Helping “Conservatives” understand Science

Recently in a conversation with a self-proclaimed conservative about global climate change I was told that numbers can say anything, that there is no consensus on global climate change and its connection to man’s activities.  It was explained to me that numbers can be audited to get at the truth of things.  So I asked to be pointed to one audit in a credible scientific journal that proved that global climate change was the hoax he and other conservatives claim it to be.  The reply I got back was the typical whoa, you mean an audit in those liberal environmental whacko sources.

This of course made no sense, there is a well established process by which science works and is published through peer-reviewed journals.  You basically could say science gets “audited” before it is even published.  Of course no audit system is perfect and occasionally we find errors in this process.  The way these errors are caught is that science demands that experimental data be replicable.  An example, if you publish a paper and claim you have a process for producing energy via cold fusion, your data may look good enough to get you published.  However, when no one, following the process you outlined, can replicate your results you quickly get doubted and then discredited in the scientific community.

So why did I get such a disjointed reply?  I was confused for a bit then it dawned on me, conservatives don’t understand science or the scientific method because it is so foreign to the way they have been indoctrinated to think.   So I thought I would take a minute tonight to help them out, you know, the sort of thing I learned we should do under the philosophy of compassionate conservatism espoused by a former conservative president.

Science is a system of inquiry by which people ask questions about the world around them.   You look at some phenomena and you take an educated guess about what’s going on.  Under the scientific method  you then construct an experiment to gather data, and then analyze the data to see what rational conclusions you can draw from that data.  So far I think all of you on the right are with me, but hang on, this is where the right turn comes.   You do all of this without having pre-determined the answer, you actually look at the data objectively as opposed to looking at it to make sure it fits the requirements of a particular, let’s say as an example conservative ideology.

Many times the conclusions we draw from experiments in science provide us results in directions we never even expected in the first place and that’s when science gets exciting for us, because it provides so many more questions.   For this very reason much of science is funded by public institutions and governments.  Why is that?  Well the fact is when private companies do research they have limited acceptable answers.  For example, if you’re a tobacco company and doing experiments to see if smoking causes lung cancer and your results suggest it does, then you can’t use that work because it goes against your dominant paradigm that suggests smoking is not harmful.  This is considered very bad science by cigarette companies, but a good conservative capitalistic process.

Conservatives have been taught to “think” by the leaders of their movement like Limbaugh, Bush, Cheney, Fox News and Rove that answers that don’t fit their dominant paradigm, conservatism, cannot possibly be correct so those conclusions must be based on faulty data or conclusions.  Not surprisingly, if the same process produced answers in support of the dominant paradigm, the data, analysis and conclusions are of course beyond reproach.  It’s a hypocritical position without a logical foundation but that is a fundamental characteristic of all “isms.”

You see conservatism isn’t alone in this flaw; it applies to liberalism, capitalism, socialism, environmentalism, etc…  It also applies to any extreme position in any belief system or religion.  It is this type of thinking that led to decades of denial that smoking was harmful, to wars like Vietnam or the invasion of Iraq.

I’m not advocating that science should be our sole philosophy or that scientists should run the world.  However I believe we’d be in much better shape if our government, the public, our political talking heads and media would take the time to develop a better understanding of the scientific method and critical thinking in general, it’s a dream I have.

If you don’t believe in Global Warming, you’re an idiot

If you don’t believe in Global Warming, you’re an idiot

If you don’t believe in Global Warming, you’re an idiot; you might think that is a strong statement but really it’s not.  Let’s define Global Warming, simply it is the fact that the average global temperature of the earth is increasing.  There is plenty of data from ice core samples to support this, as well as the correlation with CO2 but that’s ok, we don’t have to go there, just look at the graph below recording the temperatures we have measured.

Now sure, you can say it’s just a fluke or a short-term trend but you can’t deny that temperatures are rising or that the top 10 hottest years have all occurred in the last 15 years.  So Global Warming is a fact plain and simple, if you don’t believe in facts than you’re an idiot.

Now what most people want to argue about are two things, first whether or not there is a long-term warming trend and whether or not the warming is caused by human activity.  Below is a NASA site that provides all of the information you could ever want about Global Warming, including the uncertainties we have about climate science.  That’s right, as any good scientist will admit, we don’t know everything about how the climate works.  There are things that are still mysteries to science, like why winter Antarctic sea ice has grown in area over the last few years.  We don’t understand all of the intricacies of how the Earth’s climate regulates itself.  But just because we don’t understand every detail of the mechanism doesn’t mean we’re wrong.  We don’t understand every detail about how gravity works, and if you think that fact means that the science is crap, well then you go and jump off a roof and we’ll see if the theory of gravity holds for you.  And by the way, since you only believe in science where you can easily understand everything, please explain to me the details of the workings of the internal combustion engine, or start walking to work.

A definitive site on the evidence for global climate change showing evidence for each category of evidence showing how the earth is changing.  http://climate.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/

To see more of the arguments that skeptics have about Global Warming and the scientific response check-out the following link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703819904574551303527570212.html

And if you buy the idea that no one is convinced by this, take a look at the following Creation Science site  http://www.icr.org/article/evidence-for-global-warming/

On the flip side I also hear a lot by climate deniers about how scientists don’t believe in Global Warming either, well take a gander at the following survey data: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/

Finally if you don’t think the world is warming, if you don’t think this is a significant issue than answer a couple of questions.  Why are the Antarctic ice sheets melting, why are global glaciers disappearing, why is the permafrost thawing?  

While most of you can afford not to care, we’re talking about global climate and things moving on a geologic scale, even when change happens quickly by geologic time it typically takes centuries for impacts to show.  So most of you will likely be dead when the real nasty effects kick in.  However, there has been some recent work that shows that occasionally, and granted this would be a rarity, that massive global sea level change can happen very, very quickly and may be related to cultural memories of the great flood.  Additionally, there exists the possibility that melting ice could quickly disrupt Atlantic currents and paradoxically plunge North America and Europe into a mini ice age.

So who knows, there might be a reason for you to be worried after all and I haven’t even mentioned the potential severe weather impacts that might occur.  Do you live in tornado country, along the coast in the hurricane zones, maybe near a major river?  Sleep tight, I’m sure this is all just a bad dream.

A little thing called science people: Global Warming, Evolution and the Moon Landing

There are three science topics that I hear discussed all of the time and it really irks me at one level and makes me completely sad at another as to how little understanding people have of science.  So let’s tackle the big three; Evolution, Global Warming and the Moon Landing.  Let’s be clear before you get into the details, all three have solid, solid evidence and for the record, evolution is occurring, the world is warming and man has walked on the moon.  These statements are based on the analysis of the data, not on my feelings, beliefs or political leanings.  The best example I can give you of what that means is this, I have felt fine and the normal indications of high blood sugar levels that include blisters on my feet, blurry vision, and getting up to urinate many times at night were not occurring, however, my blood glucose test came back showing my blood sugar is very high.  So regardless of my belief that it wasn’t high, the data shows otherwise, this is the case with these three issues.  Everyone would consider me an idiot if I were to say I don’t care what the data says, I’m not a diabetic or it’s just a conspiracy by the drug companies, you can’t believe the data.

First let’s look at Evolution, Charles Darwin is most often given the credit for the “Theory of Evolution”, that is incorrect.  Darwin was not even close to the first scientist to consider the possibility that species changed or evolved over time, he was however the first to put it all together and provide a mechanism, which he called natural selection.  Now there are almost no biologists and very few other types of scientists who don’t acknowledge that evolution is a fact.  Heck, the evidence that evolution occurs is so overwhelming that even creationists who disavow evolution typically agree the micro-evolution occurs.  The big argument for them is that species cannot evolve over time to create new species.   Contrary to what many of them claim, there is a ton of evidence showing the veracity of the evolutionary process.  There is still some discussion as to whether or not natural selection is the whole mechanism, personally I think it’s about 90% of the mechanism but that’s a much deeper discussion.  Below is a link to a site that will give you all the details on the evidence:

http://anthro.palomar.edu/evolve/evolve_3.htm

Next Global Warming, THERE IS NO DISPUTE WHAT SO EVER, THAT THE EARTH IS WARMING!  No one who can read a graph can argue with this, the earth’s average temperature has increased 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880.  I know, 1.4 degrees sounds like nothing, however that level of temperature change over the entire planet will soon:  leave Mt. Kilimanjaro snow less; has greatly impacted the glaciers of the Himalayas; and affected the arctic sea ice to such a level that Polar Bears may be facing extinction in the near future.    Here’s a link to the basics of what’s happening:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/1206_041206_global_warming.html

The only real question at this point is how much is human activity impacting the rate of warming, the evidence is pretty good, that it is significant.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/1206_041206_global_warming_2.html

Now the one that really pisses me off, the idea that we did not walk on the moon.  I’m not the only one who gets angry, astronaut Buzz Aldrin once punched a famous hoaxer in the mouth after the guy harassed the hell out of him.  This idea has so much proof behind it I don’t even know where to start.  First, thousands of people had to have been on the conspiracy and not a single person has ever come forward with any proof that we didn’t walk on the moon.  All of the crap the hoaxers claim, the shadows are wrong, the flag is flapping, the footprints couldn’t be formed have all been shown multiple times to be false.  Probably the most entertaining way they have been debunked was on a Mythbusters episode dedicated to this very question.  Wikipedia has a surprisingly thorough discussion of almost every aspect of the hoaxers arguments and the rebuttals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories

Finally the most convincing evidence is the presence of retroreflectors on the moon.  These reflectors can be hit with a high power laser on Earth and return a high level signal from the moon.  This has been done literally over ten thousand times since the sixties.  So in order for the moon landing to be faked, there have to be thousands of conspirators at major universities all over the world participating in the hoax, I don’t think that’s happening, here’s a link to what the reflectors  are and do:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/~tmurphy/apollo/lrrr.html

Even Scientists Don’t Believe in Global Warming

“Even scientists don’t believe in global warming,” said this older woman to me today.  Well, that can’t be true I said because I’m a scientist and I know the world is warming.  She told me I was wrong she saw it on the news.  People, don’t get your science in 30 second sound bytes from CNN or Fox News, science is complicated and in fact it actually takes more than 30 seconds to explain a complex idea like global climate change.

Shallow thinking will kill us all.  Honestly folks I need some help on this, how do we get people to think deeper than a sound byte?  I think the reason newspapers are dying out is because they can get the written equivalent of sound bytes off of the web and not have to read any deeper, plus there’s a lot more celebrity gossip on the web.  I’ve even had some interesting comments about my blog, comments that were obviously made about nothing but the title of the post.  How do we get people to stop and consider the complexities of the world we live in?  I’m not sure we can, I’m a cynical bastard and honestly I don’t think people want to know, they just want to bitch.

The woman after she realized I vehemently disagreed with her and knew a bit about the topic decided to end the discussion by saying, “I guess it all comes down to which side of the (political) fence you’re on.”  I reminded her that science is not about political position but about data.  Every time I have a conversation like this I feel closer and closer to folks at NASA who have to put up with the whole, we didn’t go to the moon bullshit.

For those of you who want to argue the global warming idea you’re stupid.  The world is warming, that is a fact, look at mean global temperatures over the last 200 years they are increasing, no scientist who can read a graph can argue with that fact.  The argument is about how much of the increase is as a result of man’s actions.

Of course some people will still argue it’s not warming, I mean hell it snowed in Vegas the other day.  So my question would be if it isn’t warming why is the Antarctic Ice Sheet melting, why aren’t the seas in the arctic freezing the way they used to, why are mountain glaciers disappearing – have they gone on vacation?

Below is a link to some comparative photography using old photos with new photos taken from the same vantage point:

http://sites.asiasociety.org/riversofice/comparative-photography

Recently in the news you see things like oh the IPCC said the glaciers would melt by 2035 and they’ve had to retract that statement.  People jump on this to say, see global warming is bullshit.  In fact, the number 2035 was wrong, maybe it will be 2050, but having the year wrong doesn’t change the simple fact that they are melting.  Sometimes I think the human population deserves to die some horrible environmental death for being so damn thick-headed.  Happy New Year.

Die Prop 23 Die!

In the link below you can see the latest polling results for Proposition 23 which is attempting to make California a better business environment for big oil who is primarily bank rolling the proposition.  However, the election is still two weeks away and I would encourage everyone, as always, to get out and vote.  I hear Mickey Mouse is gaining on both Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown with my paper ballot helping the cause.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-poll-20101025,0,1234526.story

Has the right gone soft on national security? Or what does Proposition 23, big oil, the Tea Party, and the Environment all have in common?

Proposition 23, Big Oil, the Tea Party, California Politics and the Environment!  What do these three things have in common?  Well in the wild, wacky world of California politics everything.  To simply answer the question, a proposition is on the November ballot in California, Proposition 23.  The initiative, oh so cleverly the numerical reverse of Assembly Bill 32, is being funded significantly by out-of-state oil companies to reverse Assembly Bill 32.  Assembly Bill 32 is a state bill that focuses on lowering greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.  The bill has helped generate a lot of training and business in green enterprises in California including a major effort in Sacramento, the GreenWise Initiative.  California is poised to become the US leader in these areas with significant investment and innovation in the field.  Additionally, this has trickled down into the education field as well with many new training programs at the community college and four-year college levels.

A good source for just the facts on Proposition 23:

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_23_(2010)

The state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office assessment of the measure:

http://www.lao.ca.gov/ballot/2010/23_11_2010.aspx

The long-range impact of AB 32 is to poise California’s economy to be a national and possibly global leader in green technology and training.  The bill albeit driven by a controversial topic, global climate change, is extremely forward thinking and should set up the state of California for long-range success as well as improving the environment of one of the cleanest states in the country.  Contrary to the typical argument that environmental policies hurt business, AB 32 has actually attracted business to the state.

Why are big oil companies outside the state interested in this bill?  Well as you can read in the Huffington Post piece below, they make it very clear, this bill may impact their profits.  So how is it that conservatives and the Tea Party are opposing a bill that reduces our dependency on big oil?  I believe the right has been telling us for some time that reducing our dependency on oil, therefore reducing our dependency on foreign oil is a national security issue, has the right suddenly gone soft on national security, or are they just more concerned with their wallets?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/19/antienvironment-californi_n_687719.html

Does this mean Global Warming has accelerated?

Does this mean Global Warming has accelerated?

The short answer is no, but take a little walk with me.

So how do crazy tin-foil hat rumors get started and fly across the internet scaring the heck out of innocent folks?  Typically they start with a grain of truth, some piece of scientific research or information and then it gets out of control.  A couple of recent examples surrounding the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill include that the sea floor was cracked in multiple areas and that Russian Oceanographer Anatoly Sagalevitch had taken his Mir1 and Mir2 submersibles to the gulf and reported this in Russia which would lead to us needing to nuke the seafloor in the Gulf.

I busted that rumor by contacting Dr. Sagalevitch and you can read about that here:

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/anatoly-sagalevitch-comments-on-bp-oil-crisis-in-the-gulf-of-mexico/

The next one that got a serious foothold was that a giant methane bubble was going to erupt from under the Gulf of Mexico and extinguish almost all life on earth.  This rumor followed the standard path, first there is some real science, a theory by Dr. Gregory Riskin that puts forward that an event like the one describe above may have been responsible for past mass extinctions.  Then you have the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill and high levels of methane related to the spill and boom, someone jumps to the conclusion that the drilling has set off a mass extinction event.  Dr. Riskin himself debunked this one and I detailed many of the points of incongruity in another post on this blog:

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/has-bp-triggered-an-explosive-methane-event-that-will-bring-on-dystopian-times/

Well let’s see if we can head one off before it gets started, as the title suggests, a study shows plants are reducing their uptake of carbon.  So the part that is the real science is that a 10 year study has shown that carbon uptake rates have decreased over the last decade.  Now the alarming thing is that if this trend continued it would actually accelerate the rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and any impacts that result from the increase.  Hence the effects of global climate change would be greatly accelerated.   Now the not so alarming part the study, like any good scientific study, also indicates that this may have a very explainable cause.  First, the decrease is very small compared to the overall rate of carbon uptake and secondly, during the period of the study there were massive droughts in both hemispheres.  The droughts could easily account for the decrease.  You can read the article for yourself at:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0820/As-plant-productivity-dips-a-search-for-answers?sms_ss=email

As I mentioned in the methane bubble debunk piece I worry about the level of science education in the American population and the ability for the general public to discern science from conjecture, essentially the ability to tell Carl Sagan and Glenn Beck apart.

Carbon Dioxide is not Pollution

This is a repost of my very first post which I misplaced on my site, so fixing that little error:

Ok, let’s get something straight, pollution is bad, it sucks, it’s the kind of the thing that when you come into contact with it, it causes you pain, or illness or death.  So let’s refrain from calling carbon dioxide pollution at least not on the scale of mercury or DDT.  Now, all of you global warming disclaimers hold the cork on that champagne, global warming is a fact, debating that makes you an idiot.  The amount of global warming related to human activity and how much is related to natural earth cycles is up for debate to a point.  A quick statistics lesson, a correlation is when two things proceed in the same trend direction at a similar level.  Correlation may imply, but does not show cause and effect, in other words two things may be correlated but there is no evidence one is causing the other.  The classic example is that as the number of alcoholics increases so do the number of baptist ministers.  Clearly a correlation however no one is assuming baptist ministers lead to alcoholism, at least there’s no evidence at this time.  What really is at work is that both increase due to population increases which will lead to more ministers and more alcoholics.  In the case of global warming however, there is some decent indications that there is cause and effect between the rise in industrialized society, increased carbon dioxide and resulting increase in global temperatures.

Now that makes global warming an issue, a serious one, it will impact weather patterns and sea level.  This can negatively impact farming, cause droughts, violent storms and change the location of coastlines among other things.  Changing temperatures can increase the spread of pests and diseases.  These types of issues are serious without doubt and need to be addressed by reasonable means.  However I don’t believe that considering carbon dioxide a pollutant is the answer, regulation at some level is reasonable, treating carbon dioxide as toxic is not.

My biggest fear, and one that is already being realized, is that the idea of carbon dioxide as the big evil, as pollution, has allowed the nuclear industry to market nuclear power as clean energy.  I don’t know about you but I don’t typically consider spent uranium rods that stay toxic for thousands of years a byproduct of clean energy.  What they of course are saying is that it is a near zero carbon emission source of energy.  My answer to that is let’s store all those spent fuel rods in their yards, and build the reactors near their children’s schools and upwind of their homes.

Save the Earth, NO! Save your ass!

The late and immortal George Carlin once postulated using a unique Gaian perspective, that the earth allowed human evolution because it had no other way to make plastic.  God help us if that’s the truth because I think the earth may have all the plastic it needs and then, it will have no need for us.  Remember, everything on earth gets recycled, even us.  Mountains get blown down by wind, earth gets ground under in tectonic motion, rain goes to land, to river, to ocean and back to the sky.  Human beings need to develope the realization that we, not the earth are the temporary thing here.

It strikes me as funny that given the self-centered nature of the human race that when it comes to environmental impacts that we have adopted the tag line save the earth.  I mean come on folks, it should be save the humans!  Or much more bluntly save our ass.  Of course those of us who dabble in the sciences, particularly ecology have a deep understanding that all things are connected.  Saving the whales was not really about saving the whales folks it was about saving a keystone species in oceanic ecosystems that we depend on for a major part of our food supply.

This brings me to today’s point friends, the end is near, or is it?  There is a fundamental concept in ecology, it is called carrying capacity.  Simply, this is the assessment of how many of any given organism can live healthily in a system.  So maybe a thought just hit you, what is the carrying capacity of the earth?  That question is just a tad incomplete, carrying capacity is specific for each species, so the real question is what is the carrying capacity for humans on the earth.  The frightening thing is that the estimates range from 1 billion to 20 billion with the majority of scientists falling into the 10 – 15 billion range.    However, something unique to humans is that we can have a varying human footprint, or environmental impact.  That footprint can be very small, like that of a lightly populated nonindustrialized culture to the heavy footprint we have here in the USA.  So, as the third world becomes increasingly developed their footprint increases and the overall carrying capacity of the earth for humans decreases.

Two solutions loom, both seemingly wholly unpalatable to people in general and Americans in particular.  Solution one reduce the population and that means either stop having babies or get rid of the some of the current population, did I sayslaughter politely enough?  Solution two is reduce our footprint here in the US and globally and that folks is not something Americans are game for doing.  We seem to feel entitled to a standard of living that is completely unsustainable as if it has been granted by God.  I guess that’s what we mean on our money when we say in God we trust.  However, in time, this trust in God may lead to us being crushed by Gaia, so let’s drop the save the earth bit folks, SAVE OUR ASS!

Carbon Dioxide is not Pollution

Ok, let’s get something straight, pollution is bad, it sucks, it’s the kind of the thing that when you come into contact with it, it causes you pain, or illness or death.  So let’s refrain from calling carbon dioxide pollution at least not on the scale of mercury or DDT.  Now, all of you global warming disclaimers hold the cork on that champagne, global warming is a fact, debating that makes you an idiot.  The amount of global warming related to human activity and how much is related to natural earth cycles is up for debate to a point.  A quick statistics lesson, a correlation is when two things proceed in the same trend direction at a similar level.  Correlation may imply, but does not show cause and effect, in other words two things may be correlated but there is no evidence one is causing the other.  The classic example is that as the number of alcoholics increases so do the number of baptist ministers.  Clearly a correlation however no one is assuming baptist ministers lead to alcoholism, at least there’s no evidence at this time.  What really is at work is that both increase due to population increases which will lead to more ministers and more alcoholics.  In the case of global warming however, there is some decent indications that there is cause and effect between the rise in industrialized society, increased carbon dioxide and resulting increase in global temperatures.

Now that makes global warming an issue, a serious one, it will impact weather patterns and sea level.  This can negatively impact farming, cause droughts, violent storms and change the location of coastlines among other things.  Changing temperatures can increase the spread of pests and diseases.  These types of issues are serious without doubt and need to be addressed by reasonable means.  However I don’t believe that considering carbon dioxide a pollutant is the answer, regulation at some level is reasonable, treating carbon dioxide as toxic is not.

My biggest fear, and one that is already being realized, is that the idea of carbon dioxide as the big evil, as pollution, has allowed the nuclear industry to market nuclear power as clean energy.  I don’t know about you but I don’t typically consider spent uranium rods that stay toxic for thousands of years a byproduct of clean energy.  What they of course are saying is that it is a near zero carbon emission source of energy.  My answer to that is let’s store all those spent fuel rods in their yards, and build the reactors near their children’s schools and upwind of their homes.

aloha