This is both my personal learning project and my contribution in the struggle to confront the ongoing Republican/ libertarian assault on rational science and constructive learning, as manifested in their malicious strategic Attacks on Science ~ A collection of articles, scientific resources, plus my own essays and indepth critique of various presentations from unidirectional-skeptics ~ Hopefully a resource for the busy, yet discerning, student who's concerned about the health of our Earth
Goal of this article: A) To convey a recognition and appreciation of the fundamental components of our planet's climate system. B) To explain the difference between "Global Surface Temperature" and the "Global Temperature" (Something everyone conflates way the heck too often!).
Our Earth's climate is a global heat and moisture distribution engine consisting of three major components.
There's the atmosphere with it's distinctive layers, the lowest one is called the troposphere, it's where our weather lives. The troposphere varies in height from around five miles at the poles up to around twelve miles at the equator.
The troposphere is held in place and insulated from space by the stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and finally the exosphere topping out in the neighborhood of three hundred miles - actually, on the leeward side of Earth it goes way beyond, but that's a different story.
Fortunately for life, our atmosphere contains certain greenhouse gases that act to slow down the heat escaping from the surface thus acting as insulation that keeps our planet livable. The troposphere holds pretty much all the water in the atmosphere, scientists calculate it adds up to a little over 3,000 cubic miles of liquid water. If spread over the Earth's surface it would amount to an inch.
It seems to me we as a society were supposed to be having a public education dialogue with two components. First, to learn about how our global heat and moisture distribution engine operates.
Second, resolving the great debate on how best to deal with slowing down the increasing levels of insulating greenhouse gases we're injecting into our thin atmosphere. Both required good faith debates where learning from the best facts presented was the goal. Instead we've been forced into lawyerly debate games that have nothing to do with honesty, or learning, or resolving important questions and everything to do with winning political battles at any costs. This exhibit picks up where the previous one left off, as the Bush Administration continued their campaign of suppressing the climate science that was being collected while intimidating the scientists doing the collecting. I suggest it's another example of the dynamics of forcing political Seepage into what's supposed to be reporting on the science as it is (not as they wish it). This article was written by the late Rick Piltz from Climate Science Watch (which is a project sponsored by theGovernment Accountability Project). _______________________________
Court Rules that Bush Admin. Unlawfully failed to produce Scientific Assessment of Global Change
"A Federal judge says the Bush Administration has violated the Global Change Research Act by failing to produce a national global change research plan that was due by July 2006; and a scientific assessment of global change that was due in November 2004. The last scientific assessment, the US National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, was submitted to Congress in November 2000. Climate Science Watch has long maintained that the Bush administration’s suppression of official use of the first National Assessment report and its termination of the national climate change assessment process for connecting scientists to policymakers and society is the central climate science scandal of the administration.
I've been preoccupied with other concerns lately so haven't done much on this project. Still in doing some thinking about it I did remember this Union of Concerned Scientists collection of studies that seem to me classic examples of "seepage in action."
Manipulation of Global Warming Science
NOTE: The following is one of a series of case studies produced by the Union of Concerned Scientists' Scientific Integrity Program between 2004 and 2010 to document the abuses highlighted in our 2004 report, Scientific Integrity in Policy Making.
Since taking office, the George W. Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine the view held by the vast majority of climate scientists that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are making a discernible contribution to global warming.1 Despite promises by the president that “my Administration’s climate change policy will be science-based,”2 the past several years have seen widespread political interference in the work of federal climate scientists, edits to official scientific documents and a general attempt to foster uncertainty about robust scientific conclusions.
Not so random thoughts recalling seepage in action - gotta run today, so it's rough notes, I hope someone can do something with it.. (edited 3:15, May 29th} (I've added a couple interviews with Dr Santer and Dr. Mann - fromthe UQxDenial101 MOOC May 30th)
Considering the process of learning.
Learning is a cumulative process.
For example in the late 1990s a team of scientists led by Michael Mann pioneered paleo-climate studies.
They produced a graph that told a story that Republican/libertarian interests did NOT want to hear.
… I don't need to repeat the history.
The take away point is that nowhere have R/l individuals been interested in learning from incoming evidence. It's all about stonewalling with their God-given self-certitude and disinterest in evaluating any information that might threaten their perceived interests.
But learning is about taking in all the information you can, objectively evaluated all of it.
In the real world mistakes are teaching tools that we learn from and that constructively inform future actions.
But Republican/libertarian interests only seek bludgeons for battering down all they don't want to hear or think about.
So we have this scientific graph, "Mann's Hockey Stick" paleo-temperature record.
It's a pioneering effort, the "flaws" it has are all extremely minor and part of the learning process. Similar exist in most studies, and any short comings were actively investigated to learn what happened and why. That's the scientific process - study and understand mistakes, and learn your lessons, then move on to doing more accurate work in succeeding studies.
Subsequent studies repeatedly have shown that the Mc/Mc alleged errors were small and when plotted out on a graph indiscernible to the unschooled eye. They did nothing to change the factual integrity of the work.
But look at what we've allowed to happen.
Even today I can't count the times I read "broken hockey stick", etc.
Yet, in the real world one study after another repeats, the "hockey stick" shape.
The personal experience of our own lives over the past half century support the impression of sky-rocking changes like none our planet has experienced since deep time.
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Another seepage incident, the Ben Santer diversion.
A carefully penned generally agreed to sentence: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." IPCC, Madrid, November 1995 (see his video interview 20:50)
Then very crafty Republican/libertarian political word factories twisted the story and dictated the story, making an enemy out of Ben Santer who was doing his duty as lead author
the last step, physically inserting said sentence into the final IPCC report.
And the public discourse runs right off the rails.
Republican/libertarian spin masters dictated the entire discuss.
Or my latest favorite beer glass inspiration: "It's atmospheric insulation stupid, it holds in heat" now can we get on with dealing with what we know we have done and continue doing to our life sustain planet Earth ….
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Climate change is real, so why the controversy and debate? Learn to make sense of the science and to respond to climate change denial in Denial101x, a MOOC from UQx and edX.
Denial101x isn’t just a climate MOOC; it’s a MOOC about how people think about climate change.
It caught my attention because I've long been interested in better understanding, why that increasing disconnect between what most people believe about global warming and the reality unfolding upon this planet?
It's like the more information is gathered and the deeper the details we focus on, the less we're accepting what's happening.
It has been obvious to me that the cause of much misunderstanding has been decades worth of deliberate effort. Fabricated confusion by a plethora of politically motivated groups such as the Marshall Institute, CATO, Heartland Institute - organizations who make no bones about their "mission," which was/is a ruthless dedication to winning and holding on to their "free" market political/economic agenda. Read their literature nowhere does learning how our planet operates appear among their stated priorities. Yet, they are calling the shots of what's supposed to be a public education dialogue about climate science.
Sou at HotWhooper has written three insightful posts regarding Lewandosky et al 2015 that belong in this WUWTW collection of exhibits for my eventual complaint/presentation to the SFSU administration... The following was copied verbatim from HotWhooper.com. Then I starting deleting it down to it's core points, my "cliffnotes" so to speak. A couple long sections are complete, but most have been reduced. Please read the full versions.
I have added some paragraph breaks and highlights. I thank Sou for her excellent research and getting this information out there and tip my hat to HotWhopper's CC policy. Highlights: HotWhopper's "Seeps and SCAMS"
If you thought that dispassionate scientists, when doing scientific research, are immune from denialist propaganda you'd be wrong. It's not just when scientists talk about climate that they can demonstrate they've been influenced by denialists' campaigns. Even their scientific publications can be so influenced.
"About seepage - of denialist memes and framing - into the scientific community"
The paper is all about seepage. How denialists' talking points have "seeped" into the scientific community. The authors define seepage using two criteria. To be considered seepage the following two criteria must be met:
the scientific community has adopted assumptions or language from discourse that originated outside the scientific community or from a small set of dissenting scientific voices.
those assumptions depart from those commonly held by the scientific community.
