Science and the media: 21 - 27 May

MAY 27, 2011

Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:

From two major newspapers, starkly contrasting sarcasm on climate science
A biochemist’s Washington Post op-ed calling for young scientists to work in China
Nature‘s coverage of an American Institute of Physics worldwide survey on women in physics
Renewal of physicist William Happer’s vigorous public skepticism about climate
A physicist’s Wall Street Journal review of Roger Penrose’s cosmology book Cycles of Time

Skirmishes in the climate mockery wars

What’s the state of American technocivic discourse on climate? That’s a big question, but just anecdotally, there are the climate wars, and then there are the climate mockery wars. A pair of starkly contrasting mockery examples from early this week in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal might show something about the overall discussion.

It’s hard for the WSJ‘s online “Best of the Web” columnist James Taranto to outdo himself in mocking the climate consensus and its advocates. For years he has repeatedly recycled what he considers the hardee-har-har of weather-climate conflation—gleefully reporting, for instance, that Al Gore has given a global warming speech on an outlier of an especially cold day.

Now, in a recent column , Taranto notes that something bothers him “about the media mockery of Harold Camping,” the man who predicted the world would end last Saturday. Taranto asks, “Why are only religious doomsday cultists subjected to such ridicule?” Then he asserts:

Nonbelievers are no less susceptible to doomsday cults than believers are; Harold Camping is merely the Christian Al Gore. But because secular doomsday cultism has a scientific gloss, journalists like our friends at Reuters treat it as if it were real science. So, too, do some scientists. It may be that the decline of religion made this corruption of science inevitable.

Taranto may not be able to outdo himself in mocking anthropogenic climate disruption, but maybe the climate-change activist Bill McKibben can outdo Taranto from the opposite side.

The sustained sarcasm in McKibben’s 24 May Washington Post op-ed extends even to the headlines on the piece, which come from editors, not the author. In the online version: “A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!” In the paper version: “See no climate change: What to make of these record-breaking natural disasters.”

McKibben’s op-ed begins:

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas—fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been—the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected.

If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year’s record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest—resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi—could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.

“It’s far smarter,” McKibben adds, “to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change.”

But as he continues in this vein of mockery, he never actually cites any climatological findings disputing that “mantra.” Are such findings available? Have climate scientists moved beyond their former cautiousness on that scientifically and also socially crucial question?

Not according to the Post‘s own front-page news article from the same day. It reports that experts “have begun studying whether global climate change is driving more frequent—and more intense—tornado-spawning thunderstorms. Such work is at an early stage, making it difficult to draw conclusions.”

But apparently if you’re Bill McKibben, you grant yourself a license to write like James Taranto about it anyway.

My own assessment is that Taranto expects no techno-ideological conversions to result from his rhetorical strategy of fierce sarcasm. He’s just enjoying some fun with a self-selected online-only audience already on his side.

But McKibben’s piece appeared in both the online and on-paper op-ed page, which reaches all sorts of readers. I wonder if McKibben thinks his own sarcasm can somehow convert skeptics under some principle of rhetorical parity violation, whereby the persuasive ineffectiveness of Taranto’s side’s sarcasm somehow avoids being mirror-matched by a comparable ineffectiveness on McKibben’s.

Matt Stremlau and young American scientists

Last Sunday’s Washington Post contained an op-ed that seems notable not only for what it says, but for who is saying it—a young voice for science. Matthew Stremlau may lack a Wikipedia page—so far—but he doesn’t lack willingness at least to try to lead.

Stremlau has a Harvard biochemistry Ph.D. His work at Harvard showed why monkeys, unlike humans, resist HIV/AIDS. At Science magazine, his essay on that topic won the General Electric and Science Magazine Grand Prize for Young Life Scientists. He served as an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow at the State Department. He has published not only in scientific journals and Nature, but in the Los Angeles Times. He’s now at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. In 1999, as a Henry Luce Fellow, he spent a year as a visiting scientist in Beijing; in 2006, he began another year there conducting stem cell research.

Under the headline “Go to China, young scientist,” Stremlau’s Washington Post op-ed argued that as “public funding for science and technology shrinks, it just isn’t possible for people who want to become scientists in America to actually become scientists.” Here’s the heart of the piece:

The global science landscape is radically different from what it was when I started graduate school 10 years ago. Opportunities for cutting-edge science are sprouting in many other countries. China stands out. But there are plenty of others. India, Brazil and Singapore boast world-class research institutes. Saudi Arabia aggressively recruits researchers for its King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. With a staggering $10 billion endowment there—larger than MIT’s—American scientists no longer need to suffer through Boston’s endless winters. Not to be outdone, Abu Dhabi opened the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in 2009. These emerging powers have a voracious appetite for good scientists. So they’re trying to poach ours.

I spent nearly two years doing molecular biology research in China. I have worked at the National Laboratory for Agrobiotechnology and at Peking University in Beijing. The Chinese are serious about science. Government spending on research and development has increased 20 percent each year over the past decade. Even in the midst of the financial crisis of 2008-09, China continued to bet big on science and technology. China now spends $100 billion annually on research and development. The Royal Society, Britain’s national science academy, estimates that by 2013, Chinese scientists will author more articles in international science journals than American scientists do.

Stremlau’s op-ed closes with this line, addressed to his scientific peers: “If the United States can’t fund its scientific talent, find another country that will.”

Nature on AIP study: “Gender divide in physics spans globe”

Nature this week reports on an international survey conducted by the American Institute of Physics, Global Survey of Physicists: A Collaborative Effort Illuminates the Situation of Women in Physics. The study compared “the career experiences of 15,000 physicists from 130 developed and developing nations,” Nature says, and found that “men have greater access than women to opportunities and resources, and their careers suffer less when they have children.”

The article quotes Rachel Ivie, assistant director of AIP’s Statistical Research Center: “We knew things were unequal, but not this unequal.” Ivie spoke recently at the 4th International Conference on Women in Physics in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Slide 8 from her talk visually and vividly illustrates the survey’s global reach. Nature reports that the “survey reveals few differences in the degree of gender inequality between developed and developing countries.”

The article continues:

Ivie says that two factors contribute to these problems. First, physics remains a male-dominated field, operating through an old boy network. “It’s not that senior people actively exclude women; they just don’t think of recommending them for key posts or inviting them to speak at conferences,” says Ivie.

Elizabeth Freeland, a physics postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, agrees. “This is an unconscious bias—which makes it harder but not impossible to get past,” she says.

The other subtle but sinister factor is that women and men face different cultural expectations. The survey suggests that women are universally considered responsible for childcare and childcare decisions. “The overarching barrier [to women’s ascension in the field] is the deeply entrenched perception of both men and women that men are expected to be solely breadwinners, while women are expected to be solely caregivers,” says Prajval Shastri, an astrophysicist at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore.

Later the article adds, “Female participation in managerial, editorial or supervisory roles was up to 15% lower than male participation, but in one area women were far more active: advising undergraduates, a ‘nurturing’ task that typically garners little professional credit.”

William Happer vs. climate “true believers, opportunists, cynics”

William Happer has renewed his vigorous public skepticism about human-caused climate disruption.

Here’s a truncated snapshot of his stature in science: Princeton physics Ph.D., former director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory, former director of energy research at the Energy Department, endowed chair at Princeton, fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He has just published a commentary , “The Truth About Greenhouse Gases,” in the June/July 2011 issue of First Things, which says of itself that it’s “published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.”

Happer’s commentary contains nearly 4500 words, the length of a substantial magazine article. Here’s a sampler of disconnected but representative passages:

I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.
I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant to keep our land, air, and waters free of real pollution, particulates, heavy metals, and pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life.
The earth’s climate has always been changing. Our present global warming is not at all unusual by the standards of geological history, and it is probably benefiting the biosphere. Indeed, there is very little correlation between the estimates of CO2 and of the earth’s temperature over the past 550 million years (the “Phanerozoic” period). The message is clear that several factors must influence the earth’s temperature, and that while CO2 is one of these factors, it is seldom the dominant one. The other factors are not well understood. Plausible candidates are spontaneous variations of the complicated fluid flow patterns in the oceans and atmosphere of the earth—perhaps influenced by continental drift, volcanoes, variations of the earth’s orbital parameters (ellipticity, spin-axis orientation, etc.), asteroid and comet impacts, variations in the sun’s output (not only the visible radiation but the amount of ultraviolet light, and the solar wind with its magnetic field), variations in cosmic rays leading to variations in cloud cover, and other causes.
The existence of the little ice age and the medieval warm period were [sic] an embarrassment to the global-warming establishment, because they showed that the current warming is almost indistinguishable from previous warmings and coolings that had nothing to do with burning fossil fuel. The organization charged with producing scientific support for the climate change crusade, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), finally found a solution. They rewrote the climate history of the past 1000 years with the celebrated “hockey stick” temperature record.
This damnatia memoriae of inconvenient facts was simply expunged from the 2001 IPCC report, much as Trotsky and Yezhov were removed from Stalin’s photographs by dark-room specialists in the later years of the dictator’s reign. There was no explanation of why both the medieval warm period and the little ice age, very clearly shown in the 1990 report, had simply disappeared eleven years later.
A Russian server released large numbers of e-mails and other files from computers of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. Among the files released were e-mails between members of the power structure of the climate crusade, “the team.” These files were, or should have been, very embarrassing to their senders and recipients.
[P]eer review has largely failed in climate science. Global warming alarmists have something like Gadaffi’s initial air superiority over rag-tag opponents in Libya. ... Peer review in climate science means that the “team” recommends publication of each other’s work, and tries to keep any off-message paper from being accepted for publication.
Let me summarize how the key issues appear to me, a working scientist with a better background than most in the physics of climate. CO2 really is a greenhouse gas and other things being equal, adding the gas to the atmosphere by burning coal, oil, and natural gas will modestly increase the surface temperature of the earth. Other things being equal, doubling the CO2 concentration, from our current 390 ppm to 780 ppm will directly cause about 1 degree Celsius in warming. At the current rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere—about 2 ppm per year—it would take about 195 years to achieve this doubling. The combination of a slightly warmer earth and more CO2 will greatly increase the production of food, wood, fiber, and other products by green plants, so the increase will be good for the planet, and will easily outweigh any negative effects. Supposed calamities like the accelerated rise of sea level, ocean acidification, more extreme climate, tropical diseases near the poles, and so on are greatly exaggerated.
The models are not in good agreement with observations—even if they appear to fit the temperature rise over the last 150 years very well. Indeed, the computer programs that produce climate change models have been “tuned” to get the desired answer. ... [T]he models have failed the simple scientific test of prediction. We don’t even have a theory for how accurate the models should be.
A major problem has been the co-opting of climate science by politics, ambition, greed, and what seems to be a hereditary human need for a righteous cause. What better cause than saving the planet? Especially if one can get ample, secure funding at the same time? ... As the great Russian poet Pushkin said in his novella Dubrovsky, “If there happens to be a trough, there will be pigs.” Any doubt about apocalyptic climate scenarios could remove many troughs.
Publications of contrary research results in mainstream journals are rare. The occasional heretical article is the result of an inevitable, protracted battle with those who support the dogma and who have their hands on the scales of peer review.
In 2009 a conference of “ecopsychologists” was held at the University of West England to discuss the obvious psychological problems resident in those who do not adhere to the global warming dogma. The premise of these psychologists was that scientists and members of the general population who express objective doubt about the propagated view of global warming are suffering from a kind of mental illness. We know from the Soviet experience that a society can find it easy to consider dissidents to be mentally deranged and act accordingly.
An [American Physical Society] Council statement issued on November 18, 2007 states: “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security, and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.” This is pretty strong language for physicists, for whom skepticism about evidence was once considered a virtue, and nothing was incontrovertible. In the fall of 2009 a petition, organized by Fellow of the American Physical Society Roger Cohen, and containing the signatures of hundreds of distinguished APS members, was presented to the APS management with a request that at least the truly embarrassing word “incontrovertible” be taken out of the statement. The APS management’s response was to threaten the petitioners, while grudgingly appointing a committee to consider the request. It was exactly what James Madison warned against. The committee included members whose careers depended on global warming alarmism, and the predictable result was that not one word was changed. Bad as the actions of the APS were, they were far better than those of most other scientific societies, which refused to even reconsider extreme statements on climate.
Life is about making decisions, and decisions are about trade-offs. We can choose to promote investment in technology that addresses real problems and scientific research that will let us cope with real problems more efficiently. Or we can be caught up in a crusade that seeks to suppress energy use, economic growth, and the benefits that come from the creation of national wealth.

Physics in the Wall Street Journal

Anyone who thinks about physics in the Wall Street Journal probably thinks first about the ideological wars over climate science, as seen in the WSJ‘s op-ed pages. But there are other dimensions. The WSJ regularly invites opinion pieces and reviews from physicists—for example, Jeremy Bernstein and Lawrence Krauss. Now the WSJ‘s op-ed page has offered a book review by Peter Woit of Columbia University, who holds a Princeton PhD in physics and wrote Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.

Woit’s review —entitled “In the End Is the Beginning: A daring theory of how the universe, instead of expanding indefinitely, could start again in another Big Bang"—engages Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose, whom Woit describes as the author of “thought-provoking books on physics, consciousness and the theory of computation” and as “one of the most remarkable mathematical physicists of our era.”

Woit explains that Penrose “has turned his attention back to the Big Bang and some of the seemingly imponderable questions it provokes: What came ‘before’ the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago, and how might the universe it brought into being come to an end?” In a technical discussion that might be a bit extraordinary for a newspaper, the key paragraph seems to be this one:

Mr. Penrose’s radical suggestion is that, somehow, this distant past and distant future can be matched together, since they share the same geometry. A universe at either extreme of its existence is one that has no fixed ideas about what is big and what is small. Perhaps this curious coincidence indicates that one can pass continuously from one extreme to the other, and this transformation is what happened at the moment of the Big Bang.

Woit later adds, however:

As Mr. Penrose acknowledges, there are various problems with his hypothesis. There is no real evidence that the universe will ever stop expanding, and it is unclear whether Mr. Penrose’s use of conformal geometry can really solve that. As far as we know, electrons are stable, with unchanging non-zero mass. That means they will always be around to provide an energy scale, no matter how far out into the future one goes, ruining the conformal symmetry needed to ultimately match up with the Big Bang.

“Readers should be forewarned,” writes Woit at the end, “that what they have in their hands is un-refereed research of a sort that may very well not pan out and convince other scientists.”

Physics-community readers of the WSJ, meanwhile, should be forewarned that it’s probably a mistake to overinterpret the WSJ opinion editors’ strong views against the climate consensus as their only engagement of physics.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.