" . . . the longer we delay, the more unpleasant the adaptations and the greater the suffering will be."

There is still (unfortunately) a lot of "debate" about global climate change, and more precisely whether humans are the driving force behind change rates that exceed natural changes. Much of that debate would be settled, me thinks, by a real reading of, and acceptance of this paper (h/t The Climate Post):

Clearly mitigation is our best option, but so far most societies around the world, including the United States and the other largest emitters of greenhouse gases, have done little more than talk about the importance of mitigation. Many Americans do not even accept the reality of global warming. The fossil fuel industry has spent millions of dollars on a disinformation campaign to delude the public about the threat, and the campaign has been amazingly successful. (This effort is reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s effort to convince Americans that smoking poses no serious health hazards.) As the evidence for human-caused climate change has increased, the number of Americans who believe it has decreased.

There are currently no technological quick fixes for global warming. Our only hope is to change our behavior in ways that significantly slow the rate of global warming, thereby giving the engineers time to devise, develop, and deploy technological solutions where possible. Unless large numbers of people take appropriate steps, including supporting governmental regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, our only options will be adaptation and suffering. And the longer we delay, the more unpleasant the adaptations and the greater the suffering will be.

Defining Scientists - and asking self-critical questions.

Last week, I got into an interesting side debate over whether I’m still a scientist. Especially here. I have to say it caught me off guard, especially this:

“And second, I have read the work (bought off Amazon), and I have an M.S. in Oceanography (and make my living in the field, sort of) So please, do not presume to speak for me as either a scientist, blogger, or author. I can do that very nicely, thanks.”

In other words, you’re not a scientist. If you found my construction confusing, I apologize. Where scientists object to the work it is primarily on the basis of shoddy or non-existent research and poor writing.

Now, I can concede the point that, if you look at the masthead to your left, it reads that I’m not presently doing science on a daily basis. I’d also argue that it’s a gross over-simplification of how I earn a living – but the fault for that gross over-simplification is my own.

So my response went like this:

Constant,Indeed, my blog does describe me as doing strategy at present, but that hasn’t been my whole career, nor does it cover all my current work. It’s just a summary - which I obviously need to rethink.

As a person trained in science who does other thing during the day to earn money (!),

And we moved on to other matters.

Still, the question got me thinking about what constitutes the definition of a scientist. I spent the weekend mulling it over, in fact, because I believe it lies at the heart of many of the challenges we face in today’s world. Just take the climate crisis as one example. Scientists on the IPCC, and in many academic settings and government agencies, are very pointed on the nature, direction, and impacts of the climate crisis, and have a ton of research to back them up. Other people, who want to block meaningful response to climate change, place themselves in the dialogue as scientists, and the public understandably is lead to conclude that there is a controversy on climate, when, in fact none exists. So, the definition of science matters.

First, I think scientists need some kind of training in a scientific discipline. Notice I didn’t say an advanced degree in a science discipline, because I have come to know many really good scientists who are trained in other disciplines, but use the scientific method to look at the world around them. My blogging colleague Darlene highlights them all the time. Their contributions of data and observations, once informed by the proper training, are no less “scientific” then someone holding a Ph.D. in a discipline.

Second, I think scientists must, by definition, include those who do science outside of an academic setting. Too often, the biologists, physicists, and plant pathologists (to name just a few disciplines) who work in government labs on a government salary are derided as not being “real” scientists because their work isn’t “free” of any agenda. If you work for NOAA, the logic seems to go, you can’t really be doing oceanography as its practiced in academia because NOAA is a federal agency, and must ultimately answer to the White House, Congress, etc. Unfortunately, academicians who take this view are missing a key point – unless they are somehow in a n endowed research chair, with the University picking up all their expenses, they are subject to the politics of their grant funding agencies, and thus their requirements.

More basically, though, I think a scientists needs to understand and apply the scientific method to his or her professional work. They need to remain skeptical of untested hypotheses, but willing to accept those hypotheses until additional data can prove the point one way or the other. They need, also, to be able to be skeptical of their own positions, beliefs and ideals – never taking their interpretation of the world today as static.

So where does that leave me? Well, I do write strategy papers and proposals, about the strategy of doing ocean science for the nation. I read the scientific literature, and produce the occasional synthesis piece in response to policy challenges (as I am doing now on Ocean Fertilization). I even get to give occasional talks to scientific meetings. But today (and tomorrow, and next month) I am not out in the field (or on the water) collecting data. I won’t run or interpret any Analysis of Variance or check the r-square of my correlations.
But am I still a scientist – I’ll leave that up to you to judge.


P.S. Apparently I’m a Cheese Weasel now. Interesting use of both terms.

New NOAA climate science report - methane is more then just cow manure.

Apparently, it's not just Carbon Dioxide that we need to worry about. If Methane, which is regulated as a green house pollutant, is increasing this fast, I guarantee you it's not from cow farts.



H/T Joe Romm at Climate Progress.

The Deadliest Catch - Fan conventions, ocean acidification and science framing

Just when you thought it was safe to venture forth and enjoy spring, comes this word from Seattle: There is now a Deadliest Catch annual fan convention. Yes sir, no longer are fan conventions limited to the likes of Star Trek, Japanese Manga collectors, or even model train enthusiasts. Nope, now you can (if you were lucky enough to get a ticket) sit down and listen to the real life fishing boat crews from this Discovery Channel reality show.

Which makes me, as an oceanographer and ocean policy wonk ask this question – how does the ocean community leverage such phenomena to help educate the public on ocean issues? Are there ways we can, for instance, use a convention like this to help people understand the economics of commercial fishing? Or how about the intersection between king crab biology and ocean acidification? What would the impact be of Capt. Sig Hansen giving a talk not just about how he runs his boat, but about how climate change could drive his fishery to extinction?

I asked this question this morning to some of my federal ocean science colleagues. As you might imagine, I’m still getting an earful. The best crafted response so far, however, comes down on the side of not leveraging this opportunity:

“{Our Agency} is not a professional wrestling or football team, and we should not try to emulate what Discovery does. Most people don't know what an ecosystem is and won't care what {we} does. PBS viewers probably would--and this is the audience we should be targeting-- not the mindless masses who watch the other stuff (sorry if you're one, but I just can't abide them).

so--- most people just really aren't interested in the science {we do} or want to know that the world is falling apart. Stupid TV shows have replaced church as the opiate of the people, and most folks wouldn't be interested unless you can put in lots of shots of sharks eating someone. Neil Postman got it right in "Amusing Ourselves to Death".”

In many respects, I can’t say that I am surprised by the response. I know many really well educated scientists, policy analysts, economists, etc who would agree. And in a perfect world, they’d be right. PBS, for all the political bashing it does, is really the best “reality TV” out there. It is one of the things that got me hooked on ocean science as a career (Portuguese Man o’ War being another). And since I don’t have cable anymore, I haven’t seen a Deadliest Catch episode in a long time.

But where I and my colleague part ways is this – those opiated masses are the ones who want to buy steamed king crab by the pound at Giant or Red Lobster. They are the demand creators for this fishery. They are also the ones driving SUV’s, buying coal fired electric power, and doing a host of other climate change enabling things. As long as no one draws the link for them, in clear terms, between their actions and the long range consequences, there will be no groundswell politically to tackle these issues. And as any good framer of science knows, you have the best chances with the public if you get to them through existing information channels that they already access.

Does Capt. Hansen know that increasing ocean acidification might imperil his catch? If he did, would he speak to his legion of fans about it, and how they might be causing it (however indirectly)? I don’t know, but I’m hoping one of the convention goers this year will find out.

P.S. One of my other colleagues suggested that we start working on Somali coastal and fisheries restoration projects as a way to inject the needed action sequences into the program. I'll give him props for thinking WAY OUTSIDE the box!

Ways to fight back - Climate Deniers 101

On a fairly regular basis, the red headed wife sends me articles about science policy that are worth reading. Which is to say that, while everything she sends me is worth my reading, there exists a subset of articles that are worth reading by everyone. Pasted below is one such article:

Synthesizing Science and Politics

By Alexis Madrigal February 17, 2008 12:18:02 PM BOSTON, Ma -

Climate change highlights the interesting relationship that the political world has with science. While almost all scientists say that climate change is occurring, the policies of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters, China and the United States, continue to make the problem worse, flying in the face of the best available science. Lawrence Susskind, an MIT professor, presented an easy answer for why this is happening at talk here at the AAAS annual meeting. "We know that politically motivated stakeholders reject scientific analysis that challenges their policy positions," he said. "They reject the science, not just the policy."



Wish as we might, those political motivations aren't going away, so he suggests, we have to learn to deal with them. From the largest resource problems like climate change to much smaller decisions like protecting a wetland while incorporating a suburban development, everyone recognizes that increasingly complex science has not translated well into the public sphere. Susskind, however, thinks that he's developed a framework for making science not just useful but usable in the public sphere. Stakeholders, and that probably means environmentalists and businesses, need to be brought into the very design of a scientific study. Susskind argued that only if major stakeholders agree that the right questions are being asked will they be willing to accept the answers that come back. He calls the process of incorporating stakeholders from the beginning, joint-fact finding.



To execute on this so-called joint fact finding Susskind recommends bringing a new type of person into the normal debates about science: the neutral. Neutrals are mediators who all stakeholders agree can act as an honest conduit between, say, Chinese coal plant owners, American energy companies, and Greenpeace. As someone who writes about climate change regularly, this sounds like the worst job imaginable.



His basic prescription for the broken system is to make it a little more like collective bargaining. He's initiated a pilot program with the US Geological Survey called the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative. Dryly, he said, "The acronym is MUSIC because we're trying to harmonize science and policy."



(A quick peek at the website revealed some interesting papers. I've added Alexis Schulman's "Bridging the Divide: Incorporating Local Ecological Knowledge into US Natural Resource Management" to my reading list.)


Regular readers here, and elsewhere will know that I've been advocating a different approach to climate change policy, and specifically denial of climate change, for some time. Simply put, we can't deal with the science, because those who don't want to change economic, transportation, and/or energy policy to prevent further climate damage either ignore the science, or they manipulate the data in ways that say something that it doesn't. So I definitely like the article's suggestion that we invite them to the table at the beginning.

There is, however, one major flaw in this plan - most folks who deny the impacts of AGW, and misrepresent the science in the process, do not actually care about science. They care about economics, or energy generation, or capitalistic markets, or ending regulation, or . . . . anything but science. They just use science as their excuse or their hiding post from which to attack the real issues. It's intellectually dishonest at best, and I don't think having them at the table would change that.

SIDE NOTE - If you were to design a process to do this, might I suggest the often successful NEPA Scoping process?

POSTSCRIPT - Yesterday I asked for a link to the original article. Lucky for me. Mr. Madrigal's Google Alerts is working, and he supplied it himself in the comments section. SO I've added it to the title in case you want to go to the source. Thank you sir!

What we learn from Mr. George Will.

There has been much press since 15 February about the writings of George Will on climate change. Back then, Mr. will wrote an opinion piece continuing his fight against climate change (and particularly climate change caused by human action) by misrepresenting global sea ice data to try and prove that global warming isn’t occurring, or is at least not the next big catastrophe. If you’ve missed this tempest, I’ve included many links below you can follow for a variety of view points.

I’m not going to spend time rebutting the science – others have done a far better job then I could. I’m also not going to spend too much time dealing with the journalistic ethics, though I did leave a fairly lengthy comment on the Columbia Journalism Review blog about the controversy. There, I wrote in part:

“So, if Mr. Will believe (sic) the science says something that I do not, he needs to do two things. First, he needs to accurately tell us what scientists say, instead of telling us the opposite, and he needs to cite his sources. And for the record, published scientists do not cite blog posts in peer-reviewed literature.”

Having framed my two arguments, now I am forced to ask myself – what do I as a scientist and blogger do about this? What role can I adopt? And what can I carry forward as a lesson for future events like this one?

First, I think it needs to be said that Mr. Will can always be expected to start his columns from a conservative ideological point, not a set of facts. Pundits always start with their worldview. Second, I think I need to remind a few people that we shouldn’t expect Mr. Will to frame the facts he chooses in ways that we recognize or agree with, at least if we come from a liberal perspective. That’s not his job. Third, we do need to be on our guard in our responses. As I have noted before (and so Glenn Greenwald), too many forthright and reasoned responses to conservative opinion makers get shoved aside because they can too easily be accused of being shrill (as if conservatives never are). Finally, we need to make sure our responses not only set the facts straight, but make clear when ethical standards have been violated. This is especially important, since many Republicans rail that liberals do not believe in personal responsibility, the rule of law, or any kind of moral or ethical code.

Having digested all that, I view Mr. Will’s two columns as a cautionary tale for liberals (and climate change scientists especially). We need to get out ahead of these controversies. We need, as bloggers, science journalists, scientists, bureaucrats in science agencies, to start figuring out where we might be confronted by conservative ideologues and run their stories with our rebuttals before they do. This shouldn’t be too hard anymore.

Over at The Intersection, one of Chris Mooney’s commenters, Wes Rolley, notes he has suggested to ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopolous that they have Chris on as a guest to debate Mr. Will. While I’d love to see Chris on that show (he’d thus be in D.C. and we could meet for brunch after), responding to Mr. Will now is too little, too late. Had we been data mining before hand, someone could have put this out on the intertubes, and then when the first column came out, we could have all politely directed the WaPo to the blog post in question, thus making the error not just one of science (where faked controversy helps the Post sell papers) but rather one of process. And journalists, as we’ve seen, love to defend their process.

I’ll grant you I don’t have the time to do that regularly. I don’t have the audience to make that impact. And I don’t have a good command of every aspect of the science. I also can’t easily think like a conservative most days. But I’m betting there is someone out here who can. And they need to start doing so, or we’ll end up fighting rear-guard actions for decades, all the while witnessing the increasing economic, environmental and security demands of a planet driven warmer by our inaction.

One note – my typing isn’t the best, and I have now spotted three typos in my CJR comment, even though I reread through it twice before hitting the POST button. I’d really love to see more spell checking available in blog comment sections for typing challenged folks like me.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/02/27/unchecked-ice-a-saga-in-five-chapters/#comment-15159

http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2009/02/george_will_lies_music_to_my_e.php

http://www.scienceprogress.org/2009/02/the-george-will-scandal/

http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/15/george-will-global-cooling-warming-debunked/

http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/27/in-a-journalistic-blunder-reminiscent-of-the-janet-cooke-scandal-the-senior-editors-of-the-washington-post-let-george-will-reassert-several-climate-falsehoods-plus-some-new-ones/

http://mediamatters.org/items/200902240010?f=h_top

http://mediamatters.org/static/pdf/wapo-letter-20090224.pdf

http://mediamatters.org/items/200902260029?f=h_latest

http://mediamatters.org/discuss/200902260029

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/expers-big-flaw-in-wills-ice-assertions/

UPDATE:
Here's a good summary page that gives you the state of Play as of 5 March or so.

Ecomigration - the next Climate Change Impact?

It's not often that real consequences from Climate Change get real press coverage. Today's Washington Post story about ecomigrants is the exception, rather then the rule. That said, it's an important story.

As I see it, ecomigration has the potential to seriously undermine economic recovery. Our economy (and our stimulus attempts) are built on the assumption that the economy needs to go back into a shpae or systems that looks like it did a few years ago. The problem is, if there are more Dust Bowl like migrations in the next decade, that assumption will likely fall apart. You can't for instance, stimulate an economy when large numbers of workers are on the move between regions. Major manufacturing plants for things like cars don't just up and walk from Tennessee to NorthD akota in search of more hospitable climates.

And finally, what is the world to do about places like Kiribati? As highlghted in the article, this island nation of 100,000 is facing a real threat from sea level rise. These people deseve the world's help -but I fear they won't get it because then we'd have to admit something is really wrong.

James Hansen - Climate Realist 2.0

H/T to Climate Progress for bringing us the latest James Hansen outreach piece. Sadly, I think he'll be as ignored in the UK as he is here.

NOAA scientist publishes on climate change - and it's worse then we thought!

Of all the times I hope my professional colleagues are wrong - this is one of them. I can't fault Dr. Solomon's science - she really is a climate science "rock star" because she does good work, and has a solid track record of publication. That track record, incidentally, is how you get street cred as a scientist, so when her study is dismissed (as I assume it will be) by many, they will be denying decades of persistent, solid science.

Aside from the obvious challenges in the article - and anyone who thinks massive coastal flooding and drought that lasts for 100's of years isn't a challenge is delusional - there's a more fundamental issue. Read the wrong way, this article points to a future where the changes we make now have had little effect. Such prognoses, while scientifically accurate, feed the many climate change deniers who say "well, if we can't do anything about it, why should I give up my hummer, my vacation house, and all the other things that make my life a wanton display of American consumerism." After all, such single-minded folks will intone, the droughts will not occur until after I am long dead, so why should I care?

Well, if you have kids, you should care. If you like clean water and clean air, you should care. If you have a conscience, you should care. Leaving all that aside, if you value the American capitalist economy you should care. the types of drought, coastal flooding, and resultant population dislocations that Dr. Solomon's work hints at will have impacts on our economy that are far greater then what we see now in our current recession/depression. We wont' be able to sustain our economy if we're fighting this stuff. Building bridges, or bailing out banks will be the least of our worries.

So take steps now. Car pool, ride mass transit, turn out the lights. Turn your thermostat back. It all helps.

Alaska Burns - and Global Climate change looses

Burning the Alaskan wilderness seems to have an impact on tundra temperatures. On the one hand, this shouldn’t be news. Anyone who has watched the temperature plummet after a good rain fall under a black cloud knows that if you limit how much sun reaches you, you can cool off. And anyone who has ready about Pompeii or any other catastrophic volcano has probably heard about lowered temperatures lasting weeks.

Back in the 1980’s there were many “doom and gloom” scenarios about Nuclear Winter , all variations on the theme that with a Mutually Assured Destruction type exchange between the US and USSR, the amount of debris and fallout would darken the skies for years. This would plunge us all into winter, causing further hardship for the survivors of the war.

Based on this climate work, it seems they were right about that one, though the scientists caution about the usual uncertainties that come with their work. And there is where I have a problem with the language. You see, too many scientists think that because they understand statistical uncertainty, everyone does. So they don’t bother to explain statements about how something “might” be caused by something else, or what they mean by an event being “highly likely.” By approaching their topic this way, scientists leave themselves open to criticism from groups opposed to whatever principle they are advocating. Doubly so for anything having to do with Anthropogenic Global Warming.

So, by being open and honest about the uncertainty surrounding the impacts of forest fire smoke on tundra, as these scientists are at the end of the article, they leave open a small door for others to take their conclusions and run in a totally inappropriate direction. “See,” those opposed to human climate impacts will say,” nature caused Alaska and Canada to burn, and the fires LOWERED temperatures in Arctic regions. Those fires were x times as much (or as little) as the carbon we generate in our powerplant/manufacturing plant/tailpipes, and it helped lower the temperature. So humans can’t raising the temperature by burning stuff. All this global climate change language is just a scare tactic.” Or something like that.