As stated by Professor Judith Curry,
"If Salby’s analysis holds up, this could revolutionize AGW science."
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Climate textbook explains why man-made CO2 does not control atmospheric CO2
Climate scientist Dr. Murry Salby, professor and Climate Chair at Macquarie University, Australia explains in the 2012 edition of his textbook, Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate, why changes in global temperature control CO2 levels, not man-made CO2. The text corroborates the works of Humlum et al, Frölicher et al, and Francey et al demonstrating that man-made CO2 is not the driver of atmospheric CO2 or global temperatures.
As stated by Professor Judith Curry,
As stated by Professor Judith Curry,
New paper finds sea level rise has greatly decelerated over past 10,000 years
A paper published today in the Journal of Quaternary Science reconstructs sea level rise in New Jersey, USA over the past 10,000 years and "concludes that relative sea levels rose at an average rate of 4 mm per year from 10,000-6,000 years ago, 2 mm per year from 6,000 to 2,000 years ago, and 1.3 mm per year from 2,000 years ago to AD 1900." Thus, the paper finds a large deceleration in sea level rise over the past 10,000 years, to a rate in 1900 essentially the same as during the past seven years. According to the 2012 NOAA Sea Level Budget, global sea levels rose at only 1.1 - 1.3 mm/year from 2005-2012, which is less than half of the rate claimed by the IPCC [3.1 mm/yr] and is equivalent to less than 5 inches per century. Contrary to alarmist claims, sea level rise decelerated over the 20th century, has also decelerated since 2005, and there is no evidence of any human influence on sea levels.
BENJAMIN P. HORTON et al
ABSTRACT: We investigated the effect of tidal-range change and sediment compaction on reconstructions of Holocene relative sea level (RSL) in New Jersey, USA. We updated a published sea-level database to generate 50 sea-level index points and ten limiting dates that define continuously rising RSL in New Jersey during the Holocene. There is scatter among the index points, particularly those older than 7 ka. A numerical model estimated that paleotidal range was relatively constant during the mid and late Holocene, but rapidly increased between 9 and 8 ka, leading to an underestimation of RSL by ∼0.5 m. We adjusted the sea-level index points using the paleotidal model prior to assessing the influence of compaction on organic samples with clastic deposits above and below (an intercalated sea-level index point). We found a significant relationship (p = 0.01) with the thickness of the overburden (r = 0.85). We altered the altitude of intercalated index points using this simple stratigraphic relationship, which reduced vertical scatter in sea-level reconstructions. We conclude that RSL rose at an average rate of 4 mm a−1 from 10 ka to 6 ka, 2 mm a−1 from 6 ka to 2 ka, and 1.3 mm a−1 from 2 ka to AD 1900.
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| Image from Wikipedia |
BENJAMIN P. HORTON et al
ABSTRACT: We investigated the effect of tidal-range change and sediment compaction on reconstructions of Holocene relative sea level (RSL) in New Jersey, USA. We updated a published sea-level database to generate 50 sea-level index points and ten limiting dates that define continuously rising RSL in New Jersey during the Holocene. There is scatter among the index points, particularly those older than 7 ka. A numerical model estimated that paleotidal range was relatively constant during the mid and late Holocene, but rapidly increased between 9 and 8 ka, leading to an underestimation of RSL by ∼0.5 m. We adjusted the sea-level index points using the paleotidal model prior to assessing the influence of compaction on organic samples with clastic deposits above and below (an intercalated sea-level index point). We found a significant relationship (p = 0.01) with the thickness of the overburden (r = 0.85). We altered the altitude of intercalated index points using this simple stratigraphic relationship, which reduced vertical scatter in sea-level reconstructions. We conclude that RSL rose at an average rate of 4 mm a−1 from 10 ka to 6 ka, 2 mm a−1 from 6 ka to 2 ka, and 1.3 mm a−1 from 2 ka to AD 1900.
Electric cars 'human toxicity potential' is 180-290% higher than gasoline cars, and CO2 emissions about the same
The Detroit News: "According to a comprehensive engineering study published in the February 2013 Journal of Industrial Ecology, greenhouse gas emissions for an EV's [electric vehicle] full life cycle — from production through road use — are not much greener than a comparable gas-powered auto, and no more planet-friendly than a diesel car. Indeed, when you factor in the toxicity of materials used in battery production, it’s hard to make the case that EVs are a green alternative." “Human toxicity potential (HTP) stands out as a potentially significant category for problem-shifting associated with a shift from gas engines to EVs,” concludes the Norwegian study. “The different EV options have 180 percent to 290 percent greater HTP impacts.”
May 21, 2013 at 7:34 am
Henry Payne
The zero-emission vehicle myth
Tesla celebrated its first profitable quarter this year. (AP photo)
Auto enthusiasts were thrilled last week as green automaker Tesla made it into the black, earning $11 million profit on revenue of $562 million in the first quarter of 2013. “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t somewhat surprising to see they’ve been able to turn a profit so quickly” said Alec Gutierrez, an industry analyst for Kelley Blue Book.
A closer inspection of the numbers, however, reveals that the Palo Alto-based carmaker made its profit by selling $68 million in carbon credits to other automakers. Under a mandate that 15 percent of sales be zero-emission vehicles by 2025, California requires that automakers make a certain number of electric vehicles (EVs) or be penalized. And since Tesla makes only the athletic, $70,000 electric Model S, it has credits by the trunkload — while full-line automakers like GM pay a penalty.
“At the end of the day, other carmakers are subsidizing Tesla,” says Thilo Koslowski, an analyst at Gartner Inc. Combine the Golden State’s generous zero-emission credits with federal tax credits ($7,500) and a state rebate ($2,500) on purchase of each Model S, and the government subsidy amounts to $45,000 per car.
But the greater con is the fiction that electric cars are zero-emission vehicles.
According to a comprehensive engineering study published in the February 2013 Journal of Industrial Ecology, greenhouse gas emissions for an EV’s full life cycle — from production through road use — are not much greener than a comparable gas-powered auto, and no more planet-friendly than a diesel car. Indeed, when you factor in the toxicity of materials used in battery production, it’s hard to make the case that EVs are a green alternative.
“Almost half of an EV’s life cycle global-warming potential is associated with its production,” concluded a study group from the Department of Energy
and Process Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “We estimate the GWP from EV production (to be) roughly twice (that) with gas-engine production.”
and Process Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “We estimate the GWP from EV production (to be) roughly twice (that) with gas-engine production.”
Green proponents — from California bureaucrats to Leo DiCaprio to Barack Obama — celebrate EVs as morally superior, sustainable vehicles because they get their juice from the common wall plug, not carbon fuels. But while EVs out-green their fossil fuel cousins in the use phase, the energy-intensive process of lithium battery mining and assembly negates much of that advantage in their production phase. The Norwegian study also assumes a European electricity mix in producing batteries. In the U.S., where coal is a greater percentage of the mix, the production emissions of EVs are even higher.
Yet, another study commissioned by the British government and auto industry compared mid-size cars with electric and gas power-plants. It found EV production emissions equal to 80,000 miles traveled in a gas-powered car, meaning the electric must be driven that distance before it was as environmentally efficient as its rival. Given that range-challenged EVs serve mostly as short-hop commuter transportation, that mileage figure may never be reached — even as EVs gain credits for zero-emission superiority.
The earth impact of EVs gets more complicated still when you factor in the toxic tail of electronic equipment materials like copper and nickel.
“Human toxicity potential (HTP) stands out as a potentially significant category for problem-shifting associated with a shift from gas engines to EVs,” concludes the Norwegian study. “The different EV options have 180 percent to 290 percent greater HTP impacts.”
Oh.
The urgency of global warming as a public policy issue has already been undercut by science. Cutting CO2 emissions by 80 percent by 2050, as called for by the United Nations, would insignificantly impact temperature increases — while causing gross economic harm. And the 2009 Climategate scandal exposed the doctoring of climate models.
as a public policy issue has already been undercut by science. Cutting CO2 emissions by 80 percent by 2050, as called for by the United Nations, would insignificantly impact temperature increases — while causing gross economic harm. And the 2009 Climategate scandal exposed the doctoring of climate models.
Still, green consumers are looking to reduce their environmental impact. Tesla EVs are superb vehicles — but they are no more green than their gas-powered Caddy rivals, even as pols unfairly subsidize them with thousands of dollars.
. Tesla EVs are superb vehicles — but they are no more green than their gas-powered Caddy rivals, even as pols unfairly subsidize them with thousands of dollars.Henry Payne’s column runs every Tuesday online. Payne is a Detroit News editorial writer and editorial cartoonist and editor of The Detroit News Politics forum. Email him at: hpayne@detroitnews.com
From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130521/OPINION03/305210002#ixzz2TxQFs3zv
The Lewandowsky Papers
The Lewandowsky Papers
This essay was written for Spiked-Online, and will be published on Spiked at some point.
As the influence of environmental thinking has increased its hold over the political establishment, the failure to win the public support that might create the basis for decisive action to save the planet has also increasingly been blamed on climate sceptics operating on the internet. On this view, bloggers have thwarted international and domestic action to prevent climate change. Accordingly, the nature of the blogosphere and the workings of the minds of climate sceptics have become the focus of academic research, just as the mechanics of the climate system have been the subject of climate scientists. But this attempt to form a pathological view of a complex debate says much more about the researchers than the objects of their study.
A recent study by academic psychologist, Stephan Lewandowsky at the University of Western Australia aimed to identify climate change sceptics’ tendency towards conspiracy theories. According to Lewandowsky’s paper published in Psychological Science, links were placed on climate blogs, inviting readers to take part in a survey that measured each respondents’ political orientation, attitude to climate change science, and adherence to popular conspiracy theories such as those about the deaths of JFK, Martin Luther King and Diana, the 911 attacks, aliens in Roswell, and the 1969 moon landing. Hence, the title of the paper “NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science“, which claimed to find a correlation between belief in the principle of a free-market, rejection of climate change science and ‘conspiracy ideation’.
However, in spite of the title of the paper linking the idea that the moon landings were faked with scepticism of climate science, just 10 of 1145 respondents either ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ with the statement ‘The Apollo moon landings never happened and were staged in a Hollywood film studio’. Of those 10, six of them either ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ with statements representing the scientific consensus on climate change. Of the remaining four who disagreed with the climate consensus, two ‘strongly agreed’ with every conspiracy theory, another agreed either ‘strongly’ or ‘very strongly’ with each of the 14 conspiracy theories listed in survey. The single remaining climate sceptic either genuinely believed that the moon landings were faked, or was another person seeking to game the survey’s results with a more sophisticated approach than his colleagues’.
A title that better reflected the survey’s results, then, might have been NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is Real. But the problems with the study don’t stop with the researcher’s haste to give his work a compelling name.
The paper, now known as LOG12, was published on Lewandowsky’s website last July, well ahead of its publication in the journalPsychological Science in March. In spite of not yet having been published, a ‘pre-press’ version drew a great deal of attention from people across the climate debate. For environmentalists it was proof that their counterparts were textbook nut-jobs. For sceptics, it was a poorly-conceived and improperly-executed smear job with only superficial academic credibility. The paper was circulated by the green media and blogosphere and taken apart by sceptics on the web.
Many problems with the paper emerged. The authors had claimed to have asked the operators of blogs popular with people at different ends of the climate debate to invite their readers to take part in the survey. As the research admits, none of the sceptic blogs responded, leading to the criticism that sceptics had not in fact been asked to participate. More fatally for the paper, it seemed that the researchers had let slip their intention to link climate scepticism with a tendency to produce conspiracy theories, and some blog commenters openly discussed their intentions to respond as sceptics to influence the outcome. Even worse, the paper drew criticism from Lewandowsky’s own colleagues.
Lewandowsky amplified these problems by refusing to answer questions about the survey, choosing instead to write a series of blog posts attacking his critics who were trying to understand his method and analysis. Through the acrimony, it emerged that Lewandowsky had anticipated that as he was well known for his own hostility to climate scepticism, sceptical bloggers would not be willing to participate in his survey. In order to overcome the problem, he asked the University’s ethics committee for permission to send the invitation from other researchers. However, though these emails were found, they had been ignored by the blog owners as the kind of spam bloggers often get, and were discarded, meaning that, nonetheless, sceptics hadn’t really been invited to participate.
Consequently, only 127 people that could be described as sceptics of climate science responded to the survey against the 1018 respondents that Lewandowsky categorises as ‘pro-science’. This should strike us immediately as a ridiculous starting point for an investigation. We would not survey the users of a Star Wars fan website to find out why some people don’t like science fiction movies. Nonetheless, from just 127 suspect responses, Lewandowsky proceeded to make statements about the phenomenon of climate scepticism.
But worse than Lewandowsky’s approach to gathering data is his method for analysing it. Whereas most surveys give results than can be understood fairly simply — eight out of ten cats prefer… — Lewandowsky’s approach was more complicated than his task warranted. And whereas we might expect significant differences between different groups of people to show up when their responses to questions are averaged, in fact few differences between the groups emerge when the data from the surveys is analysed through simpler methods than those deployed by Lewandowsky.
For instance, if we divide the respondents into ‘sceptics’ and ‘warmists’ on the basis of their assent to/dissent from the statement, ‘I believe that burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric temperature to some measurable degree’, and then compare those groups’ assent to/dissent from popular conspiracy theories, we get the following result:
As this table demonstrates, the average (and on this test, it must be noted, fairly militant) sceptic is not much more prone towards conspiracy theories than his putatively ‘pro-science’ counterpart. In fact, the ‘warmist’ is more likely (though only just) to buy into conspiracy theories relating to the 911 and Oklahoma attacks and the assassination of Martin Luther King. Both groups are broadly inclined away from conspiracy theories, with the exception being the only positive assent to the conspiracy theory that — ‘The claim that the climate is changing due to emissions from fossil fuels is a hoax perpetrated by corrupt scientists who wish to spend more taxpayer money on climate research’.
Similarly, a graph showing sceptics’ attitudes to consensus science reveals that not much separates the two groups.
As we can see, and as we might expect, sceptics and warmists only really disagree on matters relating to climate science.
The third variable that Lewandowsky sought to relate to sceptics’ attitude to climate science and conspiracy theories was their views on the economy. (In some of these statements, the scoring was reversed, so that 1 = agreement, 4 = disagreement, denoted by ‘R’.) Here we see slightly more disagreement.
However, this part of the survey asks questions that, in the main, in fact ask the respondent to prioritise the economy versus the environment, rather than to express his views on the economy independently of his views on the environment. This is a problem for Lewandowsky’s subsequent claim that a person’s views on the economy can ‘predict’ his view on the environment. Yet nonetheless, the survey results simply do not suggest that a big difference exists between sceptics and warmists. The average sceptic is, after all, with a score of 2.51, precisely undecided about whether or not ‘I support the free market system but not at the expense of the environmental quality’. Meanwhile, if these statements really reflect opposite ends of some kind of eco-economic axis, we would expect people who are ‘pro-science’ (i.e. ‘warmists’) to dissent more strongly from the statement ‘Free and unregulated markets pose important threats to sustainable development’.
Across these three groups of statements, there is very little disagreement on much other than on the environment. Yet Lewandowsky claimed that ‘Rejection of climate science was strongly associated with endorsement of a laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets‘, and that ‘A second variable that was associated with rejection of climate science as well as other scientific propositions was conspiracist ideation‘.
It seems fairly obvious that Lewandowsky was at best mistaken. The data simply do not support his conclusions. His claims differ remarkably from what the difference between an averaged profile of a ‘sceptic’ and his counterpart look like.
What produced Lewandowsky’s result is a statistical technique called structural-equation modelling (SEM). SEM is a complex process used mainly in the social and behavioural sciences to test and explore assumptions about relationships in observational data. Though this may be an appropriate tool in some cases, its usefulness to the job of shedding light on what people think about complex political and scientific issues is debateable, and may in fact reveal more about Lewandowsky than sceptics. First, there is the problem of Lewandowsky’s assumptions: he confuses categories of economic and environmental ideas; he fails to test for conspiracy theories that might be more coincident with environmentalism than the ones he chose, (for example the idea that climate scepticism is a phenomenon produced by covert PR operations, paid for by fossil fuel companies); and he fails to achieve a robust definition of climate scepticism. Second, a much more simple method — averaging — show that, no matter what the slight statistical tendency of sceptics is, on aggregate, there is no clear line dividing lunatic sceptics from the enlightened climate scientists and their disciples. The more complex method, though, has the virtue of being a larger fig leaf for Lewandowsky’s bad faith.
This would not have been Lewandowsky’s only experiment with statistics-abuse. In June last year, using what he called ‘simple mathematics’, but which in fact depended on Bayesian statistical methods, he made a series of extraordinary claims, concluding that,‘greater uncertainty about the evolution of the climate should give us even greater cause for concern‘, that ‘greater uncertainty means that things could be worse than we thought’ and that ‘greater uncertainty means that the expected damages from climate change will necessarily be greater than anticipated’. This astonishing claim barely needs unpacking to demonstrate as so much nonsense cloaked in mathematical jargon.
This should raise questions about exactly what it is that Lewandowsky is trying to achieve through the use of dubious statistical methods, and his attempt to understand the minds of climate sceptics: is the point to advance understanding and knowledge, or is it a strategic move in a political battle that there can be no doubt he has taken a stand in.
But to suggest that either bad faith or incompetence has driven Lewandowsky would be, on his view, a conspiracy theory. This was his claim in a subsequent paper published in March by open access journal, Frontiers in Personality Science and Individual Differences, in which Lewandowsky and colleagues attempted to draw conclusions about responses from the climate sceptic blogosphere to his previous paper, LOG12.
In the paper, Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation, Lewandowsky claimed to, ‘identify and trace the hypotheses that emerged in response to LOG12 and that questioned the validity of the paper’s conclusions. Using established criteria to identify conspiracist ideation, we show that many of the hypotheses exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking.’
This involved compiling a database of the criticisms made against the first paper and categorising them. For example, one such comment posted by Richard Betts at the Bishop Hill website run by author of the Hockey Stick Illusion, Andrew Montford read as follows:
The thing I don’t understand is, why didn’t they just make a post on sceptic blogs themselves, rather than approaching blog owners. They could have posted as a Discussion topic here at Bishop Hill without even asking the host, and I very much doubt that [Montford] would have removed it. Climate Audit also has very light-touch moderation and I doubt whether Steve McIntyre would have removed such an unsolicited post. Same probably goes for many of the sceptic blogs, in my experience. So it does appear to that they didn’t try very hard to solicit views from the climate sceptic community.
This comment was put into a table with about 110 others that Lewandowsky et al reckoned to be evidence that their authors ‘Espouse conspiracy theories’. Each of the comments were put under different category of ‘conspiracy theory’, such as ‘didn’t email deniers’,‘Warmists faked data’, and ‘Emailed warmists before deniers’. However, this raises the problem, much as with the previous study, in the way categories are defined before they are tabulated and analysed.
If Betts’s comment is evidence of climate sceptics doing ‘conspiracy theory ideation’, then the test for it is set very low indeed — the comment was a straightforward criticism of Lewandowsky’s attempt to gather data, not speculation about why he had taken such liberties. Saying that Lewandowsky’s attempts to get responses from sceptics was inadequate is nothing like saying that the CIA killed Martin Luther King. Bogus categories and a seemingly objective method allowed Lewandowsky’s prejudices to prevail — a statistical technique serving as a fig leaf, again.
Even more unfortunate for Lewandowsky, however, the comment in question did not belong to a climate change sceptic at all. Richard Betts is a climate scientist, an IPCC lead author, and head of climate impacts research at the UK Meteorological Office.
The fact that Lewandowsky could put Betts into a category of ‘climate sceptic’, and his comment into a category of ‘conspiracy theory’ should be an object lesson about letting prejudice influence research for those seeking to understand and explain the climate debate. Lewandowsky’s confusion is owed to the fact of Betts’s very different and unusual approach to overcoming the climate debate: actually having the debate. Betts was able to criticise Lewandowsky after taking the opinions and discussion between climate sceptics seriously, rather than by taking it for granted that they were wrong.
Lewandowsky worked from his prejudice — that all sceptics are, a priori, wrong. His objective was to expose the ‘motivated reasoning’ that lies behind climate scepticism. But in doing so, he managed only to expose his own bad faith. This raises serious questions, not only about the categories and perceptions of ‘climate scepticism’ that dominate the language of anti-scepticism, but also broader questions about how such naked politicking can be passed off as academic research.
Across three papers based on the same data (a third appearing in the journal, Nature Climate Change), Lewandowsky, either unwittingly or deliberately allowed his prejudices to form the basis from which his study proceeded. On his view, climate scepticism is a ‘rejection of climate science’, which sits in contrast to ‘pro science’ opinion. But debunking this claim is easy. We can find climate scientists who give lower estimates of climate’s sensitivity to CO2 whose arguments are better grounded in science than any number of eco-warriors whose arguments are irrational, emotional, and lack any sense of proportion. One can either believe or disbelieve in the idea of anthropogenic climate change independently of science.
Second, Lewandowsky wanted to claim that this rejection of science is ‘motivated reasoning’ — that something else prefigures in the minds of sceptics, that causes them to reject climate science. This too, is easily countered, not just with a more straightforward analysis of Lewandowsky’s own data, which shows otherwise, but also by questioning this conception of ‘motivated reasoning’ itself.
All reasoning is, to a greater or lesser extent, ‘motivated’ — why would we reason, were it not as a means to some ends or other? However, the implication of Lewandowsky’s claim is that those who believe in climate change have transcended such human faults. Yet we can see that a great deal of presupposition and ‘ideology’ exists prior to the science in the arguments put forward in the debate about the environment. As I have argued previously on Spiked, in order to make the claim that climate change is dangerous, many environmentalists have to presuppose that society’s sensitivity to climate is equivalent to climate’s sensitivity to CO2 — a highly deterministic claim which is not borne out by history, let alone has any grounding in science, and which necessarily precludes the possibility of development mediating the vulnerability of society to climate.
Environmentalism’s presuppositions prefigure much more in Lewandowsky’s analyses than anything he can identify working in the minds of sceptics. This calls into question the ability of psychology to offer insight into the climate debate. For instance, much is made of the scientific consensus on climate change by researchers hoping to understand the phenomenon of climate scepticism, for example by asking whether or not respondents agree or disagree with positions that are assumed to represent the consensus position. However, this method is highly sensitive to the researcher’s ability to accurately represent the consensus, and to elicit from the respondent an accurate picture of his opinion. But as we have already seen, psychologists can quite easily put climate scientists into the category of climate sceptics. Researchers with misconceived ideas about what the science pertains to at best measures the public’s agreement with their own misconceptions.
Unfortunately for Lewandowsky and others engaged in the same attempts to form an understanding of climate scepticism from the psychological perspective, the objects of their study may well have a much better understanding of climate science and its problems than they possess. In this way, complex arguments and nuances are lost in the researcher’s desire to reduce multi-dimensional arguments into categories of right and wrong, good and bad, pro-science and anti-science.
Thus, the consensus on climate science is removed from its scientific context, and becomes a consensus without an object: it can mean whatever climate change psychologists want it to mean. Research into the public understanding of science, where that science has implications for public policy, becomes a vehicle for researchers to manifest their own prejudices as policy.
So what might appear at first pass as an inconsequential squabble on the internet between an arrogant researcher and recalcitrant bloggers in fact has significance for the debate about science’s role in public life. How was it that such shoddy, prejudiced, and partial research passed the seemingly objective tests of peer-review, and that such errors of category, method and analysis were nonetheless deemed worthy of publication by editors of scientific publications?
The answer here is twofold. First, there is the insidiousness of the objectless consensus: the mythology of the climate debate precedes the climate debate. The idea of there being scientists on the one hand, opposed by irrational sceptics on the other has been established so concretely that few editors, peer-reviewers or journalists even bother to ask questions about the content of the consensus, much less about how it is contradicted by the substance of climate sceptics’ arguments. Climate change orthodoxyallowed Lewandowsky’s work to go unchallenged by the checks and balances we might expect to catch out, or at least, criticise, such bare-faced framing of the debate.
Second, there is the political utility of the scientific consensus. The desire for policies to have a grounding in science is ubiquitous amongst a class of ‘policymakers’ (PKA politicians) and institutional science. Research such as Lewandowsky’s would not be significant, were it not for the (wrong) belief that climate scepticism’s influence over public opinion is the chief impediment to climate policies. For instance, in February, Parliament’s Science and Technology Select Committee called for submissions to an inquiry into the public’s understanding of climate change, following a report that had advised that ‘should scepticism continue to increase, democratic governments are likely to find it harder to convince voters to support costly environmental policies aimed at mitigation of, or adaptation to, climate change.’
In the era of ‘evidence-based policy-making’, public opinion is an afterthought rather than the measure of a democratic mandate. Only once a political consensus has been achieved between political parties do today’s ‘policymakers’ seek ways of convincing the public that their policies are a good idea. The extent of this upside-down form of politics is revealed by one of the questions asked by the select committee: ‘Does the Government have sufficient expertise in social and behavioural sciences to understand the relationship between public understanding of climate science and the feasibility of relevant public policies?‘
The academy increasingly replaces the ballot box in public affairs. And in particular, the science academy. On the face of it, it looks like a good idea. Expertise, is of course, almost always better placed to answer technical questions than is the man-on-the-street. But when the man-on-the-street becomes the object of the ‘social and behavioural sciences’, which are, in turn, employed to elicit his obedience, politics undergoes a radical transformation.
Material and social scientists have not been forthcoming in their criticism of the growing compact between the academy and the state. Indeed it much better serves those who we might expect to be the best critics of power to serve it instead. Lewandowsky, who has now moved from Australia to be the Chair in Cognitive Psychology in the School of Experimental Psychology, at the University of Bristol, has been given the Royal Society’s Wolfson Research Merit Award — a scheme designed ‘for outstanding scientists who would benefit from a five year salary enhancement to help recruit them to or retain them in the UK’. Says the university:
‘Professor Lewandowsky receives the award for his project entitled ‘The (mis)information revolution: information seeking and knowledge transmission’, which addresses how people navigate the blizzard of information with which we are faced on a daily basis, not all of which is accurate or truthful. The project emphasises how people update their memories and under what conditions they are able to discount information that turns out to be false. The project also examines how people interact with, and influence, each other to understand how information spreads through a society.’
Lewandowsky is well placed to speak about filling the public sphere with information ‘not all of which is accurate or truthful’. But what contribution to either science, or society has he really made that is worthy of such an award? And why would the Royal Society be so keen to chuck £tens of thousands at what can be called at best, cod psychology? If this award reflects the Royal Society’s priorities, it says a great deal about them.
As I’ve reported previously on Spiked, the Royal Society has sought an ever expanding role in policy-making, mostly in environmental matters. In particular, the academy published the results of a two year study into population and the environment last year, which coincided with their award to another researcher notable for his failures — population environmentalist and neo-malthusian doomsayer, Paul Ehrlich. It would seem that the closer the Royal Society get to policy-making, the more distance is put between itself and science. In spite of the failures of Ehrlich and Lewandowsky, their claims still have political utility.
It follows that the science academy’s growing desire for influence in the public sphere causes it to seek evidence that the public aren’t capable of managing their own affairs without it. The premise of a technocracy is, after all, the inadequacies of democracy. Thus we see in the Apocalyptic rants of the likes of Paul Ehrlich FRS and Lewandowsky the beneficiary of their generosity not simply claims about the material world, but claims about the shortcomings of human faculties. Between them, these men paint a picture, from the psychology of the individual, through to the functioning of the planet’s natural processes, in which humanity simply cannot help but steer a course for catastrophe without their intervention.
To point this out, though — to point to the problems with the science, or to ask questions about the political assumptions and consequences of these arguments — is to seem to be ‘anti-science’, or to betray a mindset that is preoccupied with conspiracy theories. To point out that the science is, in fact, groundless and speculative crap, and that it is intended, not to advance knowledge, but to serve a political function is to seem to stand out as a denier of science.
Scientists such as Lewandowsky are better at self-justification than scientific research. Rather than being an investigation into the workings of the material world, Lewandosky’s ‘research’ — a poorly executed and error-prone online survey, seen through dodgy statistical methods and bogus categories — is a naked attempt to explain why people dare challenge scientific authority. But there are good reasons for challenging it. Science has turned its gaze on the public as politicians have sought to remedy their diminishing public support by recruiting the academy. It is not a coincidence that the scientific agenda increasingly reflects the prejudices and problems of elite politics.
This would be an anti-science conspiracy theory if it were a claim that Lewandowsky and the Royal Society were engaged in science proper, and were aware of what they were doing. But what Lewandowsky reveals is the consequence of confusing science as a process — a method — and science as an institution. A shonky web survey is given respectability by its author’s professorship and tenure at a university, by peer-review, and by publication. The institutional apparatus of science allowed prejudice and politics to be passed off as objective study. Criticism of the survey — i.e. about the research’s adherence to (or departure from) the scientificmethod – was defended against on the basis that it challenged, not the scientific argument (i.e. science as a process), but scientific authority (i.e institutional science).
A culture of intransigence has developed in the shadow of the compact between politics and science, which can be seen in the Lewandowsky affair in microcosm. Lewandowsky’s work unwittingly demonstrates that what is passed off as peer-reviewed and published ‘science’, even in today’s world, is no more scientific than the worst ramblings of the least qualified and nuttiest climate change denier on the internet. It looks like science, certainly, but the product only survives a superficial inspection. The only difference being the institutional muscle that Lewandowsky has access to, but which unhinged climate change deniers do not. The object of the Professor’s study is his really his own refusal to debate with his lessers.
The consequence of this should be alarming to everyone who takes an interest in the climate and other scientific debates, no matter what their view on climate change. Lewandowsky demonstrates that the academic institutions do not produce dialogue that has any more merit than the petty exchanges — flame wars –that the internet is famous for. Dressing political arguments up in scientific terminology risks the value of science being lost to society — its potential squandered for an edge in a political fight. After all, if Lewandowsky’s work is representative of the quality of scientific research in general and the standards the academy expects of academics, what does that say about climate science and the quality of the scientific consensus on climate change? If the scientific argument about the link between anthropogenic CO2 and climate change is only as good as Lewandowsky’s claim that ‘Rejection of climate science [is] strongly associated with endorsement of a laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets’, then perhaps climate sceptics should be taken more seriously.
As the influence of environmental thinking has increased its hold over the political establishment, the failure to win the public support that might create the basis for decisive action to save the planet has also increasingly been blamed on climate sceptics operating on the internet. On this view, bloggers have thwarted international and domestic action to prevent climate change. Accordingly, the nature of the blogosphere and the workings of the minds of climate sceptics have become the focus of academic research, just as the mechanics of the climate system have been the subject of climate scientists. But this attempt to form a pathological view of a complex debate says much more about the researchers than the objects of their study.
A recent study by academic psychologist, Stephan Lewandowsky at the University of Western Australia aimed to identify climate change sceptics’ tendency towards conspiracy theories. According to Lewandowsky’s paper published in Psychological Science, links were placed on climate blogs, inviting readers to take part in a survey that measured each respondents’ political orientation, attitude to climate change science, and adherence to popular conspiracy theories such as those about the deaths of JFK, Martin Luther King and Diana, the 911 attacks, aliens in Roswell, and the 1969 moon landing. Hence, the title of the paper “NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science“, which claimed to find a correlation between belief in the principle of a free-market, rejection of climate change science and ‘conspiracy ideation’.
However, in spite of the title of the paper linking the idea that the moon landings were faked with scepticism of climate science, just 10 of 1145 respondents either ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ with the statement ‘The Apollo moon landings never happened and were staged in a Hollywood film studio’. Of those 10, six of them either ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ with statements representing the scientific consensus on climate change. Of the remaining four who disagreed with the climate consensus, two ‘strongly agreed’ with every conspiracy theory, another agreed either ‘strongly’ or ‘very strongly’ with each of the 14 conspiracy theories listed in survey. The single remaining climate sceptic either genuinely believed that the moon landings were faked, or was another person seeking to game the survey’s results with a more sophisticated approach than his colleagues’.
A title that better reflected the survey’s results, then, might have been NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is Real. But the problems with the study don’t stop with the researcher’s haste to give his work a compelling name.
The paper, now known as LOG12, was published on Lewandowsky’s website last July, well ahead of its publication in the journalPsychological Science in March. In spite of not yet having been published, a ‘pre-press’ version drew a great deal of attention from people across the climate debate. For environmentalists it was proof that their counterparts were textbook nut-jobs. For sceptics, it was a poorly-conceived and improperly-executed smear job with only superficial academic credibility. The paper was circulated by the green media and blogosphere and taken apart by sceptics on the web.
Many problems with the paper emerged. The authors had claimed to have asked the operators of blogs popular with people at different ends of the climate debate to invite their readers to take part in the survey. As the research admits, none of the sceptic blogs responded, leading to the criticism that sceptics had not in fact been asked to participate. More fatally for the paper, it seemed that the researchers had let slip their intention to link climate scepticism with a tendency to produce conspiracy theories, and some blog commenters openly discussed their intentions to respond as sceptics to influence the outcome. Even worse, the paper drew criticism from Lewandowsky’s own colleagues.
Lewandowsky amplified these problems by refusing to answer questions about the survey, choosing instead to write a series of blog posts attacking his critics who were trying to understand his method and analysis. Through the acrimony, it emerged that Lewandowsky had anticipated that as he was well known for his own hostility to climate scepticism, sceptical bloggers would not be willing to participate in his survey. In order to overcome the problem, he asked the University’s ethics committee for permission to send the invitation from other researchers. However, though these emails were found, they had been ignored by the blog owners as the kind of spam bloggers often get, and were discarded, meaning that, nonetheless, sceptics hadn’t really been invited to participate.
Consequently, only 127 people that could be described as sceptics of climate science responded to the survey against the 1018 respondents that Lewandowsky categorises as ‘pro-science’. This should strike us immediately as a ridiculous starting point for an investigation. We would not survey the users of a Star Wars fan website to find out why some people don’t like science fiction movies. Nonetheless, from just 127 suspect responses, Lewandowsky proceeded to make statements about the phenomenon of climate scepticism.
But worse than Lewandowsky’s approach to gathering data is his method for analysing it. Whereas most surveys give results than can be understood fairly simply — eight out of ten cats prefer… — Lewandowsky’s approach was more complicated than his task warranted. And whereas we might expect significant differences between different groups of people to show up when their responses to questions are averaged, in fact few differences between the groups emerge when the data from the surveys is analysed through simpler methods than those deployed by Lewandowsky.
For instance, if we divide the respondents into ‘sceptics’ and ‘warmists’ on the basis of their assent to/dissent from the statement, ‘I believe that burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric temperature to some measurable degree’, and then compare those groups’ assent to/dissent from popular conspiracy theories, we get the following result:
As this table demonstrates, the average (and on this test, it must be noted, fairly militant) sceptic is not much more prone towards conspiracy theories than his putatively ‘pro-science’ counterpart. In fact, the ‘warmist’ is more likely (though only just) to buy into conspiracy theories relating to the 911 and Oklahoma attacks and the assassination of Martin Luther King. Both groups are broadly inclined away from conspiracy theories, with the exception being the only positive assent to the conspiracy theory that — ‘The claim that the climate is changing due to emissions from fossil fuels is a hoax perpetrated by corrupt scientists who wish to spend more taxpayer money on climate research’.
Similarly, a graph showing sceptics’ attitudes to consensus science reveals that not much separates the two groups.
As we can see, and as we might expect, sceptics and warmists only really disagree on matters relating to climate science.
The third variable that Lewandowsky sought to relate to sceptics’ attitude to climate science and conspiracy theories was their views on the economy. (In some of these statements, the scoring was reversed, so that 1 = agreement, 4 = disagreement, denoted by ‘R’.) Here we see slightly more disagreement.
However, this part of the survey asks questions that, in the main, in fact ask the respondent to prioritise the economy versus the environment, rather than to express his views on the economy independently of his views on the environment. This is a problem for Lewandowsky’s subsequent claim that a person’s views on the economy can ‘predict’ his view on the environment. Yet nonetheless, the survey results simply do not suggest that a big difference exists between sceptics and warmists. The average sceptic is, after all, with a score of 2.51, precisely undecided about whether or not ‘I support the free market system but not at the expense of the environmental quality’. Meanwhile, if these statements really reflect opposite ends of some kind of eco-economic axis, we would expect people who are ‘pro-science’ (i.e. ‘warmists’) to dissent more strongly from the statement ‘Free and unregulated markets pose important threats to sustainable development’.
Across these three groups of statements, there is very little disagreement on much other than on the environment. Yet Lewandowsky claimed that ‘Rejection of climate science was strongly associated with endorsement of a laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets‘, and that ‘A second variable that was associated with rejection of climate science as well as other scientific propositions was conspiracist ideation‘.
It seems fairly obvious that Lewandowsky was at best mistaken. The data simply do not support his conclusions. His claims differ remarkably from what the difference between an averaged profile of a ‘sceptic’ and his counterpart look like.
What produced Lewandowsky’s result is a statistical technique called structural-equation modelling (SEM). SEM is a complex process used mainly in the social and behavioural sciences to test and explore assumptions about relationships in observational data. Though this may be an appropriate tool in some cases, its usefulness to the job of shedding light on what people think about complex political and scientific issues is debateable, and may in fact reveal more about Lewandowsky than sceptics. First, there is the problem of Lewandowsky’s assumptions: he confuses categories of economic and environmental ideas; he fails to test for conspiracy theories that might be more coincident with environmentalism than the ones he chose, (for example the idea that climate scepticism is a phenomenon produced by covert PR operations, paid for by fossil fuel companies); and he fails to achieve a robust definition of climate scepticism. Second, a much more simple method — averaging — show that, no matter what the slight statistical tendency of sceptics is, on aggregate, there is no clear line dividing lunatic sceptics from the enlightened climate scientists and their disciples. The more complex method, though, has the virtue of being a larger fig leaf for Lewandowsky’s bad faith.
This would not have been Lewandowsky’s only experiment with statistics-abuse. In June last year, using what he called ‘simple mathematics’, but which in fact depended on Bayesian statistical methods, he made a series of extraordinary claims, concluding that,‘greater uncertainty about the evolution of the climate should give us even greater cause for concern‘, that ‘greater uncertainty means that things could be worse than we thought’ and that ‘greater uncertainty means that the expected damages from climate change will necessarily be greater than anticipated’. This astonishing claim barely needs unpacking to demonstrate as so much nonsense cloaked in mathematical jargon.
This should raise questions about exactly what it is that Lewandowsky is trying to achieve through the use of dubious statistical methods, and his attempt to understand the minds of climate sceptics: is the point to advance understanding and knowledge, or is it a strategic move in a political battle that there can be no doubt he has taken a stand in.
But to suggest that either bad faith or incompetence has driven Lewandowsky would be, on his view, a conspiracy theory. This was his claim in a subsequent paper published in March by open access journal, Frontiers in Personality Science and Individual Differences, in which Lewandowsky and colleagues attempted to draw conclusions about responses from the climate sceptic blogosphere to his previous paper, LOG12.
In the paper, Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation, Lewandowsky claimed to, ‘identify and trace the hypotheses that emerged in response to LOG12 and that questioned the validity of the paper’s conclusions. Using established criteria to identify conspiracist ideation, we show that many of the hypotheses exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking.’
This involved compiling a database of the criticisms made against the first paper and categorising them. For example, one such comment posted by Richard Betts at the Bishop Hill website run by author of the Hockey Stick Illusion, Andrew Montford read as follows:
The thing I don’t understand is, why didn’t they just make a post on sceptic blogs themselves, rather than approaching blog owners. They could have posted as a Discussion topic here at Bishop Hill without even asking the host, and I very much doubt that [Montford] would have removed it. Climate Audit also has very light-touch moderation and I doubt whether Steve McIntyre would have removed such an unsolicited post. Same probably goes for many of the sceptic blogs, in my experience. So it does appear to that they didn’t try very hard to solicit views from the climate sceptic community.
This comment was put into a table with about 110 others that Lewandowsky et al reckoned to be evidence that their authors ‘Espouse conspiracy theories’. Each of the comments were put under different category of ‘conspiracy theory’, such as ‘didn’t email deniers’,‘Warmists faked data’, and ‘Emailed warmists before deniers’. However, this raises the problem, much as with the previous study, in the way categories are defined before they are tabulated and analysed.
If Betts’s comment is evidence of climate sceptics doing ‘conspiracy theory ideation’, then the test for it is set very low indeed — the comment was a straightforward criticism of Lewandowsky’s attempt to gather data, not speculation about why he had taken such liberties. Saying that Lewandowsky’s attempts to get responses from sceptics was inadequate is nothing like saying that the CIA killed Martin Luther King. Bogus categories and a seemingly objective method allowed Lewandowsky’s prejudices to prevail — a statistical technique serving as a fig leaf, again.
Even more unfortunate for Lewandowsky, however, the comment in question did not belong to a climate change sceptic at all. Richard Betts is a climate scientist, an IPCC lead author, and head of climate impacts research at the UK Meteorological Office.
The fact that Lewandowsky could put Betts into a category of ‘climate sceptic’, and his comment into a category of ‘conspiracy theory’ should be an object lesson about letting prejudice influence research for those seeking to understand and explain the climate debate. Lewandowsky’s confusion is owed to the fact of Betts’s very different and unusual approach to overcoming the climate debate: actually having the debate. Betts was able to criticise Lewandowsky after taking the opinions and discussion between climate sceptics seriously, rather than by taking it for granted that they were wrong.
Lewandowsky worked from his prejudice — that all sceptics are, a priori, wrong. His objective was to expose the ‘motivated reasoning’ that lies behind climate scepticism. But in doing so, he managed only to expose his own bad faith. This raises serious questions, not only about the categories and perceptions of ‘climate scepticism’ that dominate the language of anti-scepticism, but also broader questions about how such naked politicking can be passed off as academic research.
Across three papers based on the same data (a third appearing in the journal, Nature Climate Change), Lewandowsky, either unwittingly or deliberately allowed his prejudices to form the basis from which his study proceeded. On his view, climate scepticism is a ‘rejection of climate science’, which sits in contrast to ‘pro science’ opinion. But debunking this claim is easy. We can find climate scientists who give lower estimates of climate’s sensitivity to CO2 whose arguments are better grounded in science than any number of eco-warriors whose arguments are irrational, emotional, and lack any sense of proportion. One can either believe or disbelieve in the idea of anthropogenic climate change independently of science.
Second, Lewandowsky wanted to claim that this rejection of science is ‘motivated reasoning’ — that something else prefigures in the minds of sceptics, that causes them to reject climate science. This too, is easily countered, not just with a more straightforward analysis of Lewandowsky’s own data, which shows otherwise, but also by questioning this conception of ‘motivated reasoning’ itself.
All reasoning is, to a greater or lesser extent, ‘motivated’ — why would we reason, were it not as a means to some ends or other? However, the implication of Lewandowsky’s claim is that those who believe in climate change have transcended such human faults. Yet we can see that a great deal of presupposition and ‘ideology’ exists prior to the science in the arguments put forward in the debate about the environment. As I have argued previously on Spiked, in order to make the claim that climate change is dangerous, many environmentalists have to presuppose that society’s sensitivity to climate is equivalent to climate’s sensitivity to CO2 — a highly deterministic claim which is not borne out by history, let alone has any grounding in science, and which necessarily precludes the possibility of development mediating the vulnerability of society to climate.
Environmentalism’s presuppositions prefigure much more in Lewandowsky’s analyses than anything he can identify working in the minds of sceptics. This calls into question the ability of psychology to offer insight into the climate debate. For instance, much is made of the scientific consensus on climate change by researchers hoping to understand the phenomenon of climate scepticism, for example by asking whether or not respondents agree or disagree with positions that are assumed to represent the consensus position. However, this method is highly sensitive to the researcher’s ability to accurately represent the consensus, and to elicit from the respondent an accurate picture of his opinion. But as we have already seen, psychologists can quite easily put climate scientists into the category of climate sceptics. Researchers with misconceived ideas about what the science pertains to at best measures the public’s agreement with their own misconceptions.
Unfortunately for Lewandowsky and others engaged in the same attempts to form an understanding of climate scepticism from the psychological perspective, the objects of their study may well have a much better understanding of climate science and its problems than they possess. In this way, complex arguments and nuances are lost in the researcher’s desire to reduce multi-dimensional arguments into categories of right and wrong, good and bad, pro-science and anti-science.
Thus, the consensus on climate science is removed from its scientific context, and becomes a consensus without an object: it can mean whatever climate change psychologists want it to mean. Research into the public understanding of science, where that science has implications for public policy, becomes a vehicle for researchers to manifest their own prejudices as policy.
So what might appear at first pass as an inconsequential squabble on the internet between an arrogant researcher and recalcitrant bloggers in fact has significance for the debate about science’s role in public life. How was it that such shoddy, prejudiced, and partial research passed the seemingly objective tests of peer-review, and that such errors of category, method and analysis were nonetheless deemed worthy of publication by editors of scientific publications?
The answer here is twofold. First, there is the insidiousness of the objectless consensus: the mythology of the climate debate precedes the climate debate. The idea of there being scientists on the one hand, opposed by irrational sceptics on the other has been established so concretely that few editors, peer-reviewers or journalists even bother to ask questions about the content of the consensus, much less about how it is contradicted by the substance of climate sceptics’ arguments. Climate change orthodoxyallowed Lewandowsky’s work to go unchallenged by the checks and balances we might expect to catch out, or at least, criticise, such bare-faced framing of the debate.
Second, there is the political utility of the scientific consensus. The desire for policies to have a grounding in science is ubiquitous amongst a class of ‘policymakers’ (PKA politicians) and institutional science. Research such as Lewandowsky’s would not be significant, were it not for the (wrong) belief that climate scepticism’s influence over public opinion is the chief impediment to climate policies. For instance, in February, Parliament’s Science and Technology Select Committee called for submissions to an inquiry into the public’s understanding of climate change, following a report that had advised that ‘should scepticism continue to increase, democratic governments are likely to find it harder to convince voters to support costly environmental policies aimed at mitigation of, or adaptation to, climate change.’
In the era of ‘evidence-based policy-making’, public opinion is an afterthought rather than the measure of a democratic mandate. Only once a political consensus has been achieved between political parties do today’s ‘policymakers’ seek ways of convincing the public that their policies are a good idea. The extent of this upside-down form of politics is revealed by one of the questions asked by the select committee: ‘Does the Government have sufficient expertise in social and behavioural sciences to understand the relationship between public understanding of climate science and the feasibility of relevant public policies?‘
The academy increasingly replaces the ballot box in public affairs. And in particular, the science academy. On the face of it, it looks like a good idea. Expertise, is of course, almost always better placed to answer technical questions than is the man-on-the-street. But when the man-on-the-street becomes the object of the ‘social and behavioural sciences’, which are, in turn, employed to elicit his obedience, politics undergoes a radical transformation.
Material and social scientists have not been forthcoming in their criticism of the growing compact between the academy and the state. Indeed it much better serves those who we might expect to be the best critics of power to serve it instead. Lewandowsky, who has now moved from Australia to be the Chair in Cognitive Psychology in the School of Experimental Psychology, at the University of Bristol, has been given the Royal Society’s Wolfson Research Merit Award — a scheme designed ‘for outstanding scientists who would benefit from a five year salary enhancement to help recruit them to or retain them in the UK’. Says the university:
‘Professor Lewandowsky receives the award for his project entitled ‘The (mis)information revolution: information seeking and knowledge transmission’, which addresses how people navigate the blizzard of information with which we are faced on a daily basis, not all of which is accurate or truthful. The project emphasises how people update their memories and under what conditions they are able to discount information that turns out to be false. The project also examines how people interact with, and influence, each other to understand how information spreads through a society.’
Lewandowsky is well placed to speak about filling the public sphere with information ‘not all of which is accurate or truthful’. But what contribution to either science, or society has he really made that is worthy of such an award? And why would the Royal Society be so keen to chuck £tens of thousands at what can be called at best, cod psychology? If this award reflects the Royal Society’s priorities, it says a great deal about them.
As I’ve reported previously on Spiked, the Royal Society has sought an ever expanding role in policy-making, mostly in environmental matters. In particular, the academy published the results of a two year study into population and the environment last year, which coincided with their award to another researcher notable for his failures — population environmentalist and neo-malthusian doomsayer, Paul Ehrlich. It would seem that the closer the Royal Society get to policy-making, the more distance is put between itself and science. In spite of the failures of Ehrlich and Lewandowsky, their claims still have political utility.
It follows that the science academy’s growing desire for influence in the public sphere causes it to seek evidence that the public aren’t capable of managing their own affairs without it. The premise of a technocracy is, after all, the inadequacies of democracy. Thus we see in the Apocalyptic rants of the likes of Paul Ehrlich FRS and Lewandowsky the beneficiary of their generosity not simply claims about the material world, but claims about the shortcomings of human faculties. Between them, these men paint a picture, from the psychology of the individual, through to the functioning of the planet’s natural processes, in which humanity simply cannot help but steer a course for catastrophe without their intervention.
To point this out, though — to point to the problems with the science, or to ask questions about the political assumptions and consequences of these arguments — is to seem to be ‘anti-science’, or to betray a mindset that is preoccupied with conspiracy theories. To point out that the science is, in fact, groundless and speculative crap, and that it is intended, not to advance knowledge, but to serve a political function is to seem to stand out as a denier of science.
Scientists such as Lewandowsky are better at self-justification than scientific research. Rather than being an investigation into the workings of the material world, Lewandosky’s ‘research’ — a poorly executed and error-prone online survey, seen through dodgy statistical methods and bogus categories — is a naked attempt to explain why people dare challenge scientific authority. But there are good reasons for challenging it. Science has turned its gaze on the public as politicians have sought to remedy their diminishing public support by recruiting the academy. It is not a coincidence that the scientific agenda increasingly reflects the prejudices and problems of elite politics.
This would be an anti-science conspiracy theory if it were a claim that Lewandowsky and the Royal Society were engaged in science proper, and were aware of what they were doing. But what Lewandowsky reveals is the consequence of confusing science as a process — a method — and science as an institution. A shonky web survey is given respectability by its author’s professorship and tenure at a university, by peer-review, and by publication. The institutional apparatus of science allowed prejudice and politics to be passed off as objective study. Criticism of the survey — i.e. about the research’s adherence to (or departure from) the scientificmethod – was defended against on the basis that it challenged, not the scientific argument (i.e. science as a process), but scientific authority (i.e institutional science).
A culture of intransigence has developed in the shadow of the compact between politics and science, which can be seen in the Lewandowsky affair in microcosm. Lewandowsky’s work unwittingly demonstrates that what is passed off as peer-reviewed and published ‘science’, even in today’s world, is no more scientific than the worst ramblings of the least qualified and nuttiest climate change denier on the internet. It looks like science, certainly, but the product only survives a superficial inspection. The only difference being the institutional muscle that Lewandowsky has access to, but which unhinged climate change deniers do not. The object of the Professor’s study is his really his own refusal to debate with his lessers.
The consequence of this should be alarming to everyone who takes an interest in the climate and other scientific debates, no matter what their view on climate change. Lewandowsky demonstrates that the academic institutions do not produce dialogue that has any more merit than the petty exchanges — flame wars –that the internet is famous for. Dressing political arguments up in scientific terminology risks the value of science being lost to society — its potential squandered for an edge in a political fight. After all, if Lewandowsky’s work is representative of the quality of scientific research in general and the standards the academy expects of academics, what does that say about climate science and the quality of the scientific consensus on climate change? If the scientific argument about the link between anthropogenic CO2 and climate change is only as good as Lewandowsky’s claim that ‘Rejection of climate science [is] strongly associated with endorsement of a laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets’, then perhaps climate sceptics should be taken more seriously.
Paper finds another non-hockey-stick in Tasmania
The paper finds temperatures were about the same in the 1850's, at the end of the Little Ice Age, as at the end of the record in 1990.
New paper finds biodiversity was greatest during Roman & Current Warming Periods
A paper published today in The Holocene examines biodiversity in Romania over the Holocene [the past 11,500 years] and finds the periods with the greatest biodiversity were during the Roman Warm Period 2000 years ago, and over the past 500 years during the current warming period. Once again, the data demonstrates warming is beneficial to plant and animal life. According to the authors, "Most distinct episodes of enhanced floristic richness are evident during the Roman Period (2000 cal. yr before the present), and over the last 500 calendar years before the present."
Prior posts on biodiversity
Prior posts on biodiversity
Biodiversity variability across elevations in the Carpathians: Parallel change with landscape openness and land use
- 1Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum and Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F), Germany
- 2Romanian Academy ‘Emil Racoviţă’ Institute of Speleology, Romania
- 3University of Liverpool, UK
- 4Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania
- 5National Institute of Research and Development for Biological Sciences – Institute of Biological Research, Romania
- 6University of Leuven, Belgium
- 7‘Ștefan cel Mare’ University, Romania
- Angelica Feurdean, Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, and Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) Senckenberganlage 25, 60325, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Email:angelica.feurdean@senckenberg.de; angelica.feurdean@gmail.com
Abstract
An understanding of contemporary and likely future biodiversity requires knowledge of how past human societies have shaped diversity patterns. Here, we use long-term pollen data sets extending from lowlands to subalpine environment in the Carpathian region (Romania) with the aim of exploring the relationship between landscape openness, anthropogenic disturbance, elevation and vegetation richness over the Holocene. We found that landscape openness represents a significant driver of pollen richness: The more open sites from mid (440–750 m) and high elevations (1550–1850 m) showed on average greater diversity than more forested upland sites (1050–1360 m). For the first time, our results show pollen richness patterns along elevation gradients that remain constant over the Holocene. Although significant only over the last 3000 cal. yr BP, these elevational patterns become accentuated with stronger evidence of anthropogenic impact. We also found a strong link between diversity change and major land use strategies of prehistoric societies, demonstrating the potential of pollen richness to be used as a tool to depict the ecological impact of human disturbance on diversity. Most distinct episodes of enhanced floristic richness are evident during the Roman Period (2000 cal. yr BP), and over the last 500 cal. yr BP. Recent anthropogenic activity negatively impacted diversity in mountainous areas mainly through plantations; the lack of sites in agriculture landscapes however limits our inference for this type of setting. The maintenance of habitat diversity is key to maintaining high levels of diversity. While there is temporal consistency in the diversity pattern in records from similar climate and vegetation settings, comparison of diversity from different vegetation assemblages and levels landscapes openness should be interpreted cautiously.
Climate textbook explains why man-made CO2 does not control atmospheric CO2
Climate scientist Dr. Murry Salby, professor and Climate Chair at Macquarie University, Australia explains in the 2012 edition of his textbook, Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate, why changes in global temperature control CO2 levels, not man-made CO2. The text corroborates the works of Humlum et al, Frölicher et al, and Francey et al demonstrating that man-made CO2 is not the driver of atmospheric CO2 or global temperatures.
As stated by Professor Judith Curry,
As stated by Professor Judith Curry,
"If Salby’s analysis holds up, this could revolutionize AGW science."
Another three ways the world isn't ending right now
Global perils of dirt, glaciers and lizardocalypse overblown, say boffins
Another three ways the world isn't ending right now
Posted in Science, 21st May 2013 04:59 GMT
A trio of new studies out this week have undermined three of the basic ideas underpinning the belief that the world is facing imminent doom as a result of human carbon emissions and perhaps-associated global warming in past decades. It would seem that the menaces of a runaway feedback loop driven by carbon belching from overheated Arctic dirt, surging sea levels powered by melting mountain glaciers, and imminent extinction for cuddly tropical lizards are all a lot less likely than scientists had previously thought.
Arctic dirt belch peril
First up: It's long been suggested that rising global temperatures like those seen in the 1980s and 1990s might cause chilly soils in Arctic regions to vent off much of the carbon locked within them, so further warming the world and releasing even more carbon in a terrifying runaway feedback loop until all the Earth became a baking lifeless hell.
Indeed this idea has been so common that when a couple of California-based boffins, Seeta Sistla and Josh Schimel, headed up to a long-running experimental site in northern Alaska to look into the matter lately, they "had made certain assumptions", according to a university statement highlighting their research.
"We expected that because of the long-term warming, we would have lost carbon stored in the soil to the atmosphere," admits professor Schimel.
"Net soil carbon hasn't changed after 20 years," confirms the initially puzzled Sistla.
The two boffins believe this is because as the local plants warmed up, they grew more and so pulled more carbon from the atmosphere - so putting it back into the soil again.
"It's a surprising counterbalance," says prof Schimel.
Read all about it courtesy of blockbusting boffinry mag Nature, here [1].
Glacier melt sea-biggening waterworld flood inundation MENACE
Everyone remembers the knockabout IPCC prediction that mountain glaciers around the world would all melt by the year 2035, not only starving the hungry millions of India as their rivers dried up but also causing the world's seas to rise by serious amounts with resultant floods, tsunamis, devastation etc.
The 2035 timeline was subsequently admitted to be bunk, but many scientists remained worried about glacier melt. The major Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are so huge that it's generally admitted they would take a very long time indeed to melt - thousands of years, probably - even if so inclined, but glaciers are much smaller and might turn to water in much less time.
In particular, estimates put together by scientists observing glaciers on the ground seemed to suggest some cause for alarm. But then results from the new GRACE ice-scanner satellites last year [2] showed that in fact the glaciers of the world are simply not much affected.
This has now been further confirmed by a new NASA study of satellite data. We learn [3] courtesy of the US space agency:
The study builds on a 2012 study using only GRACE data that also found glacier ice loss was less than estimates derived from ground-based measurements.
"Ground observations often can only be collected for the more accessible glaciers, where it turns out thinning is occurring more rapidly than the regional averages," says Alex Gardner, Earth scientist at Clark University in Massachusetts.
"That means when those measurements are used to estimate the mass change of the entire region, you end up with regional losses that are too great ... Without having these independent observations, there was no way to tell that the ground observations were biased."
So, even if global warming carries on - it's been on hold for over a decade at the moment, but many scientists think that could be just a blip - it would seem that the seas aren't going to rise at any rate which would be a problem.
Lizards - the pandas of the tropics, maybe - not doomed after all
And finally today, it seems that tropical forest lizards, generally thought by all experts to be facing a scaly armageddon at the hands of human carbon emissions, are actually, not.
According to a press release issued by ivy-league academic hothouse Dartmouth College:
Human-caused climate change may have little impact on many species of tropical lizards, contradicting a host of recent studies that predict their widespread extinction in a rapidly warming planet.
"Studies conducted to date have made uniformly bleak predictions for the survival of tropical forest lizards around the globe [but] our data show that four similar species, occurring in the same geographic region, differ markedly in their vulnerabilities to climate warming," the authors of the study write in the learned journal [4] Global Change Biology. "Moreover, none appear to be on the brink of extinction. Considering that these populations occur over extremely small geographic ranges, it is possible that many tropical forest lizards, which range over much wider areas, may have even greater opportunity to escape warming."
So that's all right then.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Analysis finds increased CO2 and warming beneficial for agricultural crops
[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]
As the air's CO2 content rises, most plants exhibit increased rates of photosynthesis and biomass production (see our Plant Growth Database[1]), which should enhance the amount of food, fiber and timber production that can be utilized to feed, clothe and shelter earth's expanding human population. However, some individuals have suggested that the growth-promoting effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment may be largely negated by the global warming that is predicted to occur in the near future by a number of state-of-the-art climate models, which outcome could compromise our ability to sustain a greater human population without increasing arable land acreage. Thus, we turn to the scientific literature to see if plants will - or will not - continue to exhibit CO2-induced growth increases under conditions of predicted future warming, which we do here by reviewing what has been learned about the photosynthetic and growth responses of CO2-enriched agricultural crops grown at both current and projected future growing-season temperatures.
...
As the air's CO2 content continues to rise, agricultural crops will likely exhibit enhanced rates of photosynthesis and biomass production that will not be diminished by any global warming that might occur concurrently.
In fact, if the ambient air temperature rises, the growth promoting effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment will likely rise right along with it, becoming more and more robust.
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