Escaping the Herd Mentality — Climate Progress Points Out that Accurate Climate Change Reporting Would Blend the Existing Scientific Consensus with More Extreme Modeling Predictions — Rather than Erroneously Tempering Science with Anti-Scientific Denial — and My Related Comment about the Inertia of Ignorance and Its Grip on Science Journalism and the Public

27 November 2012

Definition of basic “intellectual progress” — knowing what we (sort of) know and having hints about what we almost certainly do not

Three basic obstacles get in the way of having a solid grasp on what we know and what we don’t. These include:

(1) Challenges simultaneously presented by:

(a) recruiting statistically adequate subject numbers,

(b) employing scientifically valid experimental procedures,

and

(2) Distortions in one or more of the above elements, due to research bias.

(3) And, more broadly, inertia-like complacence generated by ignorance among the public and its news media.

Regarding Problems 1 and 2 — statistical requirements for proof and research bias

I have often written about the statistical and experimental difficulty of knowing anything “for sure” in science and medicine. And I have further indicated that personal and institutionalized avarice plays a significant role in introducing untruth into both endeavors.

See, for example — regarding statistics and avarice-based bias

Here — statistical/research difficulty of proving anything “for sure”

Here — problems presented by biological complexity and research bias

Here — example of mistaken science assumptions, combined with poor reporting

Here — financial self-interest leading to potential research bias in creating vaccines

Here — how pharmaceutical research ignores the most basic experimental procedures

Here — financial interests captured expert panels that issue clinical practice guidelines

Here — how the Medical-Industrial Complex corrupted one school of medicine

Here — how self-interest destroyed important medical research at Duke

Here — more details about how Duke University lied to patients

Here — representative difficulty of communicating science to doctors and patients

Here — complacently not looking for medical answers where one obviously should

Here — institutionalized invention of bogus diseases for profit and lying about proofs

Here — surprising proportion of physicians lying to patients

Problem 3 — the Inertia of Ignorance

In addition to statistical sources of error and avarice-related bias, there also exists what we can call the “Inertia of Ignorance.”

When people do not know how to think critically, or don’t know how to reason in scientific terms and they are ignorant of basic scientific facts — they serve as cultural obstacle to intellectual advance. This is especially true in allegedly democratic countries, where the lowest common denominator of understanding tends to limit what can be accomplished.

This Inertia of Ignorance accounts for:

(a) the media’s characteristically mistaken or misleading reporting on science and medicine

and

(b) the public’s frequently unquestioning acceptance of journalism’s miscommunications.

A pertinent example — insightfully provided by Joe Romm at Climate Progress

Joe Romm’s excellent blog, Climate Progress, yesterday emphasized an aspect of the ignorance phenomenon and journalism’s role in perpetuating it.

Citation — to the Climate Progress blog entry that much of the following is based on

Joe Romm, New Scientist Special Report: 7 Reasons Climate Change Is ‘Even Worse Than We Thought’, Climate Progress (26 November 2012)

Which itself is based on —

Michael LePage, Climate change: It's even worse than we thought, New Scientist 2891: 34-39 (17 November 2012)

These articles (taken together) make two points

These are:

Climate models have underestimated the rapidity and magnitude of effects of global warming

and

the news media under-reported what we knew, even before this new evidence came in.

Joe Romm’s point about journalism’s silly reporting

Dr. Romm (PhD from MIT in physics) seized on a cautionary climate article in the New Scientist to re-make a point that he and Dr. William R. Freudenburg [now deceased] had made more than two years ago — namely that the effects of global warming are going to get more rapidly worse than our simplistic climate models have predicted:

Freudenburg:

“Reporters need to learn that, if they wish to discuss ‘both sides’ of the climate issue, the scientifically legitimate “other side” is that, if anything, global climate disruption is likely to be significantly worse than has been suggested in scientific consensus estimates to date.”

Maxwell Boykoff’s (year 2010) graph makes Romm’s point about idiot journalism

Twenty-one months ago, Climate Progress illustrated Dr. Freudenburg’s contention about biased media coverage of climate change in graphical form. To do this, Joe Romm used a double bell-shaped graph that Maxwell Boykoff had generated.

Click here to see Dr. Boykoff’s graph.

Dr. Boykoff is a professor and fellow at the Cooperative Institute in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado.

Boykoff’s graph correlates (a) predictions about the direction and costs of climate change with (b) the range of media reporting about the same prognostications. The graph plots the number of proponents for differing magnitudes of accrued costs which will be due to climate change. These magnitudes span the X axis spectrum from:

slightly beneficial

through “neutral”

to “slight”

through “substantial”

and (at the X axis’ rightmost end),

catastrophic.

Paraphrased, the X axis plots predictions from:

“climate change will be good”

through “it won’t make a difference”

to “it will cost us some”

past “it will cost us a lot”

to (at the most extreme) “you’re gonna wet your pants.”

The key point to Boykoff’s graph is that it revealed very noticeable bias in media coverage of the climate issue

To show this, Professor Boykoff dropped a rectangle on top of the two bell-shaped prediction curves. His rectangle illustrates the segment of the X-axis that the news media reported.

The media coverage rectangle includes only the lower combined half of the two prediction curves.

In other words, the Boykoff graph shows that the media had chosen to report only the least extreme predictions for global warming — not even getting to the moderate peak of the scientific consensus at the time.

If Dr. Boykoff’s interpretation of the range of media reports was correct (in 2010), his graph demonstrated a pronounced media bias in the direction of under-reporting existing evidence for global warming and its computer modeled future costs.

My recollection of media bias agrees with Boykoff, Romm, and Feudenburg’s

I keep track of scientific studies related to climate change, as well as of print and television media reporting about the same thing. I agree with Dr. Boykoff’s graphical representation of media under-reporting.

In its effort to appear to be unbiased (in a culture dominated by science ignoramuses), the media turns out to be grossly prejudiced against accurate climate science reporting. It allows evidence-lacking arguments (coming predominantly from the anti-scientific political right wing) to weight its climate reporting in essentially nonsensical directions.

A positive feedback mechanism results from these reporting inaccuracies. A scientifically ignorant public stays ignorant. And the understanding gap between America’s scientifically minded minority and the nation’s knowledge-lacking majority increases.

More subtly, academicians decry a failing educational system, without recognizing that the American media contribute every day to keeping us “dumb.”

Students might be more motivated to learn, if they recognized (at the popular culture level) that there actually is something to learn and profit from.

Did it turn out that the more extreme model predictions from 2010 were correct?

Apparently so.

That’s the point to Dr. Romm’s synopsis of the seven points contained in Michael LePage’s New Scientist article:

The thick sea ice in the Arctic Ocean was not expected to melt until the end of the century. If current trends continue, summer ice could be gone in a decade or two.

We knew global warming was going to make the weather more extreme. But it’s becoming even more extreme than anyone predicted.

Global warming was expected to boost food production. Instead, food prices are soaring as the effects of extreme weather kick in.

Greenland’s rapid loss of ice mean we’re in for a rise of at least 1 metre by 2100, and possibly much more.

The planet currently absorbs half our CO2emissions. All the signs are it won’t for much longer.

If we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, we might be able to avoid climate disaster. In fact we are still increasing emissions.

If the worst climate predictions are realised, vast swathes of the globe could become too hot for humans to survive.

Note

Romm provides links to Climate Progress blog entries that discuss each of the above points — because the New Scientist article requires a subscription to read.

“Pete, do you think that Joe Romm and Michael LePage are correct in thinking that the effects of climate warming are accumulating more rapidly than predicted?”

Yes.

A majority of scientific reports I have read over the past two years indicates that, among other factors, unanticipated positive feedback mechanisms are accelerating the rate and gross effects of warming.

There have been, of course, the statistically expected number of studies and observations that go the other way (in limited numbers of places). This is an attribute that scientifically uneducated people tend to think means more than it actually does.

Note

One of the key distinctions between scientifically minded people and ignorant folk is the former group’s ability to think in probabilities and apparently contradictory nuances.

Virtually no phenomenon, in a complex system, is uni-directionally uniform. In any mess of data and most systems, there are almost always statistically less probable counter-currents.

Part of the problem with climate prediction has been that climate modeling has been overly simplistic. Modeling leaves out relationships that are either unknown or too mathematically complex to account for. That is why it has been easier to generate global, rather than regional and local computer models. The latter two subsets require multi-factorial understanding(s) that we currently lack.

The journal BioScience just accepted a paper from a group of 21 scientists who make this point, based on detailed physical evidence that has been collected for fifty-plus years in New Hampshire.

Citation — to the 21 researchers’ criticism of climate modeling’s over-simplifications

Peter Groffman, Pamela Templer, Lindsey Rustad, John Campbell, Lynn Christenson, Nina Lany, Anne Socci, Matthew Vadeboncoeur, Paul Schaberg, Geoffrey Wilson, Charles Driscoll, Timothy Fahey, Melany Fisk, Christine Goodale, Mark Green, Chris Johnson, Myron Mitchell, Jennifer Morse, Linda Pardo, and Nicholas Rodenhouse, Long-Term Integrated Studies Show Complex and Surprising Effects of Climate Change in the Northern Hardwood Forest, BioScience (early online publication of uncorrected proof, November 2012)

Examples — of what these 21 researchers discovered about climate change in the “real” New Hampshire world

From the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies (with whom the lead researcher, Peter Groffman, is connected):

Following an exhaustive review of more than fifty years of long term data on environmental conditions at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the paper’s authors arrived at a sobering conclusion:

current climate change models don’t account for real life surprises that take place in forests.

According to the press release, rainfall has increased at Hubbard Brook Forest, but snowfall has decreased. Because spring temperatures come earlier, snow melts sooner. Plant growth now trails the timing of soil thawing. Which means that nutrients are washed out of the soil profile, before plants can use them.

Absent snowpack, roots are also not insulated against temperature change and become more susceptible to damaging freezes. Winter warming reduces maple sap production and simultaneously increases the environmental range and impact of insect pests and health-harming microorganisms.

As snow depths decrease, winter deer get around better. Their browsing harms young trees, and the deer spread a parasite that kills moose.

Loggers are not happy to see the snow go. They depend on it to slide logged trees.

All told:

[Peter] Groffman concludes, “Managing the forests of the future will require moving beyond climate models based on temperature and precipitation, and embracing coordinated long-term studies that account for real-world complexities.”

“These studies can be scaled up, to give a more accurate big picture of climate change challenges—while also providing more realistic approaches for tackling problems at the regional scale.”

Implications of global warming are more subtly complex and potentially costly than one might think

Following are some examples from my BrainiYak science blog.

Notice that most of the reported phenomena do not have the complexity that typifies biological systems — meaning that this is not even the scientifically difficult “stuff”:

Here — increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide weakens ice-to-ice hydrogen bonds

Here — warming increased metal ion concentrations in water near Keystone, Colorado

Here — positive feedback at work in the melting of Arctic sea ice

Here — possible decoupling of sea and air temperatures, making modeling difficult

Here — unsuspected warm water now funneling under an Antarctic ice shelf

Here — USDA’s largest-ever drought disaster declaration

Here — surprisingly reduced Antarctic Ocean water density

Here — astonishingly large amount of methane likely to be released from the Arctic

Here — reduced estimate of forests’ ability to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide

Here — reduced Hopbush leaf sizes, apparently due to warming temperatures

Here — albatross size increased, due to warming’s effect on southern ocean winds

Here — vitamin B levels vary by ocean depth and latitude, with effects on life forms

Here — warming shifts peach irrigation requirements

Here — unsuspected northward migration of the Gulf Stream’s northern limit

Here — surprisingly fast evolution of a delay in tamarisk beetles' diapause (dormancy) to match reproductive opportunities available in a warmer climate

The moral? — Misunderstanding how science works, and who is competent to communicate it, results in arguably reduced societal fitness

The above statement is only true (of course), if the future imposes a price on us for being scientifically and technologically ignorant. I suspect that it will.

If so, American news media are doing us no favors by leaving journalists uneducated in regard to scientific and technological issues. When media representatives are too “stupid” to accurately spot the limits of proven and marginally proven knowledge, they tend to focus on unimportant things and attention-seeking ignoramuses.

A knowledge-lacking public, combined with foolish news media, make for a scientifically vapid nation. Culture (arguably) does not progress by favorably emphasizing idiots and idiocies.

There is a difference between a rational contrarian and an irrational ignoramus. A surprisingly high proportion of Americans seem to have difficulty detecting the distinction. Ignorance and analytical ineptitudes are traits that charlatans, including the media, take advantage of.

Don’t be the air-head on the block or (for the agriculturally oriented) the person lost in the back forty.

PeteFree.com