Astroturf is made of people

[mmcirvin]

A couple of remarks on the environmental-science-and-politics front (note, as usual, that I am not an environmental scientist, but I like to think I've spent a lot of time observing the scientific community and its interactions with the rest of the world):


1. Apparently the line that "everyone thought there was going to be an ice age in the Seventies; these climate people, you can't believe anything they say" is still going around (RealClimate ran an article debunking it a while back).

Aside from it being fairly irrelevant anyway (even if it were true, it's on the order of "First scientists say the Sun goes around the Earth, then Earth goes around the Sun! Which is it? MAKE UP YOUR MINDS!!!") the striking thing about it is that I personally remember it not being true, and surely people who are older than I am can concur. There might have been some fretting about ice ages in popular media, but people did know and worry about CO₂-induced global warming back then; this isn't some recent fad. The general circulation models weren't there yet, but you could get the order of magnitude of the effect from basic back-of-the-envelope calculations. (I like that the article from which George Will pulled his damning quote about glaciation had a sentence completely destroying his contention in the previous paragraph. If anyone needed further proof that Will is the King of Hacks, this is it.)

But what I just remembered is that there's evidence even from pop culture: I'm pretty sure that global warming is part of the background of the movie Soylent Green.



2. Is Rachel Carson responsible for more deaths than Hitler? You might not be surprised to hear that the answer is "no". However, I've been hearing this nonsense going around in Real Life, so I suppose I should mention that Tim Lambert has been having a lovely time ripping the Environmentalists Killed Millions By Banning DDT story to pieces. I feel slightly embarrassed, because this is one that I actually thought might have a grain of truth to it the first time I encountered it. Not really, though, for reasons Lambert explains.

One of his commenters expressed bafflement that anti-environmentalists would be so obsessed with DDT in the first place, given its marginal utility for the purposes for which the Tech Central Station crowd have been advocating it. What's going on here is actually a common pattern among scientific cranks, which in its normal manifestation I call Experimentum Crucis Syndrome. It's the idea that an entire discipline rests on a single historical claim, which, once destroyed, will kick the supports out from under the whole thing. For anti-relativity cranks, it's the Michelson-Morley experiment: you'll see people writing long, tangled screeds about problems with Michelson-Morley as if that were the only thing convincing any modern scientist of the reality of special relativity. Here, it's Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, which provided much early inspiration for the environmental movement. Silent Spring was famous for helping get DDT banned for many uses. Refute the DDT thesis, so the thinking goes, and all of environmentalism collapses like the horde of zombies when you decapitate the Head Zombie.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I will admit that in popular discussions of global warming at the time, people already showed a marked tendency to confuse it with the ozone depletion problem, a confusion that annoys me to this day. In fact, since there was more uncertainty about global warming in the 1970s and 1980s than there is today, I'm pretty sure that the confusion helped to muddy the waters about the relatively clear-cut issue of CFCs and ozone. Which, by the way, has long been one of my Helpful Idiot Markers: anyone who claims that human-made CFCs are unrelated to ozone depletion is probably a hack, lunatic or ignoramus.

[jwgh]

The movie 'Soylent Green' had a global warming component. I'm not sure about 'Make Room! Make Room!', the book it was based on, since I bought the book many years ago but never got around to reading it.

I'm trying to think of other books that might have had global warming as a theme ... John Brunner is sort of my go-to guy for 'the world is doomed and it's all our fault' (and, in extreme cases, 'good riddance to bad rubbish') stories but I don't remember there being a global warming component to 'The Sheep Look Up', for instance.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There really was uncertainty back then as to whether aerosol cooling or CO2 warming would turn out to be the dominant effect, so you had a choice of global disasters if you wanted to write one. But the scientists usually seemed to just say that more information was needed, as you'd expect given honest scientists and what was known at the time.

[arsonnick.livejournal.com]

I remember one of the later episodes of All In The Family where Gloria and Michael had one of those dead-serious, ultra still camera angle moments when Gloria grabbed an aerosol can and screamed something at Michael to the effect of "This is the problem right here, Michael...This.Is.The.Problem!"

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That was presumably about CFCs and ozone, though, and the physics of that was already well-understood (which was why the American ban on ozone-depleting propellants in aerosol cans actually came through around that time), though the ozone hole over Antarctica hadn't been detected yet.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

The only think I know about MRMR is that in the book, Soylent Green is made of soybeans and lentils.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, you can also see traces of Experimentum Crucis Syndrome in the attacks on the Mann "hockey stick" paper (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=114), which rarely take into account the body of other work saying more or less the same thing.

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

Would another variant be Commoner's obsession with a claim Francis Crick made in a 1958 paper?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Probably.

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

An interesting new tactic from our good friends at the Geening Earth Society is to reference older climate models that suggested concurrent warming in the atmosphere and at the surface, and then contrast them with recent (and very accurate) data that show no warming of the troposphere and slight cooling in the stratosphere.

Of course, these models were flawed, and the newer ones indicate that the ocean would serve as a heat sink for atmospheric heat. But people like Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer are getting away with pretending those advances never happened.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, actually Soon and Baliunas have been going at that one for years. My impression is that at one time (mid-1990s?) the discrepancy in tropospheric temperatures was actually somewhat mysterious, but I could be wrong there as I haven't followed the primary sources back very far.

The usual rhetorical trick when something like this happens is to insist that your opponents just tweaked the model specifically to address your objection, and say something about "adding an epicycle". (You can tell I've read a lot of articles attempting to demolish Big Bang cosmology.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...One thing that really frustrates me about the "there is no manmade global warming" people is that they seem to be quite common and well-respected in places where people should know better, particularly in the skeptic/rationalist movement. Part of it doubtless is that they've got some easily-recognized lunatics in the environmental movement like Commoner and Jeremy Rifkin to use as strawmen. And part of it is that skeptic organizations seem to attract people with libertarian politics, who in turn tend to be badly disposed toward environmentalist claims because libertarianism works best in the absence of hard-to-detect externalities of behavior. But this is no excuse for promoting bad science.

Were they not politically powerful and funded by large corporations, even the more respectable of the scientific antienvironmentalists would basically be in the same boat as Halton Arp or Geoffrey Burbidge: people wedded to ideas that the rest of the scientific community abandoned for evidential reasons years ago, and whose arguments increasingly tend toward dark ranting about everyone plotting against them. As it is, there's the danger of them ending up more like an American Trofim Lysenko. There's a miniature version of that (minus the threat of bodily harm, admittedly) already playing out at the Fish and Wildlife Service (http://chriscmooney.com/blog.asp?Id=1593).