“I found a flaw in one of your statistical methods. Here’s a better way to do it, and here are my results using the new method.”
Denialism:
“I found a flaw in one of your statistical methods. Therefore, you’re a liar liar pants on fire.”
Legitimate scientific skepticism:
“I think one of your data sets is questionable. Here’s an analysis of how that data set impacts your overall result.”
Denialism:
“I think one of your data sets is questionable. Therefore, you’re a liar liar pants on fire.”
Legitimate scientific skepticism:
“I think your model fails to account for a factor that I believe is significant. Here’s a modified model that accounts for the factor you left out, and here are my results with the new model.”
Denialism:
“I think your model fails to account for a factor that I believe is significant. Therefore, you’re a liar liar pants on fire.”
July 9th, 2012 · Comments Off on “Welcome to the rest of our lives”
“Welcome to the rest of our lives“ is the latest video from someone who should be one of the world’s most important videographers, Peter Sinclair (or Greenman3610).
Peter has, for years now, focused his efforts on confronting global warming denialism and providing stark evidence of the truth that shows denialist arguments to be deceptive fraud. His “Climate Crock of the Week” have become must watching for those actually concerned about understanding the truth about fossil-foolish anti-science arguments.
“Welcome to the rest of our lives” does not present denialst arguments, doesn’t deal with Republican anti-science syndrome hatred of a livable environmental system, doesn’t dissect poor science, but provides an overview of the situation of where we are in terms of current weather conditions and changing climate … and links what we are seeing today to what will happen in the future.
There is nothing in this video (after the fold) that is news to me — nothing — yet it literally brought tears to my eyes in frustration over the utter inability (unwillingness) of our (local, national, international) political / economic / social systems to deal with climate change in anything approaching sane approaches and fear as to where we are heading.
These two passions are highly interlocked, not because baseball players will have to deal with ever hotter summers in the future nor the debate about whether global warming is contributing to increasing home runs but because these are two environments where there is a tremendous amount of data to examine and where statistics play an important role in our understanding. And, this is also an interesting arena due to how it can illuminate the extreme double-standards that exist not just within George Will’s brain and words but within the larger media world and even in our society.
As brought to my attention by Scarecrow, yesterday’s on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, George Will quickly explained the situation for sweating Americans (who had the electricity to be able to watch their televisions)
You asked us — how do we explain the heat? One word: summer. I grew up in central Illinois in a house without air conditioning. What is so unusual about this?
Now, come the winter, there will be a cold snap, lots of snow, and the same guys, like E.J., will start lecturing us. There’s a difference between the weather and the climate. I agree with that. We’re having some hot weather. Get over it.
We need to “get over it” because all that is going on is that “we’re having some hot weather”?
Don’t pay attention to your lying eyes as to breaking high temperature records (with so many more red dots than purple ones on the map) because this is just “one word: summer.”
Is there anything, in fact, “unusual about this”?
George grew up in central Illinois. It is not hard to check the temperature records, nowadays, for that area — for example, Champaign, Illinois. What do we find for, for example, the 2 July – 7 July period? Every single hot temperature record was broken this year there — and by over 10 degrees.
And, George asks “What is so unusual …”
So far in 2012, across this country, high temperature records are falling at a rate ten times higher than cold temperature records (and leading to the likelihood that it 2012’s summer will be hotter than the Dust Bowl years). Simply put, this has not occurred in George Will’s lifetime … and such a lopsided breaking of temperature records hasn’t occurred since such statistical analysis began over 100 years ago.
As for George’s growing up in central Illinois “without air conditioning”, I challenge George or anyone who supports Will’s willful deceit to provide an extended period of 95+ degree temperatures during his youth such that lack of air conditioning might actually have represented a threat to health.
Being from southern Illinois, I can tell George that he never went through a summer like this during his lifetime in central Illinois. I just had this same argument with my 80-year-old mother, who insisted that she remembers all the 4th of July’s that were over 100 degrees. Bull pucky! I went back over the temperature records and the highest temp on July 4th for the past 50 years was 97 degrees, and the average was 87!
This year it was 104.
“Bull pucky” indeed.
George Will’s selective memory about growing up reminds me of the parentreacting to the child talking about how difficult it is to walk through a three-foot snow bank. The 6-foot tall dad says, “this is nothing. When I was your age, I had to walk through snow up to my shoulder when I walked to school.” And, the father points his hand to his neck, two feet about the head of his 3 foot 6 inch tall son. Hmmm …
George’s selective memory is conducive to a quick data check and, well, found to be totally wanting.
The casual “oh its summer” provides a perfect example of the power of the will-fully deceiving debater. When Will made the comment, what journalist had Weather Underground’s data base for central Illinois memorized in their head to be able to call “Bull Pucky” on George?
Now, let’s link back to the start of this post … there is also baseball.
Interestingly, yesterday, George had a chance to deal with baseball in a near equivalent to the climate question.
Every baseball fan talks about the golden age of baseball, and it’s always when he was about 12 years old. I have news for you: This is the golden age.
George didn’t argue, as he did with climate, that there was ‘nothing special’ going on even though the contrast between ‘today’ and (for example) 1952 is far less stark and clear with baseball.
Just imagine a situation where home run records were falling virtually every day. And, there were a swath of players batting above .500. And, … Just imagine George Will stating “oh, this is nothing. When I was a kid and the professionals weren’t so pandered to, they were doing just the same thing. Nothing unusual here.” With an obviously falsifiable statement like that, George Will would be crucified by anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of the sport. And, in the face of repeated statements that were so easily proven false, Will’s audience — and ability to rake in money by being on ABC’s This Week and having a huge number of papers running his OPEDs — would falls off the cliff.
Yet, when it comes to climate science, this isn’t exactly George’s first time out the gate with such easily proven false statements. Time after time, those who actually pay attention to reality have had to call out “Bull Pucky” on George’s will-ful deceit. And, even with this, George remains accepted into ‘polite company’ despite his willingness (even passion) to confuse and deceive.
While baseball is without question a far more serious issue than climate change’s impacts on our economy, weather, health, national security, environment, and future prospects, the double standards remain rather shocking.
This brings to mind the fact that about 15 percent of Americans believe that the Apollo moon missions never occurred and were staged on movie sets in the desert. Would The Post, in reporting on the space program, seek to be fair and balanced by giving this 15 percent a voice equal to that of astronauts, astronomers and academic experts? Why, then, give prominent voice to global-warming deniers, who are similarly at odds with facts?
This morning, while reading the (near final editing) draft of another excellent peer-reviewed study from Stephen Lewandowsky, I was struck by how this line of questioning is so close to the truth.
Lewandowsky’s paper, just accepted for publication in Psychological Science, is based on a survey of >1000 people active in the blogging world — both climate science oriented and climate deniers and a range of people in between.
Why that blogger focus?
Although nearly all domain experts agree that human CO2 emissions are altering the world’s climate, segments of the public remain unconvinced by the scientific evidence. Internet blogs have become a vocal platform for climate denial, and bloggers have taken a prominent and influential role in questioning climate science.
As for what the survey found, the title might just suggest why I’d see a link between the study and my LTE:
NASA faked the moon landing—Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science
From the abstract:
Paralleling previous work, we find that endorsement of a laissez-faire conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science (~= .80 between latent constructs). Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientific findings, above and beyond endorsement of laissez-faire free markets. This provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science.
Conspiracists are much more likely to reject the standards-based work from scientists and to reject the global scientific c
If being a hard-headed Ayn Rand libertarian aligns withbeing a climate denier and predicts embrace of tin-foil conspiracy theories, what makes one more likely to accept science?
Acceptance of science, by contrast, was strongly associated with the perception of a consensus among scientists.
Thanks to Lewandowsky and his colleagues for another excellent piece of work that I look forward to reading in Psychological Science.
A bit unreasonable, considering that the Deseret dominates with the Mormons in Utah, but is there reason to believe that Etch-A-Sketch Mitt Romney and other Mormons would pay more attention to the Salt Lake Tribune than many of the nation’s other leading newspapers?
Reading that title, one has to wonder what the word “undeniable” truly means.
After all, at next month’s Republican National Convention, global warming denial will be an undeniably consistent element in the Republican elite’s anti-science syndrome. [Read more →]
This guest post from eOz derived from a response to something that I wrote commenting about how the fires in Colorado and heat records falling across the country seemed to have people thinking climate change. eOz’s thoughts merits a posting of its own.
I also work with a variety of clients, many of whom buy into the corporate-sponsored push-back against global climate change out of fear of economic boondoggles, as they see carbon taxes and other measures. But the tide of opinion coming in and going out has left a kernal of doubt in their minds. If we can localize the effects, like the [speaker] noting to his mom that a phenomenon in her back yard is tied to the concept, we are moving with the tide as it comes back in in a way the monied interests cannot deflect. [Read more →]
Have humanity driven the climate system beyond the tipping point beyond which preventing catastrophic climate chaos is no longer a viable option?
Have emergent catastrophic climate chaos, as evidenced in US wildfires and high temperature records falling like bowling pins, created a tipping point in American public opinion that might enable a movement toward actual government action toward change?
Consider those in reading this guest post from JamesS.
Gladwell defines a tipping point as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”[1] The book seeks to explain and describe the “mysterious” sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.”[2]
Many Americans had previously seen climate change as a “nebulous concept” removed from them in time and geography, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationchief Jane Lubchenco.“Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it’s having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events,” Lubchenco told a university forum in the Australian capital of Canberra.
Englander tried to structure his presentation as “non-partisan”, stating that his book aimed to reach people who might be ‘turned off’ by Gore (my term/summary of comments).
Englander stated that there ways that the film Inconvenient Truth creating paths that could (or did) mislead people (even as he emphasized that, in looking at the body of his work and speaking, the Vice President seeks to remain fidel to honest discussion of the science). Englander spoke specifically about how the rising sea level charts around Manhattan and Florida were such a case.
Because the structure of the film suggested that Gore was stating this (9 meter sea level rise) would occur this century (even though, as Englander stated, this is not what the film / the Vice-President said); and
Sea level rise is a global, inexorable thing driven by global warming that has some tremendous differentiation when examined locally.
Re Manhattan & Miami, Englander discussed:
Manhattan is built on impermeable, granite-type rock and has essentially zero subsidence. And, Englander asserted, it would be possible to build a sea wall to protect Manhattan infrastructure from sea level rise for 50+ years.
Miami is built on porous (limestone) and has subsidence. Thus, (a) it is not just sea level rise and (b) a sea wall couldn’t protect infrastructure as the water would rise up behind the wall due to the porous stone.
This led Englander to draw in ACCO Executive Director Daniel Kreeger. Kreeger had spent the previous week in Florida at the first Sea Level Rise Summit and he opened the ACCO conference speaking about that meeting. Englander, however, did not ask Kreeger to speak about the Summit but to relate a Kreeger-family story related to the conference’s subject matter.
Kreeger’s story (paraphrased):
In Fall 2010, I was home in Miami and there was several inches of sitting water in my parent’s neighborhood on Miami Beach.
I said “Wow, you must have gotten a ton of rain this week.”
My mother responded, “Nope, just full moon and high tide.”
My parents bought that house in 1972, so I was born and raised there. I don’t remember that happening when I was a kid other than tropical storms and hurricanes. So, I asked: “Mom, was there flooding in the neighborhood when I was a kid from high tide?”
She responded “not that I remember.”
I then asked her if she understood why it was happening … in response to which she shook her head. So I said, “that’s climate change and sea level rise. That’s what your son does for a living.”
Here I am the head of a climate-change non-profit and my own mother wasn’t connecting the dots. Let’s be clear, we’re not talking about an unintelligent or unaccomplished woman. My mother is a retired judge and is currently one of the State department’s delegates on international treaty talks involving abducted children.
Global Warming … Peak Oil … Financial meltdown … these all threaten our future prospects, our ability to see a positive future reality for ourselves and descendents.
George Herbert Walker Bush lies at the core of a driving motivation in my life.
President Bush was facing a reelection battle against Bill Clinton, and so advisers persuaded him to attend the world environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, possibly the most optiistic moment in recent history. Before he went, however, he told a press conference that “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.” If that’s true, if we can’t imagine living any differently, then all else is mere commentary.
One thing that unites the progressive blogosphere is the drive to imagine a different life, a different world, a better one, a better path forward … and we all, in our own ways, fight to achieve those visions.
Twenty years ago, the first President Bush stated that “the American Way of Life is not up for negotiation”, showing an inability to imagine catastrophe from non-negotiation and an inability to see something better. Without imagination to see a better future and the power to achieve it, we will not progress out of catastrophe to prosperous sustainability.
As seen starting at 30 seconds into the video below, Shell’s replica oil drilling rig had a spectacular ‘blow out’ that they couldn’t get under control until it had already caused serious damage.
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Unlike an alcohol drenching of a blouse, an oil rig blowout in the Arctic Ocean (think of the benign circumstances of this happening amid a winter storm of 20+ degrees below zero, winds at 40+ miles per hour, and ice floes crashing into the rig) won’t be solved by a simple trip to the dry cleaners.
Historians have a joke about American history. Anything that has already happened is history, anything more than 15 minutes old is ancient history. In this context, with consideration of Shell’s (and too many others’) fossil-foolish plans to drill in the Arctic, how do we classify the now over two year-old Deepwater Horizon events: pre-history?
Therefore, you’re a liar liar pants on fire.”
such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientific findings, above and beyond endorsement of laissez-faire free markets. This provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science.
