Retort http://blogs.plos.org/retort Diverse Perspectives on Science and Medicine Sat, 28 Apr 2012 23:12:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 Recap of “Science Writing in the Age of Denial” (part 2) http://feeds.plos.org/~r/plos/blogs/retort/~3/-IxYZR4Fdko/ http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2012/04/28/recap-of-%e2%80%9cscience-writing-in-the-age-of-denial%e2%80%9d-part-2/#comments Sat, 28 Apr 2012 23:12:46 +0000 John Rennie http://blogs.plos.org/retort/?p=2157 Continue reading »]]> My Storify recapping of last week’s “Science Writing in the Age of Denial” conference continues….

Previously, I recapped the first two sessions of the meeting organized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison (April 22-24, 2012), which covered “Communicating Science in Politicized Environments” and “The Denial of Evolution, and the Evolution of Denial.” (In the interest of disclosure, I should note that last fall I was a science writer in residence at UW-M, and that I was a paid, invited participant in the meeting.) Now I’ll pick up with what happened in the two later sessions that first day.

Cheerleading, Shibboleths and Uncertainty

There was no better keynote speaker for this session than Gary Schwitzer (@garyschwitzer), the founder of HealthNewsReview.org. The site, funded by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, provides independent reviews of the accuracy, balance and completeness of news stories about medical treatments, tests, procedures, and products.

Unfortunately, Schwitzer explained, about 70 percent of all the stories evaluated by HealthNewsReview failed to meet those criteria. Rather, too much of the time, medical news was dominated by an attitude of uncritical cheerleading for any and all new offerings, without an adequate exploration of the relative costs, tradeoffs in risks, credibility of the evidence or conclusions, conflicts of interest, and other important considerations. (A list of the site’s rating criteria can be found here.)

New medical technologies he said, get treated like “shibboleths”—objects of cultish devotion. As a consequence, journalists who should be helping to their audience to set intelligent health agendas are instead just flooding the public with half-baked information and conflicting messages, according to Schwitzer. With a dig at FOX News (which he said was notably awful in this regard), Schwitzer called the present “an age of infoxification.”

For a good example of a dreadful phenomenon, Schwitzer pointed to coverage of cancer screening. Mass screening is expensive and potentially harmful, so it should be balanced against the potential benefits. But anyone recommending that younger people not get mammograms or prostate antigen tests was loudly accused of wanting to “ration health care” or not caring whether people died.

Schwitzer has posted some of the slides from his presentation online. …

Read the rest of my recap on Storify….

]]> http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2012/04/28/recap-of-%e2%80%9cscience-writing-in-the-age-of-denial%e2%80%9d-part-2/feed/ 1 http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2012/04/28/recap-of-%e2%80%9cscience-writing-in-the-age-of-denial%e2%80%9d-part-2/ Recap of “Science Writing in the Age of Denial” (part 1) http://feeds.plos.org/~r/plos/blogs/retort/~3/Y33x_5JTdlM/ http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2012/04/25/recap-of-science-writing-in-the-age-of-denial-part-1/#comments Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:36:51 +0000 John Rennie http://blogs.plos.org/retort/?p=2135 Continue reading »]]> Here begins my Storify summation of day one from this week’s timely conference, “Science Writing in the Age of Denialism.”  Go to the conference website for complete details on panels and speakers, which also featured PLoS Bloggers Deborah Blum and Steve Silberman.  (In case you’re not familiar with Storify, what you’re reading between the short passages I wrote is a selected assortment of tweets made by participants at the conference on the hashtags #sciencedenial and #denialconf, and which I later curated.) I’ll have one or more further summaries of this sort on the rest of the conference, which I’ll try to complete soon.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison assembled a roster of science-writing all-stars to consider the roots of the public’s resistance to accepting the science about evolution, climate change, vaccines, and other matters.

The organizers made their goals for the event clear in the description listed on its website at sciencedenial.wisc.edu:

Science writers now work in an age where uncomfortable ideas and truths meet organized resistance. Opposing scientific consensus on such things as anthropogenic climate change, the theory of evolution, and even the astonishingly obvious benefits of vaccination has become politically de rigueur, a litmus test and a genuine threat to science. How does denial affect the craft of the science writer? How can science writers effectively explain disputed science? What’s the big picture? Are denialists ever right?

Welcome and Introduction

Science writer par excellence Deborah Blum of UW-M welcomed the audience at the event’s start and introduced some of those making it possible. University chancellor David Ward considered the tensions between science and irrationality, modernity and anti-modernity, inclusive pluralism vs. ideological pluralization.

David Krakauer, the head of the relatively new Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (the venue for the day’s discussions), then pointed out that all of us engage in our own forms of denial. For example, journalists covering the denial of climate warming et al. fooled themselves into thinking that they could change public opinion. For decades, Krakauer noted, popular films had carried the message that we ignore scientists’ warnings at our peril, yet the public still had this distrust of scientists.’

David Krakauer: “the science communicator’s denial? That the work makes a difference.” #sciencedenial sciencedenial

David Krakauer: “If Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott have failed, what can science writers do?” #sciencedenial   Mark Riechers

“But journalists aren’t the only ones.”  Scott Dodd

“We’re actually in the age of denial – of the end.” John Krakauer #sciencedenial Adam Hinterthuer

Communicating Science in Politicized Environments

Arthur Lupia, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, kicked off the session with an energetic and engrossing review of what biology and psychology had discovered about the challenges of making complex arguments to diverse audiences. The fleeting, fragmented nature of human attention and the phenomenon of “motivated reasoning” almost guarantee that people will not absorb and accept upsetting information unless it speaks meaningfully to their priorities and values.

Lupia: “Familiar communication plan is that if we give people right info, they will make the right decisions. But often fails.” #sciencedenial John Rennie

Lupia: “The problem is us, not them. We have unrealistic expectations about how they’ll react to info.”  #sciencedenial John Rennie

Read the rest of my report on Storify …

]]> http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2012/04/25/recap-of-science-writing-in-the-age-of-denial-part-1/feed/ 3 http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2012/04/25/recap-of-science-writing-in-the-age-of-denial-part-1/ Coffee, Bugs, and Death http://feeds.plos.org/~r/plos/blogs/retort/~3/Dx4bcazZWiE/ http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2012/04/22/coffee-bugs-and-death/#comments Sun, 22 Apr 2012 21:15:39 +0000 John Rennie http://blogs.plos.org/retort/?p=2099 Continue reading »]]>

Credit: Sheri Terris, via Flickr

People, why must you ruin my coffee-drinking life? When I indulge my fondness for the nectar of the burnt bean, I’m looking for a rich java experience, one brightened with a faint hint of bugs and a remote hope for the sweet surcease that only caffeinated death could bring. Must you take even this from me?

Buckling under pressure from the all-powerful vegan lobby, Starbucks has announced that it will soon stop preparing some of its drinks and foods with a red dye made from crushed insects. As the Associated Press reports:

The company says it will swap out cochineal extract, which is made from the juice of a tiny beetle, and instead use lycopene, a tomato-based extract.

Cochineal dye is widely used in foods and cosmetics products such as lipstick, yogurt and shampoo. Starbucks had used the coloring in its strawberry flavored mixed drinks and foods like the raspberry swirl cake and red velvet whoopie pie.

Objection!

Let us first stipulate that I am already on the record as a man not unwilling to eat insects. Indeed, sometimes I can be enthusiastic about the prospect. (Why? Circle of life, my friends, the circle of life: the bugs will get their chance soon enough.)

But lycopene? Does no one see what putting a tomato extract into foods already laden with sugar, corn syrup, salt, and other ingredients will mean? It will mean that they are making ketchup! You can’t add ketchup to whoopee pies! It’s madness!

Furthermore, are people unaware of the noble history of the insect dye in question, as so gloriously explained by Amy Butler Greenfield in her book A Perfect Red (HarperCollins, 2005)? The cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus), which is native to cacti growing in Mexico and other parts of Central America, produces the dyestuff (also known as carminic acid) in its exoskeleton to repel predators

"Indian Collecting Cochineal with a Deer Tail" by José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez (1777). (Credit: Newberry Library)

The Aztecs and Mayans discovered the dyestuff (also known as carmine) in crushed preparations of the cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus) native to cacti growing in Mexico and other parts of Central America and used it to create fabrics more vividly colored than any seen before. (The carminic acid in the insect’s exoskeleton helps it to discourage predators.) In 1519 Spanish conquistadors brought it back to Europe and gave Spain a prized monopoly on the dyestuff for many years: after silver, cochineal became the most valued commodity imported from Mexico. Greenfield describes how the brilliance of what the chemist Robert Boyle hailed as “a perfect Scarlet” ignited a fierce industrial struggle among European powers:

Determined to break Spain’s lucrative monopoly, other nations turned to espionage and piracy. In England, the Netherlands, and France, the search for cochineal soon took on the tone of a national crusade. Kings, haberdashers, scientists, pirates, and spies all became caught up in the chase for the most desirable color on earth.

Meanwhile, as bright red fabrics and pigments became more widespread, European attitudes toward the color red changed. Red garments, which had once been available only to the wealthy, nobility, and high-ranking clergy, was embraced by the poorer classes—and that in turn led the contrary Victorian gentry to start wearing dark clothes and to dismiss red as vulgar, immoral extravagance.

By the 1880s, the invention of inexpensive artificial dyes such as alizarin had busted the market for cochineal, and the laborious raising and collection of cochineal insects on plantations around the world mostly ended. Today, Peru is the leading exporter of cochineal, primarily for food colorings and cosmetics in which all-natural ingredients are prized.

As Greenfield wrote in her book’s prologue:

The history of this mad race for cochineal is a window onto another world — a world in which red was rare and precious, a source of wealth and power for those who knew its secrets. To obtain it, men sacked ships, turned spy, and courted death.

Ladies and gentlemen, I beg of you, let us not spurn cochineal casually. It is a proud, magnificent tradition that we honor when we drink our heroic flagons of strawberry frappuccino.

• • •

Indeed, should we not cherish the death-defying act involved in drinking every cup of coffee? Years ago when I worked in a cell biology lab at Harvard Medical School, the other techs and I would sometimes eye the big plastic bottle of pure caffeine powder stored in one of the reagent freezers. (It was a hand-me-down from some long-forgotten set of experiments unrelated to anything we did.) We would idly speculate about what would happen if we were to take a big heaping teaspoon of the white powder and swallow it all in a gulp. How fast would our hearts explode?

And is there any grad student or journalist on deadline who hasn’t morbidly wondered whether his or her next cup of coffee might not be one too many, freeing us from all care forevermore? What simple joy such thoughts brought us.

But apparently the very witty David Ng cannot leave well enough alone: he has gone and calculated exactly how much coffee we would need to drink for its caffeine to kill us. Read all the details of his back-of-the-envelope calculations, because the problem turns out to be more complicated than one might think. Death by coffee means not only consuming enough to achieve a lethal concentration of caffeine in the tissues but also overcoming the rates of elimination of caffeine from the body.

Long story short, Dave makes a case that drinking enough coffee to kill yourself with caffeine (or with over-hydration, for that matter) borders on the impossible:

I haven’t had a chance to extrapolate this over the full year (365 days), but I’m pretty sure that even a constant coffee drinking regime (1 cup every 24 minutes for the full year) wouldn’t work out to a retention amount above the lethal dose.

All to say that your body pretty much kicks ass in its remarkable metabolism. Now, it’ll be interesting to maybe dig a little deeper with regards to how messed up a person gets with that base 2500mg inside them (as I’m sure the case will be). As well, not sure what the deal would be with 15 litres of expresso shots per day – that may just about be enough!

To which I can only say: Stop ruining away my fantasies, Dave Ng! You’re in no position to dismiss the deadliness of my habit because you have never tasted my coffee.

]]> http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2012/04/22/coffee-bugs-and-death/feed/ 3 http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2012/04/22/coffee-bugs-and-death/ Science Bloggers’ Year of Favorites http://feeds.plos.org/~r/plos/blogs/retort/~3/yw8UqyQYSXM/ http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/12/30/science-bloggers-year-of-favorites/#comments Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:54:16 +0000 John Rennie http://blogs.plos.org/retort/?p=1999 Yesterday, I put together a list of my favorite pieces of my own work from the past year. But why not spread the favoritism around? Here’s a compilation of similar lists—some selecting the writer’s own work, some shining the spotlight on others who deserve it—by the science blogosphere’s brightest. I’ll try to update it as I learn of others; please feel welcome to add more in comments.

My apologies to anyone I’ve managed to leave out; if this exercise in compilation shows anything, it’s that the science blogosphere is rich in wonderful voices and remarkable writing. Thanks for lots of great work, everybody.

]]> http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/12/30/science-bloggers-year-of-favorites/feed/ 7 http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/12/30/science-bloggers-year-of-favorites/ 2011: The Year in Me http://feeds.plos.org/~r/plos/blogs/retort/~3/dGQvWNUEX28/ http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/12/29/2011-the-year-in-me/#comments Fri, 30 Dec 2011 02:39:09 +0000 John Rennie http://blogs.plos.org/retort/?p=1957 Having misplaced my anti-narcissism drugs earlier this week, I can’t see any reason not to usurp the year-end retrospective trope and look back at some of what I’ve most enjoyed writing in 2011. I don’t maintain that the stories listed below are objectively my best work—that’s for others to decide. But these are my favorites, for reasons I’ll try to note briefly.

A great many of them appeared here on “The Gleaming Retort” at PLoS Blogs. And why wouldn’t they? PLoS Blogs was kind enough to invite me to be one of its writers when the site debuted. It gave me complete freedom to write what and how I wishes, and it let me bask in the elevating company of Steve Silberman, Deborah Blum, David Kroll, Daniel Lende and Greg Downey, Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders, Misha Angrist, Martin Fenner, Melinda Wenner Moyer, Sarah Kavassilis, Seth Mnookin, Shara Yurkiewicz, Hillary Rosner, Emily Anthes, and Jessica Wapner, along with (pause for breath) the contributors to EveryONE, PLoS Podcast, Speaking of Medicine, The Official PLoS Blog, The Guest Blog, and The Student Blog—as accomplished, gifted, smart and warm a group of writers and people as you’ll find anywhere in the science blogosphere. (And no, I don’t always count writers as people. Why? Because I’m an editor, and I’ve watched writers eat.)

So let’s start with what my favorites for PLos Blogs and proceed in no particular order thereafter.

For “The Gleaming Retort”

For Scientific American

  • The Immortal Ambitions of Ray Kurzweil: A Review of Transcendent Man (Feb. 15). I was fair to it.
  • The Evolutionary Errors of X-Men (June 3). Catching science errors in a superhero movie is shooting fish in a barrel, I admit. But this assignment also allowed me to write More Science and Snark on X-Men: First Class (June 3) for “The Gleaming Retort,” which was worth it if only for the chance to write the following paragraph: “Helping him is January Jones as the world’s most powerful mind-reading lingerie model. In the blink of an eye, she can also change into a diamond-hard crystalline figure, then back to her original wooden form. She hates mankind—I think that expression is supposed to be hate—though to be fair, if I were a lingerie model and could read minds, I’d probably hate mankind, too.”

For Txchnologist.com

For SmartPlanet.com

  • Climate disasters: quibbling over causes (Nov. 15). Even well-meaning people sometimes get much too particular about acknowledging that, yes, climate change does cause disasters. And speaking of causes…
  • Mind games on global warming (Dec. 6). Politics is a far more immediate cause of the impasse on climate policy than psychology is.
  • Cloning vs. conservation (Dec. 20). An economist actually suggested that cloning and cryogenics might be an economical substitute for conservation. Not so.

For The Guardian

For Discover‘s “The Crux” group blog

On to 2012!

]]> http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/12/29/2011-the-year-in-me/feed/ 3 http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/12/29/2011-the-year-in-me/ A Final Word from Management http://feeds.plos.org/~r/plos/blogs/retort/~3/UQYYlJb7680/ http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/10/25/a-final-word-from-management/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:06:14 +0000 John Rennie http://blogs.plos.org/retort/?p=1881 Take the fight to your adversary without warning. That advice from my father, which he would utter so frequently during the long, brutal training sessions in ninjitsu that consumed my childhood, came back to me as I placed the explosive squib by Brian Mossop’s door. Attack without hesitation.

Penetrating the outermost layers of security in the cliffside fortress that PLoS kept as its headquarters had been elementary: the guards silently dispatched, the lasers easily deflected, the genetically engineered honey badgers roaming the grounds distracted by my robotic cobra decoys. But this office was the inner sanctum of the community manager himself, and the defenses that he might have rigged against his countless enemies were impossible to foresee. My only hope was to take him by surprise here, to hope that my training would be sufficient, so that I might at least put an end to his online reign of terror. Strike without mercy.

The squib fired and the heavy walnut door leapt open, askew on its hinges. I dove instantly into the room, rolling low to avoid the instinctive aim of anyone inside, my own twin Beretta 93R pistols at the ready. But no gunfire or hail of curare-tipped darts greeted me; only the acrid stink and fading reverberations of the blast I had set.

The room was a Victorian curiosity shop of scientific detritus. My rapid scan of the recessed shelves identified the skull of a stegosaurus, a reconstructed Antikythera mechanism, a photograph of one of President Grover Cleveland’s clandestine meetings with Thomas Edison, a diorama of stuffed marmosets, a floating power crystal salvaged from the Roswell crash, the long-lost left foot of Bono pickled in formaldehyde. No one was in the room, however, least of all Brian Mossop himself. His desk was in fact nearly bare, except for his ever-present silver wolf’s head cane placed precisely across the blotter—the first time I had ever seen it outside his grip. Beneath it was a typed note.

I always knew that it would be you who came to settle old scores, Mr. Rennie. Yet by the time you read this, I will be gone.

Gone? I thought. Gone where?

For the next stage of events to transpire, I must absent myself from your physical plane and transcend to a realm of pure digitized thought. You know, at Wired. You cannot conceive of the wonders that await me there: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate—my understanding is that they show Blade Runner in the office on Thursday afternoons. But these things are not for you to understand.

You have always seen me as your great antagonist. What you failed to recognize, however, was my underlying purpose. I brought together you and the other PLoS bloggers so that I might forge you into something stronger and more powerful: a mighty team of Open-Access Avengers whose science network of righteousness can defend earth against the unrelenting tide of ignorance and woo!

The world needs you now. For I have seen disturbing portents in the entrails of Dr. Oz, heard them in the headless chittering of Jenny McCarthy. A darkness rises like none before it! An apocalypse of ignorance that threatens to sweep away all reason and sensibility and reduce mankind to blind, unknowing slime through all eternity!

Can you please ask them to forward any mail to my home address? Thanks. —Brian Mossop

His note inspired a thousand questions—but I had no time to consider any of them. The right wall of his office unexpectedly tore open, rent apart by some incredible and unseen force, pulled into a suddenly yawning, stygian blackness. Hurricane winds ripped at every object in the room, pulling them toward the pit as well. Half shielding my eyes with a raised arm, I nevertheless had the impression of the angled corners of half-perceived objects within that maw as being terrifyingly wrong, distorted by some nightmarish violation of normal geometry.

And worse by far was my further sense of some titanic things moving within that darkness toward the light—of vast monstrosities beyond human reason crawling forward, of tentacles and three-lobed burning eyes. A hideous buzzing din erupting from the rift configured itself against my wishes into a voice, but a voice unlike any from a human throat, one chanting a soul-destroying litany I could not escape:

Iä! Iä Shub-Niggurath! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! B’ra zheevkoveesh!

I tightened my grip on the Berettas and wondered whether the bloggers at Scientopia ever had to put up with this nonsense.

]]> http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/10/25/a-final-word-from-management/feed/ 3 http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/10/25/a-final-word-from-management/ Revkin Replies to “False Equivalence” Post http://feeds.plos.org/~r/plos/blogs/retort/~3/JtBimGxv-dg/ http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/10/18/revkin-replies-to-false-equivalence-post/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:33:36 +0000 John Rennie http://blogs.plos.org/retort/?p=1845 Andy Revkin has been kind enough to respond to my previous post about his “False Equivalence on Climate Message Machines.” He’s gentleman enough to concede that he was overly glib in equating a scholarly paper’s study of how institutions push climate disinformation to a climate blogger’s name-calling parody of it. His mea culpa covers only the least important point in my critique, however. The more important matter was whether Andy truly regarded the climate disinformation apparatus discussed in the paper as equivalent to the scientific bodies, IPCC, environmental groups and other organizations that promote climate activism.

Andy seems to leave little room for doubt that he does: as he describes them, they represent committed points of view and both make statements that aren’t trustworthy, so they are more or less the same. The actual differences in how well or truthfully those sides have historically represented the science involved don’t seem to make much of a difference. Systematic efforts to undermine the science by sowing uncertainty wherever possible are apparently no worse than overstatements and zealous rhetoric. (And put aside questions about the motivations on both sides.)

Andy writes:

Setting aside the word propaganda, I will readily assert that there has been a longstanding and well-financed effort to raise public concern by downplaying substantial, persistent and legitimate uncertainty about the worst-case outcomes from greenhouse-driven warming and over-attributing the link between such warming and climate-related disasters and other events. Much of this is organized.

But it should be pointed out that there is a climate-style amplifying feedback process, in which a funding agency, a university and researchers highlight the most newsworthy aspect of a new study — even if it’s tentative — and that baton is passed to journalists eagerly sifting for “the front-page thought.” Kind of looks like a hype machine, in some ways.

It kind of does, doesn’t it? And heaven knows there’s no difference between hype of new results and outright misrepresentations of consensus science. It’s certainly not a distinction to fret over.

That “amplifying feedback process” of sensationalism is certainly a real problem for science journalism, and one I’ve decried. But it is a problem that afflicts coverage and understanding of all science, not just climate science.

He might be right, but I’m not entirely sure how Andy supports his proposition about the well-organized, well-funded effort to downplay climate science uncertainties. He cites examples of errors and overstatements but those by themselves don’t amount to the same kind of propaganda machine that Dunlap and McCright discussed in their “Organized Climate Change Denial” chapter. Perhaps he would cite Matthew Nisbet’s Climate Shift report, which concluded that the funding promoting climate activism was roughly comparable to that lined up against it, but of course that report and its conclusions have been challenged by Joe Romm at Climate Progress and by Media Matters, among others. Moreover, as far as I recall, Climate Shift made a statement about the magnitude of spending promoting new climate policies but didn’t make a claim that those messages were significantly unscientific or antiscientific, as Dunlap and McCright argued about the climate “skeptics.”

Nevertheless, I do very much agree with Andy that even in the absence of a well-organized, well-funded effort to quash climate policy, climate hawks would have a tough time convincing the public of the need to push for sweeping reforms. Moving away from fossil fuels on a global scale will be a huge and massively expensive undertaking (though not necessarily so much more expensive than inaction might be). Cultural cognition will always make some people resist the logic for those changes.

Moreover, the scientists and activists arguing for a head-on assault on climate problems often find their messaging efforts held to almost impossible standards. If they dwell on the full discussions of caveats and uncertainties in the science, the public has trouble understanding them and critics assail them for being bad communicators. If they try to simplify the messages, emphasize the costs of inaction, or cite extreme weather events as the kind of thing that could be more common in a warmer world, critics like Andy criticize them for distorting the science. (Imagine if an insistence on explicit, quantified uncertainties were pursued so avidly in other areas of policy.) If the climate activists talk about how disruptive the consequences of even moderate warming could be, their pessimism is said to be a defeatist turn-off. If they talk about how practicable some CO2 reductions might be, they are dismissed as unrealistically optimistic.

All the more reason, then, to salute the widespread support for climate policy among even more conservative parts of the public. And yet our political system does not immediately respond. Perhaps one of those two climate misinformation machines that Andy deplores is rather more effective inside the Beltway than the other.

Andy closes his column by arguing for the climate pragmatist approach over that of the climate hawks.

Get started with demonstrable steps on energy efficiency and intensified research, for example, that have wide support even among Republicans. What better way to marginalize true obstructionists at the conservative fringe?

It’s a sensible thought—but born of false equivalence, and of false dilemma. By painting a scenario in which extremists misrepresenting the truth exist on both sides, Andy implies a middle ground that only climate pragmatists can occupy. Yet climate activists are a diverse lot with many nuanced positions, as David Roberts at Grist has described, and most of them would support the kind of “energy quest” that Andy and The Breakthrough Institute want. The difference is that the climate hawks also want real, targeted action on CO2 emissions. They are willing to negotiate what targets are optimal given all the economic, humanitarian, and environmental considerations, but they recognize that until the energy quest starts to significantly reduce CO2 emissions, which will probably take decades, warming and its consequences will continue to worsen into the future according to a business-as-usual projection.

The counterargument seems to be that the world will never really go along with CO2 emission limitations, so if the climate activists would just stop hooting after their lost, impractical cause, then the reasonable people would regain control over the debate and quickly make real progress on our energy system and at least curb CO2 in the long term.

Maybe so; I can certainly relate to the frustrations in getting CO2 regulations passed and enforced. But I also suspect that if CO2 limits were completely off the table, the entrenched fossil fuel interests would find plenty of other arguments to fend off changes that meaningfully threatened their interests for a long time. Climate is simply a good whipping boy.

I gather Andy considers Joe Romm an unreliable extremist, but Joe’s summary of the situation feels more on the mark than off:

But, then, Revkin continues to this day to only endorse his vague R&D-focused “energy quest” and criticize those of us (including the National Academy of Science) who push for strong emissions reductions starting now.  Since Revkin refuses to this day to tell us what level of concentrations he thinks the world should aim for –  even a broad range, say 450 ppm to 550 ppm — Revkin retains the luxury of attacking those who are willing to state what their target is while maintaining a faux high ground that they are being politically unrealistic while he can pretend his essentially do-nothing strategy is scientifically or morally viable, which it ain’t.

I’ll differ from Joe in that I don’t consider Andy’s favored approach to be a do-nothing strategy: a quest for cleaner, more affordable energy would be scientifically and morally desirable for plenty of reasons, and it would almost certainly help to reduce future warming eventually. The problem is, there’s a very good chance it would do too little, too late. The climate pragmatists should properly be accountable for whatever level of warming and climate consequence they would countenance*—because the people who would probably bear the burden of those consequences would most likely not be the pragmatists.

Have the climate pragmatists quantified the uncertainties in their projections of when the energy quest would yield benefits and what the consequences of ongoing warming would be? Or have they just defined away the notion of damage attributable to climate changes?

—But then, that goes off into a different discussion of how to pin down the consequences of climate change to the satisfaction of some skeptics, and that will to have to wait for another time.

*And in anticipation of an all-too-easy rejoinder: yes, I would also hold climate hawks responsible for whatever negative effects their preferred policies caused. That’s why tempering climate goals with development goals is the only sane course. It’s also why keeping CO2 curbs on the table as one more tool for achieving the desired policy ends makes more sense than summarily eliminating them from consideration.

]]> http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/10/18/revkin-replies-to-false-equivalence-post/feed/ 4 http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/10/18/revkin-replies-to-false-equivalence-post/ Revkin’s False Equivalence on Climate Message Machines http://feeds.plos.org/~r/plos/blogs/retort/~3/ak_mjcTYZ3c/ http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/10/05/revkin%e2%80%99s-false-equivalence-on-climate-message-machines/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:28:56 +0000 John Rennie http://blogs.plos.org/retort/?p=1815 One can certainly debate how much the spread of misinformation on the science of global warming has hurt efforts to develop rational policy responses to climate change. Maybe the deep cultural issues on either side of the divide would always doom the discussion, as the work on cultural cognition argues. Or maybe the unscientific falsehoods spread by those opposing recognition of the problem have had a larger influence in locking up the political process over the issue. But surely we can all agree that misleading or sloppily written articles don’t help the situation.

Which brings me to an unfortunate post on Andy Revkin’s widely read Dot Earth blog this past Sunday, concerning “A Map of Organized Climate Change Denial.” As Keith Kloor of Collide-a-Scape remarked (in a post more supportive of Andy’s than I can be):

So two antagonists representing opposite ends of this debate fault Revkin for his interpretation of the chart. Make of that what you will.

What I make of it is that in an almost reflexive effort to seem journalistically objective and above the fray, Andy unnecessarily created a false equivalence between many of the people and organizations on either side of the climate dispute. As such, he’s stumbled into exactly the kind of bad “he said, she said” coverage of the topic that most science journalists and critics such as Jay Rosen have come to recognize as deficient. (Andy has seemed to speak out against it himself, too, so it’s all the more disappointing that he’s committed it here.)

Andy was writing about a diagram created by sociologists Riley E. Dunlap and Aaron M. McCright for their chapter, “Organized Climate Change Denial,” in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. There’s no mistaking that Dunlap and McCright see real denialism at work, and that it has been harmful to policymaking:

The actions of those who consistently seek to deny the seriousness of climate change make the terms “denial” and “denier” more accurate than “skepticism” and “skeptic,” particularly since all scientists tend to be skeptics.

Their illustration then shows interplay among the fossil fuel industry, corporate America, conservative foundations and think tanks, the media, astroturf groups and so on for promoting various denialist messages.

Agree with their view or disagree with it as you will. Very reasonably, Andy warns:

But it’s important to keep in mind that not everyone skeptical of worst-case predictions of human-driven climate disruption, or everyone opposed to certain climate policies, is part of this apparatus.

I had misgivings, though, about what followed:

And there’s plenty to chart on the other edge of the climate debate — those groups and outlets pursuing a traditional pollution-style approach to greenhouse gases.

On the one hand, yes, of course, a variety of entities—scientific organizations, NGOs, think tanks and so on, many of them with expressly liberal leanings—do work to put out messages about prioritizing CO2 reductions. Characterize that, too, as a machine if you like.

But what does the comparison actually mean? If it’s only pointing out that opposition exists, that there are people and organizations on the other side of the debate, then it’s so obvious as to be scarcely worth saying. Dunlap and McCright made the point that they were showing the workings of a disinformation propaganda machine, one that misrepresented science with a fixed goal of preventing policies contrary to corporate and rightwing interests. Was Andy implying that those on the climate activism side were an equivalent kind of propaganda machine, even though the case for the reality and gravity of climate change is much better validated by the scientific literature? It seemed unlikely, but he seemed to let his readers think so. (And, goodness, where is the equally important caveat that not everyone on the climate activism side is part of that machine?)

[Added (10:25 a.m.): It's perhaps also worth noting that the Matt Nisbet paper to which Andy linked documents the funding and coordination of climate activist efforts, but unless I missed something, it doesn't make a case for those efforts misrepresenting the science. The simple existence of an organized effort on that side is obvious, however, so I don't see what it accomplishes if that's the full extent of Andy's meaning.]

I chalked it up to an innocent ambiguity. On Monday, though, I noticed an update to Andy’s post:

[Oct. 3, 9:00 p.m. | Updated As it happens, the blogger behind Australian Climate Madness has posted a skeptics' map of "the climate alarmism machine." I think some, though by no means all, aspects of the map are not bad.]

Follow the link and take a look at that diagram. It apes the design of what Dunlap and McCright drew but whereas they only listed examples of the organizations that fit into each of the categories they named, the blogger insults them in keeping with his own biases.

Andy, just which aspects of this do you see as “not bad”?

National Governments Scientifically illiterate, and threatened by a rampant Green movement, national governments continue to pour billions of dollars into climate change research to appease the eco-extremists

United Nations Desire for world government and more regulation and power drives urge to control CO2 and therefore economic growth. Political motives for action outweigh any genuine scientific imperative

IPCC Established solely to find evidence of a pre-conceived conclusion that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant, its terms of reference require it to focus on human-induced climate change, with inevitable results

Academic research Drunk on a continual supply of research funding from governments, climate change research produces more and more apocalyptic predictions, which therefore attract yet more research funding from scientifically illiterate governments. Normal standards of scientific integrity disappear (Climategate) in an attempt to ensure nothing distracts from the constant flow of hysterical projections, and therefore secure further funding.

Corporates and fossil fuel industry Desperate to cash in on the “green economy” and appear politically correct at the same time, corporates allocate billions of dollars to pointless renewable energy schemes on the promise of enormous government subsidies, knowing that if they fail, someone else will pick up the bill

Environmental Advocacy Groups Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, WWF, Say Yes, GetUp! and other exreme-green [sic] and extreme-left political advocacy groups. Badger governments and individuals to take futile mitigation action on climate change, based on suspect science, in order to achieve their stated goals of global wealth redistribution and “social justice” at the expense of Western economic growth and prosperity.

I wouldn’t think that Andy endorses any of those descriptions, but his own presentation leaves readers free to guess whether he does. It seems most likely that his intention was to acknowledge the appearance of the “climate denial machine” diagram without seeming to take the side of the activists. But that unwillingness to engage meaningfully with the information and arguments isn’t doing his readers—or, heaven forbid, the truth—any favors.

Update (10/8): Andy has been on the jump this week and hasn’t had time to respond to this post, but in a postscript to his piece he mentions that he’ll try to respond to it soon, which I appreciate. He asks, though, if I missed the part where he characterized the Australian’s map as an “overdrawn, overblown caricature of reality.”

Nope, I didn’t. I just didn’t find it to be a particularly helpful caveat. In fact, it just reproduces in miniature the entire problem with false equivalence. Without any additional detail, readers can’t know which parts are caricatures and which points are more valid. In the contentious context of the climate debates, that practically invites readers to believe what they want. What makes false equivalence disreputable as commentary is that it allows journalists to surround themselves with an unearned aura of knowing criticism: from their perch above the contest, they can seem wiser than any of those silly people below who actually engage with the arguments.

One can picture Andy peering sagely over his glasses at his audience, nodding in judgment of these maps, but he’s not actually saying anything. It’s a shame because Andy is better than that.

]]> http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/10/05/revkin%e2%80%99s-false-equivalence-on-climate-message-machines/feed/ 24 http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/10/05/revkin%e2%80%99s-false-equivalence-on-climate-message-machines/ So Why Does the Garlic Trick Work? http://feeds.plos.org/~r/plos/blogs/retort/~3/KSFfaBi25p8/ http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/09/30/so-why-does-the-garlic-trick-work/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:35:15 +0000 John Rennie http://blogs.plos.org/retort/?p=1793 When it comes to cooking and working marvels in the kitchen, I can pour a bowl of cereal with the best of them. Everything that chefs do surprises me. So I was accordingly amazed by this video from Saveur magazine, which I watched at Open Culture thanks to many comments on Twitter. It shows how to peel an entire head of garlic in just 10 seconds.

The short version is that vigorously shaking a crushed head of garlic inside two metal bowls will within seconds separate the cloves cleanly from the dried peel around them. The question is, why?

Of course, the dry fibrous peel is relatively brittle, so all the agitation inside the shaking bowls helps to break it open along the seams. The clove itself is slightly slippery, so that helps it to slip out of the broken peel.

But I thought something more might be going on, so I did an experiment. I put a single unpeeled clove into the metal bowls, shook them like crazy… and nothing happened. A few flakes of peel had broken away but the clove was still enclosed. When I repeated the trick with two cloves in the bowls, however, it worked as advertised. Both cloves were very neatly separated from their peels.

My best guess is that more than one unpeeled clove is necessary because friction and the mutual abrasion of the cloves as they bounce around inside the bowls is crucial. It’s working on the same principle as a rock tumbler, in which the stones rub one another to smoothness. The trick polishes the peel away from the garlic.

That’s must my guess, however. Anyone have a different explanation, or a different experience in making the trick work?

]]> http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/09/30/so-why-does-the-garlic-trick-work/feed/ 22 http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/09/30/so-why-does-the-garlic-trick-work/ The Greenhouse Effect at 150: The Planetary Perspective http://feeds.plos.org/~r/plos/blogs/retort/~3/O9yIJ918ImQ/ http://blogs.plos.org/retort/2011/09/29/the-greenhouse-effect-at-150-the-planetary-perspective/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:19:15 +0000 John Rennie http://blogs.plos.org/retort/?p=1757

John Tyndall. (Credit: Tucker Collection, New York Public Library Archives)

One hundred and fifty years ago, the brilliant Irish physicist John Tyndall published a paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that helped to prove the existence of the greenhouse effect and its important influence on climate. Only for the 25 years or so have his discoveries been controversial, thanks to a steady pushback motivated by politics and financial interests. Tough break, science.

Nevertheless, in celebration of Tyndall and his work, the Royal Irish Academy and the Environmental Protection Agency have convened a conference in Dublin for Sept. 28-30. Richard Black of the BBC has written an excellent appreciation of Tyndall as well, which I heartily recommend.

The conference has posted a PDF of Tyndall’s paper—On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction—which Tyndall had presented as the Bakerian Lecture back in February 1861. It’s fascinating to read, because it painstakingly describes how Tyndall conducted his studies with this experimental set-up.

And here’s one of the most relevant passages from the paper, in which Tyndall reports on the relative influence of various atmospheric gases on the retention of heat.

(Carbonic acid is an aqueous solution of carbon dioxide, and was what Tyndall used to introduce the gas into his system. Carbonic oxide is similarly a solution of carbon monoxide.)

Tyndall noted that the most prominent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, based on his studies, was water vapor. However, as he recognized, the others could not be ignored. As countless climate scientists have explained to those in denial ever since, carbon dioxide is most influential on changes in climate because water vapor then amplifies its effect.

This diagram summarizes how the greenhouse effect plays into the Earth’s overall energy budget and thereby affects its climate.

Again, once upon a time, little in the above picture was controversial. Scientists would debate precisely what the values of transmitted, reflected and absorbed heat should be (and indeed, they still do), but the general scheme was widely accepted.

Only in recent decades, when so many have been so motivated to wave away concerns about global warming, has anyone tried to dismiss the effects of CO2 on Earth’s climate. They will sometimes try to argue instead that the climate is really determined, directly and overwhelmingly, by the power of the sun.

Many disproofs of that idea have been offered already; let me present just one. And because discussing the Earth’s climate seems to raise so many issues, let’s ignore Earth and look at two other planets.

Mercury. (Credit: Mariner 10, Astrogeology Team, U.S. Geological Survey)

Mercury orbits closest to the sun, at an average distance of only about 58 million kilometers. It has almost no atmosphere. On the side of the planet away from the sun, since nothing can trap the heat, temperatures can plunge down to only 100 Kelvin, or roughly -280 degrees Fahrenheit. But directly under the sun, when Mercury is at its closest approach, temperatures are estimated to hit about 700 K, or roughly 800 degrees F.

Venus. (Credit: Photo composite from Mariner 10, NASA)

Venus is about twice as far away from the sun as Mercury is: 108 million kilometers. The sunlight it receives is therefore only one quarter as strong. And yet Venus is hotter than Mercury. Because of the thick, CO2-rich clouds that drape Venus, its temperature is about 735 K, or 863 degrees F. Moreover, that is the temperature everywhere on the planet all the time—at the equator, at the poles, during the day, during the night. Venus’s greenhouse atmosphere traps heat so effectively that no area ever cools off relative to the rest.

The sun is powerful, but when it comes to climate, the greenhouse effect is the great equalizer.

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