Intellectual dishonesty, scientific illiteracy and global warming

There's a common evasion of difficult topics that might cost Americans dearly: state that the science is imperfect, therefore we should not act.

It provides cover for a faux-sophisticated stance. I'll unfairly generalize to note that it's used by people who don't understand science or economics that well, to demonstrate their supposed sophistication. The type of people who read Malcolm Gladwell or Thomas Friedman because these writers are supposedly thought-provoking.

As an example, take the responses to Stephen Dubner's post at the NY Times on what people are doing to address climate change:

Comment #10 (Paul CS):

Here are my thoughts on global warming. I see four issues that need to be addressed before we can adequately approach the problem:

1. The first point we must establish is: Is the Earth really warming at a significant pace? I’m skeptical but open to convincing that this is the case.

2. The second point: Is this warming caused by humans or is it natural? I know less about this point, but there are many intelligent people who think this is a natural phenomena — a cycle the world has been going through for millions of years.

Thanks, Paul, for your open-mindedness and skepticism! We'll get scientists and experts right on that, studying and drawing the same conclusions that they already draw, but that you so wonderfully dismiss.

Comment #7 (MPD):

Who says we need to fight global warming (assuming that it’s happening - but I’m not getting in that fight now)? We know that the earth has gone through many warming and cooling cycles in it’s history. (The high-plains desert that I’m typing this from used to be a tropical rain forest millions of years ago). I’d assume that economists of all people would know that it’s hard (often impossible) to define optimal. So who can say that 1)there’s an optimal climate for the earth, and 2)that the current climate is optimal and that “global climate change” is a bad thing.

No one has ever thought of this!

Of course it's silly to argue with anonymous Internet postings, but the president has used the same evasion multiple times: ``we need better science."

So my question for all these genius skeptics:
What would convince you? What concrete scientific evidence would you need to persuade yourself that global warming is happening, man-made, and bad?

If you can't answer this, you're not being properly skeptical. You're being an ass.

Then we get into the lovely ``I don't trust all those biased experts" schtick:

Comment #53(Michael D):

Your questions are all based on the flawed premise that global warming is occurring. I would have much rather seen some real questions concerning the “hype” that is global warming, as opposed to what a nut like Ed Begley Jr. thinks.

A “PhD” after someone’s name should incline you to believe the opposite opinion, Ed.

[In reply to Ed Begley Jr.'s note that many people with Ph.Ds think global warming is occurring.]

Yes, this is a great point. We should not trust people with Ph.Ds in atmospheric sciences. We should trust, um.... ? Lawyers? Lobbyists? MBAs? And next time you have a toothache, you should go see your lawyer, who has a JD instead of DDS.

Then there's the reply to Comment #58 (Dan):

Just because someone claims to be a ’scientist’ who studies the environment, doesn’t mean their ‘opinions’ are correct.

There is a reason that peer-reviewed scientific evidence is the gold-standard in our country. The overwhelming majority of you would trust a doctor who wants to treat you for meningitis. You’d agree because years of peer-reviewed studies have shown that to work, and because not doing so has enormous consequences.

Peer-reviewed scientific literature clearly indicates that there is a global climate crisis. The reason why so many deny it, is that accepting it requires us to do something about it. We innately evaluate situations we see so that they align with our world view. This makes it very difficult to make dramatic changes in our lifestyles.

It’s much easier to ignore reality and cling to fringe group beliefs, but I doubt you’ll do that the next time you’re sick or injured. Instead, I’ll see you at the hospital.

in which the snarky commenter Dan-O (#62) shouts:

Dan,

Peer-reviewed scientific literature? What literature? Al Gore’s blog posts?

And who are the peers reviewing it? Prof. Sherman Frankel [another commenter -ed]?

Fringe group beliefs? Who’s on the fringe my friend?

Yes, please, I would appreciate a visit in the hospital.

This is the "if I don't look at the evidence, I can pretend it isn't there" reply. (Also, note that he doesn't get the reference to a point I copied above.)

Which is, frankly, stupid.

I must allow that not everyone has a university's access to the Journal of Geophysical Research, Journal of Climate, Journal of Atmospheric Sciences or similar journals. Only by ignorance, however, could you imagine that these don't exist.

In closing, Douglas Adams put it best (twice):

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough."

"One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he didn't actually understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly so-but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous. This above all appeared to Trillian to be genuinely stupid, but she could no longer be bothered to argue about it."

Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Recent IPCC report

There's no time like the present

Some articles stick with you. Case in point: I remember reading a terrific op-ed in the Sunday LA Times many years ago that eviscerated a common rhetorical tool of the conservative movement, the nostalgia for a orderly 1950s Leave it To Beaver world.

The context was Bob Dole's speech to the Republican convention stating that he wanted to build a link to a better time, a safer time in Russell, Kansas, where people left their doors unlocked and kids were able to play in the streets, and so forth. Bill Clinton, in dual speeches in Santa Barbara, CA (I was there!) and San Antonio, TX, would take this image and turn it on its head, promising to build ``a bridge to the twenty-first century." Clinton continued to campaign on this phrase, Dole never had a reply, and Bill's phrase will be the more noted in history.

In response to Dole's speech, Bruce Schulman, historian, had this to say in the Sunday Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times:

'To those who say it was never so, that America has not been better, I say, you're wrong, and I know, because I was there. I have seen it. I remember."

With that pronouncement, Bob Dole accepted the Republican presidential nomination two weeks ago and asked that the American people let him be the bridge to a "time of tranquillity, faith and confidence in action." Dole, vice presidential nominee Jack F. Kemp and virtually every other speaker at the GOP convention in San Diego pledged to restore the American dream, to retrieve the bygone era when neighbors gathered on the village green, boy met girl at the soda fountain on Main Street and no one locked their doors at night. Candidate Dole railed against the "values of the present," that had ushered in an ugly new world where the soda fountain had closed, gunfire echoed through the town square and "what we have is crime, drugs, illegitimacy, abortion, the abdication of duty and the abandonment of children."

Dole's outrageous declaration combined dewy-eyed nostalgia, tunnel vision and outright error. For most Americans, and many others across the world, the American dream seems more real today, more accessible now, than in the heady days after World War II. And what worthy values we have lost from that early postwar era derived from the collective mind-set and widespread government intervention that Dole and his fellow Republicans so vigorously repudiate.

Dole surely never asked the convention's most memorable speaker whether he shared his nostalgic vision of the 1940s and 1950s. Colin L. Powell would not have willingly returned to an era when black Americans lacked the most fundamental rights of citizenship, when even heroic soldiers fought and died for the American way in a Jim Crow army, denied opportunities for command and relegated mainly to menial tasks. In those dark days, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) grew up in an Alabama home with a shotgun always ready to hand--a constant reminder not only of the daily indignities of segregation but the deadly violence threatening any who dared tread over the color line.

Even after the civil-rights revolution, many black Americans remain disappointed with the failed promise of American life, but none pine for the days of legal segregation, restrictive covenants and lynching. For African Americans like Powell and Lewis, the American dream seems far more real, and realizable, today.

The nominee seems not to have consulted Elizabeth H. Dole, either. In the late 1940s and '50s, public policy and popular culture exalted marriage and motherhood as never before. Devotion to home and family became the only acceptable ambition for American women; "career girls" were routinely denounced as selfish, neurotic, even unbalanced. A generation of highly trained, professional women reluctantly relinquished new-found job opportunities to returning veterans, and retreated to isolated suburban homes with few opportunities for productive work or regular social contact.

In Dole's "glory" years, capable, privileged women like Elizabeth Dole dusted cabinets; they did not serve in the president's Cabinet. They might donate blood or raise money for the Red Cross, but not run the organization. Betty Friedan famously chronicled the discontent of this generation in "The Feminine Mystique." Dole's brighter, better days looked grayer and gloomier from the other side of the breakfast table.

And from the other side of the tracks. Did the American dream appear less distant then for Catholics and Jews--barred from many jobs, colleges and country clubs because of their faith? What of the great masses of humanity in Southern Europe, Asia and Latin American, longing to reach the promised land of prosperity and opportunity? Until President Lyndon B. Johnson reformed the immigration laws, the odious quota system slammed the gates shut against most of these ambitious migrants. After 1965, intrepid and industrious sojourners from around the globe flooded through the re-opened and, in their eyes, still golden door.

Elderly Americans might also think twice about returning to the '40s and '50s. Dole made much of his decision to resign his majority-leader post in Washington, to sacrifice the security of his Senate seat and run for president without a safety net. Of course, senior citizen Dole can count on a generous government pension (not to mention a large personal fortune) if the voters send him home next November, but even if he couldn't, he would still receive Social Security and Medicare. Until the 1960s, most elderly Americans struggled to survive; the vast majority of the nation's impoverished were senior citizens. In recent years, Medicare, expanded Social Security and other programs have essentially eliminated poverty among the elderly.

But Dole's rosy-eyed view of the past reflects more than the tunnel vision of a young, privileged WASP male. Men of the World War II generation--white and black, Protestant and not--possessed a uniquely privileged position. A set of affirmative-action guidelines gave veterans preferential access to training programs and remunerative jobs. The GI Bill, the most generous social program in U.S. history, gave Dole and his fellow veterans free college educations, cut-rate mortgages and low-interest loans to start their own businesses. The Veterans Administration offered free medical care. Alone among Americans, World War II veterans lived in a full-blown welfare state.

That points up the fundamental irony in the GOP standard-bearer's message. Dole yearns for an era when liberalism held sway, when Big Government provided the safety, community and economic security Dole celebrates. Keynesian fiscal policy revved up the economy with military spending (which fueled Southern California's aerospace boom) and massive public-works projects.

Americans in the '50s bought their first suburban homes with FHA mortgages, commuted to work on federally financed interstate highways and sent their kids to college with Guaranteed Student Loans. Blue-collar workers enjoyed high wages and job security as union membership reached its historic peak--thanks to government protections for collective bargaining. President Dwight D. Eisenhower practiced what he called "Modern Republicanism," raising the minimum wage, extending welfare benefits and constructing public housing. And, of course, the GI Bill transformed a generation of working-class strivers into comfortable, college-educated homeowners. Well, Americans might miss those things, but a 15% tax cut will do little to revive them.

Dole's hankering for the golden days hardly becomes the "most optimistic man in America." If Dole possessed genuine faith in America's resilience and the genius of its people, he would lay aside his self-serving nostalgia and acknowledge the hard-bought achievements of the past half century. Dole is entitled to his pleasant memories, but we cannot renew the American promise by returning to a dreamy past that never was."

For those on the right who fear Hispanic immigration

For the crazy conspiracy theorists, que tienen miedo de una llamada `Reconquista' (locura):

Note that supposed national symbol Anheuser-Busch is going to stop Inbev's hostile takeover bid by trying to form a joint venture with the Mexican brewing company Grupo Modelo, makers of Corona and Negro Modelo.

Besos, Profesor Huntington!

On the Economist

It bothers me that the Economist advertises itself as a magazine for thinkers. This worries me only because I don't know to what extent their readers understand that the magazine is 25% news, 25% historical summary, and 50% opinion, in each and every article.

In this week's edition, the Obama campaign is described as a near-messianic campaign with a strong belief in the candidate's perfection. That's not news; that's opinion unsupported by facts. If this were include a poll of campaign supporters, then one might be warranted in making such a statement.

Then Lexington brings us the phrase "Bush derangement syndrome" and the argument that both Obama and McCain are against torture (which is unsupported by McCain's vote for the Military Commissions Act and the prohibition on the CIA's use of the technique).

Informing or whitewashing?

On the NY Times

Could the Times op-ed page just have either Tom Friedman or Roger Cohen write one column three or four times each week? Or pay them both each half-salary?

Having two white male liberal international hawks who see a technological fix to everything but don't really understand politics as columnists doesn't make much sense. They have the same epiphanies and thoughts, with the only noticeable difference being that Tom travels more and Roger doesn't speak in terribly mashed-up metaphors.