How Peer Review is Used to Shut Down Debate

Peer review is not ‘the foundation of the scientific process’ as a NASA scientist claims. And climate scientists have no business telling the public where scientific arguments can and cannot be conducted.

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Green Death Threats: 'Change or Die'

The key message of today’s environmentalists is: Accept our worldview, submit to our solutions – or else. This is, let us be blunt, a death threat. It is the voice of an extortionist.

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Naked Intolerance in the Media

Why does climate change elicit so much partisan sneering on the part of the media?

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NASA, Climate Change, and Children

NASA used to be about the right stuff. It used to be about knowledge, human ingenuity, and the triumph of sheer brainpower in the face of unfavourable odds. Now, rather than seeking to inspire kids, NASA tries to frighten them.

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James Hansen Drags NASA into His Personal Politics

In a democratic society there are endless ways to protest lawfully and creatively. When people deliberately choose to break the law for political reasons, they do so knowing that criminal penalties apply. If they feel strongly enough to pay those penalties, they sometimes earn the grudging respect of those who disagree with them.

Dr. James Hansen is the Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Yesterday he signed a letter (along with Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, and Terry Tempest Williams) which declares that a young man whom everyone admits broke the law should not be prosecuted next month in Salt Lake City. Not because he is remorseful and has seen the error of his ways - but because, in the words of the letter: "We don’t want Tim on trial—we want global warming on the stand."

The letter acknowledges that Tim DeChristopher "bid for the oil and gas leases on several parcels of federal land even though he had no money to pay for them" thus sabotaging a federal auction and violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act.

Hansen thinks DeCristopher performed "a noble act, a profound gesture made on behalf of all of us and of the future." He sees this young man as someone "who blew the whistle" on a process that was "corrupt". No evidence of any corruption is supplied (or linked to). Instead, we're supposed to be persuaded by vague allegations:

Tim’s action drew national attention to the fact that the Bush Administration spent its dying days in office handing out a last round of favors to the oil and gas industry. After investigating irregularities in the auction, the Obama Administration took many of the leases off the table, with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar criticizing the process as “a headlong rush.”

The letter that Hansen signed further declares:

• "Tim’s upcoming trial is an occasion to raise the alarm once more about the peril our planet faces."
• "Outside the courthouse, there will be a mock trial, with experts like NASA’s Jim Hansen providing the facts that should be heard inside the chambers."
• "Demonstrators will be using the time-honored tactics of civil disobedience to make their voices heard outside the courthouse in an effort to prevent “business as usual”—it’s business as usual that’s wrecking the earth."
• "we won’t sit idly by while the government tries to scare the environmental movement into meek cooperation. This kind of trial is nothing but intimidation..."
• "Tim DeChristopher deserves and needs our physical and spiritual support in the name of a just and vibrant community." [bold added]
  

It would be difficult to find many people heartless enough to condemn this young man to the ten years in prison the letter claims he's at risk of.

But it may be equally difficult to find many who are comfortable with the way Hansen, via this letter, has dragged NASA's good name into this matter.

Hansen's personal political views are his own business. But NASA belongs to - and is supposed to serve - all Americans. When a senior NASA official declares that lawbreakers "deserve" support for their "noble" gestures - well, you know what they say about Houston having a problem.

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Feb. 10, 2010 UPDATE: On reflection, I think it's useful to emphasize that the body of this letter doesn't mention the credentials of the three other signatories. It doesn't say that Naomi Klein, a best-selling author and world-renowned left-wing intellectual, will give evidence at the mock trial activists plan to hold outside. It doesn't say that Bill McKibben, who wrote the first book on global warming for a mainstream audience and who is now the director of 350.org, will take an active part in the demonstrations. It doesn't tell us about the credentials of author, activist, and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams and what his contribution to the protests will be.

There's a blurb at the top of the screen that discusses everyone's credentials, yes. In that context, we're grandiosely advised that Hansen is "regarded as the world's leading climatologist." But the letter itself highlights only the participation of Hansen - drawing attention to his association with NASA and his allegedly "expert" standing in the context of what is a highly political - rather than a scientific - discussion.

Many professionals routinely preface their public remarks outside of their workplace with a disclaimer that says, in essence, that the views they're expressing are not the views of their employers. In this letter, however, a deliberate effort is made to lend the entire affair respectability by trading on NASA's reputation.

I would never suggest that Hansen doesn't have the same right to free speech as any other citizen. What I have a problem with is people who confuse a scientist's personal political views with science itself.

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>> NASA's mistaken glacier info
>> James Hansen and the experts
>> Systemic failure: invasion of the drama queens
>> Yes Virginia, the climate bible relies on newspaper clippings

Systemic Failure: Invasion of the Drama Queens

I love the boys over at Climate-Resistance.org because they're big-picture thinkers. Their analysis emphasizes the ethical, philosophical, and political aspects of the climate discussion.

This week they've been saying that replacing Rajendra Pachauri as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) won't solve our problems. Personally, I think he needs to go. But it's true we'd be having a totally different discussion had numerous parties not failed us.

You have to be a bit of a drama queen to interpret a few degrees increase in temperature over the span of a century as a catastrophe. The fact that this mindset has been adopted by so many people means the failure has been systemic.

That's it man. Game over, game over. sound bite Aliens sound bites

Private Hudson (Bill Paxton), Aliens

Let's look at those who are now tainted by their support for the outrageously flawed 2007 IPCC climate report:

1. The United Nations, the wicked stepmother of this sad story. The IPCC is a United Nations creation. But it has no conflict-of-interest guidelines. It has no checks-and-balances to prevent its hijacking by special interests. It is also exempt from the sort of Freedom of Information provisions now commonplace in democratic nations. In other words, it lacks accountability and is structurally a disaster.
   


2. The Nobel Peace Prize committee, which devalued its most precious resource. The Nobel committee bestowed its seal of approval jointly on the IPCC and Al Gore - even though there are significant discrepancies between what the IPCC says will happen and what Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, dramatically implies. Now that the government of India has established its own climate body, and the government of the Netherlands says the IPCC got basic facts wrong (regarding the percentage of its country that falls below sea level), the Nobel prize has never seemed more tarnished.
   


3. NASA, supposedly a purveyor of scientifically-sound info. Until late January of this year, NASA parroted on its website the absurd IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by the 2030s. According to Jeffrey Kargel, at the University of Arizona, this statement "was just so wrong it wasn’t worth discussing." Surely the question needs to be asked: if NASA is clueless about such matters, why should we pay attention to anything it says about climate change going forward?


4. The science academies of more than a dozen of the world's best-educated nations. Reputable organizations such as the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of the UK have endorsed the IPCC's climate analysis. This joint 2008 statement cites the IPCC as though it were the purveyor of gospel. Did it not occur to these folks that third-party verification of IPCC findings should be undertaken before they, too, declared that the entire world needed to "transition to a low carbon society"? Drug trial results are closely scrutinized. Corporate financial statements are routinely audited. Yet science academy bureaucrats told us to blindly trust IPCC reports.
   


5. Prestigious, influential science journals. While the public assumes such journals are devoted solely to rigorous scientific inquiry, one-sided political commentary regarding global warming has appeared in the editorials of these publications since at least 2001. In 2008, Nature (owned by Macmillan Publishers which is, in turn, owned by the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group) even endorsed Barack Obama for US president. We're naive to imagine that the science media isn't political. [more here]
   


6. The mainstream media, who've become a cheerleading squad. It's the media's job to hold governments accountable, to shine light on special interests and snake-oil salesmen, to promote informed discussion about vital issues of the day. Instead, journalists fell for some of the lamest lines imaginable: the "science is settled" and the "debate is over." Rather than providing their readers, viewers, and listeners with the opportunity to make up their own minds (in a democracy, voters get to decide for themselves, remember?), journalists gushed over Al Gore's eco crusade and ignored skeptics. This is called betraying the public trust.


7. Environmental groups, who've morphed into big business. Green activists say they're saving the world. They're also empire building. As Climate-Resistance points out, between 2003 and 2008 the World Wildlife Fund raised $3.1 billion dollars. Similarly, Greenpeace raised $2.4 billion over a 12-year period. To keep that kind of money flowing into their coffers, might some people be willing to exaggerate environmental threats?
   


8. Politicians from top to bottom, from one end of the spectrum to the other. Wrapping oneself in a green cloak is easy. But solving tough problems in the real world is what they're elected to do. In Toronto, where I live, public transit faces dramatic funding cuts and there isn't enough money to keep school swimming pools open. But ads in my community newspaper tell me that grants "of up to $25,000 are available" to environmental groups for projects that "reduce emissions... and help us adapt to climate change." The more I examine governments around the developed world, the more I find this pattern.
   


9. Ordinary folks like you and me. Yes, many of us have busy lives. We're focused on getting our families through the week, and through the school year. Some of us are coping with illness and injury. We don't have endless hours to untangle complicated political questions. But before we make up our minds about a matter as important as climate change, should we not spend some time listening to more than one side of the story? We wouldn't convict someone of a crime without giving them an opportunity to defend themselves. We shouldn't convict carbon dioxide emissions of triggering all manner of disaster before we've considered the opinion of one or two people who think this theory is nonsense.
   

We've all contributed to this train wreck. Now we need to stare down the drama queens and start behaving like grownups.

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>> NASA's mistaken glacier info
>> The big picture: the Y2K lesson
>> Science says: hop on one foot
>> Scientific organizations: should we trust them?

NASA's Mistaken Glacier Info

[click image for a larger version of this screengrab
taken of NASA's website on Jan. 19, 2010 ]

We can trust NASA, right? It puts people on the moon, sends missions to Mars, has a stellar scientific reputation, etcetera, etcetera.

The second sentence is true, but answering the question that precedes it is complicated. Whatever else might be said about NASA, in the context of the global warming debate one fact predominates: it has, inadvertently or otherwise, provided a prestigious platform to its employee, Dr. James Hansen.

(Hansen is an activist climate scientist whom many regard as the person most responsible for popularizing the idea of catastrophic global warming. See my blog post here and the second-last paragraph of this one for a taste of his controversial views and behaviour. Joanne Nova has a post about an eco-terrorist book he has endorsed. Some feel Hansen uses his association with NASA to lend his opinions an aura of unwarranted scientific certainty - thus tarnishing the reputation of his employer in the process. See here and here.)

Now NASA finds itself with egg on its face regarding the erroneous United Nations report that claimed Himalayan glaciers were at risk of disappearing by 2035. (Such an event would be significant because this could impact water supplies upon which billions of people depend.)

It turns out, NASA - the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - has a web page on which it declares that the "evidence for abrupt climate change is compelling." However, rather than making an argument based on its own, direct expertise, NASA merely repeats claims contained in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) Nobel-prize-winning report.

Up until January 19th of this year, five of the six footnotes on the NASA web page referred to various parts of that report. On January 20, however, the IPCC repudiated the 2035 estimate after media attention revealed that most glacier experts consider it absurd.

As one would hope and expect, NASA has since taken steps to correct what it tells the public regarding this matter. Rather than repeating the mistaken idea that Himalayan glaciers may "disappear altogether" within a few decades it now says: "Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa." (This neglects to mention that glaciers have been expanding and retreating for much of the planet's history, but never mind.)

There's an interesting twist, though. As the image at the top of this post reveals (click HERE for an enlargement), when NASA was passing along the earlier info to the public it shaved five years from what was already an unrealistic number.

The IPCC report used the year 2035. NASA told the little kids who visit its website that this would happen even sooner - in 2030.

Was this a careless typo - or an example of layering hype over hype? Who knows. The important point is that we're all fallible. Many of the things we believe - and pass along to others - may, in fact, be supported by meagre evidence, indeed.

My original title for this blog post was: "NASA Said It, So it Must Be True." In the grownup world, that's actually not the case.

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>> James Hansen drags NASA into his personal politics
>> Scientific organizations - should we trust them?
>> Climate psychics: 10-year-old snow prediction fails miserably
>> The cult of the expert