August 23rd, 2012 · Comments Off on Baseball statistics to climate science … insight from advertising
For most of 2012, the following ad has been running.
Sadly, too many take baseball statistics far more seriously than climate change science. (After all, who would put up with George Will’s truthlessness about climate change if thrust into discussions about baseball?)
This ad reminds of me of something …
This ‘doubting’ sounds all too familiar in terms of: let’s not act until the science is 100% settled and “proven”.
Sadly, unlike debates over obscure baseball stats, the demanding of 100% “proven” certainty when it comes to climate chaos has real-world implications.
Comments Off on Baseball statistics to climate science … insight from advertisingTags:Energy
Missing among much of this fanfare is the core symbolism of putting Donald Trump on the stage of a major political event. The Republican Party leadership has, sadly for the nation, been captured by an ideological vision enraptured by conspiracy theories and hateful of expertise (and knowledge and institutions and thinking …) at odds with their policy priorities.
The United Nations Agenda 21 is being covertly pushed into local communities throughout the United States of America through the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) through local “sustainable development” policies such as Smart Growth, Wildlands Project, Resilient Cities, Regional Visioning Projects, and other “Green” or “Alternative” projects
The Republican National Committee recognizes the destructive and insidious nature of United Nations Agenda 21 and hereby exposes to the public and public policy makers the dangerous intent of the plan.
Putting aside the simple reality that ICLEI is an excellent organization worth supporting rather than some form of devilish covert underminer of U.S. security, the RNC embrace of junk conspiracy theory and anti-science concepts is far from limited to just this one resolution.
The anti-science syndrome nature of the current RNC is all too clear with the GOP’s passion for global warming denial. The GOP’s determined denial of basic science and desire for Americans to disregard drought, heat-wave, wild-fire, and other tangible examples of mounting climate chaos is one of the clearest examples in American history of ideology trumping basic common sense and wisdom.
Donald Trump’s Las Vegas-like headline act at the RNC next week is thus fitting for all too many reasons:
Trump, in many ways reminiscent of nominee Mitt Romney’s Bain experience profiting off bankrupting companies, has a long record of huge loses and bankruptcies. Trump has flamboyantly made a speciality trumping others via bankruptcy. Many have lost their shirts off their backs investing with or loaning to him. Trump thus stands as a symbol of how the RNC’s precepts would profit a few even while bankrupting the nation.
Trump, just as with the RNC Agenda 21 Resolution, has promoted conspiracy theories. For example, Trump is a prominent “Birther” (questioning whether — despite the truth being quite different — whether Barack Obama was born in the United States).
“With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore,” the tycoon told members of his Trump National Golf Club.
Americans have learned more about climate change from Rush Limbaugh than from anyone else.
The phrase “climate change” appears 2,780 times in his talk show transcripts, and “global warming” appears almost as often, according to a Google search. With that in mind, would it surprise you to learn that Rush takes the subject so seriously he would abuse an eight year old girl over the issue?
Rush, of course, asserts that the “whole global warming thing is a manufactured left-wing hoax”.
I’ve instinctively known this from the get-go, from 20 years ago! The whole thing is made up, and the reason I know it is because liberals are behind it! When they’re pushing something, folks, it’s always bogus.—Rush Limbaugh
Not just any hoax, this. Limbaugh considers manmade global warming to be “one of the most preposterous hoaxes in the history of the planet.” According to Limbaugh,
Before the ozone hole it was acid rain, and then it was nuclear winter, and it went from global warming to…compact fluorescent lightbulbs! I’m telling you: Every aspect of it is a lie. Every environmental claim, every one that’s apocalyptic, is a lie — full-fledged, 100% through and through.
—Rush Limbaugh
Some credit Limbaugh with forcing Mitt Romney to back away from his acknowledgement of global warming. But he’s not averse to using global warming as a club on the Republican establishment, either:
I frankly don’t know where the Republican establishment is on global warming. My guess is they probably think it’s happening ’cause they want big government. They just want themselves in charge of it.—Rush Limbaugh
Analysis should enable more informed decision-making. Regrettably, economic and fiscal analyses too often occur in a stove-piped fashion that provides only limited perspectives as to real costs and benefits. Energy and environmental analysis, in particular, suffer from this problem. This has been true from the individual household to business to national policy level discussions where, almost, the analytical constructs tend toward exaggerating the cost(s) of action while downplaying the benefits that would accrue from taking action. While there are both legitimate and interest-party driven reasons for this tendency, the inadequate general understanding has weakened support for more effective energy/environmental options and hampered efforts to achieve informed decision-making. We face a serious decision-making challenge: opponents exaggerate costs and proponents understate benefits.
Climate change is the poster child of this problem.
There is a simple truth:
Acting on climate mitigation is an investment …
An investment, which if done right, that will have huge economic benefits.
Acting on climate mitigation is just about the smartest investment society can make — even if we put aside the economic impacts from climate chaos (such as disrupted agricultural production and higher food prices). The entire debate about climate change, when it is in financial terms, almost (and the exceptions are extremely rare) always reverberates about whether ‘the high cost in the near term is worth the uncertain longer term benefits … if those benefits exist’. This is a wrong-headed and erroneous framing based on stove-piped thinking and analysis. More robust analysis changes this equation and leads to a very different understanding of the benefit streams. Very simply: investing in climate mitigation will have huge economic benefits while reducing future risks.
If nothing else from this post, remember this:
Climate-mitigation is an investment that will have huge benefit streams.
Seriously examining the systems-of-systems implications from climate mitigation (increasing energy efficiency, reduced fossil fuel use (and reduced oil imports), reduced pollution, reduced carbon emissions, … ) would show that a wide array of economic benefits that would dwarf costs of taking action in the near, mid, and long term.
Have to say that “Weather Gone Wild” sounds all too close to tasteless (and discomfitting) late-night advertising during repeats of old B movies on obscure cable channels (happily not seen for a long time). This could easily be the title for much of The Weather Channel’s programming. In fact, this is the cover story and focus of National Geographic’s September 2012 issue.
The introductory question:
Disastrous rains. No rain at all. Unexpected heat or cold. Is Earth’s climate changing dangerously?
The editor’s note, Coming Storms, opens with a discussion of ominous weather in Kansas. He ends
[the story’s] author … knows this subject well. In the spring of 1986 he and I spent nearly three months chasing thunderstorms with a team from the National Severe Storms Laboratory for a story on tornadoes that ran in the June 1987 issue. Much has changed since then. Our planet has warmed up, there is more moisture in the atmosphere, heavy rains are more frequent, and droughts are more pronounced. Peter examines the causes and considers the future, which some say looks as ominous as a Kansas supercell in May.
“Looks as ominous” as a Biblical event?
“Weather gone wild” begins:
Rains that are almost biblical, heat waves that don’t end, tornadoes that strike in savage swarms—there’s been a change in the weather lately. What’s going on?
The story opens with a look at the devastating — and unprecedented — spring 2010 Nashville, TN, floods. The author then highlights that “extreme” is increasingly frequent not just on ESPN X-Game emissions. And, then, the trillion dollar questions:
What’s going on? Are these extreme events signals of a dangerous, human-made shift in Earth’s climate? Or are we just going through a natural stretch of bad luck?
The short answer is: probably both.
Two paragraphs follow on ‘natural’ causes and improving scientific understanding of El Niño and La Niña events.
And then … paragraph after paragraph about how a warming planet is driving increased risks of extreme events. From those paragraphs.
“New evidence suggests that warming is altering the polar jet stream, adding lazy north-south meanders to its path around the planet—which might help to explain why North America was so warm last winter and Europe so cold. “
“In the case of some weather extremes, though, the connection is pretty clear. The warmer the atmosphere, the more potential for record-breaking heat waves. “
“As moisture in the atmosphere has increased, rainfall has intensified. The amount of rain falling in intense downpours—the heaviest one percent of rain events—has increased by nearly 20 percent during the past century in the U.S.”
For example, an excellent linkage of weather to steroid use (as per here).
“You’re getting more rain from a given storm now than you would have 30 or 40 years ago,” says Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Global warming, he says, has changed the odds for extreme weather.
“Picture a baseball player on steroids,” Meehl goes on. “This baseball player steps up to the plate and hits a home run. It’s impossible to say if he hit that home run because of the steroids, or whether he would have hit it anyway. The drugs just made it more likely.”
It’s the same with the weather, Meehl says. Greenhouse gases are the steroids of the climate system. “By adding just a little bit more carbon dioxide to the climate, it makes things a little bit warmer and shifts the odds toward these more extreme events,” he says. “What was once a rare event will become less rare.”
When it comes to that drought or flood or Derecho or heat wave …, human-driven climate change “drugs just made it more likely” that “a rare event will become less rare.”
And, the author runs with the analogy. While Nashville opens the story, Texas comes into play just after Meehl’s comments. This begins:
Nobody has lived through more weather on steroids lately than Texans.
And 13 paragraphs follow on Texas’ drought, heat wave, and fires.
“But when there’s no water to evaporate, all that energy goes into heating the ground and consequently heating the air. Given how little rain we had, we probably would have had record warmth in Texas in 2011 even without climate change. But climate change added an additional degree or so of heat to it.”
That extra degree of heat was like an extra shot of gasoline on the state’s forests: By increasing evaporation, it made them even drier. In a drought, said [Texas state climatologist John] Nielsen-Gammon, “every little increase in severity makes a big difference.” Texas in 2011 experienced the worst wildfire season on record. Taken together, the fires blackened an area larger than Connecticut—nearly twice as much acreage as in the previous worst year.
Another excellent example of memorable scientific commentary comes in this paragraph near the end of the story:
Weather disasters are like heart attacks, says [scientist] Jay Gulledge. “When your doctor advises you about how to avoid a heart attack, he doesn’t say, Well, you need to exercise, but it’s OK to keep smoking,” he says. The smart approach to extreme weather is to attack all the risk factors, by designing crops that can survive drought, buildings that can resist floods and high winds, policies that discourage people from building in dangerous places—and of course, by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
For me (and millions of Americans), National Geographic is the iconic (and eloquent) communicator of truth about our planet. A question to consider: Will this iconic truth-teller reach people who have — to date — resisted hearing the truth about climate change?
Again, I recommend reading Weather Gone Wild. Well written, informative, thoughtful — it is worth the time. A hat tip to the author, Peter Miller, and a major hat tip to National Geographic for commissioning and publishing it.
In 2004, amid many frustrations, I could not understand why Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry (and the ‘campaign’) remained locked so hard into the Vietman War and failed to create a narrative of his life-long service to the nation from the SEAL operations in Vietnam, to principaled efforts to end the war on his return from overseas, to protecting citizens in the courts as a prosecutor, to his service in Congress. Rather than “SEAL in Vietnam”, I yearned for “a life of service” as message. While that frustration remained through the campaign and beyond, that frustratrion never fit within a meaningful intellectual construct until page 96 of Joe Romm’s new book Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln and Lady Gaga.
The 2004 presidential campaign revealed how foreshadowing had moved to the forefront of modern political campaigns. … John Kerry based much of his campaign on events in Vietnam …
Kerry, however, made two fatal mistakes in his foreshadowing effort … First, he never linked the second half of his life to the first half, never completed the life story, to show that the foreshadowing had in fact foreshadowed anything.
A core inadequacy of the 2004 campaign captured succinctly within the framework of rhetoric and the power/importance of rhetoric.
As for the second ‘fatal mistake’, leaving the door open for the misrepresentations and (outright) lies for the Swiftboat Veterans for Truthiness:
Second, if you are going to build a campaign around some foreshadowing event, you must defend your story against the inevitable attacks. Your opponents understand the power of foreshadowing and will not just sit by while you write the story you write.
Page 96 does not rest unique — essentially every page provided some form of education and enlightenment from lessons about the educational environment of Shakespeare’s formation to Lincoln’s intense passion about rhetoric to the power of metaphor within Lady Gaga’s lyrics. Paragraph-to-paragraph, page-to-page, Language Intelligence is filled with insights and lessons about the power of language and how to use it more effectively for impact.
And, there are substantive lessons to apply (note: some provided after the fold). For example, my recent tweet on temperature records:
Focused on #Olympic records? What about climate change’s 2012 olympian record breaking? http://getenergysmartnow.com/2012/08/08/focused-on-olympic-record-breaking-what-about-your-backyards-olympian-climate-chaos-records/ â?¦ @LO2012 @climatereality
The linked piece analogizes the climate on steroids to East Germany’s “female” swimmers. And, to get a grade, I ran the tweet by Joe:
Repetition and allusion/metaphor.
Pithy and profound.
It actually isn’t hard once you start doing it since it comes closer to natural speech and storytelling.
I have come to the conclusion that I spent the second half of my life unlearning what I was taught in the first half.
Thus, perhaps this is a book about”unlearning” …
While Romm is best known for his passionate — science-based — advocacy for action to address our energy and climate challenges, this is not a book “for” climate scientists or those advocating for action to address our catastrophic climate chaos, those these people should read it, but has value for anyone concerned about leveraging language more effectively to confront those who distort reality to undermine American democracy.
While powerful as a political text(book), this is a book destined for the nation’s classrooms. Romm has written something that every high-school debate team would learn from and any English teacher concerned about Language Intelligence would be well advised to read it and consider incorporating it into their educational program. And, every public librarian in the country should add it to their collection.
Unusually, after having read a book, my intent is to read it again — soon. I also intend to have my children read it and will recommend other family members read it. I recommend that you do so as well.
Romm’s book is packed with powerful advice. A few are highlighted below:
The title is probably more important than the content. Hey bloggers, your title is like the cover letter while your blog is the resume. A great cover letter means your resume will get a read. Bad letter = no read. Spice up those titles.
Keep it simple! Avoid jargon and try to use one syllable words as often as possible. I recall a phone interview I did with a reporter at The Los Angeles Times. Afterward, the reporter said, “Thank you for talking to me so even a 12 year old could understand.” Big words impress few. Small words impress many.
Use metaphors, similes, analogies, and irony to make your points. The brain is always trying to make connections and these rhetorical strategies help to cement those connections. Climate communicators can see many great examples at Climatebites.org.
Repetition, repetition, repetition. One of the quotes that really stuck with me is one from Republican strategist and no friend of climate change, Frank Luntz:
“There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your audience has heard it for the first time.”
Reading this book is like taking steroids. If you are not a good communicator right now, after reading this book, you will be. If you are a good communicator right now, you will become a great one! Give yourself a legal injection of powerful rhetoric – read this book.
If you ever want to understand why scientists fare so poorly getting their message across–and why liberals lose policy debates and, often, presidential campaigns–this is also the book for you. In essence: too much higher education, too much wonk sophistication, destroys the common language simplicity of good rhetoric and makes you less persuasive.
Romm–quite-self consciously–uses powerful rhetoric himself to get the point across. And he shows how, slowly, climate researchers are coming to recognize the power of figures of speech–comparing global warming’s influence on the weather to a batter on steroids who hits more home runs, for instance, or to the loading of dice.
Given his day job, Romm continually connects back to the difficult task of communicating about climate change. “Those who deny the reality of climate science have made use of the best rhetorical techniques,” Romm said. “Those seeking to inform the public about the very real dangers of a warming climate will need to learn the lessons of the best communicators if they are to overcome the most well-funded disinformation campaign in history.” There’s plenty here to help scientists looking to become better communicators.
This insightful and important little book — it’s a concise 213 pages — comes at a time when, despite having more ways to communicate than ever, trust in what is being communicated stands at an all-time low. If rhetoric is king, then trust is God. And yes, that’s a metaphor.
For science communicators, I believe the most important lesson is the use of metaphors. Scientists are trained to think in the abstract while in general, people think in metaphors. It’s a “Scientists are from Mars, people are from Venus” kind of thing. People conceptualize and make meaning of the world using analogies and metaphors, which transform the abstract into the concrete. Consequently, we take more notice of messages and remember them better when metaphors are used. Romm provides example after example of history’s greatest communicators using metaphors to land home their message. And if you want to take it to the next level, use extended metaphors where your metaphor is adopted through a whole speech, article, political campaign, etc.
August 11th, 2012 · Comments Off on Another Romney Olympic Moment: Climate Zombie Dream Team
Mitt Romney made waves when he crossed the pond to the United Kingdom prior to the Olympics. It is hard to imagine that a prominent American would embarrass the United States with our key ally as it entered to a prominent world event with so many casual insults and errors. One could say that Romney exceeded expectations with his words and actions with the opening of the Olympics — exceeded by one of the worst foreign policy trips ever by a major American political figure.
A favorite of the Koch brothers, Ryan has accused scientists of engaging in conspiracy to “intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.” He has implied that snow invalidates global warming.
And, as another key player of that coed climate-zombie dream team, there is Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul. As Michael Mann put it,
Andrea Saul and the others at DCI Group who carried out this attack on climate scientists and their work helped to delay any serious actions to combat climate change and its impacts, at great cost to society.
These people — Romney, Ryan, and Saul — have already created “great cost to society”. Putting them in the White House would move us from “great cost” to total disaster.
August 9th, 2012 · Comments Off on GOP threat to the environment … “must see” …
Once upon a time, there were two major parties in the United States who both agreed that it mattered to protect Americans’ health and the ecosystems that enable our robust nation to prosper. While not in perfect harmony, once upon a time, these two parties would come together to agree on solution paths to address environmental challenges to improve public health and create new economic activity.
What seems like fantasy today was once the truth in America … once upon a time.
Today, we have a political party that is intent on destroying protections for Americans’ health and to hasten our already headlong rush into climate catastrophic climate chaos.
From the video’s introductory statement:
If there’s one issue that hasn’t been talked about enough in this election, it’s the environment.
Yet the difference between the parties is stark: Republicans, bankrolled by polluters like the Koch Brothers, want to cut the EPA and rollback or weaken vital environmental protections like the Clean Air and Clean Water Act, laws that ensure millions of Americans can breath our air and drink our water safely.
Mitt Romney calls the EPA “a tool in the hands of the President to crush the private enterprise system,” and has vowed to block needed protections on things like fracking and carbon emissions.
Now, perhaps the weakest thing of this video (other than it has the audacity to be longer than Americans’ 30 second attention span) is the title: “The GOP Threat to The Environment” falls into the framing of “environment” as something external, something outside (or alongside) humanity and human interests rather than the reality that the economy is within the environment, that we live within the environment, that our society will not thrive in an ever-worsening and disrupted eco-system (and eco-systems). Perhaps the true title is: “The GOP Threat to U.S. (and all of us) via their attacks on the environment.”
In response to a post earlier today analogizing 2012 US hot temperature records with the East German women Olympic swimmers on steroids, a frequent commentator and interlocutor had some thoughts about what is ‘appropriate’ behavior for ones who are aware of how serious the situation is when it comes to mounting catastrophic climate chaos. Note that NNadir, whose tag line is “ignorance kills“, is (a) extremely knowledgeable, (b) extremely passionate, (c) an extremely strong advocate for nuclear power, (d) a parent like myself, and (e) terrified (or stoic) about climate chaos’ implications for humanity, the United States, and his children. Not all of our interactions have been genial or necessarily (emotionally) rewarding for (either of) us, but value rarely comes from unanimity or perfect harmony.
Sparking me to turn this interaction into a post were two interrelated comments.
One thing I like about you Adam is that you never stop hoping that someone will care, even after it’s much too late for anything meaningful to be done.
Truthful, perhaps, on multiple levels. Yet, as I responded to him,
“Anything meaningful …” We have what any sane person would define as catastrophic impacts already apparent. And, as we both know, these will get worse. I retain some ‘hope’ that we can act to impact (reduce) how much “worse” the situation will get.
NNadir responded with a metaphorical differentiation of our approaches to climate chaos.
we’re both on the Titanic, and you’re trying to organize the lifeboats, and I’m listening to the beautiful rendition of “Nearer my God to thee.”
The most appropriate response that I can consider is actually the tag line of the only other commentator in the thread, The Fan Man:
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
I am planting apple trees — that will, I hope, bear some fruit for my and others’ children for generations to come.
While there are those ordering full speed ahead even as climate chaos’ iceberg crushes into the metaphorical Titantic‘s hull, for those in the reality-based world the question becomes: which is the right response?
Millions (perhaps billions) around the world hold their breath during Olympic events, watching the seconds fly with their eyes on the “OR” (Olympic Record) and “WR” (World Record) numbers in the corner of the screen. And, moving past the nationalism of “our” (whichever nation’s) athletes, it is a hold the breath amazing moment when a new record tumbles.
Sadly, however, the Olympics are far from where the most impressive and most important record-breaking is occurring. Instead, it is in our backyards and communities.
In the United States through 5 August, with over 35% of the year still to come), there have been 27,042 high temperature records broken in 2012.
To provide a context, “2011 had the second-warmest summer on record for the lower 48 states.” And, with that “second-warmest summer on record”, the United States broke or tied 26,674 daily record highs — through all 12 months of 2011.
Let’s be clear, just like in athletics, many “records” are “made to broken”.
However, just like in athletics, ‘steroids’ can have their impact on weather. With droughts, heat waves, flooding, storms, and other mounting extreme weather, the United States — and the rest of the planet — is seeing the impact of a climate on the steroids of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and other impacts on the climate system.
Simply put, hot and cold records should roughly balance over time. We are, however, seeing a drastically skewed set of record-breaking that is worsening in an almost exponential fashion. While recent decades have seen a growing proportion of “hot” vs “cold” records, rather than an even balance, 2012 is seeing something more like a 10 to 1 imbalance of more hot rather than cold temperature records.
It’s time for us all – whether we’re leaders in Washington, members of the media, scientists, academics, environmentalists or utility industry executives – to stop acting like those who ignore the crisis or deny it exists entirely have a valid point of view. They don’t.
The international community — and the United States and the United States Congress — reacted with disgust at the impact of steroids on sports (especially the Olympics). And, there has been action to reduce that impact with severe penalties to those who violate the rules against steroid use.
With all due respect to the personal achievements of Olympic and other athletes, sports record-breaking is meaningless in comparison to the real-world impacts that we are already seeing from climate change and the spectre of what might happen with unchecked catastrophic climate chaos. It is well past time to move our attention off the sports pages and to treat climate statistics with the same seriousness and passion as sports records.
