As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it’s not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen:

The world’s oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.– Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.

– Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.

– Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997.

Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn’t forecast results quite this bad so fast.

“The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought,” said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Another excellent article from the AP’s Seth Borenstein (see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous”).  Borenstein actually takes the time to talk to real climate scientists, and when you do, the story writes itself:

And the effects of greenhouse gases are more powerful and happening sooner than predicted, scientists said.

“Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated; the rate of change has been faster,” said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey….

That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped broker a last-minute deal in Kyoto.

“We’ve come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in everyone’s face,” said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist.

The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. It’s all happening far faster than predicted.

Back in 1997 “nobody in their wildest expectations,” would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. What’s been lost is the size of Alaska.

Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves — adding up to the size of Delaware — came off the Antarctic peninsula.

While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn’t raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles.

Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall. In multiple reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, scientists didn’t anticipate ice sheet loss in Antarctica, Weaver said. And the rate of those losses is accelerating, so that Greenland’s ice sheets are melting twice as fast now as they were just seven years ago, increasing sea level rise.

Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich.

“Glaciers are a good climate indicator,” Zemp said. “What we see is an accelerated loss of ice.”

Also, permafrost — the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines are built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane — is thawing at an alarming rate, Burkett said.

Another new post-1997 impact of global warming has scientists very concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the carbon dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water. That causes acidification, an issue that didn’t even merit a name until the past few years.

More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say.

In 1997, “there was no interest in plants and animals” and how they are hampered by climate change, said Stanford University biologist Terry Root. Now scientists are talking about which species can be saved from extinction and which are goners. The polar bear became the first species put on the federal list of threatened species and the small rabbit-like American pika may be joining it.

More than 37 million acres of Canadian and U.S. pine forests have been damaged by beetles that don’t die in warmer winters. And in the U.S. West, the average number of acres burned per fire has more than doubled.

The Colorado River reservoirs, major water suppliers for the U.S. West, were nearly full in 1999, but by 2007 half the water was gone after the region endured the worst multiyear drought in 100 years of record-keeping.

Insurance losses and blackouts have soared and experts say global warming is partly to blame. The number of major U.S. weather-related blackouts from 2004-2008 were more than seven times higher than from 1993-1997, said Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

“The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did in 1997 and it’s all negative,” said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “Things are much worse than the models predicted.”

The time to act is now.

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A scientific hack job that won’t cripple climate talks

In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”

Let’s look at one of the illegally hacked emails in more detail

NOTE:  This post will be continually updated to cover things like the NYT’s misdirected (front page!) reporting.

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution).

So begins the RealClimate post on this hack-heard-round-the-blogosphere.   At the end, I’ll excerpt that post, which makes clear this is much ado about not bloody much.  I’ll also look at the

The predictable FoxNews take is here (screen capture of their front page is above).  At the end, I’ll post some truly amazing quotes from the anti-scientific side of the blogosphere, from Brad Johnson’s Wonk Room post, including this from the Telegraph’s James Delingpole:

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW.

Whatever smoke the anti-scientific disinformers are able to blow into people’s faces over this bunch of emails dating back over a decade, it doesn’t change the basic facts about human-caused warming:

Figure: Time series of global mean heat storage (0–2000 m), measured in 108 Jm-2.

The NYT’s Revkin has a piece whose headline and lede, typically, misses the entire point, “Hacked E-Mails Fuel Climate Change Skeptics.”  Note to Andy:  Everything fuels the disinformers! And that includes studies and data that prove the exact opposite of what they assert.

Who cares that, as Revkin says in his opening (!) sentence, this is “causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change”?  This was a chance for Revkin to make up for his misinformation-filled post from September [see "NYT’s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation"].  Even his most science-based sentence is hedged:  “But the evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so broad and deep that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.”  Unlikely?  Ya think?

Revkin asserts in the so-called paper of record that “some of the comments might lend themselves to sinister interpretations.”  So is this a news story or just a speculative opinion piece?  Instead of saying what interpretation might be possible, why not actually talk to the authors of the emails and other scientists and report what they emails actually were meant to communicate?  Oh, wait, later in the piece he notes “But several scientists whose names appear repeatedly in the e-mails said they merely revealed that scientists are human beings, and did nothing to undercut the body of research on global warming.”  Duh.

I do appreciate that Revkin reported this blockbuster news in the third paragraph:

In another [email], a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Stop the presses!

The fact that a crime was committed is buried in the story — Scholars and Rogues has a genuine analysis of that important fact and its implications, which Revkin basically glosses over.   It is worthwhile to note at this point that the University “could not confirm that all the material circulating on the Internet was authentic.”  Again, duh.

The fact that this misdirected NYT story was on the front page just compounds the miscoverage.  The Washington Post story is on page A14, with this vastly superior headline and subhead:  “Hackers steal electronic data from top climate research center: Scientists’ e-mails deriding skeptics of warming become public.”

Here’s most of the rest of the post from the scientists at RealClimate, which is still the most thoughtful thing I have seen written on the subject:

As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

There are of course lessons to be learned. Clearly no-one would have gone to this trouble if the academic object of study was the mating habits of European butterflies. That community’s internal discussions are probably safe from the public eye. But it is important to remember that emails do seem to exist forever, and that there is always a chance that they will be inadvertently released. Most people do not act as if this is true, but they probably should.

It is tempting to point fingers and declare that people should not have been so open with their thoughts, but who amongst us would really be happy to have all of their email made public?

Who indeed?

If you want some specific explanations for some of the other e-mails that have been getting the most attention, Gavin Schmidt has been doing yeoman’s work in the comments at Real Climate.  Just search for “gavin,” and you will find his various responses.  Gavin is asked, “Is Dr Trenberth correct in his claim that we can’t explain why the planet hasn’t been warming as expected?”

Here is a longer discussion of the email by NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth on “where the heck is global warming?”

Brad Johnson from Wonk Room notes the disinformers are “sifting through the illegally obtained letters of private correspondence for “proof” that the scientific consensus on climate change is actually a global conspiracy“:

– Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss “repetitive, false data of higher temperatures.”

– The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, “The blue-dress moment may have arrived.”

– “The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century,” blares Michelle Malkin.

– The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are “proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in moderrn [sic] science.”

The UK media reports that the official University of East Anglia reply as of Friday afternoon is:

“We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites,” said the spokesperson in a statement. “Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.”

“This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation,” the spokesperson continued.

“We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this enquiry.”

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SuperFreak Dubner embraces ClimateGate conspiracy theories

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”

The climate problem is incredibly complex. Heck, it’s unfathomably complex to most folks, as it involves chemistry, computer models, economic development, and, of course, the weather.

This complexity demands strong, explanatory journalism—the kind of fact gathering and storytelling that too many news organizations are ignoring in an era of declining budgets and celebrity infatuations.

There are exceptions, thankfully. The good people at the Earth Journalism Awards have singled out 15 journalistic approaches to the climate problem (or aspects of it) that they believe did the best job at exploring the issue and breaking it down for their readers.

The 15 finalists for the 2009 awards include a Scientific American series on carbon sequestration and a report from the Business Daily of Nairobi on how Kenya’s companies are losing out in the global carbon trading scheme.

You, dear reader, have a voice in selecting the winner of the Earth Journalism Global Public Award.  Go to the site, read the stories, and vote on the one you think is the best.

You’ll be doing two important things—informing yourself, and supporting journalists who are doing their best to gather facts about the most consequential threat facing humanity.

The winning story will be presented at the Earth Journalism Awards ceremony to an audience of negotiators, climate change experts, activists and media representatives in Copenhagen on December 14 on the eve of the negotiations.”

Follow the Earth Journalism Awards on Facebook.

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Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

For some people, climate change is a tough cause to rally ‘round—even those who understand that it’s happening and that it’s human-caused get distracted by things like eating, working, having sex, watching TV, or watching people on TV have sex.

While social scientists ponder the best ways to get the message out and motivate the masses—and since we’re gearing up to cover December’s climate talks in Copenhagen—we’ve devised a Grist list of good reasons to care about this global crisis. Got reasons of your own? Let us know in the comments section below.

25. Because supermodels are stripping for the cause. If these lovely ladies are getting hot and bothered, shouldn’t you? At least watch the video. Call it your good deed for the day.

24. Because you don’t want your insurance premiums to go up. The sea level rise, severe weather, flash floods, and windstorms attributable to climate change have all got the insurance industry on edge. Some firms in the U.S. have already raised premiums in coastal areas, and rates in the U.K. are on the rise as well.

Dirt moguls just aren’t the same.Photo: Shay Haas23. Because you like to ski. Listen up, snow bunny: you’ll soon be consigned to schussing in an indoor dome if climate chaos has its way. Shorter winters and decreased snowfall are forcing big ski areas to ramp up their snowmaking efforts (a questionable scheme in the face of global water shortages) and leading smaller ski areas to close.

22. Because you’re a raging hypochondriac. Warmer temperatures mean happy, thriving insects, which might mean increased risk of West Nile, encephalitis, malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever. Do you really need more to worry about? Isn’t that weird spot on your inner thigh enough?

Nothing to see here, folks.Photo: andedam via flickr21. Because it’s a good excuse to learn weird things about animal sex. OK, you don’t care about the plight of the polar bears. But admit it, you’re curious about polar bear penises, aren’t you? And why they’re larger in snowier areas? That’s nothing compared to the lengths sea turtles go to for reproduction, and the flip-flopping gender of the hot bearded dragon lizard. Go on, check it out —you know you want to.

20. Because you hate oil. If your soul still wilts at the thought of all those people in slickers cleaning slick-covered birds in the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill, if you’d rather ride a bike than participate in the auto economy, then climate change is your issue, man. Fossil fuels got us here, and ending our reliance on them can get us out. But you don’t need us to tell you that.

19. Because you love oil. So maybe you didn’t mind the oily birds and you love driving your car? You should be worried too: according to a report from the U.S. government, the severe storms that are becoming more frequent due to climate change threaten our infrastructure and transportation networks, including the ports and freight lines used to transport oil. The oil-rich Gulf Coast is, as was made painfully clear in 2005, a particularly vulnerable area. Stop climate change in its tracks! Save the oil distribution network!

18. Because you eat rice. It’s a pleasant side dish to you, and for 750 million people, it’s a life-giving staple: rice. But this crucial crop stands to wither in the face of climate change, thanks to rising temperatures, increased flooding, and rats. Yeah, rats—they scurry in after major storms, eat all the rice, and nibble on people too. Care yet?

He speaks truth.Photo: Martin Crook17. Because Stephen Colbert does. Need we say more?

16. Because the Christian Coalition does. Need we pray more?

15. Because it will create jobs. Talk about your silver lining: In the midst of the deepest recession this country has seen in decades, attempts to forestall this global climate scourge could create new jobs in clean-energy industries, weatherization, and other areas. The feds are already steering money toward job training for green professions, and clean-energy legislation now before Congress could create jobs and boost the GDP of every U.S. state.

14.  Because you live near water. Sea levels could rise as much as a meter or more by 2100. That’s enough to put places like Miami, downtown Philadelphia, and parts of Manhattan underwater. How many people live in such vulnerable coastal areas? Oh, just 53 percent of the U.S. population.

13. Because Kardashians interest you more than Katrinas. Who can forget the powerful images beamed around the world when Hurricane Katrina hit: the faces of the forgotten, houses crumpled like paper cups, water washing over everything. And who can forget how they beamed in during your favorite show! So inconsiderate. If this sort of prime-time interruption irritates you, you may want to get involved in the climate fight. Because we’re going to see a lot more storms, and that means a lot more unhappy people beamed in your living room.

12. Because you like breathing. Got lungs? Got a healthy apprecation for fresh air? Well, take a deep breath: warming-induced increases in ground-level ozone and particulate matter are expected to increase respiratory disorders including asthma, and a recent study says more children will be hospitalized over the next decade due to such respiratory problems.

11. Because colorful coral jewelry completes most of your outfits. Prepare to adopt a new accessory, or wear a lot of white necklaces: climate change has led to massive coral bleaching and die-offs. The real problem is the disturbance of the delicate relationship between coral reefs and the teensy organisms that build them and give them color. It’s the foundation of a healthy ocean, which is the foundation of a healthy planet.

10. Because you won’t be able to hold up your end of a conversation with Obama, Lucy Lawless, Glenn Beck, Evander Holyfield, or the Pope if you don’t. You can probably fake it with Miley Cyrus, though.

Fading to black.Photo: burnblue9. Because colorful fall leaves are so pretty. But warmer autumns—and pests that enjoy warmer autumns—are messing with the trees. Duller leaves means less for you to look at, and translates into an economic hit for places like New England that rely on tourism generated by the annual phenomenon.

8. Because you don’t want to serve embarrassing champagne. Rising temperatures are altering the world’s finest champagnes, making the alcohol content “embarrassingly high,” says one British wine critic. How fun! Uh, we meant to say how terrible.

7. Because you like lights to come on when you flip a switch. Remember that blackout in 2003? The one that left 50 million people in the dark? That happened on a hot, hot day when lots of people wanted electricity. Guess what we’re in for more of? Hot, hot days. Guess how much our power grid has improved since then? Not much. For a little bit of Jazzercise for the brain, check out this academic paper on climate’s potential impacts on our power grids and national security—including, oh, crippling our society.

6.  Because: “insect feeding frenzy.” Shudder.

5. Because you support the recycled-soda-bottle fleece industry. What will become of those cozy fleece jackets made from recycled soda bottles? Such an incredible innovation, such a wonderful way forward—but if our northern climes turn temperate and our southern climes turn tropical, no one will wear fleece. And those soda bottles are going right back in the trash.

4. Because you think it’s depressing when old people die alone in hot apartments. Heat waves are the deadliest natural disaster in the U.S.—and the probability of severe heat waves is increasing along with temperatures. If emissions are not reduced, heat waves are projected to double in Los Angeles and quadruple in Chicago. With an aging boomer population, that’s a recipe for one hot mess.

3. Because you think it’s depressing when little kids die. It’s happening. Now. According to Save the Children, 9 million kids die before their fifth birthday each year from diseases that are occurring more frequently because of climate change, which is also affecting access to food and water. What are you, completely heartless?

2. Because everyone at Grist cares. We’re a bunch of (fairly) normal people, with pets and kids and money woes and Twitter obsessions—but we all think this is big. Like, bigger than Elvis. A survey shows that our reasons range from the practical (I live near the coast) to the dire (it’s going to kill my unborn grandbabies). But on one thing we agree: we need to do whatever we can to reverse this course.

1.  Because if we stop climate change, we can stop earnest lists like this. Seriously. We’d rather be doing other stuff too. Like maybe watching that supermodel video again?

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China, India, U.S. commit to seal Copenhagen deal

Chuck Norris on Copenhagen

For the past few weeks there has been the appearance of a flood of news about the Copenhagen climate talks and the clean energy bill in the U.S. Senate. Standing in that flood it's easy to get caught up in the atmospherics of frantic action and constant crisis. But step out for a while and it becomes clear just how much of the "news" consists of people who don't really know anything guessing: what things mean, who's thinking what, what the future holds.

Copenhagen failed and sprang back to life a half-dozen times and it hasn't even started yet. The clean energy bill was declared doomed over and over in the House, until it passed. The Senate bill was declared dead, totally impossible ... then, no, it would be done by Copenhagen ... then it was hopeless ... then there was a bipartisan road to passage ... then they were abandoning the carbon cap entirely ... then it was a bill in Spring ...

What all this "news" has in common is that it's based on Some Person Guessing. The closer one gets to the circus, the more one realizes that everyone is guessing, right up to negotiators and senators themselves. Everyone's trying to shape the future, not forecast it. Check out these results from National Journal's poll of political insiders:

Q: How likely is this Congress to enact cap-and-trade legislation to curb global warming?

Democrats (38 votes)

Very likely: 16 percent
Somewhat likely: 37 percent
Somewhat unlikely: 37 percent
Very unlikely: 11 percent

Republicans (40 votes)

Very likely: 3 percent
Somewhat likely: 10 percent
Somewhat unlikely: 35 percent
Very unlikely: 48 percent
Other responses (volunteered) 5 percent

These are insiders, close to the process itself, and their predictions line up rather eerily with their ideological predispositions. Kerry says the bill will pass in the Spring; Murkowski mutters that it won't happen this session. Which really knows? Neither. There is nobody who really knows. In an age of text, Twitter, and 24 hour media, there just aren't many secrets left, even for insiders. What secrets there are stay that way not by being concealed but by being difficult to pick out from the torrent of junk speculation that surrounds them. (The same is true of predictions about what effect such a massive piece of legislation would have. The accurate answer is that no one really knows.)

Anyway, these days everyone's a pundit, and pundits are always wrong:

[Philip Tetlock at Berkeley] studied pundits and discovered they were, to a rough approximation, always wrong when making predictions. He took 284 pundits and asked them questions about the future. Their performance was worse than chance. With three possible answers, they were right less than 33 per cent of the time. A monkey chucking darts would have done better. This is consoling. More consoling still is Tetlock's further finding that the more certain a pundit was, the more likely he was to be wrong. Their problem being that they couldn't self-correct, presumably because they'd invested so much of their personality and self-esteem in a specific view. (That makes me think of so many people, almost everybody, in fact.)

There's a whole political media ecosystem that feeds on everyone being a pundit. Those inside it have every incentive to exaggerate the importance of every day's comments and developments. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the country ignores almost all of it. It's hard not to think sometimes that the world would be a better place if there were fewer people involved in the closed-loop meta-gossip circuit and more involved just putting their heads down and doing real work.

(Yes, yes, I know. Guilty as charged.)

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When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web.

----------------

Get 'em while they're hot.  • For years, Barry Estabrook reported on food politics for Gourmet Magazine and its Web site. In a sense, he played the role of the conscience of the foodie set--at the margins of a magazine devoted to celebrating the latest cooking techniques, ingredients, and vacation hotspots, Barry gently but tenaciously informed pleasure-seeking readers about issues like the brutal economics of dairy farming and the ecological consequences of mindless fish-eating.

I always thought that Barry's toehold at Gourmet would inspire other glossy food magazines to open their pages to serious discussions of the U.S. food system. It never happened--Gourmet's competitors continued  singing the glories of, say, the steak, without troubling readers with information about how steaks are made in America. And now Gourmet is gone.

Barry, thankfully, isn't. He's launched a blog called Politics of the Plate. His latest post is typical: a well-reported piece on the creepy harassment members of Florida's Coalition of Immokalee Workers are getting as they try to force the supermarket chain Publix to pay up for fair tomatoes.

• I sometimes enjoy New Yorker critic-at-large Adam Gopnik's food writing. For example, I loved his 2005 piece comparing British chef Fergus Henderson, famed for utilizing the "whole beast," with French chef Allain Passard, who shocked the cooking world by dispensing with beast altogether. I am forever in Gopnik's debt for introducing me to the work of Henderson, whose prose style and cookbooks I admire, as I hope someday to admire his restaurant. (If I hadn't read about Henderson in Gopnik's piece, I might never had landed a review of Henderson's book The Whole Beast in Gastronomica a couple of years ago.)

So I was excited to see Gopnik's long rumination on cookbooks in the latest New Yorker. I, too, have a complicated and loving relationship with cookbooks. I wanted to like Gopnik's piece, but didn't. For me, Gopnik laid out a thicket of sentences, some 4,000 words' worth, many of them over-elaborate or too dense by half, to belabor one point: "Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved." Besides the "first" bit--don't most folks learn that lesson before they first crack open a cookbook?--that seems true enough. And that (eventually) brings him here:

When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven't been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven't yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that's the game.

That's well-said--but also well-established: Another way of saying that it's the journey, and not the destination that counts, in cooking as in life. Okay.

But what about the ways people's relationship to cookbooks has changed? Gopnik takes a quick glance at one: with the Web, it's now easy to quickly search for recipes and information of on ingredients, meaning we reach for our laptops more and to our bookshelves less.

Here's another, related one. In the old days (the mid-1990s), I would often be inspired by a recipe from a cookbook--say, a kibbeh from Paula Wolfert's wonderful Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean (1994). I'd procure the ingredients at a combination of the supermarket and ethnic markets and then go home and cook. The results ranged from delightful to disastrous to that melancholy in-between described by Gopnik.

These days, settled as I am into the new-wave tradition of local and seasonal cooking, I start with available ingredients and then seek preparation ideas (when I don't just lean on my established repertoire). This latter method is much more suited to the broad universe of Google than the inherently narrower universe of the cookbook shelf. Yet I still love cookbooks.

• I've been impressed by the emergence of the young novelist Jonathan Safran Foer as a public intellectual on the question of meat.

I haven't read his new non-fiction book Eating Animals yet. I found his big New York Times Magazine essay on why he went vegetarian plodding and unconvincing; but his Wall Street Journal piece, "Let Them Eat Dog: A Modest Proposal for Throwing Fido in the Oven," was brilliant. In a way I haven't seen since the great J.M. Coetzee's performance in the novel Elizabeth Costello, Foer plumbed the moral depths of meat eating.

I believe that mixed farming systems--ones that grow grains, veggies, and livestock synergistically--are probably the most productive and sustainable. Moreover, I cherish the cultural heritage of the globe's various cuisines--most of which include meat, if usually in moderation. Thus I eat meat occasionally, and enjoy it greatly when I do. Yet the moral questions around systematically killing sentient beings--and arbitrarily declaring one species "pet" and another "dinner"--must be confronted and thought through.

Moralists like Coetzee and Foer push us to do just that. Even if we end up rejecting their insistence that we become vegetarians, they remind us of the suffering we cause when we eat meat--and thus they inspire us to do so only in moderation, and with great care for how the animal was treated.

On the other hand, wittingly or not, their appeals suggest a hallowed moral status for vegetarians. But in a society in which relatively few people are engaged in food production, morally upright victuals are hard to come by. Supermarket tomatoes carry the taint of exploitation and even slavery;  and even buying organic doesn't guarantee socially just conditions in farm fields.

"Every document of civilisation is at the same time a record of barbarism," wrote the great German writer Walter Benjamin. Vegetarians, nearly as much as omnivores, need to conduct a withering critique of the moral and ecological liabilities in the processes that feed tham--and work to transform them accordingly.

• For the wine-obsessed, The New York Times' excellent Eric Asimov has an overview of six recent wine books. Eco-wine enthusiasts like me will want to get their hands on two of them: Been Doon So Long, by the pioneering California vintner Randall Grahm; and Liquid Memory, by wine-world enfant terrible and polemicist Jonathan Nossiter.

Grahm, proprietor of Bonny Doon Vineyard, is legendary for his wacky and hilarious label prose and his trend-setting wine-making ways. According to a great piece by Asimov last spring, Grahm is now moving to organic farming and natural wine-making techniques. May a thousand imitators bloom in California wine country

Nossiter, a former sommelier at Manhattan's Balthazar, is most famous for directing the documentary Mondovino--which doubles as a stink bomb hurled at makers of highly manipulated, lavishly marketed, and overpriced wines, and a love letter to Europe's remaining traditional vintners.

• For the beer-inclined, here's Paste Magazine's "25 Best American Breweries of the Decade." Any quibbles you might have with the list--there are 19 better breweries than San Diegos's Stone?--just underscore the pretty truth: we're in the full flower of a spectacular beer renaissance in the United States.

• Did y'all see my Newsweek piece?

Related Links:

Martha Stewart blisters meat industry in Thanksgiving show

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

Here’s what we know so far

On Monday, The New Yorker published Elizabeth Kolbert’s lengthy review of SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance.  In her 2400-word review, titled “Hosed:  Is there a quick fix for the climate?” she writes:

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years.  Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate.

On Friday, coauthor Stephen Dubner replied in a post titled, “With Geoengineering Outlawed, Will Only Outlaws Have Geoengineering?“  Notwithstanding the title, the piece is clearly meant to be serious.  Here is what they have to say about Kolbert’s review:

And for a great illustration of just how repugnant some environmentalists find the very thought of geoengineering, consider this scathing review of our book in The New Yorker. The author, Elizabeth Kolbert, seems to disdain everything we’ve ever written on any topic, and claims we utterly fail to understand climate science (unless of course we don’t). She is a feeling and passionate environmentalist who, seemingly so disturbed by geongineering, is compelled to cast our own horse-dung story right back at us with a splat. Here is my favorite line from the review: “Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science — or, for that matter, in science of any kind.”

The time has probably come to admit that neither of us were Ku Klux Klan members either, or sumo wrestlers or Realtors or abortion providers or schoolteachers or even pimps. And yet somehow we managed to write about all that without any horse dung (well, not much at least) flying our way. Kolbert, meanwhile, has written widely about the perils of global warming, both in The New Yorker and in book form (see Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change), and seems to be extremely well-regarded in the field of environmental journalism. And yet, if her Wikipedia page is correct, she somehow accomplished all this with a degree from Yale in … literature.

Snap.  Or not.

Note how Kolbert is pigeonholed as an “environmentalist,” albeit a “feeling and passionate” one, since that allows her to be lumped in with all the other environmentalists who supposedly find geo-engineering repugnant — as opposed to, say, climatologist Ken Caldeira who merely finds the geo-engineering-only solution that the authors propose in their book unworkable and “pretty ugly” and “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story” and “crazy.“  Kolbert herself notes:

There are eminent scientists—among them the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen—who argue that geoengineering should be seriously studied, but only with the understanding that it represents a risky, last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe.  “By far the preferred way” to confront climate change, Crutzen has written, “is to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases.”

You can read the interview she gave and decide if that makes here “a feeling and passionate environmentalist” — not that there’s anything wrong with that — or simply a journalist who has talked to dozens of the leading climate scientists and visited many of the places where the climate is changing the most and reported on what she heard, saw, and learned.

Indeed, Kolbert’s point about credentials is almost exactly the opposite of what Dubner implies in his dismissal of her:

Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science—or, for that matter, in science of any kind. It’s their contention that they don’t need it. The whole conceit behind “SuperFreakonomics” and, before that, “Freakonomics,” which sold some four million copies, is that a dispassionate, statistically minded thinker can find patterns and answers in the data that those who are emotionally invested in the material will have missed….

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming.  Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong.

Their credentials aren’t the issue for her.  They simply didn’t do their homework, and so they got the science all wrong (as many, many others have pointed out).  Hence her quote of Pierrehumbert.

Their dismissive reply to her substantive critique is another attempted aerosol smokescreen, just as Levitt’s reply to Pierrehumbert on RealClimate was:

Raymond,

I enjoyed your intentional misreading of my chapter on global warming! I think it has really contributed to moving towards a solution to these important problems….

As Pierrehumbert replied:

Steve, glad to see you’re reading this.

Something I have found rather bizarre about your responses to the criticisms of your climate chapter is the way you continually try to change history about what you actually wrote, which is plainly there for anybody to see. I found it so unbelievable that you included the “black solar cell” meme when I first heard it that I actually went over to Borders and stood there and intentionally read (not misread) the chapter to see if it was true.

Go figure.

Kolbert ended the review:

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness.  All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

You don’t need to be a climatologist to know that.

Related Links:

SuperFreak Dubner embraces ClimateGate conspiracy theories

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”

In September, I wrote a post “Newsweek gets duped by Big Oil -- for real -- in worst Big Media story of the year.”   The Newsweek piece by Rana Foroohar was titled “Big Oil Goes Green for Real” with greenwashing lines like “So how should we take the spate of new green announcements from the world’s major oil firms?”  Not.

What I didn’t realize is that Newsweek was not getting duped by Big Oil -- it was getting cash from the American Petroleum Institute in return for “access,” as journalism and ethics experts told E&E News (subs. req’d).

Newsweek since 2007 has sold advertising packages to the oil industry’s biggest influence group that included the right to co-host forums on energy issues, including two where members of Congress sat side-by-side on panels with the association’s president.

American Petroleum Institute ranks among advertisers that have reached a spending threshold that allows them to attach their name to a Newsweek event and have their top executive as a panel speaker. API President and Chief Executive Jack Gerard was the sole industry speaker joining Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Reps. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) and Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) at an “executive forum” the magazine and API held at the U.S. Capitol in March.

Newsweek and API have teamed on four forums so far and are planning another -- “Climate and Energy Policy: Moving?” -- for Dec. 1, when the Senate could be holding a floor debate on climate legislation. An invitation sent yesterday to lawmakers’ offices said Gerard again would be a panelist and that requests to speak were “currently pending confirmation with notable members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate.” Lawmakers receiving invitations included Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

I urge all lawmakers to shun this event.

TPM Muckraker also has a good story on part of this, “Newsweek And Oil Lobby Team Up To Host Climate Change Event With Lawmakers,” which noted:

In February 2008, the news weekly and the oil lobby held a panel discussion on “Globalization Trends and Energy and the Growing Competition for Resources.” That event featured Foroohar, the author of the recent Newsweek story lauding big oil, as well as Tony Emerson, the managing editor of Newsweek International, API’s then-CEO Red Cavaney, and an energy specialist for the Chamber of Commerce. Emerson, moderating, described API as “an advertising partner.”

Remember, the API is spending millions to spread disinformation about the climate bill (see here) and create fake grassroots campaigns against it (see “Leaked memo: Big Oil manufacturing ‘Energy Citizen’ rallies to oppose clean energy reform“).

The E&E story, “API’s partnership with Newsweek raises ad cash and ethics questions,” is so shocking that I will excerpt the rest of it at length below:

Newsweek said it imposes ethical safeguards for the events, including that industry sponsors have no say in who is invited as panelists or what questions will be asked by the moderator, usually a Newsweek editor. API has no direct contact with the magazine’s newsroom, which sometimes covers the forums, said Mark Block, the magazine’s director of external relations. Outside media are invited and attend, and everything said is on the record for publication.

“There’s absolutely no conflict of interest, because they’re not driving our editorial” content, Block said. “These events are transparent. They’re on the record. They’re inclusive of media. They’re inclusive of people that might disagree. There’s no concern of appearance of impropriety because it’s an open and transparent process.”

But journalism and ethics experts decried the arrangement.

“You’re selling access,” said Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. “Newsweek is using its reputation as a great news organization to convene these officeholders to talk about public policy. Then it’s renting out a space at the table for one of its customers who would not be at the table if not for giving money to Newsweek.”

John Watson, associate professor of communication law and journalism ethics at American University in Washington, agreed.

“You’re enticing them to buy these ads to get this thing of value,” Watson said.

And they aren’t just selling access to lawmakers, they are selling access to journalists.  Hence the green-washing story I critiqued, “Big Oil Goes Green for Real.”

Newsweek has had the co-presentation partnerships with advertisers since at least 2003, Block said. The relationship with API started in May 2007, when API and the magazine teamed up for a forum called “Progress on Energy Legislation in the 110th Congress.” At that forum, like the one earlier this year, API’s president had the stage along with members of Congress. Panelists were then-API President Red Cavaney, Rep. Jim Matheson (R-Utah), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and a Newsweek representative.

Newsweek under the program also has held events sponsored by petroleum company BP, a question-and-answer session in 2007 and a Q&A and roundtable discussion in 2008 on “the Future of Energy.” BP chose not to have an executive appear as part of either one, although it was eligible to do so. Newsweek has teamed with Ricoh and Lufthansa Airlines on more expansive leadership conferences that featured two to three 45-minute discussions. There are partnerships with others, as well.

About 20 to 30 advertisers reach the spending level where they are “afforded the opportunity to co-present an event with Newsweek,” Block said. The majority chose not to do so, he said, because they either don’t have an issue that would work with a forum or don’t want the publicity.

Block declined to reveal the level of advertising required, but said that, “they’re all at a very high level that they’d be offered that opportunity.”

Newsweek develops the content of the events, with no input from the advertising partner, he said. Of the advertisers, he said “what they are allowed to do, they will have their most senior person take part in the discussion. That is the extent of their participation.”

The person chosen to speak “must be credible and must be accredited,” Block said. He described Gerard and his predecessor Cavaney as meeting both criteria because “they’re speaking on behalf of a lot of people.”

… Newsweek and API also united for an event in February 2008 called “globalization trends and energy and the growing competition for resources.” Cavaney, API’s president at the time, spoke at that along with Karen Alderman Harbert, who at the time had just left her job as Department of Energy assistant secretary for policy and international affairs. There was another event in May 2008 at Stanford University on energy research innovation.

At the Washington events, Block said, Newsweek invites outside media, lawmakers, and people from think tanks and schools.

“The panel is very objective and does not have the editor speaking directly with the panelist before the event,” Block said. “It’s not influencing A. how Newsweek covers the story, B. how the moderator asks questions, or C. how the audience” responds and asks questions.

“There’s absolutely no conflict of interest because they’re not driving our editorial” content, Block added.

So then it was just a coincidence that, as TPM wrote (linking to me):

In September, Newsweek ran a story by Newsweek International editor Rana Foroohar entitled “Big Oil Goes Green For Real,” which infuriated environmentalists by asserting that oil industry investments in alternative energy were no longer just green-washing, but rather were “the real deal.”

Yes, as TPM notes, Newsweek has written some tough-minded stories on Big Oil, but nothing can compare to their September Big Wet Kiss to Oil [Note to self:  That is one mixed metaphor!].

Back to E&E’s story:

Asked whether the events give API and other advertisers access to lawmakers, he said that “Jack Gerard and API are sophisticated and organized enough that they have the ability to reach these people without Newsweek.”

The safeguards Newsweek puts into place at the events don’t negate the conflict, said Watson with American University.

“There should be an impenetrable wall between media fundraising, which is what advertising is, and the newsroom,” Watson said. Rules put into place “after the fact,” he added, are “bandages to cover a gaping ethical wound.”

“The firewall is there not only to prevent the quid pro quo but the appearance of quid pro quo,” Watson added. Journalists must be considered credible to convey information readers trust, he said.

“As soon as there’s any connection between income and newsroom employees, you’ve stepped off the precipice,” Watson said.

As the Old Media’s business model dies, more and more publications are selling access.

Newsweek is not the only publication that holds events sponsored by industry. Atlantic Media and the Wall Street Journal are among those that accept corporate funding. Criticism of Newsweek’s arrangement with advertisers comes not long after the magazine’s parent, the Washington Post Co., suffered a major ethical black eye.

The Washington Post this summer had planned to have a series of off-the-record dinners at the home of its publisher, Katharine Weymouth, where corporations, lobbyists and interest groups could pay $25,000 for private access with public officials and journalists. The series of “salons” was canceled after a flier on it slipped out and Politico reported the plan.

That scandal, and the partnerships that Newsweek and others have with industry, come as newspapers and magazines suffer plummeting circulation. Most media companies are looking for new sources of revenue.

“This is a crisis period for journalism,” Watson said. “Everybody is looking for a new market paradigm. The danger is that everything else of value to journalism is at risk because you have to stay alive.”

… Atlantic Media surpasses Newsweek in terms of number of events with industry. So far this year, it has hosted 54 sessions alongside corporations, advocacy organizations and sometimes nonprofit groups, said Zachary Hooper, a spokesman for the company. There are usually multiple sponsors for each event, he said, and they are “people who have a particular vested interest in a topic.” Many of those same people are advertisers, he said.

Companies sometimes directly help fund conferences, Hooper said. Other times, they buy ad packages that include funding a conference.

Last week, Atlantic Media held an event on water as an environmental concern. Agriculture and biotechnology company Monsanto Co. and Black & Veatch, an engineering, consulting and construction company, sponsored the gathering. Monsanto Co.’s CEO Hugh Grant and Dan McCarthy, president and CEO of Black & Veatch Water, spoke during a panel discussion during the event. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Anne Castle, Interior assistant secretary for water and science, also spoke at the summit.

Atlantic Media with the Aspen Institute co-sponsors the Aspen Ideas Forum and its D.C. counterpart, Washington Ideas Forum. Corporate sponsors of the 2009 Aspen Ideas Forum held in July included Altria, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, Ernst & Young, Philips, Shell, and Thomson Reuters. Atlantic Media and the Aspen Institute charge admission for the Aspen festival.

“I don’t really think there is a conflict” of interest, Hooper said. “These are structured as an open dialogue. These are all on the record.” Outside media can attend, he said, adding “the panels are structured to encourage debate and not focus on any one particular agenda.”

The Wall Street Journal holds six forums a year that are sponsored by companies as part of an advertising package, said Robert Christie, vice president of communications for Dow Jones & Co., which owns The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones sells tickets to the events that are restricted to certain people. To attend the chief executive officer council, for example, one must be the head of a large enough company.

The events are open to outside media, Christie said, and are covered by Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. The newsroom side of the company handles the content of the events, and “they meet the same standards as the stories that go into the Journal,” he said.

All of the events have members of Congress attending, Christie said. He rejected the idea that companies at the events have special access to those lawmakers.

“All of our conferences are public, whether you attend or you just view on WSJ.com,” Christie said. About the lawmakers who attend, he said “most of them just make a speech and leave.”

Again, it doesn’t matter that the conferences are public or the dialogue is on the record.  As I’ve said, the access to big time reporters is as valuable as anything else Big Oil is buying.

Media watchdogs remain vigilant to expose these cash-for-access stories, stories that were, ironically, once the stock and trade of Big Media itself.

Kudos to TPM and E&E for breaking this important story.

Related Links:

SuperFreak Dubner embraces ClimateGate conspiracy theories

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”

Is calling global warming a religion the same thing as denying global warming science?

While the authors of Superfreakonomics, which is riddled with basic scientific errors, have started to issue some retractions, they continue to embrace self-contradictory denial of the basic science.

In mid-October, economist Steven Levitt wrote a blog post titled, “The Rumors of Our Global-Warming Denial Are Greatly Exaggerated,” which asserted:

Like those who are criticizing us, we believe that rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon and that global warming is an important issue to solve.  Where we differ from the critics is in our view of the most effective solutions to this problem.

Then in another red-herring-filled post from last month, “The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz,” Levitt asserted that “we believe” it is “TRUE” that “The Earth has gotten substantially warmer over the past 100 years.”  And he writes of that statement — that “fact” — (and 5 others), “It is our impression that none of the six scientific statements above is at all controversial among climate scientists.”

Duh.  In fact, the most recent survey of the scientific literature signed off on by every major government in the world, including the Bush Administration, concluded “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

Unfortunately for the Superfreaks, their book is once again searchable on Amazon, so everyone can confirm it contains the following sentence — the very first one I criticize them for in my original debunking when I broke the story of their error-riddled book:

Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception.

That is a staggeringly anti-scientific statement.  It should be retracted.  It should certainly not be repeated, as Levitt is now doing on his blog!

Note that they didn’t say something like “belief in climate solutions” is a religion.”  And they didn’t even say, “the theory of human-caused global warming is a religion” — which, in any case, they presumably don’t believe given that they say they believe rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon.

No, to Levitt and Dubner, “global warming” itself is a religion.  Except, of course, it isn’t.  Again, actual observations show that “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

The only reason I am bringing this up again is that Levitt has doubled down on this piece of anti-scientific nonsense.  As a eagle-eyed reader pointed out, Levitt blogged last week:

Actually, yes, at least if you live in the United Kingdom.

So what is it, Levitt?

You can’t simultaneously claim you understand that warming of the climate system is an uncontroversial statement of scientific fact — and then keep repeating the claim that global warming and belief in climate change is a religion.

As University of Chicago Geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert has charged, Levitt is guilty of “academic malpractice in your book.”

And for the record, climate change belief is not a religion even in the UK.  It remains a scientific understanding there and everywhere else.

The particular case and the ruling are convoluted — no doubt in part because the judge was the same one who issued that confused ruling on Al Gore’s movie (see here).  I would welcome any experts on British law posting here — and would certainly recommend reading the Guardian piece and an excellent dissection on Salon by Andrew Leonard.  As the Guardian notes:

In today’s ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton decided that: “A belief in man-made climate change, and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations.”

… The written ruling, which looked at whether philosophy could be underpinned by a scientific belief, quoted from Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and ultimately concluded that a belief in climate change, while a political view about science, can also be a philosophical one.

At least in Britain, science can apparently drive moral imperatives that are protected by the law.  As the winner of the lawsuit put it:

I’m delighted by the judgment, not only for myself but also for other people who may feel they are discriminated against for their belief in man-made climate change. This is a huge issue and the moral and ethical values that I have in relation to the imperative to do something about it, but crucially underpinned by the overwhelming scientific consensus, mean that to have secured protection in this way is, I think, a landmark decision … It’s a philosophical belief based on my moral and ethical values underpinned by scientific evidence and that’s the distinction [with it being a religious belief] I think. The moral and ethical values are similar to those that are promoted and adopted by many of the world’s religions. But one of the key differences I think is that mine is not a faith-based or spiritual-based belief: it is grounded in the overwhelming scientific evidence and it’s the combination of that scientific evidence with the moral and ethical imperative to do something about it that is distinct from a religion.

Levitt, of course, is beyond such nuanced understanding.

He made an anti-scientific statement in the book, and notwithstanding certain half-hearted walk backs, he clearly stands by the statement.

Is calling global warming a religion the same thing as denying global warming science?  You be the judge.

Related Links:

SuperFreak Dubner embraces ClimateGate conspiracy theories

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”

So I’m watching an otherwise interesting story on “efforts to convert algae into clean fuel,” by the otherwise very solid Tom Bearden of PBS’s NewsHour.  Then, boom, he drops the media’s favorite wishy-washy hedge:

Wells also produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas thought to contribute to global climate change.

C’mon.  I think we are at least one decade, if not two decades or more, passed a time when the words “thought to” are justified.

Note to Beardon:  Why exactly do you think it is called a greenhouse gas?

This hedge remains all too common in the media -- see Memo to Wall Street Journal: You can do better than “greenhouse gases, which are believed to contribute to climate change.”

As I wrote in that earlier post, this hedge is especially pointless and misinforming because of the second hedge -- “contribute to.”  All but the most extremist deniers of the basic climate science accept that carbon dioxide contributes to global climate change.

So perhaps the NewsHour might catch up with the scientific understanding and write some variation of:

… carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that causes the global climate to change.

And people wonder why the public is still underinformed on this subject.

Related Posts:

Related Links:

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”

Let’s look at one of the illegally hacked emails in more detail

Okay, the Examiner.com calls it their "First Annual Survey on Global Warming."  But I think you'll agree with our friendly neighborhood Rabett that it's more like a "push poll."

What has gotten Eli hopping mad?  This remarkable "you-are-a-pigeon question":

Which, if any, of the following statements comes closest to capturing your attitudes and opinions about global warming?

(We'll give you a chance to amplify in your own words later-but I need to pigeonhole-umm, stereotype-umm, put you in a ‘box' if at all possible. If necessary, just pick the least objectionable statement, or indicate that you prefer not to say.)

O I believe global warming is the crisis of this generation, and should be the highest priority for policy makers right now.

O I think global warming is undoubtedly real and a serious problem, but I think it has been ‘overplayed' by the press, politicians and some organisations.

O It looks to me like global warming probably has a grain of truth in it, but it's almost certainly not as bad as it has been made out to be.

O I believe global warming is true, but not man-made.

O I don't believe global warming is true. I think natural forces account for the changes in climate and there's no need to look at human contributions-which in any event have not been proven.

O This issue is not even at the top of my radar screen. I don't pay much attention to global warming or climate change, it doesn't influence how I live, how I spend my money, who I vote for-I don't really pay too much attention to this.

O I prefer not to say.

I'm filing this post under humor only because I never bothered starting a category for "unintentional humor."

Eli notes "the airspace between the first and the second choice and the fine gradations between the rest," which is to say that all of the later choices are designed to 1) get lots of votes that totally outnumber the votes for the first choice and 2) make the first choice seem extreme, even though it is certainly the closest to representing the current state of our scientific understanding, albeit not with language I would use (see "Intro to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water" and UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but "we do have time to stop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon").

Examiner.com has inspired me to offer my own "First Annual Survey on the Examiner's First Annual Push Poll on Global Warming."  Which, if any, of the following statements comes closest to capturing your attitudes and opinions about the Examiner's First Annual Push Poll on Global Warming?

Related Links:

SuperFreak Dubner embraces ClimateGate conspiracy theories

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”

The long-awaited sequel to An Inconvenient Truth comes out Tuesday, Nov. 3.  If you want a preview, Al Gore and the book are featured in an excellent Newsweek cover story, The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.

In September, Nature Reports Climate Change asked me (and several others) to suggest three books to read ahead of the Copenhagen conference.  Of those, they then asked me to review Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis:

When your last work led to an Oscar and Nobel Prize, anticipation is high on the sequel. And former US Vice President Al Gore’s new book delivers. Our Choice, due out in November, is a wonderfully readable treatise on climate solutions. Whereas An Inconvenient Truth framed the crisis that climate negotiations are tackling, this followup spells out what needs to be done.

Based on 30 of Gore’s ‘Solutions Summits’ as well as one-on-one discussions with leading experts across multiple disciplines, the book aims, in Gore’s words, “to gather in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now.” Gore naturally focuses on energy, the source of most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and discusses many underappreciated strategies such as concentrated solar thermal power and cogeneration. He also devotes a full chapter to soil, a major carbon sink that is gradually degrading. Farming strategies for restoring soil carbon are described, including biochar, a porous charcoal that can potentially enhance the soil sink while providing a source of low-carbon power. And like its PowerPoint-based predecessor, Our Choice is replete with lush photos and simple but powerful charts. This [is] a must-read book for those who want a primer on all the key solutions countries will be considering at Copenhagen.

I was at one of the Solutions Summits, as long-time readers know (see “My Al Gore story").   I was interviewed by Newsweek about that Summit for their cover story:

Gore assigned each speaker at the summits a half dozen or so questions: Is nuclear power a viable solution? How can new photovoltaic technologies enter the market? He moderated every discussion, and no one remembers him ever glancing at his iPhone during even the most eye-glazing PowerPoint slides (”differentiation of value chain strategies”). Every panel at the New York meetings ran late, recalls Joseph Romm, who oversaw the Department of Energy’s renewables program from 1995 to 1998, as Gore asked question after question. “It was a fire hydrant of information,” says Romm, and it taught even experts things they didn’t know “about the latest technologies and strategies for clean energy.” Gore also hosted a reception afterward, where he betrayed no doubt that everyone would find everything as fascinating as he did. “Have Tim tell you all about soil carbon!” he said to one scientist. “Gore bothers to come talk to us,” says climatologist Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Most other politicians are too busy: ‘Just give us the talking points.’ He’s the only politician who’s interested in the nuts and bolts of the science—and the only one who knows what a hydroxyl radical is.”

Like Gore, I learned a lot from the summits.  Here is what I wrote in January 2008:

For the last three days I attended a small climate solutions summit hosted by the former Vice President and current Nobel Laureate. It was off-the-record, so I can’t report on presentations directly, but they have made me a lot smarter about the latest technologies and strategies for clean energy, which will inform my blogging this year on climate solutions. I will say now as an aside that I have become much more bullish on the potential for large-scale solar photovoltaics as a result of attending these meetings. The VP asked me to speak for seven minutes on hydrogen at dinner Wednesday. Before dinner, I gave him a copy of the brand-new paperback edition of -- warning, shameless product placement -- Hell and High Water. He looked it over for a few minutes and said, deadpan,

I have only one problem with this book—this blurb on the back here that says, “If you buy only one book about global warming, make it Hell and High Water.” I just can’t agree with that.

When he introduced me that night, he repeated the line to great laughter.

BTW, in case it wasn’t obvious from his movie, the VP has a terrific sense of humor — and not just in his delivery timing of canned jokes, but in quick, impromptu one liners, like the one above, many of them self-deprecating (one of the speakers from a web-based company thanked him for his work accelerating the Internet, and he said something like, “You heard I had something to do with the internet?”).

And in case this wasn’t obvious from his movie, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of all things related to climate, energy, science, and technology.

I didn’t realize until I read the Newsweek piece that the VP had a similar reaction to the PV panel:

By all accounts, Gore was open to changing positions he brought to the summits. He originally thought that concentrated solar thermal power, in which the sun heats liquids that then power an electric generator, is superior to photovoltaics, in which sunlight produces electricity directly (PVs are the solar panels sprouting on rooftops these days). But “the PV industry surprised people over the last three years with the speed at which costs dropped,” says Cornelius, who is now at Hudson Clean Energy, a private-equity firm. Gore came around. “We are at or near a threshold beyond which photovoltaics will actually have a cost advantage” over concentrated solar as well as fossil fuels, Gore writes. He likes the fact that they can be deployed in small installations—those rooftops—whereas solar thermal projects are immense; he’s impressed that the price of photovoltaics is dropping while their efficiency is rising, thanks to new materials and manufacturing techniques. “Photovoltaics are a prime example of where the developmental pathway had a big impact on my conclusions,” Gore said at his home last month. “The rate of cost reductions and increases in efficiency for PVs is very impressive. PVs probably overtakes concentrated solar thermal within the next half year.”

I’m not certain one can directly compare PV and solar thermal.  And I still think solar thermal will deliver more kilowatt-hours this century than any other form of low carbon electricity (see Solar Baseload—a core climate solution) particularly because it is so much cheaper and efficient to store thermal energy than electricity, and there are no obvious production bottlenecks for CSP.  But this summit did convince me to include a full wedge of PV in “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution,” along with 3 wedges of CSP.

The Newsweek article is by Sharon Begley, a journalist who definitely gets global warming—see Newsweek’s Science Editor explains why climate change is “even worse than we feared” and how “a consensus has developed during IPY that the Greenland ice sheet will disappear.”

And for those who want to learn about soils and biochar, the book has a good chapter:

Gore loves plants and soils as only a former farm boy can (well, a summertime farm boy: as a kid he spent the school year in Washington, where his father was a senator). He regales you with numbers: more CO2 is emitted from burning and destroying forests—20 to 23 percent of the annual total—than from all the world’s cars and trucks; only by the 1980s did CO2 from fossil fuels overtake that from deforestation, which accounts for 40 percent of the CO2 increase since the 1800s.

The potential for soils to absorb more of the CO2 that our utilities, factories, and vehicles spew poses a dilemma for Gore, one of two where his scientific and political instincts collide. With better management, soils could sequester much more carbon than they do now. The question is how much more. Soils scientist Rattan Lal of Ohio State University was surprised to get a call last summer (”Vice President Gore would like to talk to you”) that began, “I have 15 or 20 questions about soils and climate for you.” Lal calculates that if more farmers adopted mulching, no-till farming, and the use of cover crops and manure, 3,700 million acres worldwide could sequester 1 gigaton per year of CO2, roughly 12 percent of annual global emissions. Other experts are even more sanguine. “If we feed the biology and manage grasslands appropriately, we could sequester as much carbon as we emit,” says Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, who presented at two summits. The political clash is this: if you tell people soils can be managed to suck up lots of our carbon emissions, it sounds like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and could decrease what little enthusiasm there is for reducing those emissions—as one of Gore’s assistants told LaSalle in asking him to dial down his estimate. (He didn’t.)

To his credit, Gore sides with the science, letting the political chips fall where they may. He writes that soils could sequester an additional 15 percent of annual global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. That could cut 50 parts per million of CO2 from the atmosphere over the next 50 years. (We are now at 387, up from 280 before the industrial era, with 450 ppm or even less a dangerous level.) To encourage changes in agriculture that would foster carbon sequestration, Gore advocates moving away from price supports and toward paying farmers for “how much carbon they can put into and keep in their soil,” he says. Paying farmers to sequester carbon might jump-start the use of biochar, which Gore calls “one of the most exciting new strategies for restoring carbon to depleted soils, and sequestering significant amounts of CO2.” Biochar, which he learned about during a 1989 trip to the Amazon, is basically porous charcoal. Made by burning switch grass, corn husks, and other waste, it can absorb CO2 like a charcoal filter in a cigarette absorbs gases. Gore estimates that biochar could sequester 40 percent of annual CO2 emissions.

Begley notes one especially unexpected chapter in the book:

But because of one sentence, and one chapter, it does surprise. The chapter is an astute analysis of the psychological barriers that keep most Americans from taking the threat of climate change seriously, his acknowledgment that emotion, not just reason, drives the decisions people make. The sentence is this: “Simply laying out the facts won’t work.”

… Gore is a canny-enough politician to know that change of this magnitude takes time, and that politics tends to trump science. A new poll by the Pew Research Center found sharp declines in the numbers of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world is warming (57 percent, compared with 71 percent in April 2008), and in how many believe it is because of human activity (36 percent vs. 47 percent). Gore blames this on the boatloads of money the coal and oil industries have spent to muddy the science and confuse the public…. His favorite quote in Our Choice is from the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): “The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power … has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”

The piece concludes with Gore’s native optimism:

“You know, the political system is [like climate] also nonlinear,” Gore says. “I’ve been waiting a long time for that tipping point,” when politicians and the public recognize the threat of climate change and act to avert it. “But I think we’re closer than ever. Reality does have a way of knocking on the door.”

Walking back through the house, I ask Gore again whether he believes the sanguine vision of Our Choice will come to be. He points to solar panels on his roof, and to his driveway, 300 feet beneath which seven geothermal wells gather the planet’s warmth to heat and cool his house. “I have to,” he says.

Our Choice is really the anti-SuperFreakonomics.  I’m sure it will be widely attacked by the deniers and delayers, so no doubt I’ll be blogging about it more this month.  The bottom line is that besides being informative, Our Choice is a truly beautiful book page after page, and I highly recommend it, particularly for those who want a broad overview of the key strategies for preserving a livable climate.

Related Links:

Fair, Ambitious & Binding: Essentials for a Successful Climate Deal

Kids just say no—to fossil fuels

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

In the past, before Rupert Murdoch's $5.6 billion acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, the paper was greatly respected by its peers for its news coverage, even on climate issues.

This year that has changed. First we had veteran science reporter Robert Lee Hotz's story on New York City's sloshy, scary future, which appeared to have barely survived a cleaver-wielding editor.

Then about a week and a half ago, Andrew Revkin, dean of climate reporters for the New York Times, pointed on the blog Dot Earth to a long video interview the Wall Street Journal ran with the famously successful entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson. Branson has invested a great deal of his wealth into an all-out effort to reduce the risks of climate change, including backing a $25 million prize for inventors, but this went completely unmentioned in the lengthy interview, which Revkin called "puzzling."

And this weekend the WSJ ran a story about global warming that makes a huge issue of a slight decrease in the rate of warming. The story features the best known climate change denier, and implicitly argues that the short-term trend puts the long-term outcome in doubt. To wit:

Scientists who have long questioned man-made global warming cite the temperature drop that began in 2006 as more evidence the models are wrong. "They were predicting warming," says Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Lindzen's work, regarded as leading the research challenging man-made warming, suggests that natural factors such as clouds generally inhibit, rather than intensify, greenhouse-gas warming. He wrote in a recent article that the study from the U.K. admits that the kind of climate model cited in the U.N.'s IPCC report "did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability, thus demolishing the basis for the IPCC's iconic attribution" linking greenhouse-gas emissions to climate change. He added that "even when all models agree, they can all be wrong."

The researchers behind those studies strenuously reject that description. But they disagree among themselves on how long the cooling will last. The British paper says warming will resume as early as this year. The German paper says warming won't resume for perhaps a decade.

Yet if you look at the graph published with the story, the warming trend is unmistakable. Meaning that the text has been massaged beyond factuality.

Sad to see this happen to news coverage at a once-great paper.

Related Links:

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

In other UK news: “Rain like this happens once every 1,000 years”

Let’s look at one of the illegally hacked emails in more detail

"The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings."
-- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

-----------

In the late 18th century, Edward Gibbon fretted about getting into trouble for his blunt take on the early Christians. Short summary: their intolerance and stupidity unwittingly helped bring down Rome. In the above-quoted passage of his Decline and Fall, Gibbon tried to prepare the gentle reader for his coming exposé of early-church idiocy.

Like the great institutions of European Christianity, modern science has amassed tremendous power--and not always lived up to its founding creeds. Science needs a Gibbon--someone who appreciates its intellectual grandeur and potential, but who also can train a cold eye on the "inevitable mixture of error and corruption" that has accompanied its tenure since the Enlightenment.

That Gibbon is not Michael Specter, a New Yorker staff writer and author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. His book purports to defend science from its philistine critics--people who, in Specter's view, reflexively deny the validity of the scientific process.

In his intro, Specter sets up the defining focus of the book. He contrasts the "rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science" with "the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment" (i.e., "denialism"). Already, we're on thin intellectual ice; Specter evidently believes in a pure science, one that exists completely apart from ideology. In Gibbon's phrasing, he's defending a science as "she descended from Heaven [read: the Enlightenment], arrayed in her native purity."

Menace to society? An organic farmer, with bounty. According to Denialism, organic farming threatens millions in Africa. According to the UN, not so much. But science doesn't exist in an ideal state. Like the arts, it lives on its patrons--and their interests shape its contours. Here in the United States, public funding for universities and research has plummeted since the Reagan era. Into that void have stepped monied interests--corporations more inclined to finance the generation of proprietary knowledge than the sort of pure science Specter so values.

Does this factor automatically invalidate the scientific enterprise? Of course not. But anyone who takes on the topic of modern science has to account for it--or risk playing the fool. Specter blithely ignores the political economy of science as it is practiced. That oversight severely limits the value of his book.

But there's another, even more glaring oversight at work here. In a book devoted to "denialism," and "how irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet, and threatens our lives," there is almost no discussion of the most powerful and successful of all the denier cliques: those who insist human-induced climate change is a hoax.

So what do we find in these pages? We get a chapter defending the pharmaceutical industry against critics who question its wares--an industry with nearly $300 billion in sales in the U.S. alone, and fast-growing markets overseas. Specter's defense aside, Big Pharma typically vies with "oil and mining" and "commercial banks" for the title of most profitable industry in the United States.

There's a chapter decrying those who question the necessity of vaccinations--even as global child vaccine rates continue to rise. (Indeed, according to a recent report, the main factor holding vaccines back isn't denialism, but rather their heightened cost.)

We get a chapter lambasting what Specter calls the "organic fetish"--even though organic food sales remain less than 5 percent of the U.S. market (as Specter acknowledges). But really, this chapter (more on which below) amounts to a ringing defense of genetically modified organisms--which can now be found in 75 percent+ of the offerings on supermarket shelves.

Another chapter blasts the herbal remedy and supplement market--substantial at $23 billion in sales per year (according to this report), but still a fraction of the pharma market's size.

In other words, Specter mainly trains his sights on unsuccessful or marginally empowered "deniers," such as those challenging the pharma behemoth or vaccines for children.

But what about the successful deniers--the ones who have managed to block any meaningful response to climate change from the federal government, and are even now fouling up the effort to pass an effective climate bill? These folks, part of a loosely concerted movement funded largely by the oil and coal industries, get barely a mention in Denialism; they certainly don't rate a chapter.

The book's index has no entry for "climate change." The entry for "Global warming" cites just one page--a reference to genetically modified foods as a "solution" to global warming. 

Does this mean that Specter thinks Monsanto's critics--of whom I am one--pose more of threat to humanity than the likes of Sen. James Inhofe, who airs his views not in a blog but on the floor of the U.S. Senate? Monsanto has certainly shaken off its deniers; it now dominates the U.S. corn, soy, and cotton seed markets. The movement to mitigate climate change hasn't been so lucky.

Specter's failure to consider this most successful foray into denialism just astounds me. Did an author really just publish a book about "denialism"--and forget to address climate-change deniers? It's like writing a book about the British invasion of the 1960s, and neglecting to mention the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

OK, so what's in Specter's chapter on organics and GMOs? Astonishingly, not very much science. Two major assumptions underlie it: organic agriculture delivers frightfully low yields, and GMO agriculture delivers reassuringly high yields. He doesn't deliver data to back up either of those claims. Here are two studies, both of which came out in time for consideration in Denialism, that Specter really should have grappled with: 1) a 2009 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists showing that after decades of research, transgenic seeds have yet to deliver yield increases; and 2) a 2005 study in Bioscience (summary here) showing that yields of organically grown corn and soy match those of their conventional counterparts--with dramatically lower energy inputs.

Straddling his two wobbly, undefended givens about GMO and organic yields, Specter leaps to the conclusion that proponents of organic agriculture are dooming millions to starvation. Or as he puts it:

An organic universe sounds delightful, but it would consign millions in Africa and in much of Asia to malnutrition and death.

To hear Specter tell it, the only thing standing between the African continent and a future marked by widespread famine is a complete surrender to GMO technology. But in declaring that vision, he's brazenly denying the conclusions of the largest and most comprehensive study on the future of agriculture in the global south, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).

Under the auspices of the United Nations, World Bank, WHO, and other institutions, the IAASTD gathered 400 scientists and development experts from dozens of nations to assess the very problems that concern Specter. A three-year project, it has been called the IPCC of agriculture. Its conclusion: agroecological practices--including the very organic-farming techniques Specter finds so frightful--are at least as important as biotechnology in terms of "feeding the world" in the decades to come.

The study [PDF] is at best lukewarm on GMOs. It openly doubts whether GMOs actually increase yields; and deplores the patent regime that now governs them. The IAASTD states:

In developing countries especially, instruments such as patents may drive up costs, restrict experimentation by the individual farmers or public researchers while also potentially undermining local practices that enhance food security and economic sustainability. In this regard, there is particular concern about present IPR instruments eventually inhibiting seed-saving, exchange, sale and access to proprietary materials necessary for the independent research community to conduct analyses and long term experimentation on impacts. Farmers face new liabilities: GM farmers may become liable for adventitious presence if it causes loss of market certification and income to neighboring organic farmers, and conventional farmers may become liable to GM seed producers if transgenes are detected in their crops.

The IAASTD turned out to be so unenthusiastic about GMOs, in fact, that Croplife International, the trade group for the globe's dominant GMO/agrichemical purveyors, angrily pulled out of participation shortly before its release.

I'm not blasting Specter for refusing to agree with the IAASTD's conclusions; but I do find it inexcusable that he failed to grapple with this vast scientific undertaking. In doing so, he lurches toward a kind of denialism of his own.

Generally, he might have more fully engaged the major literature on ag development in the global south. He glancingly refers to the FAO's 2003-'04 "State of Food and Agriculture" paper that gave tepid support for GMOs among poor farmers (while stressing that they're "not a panacea"). Yet Specter ignores a more recent paper (this one from 2008, by the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development) that's directly relevant to the topic of his chapter: its on the potential of organic ag in Africa. The paper concludes:

Organic agriculture can increase agricultural productivity and can raise incomes with low-cost, locally available and appropriate technologies, without causing environmental damage. Furthermore, evidence shows that organic agriculture can build up natural resources, strengthen communities and improve human capacity, thus improving food security by addressing many different causal factors simultaneously ... Organic and near-organic agricultural methods and technologies are ideally suited for many poor, marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa, as they require minimal or no external inputs, use locally and naturally available materials to produce high-quality products, and encourage a whole systemic approach to farming that is more diverse and resistant to stress.

Again, no need to agree with every science-based report that praises organic ag. But to pretend such papers don't exist is poor journalism. Judging from his organic chapter, Specter spent a lot of time trolling the aisles at Whole Foods, marvelling at the simplistic comments of the shoppers. Fine. I have no doubt that he heard silly, science-denying things there. But where is the push to find the intersections between organic and science--such at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, which has for years been running a test organic farm, complete with control farm? The results of its work, often in conjunction with USDA researchers, show that innovative organic techniques have at least as much promise for mitigating and surviving climate change as some patent-protected transgenic seed cooked up in a Monsanto lab.

Scientific output is messy and full of contradictions. And that brings me back to my broader critique of this book: that Specter defends an ideal, objective science that doesn't exist in this world. There is no greater case study of the grubbiness of real-world science than the rise of Specter's beloved GMOs.

(I'm still marveling at this statement, from the introduction: "I wonder, as the ice sheet in Greenland disappears, the seas rise, and our sense of planetary foreboding grows, will denialists consider the genetically engineered organisms that propel our cars and sustain our factories as a continuation of what [organic champion] Lord Melchett described as a war against nature?")

GMOs are hardly a product of the kind of pure and objective science that Specter celebrates. Indeed, the few companies involved in GMO seed production have been accorded such extraordinary intellectual property power by the U.S. government that research scientists have risen up in rebellion.

In an article published in February of this year--maybe too late for consideration by Specter--The New York Times reported that 26 corn-insect specialists signed a letter to the EPA complaining that "no truly independent research [on GMOS] can be legally conducted on many critical questions" because the patent-holding companies have so much power over research. From the Times:

The problem, the scientists say, is that farmers and other buyers of genetically engineered seeds have to sign an agreement meant to ensure that growers honor company patent rights and environmental regulations. But the agreements also prohibit growing the crops for research purposes.

Shockingly, "The researchers ... withheld their names [from the EPA letter] because they feared being cut off from research by the companies." Now there's an example of scientists who are free to pursue the path of truth!

I'd also urge Specter to read a paper by Don Lotter, published early this year in the International Journal of the Sociology of Food and Agriculture. Lotter's paper, provocatively titled "The Genetic Engineering of Food and The Failure of Science," shows how the collapse of biology's "central dogma"--the one-gene, one-trait thesis that fell apart with the mapping of the human genome--exposed GM plant breeding as a rather crude tool. He traces the rise of GMOs, convincingly arguing that political and economic power, not scientific rigor, have driven the technology's ascent.

But political and economic power are precisely what elude Specter's gaze. This great defender of science appears to be cursed with something that a love of science should have cured: naiveté. To be sure, the kind of know-nothing, reflexive anti-scienticism that Specter deplores certainly exists; and its adherents need a kick in the pants. Specter's boot misses the target. Moreover, he sees deniers everywhere, except where they are actually powerful and effective: denying climate change.

Related Links:

AP: Since 1997 “climate change has worsened and accelerated”

Here’s what we know so far

Uh-oh: Tamiflu-resistant swine flu rears up in the U.S., U.K.

The Atlantic Monthly named Freeman Dyson a “Brave Thinker” for the “contrarian view” he’s taken on climate change.  They tout his quote, “I like to express heretical opinions. They might even happen to be true.”

Like the authors of the error-riddled Superfreakonomics, Dyson is contrarian for the sake of contrarianism — the truth is secondary.  Coincidentally, the same is true of the reporter who profiled him for the NY Times magazine — see Media stunner: When asked “Does it matter, from a journalistic point of view, whether [Freeman Dyson is] right or whether he’s wrong?” his NYT profiler replies “Oh, absolutely not.”

In fact, the media’s adoration of contrarians means it is a lot less brave to be a contrarian these days than it used to be in, say, Galileo’s day.   Dave Roberts at Grist makes that point in a terrific piece (reposted below):

Willing to risk a fawning NYT profile … freeeeeedooooom!
Is Freeman Dyson really “brave”?

… What leads people to think that entire areas of climate science and policy, the subject of close study by thousands of very smart people all over the globe every day, can be overturned with facile points of logic and Silver Bullets Nobody’s Thought Of?

Well, it ain’t bravery….

On the other hand, simply repeat the broad global consensus— climate change is an urgent problem that warrants coordinated action to reduce GHG emissions—and you get nowhere. Boooring.

(I can’t tell you how many back-and-forths I’ve had with media outlets where I try to explain that the thing most people think is right actually is right, and they say, maybe so, but that’s not going to titillate our readers.)

Ditto!  Scientific wisdom was, like, so last year.

Krugman had it right in his first take on the Superfreaks:  “If you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study, like the fate of the planet, you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counterintuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong.”  Last week, in “Contrarianism without consequences,” the Nobel laureate added:

The refusal of the Superfreakonomists to take responsibility for their failed attempt to be cleverly contrarian on climate change is a sad spectacle to watch….

What it is, instead, is a failure of courage — having paraded their daring contrarianism, the freakonomists are trying to wiggle out of the consequences when it turns out that they were wrong.

Krugman links to a terrific post by contrarian Daniel Davies on the Superfreaks, “Rules for Contrarians: 1. Don’t whine. That is all,” which I’ll repost at the very end

Contrarian Dyson was one of the “geniuses” pushing Project Orion — the absurdly impractical idea of creating a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs.  Hard to beat that for being contrary to good old-fashioned common sense.  You want real bravery?  How about Dyson test piloting the thing?

More recently he started saying stuff like, “There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global” (see “Freeman Dyson, Climate Crackpot“).  Contrarian?  Yes.  But it doesn’t happen to be true.  The warming is global and occurring in virtually every region of the planet, as made clear in this figure from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies comparing the temps during the 2000s with those from 1951-1980 (you can make your own map here):

And Dyson started proposing outlandish “solutions” (see Freeman Dyson and his amazing, incredible ‘genetically engineered carbon-eating trees’):

If one quarter of the world’s forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years.

Oh, well, replacing 25% of existing trees with imaginary genetically-engineered carbon-eating trees will solve the problem. Why didn’t anyone point this out before? It certainly would’ve saved the IPCC a lot of time.

Wait, I can improve his idea. It’s obviously too risky to take the carbon and “bury it underground.” What if it leaked? Let’s put the carbon on rocket ships powered by nuclear bombs. That way we can be sure the carbon won’t ever return to our atmosphere.

Dyson and his fawning, fact-check-free NYT interview goes on and on:

… “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse,” because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields.

Except that ain’t happening. Quite the reverse (see “Science: Global warming is killing U.S. trees, a dangerous carbon-cycle feedback” and “Climate-Driven Pest Devours N. American Forests” and “Nature on stunning new climate feedback: Beetle tree kill releases more carbon than fires“).

But that’s the beauty of being an 85-year-old theoretical physicist with no training or publications in climate science — you don’t have to concern yourself with the facts.

“Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now,” he contends, “and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.”

Well, yes. Of course, sea levels were 250 feet higher back then. But Dyson says not to worry:

Sea levels, he says, are rising steadily, but why this is and what dangers it might portend “cannot be predicted until we know much more about its causes.”

Seriously.

Note to Dyson: Sea levels are rising because the planet is getting hotter, causing the water to expand and the land-locked ice to melt and/or flow rapidly into the oceans. Those are the “causes.” Duh. Either read the scientific literature or shut up. Start here: Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100.

You can read more debunking of Dyson here.

Dave Roberts full response to Dyson and the Superfreaks is well worth reading:

Freeman Dyson is a noted physicist who’s argued—utterly implausibly—that carbon eating trees will save us and we shouldn’t worry about the whole climate change thing. For this, he’s been profiled in The New York Times and now dubbed a Brave Thinker by the Atlantic. But is he really that brave?

Said friend Oliver Sacks of Dyson, “He feels it’s important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive, and he’s done that all his life.” For whatever reason, Dyson decided enviros were the latest orthodoxy to need a thumb in the eye.

It’s a pretty common sentiment.  Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner are the latest to do it, in their new book Superfreakonomics. Their chapter on climate change sits awkwardly with the rest of their work; the original Freakonomics was based on Levitt’s academic work, real data and models the authors used to make ostentatiously counterintuitive points about perverse economic incentives. But Levitt did no original work on climate. The chapter’s not about economic incentives. There’s no evidence of deep or sustained engagement with the literature or previous research on the subject. The authors just high-stepped in, cast a cursory glance around, and started condescending to the people involved in it (and stepping on rakes).

Why? What leads people to think that entire areas of climate science and policy, the subject of close study by thousands of very smart people all over the globe every day, can be overturned with facile points of logic and Silver Bullets Nobody’s Thought Of?

Well, it ain’t bravery.

The fact is, anybody who takes a poke at the Dirty F*ckin’ Hippies—anybody, for any reason—can get attention and access to media. There’s an enormous infrastructure on the right to elevate any anti-DFH voice, including random economists,  physicists, meteorologists, talk show hosts, computer programmers, whatever. You don’t need any particular credentials. You don’t even have to believe what the right does; as long as you confuse the issue, they’ll amplify your voice. (Indeed, they’re embracing Superfreakonomics.)

Add to that the fact that mainstream media outlets seek one thing above all else, and that’s the unexpected, the contrarian. When it comes to climate change, that generally means taking a poke at greens (or better yet, at Al Gore). It’s even better if you’re a purported green bashing other greens. That’s the kind of media crack Nordhaus & Shellenberger dealt on their way to fame and funding. Bash the greens, no matter your qualifications or the merits of your arguments, and you will find yourself on television and in opinion sections from the New York Times to Washington Post to Wired.

Helpfully, when you offer facile dismissals of science and policy to which people have devoted their lives—“We could end this debate and be done with it,” sighs Dubner, “and move on to problems that are harder to solve.”—they get angry, and they express that anger. Then you get to be the Brave, Persecuted Freethinker battling the Quasi-Religious Orthodoxy, and the press loves you all the more.  Why else would anyone know Roger Pielke Jr.‘s name? Lomborg rode that train, along with Shellenberger/Nordhaus and Dyson. In a smaller, grubbier way, even a flack like Patrick Moore (“co-founder of Greenpeace”!) has made it work for him. It’s no wonder Levitt/Dubner thought they could do the same thing, and you can sense their hesitation now that it’s not working so well. Though it did work like a charm on the normally sharp Jon Stewart, who offered Levitt this pathetically fawning interview:

On the other hand, simply repeat the broad global consensus— climate change is an urgent problem that warrants coordinated action to reduce GHG emissions—and you get nowhere. Boooring. (I can’t tell you how many back-and-forths I’ve had with media outlets where I try to explain that the thing most people think is right actually is right, and they say, maybe so, but that’s not going to titillate our readers.)

I could start doing this crap tomorrow: Have a revelation that greens are emotional, irrational, in the grips of a cultish faith (a “secular religion”!). Realize that they’re doing everything wrong, from their message to their recommended policies. Discover that the real solution is … I don’t know, thorium reactors, and everything else is needless hype and meddling. I could be denounced by greens and wear their opprobrium as a badge to gain entry into cable news and op-ed pages.

I would get the egoistic thrill of subversion. I’d get a hearty band of supporters on the right and thrillingly dastardly enemies on the left. I could parlay the conflict into national attention and infamy. If I was a retired physicist in my twilight years, it might even be a real kick in the pants to be back in the fray again.

Yeah, I could do all that. It would be many things, but “brave” isn’t among them.

Jon Stewart’s “interview” of Levitt was indeed one of his worst in recent memory, but people should realize that Stewart has not taken the time to educate himself on climate science, preferring to take the contrarian role himself in his May interview with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson  — see Treehugger post here:

Brad Johnson of Wonk Room spares me the trouble of critiquing Stewart and yet another debunking of the Superfreaks:

On last night’s Daily Show, host Jon Stewart heaped praise on the contrarian approach to global warming taken by SuperFreakonomics author Steve Levitt, a University of Chicago economist. Stewart was baffled by the widespread criticism of Levitt and co-author Stephen Dubner, asking, “Have you stepped on a secular religion?” Stewart, often a tough interviewer, coddled Levitt, saying, “I’m sorry you’ve taken so much s**t for it.” He blamed the uproar over SuperFreakonomics on people who “feel you are betraying environmentalism”:

I’ve been somewhat surprised at how angry people are. The global warming chapter, you don’t deny global warming. You don’t say that CO2 isn’t a factor, but they feel you are betraying environmentalism or our world. Why are people so mad?

SuperFreakonomics mischaracterizes the field in order to argue that “moralism and angst” has blinded scientists and policymakers from pursuing the “cheap and simple solution” of geoengineering. Although the book condemns scientists for fearmongering and promotes a radical alternative to existing policy, Levitt tells Stewart, “I don’t try to pretend I know the science.”

In reality, the critics of Levitt’s treatment of climate science and policy are not “dogmatic” believers of a “secular religion” — they are highly respected climate scientists, energy experts, and economists, including climate scientist Ken Caldeira, who has said Levitt and Dubner misrepresented his views. The widespread criticism isn’t based on the book’s personal attacks on Al Gore or its mocking of global warming as a “religion,” but on the multitude of factual errors, misrepresentations, and false conclusions that the authors use to promote their mindless contrarianism. As science journalist Eric Pooley writes, “The book claims the opposite of what Caldeira believes.”

Levitt recommends untested, planetary scale geo-engineering to block the sun as a “band-aid” that “buys us time” if “we might need to do something,” because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long time. However, scientists concerned that global warming needs to be reduced rapidly have already found a well-proven approach that’s cheaper and safer than pumping unlimited amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere: stopping black carbon emissions of soot from diesel and biomass burning.

Stewart hit the nail on the head when he concluded, “I really don’t know what I’m talking about, do I?” However, he failed to understand his mistake when he concluded that he had “apparently frightened our audience by suggesting that conservation isn’t the only way out of any of our problems.”

Stewart has excoriated other media darlings for their laissez-faire approach to serious issues, from Tucker Carlson to Jim Cramer, and just last week skewered CNN for its failure to do even basic fact-checking of its guests. Unfortunately, this time Stewart ended up being just like those he usually mocks — neither funny nor accurate.

UPDATE 1:  Stephan Faris writes:

In short, Stewart misses the point completely. There’s no doubt the environmentalist movement is full of people who are ideologically opposed to consumption. But there are also plenty of people (like myself) who are no fan of hairshirts, but still worry about the potential catastrophic impacts of climate change. The problem with Levitt’s book isn’t that it attacked a holy cow (it may have done that, but that isn’t the problem). Where Levitt went wrong is that the solution he and his co-author Stephen Dubner propose isn’t actually a solution.

UPDATE 2:  Geenfyre’s Mike Kaulbars writes:

That’s right, Levitt doesn’t even have to BS the interview because Stewart does it for him. From mocking green living to calling climate science “a religion” Stewart sounds like he is reading Levitt’s talking points. Instead of challenging Levitt, Stewart does all of the disinformation and obfuscating for him. Journalism schools could use this as a case study of really appalling interview technique; it’s that bad.

Finally, here’s Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber:

I like to think that I know a little bit about contrarianism. So I’m disturbed to see that people who are making roughly infinity more money than me out of the practice aren’t sticking to the unwritten rules of the game.

Viz Nathan Mhyrvold:

“Once people with a strong political or ideological bent latch onto an issue, it becomes hard to have a reasonable discussion; once you’re in a political mode, the focus in the discussion changes. Everything becomes an attempt to protect territory. Evidence and logic becomes secondary, used when advantageous and discarded when expedient. What should be a rational debate becomes a personal and venal brawl.”

Okay, point one. The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people. Now opinions may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do – I think it’s fantastic – but if annoying people is what you’re trying to do, then you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do. If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you’re in a fight. It’s the definition of passive-aggression and really quite unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your standards of a calm and rational debate. If Superfreakonomics wanted a calm and rational debate, this chapter would have been called something like: “Geoengineering: Issues in Relative Cost Estimation of SO2 Shielding”, and the book would have sold about five copies.

Viz also, Stephen Dubner:

“They have given the impression that we are global-warming deniers of the worst sort, and that our analysis of the issue is ideological and unscientific. Most gravely, we stand accused of misrepresenting the views of one of the most respected climate scientists on the scene, whom we interviewed extensively. If everything they said was actually true, it would indeed be a damning indictment. But it’s not.”

Okay, point two. The other point of contrarianism is that, if it’s well done, you assemble a whole load of points which are individually uncontroversial (or at least, solidly substantiated) and put them together to support a conclusion which is surprising and counterintuitive. In other words, the aim of the thing is the overall impression you give. Because of this, if you’re writing a contrarian piece properly, you ought to be well aware of what point it looks like you’re making, because the entire point is to make a defensible argument which strongly resembles a controversial one.

So having done this intentionally, you don’t get to complain that people have “misinterpreted” your piece by taking you to be saying exactly what you carefully constructed the argument to look like you were saying. Fair enough, you might not care to defend the controversial point it looked like you were making, but a degree of diffidence is appropriate here, because the confusion is entirely and intentionally your fault:

“(That is the “global cooling” in our subtitle. If someone interprets our brief mention of the global-cooling scare of the 1970’s as an assertion of “a scientific consensus that the planet was cooling,” that feels like a willful misreading.)”

No it doesn’t; it feels like someone read the first two pages for the plain meaning of the words and didn’t spot that you were actually playing a little crossword-puzzle game where the answer was “consensus”. In general, whatever “global cooling” meant, it was put on the cover in full knowledge of the impression it would give to a normal reader so once more, it is not legitimate to complain that this phrase was interpreted in the way in which it was intended to be interpreted.

In general, contrarians ought to have thick skins, because their entire raison d’etre is the giving of intellectual offence to others. So don’t whine, for heaven’s sake. Own your bullshit, like this guy.

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UPDATE:  Yes, bad coverage by big media, including the NYT’s Revkin, is one reason there has been a modest decline since April 2008 in the number of Americans who know that there is solid (in fact, overwhelming) evidence the Earth is warming and humans are the primary cause (see here).  Big media “did” the global warming story in 2006 and 2007 when Gore’s movie came out and then throughout 2007 when the IPCC released its four major summary reports.  Looking for a new angle, the NY Times and others played up the global cooling myth.  Now couple that with a ramped up disinformation campaign from the deniers who keep repeating the global cooling myth and continued lame messaging from the scientific community (see “Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1“) and a progressive community filled with people who have been persuaded by bad analysis that they shouldn’t even talk about “global warming” (see Messaging 101b: EcoAmerica’s phrase ‘our deteriorating atmosphere’ isn’t going to replace ‘global warming’ — and that’s a good thing).  That’s a recipe for an underinformed public.

I have serious doubts whether major journalists should be blogging very much.  It conflates different roles, which can be confusing to the reader, and I’ve always thought that the media’s blogging was inherently lower quality journalism but still imprinted with the credibility of the journalist and his or her media organization (see “What exactly is the difference between journalism and blogging?“).

Today’s remarkble NPR interview of top NY Times climate reporter Andrew Revkin underscores my doubts and introduces yet another major problem I hadn’t considered — sagging quality of the print reporting as a result of too much time spent blogging.  Or, in Andy’s case, he’s apparently doing the same amount of blogging but more print reporting.

Revkin says “I’ve been in print more, but I haven’t slowed down on the blog.”  The impact:

“I’ve made missteps. I’ve made probably more mistakes this year in my print stories than I had before.  That’s kind of frustrating.”

You aren’t the only one who is frustrated, Andy!

The published articles reach a vastly larger audience.  I’d gladly do without every one of Andy’s posts at his blog, many of which are quite informative — in return for his not repeatedly screwing up the facts and the framing of those facts in just one recent story, see “NYT’s Revkin pushes global cooling myth (again!) and repeats outright misinformation.”

I suspect (or, at least, hope) that if he had had more time to get the facts right, he might not have written that story at all or it would have completely reframed it.  And yes, if you check the sentences I said were wrong or misleading, he went back and changed every single one of them — although the change to the key opening sentence was just adding one word, “relatively,” which is quite inadequate:

… global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.

That is still very misleading, with the phrase “relatively stable for a decade” not actually based on scientific data and the phrase “may even drop” not supported by the recent scientific literature, including the work of the one person Andy cites, Mojib Latif (see “Exclusive interview with Dr. Mojib Latif, the man who confused the NY Times and New Scientist“).

[I still haven't seen the print edition of that story -- if someone can find it and send me the PDF, I'd love to see it.  I think my blog post was too late to correct the print story.]

Let me end with a general statement I made after the terrific journalist James Fallows made some errant statements on climate (see “James Fallows, Physics for Future Presidents, Al Gore, blogging journalists, and what will become of hockey sticks on an ice-free planet?“):

Blogging journalists.  Now that global warming and clean energy have become a first-tier political issue, every major journalist is writing about it.  My unsolicited advice: This is the story of the century, so you should be writing about it, but it has many mine fields so please do your homework before opining on it….

FINAL NOTE TO MEDIA:  Time for you to go back to the basics of reporting the science.  You might stop the blogging and start with this story — 18 leading scientific organizations send letter to Senators affirming the climate is changing, “human activities are the primary driver,” impacts are projected to worsen “substantially” and “If we are to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change, emissions of greenhouse gases must be dramatically reduced.”

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This weekend marks the twentieth annual occurrence of a vaunted celebration you’ve quite possibly never heard of: the Environmental Media Association awards. The EMAs actually do a pretty good job of attracting A-list stars, or at least A-minus, and are the original “green-carpet” event. Each year, there are a handful of honorary awards (this year’s recipients include Richard Branson and Jason Mraz) and several others given in various film and TV categories. Sometimes it can feel like a stretch: for instance, while the nominating committee must have been thrilled with the documentary selections available to them this year—Fuel, Food, Inc., The Cove, No Impact Man—when it came to TV, they were reduced to choosing episodes of such knock-your-socks-off shows as Better Off Ted and ‘Til Death.

Yeah.

But it’s fun to add some glitz to green, and I tip my newsgirl cap to the EMA for the work it’s done on that front through all its efforts, including these awards. Apparently for twenty years! Who knew.

In search of a little context, I thought I’d see who else is celebrating a “platinum” anniversary this year—since Grist has made it to ten years (tin/aluminum!), why not look to our elders for wisdom. Turns out those commemorating their twentieth include such international heavyweights as the Goldman Prize and the U.N. Environment Program’s information office, known fondly as GRID-Arendal. They also include slightly lesser, but no less fascinating, eco-lights: the National Wetlands Awards, New York City environmental-justice and health organization WE-Act, NRDC’s Southern California office, Canadian grocery company Loblaw’s PC Green product line, and ... Turtle Independence Day!

Which can mean only one thing—it’s time to raise a glass, and it’s time to vote:

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Traffic is the answer!richardmasoner via flickrMeant to mention these two pieces last week, but things fell apart, as they say. (Do “they” say that, or is it just me?)

Both relate to the connection between cars and public transportation, and both are a bit counterintuitive.

The first, an op-ed by David Owen in the Wall Street Journal, posits that traffic jams are a boon to public transportation because they piss drivers off and “turn [them] into subway riders or pedestrians”—and that congestion pricing is counterproductive because it makes driving a more pleasant (albeit expensive) experience:

Advocates of congestion-fighting strategies usually argue that traffic jams waste gasoline. That’s true, but the energy waste and carbon output attributable to idling cars is smaller than that attributable to the overall transportation network. There’s nothing green about fighting congestion if, by distributing traffic more efficiently, it results in an overall increase in traffic volume and extra miles driven by vehicles avoiding the fee areas.

I suspect squadrons of transit thinkers have plenty to say about this, but my quick reaction is this: never has a traffic jam made me want to go hop on a subway. When a traffic jam breaks, all I want to do is drive fast, and far, and reclaim the road. And I’m a fan and user of public transportation. I hope there are indeed people out there who think, “By gosh, this road sure is prone to traffic jams. I think I’ll walk next time.” But something tells me it’s not happening as often as Owen would like to think.

Or is it? Because the other piece is about parking garages in transit-oriented developments, and how more garages are being built—and in a sustainable way—so that people can drive to the train.

Parking garages have become key to the success of transit lines, developments that emphasize transit, and suburban town centers — all popular with environmental groups and others who support reduced dependence on the automobile.

Without abundant parking near transit stations in suburban areas, people won’t bother to hop on subways and trains, says Martin Stein, president of the 1,200-member National Parking Association, which is meeting near Washington, D.C., this week.

“The perception of convenience is very important,” Stein says.

So to sum up: Traffic jams are necessary to convert people to public transportation. And then cars and parking garages are necessary to make transit convenient. Partly that sounds like common sense, and partly it sounds like—well, we are just the teensiest bit addicted.

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Cast your vote for the best climate journalism

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

I am starting an internship at a sustainability consulting firm and was asked to blog about relevant issues. I am blocked by a few mind obstacles: I can't help but think that I'm stealing other writers' ideas, or that my audience is in the same bucket as those that may have already read what I'm referring, or that I do not have the expertise to make substantive claims outside of the claims of the piece I am blogging about. Otherwise, what makes a successful entry? Please help if you can.

Kang
Washington, D.C.

A. Dearest Kang,

What to say, what to say.Just start writing. Whatever a mind obstacle is, writing a letter to me will not make it go away. In addition, you are not writing the next great American novel while holed up in a garret, subsisting on peanut butter and praying to find an agent. You are an intern. The obstacle that should most concern you is your supervisor's mind approval. If your sustainability firm wanted someone who had nothing but fresh, genius-level epiphanies to report, they would have hired a professional.

Boldly move forth with your work. An internship is a fabulous opportunity to be open to learning without feeling like you need to know all the answers. Try to write well and clearly about topics that interest you. Do your background research. If you have an opinion, share it. If you don't have the expertise, let your readers know that you are making an assumption or have missing data.

Quite a bit of writing, especially of the weblog variety, involves interpretation, translation, or exploration of news or data that the writer's audience might already have read. I suppose people read this sort of blog precisely to get a new perspective on information, just as we might read the opinion pages of a newspaper. Or they read them so as to avoid putting their own time and effort into synthesizing the information. Or, they know it all already and read the post because the writing is strong. You might succeed with all three of these types of reader.

You can't please all of the people all of the time. It will be possible to figure out how many people are reading your posts by tracking the unique visitors to them -- which hopefully your organization will do. Or, if they don't track the hits, mayhap they primarily care about your experience as a writer instead of your effectiveness as a proselytizer for their firm. In any case, you are in the lucky position of needing to look only to your supervisors for approval. These persons should not expect you to be good at everything already. So relax. Focus on writing readable, clear, purposeful posts, and enjoy yourself.

Slalomly,
Umbra

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Hard times aren't always the worst times for magazines. In 1941, with the economy still depressed and the nation on the verge of war, a magazine called Gourmet hatched.

In the years since, Gourmet sprouted into the nation's most celebrated and influential glossy food magazine. But this week--in the wake of another Great Crash and years into two grinding wars--hard times spelled doom for the "magazine of good living."

What does its demise mean? One early reading is that Gourmet had badly lost touch with the times. In a witty Wednesday editorial, the Boston Globe declared Gourmet a "symbol of [a] bygone vision of gourmet life in America," and a "sign that even upmarket niches can be too confining."

Judith Jones, the legendary editor who ushered Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (among many other classic cookbooks) into being, echoed that sentiment. "Gourmet got away from the things that are going on in people's homes, and seemed to be for an elite that got smaller and smaller," Jones told the New York Times.

In this view, glossy celebrations of gracious living just don't mix with 10 percent unemployment and stagnant wages. Move over, Gourmet, and make way for Every Day with Rachel Ray, a practical-minded magazine that has continued to thrive even as Gourmet's ad pages plunged.

But I think the out-of-touch explanation is too facile by half. True enough, Gourmet burned through cash like an Italian chef uses olive oil. One well-placed source tells me that a typical Gourmet photo shoot, all gorgeously rustic locations and impossibly beautiful models, could cost as much as $100,000. (To be fair, I'm also told that up until the Great Recession settled in, the magazine consistently turned a profit).

And while the magazine always maintained a reverence for the kind of aspirational living that characterized its post-War heyday, it has also evolved in ways that its post-mortem critics aren't acknowledging. For years now, alongside elaborate spreads featuring splashy feasts, Gourmet has run plenty of the kind of 30-minute, weeknight-ready, simple-ingredient that have made Rachel Ray an icon. As a home cook on a limited time budget, I've successfully used these precisely written recipes dozens of times in the past several years.

More importantly, Gourmet has been a pioneer among its glossy peers in making space for a new and fast-growing appetite among American readers: the desire for critical perspectives on the food system. Since editor Ruth Reichl took the helm a decade ago, the magazine has run excellent articles on the quiet rise to ubiquity of genetically modified foods; the ecological damage wrought by industrial farming; the public health damage wrought by trans fats and the FDA's limp response to it; and the abominable working conditions in Florida's tomato fields.

While Reichl trail blazed food politics as a topic for glossies, few of her rival editors had the stomach to make more than baby steps in that direction. Yet given the popularity of books like Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the foodie public clearly craves more information about where their food comes from.

In a sense, then, far from being out of touch with the times, late-model Gourmet was ahead of its time. No doubt, it was bleeding money, and no doubt, its parent company Condé Nast, could no longer afford to maintain its spendy ways. But rather than kill a vital and iconic asset like Gourmet, you could always simply cut its budget.

And this brings us to the real trend behind the Gourmet story: the power of axe-first, ask-later consultants in molding the media landscape in a time of crisis. For weeks now, according to various reports, grim-faced outsiders in suits have swarmed the Condé Nast offices. Employed by the consultancy McKinsey, their evident task is to scrutinize the books and hack away at anything not turning a profit.

Yet in their search for maximum short-term profit and return on invested capital, they tend to be myopic, unable to see beyond the next quarter's bottom-line prospects. They are like the cynic in the Oscar Wilde play--they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. More than the dismal economy and ongoing changes in readers' habits, the biggest threat to good journalism going forward could well be the unaccountable power of consultants.

Indeed, if public interest in the politics and ecology of food continues growing, Condé Nast execs may live to regret their decision to heed McKinsey's counsel on this one. In throwing Gourmet to the dogs, they've sacrificed their one publication with a long track record in telling people where their food comes from--which it did in such a stylish and palatable way.

Note: The essay was first published on Huffington Post Green.

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