Here’s my commentary:
Recent attacks by skeptics like Marc Morano, and the devolution of discourse on climate change back to the simplistic “global warming: yes or no?” debate, has prompted some prominent scientists to push back. That much is clear from the recent series of email exchanges between a group of scientists made public by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. [Here's a pdf file of the full text of the e-mail messages.]
I would urge anyone who is interested to read the actual texts of the e-mail messages. From what I’ve looked at so far it’s clear that some of the stuff there is clearly a manifestation of folks being hopping mad and needing to blow off steam. Too bad they still haven’t gotten the message about the public nature of e-mail…
Some of it also reflects what I take to be a truly breathtaking naïveté. For example, George Woodwell says this: “If the opposition opens an issue, make the issue theirs, and so hot that they have to let go.” [*]
As if a group of climate scientists can make it “hot” enough to force the likes of Marc Morano to let go. Even if they could, they’d basically be turning themselves into Morano. And a lot of good that would do for their standing in the eyes of the public. (Moreover, any scientist who thinks he or she can beat Morano at his own game is in for a very rude awakening.)
But I also tried to put myself in the shoes of a scientist who Senator James Inhofe has said should be investigated for criminal activity. As an outsider looking in, I’ve regarded this as clownish political theater. And then I realized that if the Democrats were to lose the Senate, clownish political theater could become more serious.
Obviously, Inhofe isn’t really interested in getting to the truth. He is mostly interested in intimidating scientists – to stifle research that conflicts with his political agenda, and also to squash political speech. Whether the research is right or not, and whether you agree with what scientists are saying in the political arena, such an attempt at intimidation by a government official is pretty disturbing.
Meanwhile, the polls show some weakening in the urgency felt by the public for policy action. But I think partisans on both sides of the climate wars tend to exaggerate what’s happening. For an aggregation of recent polls, seehttp://www.pollingreport.com/enviro.htm. It’s difficult to conclude from these data that the end of the world is nigh with regard to public opinion on climate change.
But it’s pretty clear that the public has other priorities right now. I get the sense that many scientists and other observers, including Randy Olson, attribute this at least in part to bad communication about climate science, both by scientists and journalists. I wonder.
If you were out of a job, if you feared losing your job, if your wages were stagnant or declining, if you were underemployed, if you lacked adequate health care, if you were struggling to pay the mortgage, if you couldn’t afford tuition for your children, if your child was off fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, if you couldn’t retire on time because your savings have disappeared, etc., etc., you might very logically and reasonably conclude that action on climate change — particular an incomprehensible policy that looks like a Rube Goldberg device — should take a back seat to other priorities. (And particularly during a winter like the one we’ve been experiencing!)
We’ve had more than 20 years of communication of climate science. … And thanks in part to Web 2.0, today there is more varied and voluminous communication on the subject than ever before, including some very effective efforts by scientists. Yet with all of that communication about climate science, we still do not have substantial policy action. So might it be that the problem has not been a failure of a communication, but a failure of policy?
Please don’t get me wrong: I’m all for more and improved communication of climate science, both by scientists and journalists. But I do not believe this is the key that will unlock better policy outcomes.
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Well, we’ve had a failure to get a policy thanks to the efforts of the villains you’ve called out here. There hasn’t been a policy because we are still arguing with idiot noisemakers over the science. The thing is, in the long run, what the man on the street thinks won’t matter: He or she will still pay a gas tax or anything else engineered by elected officials. As with current fuel taxes for fixing the roads, a carbon tax will fix this particular pollution problem. People will pay it and not know the difference. They will buy green energy if that’s the only kind available. That’s the way things work, when the right people employ the right policy. Getting there isn’t easy, but this latest is just criminal noise: A last gasp of scoundrels. The energy companies even agree now. They are moving forward toward different sources of energy. They can see the writing on the legislative wall even if the average Joe & Jane can’t.
Try some objectivity in reporting rather than sounding like a PR flack pretending to be objective. People sniff out a sales pitch in the global warming “crisis” and the emails indicate that the science has been tailored to close the deal. If you can’t see that in the emails, you have lost your objectivity.
BTW, I believe in the physics of CO2 AGW and don’t trust the feedback and impact assessments.
Much of the policy is based on the fuzzy pseudoscience contained in the non-physical IPCC working groups. People have a pretty good BS detector and have not accepted that the policy put forward is a reasonable response to very uncertain impacts.
Figuring out better sales techniques will not work.
Howard: With all due respect, I am not a PR flack, nor do I sound like one. I have not proposed any kind of “sales technique,” nor have I ever used the word “crisis” in connection with climate change (because I prefer to “show” rather than “tell”.) My point here is that the reason for policy inaction may not be poor communication, as some say. Maybe there’s something wrong with the policy approach that has been tried for nearly 20 years. If you disagree, that’s fine. I would respect your perspective. But you don’t seem to even know the difference between a blog posting and a reported story, so it is difficult to take you seriously.
Tom:
Q1: How would you characterize the “policy approach that has been tried for nearly 20 years”?
Q2: When you say “failure of policy” and “policy approach” are you talking about the political process, the bill-writing process, or the particulars of policy proposals, or all three, or something else altogether?
Thanks.
Paulina:
Answer to Q1: Attempts to implement meaningful international agreements to control carbon emissions and thus limit climate risks using a top-down, targets and timetables approach. (And in the United States, this approach has so far failed as well.)
Answer to Q2: The whole ball of wax. At the international level, the divide between developed and developing nations has so far stymied action on a scale that might actually reduce climate risks (as we saw so dramatically in Copenhagen). At the national level, the nations of Europe have had trouble meeting their Kyoto targets, and the politics of the issue in the United States has so far meant no targets and timetables legislation has passed — and the prospects look pretty grim.
Given this track record, I believe journalists should asking whether the overall policy approach — top-down regulation/targets and timetables — can be successful. They should also be questioning whether the politics that prevail here in the U.S., characterized by a wide divide between the political and economic philosophies of liberals and conservatives, are conducive to this approach, or whether the political realities should dictate another one. (For example, bottom up energy technology innovation driven by government funding for R&D, tax incentives, etc.)
Right now, we aren’t seeing too much of that kind of journalistic probing. These days, much coverage seems to have fallen back into “global warming: yes or no?” mode, with lazy he said/she said “false balance” reporting. Climate partisans have constructed this box for us, and we seem to have been all too happy to climb into it — to the detriment of public understanding of the issues.
Tom:
On a blog with journalism in the title, one naively expects a professional standard of objectivity. I apologize for my high expectations. I appreciate that you are not aware that you sound like a PR flack in the tank for “consensus” climate science. That is the way you sound to me and many of my fellow colleagues. The most troubling aspect of your post is your repeated insistence that the debate has now shifted to a simplistic AGW yes or no mode. This is an unsupported conclusion that has the appearance of a Marketing 101 tactic designed to deflect the bad press that climate science has suffered from over the past several months by painting critics as narrow-minded moronic children.
Crisis spin has dominated media coverage of AGW for over a dozen years and people see through it. Figuring out a new spin angle will not help to implement policy changes. Due to the grotesque mismanagement of IPCC and peer reviewed climate-related science, public confidence may not be recoverable.
The only hope is to quietly go back to work and do the hard work of solving the major questions of climate science (like figuring out the causes of natural variation and quantifying actual feedback mechanisms). The current situation that you lament was caused by science half-way done, outrageous claims of harm and proposed sweeping draconian changes to the world economy. Have you noticed that in geologic history, warming is almost always beneficial for life on earth, but “studies show” that AGW only produces negative and catastrophic outcomes?
Even Walmart shoppers can tell the difference between mud and bullcrap. Unfortunately for you and your cohorts, the philosophy of Lincoln has trumped that of Barnum.
Howard writes of “grotesque mismanagement of IPCC and peer reviewed climate-related science ‘
Who is indulging in ‘crisis spin’ now, sir?
The number of bona-fide errors found in the 3000-page IPCC is…what? Two? Four? And how many were in the science section (WG1 report)? Zero.
This is evidence of grotesque mismanagement of IPCC and peer review only in teh fevered rhetoric of the denialsphere.
And btw, shame on the media for not *always* putting those much-touted AR4 errors in perspective. Writing about ‘errors in the IPCC report’ without denoting relative numbers and importance (nor noting the issues surround whether they were all really errors), is highly misleading. How about an essay on that, Mr. Yulsman?
I’m glad you are satisfied with IPCC Steven, however, it is hard to believe that you are a serious practicing scientist if you think any report has zero errors. The statistics you quote for 2 to 4 errors in a 3000-page report is an utter falsehood. The squishy social/policy/economic reports have not been fully vetted yet, but there are many folks outside the WUWT mouthbreather idiotsphere you love as a strawman that have already poked some big holes.
WG1 undoubtedly contains many errors and omissions (understanding of feedback mechanisms and the physical basis of GCM’s remain very immature at this stage), but it is a pretty clean and vetted effort. BTW, WG1 indicates that AGW at the high end of the range of scenario estimates is not very threatening to human health or the environment. In fact, there has been much criticism from the Big Green flacks for Big Business Cap and Trade regarding the lack of hysterical predictions in WG1 to match the other group reports.
Tom:
Thanks for your response.
1.
I agree that journalists need to do a lot more probing. There’s too much indirect and direct quoting of talking points, and too often writers seem to be letting talking point narratives provide outlines for articles. This just results in noise. But for this very reason, the *quantity* of “communication” on a topic seems beside the point (and perhaps part of the problem, if much of it is noise)–even if there are also examples of good communication within the noise.
As a small practical suggestion, I think it would be interesting to see online versions of news stories experiment with linking direct and indirect quotes to their respective contexts (with pop-ups or whatever). So as not to make this prohibitively cumbersome (in the advance of the inevitable software that will make this a standard feature of reporting), perhaps just the verbatim *questions* to which the persons quoted are responding could be linked; even that could make a big contribution to information value. I think software improvements in this space (for both the interviews themselves and the online presentation of news stories) could soon drive much better questions being asked in the first place (but then I’m an optimist), which seems to be what you are calling for.
2.
The “detriment of public understanding” you see caused by lazy he said/she said reporting surely includes public understanding of many issues related to climate change, not just the insufficiently-explored political&economic-philosophy frameworks at play in US politics?
3.
Finally, and more directly to your main point: if you look at H.R.2454 and S.1733, these are, of course, neither top-down nor bottom-up, as you use these terms here, but hybrid approaches. In addition to more probing of the politics of the issue, I would urge journalists to help the public get more information (not just more “communication”!) on what the basis is, for a variety of claims made by politicians, in this context. What *are* the economic philosophies of the individual senators, *why* are these their philosophies, and how would they legislate if they attempted to do so by what these philosophies *entail*, how does their rhetoric match these philosophies?
And, then, to probe what appears to be a basic assumption of yours: are political and economic *philosophies* even part of “the politics of the issue” in the sense of “the politics of the issue in the United States has so far meant no targets and timetables legislation has passed” or is the answer found somewhere else altogether?
Thanks.
Paulina: All I can say is thank you for posting your thoughtful comments here. You have given me a needed boost in enthusiasm as a blogger. And I extend those same thanks to all of the commenters here who maintain a civil, respectful tone and use evidence-based, rational arguments. The great promise of blogging is that we can all learn from each other through conversation, even if we disagree on some things. But so often, the blogosphere is instead a place for bullying and intellectual masturbation.
Paulina, as to your specific points, I think the idea of using technology to enhance transparency in journalism is excellent. And I think we’re already seeing things along those lines, but not enough. About your last question, I’m not exactly sure what you mean, but I think you’re asking whether something other than political and economic philosophy is at work in the failure to pass climate legislation. If so, what are your thoughts? I think there are a number of factors at play. For example, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, and whether you believe in a bigger or smaller role for government, if you are from, say, West Virginia or the Upper Midwest, you’re probably going to be more skeptical about cap-and-trade than if you represent, say, my district here in Colorado. But in my opinion, at the base of it all are the fundamental political and economic philosophies that shape all of American politics.
No matter how much evidence piles up implicating humans in climate change and suggesting that we run increasing risks if we fail to do something about it, James Inhofe will never accept it. That’s because his core belief is in limited government. And if he were to accept the reality of human-induced climate change, he’d probably have to accept more government involvement in the economy, not less — even if it is only an expanded role for government in funding for energy R&D.
Inhofe believes in limited government? Not the last time I checked. He probably does believe in limiting government’s role in promoting things he doesn’t like for other reasons, but I find it difficult to infer from his views on e.g. the PATRIOT Act and the military budget any sort of consistent limited government philosophy.
With regard to his views on climate change, I think they’re neatly explained by his perceived self-interest relative to the fossil fuel industry.
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