If-Then Knots ---------------------->

This American Life on Iraq Mortality

Here is This American Life's second episode on the Lancet mortality studies.

Science is for socialists.

Math is for Marxists.
Reading is for radicals.

These are the slogans of the reactionary right.  Consider this.  When Al Gore mentioned the leadership he showed in Congress toward the public-private partnership that lead to the commercial web, he was mocked by Republicans.  Those who know how important evidence-based leadership is to America's technological strength and leasdership in the world, like Vint "father of the internet" Cerf, actually awarded Gore for his work.  Now for his work on alerting the public to the urgent need of addressing global warming Gore is receiving  awards again. 

Sadly, as more negtive effects of global warming become evident we can expect the far right to be more interested in the paranoid conspiracy theories of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Exxon) and fiction writer Michael Crichton than evidence-based leaders like Gore and or to actual climatologists.  Happily, no one takes wingnut conspiracy theories about global scientific hoaxes all that seriously.

Dumsfeld

Our "leaders" continue to think of the WoT in terms of strained historical analogies.  These kinds of analogies make sense as rhetoric for speeches and elections.  Certainly, a good campaign strategy is to make your opponent seem like an "appeaser."  But you have to wonder if these guys are even capable of attacking terrorism on its own terms.  Even as their analogies become strained to the point of breaking and their metaphors breath their last breaths, they're sticking to their slogans.  (A nice article in Slate.)

They just can't seem to think outside of their slogans.  This is a very dangerous thing.  Terrorism is a tactic that can be employed by different groups to different ideological ends.  In WW2 there were pretty specific groups, nation-states, that were our enemies.  In the Cold War we opposed the spread of an ideology.  We mis-stepped when we lumped all groups conforming to that ideology together.  The paradigm example is Vietnam.  Although both the Chinese and the N. Vietnamese espoused similar (though different) socialist ideologies they were millenial enemies due to thousands of years of Chinese rule over Vietnam.  McNamara himself says this was a major miscalculation, lumping all commies together, if you watch the film "Fog of War." 

Now we are in another stage, but instead of looking forward and making a real strategy our leaders are living in the past.  Of course, they do have a strategy for the midterms. . .

Bush ignoring the good news.

Bush is clearly in cahoots with the liberal media. Next thing you know, he will be agreeing with Al Gore and thousands of climate scientists that greenhouse gasses are responsible for the greenhouse effect.

"Obviously the violence in Baghdad is still terrible."
--W

More troops to Baghdad.
www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2006/07/25/ap2902871.html

Clearly Marked

Israelis have bombed ambulances, destroyed civilian infrastructure, and killed hundreds with scores more innocent casualties in retaliation for the kidnapping of two soldiers, fulfilling the promise of collective punishment on Lebanese civilians made by Israel's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz: "If the soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years."

American neoconservatives applaud the killing of innocent civilians.  Many say that we should not observe morality in war, and nearly all that I spoke with mocked notions of "proportionality" as some kind of pansey liberalism.  One neocon that I have known online for a few years expressed a wish to have participated in the massacres of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatilla except that the Phalangists wouldn't have had him because he wasn't "Christian" enough to participate in the wholesale slaughter of thousands trapped in camps by the surrounding IDF.  Dehumanization of Arabs occurs daily and totally casually in almost every public forum I encounter online. 

The hatred, I'm sure, is equally seething on the other side.  Syrian diplomats say with straight faces that rocket attacks on Israel are aimed at military targets.  Cooler heads, at present, are not prevailing.

Proportionality Principle

Was the reaction of Germany and Austria at the outset of WW1 to the assasination of Archduke Ferdinand "proportionate"? If one criticizes the invasion of Serbia by Austria as disproportionate, is that necessarily a defense of Princip's actions and of the Black Hand?

Further question: What are the significant analogies/disanologies involved in the case of Israel's invasion of Lebanon? One that comes to mind is Hezbollah's position in the Lebanese government, which I don't believe the Black Hand had any position in govenment. On the other hand, the Lebanese government is not identical with Hezbollah; the President is Christian, in fact.

Of course, in trying to wrap my head around this complex situation and suggesting that Israel may have been more restrained rather than escalating violence against Palestinian and Lebanese populations that had nothing to do with the abduction/capture of the three soldiers, I am clearly being an anti-Semite. . . or something.

The Denial of Secularism is Dominionism

This fact could not be more evident than in the response to Barack Obama's call for a balanced role for religion in democratic society.  Obama argued that religious people should not check their convictions when they enter the public square but should seek to make arguments for their convictions on grounds that will appeal to those that may not share their particular faith.

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, to take one example, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

--Sen. Barack Obama (D, Thrillinois)

Dr. Albert Mohler responded that it is impossible to have a religiously diverse society with a shared discourse aiming for objective governing principles.

Sen. Obama seems to believe in the myth of a universal reason and rationality that will be compelling to all persons of all faiths, including those of no faith at all. Such principles do not exist in any specific form usable for the making of public policy on, for example, matters of life and death like abortion and human embryo research.

--Dr. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

There is simply no way around it.  If Mohler is right, then political discourse in a religiously diverse society is just a rhetorical battleground where one religious group fights for dominion over others.  Dr. Mohler is not right, however.  He argues from the fact that just because some people (such as himself) refuse to adopt a neutral stance and argue from logic and observation, that no such stance is impossible.  Certainly there are folks that believe in all kinds of things for all kinds of irrational reasons.  People make life-altering decisions based on the flop of Tarot cards.  That fact does not imply that flopping Tarot cards is as good a basis for major decisions as listing of pros and cons, for instance.  It may well be the case that there will never be agreement on objective principles of governance, but even that does not imply that it is not a worthy goal and in general worthwhile to persue in a pluralistic democracy.  The alternative to persuing this goal is politics as "war by other means"; ie, a battle for dominion.

In any case, Mohler reveals quite clearly who the true relativists are and it damn sure isn't the secularists who believe in the "myth" of rationality.  Rather, it is the epistemic relativists like Mohler that subject their beliefs to a different standard of justification than they allow in others that are the real relativists.

Congressional Climate Change Deniers Attack AP and Gore

Attacking the media and scientists for reporting to Americans that their CO2 emmissions are changing the climate, the Republicans on the James Inhofe lead US Senate Committee on Environment and Public works issued a press release today citing the usual handful of climate skeptics/deniers.  Below, I quote then refute each claim made in the press release.  The blockquoted portions are from the "Majority Press Release" linked above. 

The AP also chose to ignore Gore’s reliance on the now-discredited “hockey stick” by Dr. Michael Mann, which claims that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere remained relatively stable over 900 years, then spiked upward in the 20th century, and that the 1990’s were the warmest decade in at least 1000 years. Last week’s National Academy of Sciences report dispelled Mann’s often cited claims by reaffirming the existence of both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. See Senator Inhofe’s statement on the broken “Hockey Stick.” (http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=257697 )

In fact, this goes explicitly against results just released by the National Academy of Science vindicating the "hockey stick" and the Mann study as "plausible."  The Republicans on the committee are now misrepresenting the outcome of the NAS report that they themselves commissioned.  Here is what the report concluded specifically: "The Research Council committee found the Mann team's conclusion that warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last thousand years to be plausible, but it had less confidence that the warming was unprecedented prior to 1600; fewer proxies -- in fewer locations -- provide temperatures for periods before then."  That hardly counts as "discreditting."

An even more detailed discussion of the "hockey stick" can be found on realclimate.org.  Of particular note is the fact that the Mann study is not the only peer-reviewed study showing exceptional warming trends.

Gore’s claim that global warming is causing the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro to disappear has also been debunked by scientific reports. For example, a 2004 study in the journal Nature makes clear that Kilimanjaro is experiencing less snowfall because there’s less moisture in the air due to deforestation around Kilimanjaro.

Every single tropical glacier on earth is receeding, including many that do not have changes in precipitation and humidity due to deforestation.  Kilimanjaro may be receeding because of both warmer temperatures and deforestation.  Here is a National Geographic article in which the authors of the study mentioned discuss how a variety of factors including global warming are causing the Kilimanjaro glaciers to disapear.  In that article, Dr. Stefan Hastenrath describes how these factors are combining with warmer temperatures to drive the disapearance: "The warming increases humidity, and as the air gets more moist, it hinders evaporation.  The energy saved from evaporation is instead spent on melting. That might seem like a good thing—to stop evaporation of the glaciers—but it's certainly not. Melting is eight times more energy-efficient than evaporation, so now, with global warming, the glaciers are disappearing eight times faster than before."

Bob Carter--"Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention.  The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

Carter loses credibility for grossly overstating his criticism.  There is room for further discussion of some of the points made in Gore's movie, but it is not grossly out of line with science in any respect.  If Gore is an "embarassment to science," then the following organizations are also "embarrasments to science" for endorsing the consensus view that more greenhouse gasses means more greenhouse effect:

A joint statement from the the following acaedmies of science:
* Academia Brasiliera de Ciências (Bazil)
* Royal Society of Canada
* Chinese Academy of Sciences
* Academié des Sciences (France)
* Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)
* Indian National Science Academy
* Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)
* Science Council of Japan
* Russian Academy of Sciences
* Royal Society (United Kingdom)
* National Academy of Sciences (United States of America)
* Australian Academy of Sciences
* Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts
* Caribbean Academy of Sciences
* Indonesian Academy of Sciences
* Royal Irish Academy
* Academy of Sciences Malaysia
* Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand
* Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Here are additional statements from American and Canadian professional scientific organizations:

* NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
* National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
* National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
* State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC)
* Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
* Royal Society of the United Kingdom (RS)
* American Geophysical Union (AGU)
* National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
* American Meteorological Society (AMS)
* Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)

(Hat tip to A Few Things Ill Considered.)

Richard Lindzen--“A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.”

I'm suspicious that Lindzen has not seen the film.  Gore is very careful to make the case that the present change is unprecedented in the past 600,000 years and that it is driven by human activity.  He doesn't ignore the fact that there are both positive and negative natural forcings.  Lindzen is the one ignoring (assiduously even) the fact that in addition to natural forcings there can also be anthro forcings, such as dumping billions of tons of excess greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

“…A study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.”

In his unpublished review of Oreskes meta-study, Peiser makes several seemingly intentional mistakes to get different results.  He presents himself as if he were trying to duplicate her results, but does not use her original search terms and (most notably) includes non-peer reviewed work.  Here is a more detailed response to Peiser.

Dr Roy Spencer--“…Temperature measurements in the arctic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930's...before most greenhouse gas emissions. Don't you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then were low, too?”

Dr. Tim Ball--"The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology"

Spencer and Ball contradict the findings of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment compiled by 300 researchers of the climate and ecology of the Arctic.  Spencer tries to refute the fact that the present warming is due to increasing the greenhouse effect by increasing greenhouse gasses by pointing out that it was also unusually warm in the Arctic in the 1930s.  This is the familiar fallacy of supposing that like effects always have same causes.  Ball's attempt is just kind of silly.  I don't recall Gore citing a specific study in the film, and as the ACIA shows there is not just one study showing the Arctic warming trend. 

The Reps on the US Senate Committee on the Environment and Piublic Works lead by Inhofe want it both ways; first they quote Spencer saying that the Arctic warming is precendented then they have Ball saying that the warming isn't even happening.  They need to get their story straight.  Here is what NASA (apparently and "embarassment to US science") said in a 2003 report on Arctic warming: "Experts have long regarded Earth's polar regions as early indicators for global climate change. But until the last few years, wide ranging, comprehensive research about overall polar conditions has been challenging to conduct. Now a more than twenty-year record of space based measurements has been analyzed by researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Based on their findings, evidence of a warming planet continues to grow."  Since 2003, more evidence of the warming Arctic has accumulated.  Indeed, April of 2006 was warmer than any May ever recorded.

It is time to act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and time for the anti-science Republicans to stop this stuff where they mine right-wing editorials on global warming for quotes from the mere handful of skeptics/deniers that are left.  It's no mistake that these same names (Lindzen, Ball, Spencer, etc.) turn up over and over again.  Out of thousands of climate scientists, these are the only ones left for the politically motivated deniers to turn to.  See Deltoid (especially for the graph provided on the Arctic data) and ThinkProgress for more.  Here's a great blog on Richard Lindzen.

The MSM

The media looks con to me: Probably because I'm a lib and they don't report exactly the stories I want in the manner I want them reported.  Likely, they look lib to cons for much then same reason.  (It also seems that cons can't comprehend the fact that perspective influences your perception.  That is a little loony.)

Here's a tip on how to watch the MSM.  They're in it to make money.  That doesn't mean that it's all a fabrication, but it does mean that each week they need to push the "story" in ways that keep people watching.  So the MSM's presentation of things is influenced by, amoung other things, a kind of narrative force.  So, to use an example where I was disapointed, rather than looking at all the lies the WH told with respect to Rove's involvement in outing Plame, the media played up the non-indictment as if it were total vindication.  They didn't do that because they are cons and love Karl Rove and want to help him get away with his shenanigans.  They did it because it's a good story: The power puncher pulls himself off the mat.  Plus, Rovian politics (swiftboating, etc.) are good for ratings, real policy and ideas debates aren't.  We shouldn't expect anything else from for-profit media.

Another Hit-Piece on "An Inconvenient Truth"

In an article written for the "Grassroot Institute," a conservative "thinktank," Michael R Fox quotes Dr Robert Balling's claim that Al Gore misleads his audience by referencing glacial recession on Mt Kilamanjaro.  Balling's article states:

2) Gore discusses glacial and snowpack retreats atop Mt. Kilimanjaro, implying that human induced global warming is to blame. But Gore fails to mention that the snows of Kilimanjaro have been retreating for more than 100 years, largely due to declining atmospheric moisture, not global warming. Gore does not acknowledge the two major articles on the subject published in 2004 in the International Journal of Climatology and the Journal of Geophysical Research showing that modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro was initiated by a reduction in precipitation at the end of the nineteenth century and not by local or global warming.

Perhaps Balling does not want to get caught red-handed in a bald faced lie, after the way the Competitive Enterprise Instute has humiliated itself and its funders, like Exxon Mobil, with their highly misleading advertisement.  In any case, having had to do some extra work because Fox did not provide authors or a title, I am presuming that Fox is referring to this paper discussing whether factors beyond global warming.  That article got alot of attention after it was cited in a "Greening Earth Society," which also receives funds from Exxon Mobil, newsletter as "debunking" anthropogenic global warming.  The article was titled, "Snow Fooling!: Mount Kilamanjaro's glacier retreat is not related to global warming."  That article's false interpretation that the study contradicts the view that global warming is causing Kilimanjaro's glacial retreat has now been widely circulated online amoung groups that demagogue climate scientists and environmentalists. However, Dr. Georg Kaser, the lead author of the study that was cited, contradicted the Exxon funded interpretation:

"We are entirely against the black-and-white picture that says it is either global warming or not global warming."

  This appears to be another case of global warming deniers misrepresenting scientific research.  Dr. Douglas R Hardy, another author on the Kilimanjaro study, has commented (my emphasis):

We have a mere 2.5 years of actual field measurements from Kilimanjaro glaciers, unlike many other regions, so our understanding of their relationship with climate and the volcano is just beginning to develop.  Using these preliminary findings to refute or even question global warming borders on the absurd.

The work of Kaser et al is advancing and refining the understanding of Kilimanjaro in particular.  None of the authors think their work is conclusive and none think that it contradicts in any way the global consensus reflected in the "Joint science academies’ statement: Global response to climate change" calling for action to reduce greenhouse emissions.  Furthermore, the balance of research on Kilimanjaro and on glaciers in the tropics in general suggest a strong role of global warming.  Dr. Lonnie G Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, who has collected data from ice cores that go much further back than 2.5 years has maintained that in the last 20 years climate change has played a major role in the glacial recession on Kilimanjaro.  Dr. Stefan Hastenrath has shown that on other tropical glaciers patterns of melting changed in 1962.  Prior to that, in areas of the mountain that were shaded the melting had not been occuring, but after 1962 melting occured even in the shaded regions, suggesting that climate change began playing a significant role in the 1960s.  Gore's movie is a documentary on global warming, not just Kilimanjaro.  He might have spent 2 or 3 hours giving an account of all research on Kilimanjaro including the preliminary and tentative research of Kaser et al on factors in addition to global warming, but the science as a whole supports the claim that the glaciers are melting because of glogal warming.  Dr Hastenrath describes how global warming is accelerating the melting of the glaciers (emphasis added):

"The warming increases humidity, and as the air gets more moist, it hinders evaporation.  The energy saved from evaporation is instead spent on melting. That might seem like a good thing—to stop evaporation of the glaciers—but it's certainly not. Melting is eight times more energy-efficient than evaporation, so now, with global warming, the glaciers are disappearing eight times faster than before."

Compared to the misinformation put out by the groups funded by Exxon, which according to the authors of the studies themselves in two cases now, grossly misrepresent the significance of the work that has been cited, Gore's movie helps close the gap between what science knows about global warming and what the public understands.