HOW BOILED FROGS HIJACKED THE CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE

By Jeffrey Berger

When writing about climate change, the boiled frog analogy serves a useful purpose, and it goes like this: If you place a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out. However, if you place the same frog in slowly heated water, it will adjust to gradually rising temperatures and stay put until it boils to death. No frogs were harmed in the writing of this post. Nevertheless, the boiled frog analogy explains a quirk of human nature: How some people ignore a looming threat that unfolds gradually over time.

Climate change cannot be watched on cable TV with the immediate impact of a tsunami. Climate change may not be felt this year, next year, or for several years. Yet, climate scientists predict a grim future of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, coastal flooding, drought, crop failures, disruptions in global food supplies, famine, refugee crises, and wars. In short, climate change represents an existential threat to future generations. Despite these warnings, there are skeptics, doubters, and boiled frogs.

We understand why the concept of climate change provokes anger among people. The economic, political, and moral implications are troubling; and there are deeply rooted historical and cultural impediments to overcome. Yet, we can no longer afford to dither. The climate bomb is ticking, and time is running out.

Climate change scientists study greenhouse gas emissions, heat retention models, and the complex relationship between variables on a global scale. Decades of careful observations lead to an irrefutable conclusion: Human impacts - especially greenhouse gas emissions - are the leading cause of rising global temperatures.

As we burn energy in our cars, homes, and factories, we release greenhouses gases into the atmosphere. “So what,” croaks the frog. “Everything in nature is flatulent.” Yet, when we examine sources of atmospheric greenhouse gases from natural to manmade, fossil fuels are literally the smoking gun. How do we know? Manmade pollutants have a unique molecular signature, unlike natural emissions.

Imagine two world maps, one superimposed over another. One map shows distributions of human population; another map shows sources of greenhouse gas emissions. These maps overlap with uncanny precision. Satellite data confirm the relationship between human activity and greenhouse gas emissions. How extensive, we ask? An increase of 78% since 1970, and 96% since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Hence, the term ‘anthropogenic,’ meaning ‘caused by human beings.’

Boiled frogs often cite geological history to disprove the anthropogenic cause of climate change. “So what,” croaks the frog. “Everyone knows Mother Earth has mood swings.” Yet, the boiled frog version of earth history omits one all important detail: How the biosphere influences climate.

Before the Carboniferous period, 400 million years ago, earth was uniformly hot and humid due to high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Plants consume carbon dioxide, and herbivores consume plants. Fossil fuels are the carbon remnants of ancient plants and animals that lived and died millions years ago and became buried underground.

Eons later, an upstart biped learned how to unearth and burn these fossil fuels. Within 12 generations, human beings released thousands of giga-tonnes of long buried carbon into the atmosphere — reversing a four-hundred million year old process in less than 250 years.

Despite decades of record high global temperatures, cold spells bring out the boiled frogs among us. Here is a statistical concept to keep in mind. All data sets — no matter how conclusive — contain some degree of random noise known as ‘statistical outliers.’ Climate change deniers build deceptions and errors of omission on foundations of random noise. In other words, statistical outliers turn boiled frogs into consummate liars.

The definitive scam came to light last year when InsideClimate News interviewed former scientists of Exxon Corporation and released hundreds of pages of internal documents. Decades ago, Exxon’s own research confirmed the consensus of climate scientists. In 1978, Exxon Senior Scientist James Black wrote: "Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions … become critical.”

In the 1980s, Exxon suspended publication of its findings and embarked upon a campaign to mislead the public. Exxon Mobil is currently under investigation in California and New York for fraud and alleged violations of environmental, public health, and shareholder protection laws. Rivaling the fraudulent practices of asbestos and tobacco producers, Exxon Mobil used deceptive tactics to protect its horde of filthy lucre.

Admittedly, the boiling frog story employs a fanciful metaphor. The definitive experiment was performed in 1869 by Friedrich Goltz, a German physiologist who searched for the location of the soul. His experiment confirmed a fundamental truth: Frogs whose brains have been removed will remain in slowly heated water until they boil to death. Thus, I end my commentary on this note. Unlike their intact amphibian counterparts, the hardboiled frogs of climate change denial and depraved indifference have neither brains nor souls.

(c) 2016

Is Climate Change Real? Or Just a Delusion Created By Liberals?...

Rational Nation USA
Purveyor of Truth

At one time being a skeptic of climate change (global warming) is what seemed to be a reasonable position. It even sounded plausible to me that left leaning scientists (most are for explainable logical reasons) were in cahoots with left leaning politicians who saw climate change as an avenue to enact legislation (cap and trade) and an pathway to exact more taxes on business. Taxes which could be used to fill the coffers of government so government could spend more on social programs that may ultimately lead to greater dependendency on government.

Sound familiar?

At this juncture in my thought process (aided by evaluating factual data) the narrative now seems more geared to preserving the bottom line profit motivation of companies whose business it is to grow exceedingly wealthy by exploiting and expanding fossil fuel consumption. Of course my re-evaluation has been an evolving process over time. But given the following (which certainly supports my new found premise) continuing skepticism just seems like the elixir of the fool.

The New Yorker - Wednesday morning, journalists at InsideClimate News, a Web site that has won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on oil spills, published the first installment of a multi-part exposé that will be appearing over the next month. The documents they have compiled and the interviews they have conducted with retired employees and officials show that, as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming.

There’s a sense, of course, in which one already assumed that this was the case. Everyone who’s been paying attention has known about climate change for decades now. But it turns out Exxon didn’t just “know” about climate change: it conducted some of the original research. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company employed top scientists who worked side by side with university researchers and the Department of Energy, even outfitting one of the company’s tankers with special sensors and sending it on a cruise to gather CO2 readings over the ocean. By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company’s management committee that there was “general scientific agreement” that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2; a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. That’s just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. “Present thinking,” Black wrote in summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

Those numbers were about right, too. It was precisely ten years later—after a decade in which Exxon scientists continued to do systematic climate research that showed, as one internal report put it, that stopping “global warming would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion”—that NASA scientist James Hansen took climate change to the broader public, telling a congressional hearing, in June of 1988, that the planet was already warming. And how did Exxon respond? By saying that its own independent research supported Hansen’s findings? By changing the company’s focus to renewable technology?

That didn’t happen. Exxon responded, instead, by helping to set up or fund extreme climate-denial campaigns. (In a blog post responding to the I.C.N. report, the company said that the documents were “cherry-picked” to “distort our history of pioneering climate science research” and efforts to reduce emissions.) The company worked with veterans of the tobacco industry to try and infuse the climate debate with doubt. Lee Raymond, who became the Exxon C.E.O. in 1993—and was a senior executive throughout the decade that Exxon had studied climate science—gave a key speech to a group of Chinese leaders and oil industry executives in 1997, on the eve of treaty negotiations in Kyoto. He told them that the globe was cooling, and that government action to limit carbon emissions “defies common sense.” In recent years, it’s gotten so hot (InsideClimate’s exposé coincided with the release of data showing that this past summer was the United States’ hottest in recorded history) that there’s no use denying it any more; Raymond’s successor, Rex Tillerson, has grudgingly accepted climate change as real, but has referred to it as an “engineering problem.” In May, at a shareholders’ meeting, he mocked renewable energy, and said that “mankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity,” which would stand it in good stead in the case of “inclement weather” that “may or may not be induced by climate change.”

The influence of the oil industry is essentially undiminished, even now. The Obama Administration may have stood up to Big Coal, but the richer Big Oil got permission this summer to drill in the Arctic; Washington may soon grant the rights for offshore drilling along the Atlantic seaboard, and end a longstanding ban on oil exports. All these measures help drive the flow of carbon into the atmosphere—the flow of carbon that Exxon knew almost forty years ago would likely be disastrous.

We’ve gotten so inured to this kind of corporate power that the report in InsideClimate News received relatively little coverage. The big news of the day on social media came from Irving, Texas, where the police handcuffed a young Muslim boy for taking his homemade alarm clock to school; all day people tweeted #IStandWithAhmed, and rightly so. It’s wondrous to see the power of an Internet-enabled world shining the light on particular (and in this case telling) injustice; there’s a principal and a police chief in Irving that will likely think differently next time. But we badly need the same kind of focus on the long-lasting, underlying abuses of corporate might. As it happens, Exxon is based in Irving, Texas too.

No doubt the rightwing corporatists, and politicians who are getting well greased by corporate money, will deny this and point to it as just another leftwing lie and attempt to manipulate the perception of the general public. These folks know a great deal about manipulation. They've been doing it for decades.

All Opinions Are Not Equal

What's up with news stories with totally inaccurate attention grabbing headlines? 

For the past couple of days, headlines have proclaimed some variation of the following headline, Obamacare Will Cost 2.5M Workers by 2024. However, if you read the articles, it becomes clear that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) did not conclude that the ACA was a causative factor in the decrease of workers. The CBO concluded the reduction in worker hours was almost entirely because of workers choosing to work less. According to the CBO report, “The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in business’ demand for labor."

The problem is straightforward. A lot of people never read past a story's headline so their conclusions are based on a misleading headline. Some of those who read the article have poor reading comprehension skills and come away still believing that the ACA will cause 2.5 million people to lose their jobs. All of these misinformed people like to share their invalid information and the chain of people firmly believing information that is false grows by leaps and bounds. Couple that with the American belief in individualism and that all opinions are equally valid, and ill-informed opinion becomes fact for millions.

I think one of the dumbest statements that I see far too often is, "I'm entitled to my opinion." When people declare, "I'm entitled to my opinion," what they really mean is my opinion is of equal value to all other opinions.

There's no entitlement to be ignorant. If my opinion is that a giant turtle carries the world on his back around the sun, then my opinion has no value; it's worthless. Stating that I'm entitled to have it doesn't make it have merit. It's still worthless and of no value. 

All opinions are not equal. We do ourselves a disservice when we pretend that they are. All we need do is examine how many publicly funded schools in multiple states are allowed to teach creationism under state science education standards as an alternative to evolution. Additional states are poised to pass legislation this year to expand the science curriculum to include creationism.

Replacing intellectual analysis with personal opinion undermines our ability to make decisions based on facts and knowledge rather than belief. Ethics play second fiddle to a mish-mash of personal beliefs and emotions about groups of which we are not a member. A key tenet of our constitution's Bill of Rights is that the government shall not establish or govern religion, yet hot button issues such as abortion and gay marriage that divide us at present, center around the attempt of some Christians to impose their belief system on our system of secular law.

We have many issues confronting us that we must address as a nation and as a part of the world. Climate change is a reality, not an abstract theory. Access to clean water, clean energy, and clean air are essential to the survival of all of this planet's inhabitants. Working together is necessary, but to do so we have to develop diplomatic strategies and policies for resolving our differences and not fall back on wars and police actions as problem solvers. We need to work collectively on solutions to these issues, not cling to opinions shaped by misinformation and narrow belief systems that we have elevated to the level of absolute fact.

Math is hard, Barbie!

The Trophy Wife asked me a question, which turned out to have a slightly different answer than she thought. Her question was "When was the last hurricane to hit New York?"

Because Irene got more media attention than normal, she figured it had been a while.

As it turns out, there have been 84 "tropical or subtropical cyclones that have affected the state of New York since the 17th century." About one a year, recently.

However, looking over the list, I noticed something. The groups seemed roughly the same size, but the last one, up to modern day, was a decade. The groups preceding it were quarter centuries. Then a half century. Then a century.

So I charted it (thank you, Excel). Filtering out Irene (to keep it in even decades), the X Axis (that's the horizontal line, for those of you with a standard American education) is decades. The Y Axis (that's the other one) is the number of storms. (Feel free to do the math yourself.)



I'm not saying it means anything. Because we all know that climate change (a.k.a. "global warming") is a myth, right? Just because there have been increasing numbers of storms hitting New York since the Industrial Era? Coincidence, right?

ENERGY, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE INDIGNANT DESERT BIRDS OF WILLFUL SELF-DESTRUCTION

(This article originally appeared on Blog Action Day, October 15, 2009, as part of a global initiative to promote climate change awareness. Of the 33,000 articles posted – which included submissions by PM Gordon Brown of the UK, the PM of Spain, The White House, The Economist, and Greenpeace, as examples – this article was named ‘best’ by the event sponsors. Although news of the Gulf oil spill has dominated prime time, let us not forget the larger issue of clean and sustainable energy.)

The enemy of realism is hubris.

- Reinhold Niebuhr -

It takes a special humility to understand our place in the natural world. Yet our mythology places us on a pedestal and speaks of human beings as having dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, over cattle and every creature that creeps upon the earth, even over earth itself.

In our American history texts, we read of Manifest Destiny and the relentless expansion from sea to shining sea in search of territory, resources, and prosperity ... where our sense of freedom is predicated on abundance.

Notions of freedom and abundance turned the gears of the Industrial Revolution, which relied upon the labor of immigrants who arrived in waves to partake of the American Dream.  For them, dreams of freedom and abundance outweighed all deprivations including bigotry by race, religion, ethnicity, and class.

World War II turned America into an economic superpower. After the war, America possessed almost two-thirds of the world's gold reserves, more than half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, and exported two-thirds of the world’s goods. The relationship between freedom and abundance was no longer the privilege of the few but had become the birthright of the many.

It is ironic to note how rapidly fortunes change ... and how the sudden scarcity of a once abundant resource leads to economic decline.  By 1970, as the demand for oil outpaced domestic production, America turned into a net importer and, within a generation, the largest creditor nation in the world turned into the largest debtor nation.  Today, our nation has 5% of the world's population yet consumes 25% of the world's oil and emits 40% of the world's pollutants.  With proven petroleum reserves of 21,317 million barrels, the Unites States has a 3 to 5 year supply beyond which our nation will be totally dependant on imports (source).

Of course, there are critics, pundits, and politicians who rally around the flag with chants of 'drill, baby, drill!'  Drill off the coasts, they say.  Drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. More opinionated than informed, what they do not know is that ANWR contains less than a year's supply of oil at current consumption rates … and production is more than a decade away.  There are others who want to strip mine the Bekken oil sands of North Dakota and the oil shale slopes of our Rocky Mountain States. At least 30 or more years of oil, they claim, but what they do not know is that less than 3% is recoverable … resulting in colossal environmental damage for negligible gain.

Grow our way out of the energy crisis, still others say. Distill ethanol from corn and switchgrass; but what these advocates have not considered is the enormous spike in food prices as agricultural land is diverted from food to energy production ... and the BTU deficit that requires far more energy to be invested than can be taken out. Furthermore, a 70% increase in food production will be needed just to keep pace with projected worldwide population growth. Ethanol offers no solution beyond a good stiff drink.

Even our friends at Google have joined the ranks of Internet punditry with this expression:


What it means is 'renewable energy for less than the cost of coal.'  It is a statement about energy economics but little else. It tells us that any hypothetical alternative energy source must compete with coal - the cheapest commodity available - to be economically viable.  It says nothing about why non-combustible sources (such as nuclear, solar, wind, and geo-thermal) must be considered within the context of global climate change.


We cannot separate the energy crisis from the climate change crisis. In economic and environmental terms, these are two sides of the same coin. From the Industrial Revolution to the present, energy consumption has lead to a substantial rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Levels of carbon dioxide, which account for 62% of all greenhouses gases, have nearly doubled since 1750.  Methane, which accounts for 20% all greenhouse gases, has risen 155% during the same period. Most disturbing of all, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts a 52% rise in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 - a mere 20 years away (source).

We approach global climate change as just another problem to be solved with good old American ingenuity. We cite the Manhattan project, the national highway system, and the space race as shining examples of past glory. However, global climate change is more than merely a technical or structural problem. It has deep historical and cultural roots and a system of unspoken values instilled from the beginning of civilization and passed from generation to generation.


“America is addicted to oil,” declared former President George Bush in his State of the Union address on January 31, 2006. Was the President signaling a dramatic shift in American energy policy, or were these merely pious words meant for the history books?  Scarcely a day after the speech, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman issued this disclaimer:  Don’t take the President literally.  In other words, there will be no rehab for America's addiction under this president.

The Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 was the first of several warning shots.  Almost 40 years later, we are still dithering as if our energy policy paralysis is the sum total of our mythology, our culture, our national heritage, and a cowboy lifestyle that refuses to face reality.  More than these, our energy debate mirrors our healthcare debate:  There are entrenched interests hell-bent on protecting their hordes of filthy lucre.

ExxonMobil gave $1.6 million to the American Enterprise Institute in an attempt to undercut the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a report widely regarded as the most comprehensive review of climate change science. The Bush administration sought to further undermine public awareness by censoring the key findings of climate scientists. Thus, our government, under pressure from the oil lobby, suppressed meaningful data to skew public debate.

Manipulating public opinion is easy when you are the CEO of Big Oil with money and lobbyists and politicians in your pocket. In the weeks and months ahead, Big Oil will be staging Astroturf events to protest new climate change legislation … groups such as Energy Citizens organized by the American Petroleum Institute whose members include Anadarko Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips, among others (source).

Let me digress for a moment to tell another Genesis story. It begins 400 million years ago, between the Devonian and Carboniferous Periods, when the earth was still hot and humid and long before the polar ice regions formed.  As newly evolved forests drew carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and fell where they stood - their carbon buried and sequestered under layers of sedimentary rock - the climate cooled and glaciers formed.

Hundreds of millions of years later, a peculiar Pleistocene creature walked the earth and learned in short order how to dig up and burn those fossil fuels to cook food, warm homes, build cities, drive Hummers, make microchips and Barbie dolls and a myriad of trinkets to delight the fancy ... all far removed from basic survival needs. In less than 25 generations, these peculiar Pleistocene creatures released into the atmosphere as much carbon as earth had sequestered over hundreds of millions of years. This is what is known as the anthropogenic cause of global climate change.



Meanwhile, the National Defense Institute explored the potential impact of global climate change as a threat to national security.  Its conclusion: Vulnerable regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the island nations of the Pacific will face food and water shortages, catastrophic flooding, unprecedented refugee crises, religious conflict, and the spread of contagious diseases. These will demand massive humanitarian aid efforts and/or a military response (source).

There will always be voices in the crowd who keep hearing messages the dead have stopped sending. There will always be voices arguing, not for the common good, but from pure self-interest. Implementing public policy changes are always difficult at best, and we can understand these quirks and follies of human nature with some sympathy, but the climate bomb is ticking and time is running out.  Our worst nightmares have yet to unfold.

THE REPUBLICAN WAR AGAINST CLIMATE SCIENCE: A BOZONE REPORT

This will be the first of a series of posts, which I will call The Bozone Report. What is a Bozone Report, you ask?  First, a definition:

The Bozone is an aura surrounding exceptionally stupid people for whom no amount of knowledge or intelligence is known to penetrate. Although chemically inert, the Bozone Layer is highly toxic and known to destroy any productive reaction that comes in contact with it.

My first Bozone Report focuses on Senator James Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee. Long known for his global warming denialist propaganda, Senator Inhofe is now using (read: abusing) the resources of a Senate committee to threaten 17 leading climate scientists with criminal prosecution.

You did not misread the previous paragraph. This Minority Report released by Inhofe’s staff contains 83 pages of false and misleading statements, shameful accusations, and a list of federal laws allegedly broken that threatens 17 climate scientists with prosecution. In other words, this is the worst case of political thuggery since Senator Joseph McCarthy first employed these tactics 60 years ago. Here is a list of the accused:

Raymond Bradley - Professor in the Department of Geosciences and Director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Keith Briffa - Deputy Director of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia.

Timothy Carter - Research Professor at the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Helsinki, Finland.

Edward Cook - Senior Scholar at the Tree-Ring Laboratory, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, New York.

Malcolm Hughes - Regents' Professor in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Phil Jones - Professor at the University of East Anglia’s CRU.

Thomas Karl - Designated Transitional Director of the NOAA Climate Service.

Dr. Michael Mann - Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center, Pennsylvania State University.

Dr. Michael Oppenheimer - Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School, and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University.

Dr. Jonathan Overpeck - Co-Director of the Institute of the Environment, and Professor in the Department of Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona.

Dr. Benjamin Santer - Research Scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Gavin Schmidt - NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Dr. Stephen Schneider - Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Professor of Biological Sciences, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University.

Dr. Susan Solomon - Senior Scientist at the Chemical Sciences Division (CSD) Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL), NOAA.

Peter Stott - Climate Monitoring Expert and Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, Hadley Centre.

Dr. Kevin Trenberth - Senior Scientist and Head of the Climate Analysis Section, the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Dr. Thomas Wigley - Senior Scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

The Minority Report accuses the Climate 17 (listed above) of unlawful use of federal funds and ethical misconduct. Specifically, it calls for an investigation to determine if any of the following Federal laws were violated:

Freedom of Information Act – accuses the Climate 17 of deliberately withholding information to prevent FOIA release.

Shelby Amendment – accuses them of failing to comply with an Agency request for raw data produced with federal funds.

OSTP Policy Directive – accuses them of “misconduct in research,” which is punishable with “criminal liability” and debarment.

Federal False Statements Act – accuses them of falsifying, concealing, or covering up: of making materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements; of making or using documents known to contain false, fictitious, or fraudulent entries; punishable by fines, or imprisonment up to 5 years, or both.

The False Claims Act (Criminal) – accuses them of creating a “tampered database” and making claims for payment from Federal funds (note: this statue requires no proof of specific intent to defraud).

Obstruction of Justice: Interference with Congressional Proceedings – accuses them of providing false or misleading testimony (although the Climate 17 never appeared before Congress).

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), the ranking Republican on the House global warming committee, has sent a letter to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, calling for these scientists to be blacklisted.

Thus, Congressional Republicans are employing every possible means to suppress research data. Furthermore, Congressional Republicans, in refusing to allow a fair hearing of evidence on climate disruptions and its implications, are trying to withhold these data from the public.

In an interview with the Guardian, Michael Mann noted a sharp rise in hostile email since November:

"Some of the emails make thinly veiled threats of violence against me and even my family, and law enforcement authorities have been made aware of the matter," he told the Guardian. He said the attacks appeared to be a coordinated effort: "Some of them look cut-and-paste."

Gavin Schmidt has seen an increase in Freedom of Information Act requests:

"In my previous six years I dealt with one FoIA request. In the last three months, we have had to deal with I think eight," he said. "These FoIAs are fishing expeditions for potentially embarrassing content but they are not FoIA requests for scientific information … The idea very clearly is to let it be known that should you be a scientist who speaks out in public then you will be intimidated, you will be harassed, and you will be threatened … The idea very clearly is to put a chilling effect on scientists speaking out in public and to tell others to keep their heads down."

The Minority Report is pure McCarthyism. This is not just an attempt to politicize science but to criminalize it; not just a threat to prosecute but to persecute. The Republicans are at war against academic freedom; at war against science; at war against the free exchange of knowledge and ideas … in short, the Republicans are at war against humanity.

The Minority Report is affront to my most cherished beliefs and values. The tactics employed by Congressional Republicans are as oppressive and dastardly as any employed by a totalitarian regime in recent memory. As much as I regret having to say this: The Republicans are also at war against me, and I intend to fight them with any and all means necessary.

Also sprach der Krakken.

CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS AND BOILED FROGS - UPDATED

By (O)CT(O)PUS

Credit: AZRAINMAN

Whatever you call it, a silly anecdote or imperfect metaphor, the boiling frog story serves a useful purpose, and it goes like this. If you place a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out; but if you place the same frog in cold water that is heated slowly, it will not notice the gradual rise in temperature but will stay in the water until it boils to death. No frogs were harmed in the writing of this post, but the boiling frog story is a useful metaphor to describe how people refuse to recognize a threat that occurs gradually.

Climate change deniers are akin to slow boiling frogs. For most folks, the climate change crisis is vague and impalpable. You cannot see it, touch it, or watch it happen on cable news. It lacks the immediate drama of a hurricane or tsunami. Climate change may not be noticed for a decade or even within a lifetime. Yet, it exists today as a set of observations and data points that are too arcane and abstract for many people to grasp. But make no mistake: Global climate change is here … a dark cloud hanging over the lives of our grandchildren and future generations. Despite the preponderance of data, there are skeptics, doubters, and boiled frogs. A case in point (source):

Double click on image to enlarge.

When a climate scientist looks at the above graph, the most obvious feature is the red [my addition] trend line. The above graph plots rising temperatures from different data sources. The skeptical boiled frog might look at these data and say: “So what! It proves nothing.”

There are two statistical concepts to bear in mind. Some data points conform to a pattern while others seem randomly spread. When data points fall outside a trend line, we call these “outliers,” a fancy word for random distribution. The skeptical boiled frog focuses on the random jitters and ignores the trend line. “So what,” croaks the frog, “Mother Earth has mood swings.” My point: Statistical outliers turn boiled frogs into outrageous liars.

Still skeptical? Next slide (Fossil fuel combustion as a component of total greenhouse gas emissions):

Double click on image to enlarge.

What this graph shows are the various types of greenhouse emissions, such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorocarbons from various sources. Most importantly, the graph shows the source of each greenhouse gas: From forest fires, from natural decay, from agriculture, from waste, and from fossil fuel combustion. Notice the large red area dominating the bottom half of the graph. This represents carbon dioxide as a product of fossil fuel consumption. What does this mean?

It means climate change is a man-made phenomenon. People burn fossil fuels in their cars, homes, and factories. Skeptical boiled frogs have claimed that greenhouse gases come from natural sources ranging from forest fires to flatulence, or from the rise and fall of some geologically unknown Dow Jones. These data tell a different story. It means that more than half of all greenhouse gases (56% of total emissions) have a human origin. Hence, the term “anthropogenic,” meaning “caused by human beings.”

One more slide for a skeptical boiled frog (Spatial distribution of greenhouse gas emissions):

Double click on image to enlarge.

This color-coded map shows the distribution of carbon dioxide around the world. Notice how concentrations of CO2 emissions correspond with areas of human population density and, most especially, with areas having the highest levels of industrial output. These data confirm the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and human activity.

Overall, the latest observations show that globally averaged levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) have reached new highs in 2008: Higher than those of pre-industrial times (before 1750) by 38%, 157% and 19%, respectively. Within the past 10 years alone, levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have increased 26.2%.

Admittedly, the boiling frog story employs a flawed metaphor. Experience has shown that most frogs are too restless to sit still long enough for any pot of water to reach the boiling point. However, the definitive experiment was performed in 1869 by the German physiologist, Friedrich Goltz, who was searching for the location of the soul and demonstrated a fundamental truth. Frogs that had their brains removed will remain in slowly heated water; whereas frogs with intact brains will promptly escape. Thus, I end my post with this observation:  Climate change deniers, unlike their intact amphibian counterparts, have neither brains nor souls.

UPDATE: Readers may also be interested in this slide show prepared by the Philosophy Department at UCSD. There is a brief history of the climate change debate starting with John Tyndall, the first to discover the greenhouse properties of CO2, and James Fleming Callendar, who argued as early as the 1930s that increases in CO2 levels would raise global temperatures. My thanks and a hat tip to Flying Junior for the link.

THE CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE ACCORDING TO KRUGMAN, HANSEN, AND PALIN

Credit: AZRAINMAN

Years ago, I served on the board of directors of a conservation group whose mission and purpose was to preserve an endangered species. We spent considerable time debating, discussing, and revising our bylaws and even more time reporting, debating, and balancing our balance sheets, plus the obligatory inventory of office supplies and cute plush toy souvenirs. “Merchandising with a message,” they called it. There were monthly board meetings and monthly membership meetings followed by refreshments, but how much time was actually spent preserving and protecting our charges? Ahem, not that much.

Years pass, and my transformation from human being to cephalopod is now complete. I no longer converse with human protectors but with the protected, and here is what the protected think of their benefactors: “We are doomed, DOOMED!” From the viewpoint of an endangered species, human beings are all talk and cute plush toys but no action. In the human Universe, the shortest distance between two points is through every conceivable viewpoint.

My experience in the endangered species preservation biz reminds me of the latest argument between economist Paul Krugman and climate change scientist James Hansen, who fired the first volley in this New York Times Op-Ed:

Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate.

(…)

Coal emissions are still significant contributing factors in four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States — and mercury, arsenic and various coal pollutants also cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments.

(…)

The House and Senate energy bills would only assure continued coal use, making it implausible that carbon dioxide emissions would decline sharply.

(…)

If that isn’t bad enough, Wall Street is poised to make billions of dollars in the “trade” part of cap-and-trade.

Not to be outdone on matters of energy economics by a lowly climate change scientist, Paul Krugman, our infamous defender of faith and turf, returned fire with this:

Things like this often happen when economists deal with physical scientists; the hard-science guys tend to assume that we’re witch doctors with nothing to tell them, so they can’t be bothered to listen at all to what the economists have to say, and the result is that they end up reinventing old errors in the belief that they’re deep insights.

What a condescending and prickly reply, I thought. Clearly, Paul Krugman represents the Cute Plush Toy School of environmental protection that amuses protectors but accomplishes little on behalf of the protected. Worse still, here is what Krugman says of Hansen’s carbon tax proposal:

If you use a tax, you know what the price of emissions will be, but you don’t know the quantity of emissions; if you use a cap, you know the quantity but not the price. Yes, this means that if some people do more than expected to reduce emissions, they’ll just free up permits for others — which worries Hansen.

What worries Hansen should also worry us. A system of cap and trade will invite chicanery from players on both sides of the equation. Polluting industries will abuse the “cap” on emissions by continually lobbying Congress for exemptions, offsets, and opt-outs. Speculators will abuse the “trade” by gaming the system in much the same way Enron manipulated energy markets and defrauded consumers. Thus, cap and trade will become the ultimate plush toy for powerful interests but accomplish little or nothing in actual emissions reduction. Furthermore, Krugman ignores Hansen’s proposal of a fee-and-dividend system which clearly states:

The fee would be uniform, a certain number of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide in the fuel. The public would not directly pay any fee, but the price of goods would rise in proportion to how much carbon-emitting fuel is used in their production. All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs.

(…)

Given the amount of oil, gas and coal used in the United States in 2007, that carbon fee would yield about $600 billion per year. The resulting dividend for each adult American would be as much as $3,000 per year. As the fee rose, tipping points would be reached at which various carbon-free energies and carbon-saving technologies would become cheaper than fossil fuels plus their fees. As time goes on, fossil fuel use would collapse.

While I favor Hansen’s fee-and-dividend system, we should also consider a proposal put forth by arch-conservationist extraordinaire, Sarah Palin. In her recently released bestseller, the Sarahdon said: "If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?" We should take her at her word. If God made meat to be eaten, and if human beings are also made of meat, then it stands to reason that human beings should join her list of fair game. Her modest proposal would require only a slight modification of God’s Word. If you change “Love thy neighbor” to “Eat thy neighbor,” famine would disappear and all human impacts on the environment would diminish over time. As everyone knows, once you remove human impacts from the environment, Nature has an uncanny way of recovering and bouncing back ... quicker than a wink!

CYBER-HACKERS AND THE CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE

From Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal:

For anyone who doubts the power of the Internet to shine light on darkness, the news of the month is how digital technology helped uncover a secretive group of scientists who suppressed data, froze others out of the debate, and flouted freedom-of-information laws. Their behavior was brought to light when more than 1,000 emails, and some 3,500 additional files were published online, many of which boasted about how they suppressed hard questions about their data.

I have been writing about the impacts of energy on the economy, the environment, and public health since 1974. My career began as an educational and documentary filmmaker starting with this project: A Consumer Guide to the Energy Crisis (1974), a co-production of Prentice-Hall and the New York Daily News. Since the 1970s, I have written, directed, and produced numerous documentary films for Burns & Roe (engineers of utility-scale conventional and nuclear electric generating plants), the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Rural Electrification Administration (a division of the USDA). Although not an engineer or scientist by training, I am no stranger to the subject.

With respect to energy consumption and global climate change, it is hard to know where to begin. Shall we begin by talking about the hazards of coal starting with mining accidents … but by no means ending with slow agonizing deaths by black lung disease? Shall we talk about acid rain and the damage to North American forests, lakes, and streams? Or the Love Canal incident that drove hundreds of families from their homes after 21,000 tons of chemicals leached into their basements and groundwater? Or the oil slick that caused the Cuyahoga River to burst into flames? Or the incidence rate of cancer in the general population attributable to industrial pollutants? Or the 123 oil and gas platforms in the Gulf destroyed by Hurricane Katrina? Or the geopolitics of oil?

The history of corporate piggish and pigheadedness does not even begin to cover the global climate change debate.

I am tired … tired of corporate interests that put profits over public welfare, tired of privateers who pollute and pillage, and tired of climate change deniers and the want-it-now crowd lacking forethought as to the consequences of profligate consumption on future generations. I am tired of mendacities, false conspiracies, and every contrivance to confuse and confound the climate change debate.

These days, everyone is an expert with an opinion; but there is no prerequisite obligation to read a book or research a subject before blathering. Talk is cheap, and the Internet is cheapest where free confers a presumptive right to engage in free-for-alls. The Internet has not fulfilled its grand utopian vision as a repository of knowledge and scholarship; it has merely accelerated the spread of ignorance through viral messages and cyber-terrorism. If “the best lack all conviction,” there will always be " open-minded" neophytes and dilatants willing to be suckered by swift boaters and hackers engaged in criminal acts parading as heroism. When cyber-crooks poke holes in the dike to trap fingers and hands, that is when they steal your wallet. Its called distraction, distraction, distraction.

My career rewarded me with a decent income, but there is no money, no glory, and all too often little sense of accomplishment in blogging. Why do we bother? Are we motivated by some overwhelming sense of mission and purpose? Or do we blog just to amuse and entertain ourselves? Why bother when you have to watch your back at every turn.

ENERGY, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE INDIGNANT DESERT BIRDS OF WILLFUL SELF-DESTRUCTION

The enemy of realism is hubris.

- Reinhold Niebuhr -

It takes a special humility to understand our place in the natural world. Yet our mythology places us on a pedestal and speaks of human beings as having dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, over cattle and every creature that creeps upon the earth, even over earth itself.

In our American history texts, we read of Manifest Destiny and the relentless expansion from sea to shining sea in search of territory, resources, and prosperity ... where our sense of freedom is predicated on abundance.

Notions of freedom and abundance turned the gears of the Industrial Revolution, which relied upon the labor of immigrants who arrived in waves to partake of the American Dream.  For them, dreams of freedom and abundance outweighed all deprivations including discrimination by race, religion, ethnicity, and class.

World War II turned America into an economic superpower. After the war, America possessed almost two-thirds of world's gold reserves, more than half of the world’s manufacturing capacity, and exported two-thirds of the world’s goods. The relationship between freedom and abundance was no longer the privilege of the few but had become the birthright of the many.

It is ironic to note how rapidly fortunes change ... and how the sudden scarcity of a once abundant resource leads to economic decline.  By 1970, as the demand for oil outpaced domestic production, America turned into a net importer and, within a generation, the largest creditor nation in the world turned into the largest debtor nation.  Today, our nation has 5% of the world's population yet consumes 25% of the world's oil and emits 40% of the world's pollutants.  With proven petroleum reserves of 21,317 million barrels, the Unites States has a 3 to 5 year supply beyond which our nation will be totally dependant on imports (source).

Of course, there are critics, pundits, and politicians who rally around the flag with chants of 'drill, baby, drill!'  Drill off the coasts, they say.  Drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. More opinionated than informed, what they do not know is that ANWR contains less than a year's supply of oil at current consumption rates … and production is a decade away.  There are others who want to strip mine the Bekken oil sands of North Dakota and the oil shale slopes of our Rocky Mountain States. At least 30 or more years of oil, they claim, but what they do not know is that less than 3% is recoverable … resulting in colossal environmental damage for negligible gain.

Grow our way out of the energy crisis, still others say. Distill ethanol from corn and switchgrass; but what these advocates have not considered is the enormous spike in food prices as agricultural land is diverted from food to energy production. Furthermore, a 70% increase in food production will be needed just to keep pace with projected worldwide population growth. Ethanol offers no solution beyond a good stiff drink.

Even our friends at Google have joined the ranks of Internet punditry with this expression:


What it means is 'renewable energy for less than the cost of coal.'  It is a statement about energy economics but little else. It tells us that any hypothetical alternative energy source must compete with coal, the cheapest commodity available, to be economically viable.  It says nothing about why non-combustible sources (such as nuclear, solar, wind, and geo-thermal) must be considered within the context of global climate change.


We cannot separate the energy crisis from the climate change crisis. In economic and environmental terms, these are two sides of the same coin. From the Industrial Revolution to the present, energy consumption has lead to a substantial rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases. Levels of carbon dioxide, which account for 62% of all greenhouses gases, have nearly doubled since 1750. Methane, which accounts for 20% all greenhouse gases, has risen 155% during the same period. Most disturbing of all, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts a 52% rise in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 … a mere 20 years away (source).

We approach global climate change as just another problem to be solved with good old American ingenuity. We cite the Manhattan project, the national highway system, and the space race as shining examples of past glory. However, global climate change is more than merely a technical or structural problem. It has deep historical and cultural roots and a system of unspoken values instilled from the beginning of civilization and passed from generation to generation.


“America is addicted to oil,” declared former President George Bush in his State of the Union address on January 31, 2006. Was the President signaling a dramatic shift in American energy policy, or were these merely pious words meant for the history books?  Scarcely a day after the speech, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman issued this disclaimer:  Don’t take the President literally.  In other words, there will be no rehab for America's addiction under this president.

The Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 was the first of several warning shots.  Almost 40 years later, we are still dithering as if our energy policy paralysis is the sum total of our mythology, our culture, our national heritage, and a cowboy lifestyle that refuses to face reality.  More than these, our energy debate mirrors our healthcare debate: There are entrenched interests hell-bent on protecting their hordes of filthy lucre.

ExxonMobil gave $1.6 million to the American Enterprise Institute in an attempt to undercut the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a report widely regarded as the most comprehensive review of climate change science. The Bush administration sought to further undermine public awareness by censoring the key findings of climate scientists. Thus, our government, under pressure from the oil lobby, suppressed meaningful data to skew public debate.

Manipulating public opinion is easy when you are the CEO of Big Oil with money and lobbyists and politicians in your pocket. In the weeks and months ahead, Big Oil will be staging Astroturf events to protest new climate change legislation … groups such as Energy Citizens organized by the American Petroleum Institute whose members include Anadarko Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips, among others (source).

Let me digress for a moment to tell another Genesis story. It begins 400 million years ago, between the Devonian and Carboniferous Periods, when the earth was still hot and humid ... long before the polar ice regions formed.  As newly evolved forests drew carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and fell where they stood, their carbon buried under layers of sedimentary rock, the climate cooled and glaciers formed.

Hundreds of millions of years later, a peculiar Pleistocene creature walked the earth and learned in short order how to dig up and burn those fossil fuels to cook food, warm homes, build cities, drive Hummers, make microchips and Barbie dolls and a myriad of trinkets to delight the fancy ... but far removed from basic survival needs. In less than 25 generations, these peculiar Pleistocene creatures released into the atmosphere as much carbon as earth had sequestered over hundreds of millions of years. This is what is known as the anthropogenic cause of global climate change.



Meanwhile, the National Defense Institute explored the potential impact of global climate change as a threat to national security.  Its conclusion: Vulnerable regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the island nations of the Pacific will face food and water shortages, catastrophic flooding, unprecedented refugee crises, religious conflict, and the spread of contagious diseases. These will demand massive humanitarian aid efforts and/or a military response (source).

There will always be voices in the crowd who keep hearing messages the dead have stopped sending. There will always be voices arguing, not for the common good, but from pure self-interest. Implementing public policy changes are always difficult at best, and we can understand these quirks and follies of human nature with some sympathy, but the climate bomb is ticking and time is running out.  Our worst nightmares have yet to unfold.