#13 Critical Thinking and "keep the debate alive" - CC/Steele Landscapesandcycles Debate

A virtual debate with Jim Steele, based on his interview at Heartland Institute: 

Heartland Daily Podcast | Jim Steele | January 27, 2015 

Research Fellow H. Sterling Burnett (for the National Center for Policy Analysis) interviews Jim Steele, ecologist, director emeritus of the Sierra Nevada field campus of San Francisco State University

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Steele writes:  "And we trust the scientific theory because its been fairly tested by others - the theory must out perform all alternate explanations, eliminate confounding factors plus lively debate.  But, what I was finding was the scientific process was being defiled when scientists refused to debate in public. ... and any attempt to prevent that debate, in our schools, in the media, in peer reviewed science, it's only denigrating the scientific process.  ... 

And I think those public debates would help create real climate literacy …"

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Well then Mr. Steele, let's have our Great Global Warming Science Debate.  

I will accept these responses from your Heartland Institute podcast as your opening round.  I'll offer my rebuttals, evidence and questions.  I agree to post your thoughtful responses unaltered. (Though it's looking like you're going to do your best to hide and ignore these critiques of your self-certain claims. Your silence will serve to expose your hypocrisy and inability to defend your statements on an even playing field.)

In this thirteenth installment I want to look at Jim advocating that we empower our youth to judge the veracity of experts and other such notions in "critical" thinking.

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"How should society contend with those who knowingly 

disseminate misinformation about climate science."  

Lawrence Torcello

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Steele says:  We're only hurting our science education in that way...(see #12)... We can't just spoon feed students science and have them memorize and spit it back like propaganda.  You gotta encourage students to be critical thinkers.

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Be serious, students are in school to learn the fundamentals of the world around them.  High school and early college is about teaching skills, such as mathematical, scientific fundamentals, critical thinking, learning and communication skills - you know the tools required for the advanced learning that's required before one can judge experts and seasoned professionals.

Just like with your running skills, first you needed to learn to sit up and crawl, only then could you put weight on those legs and begin first tentative stubbles until you learned the tricks of the trade.  Then, only after many years of learning and development were you finally able to beat your dad in a race.  And only then were you finally poised to take that skill on to further levels of achievement.  Brain development is not so different.

What makes you think students can or should sit in judgmental "debate" on their professors?  Were you a Maoist back in da day and missed the bulletin about what a disaster the Great Leap Forward was?

As for critical thinking, keep an open mind but not so open that your brain falls out, 
or to frame it more constructively I'll rely on an expert Robert Ennis PhD :

The Nature of Critical Thinking: 

Outlines of General Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities 

Robert H. Ennis  2013

http://faculty.education.illinois.edu/rhennis/

http://www.criticalthinking.net/longdefinition.html

"Critical thinking is "reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do." This definition (or concept) of critical thinking I believe captures the core of the way the term is ordinarily used by supporters of critical thinking. In deciding what to believe or do, one is helped by the employment of a set of critical thinking dispositions and abilities (which is a conception of critical thinking) that I outline in detail below. ..."

"... For the sake of brevity, clarification in the form of examples, qualifications, and more detail, including more criteria, are omitted, but can be found in sources listed below, including "Critical Thinking: A Streamlined Conception" (1991b), "A Taxonomy of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities" (1987a), and "A Conception of Rational Thinking" (1980), but more fully in Critical Thinking (1996a).  See Note 1. ... "

CRITICAL THINKING DISPOSITIONS

Ideal critical thinkers are disposed to 

1. Seek and offer clear statements of the thesis or question

2. Seek and offer clear reasons

3. Try to be well informed

4. Use credible sources and observations, and usually mention them

5. Take into account the total situation

6. Keep in mind the basic concern in the context

7. Be alert for alternatives

8. Be open-minded

    a. Seriously consider otherpoints of view 

    b. Withhold judgment when the evidence and reasons

       are insufficient

9. Take a position and change a position when the evidence

       and reasons are sufficient

10. Seek as much precision as the nature of the subject admits

11. Seek the truth when it makes sense to do so, and more broadly, try to "get it right" to the extent possible or feasible

12. Employ their critical thinking abilities and dispositions

“Science and Distortion - Stephen Schneider”

{edited 6/9/2014 evening}

“Science and Distortion - Stephen Schneider”

Produced by Stephen Thomson and Plomomedia

Is a tribute to the late Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider.  A video montage featuring clips of Stephen Schneider speaking at Climate One - including interview clips of a young Dr. Schneider explaining the 1970s "consensus." 

It's a selection of incisive observations regarding the decades long Republican/Libertarian driven PR attack on science and all attempts at a rational public global warming education dialogue.

Since this short list of Dr. Schneider's observations are worth becoming familiar with, I transcribed them, both to help me digest the information and to share with others who might be curious. 

ScottishSceptic allow me to tell you about the tragedy of our time.

I received another email from the ScottishSceptic and since he's changed tact I'll use the opportunity to write a few words about the difference between the "skeptical of science" community's war-footing and the world of scientists with their commitment to constructive learning.

But first Scotty's email:

Stephen Schneider - Science and Distortion… the video

Lately I've been extra busy working so haven't had much chance to keep up on the climate change blogosphere dialogue, which seems more mud fight than constructive conversation, but hope and striving for improvement we must.  Now that I'm getting caught up, I've been revisiting the SkepticForum.com climate change board to look in on the haps, read some opinions, share some thoughts, take some abuse, and do some people watching.  

In any event, the denialist* arguments of a few - (*oops, they want to be called "skeptics" even though their skepticism runs in only one direction) -  are like listening to a broken record repeating vacuous soundbites as though never absorbing one piece of scientific information.  Like there's nothing to learn, only a mantra to repeat with eyes, ears and minds firmly closed.

Though trying to discuss the actual Climate Science with them always seems to turn down dead-ends where muggers lurk, the beatings do inspire me to react with constructive exercises that sometimes turn into blog posts and an occasional article.  

This time, I decided to transcribe some highlights of a talk given by Stephen Schneider PhD not too long before his tragic untimely death in 2010.  In this talk Dr. Schneider does a masterful job of describing the dysfunctional public dialogue.  He reviews the scientific process and systems science, and speaks to the issues of educating the public, risk assessment and value judgements.

I'm posting it because Dr. Stephen Schneider's words are a beautifully concise distillation of over four decades worth of world class scientific experience and all around learning.  If you are engaged in the struggle to communicate science and dialogue with faith-based denialist types, you're sure to find these personal reflections beneficial for your own process.

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Science & Distortion
The Truth About Global Warming 

Stephen Schneider

Produced by Plomomedia at http://www.plomomedia.com/

Posted by GlobalClimateNews  ~  12:00 minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_eJdX6y4hM

0:15  "How did we know, in the 1970s, pretty much what would happen?  It was theory then.  And since then nature's been cooperating with theory, but we kinda knew what would happen, you couldn't add 4 watts of energy over every square meter and have nothing happen."

0:35  (a clip of Dr. Schneider in 1979) "The scientific consensus that CO2 will build up and will be a potential problem is pretty large.  But, a scientific consensus on exactly how influential it will be in ten years, twenty years, what areas will get better what areas would get worse, this is where the controversy comes in."

0:50  "We also knew that we needed to stop using the atmosphere as a unpriced sewer to dump your smoke stack and tailpipe waste and land use changes interactions, all that was known.  It was known not just in the club of a hundred left brained people. ..."

1:35  So why didn't we succeed?  What happened?  

1:40  "science is never settled"  

"Climate Science is a system science.  It's like trying to understand your body or trying to figure out something with cancer, ..., everyone of these complex systems problems has multiple components.  And when you break them down what you find out is, rarely do we know everything and rarely do we know nothing.

"So we have to break systems science into the well established components, which are settled... into competing explanations  where our work has been able to get us to winnow it down to two or three possibilities. 

"Here's where the disconnect comes along.  Special interests will grab what's convenient for their ideology or their position.  So what you end up with, is you end up with a cacophony typically of people selecting stuff out of context.  And then you end up with, the end of world versus good for you."

3:30  "I'll confess my preference, the end of the world and good for you are the two lowest probability outcomes.  What we are looking at is a multiple range of potential outcomes. ..."  What systems scientist do is they try to winnow out the relative likelihood of these other multiple outcomes.  

So if you try to cover it as a Yes or No and you go out there and take a 200 scientist report like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change it goes through three years of writing, two rounds of reviews, thousands of comments on each chapter and two petroleum geologists come along who are special interests in finding oil, paid by you know which oil company, because they have PhDs they are given equal status in a story or on television, you see we get a little mad about that.

4:15  "We call that utter distortion.  And they say, oh no that's balance.  It is not balance, it is utter distortion because they are not reporting the relative credibility of the multiple positions.  And it means you are leaving it up to the public and the political world to figure that out for themselves.  They're capable of it, but they rarely do it."

5:00  "Supposing you got a spot on your lung for a chest X-ray that you did for a different purpose than for looking for cancer.  Well it could be cancer and it could be a lesion... What should be done?  ... biopsy ... risk assessment ... there is a price for false positive ... what if you wait ... but if you wait and it's metastatic and it's too late to do anything? ... Or you could have had it taken out and lowered your likelihood of being dead now..."

6:00  Risk assessment... value judgement

"There is no right answer, that's your value judgement..."

6:15  Home owners and fire insurance to protect against a 1 to 2% risk

6:30  "We do not need 95% certainty."

People frame this problem by looking of exceptions to the conventional wisdom and claim until the exceptions are resolved, it isn't proven and it's premature to act.  Yet we're acting on a one percent risk and paying (fire) insurance and here we're talking about 50% risk to the planetary life-support system, and they're telling us that's not certain enough."

7:15  "... special-interest blather..."

8:00  Pro-smoking ad campaign, cigarettes and risk assessment

"... and they correctly said and still to this day we do not know biophysically the precise link between smoking and cancer.  So they give you a therefore, when there's no therefore there.  Therefore it's premature to act, that's a value judgement about risk management and of course they want you to protect market share.  

"Whereas the data are so overwhelming epidemiologically, you know the statistics, that you'd have to be crazy not to control this, even though you don't understand every detail of the mechanism.  

So this is again where we have to do risk management.  Which is how do you want to deal with a preponderance of evidence, not an absolute certainty in every detail.

9:00  "Lets talk about tipping points... "

What about Greenland?  Could Greenland be a tipping point?"

Giving some details of the glacial dynamic going on in Greenland.

9:30  "... what we don't know is does it need one more degree before that happens, 2 or 3?  All I can say with high degree of confidence is the more we keep adding unprecedented levels of warming to the system the more the number of tipping points that are going to be crossed.

We know for sure they are there, we don't know for sure where they are."

9:45  "This is not just an academic exercise, this is something we've got to have people deeply engaged in, because we're talking about the sustainability of their children and grand-children and the rest of nature.

"What's the worst thing about tipping points like Greenland, we will probably never know when we've crossed it for fifty years.  So our behavior in the next generation could (will) precondition a sustainability issue for a millennium or ten based upon the convenience of one species for one generation.  I find that a very morally daunting prospect.

10:35  (a clip of Dr. Schneider in 1979)  "What we're really doing is we're insulting our global environment at a faster rate than we are understanding it.  And the best we can do in all honestly is say: "Look out, there's a chance, a potentially irreversible change on a global scale based upon the benefits of the use of energy and it's very tough for us to know if those benefits today are worth the potential rises of environmental change over our children."

11:10  "How are we going to deal with this problem, or others like it, if it requires public understandings so they can send the right value signals to our representatives when they're completely knocked off their pins by this cacophonous fraudulent debate where all parties are given equal credibility when they don't deserve it?"

"We've got to take back the air waves and make certain that what's out there is more credible not just simply following some formulaic balance."

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The Truth About Global Warming - 
Science & Distortion - 
Stephen Schneider

Uploaded on Jan 2, 2012

Information:

Stephen Henry Schneider (February 11, 1945 -- July 19, 2010) 

was Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University, 

a Co-Director at the Center for Environment Science and Policy of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and, 

a Senior Fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. 

Schneider served as a consultant to federal agencies and White House staff in the Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

His research included modeling of the atmosphere, climate change, and "the relationship of biological systems to global climate change." 

Schneider was the founder and editor of the journal Climatic Change and authored or co-authored over 450 scientific papers and other publications. 

He was a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group II IPCC TAR and was engaged as a co-anchor of the Key Vulnerabilities Cross-Cutting Theme for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) at the time of his death. During the 1980s, Schneider emerged as a leading public advocate of sharp reductions of greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming.