GELFAND’S WORLD-I'm tired of the cliche that it's somehow all right for political candidates to lie. "Politics ain't beanbag" is the chosen defense of mud slinging by a few sleazy folks who get paid to do it. We ought to automatically discredit any campaign manager who uses that phrase. But that's candidates lying about each other, a different topic from what I want to talk about here. Instead, I want to discuss the way that political candidates rely on cheap, indefensible lies to hammer on some particular ideology, and usually get away with it. As exhibit A, I'm going to talk about a candidate -- otherwise polite and refined -- who managed to pull off one of the least defensible attacks on global warming I've heard (and suffered through) in many a month.
It was at a forum for a local candidate for the state legislature. My district is definably Democratic in the way it votes, so perhaps it wasn't much of a surprise that this particular person didn't actually mention his own political identification on the campaign postcard.
No. It became apparent rapidly that this wasn't one of your run of the mill Democrats fighting it out for an open seat. This was a Republican who despises the Affordable Care Act. I will give him credit for one thing. He was willing to put up with a couple of folks who disputed his every utterance about the delivery of healthcare in California, including me.
He did manage to give as well as he got on one point. His question, a little more than rhetorical, went like this: If there are really 30 million people in this country who lack health insurance, then why have only a fraction of this number actually signed up for Obamacare? I suspect that there is an answer to this question, but I didn't have it, and the question seems to be a legitimate one for now.
There were other topics that came and went, but right at the end, this gentleman tossed out a remark that has, I'm afraid, cost any respect I might have had, speaking as a scientist, for his campaign ethics.
First, the remark, and then a little bit of analysis about why I think it's symptomatic of a lot of things that are wrong in American politics. One hint -- part of the analysis involves the failure of the American mass media to consider the truth or falsity of candidate statements productively.
Here's the remark and the context. I had been responding to the candidate's remarks about healthcare with stories of my own, including the story which found its way into City Watch as The Socialized Medicine Horror Show. I suspect that this caused me to be viewed as a kind of voice of the opposition, even though I'm not, technically speaking, registered to any political party at the moment. So this candidate looked at me and said, "You're going to hate me for this." He then argued that global warming is not legitimate, and that observed differences, such as they are, are due to solar flares.
I've paraphrased a little, but not to such an extent as to modify his meaning. Solar Flares. No real global warming, except of a naturally occurring variety.
I'm going to couch my response in tiers. The first will be to dispose of the solar flare argument in two sentences. The second will be to explain how the scientifically minded thinker would actually consider the possibility of, and evidence for, global warming of human derivation. The third tier will be to try to explain how the desperate politician and the mass media collude.
The first two sentences: A couple of scientists wondered about the effects of solar flares on earth's climate, because it's legitimate to consider any and all possible causes; they published data which included a graph which looked like there could be a correlation between observed surface temperatures on earth and the number of solar flares. Then another group looked at the data more closely and showed that there actually is no proper correlation between solar flares and earth's climate, debunking the original hypothesis.
In other words, the scientific process worked. A not-inconceivable hypothesis was raised along with a little preliminary supportive data, and then the evaluation process continued in a way that looked more closely and in so doing, undercut the original idea. That's how the system is supposed to work. At the current time, you won't find a lot of serious planetary scientists who buy into solar flares as the cause of the observed changes in global surface temperatures. That's because there probably is no such correlation.
That doesn't mean there aren't a few people who still oppose the building consensus that there is anthropogenic global warming (a fancy term for "we caused it by burning stuff"), but they are getting fewer and farther between. Still, if you wanted to take the party line viewpoint that there is no global warming, or that it exists but we didn't cause it, or that it exists and we caused some of it, but there is nothing we can do about it -- well then, you could take one of these positions and at least be somewhere inside of the Republican tent. You'd be wrong, but you would have company in your ignorance.
But solar flares? This is just too easy a target, and it doesn't take more than a couple of minutes (even just using Google) to find the original argument and its refutation. Think of that solar flare argument as a form of intellectual laziness.
So why did this candidate pull that argument out? For the life of me, I don't know, but the best explanation is that it's all he had, because he's not a planetary scientist, and he wanted to make some remark that went contrary to the increasingly majoritarian point of view. Maybe he's just not scientifically centered, and as far as he is concerned, one scientific sounding hypothesis is as good as any other when it comes to speaking to the rubes. That kind of attitude, if that's what we were seeing, is awfully insulting to the people who dedicate thousands of hours of study and their whole lives to trying to find scientific truth.
As I said, I don't know the motivation for being so sloppy about something that is, after all, one of our most compelling problems. The important lesson for the rest of us is that political candidates get away with this kind of sloppiness when it comes to science and engineering. If the topic were the law of eminent domain or the wording in the Constitution, there would be no such leeway. A slip of the tongue about what Article IV says about Full Faith and Credit, and you are raw meat for the journalistic piranhas. But claim that carbon dioxide doesn't do what is described in a standard textbook of organic chemistry, and you are home free.
It's easy to point out that the press messes up on scientific stories because journalists are usually painfully ignorant of science and math. I know it's easy to point this out because I've been doing it for more than a decade, and nobody has bothered to refute me. But I think there is a deeper problem than ignorance of Maxwell's equations or failure to be able to compute a Lorentz transformation.
The problem, it becomes increasingly apparent, is that a lot of journalists get lost in the story of how scientific consensus comes about, and what it means to point out that some consensus exists.
Let's consider global warming from a fairly superficial, but more historical point of view. Planetary scientists like to explain that the increase in carbon dioxide was observed, and the results published, several decades ago. The fact that a greenhouse process exists was added to the thinking process, and out of this came a working hypothesis that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere could result in more and more heat being trapped within the atmosphere and ultimately being absorbed in the oceans, lakes, and land masses at the earth's surface.
In other words, the observed increase in carbon dioxide and the known effects of carbon dioxide at the theoretical level provided a hypothesis that was and continues to be subject to experimental testing in the real world. And scientists did just that.
There's one other point that needs to be understood. Suppose you have a working hypothesis that a buildup of carbon dioxide will cause a runaway greenhouse effect and therefore threaten the existence of human civilization. How do you test your hypothesis?
The answer is that it isn't always obvious how to test your hypothesis. That's why science can be hard to do, and why a lovely hypothesis is not necessarily accepted as demonstrable right away.
But when you have results from very different approaches that are consistent with each other, then this strengthens the conclusion.
In the case of anthropogenic global warming, scientists went after the question from various directions. One method is just to measure temperatures as well as you can. You can do it on earth and in the ocean, and importantly to this discussion, we have also been able to do measurements from space for several decades now. You can try to get information about what the earth's temperature has been for the past several thousand years, and how much snow fell in a couple of places. Scientists did all of those things. Not only that, but they went back and looked at data collected over the past half century and more of antarctic exploration. They looked at tree ring records to get some estimate of climate and rainfall over the centuries.
Now let's consider what happens when you do these kinds of studies for either (a) a hypothesis that isn't very good or (b) a hypothesis that is correct. I think it should be obvious that in the case of the weak hypothesis your results can be all over the place. Some may be supportive, but others not so much. Those are the kinds of hypotheses that get thrown out after a while.
But when something is really real, the experiments tend to go in the same direction. Let's say, for example, that you have just read Newton's account of gravitational attraction. Whether you happen to have read it in England or Australia, you can do the same sorts of experiments and get pretty much the same results. You can drop cannon balls off of towers and measure the time they take to hit bottom, and you won't see a lot of difference between spring and fall, or what latitude you are at.
That kind of result is what is called robust. The robustness is in the hypothesis, since it gives correct predictions under different circumstances and different kinds of experimentation.
And this is the kind of result structure that has been developing in the case of anthropogenic global warming. It's getting robust. False avenues and detours like the solar flare hypothesis get sanded away. One famous professor at Berkeley, initially skeptical, agreed to review the world's data and came away convinced that the hypothesis works and things are every bit as bad as the global warming crowd has been saying.
So here is the difference between the honest man, defined here as somebody who is willing to look at the evidence in the entirety vs. the alternative, the political hack. The hack does the opposite, by looking for some cherry picked outlier of an experiment, and uses that as an excuse to be a naysayer.
The smart approach in a scientific controversy is to look at the evidence in its entirety, from all sources, and weighted according to the precision and believability of each component. Let's put it this way -- measurements of infrared emissions carried out by an orbiting satellite are highly believable for what they are. Considered in the context of tens of thousands of measurements of like believability, we begin to get the overall context and the inner details of what is going on at our planetary surface.
The press consists of lots of writers and editors, few of whom have any inkling of what kind of knowledge or background it takes to understand this kind of science. At a loss for full understanding, they do what they have been taught to do, which is to interview people who can be expected to have expertise. This often works fairly well.
The journalists don't actually understand how equations that model areas of the earth's surface are put together in some giant computer simulation. Those things are complicated and involve math. They also involve computer languages. No, the best the journalists can do is to find somebody who is trustworthy and who is able to communicate.
Well, what happens when some corporate group has a financial reason to spread lies instead of the truth -- like the lie that there is no anthropogenic global warming? And this group sets up nonprofit foundations whose main function is to view everything in nature through a particular ideological filter?
Well then, we have what the journalists see as "two sides to the story."
To the honorable scientists who are trying to warn the world that global warming exists and that it may be every bit as bad as it could be, the idea of "two sides" is beyond criminality. It is evil, because it seeks to mislead mankind to do things that put our entire future at risk.
But to the journalistic profession, the idea that there are opposing sides isn't evil. To that profession, the competition is a useful thing, because it provides dramatic tension. It's the narrative hook that grabs the reader. After all, dramatic tension is what makes plays and movies work, and it's taught to aspiring writers as a necessary element if you want your stuff to sell.
In the literary environment in which journalism itself is subject to the temptation to jazz things up with a little dramatic tension, we have the perfect situation for the cynical politician. He just gives them something they want, and they run with it. In his case, it's a narrative which allows the writer (or television host) to say with all feigned sincerity, "But there are some people who don't accept global warming."
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch and can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 22
Pub: Mar 14, 2014