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openspace4lifeWhen a scientifically-minded person gets too certain about something, especially something that could justly be called an extraordinary claim, s/he should get a little nervous. I'm a little nervous because my beliefs on both climate change and the current state of our democracy have pretty much solidified: in both cases, we're in the midst of an unprecedented crisis. Here are the best quotes I have to back me up at present (they are rather lengthy, sorry), along with quotes that offer hope for solutions. Please poke holes in them if you can:
"Some environmental stories don't add up. . . . Ask questions, or go and look for yourself, and the story dissolves before your eyes. I like to question everything. I am, I hope in the best sense, a skeptical environmentalist. Sometimes it is bad for business. I have made enemies by questioning theories about advancing deserts, by pointing out that Africa may have more trees than it did a century ago, and by condemning the politics of demographic doomsday merchants.
"But climate change is different. I have been on this beat for eighteen years now. The more I learn the more I go and see for myself, and the more I question scientists, the more scared I get. Because this story does add up, and its message is that we are interfering with the fundamental processes that make Earth habitable [emphasis added]. It is our own survival that is now at stake, not that of a cuddly animal or a natural habitat. [Note: plenty of those are certainly threatened by climate change too...]
"Two important criticisms are made. One is that satellite sensors and instruments carried into the atmosphere aboard weather balloons do not back up surface thermometers. . . .
"Not surprisingly, skeptics have given great play to the suggestion that satellites 'prove' the surface thermometers to be at fault. Not so fast, says [meteorologist Steve] Sherwood [of Yale]. The satellite data are untrustworthy, because they . . . cannot easily distinguish between the troposphere, which is expected to be warming, and the stratosphere, which should be cooling as less heat escapes the lower atmosphere. . . .
"So how good are the balloon data? Here Sherwood found a surprisingly obvious flaw---obvious, at any rate, to anyone who has left an ordinary thermometer out in the sun. The sun's ultraviolet rays shining on the bulb force the temperature reading continuously upwoard so that it no longer measures the air temperature. . . .
"Meteorologists have recently fixed the problem by shielding the thermometers attached to weather balloons inside a white plastic housing. But this was rarely done thirty years ago. . . .
"Two further observations back up this interpretation. First, spurious readings should not be a problem when the sun goes down, so 1960s and 1970s readings at night should be reliable. And sure enough, nighttime balloon data over the past thirty years show a warming trend. Second, the data from both balloons and satellites show a strong cooling in the stratosphere---which is likely only if more heat is truly being trapped beneath it, in the troposphere.
"[The claim that urban heat islands skew the data is belied by the facts that] The largest areas of warming have been recorded over the oceans, and the greatest magnitude of warming is mainly in polar regions, distant from big centers of population. . . .
"One argument is that more radiation reaching us from the sun can account for most of the warming of the past 150 years. This case was made best by the Danish scientists Knud Lassen and Eigil Friis-Christensen in 1991. They found a correlation between sunspot activity . . . and temperature changes on Earth from 1850 onward. Time-based statistical correlations . . . can happen by chance; but the Danes' correlation looked convincing . . . However, newer data have convinced Lassen that solar activity cannot explain more recent climate change. Declining sunspot activity since 1980 should have reduced temperatures on Earth. Instead, they have been rising faster than ever. . . .
"But all that said, I do think the skeptics are important to the arguments about climate science. The desire for consensus is always likely to lead the mainstream scientific community to don blinkers. This has not only blotted out the arguments of skeptics but also sidelined results from the handful of 'rogue' climate models that keep turning up tipping points that could tumble the world into much worse shape than what is currently predicted by the mainstream."
- Fred Pearce, With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change
"Bolted onto the exhaust stacks of a brick-and-glass 20-megawatt power plant behind MIT's campus are rows of fat, clear tubes, each with green algae soup simmering inside.
"Fed a generous helping of CO2-laden emissions, courtesy of the power plant's exhaust stack, the algae grow quickly even in the wan rays of a New England sun. The cleansed exhaust bubbles skyward, but with 40% less CO2 (a larger cut than the Kyoto treaty mandates) and another bonus: 86% less nitrous oxide.
"After the CO2 is soaked up like a sponge, the algae is harvested daily. From that harvest, a combustible vegetable oil is squeezed out: biodiesel for automobiles. [Dr. Isaac] Berzin hands a visitor two vials — one with algal biodiesel, a clear, slightly yellowish liquid, the other with the dried green flakes that remained. Even that dried remnant can be further reprocessed to create ethanol, also used for transportation."
- Mark Clayton, "Algae — like a breath mint for smokestacks," USA Today 1/10/2006
Sound-bite version: The climate crisis is real. We must start mass-producing solar arrays, wind farms, and biofuels made from algae that also captures smokestack emissions. Let's get moving!
"Largely based on proposals written by the White House and Justice Department, the Military Commission Act is breathtaking in its denial of fundamental rights under the Constitution and international law. The law re-establishes virtually intact President Bush's military tribunals, which were rejected by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in Hamdam v Rumsfeld only three months ago.
"It legalizes U.S. war crimes committed before Dec. 30, 2005. It also prevents people harmed by the U.S. in violation of the Geneva Conventions from filing a claim in a U.S. court and strips legal residents of their right to challenge their detention in court if they are accused of being enemy combatants. It retroactively abolishes the right of Guantanamo detainees to challenge their detention [Habeas Corpus, sometimes referred to as the "wellspring of liberty"], approves the CIA program that in the past allowed waterboarding and other forms of torture and designates any individuals as unlawful enemy combatants if they provide material support to those engaged in hostilities against the U.S., a concept previously found unconstitutionally vague by the U.S. District Court for the Central District, in Los Angeles. Even worse, the law expands the definition 'unlawful enemy combatant' to include anyone determined as such by a tribunal under the authority of the president or the defense secretary [emphasis added]. The law denies anyone determined to be an enemy combatant - or anyone 'awaiting such determination' - the right to challenge his or her detention, treatment or conditions of confinement in court.
"The law not only lacks explicit prohibitions against the sadistic U.S. government abuses since 9/11 but also authorizes the president to define Geneva Conventions violations as he sees fit. There is no clear bar to the Bush administration once again authorizing illegal acts such as waterboarding, death threats, induced hypothermia, use of dogs and stress positions. . . .
"The new law strips the courts of their constitutional role as a check on the executive branch, including their authority to ensure that the protections of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions are enforced. Even a detainee who is tortured will not be allowed to seek relief from any U.S. court. Denying access to the courts signals to the world that we fear our own independent judiciary. . . .
"Although the law does allow limited appeals for those who go before a military commission or a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, there is no guarantee that any person detained by our government will be provided either a trial or a tribunal. Even when the government holds a tribunal proceeding, the decision can be based on coerced and hearsay evidence. Moreover, based on the reports from tribunal proceedings in Guantanamo, most, if not all, of the detainees are being held based almost entirely on evidence they may never have seen. . . .
"Congress has never before authorized federal prosecutors to use evidence obtained by torture or abuse in any criminal trial. The new law allows convictions based on statements made by people who may have been willing to invent anything to stop the pain."
- Stephen Rhode, "Military Commissions Act Shames the Constitution and Weakens America," editorial in Tikkun Magazine written in October 2006
"Nixon's impeachment took 3 months, and Clinton's 2 (plus 2 more for a trial in the Senate). No past impeachment has taken the 8 months this Congress has now wasted avoiding impeachment in order to fund the occupation of Iraq and legalize an illegal spying program.
"Impeaching Nixon put a halt to criminal activities, put the President on the defensive, allowed a more significant correction to the minimum wage than this Congress passed at the cost of funding war, allowed the creation of the Endangered Species Act, and forced Nixon to back off on veto threats allowing Congress to end the war in Vietnam. Impeaching Nixon resulted in the biggest Democratic electoral victories in modern times. Impeaching Nixon resulted in a positive legislative direction post-Nixon, including the creation of the law that this Congress just shredded: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
"Putting the impeachment of Ronald Reagan for Iran-Contra off the table, for exactly the reasons Dodd regurgitates today, resulted in Democratic defeats and the birth of the Bush dynasty.
"If you read back through 230 years of impeachment attempts, as you can easily do in John Nichol's genius of a book, 'The Genius of Impeachment,' you'll find that impeachment efforts when merited are always electorally beneficial, and failure to attempt impeachment when merited hurts the opposition party. Clinton's impeachment was unique in that the public opposed it, yet the Republicans who rammed it down our throats held onto both houses and the White House. . . .
"[What would happen if the American people told our representatives] that they don't want a year and a half of passing bills for show that will be vetoed, that they have other priorities than the elimination of the Fourth Amendment, that they want the Bill of Rights restored through the means given to us by the authors of the Constitution, that they want Bush and Cheney impeached and they want it now?"
- David Swanson, "Senator Dodd Thinks You're Stupid," on AfterDowningStreet.org
Sound-bite version: Lying us into war? Warrentless spying on Americans? Torture? Habeas Corpus eliminated? Let's make sure future presidents don't think they can get away with this. Impeach now!
Also, here's a rather over-the-top comic version. (Well, it's possible that we'll have a king by 2024, but he certainly won't call himself one in public.)
"Some environmental stories don't add up. . . . Ask questions, or go and look for yourself, and the story dissolves before your eyes. I like to question everything. I am, I hope in the best sense, a skeptical environmentalist. Sometimes it is bad for business. I have made enemies by questioning theories about advancing deserts, by pointing out that Africa may have more trees than it did a century ago, and by condemning the politics of demographic doomsday merchants.
"But climate change is different. I have been on this beat for eighteen years now. The more I learn the more I go and see for myself, and the more I question scientists, the more scared I get. Because this story does add up, and its message is that we are interfering with the fundamental processes that make Earth habitable [emphasis added]. It is our own survival that is now at stake, not that of a cuddly animal or a natural habitat. [Note: plenty of those are certainly threatened by climate change too...]
"Two important criticisms are made. One is that satellite sensors and instruments carried into the atmosphere aboard weather balloons do not back up surface thermometers. . . .
"Not surprisingly, skeptics have given great play to the suggestion that satellites 'prove' the surface thermometers to be at fault. Not so fast, says [meteorologist Steve] Sherwood [of Yale]. The satellite data are untrustworthy, because they . . . cannot easily distinguish between the troposphere, which is expected to be warming, and the stratosphere, which should be cooling as less heat escapes the lower atmosphere. . . .
"So how good are the balloon data? Here Sherwood found a surprisingly obvious flaw---obvious, at any rate, to anyone who has left an ordinary thermometer out in the sun. The sun's ultraviolet rays shining on the bulb force the temperature reading continuously upwoard so that it no longer measures the air temperature. . . .
"Meteorologists have recently fixed the problem by shielding the thermometers attached to weather balloons inside a white plastic housing. But this was rarely done thirty years ago. . . .
"Two further observations back up this interpretation. First, spurious readings should not be a problem when the sun goes down, so 1960s and 1970s readings at night should be reliable. And sure enough, nighttime balloon data over the past thirty years show a warming trend. Second, the data from both balloons and satellites show a strong cooling in the stratosphere---which is likely only if more heat is truly being trapped beneath it, in the troposphere.
"[The claim that urban heat islands skew the data is belied by the facts that] The largest areas of warming have been recorded over the oceans, and the greatest magnitude of warming is mainly in polar regions, distant from big centers of population. . . .
"One argument is that more radiation reaching us from the sun can account for most of the warming of the past 150 years. This case was made best by the Danish scientists Knud Lassen and Eigil Friis-Christensen in 1991. They found a correlation between sunspot activity . . . and temperature changes on Earth from 1850 onward. Time-based statistical correlations . . . can happen by chance; but the Danes' correlation looked convincing . . . However, newer data have convinced Lassen that solar activity cannot explain more recent climate change. Declining sunspot activity since 1980 should have reduced temperatures on Earth. Instead, they have been rising faster than ever. . . .
"But all that said, I do think the skeptics are important to the arguments about climate science. The desire for consensus is always likely to lead the mainstream scientific community to don blinkers. This has not only blotted out the arguments of skeptics but also sidelined results from the handful of 'rogue' climate models that keep turning up tipping points that could tumble the world into much worse shape than what is currently predicted by the mainstream."
- Fred Pearce, With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change
"Bolted onto the exhaust stacks of a brick-and-glass 20-megawatt power plant behind MIT's campus are rows of fat, clear tubes, each with green algae soup simmering inside.
"Fed a generous helping of CO2-laden emissions, courtesy of the power plant's exhaust stack, the algae grow quickly even in the wan rays of a New England sun. The cleansed exhaust bubbles skyward, but with 40% less CO2 (a larger cut than the Kyoto treaty mandates) and another bonus: 86% less nitrous oxide.
"After the CO2 is soaked up like a sponge, the algae is harvested daily. From that harvest, a combustible vegetable oil is squeezed out: biodiesel for automobiles. [Dr. Isaac] Berzin hands a visitor two vials — one with algal biodiesel, a clear, slightly yellowish liquid, the other with the dried green flakes that remained. Even that dried remnant can be further reprocessed to create ethanol, also used for transportation."
- Mark Clayton, "Algae — like a breath mint for smokestacks," USA Today 1/10/2006
Sound-bite version: The climate crisis is real. We must start mass-producing solar arrays, wind farms, and biofuels made from algae that also captures smokestack emissions. Let's get moving!
"Largely based on proposals written by the White House and Justice Department, the Military Commission Act is breathtaking in its denial of fundamental rights under the Constitution and international law. The law re-establishes virtually intact President Bush's military tribunals, which were rejected by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in Hamdam v Rumsfeld only three months ago.
"It legalizes U.S. war crimes committed before Dec. 30, 2005. It also prevents people harmed by the U.S. in violation of the Geneva Conventions from filing a claim in a U.S. court and strips legal residents of their right to challenge their detention in court if they are accused of being enemy combatants. It retroactively abolishes the right of Guantanamo detainees to challenge their detention [Habeas Corpus, sometimes referred to as the "wellspring of liberty"], approves the CIA program that in the past allowed waterboarding and other forms of torture and designates any individuals as unlawful enemy combatants if they provide material support to those engaged in hostilities against the U.S., a concept previously found unconstitutionally vague by the U.S. District Court for the Central District, in Los Angeles. Even worse, the law expands the definition 'unlawful enemy combatant' to include anyone determined as such by a tribunal under the authority of the president or the defense secretary [emphasis added]. The law denies anyone determined to be an enemy combatant - or anyone 'awaiting such determination' - the right to challenge his or her detention, treatment or conditions of confinement in court.
"The law not only lacks explicit prohibitions against the sadistic U.S. government abuses since 9/11 but also authorizes the president to define Geneva Conventions violations as he sees fit. There is no clear bar to the Bush administration once again authorizing illegal acts such as waterboarding, death threats, induced hypothermia, use of dogs and stress positions. . . .
"The new law strips the courts of their constitutional role as a check on the executive branch, including their authority to ensure that the protections of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions are enforced. Even a detainee who is tortured will not be allowed to seek relief from any U.S. court. Denying access to the courts signals to the world that we fear our own independent judiciary. . . .
"Although the law does allow limited appeals for those who go before a military commission or a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, there is no guarantee that any person detained by our government will be provided either a trial or a tribunal. Even when the government holds a tribunal proceeding, the decision can be based on coerced and hearsay evidence. Moreover, based on the reports from tribunal proceedings in Guantanamo, most, if not all, of the detainees are being held based almost entirely on evidence they may never have seen. . . .
"Congress has never before authorized federal prosecutors to use evidence obtained by torture or abuse in any criminal trial. The new law allows convictions based on statements made by people who may have been willing to invent anything to stop the pain."
- Stephen Rhode, "Military Commissions Act Shames the Constitution and Weakens America," editorial in Tikkun Magazine written in October 2006
"Nixon's impeachment took 3 months, and Clinton's 2 (plus 2 more for a trial in the Senate). No past impeachment has taken the 8 months this Congress has now wasted avoiding impeachment in order to fund the occupation of Iraq and legalize an illegal spying program.
"Impeaching Nixon put a halt to criminal activities, put the President on the defensive, allowed a more significant correction to the minimum wage than this Congress passed at the cost of funding war, allowed the creation of the Endangered Species Act, and forced Nixon to back off on veto threats allowing Congress to end the war in Vietnam. Impeaching Nixon resulted in the biggest Democratic electoral victories in modern times. Impeaching Nixon resulted in a positive legislative direction post-Nixon, including the creation of the law that this Congress just shredded: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
"Putting the impeachment of Ronald Reagan for Iran-Contra off the table, for exactly the reasons Dodd regurgitates today, resulted in Democratic defeats and the birth of the Bush dynasty.
"If you read back through 230 years of impeachment attempts, as you can easily do in John Nichol's genius of a book, 'The Genius of Impeachment,' you'll find that impeachment efforts when merited are always electorally beneficial, and failure to attempt impeachment when merited hurts the opposition party. Clinton's impeachment was unique in that the public opposed it, yet the Republicans who rammed it down our throats held onto both houses and the White House. . . .
"[What would happen if the American people told our representatives] that they don't want a year and a half of passing bills for show that will be vetoed, that they have other priorities than the elimination of the Fourth Amendment, that they want the Bill of Rights restored through the means given to us by the authors of the Constitution, that they want Bush and Cheney impeached and they want it now?"
- David Swanson, "Senator Dodd Thinks You're Stupid," on AfterDowningStreet.org
Sound-bite version: Lying us into war? Warrentless spying on Americans? Torture? Habeas Corpus eliminated? Let's make sure future presidents don't think they can get away with this. Impeach now!
Also, here's a rather over-the-top comic version. (Well, it's possible that we'll have a king by 2024, but he certainly won't call himself one in public.)
Algae-to-biodiesel, skepticism
Date: 2007-08-11 04:06 pm (UTC)Of course, that doesn't address your skepticism question. In that vein: Clayton's assessment is strengthened by his claim that he actually checks this stuff out and rejects the thin soup of tree-hugging fear-mongering in favor of the hardest data and deepest thought available. In the scientific view, truth is very rare -- Clayton (and you, and I) agree that our best working hypothesis -- fossil carbon emissions are warming Earth quickly -- strongly favors rapid action to slash those emissions. In contrast, Niven-esque speculation that more CO2 is good -- we're actually saving ourselves from an ice age -- doesn't reflect skepticism; it evinces magical thinking in which we choose to believe what's convenient and comforting. It panders to energy expediency, almost like claiming that smoking improves health.
You seem to be asking how one takes a firm stance and yet remain true to scientific skepticism. Evidence strongly points to a correlation between CO2 and temperature, and shows a dramatic rise in CO2 in recent years. We can say that corresponding, worrisome environmental changes justify strong, prompt action. Focusing too much on the real possibility that you're wrong about this will harm your effectiveness; healthy skepticism need not deter you from taking a strong stand.