- the mistake was the claim that the glaciers could be gone by 2035. Studies on the effects of glacial melting are needed, whether the complete loss of those glaciers is 25 years away or 75 years away--and our experience with rapid Arctic ice melt shows that things can turn out to be worse than even the most pessimistic scientists expect. When summer river flows from those glaciers decline, major agricultural areas in India, China and especially Pakistan will be in serious trouble.
The credibility of the IPCC has been damaged, says Ms. Wente. Of course this can be read in two ways: is the IPCC perfect? Of course not, and anyone who thought so was silly and (no doubt) disappointed. But is the IPCC a credible source of information and advice on the state of climate science, the risks and impacts of climate change and what measures might mitigate them? Yes, obviously it is. Like any large group of people dealing with massive amounts of information, it will make mistakes. But the IPCC process of detailed examination of the scientific literature by multiple experts, with input from many different sources carefully (even if, yes, imperfectly) reviewed is an admirable and important accomplishment.
Wente closes with a flourish: "By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement." But who's exaggerating? Are the certainties exaggerated by the IPCC? Does the existence of two small errors in the IPCC "impacts" report constitute a general pattern of exaggeration? Does the fact that skeptics have been criticized for their regular, gross distortions of the facts (from George Will's repeated nonsense about sea-ice levels to widespread claims of cooling based on cherry-picked starting and ending dates to Ms. Wente's own eager endorsement of of denialist attacks on Michael Mann's (sound and increasingly well-supported) 'hockey stick' graph), constitute 'demonization'? How imminent and severe must catastrophe be before it would OK with Wente to sound the alarm?
Yes, there are uncertainties in science, but scientists continue to work to resolve and reduce them. The historical evidence that Earth's climate is a sensitive beast is clear-- if it weren't, the Milankovitch cycles couldn't possibly explain past cycles of glacial advance and retreat. The collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica may take centuries, but once it's underway, we cannot stop it-- and nothing in the historical record shows substantial delay between climate forcing and the big melt. The climate forcing we're now imposing is much more rapid and much larger than the forcing that ended the last ice-age.
Before closing, I want to turn a more immediate question: what's going on here? There's an increasingly extreme double-standard at work, not just in this column by Margaret Wente, but in the world of journalism in general. It seems that scientists and organizations involved in climate change research and advocacy must be pure as the driven snow to avoid extensive, detailed, nit-picking and exaggerated criticism. But the lies and confusions and distortions and motivations of denialists are not even worth mentioning, let alone examining carefully or mentioning in the same breath with which climate scientists' reputations are blown away. Even journalists who are broadly supportive of the scientific consensus-- now more than a decade old and more firmly established than ever-- have accepted the double standard: they systematically examine and report even tiny flaws or errors in IPCC reports and the personal behaviour of every significant climate scientist, while passing over the dishonesty, zombie arguments and long-established P.R. campaign whose funding, whose main figures and whose motives have been laid bare over and over again, to yawns of indifference from Ms. Wente and her fellow-travelers. Cherry-picking errors and mistakes on the part of scientists and organizations who are worried about global warming and ignoring the regular pattern of mistakes, flawed arguments and outright speculation in work by the few remaining skeptics who actually do climate science, and the quick assumption that environmental activists' claims can be dismissed outright as suspicious because of their motives, while ignoring the role of motives amongst the skeptics-- surely there's something wrong here!
And last, I want to close on a different note-- a note that really rings false in Wente's column. If she's not denying the vast body of evidence that climate change is happening, if she's not denying that human activities are largely responsible, surely she ought to be worried if the political debate is really going as badly as she says. Is it good news, if the IPCC, the largest, most systematic effort to evaluate and report on the state of a scientific question in history, turns out to be a failure not in the sense of getting the science wrong, but in the sense of failing to persuade politicians and populations to actually do something about a real problem? Is the triumph of denialist propaganda, the general journalistic obsession with small errors by serious scientists and the apparent utter disregard for the documented dishonesty of climate change denialists, really something Ms. Wente should take pleasure and delight in announcing (and exaggerating)?
Is this an issue for cheering and booing? Does Wente think 'her side' of the public issue has won, and damn the consequences? The consequences we're talking about include, on the middle-of-the-road 3 degrees Celsius per CO2 doubling climate sensitivity, truly frightening prospects-- prospects that, failing serious action, will be locked in and unavoidable by the middle of this century, even if privileged middle-aged people alive today don't live to see them. Just to list a few, I'm talking about massive glacial melting, the collapse of southwestern and even mid-western farming in the United States and many other farming regions, the continued burning of Australia and the U.S. west coast, and a risk of ocean levels rising as fast as several meters per century, forcing migrations of hundreds of millions (and that's just a start). There may be a delay-- some these consequences may be left for our descendants in the 22nd century to cope with. But they will be inevitable if we don't act. Some will not be delayed enough to protect our children, and our grandchildren will remember us as the blind and selfish lunatics who destroyed their world. The longer action is delayed, the more costly and the less effective it can be-- and the more likely and more serious the disasters that we are risking become. I'm waiting for Margaret's other shoe to drop-- though I'm not holding my breath.
Since there are so many distortions and exaggerations in the column, this response will be far longer than I'd like. That's the trouble with what we call, in the parallel debate between evolution and creationism, the 'Gish Gallop': a debating technique famously used by creationist Duane Gish to discomfit his opponents, by rhyming off dozens of falsehoods, distortions and exaggerations in a quick few paragraphs, and leaving the other side the unenviable choice between examining and refuting each in careful detail (time's up, and the audience isn't listening carefully enough to follow anyway) or dealing with at most a few (what? you didn't say anything about claim 3 or claim 7 or claim 25). Since this is a blog and I can go on as long as I please (or my family will tolerate) I'll take a (modest) version of the first approach here. Please be patient.
Wente's column begins with the IPCC error regarding Himalayan glaciers, which are indeed melting, but not as quickly as a non-peer-reviewed report cited by the IPCC had claimed. "But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it", Wente remarks-- leaving the impression that a gross exaggeration was deliberately included in the IPCC's last report. This is, of course, false. The IPCC is a massive project, with separate groups examining different aspects of the issue. Working Group 1 addresses the basic science of climate change, Working Group 2 works on "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability", and Working Group 3 studies ways to reduce GHG emissions and otherwise mitigate climate change. The world's top glaciologists are involved in the process, but this claim in the Group 2 report slipped past them-- no expert on the Himalayan glaciers (which are indeed threatened) caught the error.
From this exaggeration, Ms. Wente moves to a quick, cherry-picked evaluation from the "brilliant" Walter Russell Mead, an influential commentator on American foreign policy, a big supporter of the disastrous invasion of Iraq who warned of potential American economic stagnation--in 1992, just before the massive growth in jobs and employment of the Clinton Presidency. Mead claims, to Ms. Wente's approval, that "(t)he global warming movement as we have known it is dead." He may be right, but his track record on actual policy recommendations isn't encouraging. Further, and interestingly, Mead continues by claiming that a major international agreement was never in the cards anyway: his analysis is that the complexity and difficulty of agreeing to share the burdens of action on climate change is too much for the international system to cope with, raising serious doubt about whether there's any blame at all to be laid at the feet of the IPCC and scientists who are trying to warn the world about the consequences of inaction.
From here Wente's whirlwind tour moves on to the East Anglia email hack-- a propaganda success for deniers, perhaps, but no more than that: the only serious matter revealed in 13 years of emails were some inappropriate responses, at East Anglia, to repeated demands for the release of documents that had reached the level of outright harassment-- does Ms. Wente think she could continue to do her job while receiving and responding to tens of formal demands for access to her correspondence, notes and other materials monthly? All the other (widely cited but rarely examined) 'smoking guns' turned out to be quotes out of context and outright distortions of what was in the emails. But she declares her denialist reading of the emails just right: "these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide"-- a grossly unfair non-sequitur. If they did have a lot to hide, surely there would actually be some evidence of this in the emails and the data (pretty well all of it) that's been released?
Then it's on to citations of (small bits of) bad data from Chinese weather stations, in a report by Phil Jones and Wei-Chyung Wang. These data were part of the support, in IPCC 2007, for the claim that warming related to cities rather than climate change was insignificant. While the quality control of those data was apparently not as good as it should have been, similar comparisons have been made elsewhere, for example by the NOAA, and by testing various effects, such as a systematic difference between windy and calm nights in urban temperature records-- and the results are the same: the storied 'urban heat island effect' is negligible.
Another small problem for Working Group 2 is next, a possibly unreliable report on just how sensitive the Amazon rain forest may be to reductions in precipitation-- an article that one expert dismisses as "a mess". But how important is this? Multiple reports in the peer-reviewed literature show that climate change may alter precipitation and dramatically change the nature of the Amazon forest.
Ms. Wente then turns to the latest 'scandal du jour', the debate over Dr. Regenda Pachauri's Energy and Resources Unit, which has received millions of dollars to study the effects of glacial melting in the Himalayas. Pachauri is the current head of the IPCC; Wente claims that these grants are based "on the strength of that bogus glacier claim". But again, this is a tempest in a teapot. That the Himalayan glaciers are endangered is not in question-- the mistake was the claim that the glaciers could be gone by 2035. Studies on the effects of glacial melting are needed, whether the complete loss of those glaciers is 25 years away or 75 years away--and our experience with rapid Arctic ice melt shows that things can turn out to be worse than even the most pessimistic scientists expect. When summer river flows from those glaciers decline, major agricultural areas in India, China and especially Pakistan will be in serious trouble.
The credibility of the IPCC has been damaged, says Ms. Wente. Of course this can be read in two ways: is the IPCC perfect? Of course not, and anyone who thought so was silly and (no doubt) disappointed. But is the IPCC a credible source of information and advice on the state of climate science, the risks and impacts of climate change and what measures might mitigate them? Yes, obviously it is. Like any large group of people dealing with massive amounts of information, it will make mistakes. But the IPCC process of detailed examination of the scientific literature by multiple experts, with input from many different sources carefully (even if, yes, imperfectly) reviewed is an admirable and important accomplishment.
Wente closes with a flourish: "By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement." But who's exaggerating? Are the certainties exaggerated by the IPCC? Does the existence of two small errors in the IPCC "impacts" report constitute a general pattern of exaggeration? Does the fact that skeptics have been criticized for their regular, gross distortions of the facts (from George Will's repeated nonsense about sea-ice levels to widespread claims of cooling based on cherry-picked starting and ending dates to Ms. Wente's own eager endorsement of of denialist attacks on Michael Mann's (sound and increasingly well-supported) 'hockey stick' graph), constitute 'demonization'? How imminent and severe must catastrophe be before it would OK with Wente to sound the alarm?
Yes, there are uncertainties in science, but scientists continue to work to resolve and reduce them. The historical evidence that Earth's climate is a sensitive beast is clear-- if it weren't, the Milankovitch cycles couldn't possibly explain past cycles of glacial advance and retreat. The collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica may take centuries, but once it's underway, we cannot stop it-- and nothing in the historical record shows substantial delay between climate forcing and the big melt. The climate forcing we're now imposing is much more rapid and much larger than the forcing that ended the last ice-age.
Before closing, I want to turn a more immediate question: what's going on here? There's an increasingly extreme double-standard at work, not just in this column by Margaret Wente, but in the world of journalism in general. It seems that scientists and organizations involved in climate change research and advocacy must be pure as the driven snow to avoid extensive, detailed, nit-picking and exaggerated criticism. But the lies and confusions and distortions and motivations of denialists are not even worth mentioning, let alone examining carefully or mentioning in the same breath with which climate scientists' reputations are blown away. Even journalists who are broadly supportive of the scientific consensus-- now more than a decade old and more firmly established than ever-- have accepted the double standard: they systematically examine and report even tiny flaws or errors in IPCC reports and the personal behaviour of every significant climate scientist, while passing over the dishonesty, zombie arguments and long-established P.R. campaign whose funding, whose main figures and whose motives have been laid bare over and over again, to yawns of indifference from Ms. Wente and her fellow-travelers. Cherry-picking errors and mistakes on the part of scientists and organizations who are worried about global warming and ignoring the regular pattern of mistakes, flawed arguments and outright speculation in work by the few remaining skeptics who actually do climate science, and the quick assumption that environmental activists' claims can be dismissed outright as suspicious because of their motives, while ignoring the role of motives amongst the skeptics-- surely there's something wrong here!
And last, I want to close on a different note-- a note that really rings false in Wente's column. If she's not denying the vast body of evidence that climate change is happening, if she's not denying that human activities are largely responsible, surely she ought to be worried if the political debate is really going as badly as she says. Is it good news, if the IPCC, the largest, most systematic effort to evaluate and report on the state of a scientific question in history, turns out to be a failure not in the sense of getting the science wrong, but in the sense of failing to persuade politicians and populations to actually do something about a real problem? Is the triumph of denialist propaganda, the general journalistic obsession with small errors by serious scientists and the apparent utter disregard for the documented dishonesty of climate change denialists, really something Ms. Wente should take pleasure and delight in announcing (and exaggerating)?
Is this an issue for cheering and booing? Does Wente think 'her side' of the public issue has won, and damn the consequences? The consequences we're talking about include, on the middle-of-the-road 3 degrees Celsius per CO2 doubling climate sensitivity, truly frightening prospects-- prospects that, failing serious action, will be locked in and unavoidable by the middle of this century, even if privileged middle-aged people alive today don't live to see them. Just to list a few, I'm talking about massive glacial melting, the collapse of southwestern and even mid-western farming in the United States and many other farming regions, the continued burning of Australia and the U.S. west coast, and a risk of ocean levels rising as fast as several meters per century, forcing migrations of hundreds of millions (and that's just a start). There may be a delay-- some these consequences may be left for our descendants in the 22nd century to cope with. But they will be inevitable if we don't act. Some will not be delayed enough to protect our children, and our grandchildren will remember us as the blind and selfish lunatics who destroyed their world. The longer action is delayed, the more costly and the less effective it can be-- and the more likely and more serious the disasters that we are risking become. I'm waiting for Margaret's other shoe to drop-- though I'm not holding my breath.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Margaret Sommerville's Ethical Fascism
This Wednesday, Margaret Sommerville gave us another in a long series of morally purblind columns. Once again the subject was death and dying, and once again Sommerville moved unhesitatingly from her personal views on the value of living through the process of dying, coping with suffering and displaying nobility of character throughout, to an aggressively authoritarian view of what the law should be: Sommerville's personal rejection of euthanasia should be imposed by law on every Canadian, and, presumably, on everyone everywhere in the world.
This shift, from personal moral reflections on how she would prefer to die and what she thinks is valuable about going through death without any hastening of the end to the demand that everyone be forced to do the same, regardless of their personal opinions, their ideas about the value of life, and the actual suffering they may be going through, is almost invisible in her writing, but it utterly undermines the tone of open moral inquiry and concern she cultivates. On a merely factual level, of course, her quick and dismissive insistence that pain control (all too often a challenge beyond modern medicine) can be taken for granted by the dying and their families is also completely discrediting-- not to mention the only slightly subtler problem raised by the fact that pain is far from the only form of suffering that the dying sometimes endure.
In frustration with Sommerville's thick-headed arrogance, one is tempted to voice ungracious responses-- the wish that she should die (in all good time) in intractable pain, for instance--or, far crueler, that she should have to watch a loved one die badly and in pain, begging for release. But I will restrain myself-- having gone through something altogether too close to the latter, I would not wish it even on an arrogant and harmful fool like Dr. Sommerville.
The response I will make is more general, and I hope it will provoke some of those inclined to support Dr. Sommerville's opinions to further thought: Death is a very personal matter. No one can accompany you along that journey. At the end of it, as far as anything we know indicates, the traveler is gone, her life finished: she exists no more. There is nothing more immediately, exclusively personal. But the process of dying can be horribly cruel. Pain control, even in the best of circumstances, is limited; in the worst cases, with intractable nerve pain, 'breakthrough' pain, surges that overwhelm medications and complications that restrict pain control options, it can be utterly unmanageable. During our son's last days he said that his pain was under control-- but in his sleep he muttered 'ouch, ouch, ouch...' repeatedly. And suffering extends far beyond pain to loss of comfort, loss of enjoyment, loss of function and dignity, loss of the prospect of a future, and other losses as well. What makes Dr. Sommerville so sure that her preference (as a healthy adult) is not only right for others, but so clearly right that it must be imposed on them by law? For the law to intervene so directly in our most personal and final hours, days and moments should require a standard of justification, a standard of certainty far beyond what can be provided by the narrow opinions and anecdotal reflections of a religiously-minded, privileged and self-righteous believer.
This shift, from personal moral reflections on how she would prefer to die and what she thinks is valuable about going through death without any hastening of the end to the demand that everyone be forced to do the same, regardless of their personal opinions, their ideas about the value of life, and the actual suffering they may be going through, is almost invisible in her writing, but it utterly undermines the tone of open moral inquiry and concern she cultivates. On a merely factual level, of course, her quick and dismissive insistence that pain control (all too often a challenge beyond modern medicine) can be taken for granted by the dying and their families is also completely discrediting-- not to mention the only slightly subtler problem raised by the fact that pain is far from the only form of suffering that the dying sometimes endure.
In frustration with Sommerville's thick-headed arrogance, one is tempted to voice ungracious responses-- the wish that she should die (in all good time) in intractable pain, for instance--or, far crueler, that she should have to watch a loved one die badly and in pain, begging for release. But I will restrain myself-- having gone through something altogether too close to the latter, I would not wish it even on an arrogant and harmful fool like Dr. Sommerville.
The response I will make is more general, and I hope it will provoke some of those inclined to support Dr. Sommerville's opinions to further thought: Death is a very personal matter. No one can accompany you along that journey. At the end of it, as far as anything we know indicates, the traveler is gone, her life finished: she exists no more. There is nothing more immediately, exclusively personal. But the process of dying can be horribly cruel. Pain control, even in the best of circumstances, is limited; in the worst cases, with intractable nerve pain, 'breakthrough' pain, surges that overwhelm medications and complications that restrict pain control options, it can be utterly unmanageable. During our son's last days he said that his pain was under control-- but in his sleep he muttered 'ouch, ouch, ouch...' repeatedly. And suffering extends far beyond pain to loss of comfort, loss of enjoyment, loss of function and dignity, loss of the prospect of a future, and other losses as well. What makes Dr. Sommerville so sure that her preference (as a healthy adult) is not only right for others, but so clearly right that it must be imposed on them by law? For the law to intervene so directly in our most personal and final hours, days and moments should require a standard of justification, a standard of certainty far beyond what can be provided by the narrow opinions and anecdotal reflections of a religiously-minded, privileged and self-righteous believer.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Margaret Wente -- enemy of democracy
Margaret argues that media criticism of Harper's decision to prorogue Parliament to avoid questions about the Afghan detainee scandal is misplaced because the Liberals under Chretien prorogued Parliament to avoid political heat over their own scandals, "Pots should proceed with caution before they call the kettles black," and because Parliament itself isn't very important,"Very little of importance goes on there." But, and I'm surprised this needs saying, proroguing Parliament to avoid investigation of government malfeasance is wrong regardless of who does it. And what of importance goes on in Parliament is democracy, warts and all.
As an aside, Margaret also notes that"According to a new Angus Reid poll, only 6 per cent of Canadians say Iggy is the party leader they'd most like to share a beer with." Two things are worth saying in response. First, since when did being someone you'd want to have a beer with become a criterion for being Prime Minister? And second, the only current party leader I think would at all make an interesting drinking companion is Gilles Duceppe -- and I have neither the ability nor the inclination to vote for him.
As an aside, Margaret also notes that
Thursday, January 7, 2010
NGOs and the Conservatives
Margaret is at it again today-- it seems that anything our present government does is OK by her, so long as it only hurts people and groups she disagrees with. The question she poses is straightforward enough: why, she asks, do we support NGOs? Oddly, for someone who often seems attracted to the idea of privatization, Ms. Wente dismisses the possibility that such groups might actually do a good job of promoting and serving the valuable causes they are devoted to. Her concern is that some such groups adopt positions and policies that she objects to-- and her conclusion is that, if she objects to something an NGO group does or says, it's OK by her for the government to cut off their funding, regardless of what impact that decision might have on the people the NGO actually helps.
There are too many NGOs, she says-- and somehow, the fact that government funds are not used for political advocacy, but instead for actual aid as approved by CIDA, a government agency that oversees these funds and ensures they are properly spent, is passed over as insufficient or irrelevant-- the crucial fact, for Margaret, is that that the very same groups also engage in 'politically undesirable' activities (such as criticism of Israel), and this, she thinks, is perfectly good grounds for cutting off the funding that they use to help people in accord with the goals of established government programs.
The idea seems to be that anyone who accepts government funds, for a purpose that government policy supports, is not just responsible to the government for making proper use of those funds-- they are also required not to inconvenience the government by taking positions and expressing views, as private organizations, that the government doesn't want to hear. This attack on freedom of speech doesn't upset Margaret because she agrees with the government on these issues, and punishing and even shutting down organizations she disagrees with is a good thing. This fits all too well with the recent attack on a SSHRC funded conference at York University, which also featured some speakers who are critics of Israeli policies. The minister demanded that SSHRC break its own rules (under direct threat of budget cuts) regarding how and when the funded activities would be reported, and SSHRC complied. Government funding is no longer contingent just on operating within the rules and respecting the standards for use of funds--it's also contingent on not expressing views that the government doesn't like. Somehow Margaret doesn't see this as a threat to free speech and open debate-- so long as she has her own paid soap box at the Globe, it's fine if other people and organizations are bullied into silence. What a disgrace. And there's a broader pattern here that should worry all Canadians, whatever their politics.
The pattern this government is following is all too clear-- their aim (modeled on the Bush administration's public relations policies) is to shut down any independent voices that might criticize the government's policies. The Bush administration eagerly attacked anyone critical of the disastrous war in Iraq for 'not supporting the troops', and Republican administrators at NASA systematically limited James Hansen and other NASA scientists' access to the press and public to ensure the administrations' policies on global warming would not be undermined by reports and analysis showing how irresponsible they were. Similarly, this fall the Conservatives in Ottawa conducted a smear campaign against a diplomat who testified to inconvenient facts from Afghanistan (after ignoring and suppressing his original reports), and now they have shut down Parliament to delay any further examination of the facts and avoid a Parliamentary order to release documents that have been crudely censored to protect the government.
This pattern is not entirely new to Canada, though-- it has long been a part of Alberta politics, where our one-party government has cut access for press outlets that reported inconvenient stories, shut down institutions such as the health care boards that were in a position to speak out about government policies (they were, at first, supposed to be elected-- a promise Mr. Klein never kept, since elected boards would have been far too free to speak as an independent, voter-supported authority on health policy questions), and derided as 'irrelevant' and as 'special interests' any group that wasn't one of the special interests (the oil and gas industry prominent among them) the government sees itself as allied with. Inconvenient and dissenting voices are silenced whenever possible, and branded as 'extreme', 'unAlbertan' and (worst of all) 'liberal' when they can't be silenced. Coming soon to a country near you...
There are too many NGOs, she says-- and somehow, the fact that government funds are not used for political advocacy, but instead for actual aid as approved by CIDA, a government agency that oversees these funds and ensures they are properly spent, is passed over as insufficient or irrelevant-- the crucial fact, for Margaret, is that that the very same groups also engage in 'politically undesirable' activities (such as criticism of Israel), and this, she thinks, is perfectly good grounds for cutting off the funding that they use to help people in accord with the goals of established government programs.
The idea seems to be that anyone who accepts government funds, for a purpose that government policy supports, is not just responsible to the government for making proper use of those funds-- they are also required not to inconvenience the government by taking positions and expressing views, as private organizations, that the government doesn't want to hear. This attack on freedom of speech doesn't upset Margaret because she agrees with the government on these issues, and punishing and even shutting down organizations she disagrees with is a good thing. This fits all too well with the recent attack on a SSHRC funded conference at York University, which also featured some speakers who are critics of Israeli policies. The minister demanded that SSHRC break its own rules (under direct threat of budget cuts) regarding how and when the funded activities would be reported, and SSHRC complied. Government funding is no longer contingent just on operating within the rules and respecting the standards for use of funds--it's also contingent on not expressing views that the government doesn't like. Somehow Margaret doesn't see this as a threat to free speech and open debate-- so long as she has her own paid soap box at the Globe, it's fine if other people and organizations are bullied into silence. What a disgrace. And there's a broader pattern here that should worry all Canadians, whatever their politics.
The pattern this government is following is all too clear-- their aim (modeled on the Bush administration's public relations policies) is to shut down any independent voices that might criticize the government's policies. The Bush administration eagerly attacked anyone critical of the disastrous war in Iraq for 'not supporting the troops', and Republican administrators at NASA systematically limited James Hansen and other NASA scientists' access to the press and public to ensure the administrations' policies on global warming would not be undermined by reports and analysis showing how irresponsible they were. Similarly, this fall the Conservatives in Ottawa conducted a smear campaign against a diplomat who testified to inconvenient facts from Afghanistan (after ignoring and suppressing his original reports), and now they have shut down Parliament to delay any further examination of the facts and avoid a Parliamentary order to release documents that have been crudely censored to protect the government.
This pattern is not entirely new to Canada, though-- it has long been a part of Alberta politics, where our one-party government has cut access for press outlets that reported inconvenient stories, shut down institutions such as the health care boards that were in a position to speak out about government policies (they were, at first, supposed to be elected-- a promise Mr. Klein never kept, since elected boards would have been far too free to speak as an independent, voter-supported authority on health policy questions), and derided as 'irrelevant' and as 'special interests' any group that wasn't one of the special interests (the oil and gas industry prominent among them) the government sees itself as allied with. Inconvenient and dissenting voices are silenced whenever possible, and branded as 'extreme', 'unAlbertan' and (worst of all) 'liberal' when they can't be silenced. Coming soon to a country near you...
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Racial/ Religious Profling and Differential Rights
Margaret's target today is airport security. She starts unusually well by rightly pointing out screening measures -- like shoe inspections -- brought into effect as a result of the latest attempt to bring down an airliner are often largely ineffective. But things quickly decay as she despairs that her favored alternative -- religious profiling -- is unlikely to be embraced: "[if] everyone is equal, then differential treatment must be racist."
Margaret's guiding assumption is that the percentage of airline passengers who intend to crash/ blow up/ etc. the planes on which they fly is higher among young Muslim males than among the flying public writ large (and given that white Christian terrorists have recently seemed more interested in blowing up government buildings and killing doctors who perform abortions than blowing up planes, this may even be so). The lesson Margaret draws is that white Christian (and atheist?) passengers ought to subjected to minimal security screening and Muslim males ought to be subjected to presumably much more stringent measures than all of us currently are -- can you say "body cavity search" anyone? And even though the vast majority of Muslim male passengers have neither done nor intend anything that warrants this kind of treatment, some such practice is nevertheless justified as "a certain collective punishment of the killers' neighbours."
The trouble with racial/ religious profiling is that it, in effect, produces a system of differential rights for members of different racial or religious groups. Differential treatment is, of course, compatible with equal rights, but only when based on behavioural evidence: if my behaviour, but not yours, gives reasonable grounds to believe that I mean to engage in malfeasance -- or have already done so -- then the authorities may reasonably detain me, but not you. But differential treatment based not on what one has done, but on who one is -- as occurs with racial/ religious profiling -- is not compatible with equal rights: to be a member of a profiled group is simply to have a weaker right to non-interference.
Margaret's guiding assumption is that the percentage of airline passengers who intend to crash/ blow up/ etc. the planes on which they fly is higher among young Muslim males than among the flying public writ large (and given that white Christian terrorists have recently seemed more interested in blowing up government buildings and killing doctors who perform abortions than blowing up planes, this may even be so). The lesson Margaret draws is that white Christian (and atheist?) passengers ought to subjected to minimal security screening and Muslim males ought to be subjected to presumably much more stringent measures than all of us currently are -- can you say "body cavity search" anyone? And even though the vast majority of Muslim male passengers have neither done nor intend anything that warrants this kind of treatment, some such practice is nevertheless justified as "a certain collective punishment of the killers' neighbours."
The trouble with racial/ religious profiling is that it, in effect, produces a system of differential rights for members of different racial or religious groups. Differential treatment is, of course, compatible with equal rights, but only when based on behavioural evidence: if my behaviour, but not yours, gives reasonable grounds to believe that I mean to engage in malfeasance -- or have already done so -- then the authorities may reasonably detain me, but not you. But differential treatment based not on what one has done, but on who one is -- as occurs with racial/ religious profiling -- is not compatible with equal rights: to be a member of a profiled group is simply to have a weaker right to non-interference.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Time: Rex Murphy's News Magazine of the Year
Funny, I always thought Time's "Person of the Year" was -- like Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition -- a gimmick by a third-rate news magazine to sell more copies, rather than a harbinger of Presidential fortune. Oh, and could you pack more falsehoods and distortions into a single column, Rex?
Rex's Fragile Grip on Reality
Rex Murphy's first column of the new year is a near-perfect illustration of his increasingly fragile grip on reality. The subject is Barack Obama, and Rex's tone is inimitable as he smugly dismisses Mr. Obama as a failing figure, with declining popularity, no substantial accomplishments, a rhetorical style that has lost its charm and a hold on the American public that depended more on hostility to George W. Bush than any real substance in Mr. Obama.
(Oddly, Rex himself continued to defend Mr. Bush to the bitter end, labeling Bush-critics as deranged by 'Bush-hatred', while Mr. Bush declined from approval ratings in the 90's following the 9/11 attacks to record lows that persisted to his departure. Mr. Bush used lies and propaganda to trigger a ruinous and failed war on a country that had no tie to those attacks, and left the American economy in ruins while failing to implement the signature 'reform' he sought for his second term: the conversion of Social Security to private investment funds. Of course, had Mr. Bush succeeded in that project, the market losses of the recent recession would have destroyed the Social Security system. So perhaps that failure should be counted as a left-handed kind of success.)
Along the way Rex comes completely unglued: first, he declares that the press gave Mr. Obama a free ride during the presidential campaign of 2008 while saving its 'ferocity' for attacks on Sarah Palin. Really? Is Rex talking about the press that repeatedly interviewed Mr. Obama's (now former) minister, whose 'God damn America' rhetoric was played over and over again (and not just on Fox News)? The press that, before and after the election, continued to cover the 'Birther' movement's paranoid claims that Mr. Obama was not even a citizen of the United States? The press that proclaimed Mr. Obama's campaign dead in the water after Sarah Palin's introductory speech at the Republican convention? The press that hung on every word Joe the (not) Plumber had to say despite the fact that the Obama 'tax increase' Joe claimed to fear would never have applied to Joe's (modest) income? The press that played and re-played, without context or question, charges from the McCain/Palin campaign that Mr. Obama had 'palled around with terrorists'?
Of course it is true that Ms. Palin encountered some trouble with the press during the campaign. When asked, in an interview that the McCain campaign had tried to defer, what magazines she read, Ms. Palin happily declared she read many, but couldn't name a single one. When asked to explain how her political career in Alaska had prepared her to deal with foreign policy issues, her response was to repeatedly insist on Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia. When she declared her opposition to wasteful government spending, and then used the famous 'bridge to nowhere' as an example of her principled stance, it turned out that she had been a big supporter of that bridge project, and the press noted this (though only briefly, and Ms. Palin continued to use it as an illustration of her principled stand on government waste). But it's hard to see the press's treatment of these incidents as in any way unfair to Ms. Palin, when so many of her statements were plainly self-serving distortions of the truth.
The more important question is, how has Mr. Obama done, after a year of tea-parties, death-panels, Glenn Beck's repeated on-air sobbing, unprecedented and grossly distorted attacks by the ex-vice-President (widely disseminated by the media Rex imagines are so strongly in Mr. Obama's corner)? Well, on the positive side, there is a health-care bill finally on the verge of passing that will raise the number of Americans with good coverage from around 60% to somewhere around 90% and guarantee access even to those with 'pre-existing conditions'-- despite the 'death panel' panic (endorsed by Sarah Palin, among others). On the other hand, the bill does little to actually cut the exorbitant overheads that make the American health care patchwork system the most expensive in the world, and Mr. Obama has continued all the wars Mr. Murphy loved so dearly to defend when they were Mr. Bush's wars, not to mention the detention of hundreds without charges or trial in Afghanistan and Guantanamo--all insufficiently hard-line for today's Republicans, who seem to be demanding the public torture of suspected terrorists while accusing Mr. Obama and the Democratic party of being both "Communists" and "Fascists".
And the final issue: what are we to make of Mr. Obama's declining popularity, from which Rex draws so much comfort? Mr. Obama's moderation, his continued coolness in the face of provocation, may be a weakness. It may make it easier for his opponents to blame him for the economic conditions that have made the 2000's a lost decade for the American economy. A more combative style, a few more words of blame for Mr. Bush and a stronger attack on Republican obstructionism (unprecedented in the current Senate, which now seems to require a 60% majority to do anything at all) might help Mr. Obama weather the storm. But hyperpartisanism and blaming the other side for everything that goes wrong is a disease of current politics, not the way forward. The Republican party may have succeeded in tarnishing Mr. Obama's brand (and high unemployment is certainly not helping), but Republican popularity continues far below Mr. Obama's, and the Republican's turn to paranoia and fear-mongering has solidified their base at the cost of undermining any broader appeal they might have. If Stephen Harper were now enjoying polls as strong as Mr. Obama's, Rex would be the first to trumpet them as a triumph for the Conservative Party. So let's wait and see: my bet is that Rex will be eating his words come 2012 (not that I expect him to ever look back, as Jeffrey Simpson explicitly does every year, to recognize his mistakes).
(Oddly, Rex himself continued to defend Mr. Bush to the bitter end, labeling Bush-critics as deranged by 'Bush-hatred', while Mr. Bush declined from approval ratings in the 90's following the 9/11 attacks to record lows that persisted to his departure. Mr. Bush used lies and propaganda to trigger a ruinous and failed war on a country that had no tie to those attacks, and left the American economy in ruins while failing to implement the signature 'reform' he sought for his second term: the conversion of Social Security to private investment funds. Of course, had Mr. Bush succeeded in that project, the market losses of the recent recession would have destroyed the Social Security system. So perhaps that failure should be counted as a left-handed kind of success.)
Along the way Rex comes completely unglued: first, he declares that the press gave Mr. Obama a free ride during the presidential campaign of 2008 while saving its 'ferocity' for attacks on Sarah Palin. Really? Is Rex talking about the press that repeatedly interviewed Mr. Obama's (now former) minister, whose 'God damn America' rhetoric was played over and over again (and not just on Fox News)? The press that, before and after the election, continued to cover the 'Birther' movement's paranoid claims that Mr. Obama was not even a citizen of the United States? The press that proclaimed Mr. Obama's campaign dead in the water after Sarah Palin's introductory speech at the Republican convention? The press that hung on every word Joe the (not) Plumber had to say despite the fact that the Obama 'tax increase' Joe claimed to fear would never have applied to Joe's (modest) income? The press that played and re-played, without context or question, charges from the McCain/Palin campaign that Mr. Obama had 'palled around with terrorists'?
Of course it is true that Ms. Palin encountered some trouble with the press during the campaign. When asked, in an interview that the McCain campaign had tried to defer, what magazines she read, Ms. Palin happily declared she read many, but couldn't name a single one. When asked to explain how her political career in Alaska had prepared her to deal with foreign policy issues, her response was to repeatedly insist on Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia. When she declared her opposition to wasteful government spending, and then used the famous 'bridge to nowhere' as an example of her principled stance, it turned out that she had been a big supporter of that bridge project, and the press noted this (though only briefly, and Ms. Palin continued to use it as an illustration of her principled stand on government waste). But it's hard to see the press's treatment of these incidents as in any way unfair to Ms. Palin, when so many of her statements were plainly self-serving distortions of the truth.
The more important question is, how has Mr. Obama done, after a year of tea-parties, death-panels, Glenn Beck's repeated on-air sobbing, unprecedented and grossly distorted attacks by the ex-vice-President (widely disseminated by the media Rex imagines are so strongly in Mr. Obama's corner)? Well, on the positive side, there is a health-care bill finally on the verge of passing that will raise the number of Americans with good coverage from around 60% to somewhere around 90% and guarantee access even to those with 'pre-existing conditions'-- despite the 'death panel' panic (endorsed by Sarah Palin, among others). On the other hand, the bill does little to actually cut the exorbitant overheads that make the American health care patchwork system the most expensive in the world, and Mr. Obama has continued all the wars Mr. Murphy loved so dearly to defend when they were Mr. Bush's wars, not to mention the detention of hundreds without charges or trial in Afghanistan and Guantanamo--all insufficiently hard-line for today's Republicans, who seem to be demanding the public torture of suspected terrorists while accusing Mr. Obama and the Democratic party of being both "Communists" and "Fascists".
And the final issue: what are we to make of Mr. Obama's declining popularity, from which Rex draws so much comfort? Mr. Obama's moderation, his continued coolness in the face of provocation, may be a weakness. It may make it easier for his opponents to blame him for the economic conditions that have made the 2000's a lost decade for the American economy. A more combative style, a few more words of blame for Mr. Bush and a stronger attack on Republican obstructionism (unprecedented in the current Senate, which now seems to require a 60% majority to do anything at all) might help Mr. Obama weather the storm. But hyperpartisanism and blaming the other side for everything that goes wrong is a disease of current politics, not the way forward. The Republican party may have succeeded in tarnishing Mr. Obama's brand (and high unemployment is certainly not helping), but Republican popularity continues far below Mr. Obama's, and the Republican's turn to paranoia and fear-mongering has solidified their base at the cost of undermining any broader appeal they might have. If Stephen Harper were now enjoying polls as strong as Mr. Obama's, Rex would be the first to trumpet them as a triumph for the Conservative Party. So let's wait and see: my bet is that Rex will be eating his words come 2012 (not that I expect him to ever look back, as Jeffrey Simpson explicitly does every year, to recognize his mistakes).
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