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President Obama Went to Alaska; Here’s Why That is Important to Climate Change Communication

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AlaskaIt’s been a big week in climate change, in more ways than one. This is especially true for President Obama. First he went to New Orleans, and then he spent several days in Alaska. That’s a big deal for climate communication.

The New Orleans visit was on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Ostensibly the focus of the trip was to show the federal government hasn’t forgotten about those who are still struggling to recover. Despite Republican Governor Bobby Jindal’s request that Obama not mention climate change, he did. And it was appropriate to do given that much of New Orleans still lies below sea level…and sea level is rising. Which means the next Katrina could be even worse.
But it’s the Alaska visit that is most critical. Using a variety of modern media methods to reach out to the populace – Twitter, a “survival” television show appearance, Instagram, and video blogs, the President highlighted the importance of places like Alaska in climate change effects, and why solutions are needed.
He even talked about gigatons!

The above is a partial cross-post of the full article on The Dake Page. Please click on the link above to read further. Thanks.

David J. Kent has been a scientist for over thirty years, is an avid science traveler, and an independent Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity (now in its 5th printing) and two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate. His book on Thomas Edison is due in Barnes and Noble stores in spring 2016.

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Catching Up on Climate Denial

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With a critical international meeting coming up in Paris soon, it’s time to catch up on climate denial. The following are three articles posted on The Dake Page in recent weeks. Follow the links to the full articles.

It’s Time Presidential Candidates Had a Science Debate

 

Science smartphoneIt’s time for a science debate in which all the candidates for president – Republican and Democratic – engage in an honest discussion of science-based issues. Such is the premise behind ScienceDebate, a non-partisan, non-profit effort to require candidates to address science.  [Continue Reading]

 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot – Scientific Ethics and More

Henrietta LacksThis is the story of Henrietta Lacks, her HeLa cells, and her family’s struggle to learn about their long dead mother. It’s also a detective story, a story of medical conduct, a story of Jim Crow, a story of modern and historical psychology, a story of ethics, and a story of religious faith. It is even a love story. It is all of these things, and Rebecca Skloot has successfully merged them into one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in many years. [Continue Reading]

The Irony of Climate Deniers Attacking Published Journal Articles

falsebalanceA new peer-reviewed paper was published recently in the scientific journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology. Its title is “Learning from Mistakes in Climate Research” and the objective is to survey recent “denier” papers, that is, the rare papers that reject the unequivocal scientific consensus that human activity is warming our climate system. The authors – seven climate scientists and science communicators from Norway, the Netherlands, the United States, the UK, and Australia – highlighted the errors in fact and logic common to the selected denier papers.

Not surprisingly, the denier lobbyists and their network of front groups and bloggers attacked the study. [Continue Reading]

The above is a partial cross-post of full articles on The Dake Page. Please click on the links above to read further. Thanks.

David J. Kent has been a scientist for over thirty years, is an avid science traveler, and an independent Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity (now in its 5th printing) and two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate. His book on Thomas Edison is due in Barnes and Noble stores in spring 2016.

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What President Obama’s Clean Power Act Does for Climate Change – It May Surprise You (from The Dake Page)

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On Monday, August 3, 2015, President Barack Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency released final rules designed to curtail coal-based power plant emissions. Called the Clean Power Plan, the goal is to reduced carbon emissions contributing to man-made climate change. The impact of this plan will surprise a lot of Americans.

The following video is only a little over 2 minutes and worth watching:

Reaction has been about what you might expect. The Republican candidates for president and their Republican colleagues in the House and Senate have falsely attacked the plan for the usual false reasons. The Democratic candidates and in Congress largely agree that the steps proposed are necessary to deal with the unequivocal science demonstrating humans are warming the climate system.

Media reporting of the Clean Power Act shows its critical importance. Time magazine says that the President is taking the lead on this “superwicked problem.”  CNN says the President “unveils major climate change proposal.” To the New York Times this is a “crucial step on climate change.” Other media outlets also note the unprecedented action by the White House and EPA.

Of course, there are also the denial lobbyists saturating the blogosphere with anti-Clean Power Act rhetoric. All provide opinions based on a single negative “report” produced by, you guessed it, one of the denial lobbyist organizations in their network. That’s a common tactic of lobbyists – create a biased report and then get all your friends to cite your biased report as “unbiased.”

Meanwhile, the response from the scientific community has generally been positive, as might be expected given that nearly every climate scientist agrees that 100+ years of published science unequivocally demonstrates a need to address man’s contribution to climate change. There are some, like outspoken climate scientist James Hansen, who feel the Plan is merely a drop in the bucket and won’t in itself create significant progress in dealing with our changing climate.

Hansen is probably right.

So let’s assume that the Clean Power Plan is insufficient to deal with climate change….

[Read the rest on The Dake Page]

The above is a partial cross-post of a full article on The Dake Page. Please click on the link above to read further. Thanks.

David J. Kent has been a scientist for over thirty years, is an avid science traveler, and an independent Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and the e-book Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time. He is currently writing a book on Thomas Edison.

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Why the TSCA Reform Bills Should Become Law Even Though They Won’t Make Us Any Safer (from The Dake Page)

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World Chemical FlaskRecently there has been a sudden surge in support for passing bills in both the House and Senate to modernize the four-decade-old Toxic Substances Control Act, i.e., TSCA. This post will explain why this is happening, why TSCA Reform can pass now, and why it should pass – even though it likely will do nothing substantial to make us safer.

What is TSCA anyway?

For those who missed it, TSCA was passed in 1976. That’s right, when Gerald Ford, the only President never to have been elected to either the presidency or vice-presidency (Hint: Nixon and Agnew were, in fact, crooks), signed it into law. TSCA was designed to regulate commercial chemicals before they could be put on the market. Well, except for the 65,000 or so chemicals that were already on the market – those chemicals got grandfathered onto an Inventory, a list of chemicals it was okay to use despite none of them ever having been tested for safety. New chemicals had to go through a review by the Environmental Protection Agency, though the EPA could not actually require any safety testing unless they could prove that the chemicals were dangerous…which they found hard to do since they couldn’t require anyone to do any safety testing. You can see why there was a need to reform TSCA.

Which no one did for nearly 40 years.

Why COULDN’T TSCA be reformed before?

Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) tried. In 2005 he introduced the first of several TSCA reform bills that were immediately relegated to the wastebasket with zero action. Not one ever got out of committee. For ten years the Republican Party, along with a few Democrats from states heavy on chemical industry influences, managed to block a half-dozen or more attempts by Lautenberg in the Senate (and Henry Waxman [D-CA)] in the House) from ever getting a vote.

Lautenberg’s initial bill would have fundamentally changed our chemical control system by requiring companies to provide substantial health and safety data on chemicals before they went onto the market. It would have also required companies to provide data for all of the 65,000 chemicals that had been grandfathered onto the Inventory (plus, all the 25,000 or so additional chemicals that were added to the Inventory after only rudimentary model-based evaluation by EPA).

While needed, the requirements were functionally unworkable under our current review structure. When Europe passed a law called REACH that required essentially the same data, they also created an entirely new chemicals agency staffed with at least 500 people and a system for collecting and evaluating the millions of data points that would be coming their way over a ten year period.

A new agency! The EPA would not have been able to handle the workload, especially given the Congressional defunding and forced retirement of key staffers that has been plaguing them for the last decade or more. There is no way Congress would even boost their staff to handle the new data, never mind create an entirely new agency. That one fact killed any chance of a workable solution.

Lautenberg continued to try to revise his bills over the next 10 years, making them more and more industry-friendly with each iteration. His latest version, offered up soon before he passed away, was supported by then-committee chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who frequently sparred with then-ranking member and serial climate denier James Inhofe (R-OK). Her conflicts with Inhofe were seamlessly passed to his replacement, Senator David Vitter (R-LA), when he began working with Lautenberg on a new, even more industry-friendly, bill. After Lautenberg’s death, Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) joined with Vitter to come up with the precursor to the current Senate bill. While the bipartisanship was nice, the dropping of all the fundamental reforms originally proposed by Lautenberg make Boxer a bitter enemy of the bill.

Why CAN TSCA reform pass now?

The answer is easy, though it’s also a reflection of the rather cynical power of lobbyists when it comes to making laws.

[Continue reading on The Dake Page]

The above is a partial cross-post of a full article on The Dake Page. Please click on the link above to read further. Thanks.

David J. Kent has been a scientist for over thirty years, is an avid science traveler, and an independent Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and the e-book Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time. He is currently writing a book on Thomas Edison.

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Climate Denier Tactic – Lying About Actual Scientific Studies (from The Dake Page)

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June 2015 Arctic Sea Ice Extent trendWe’ve talked about several of the tactics used by climate deniers to intentionally mislead the public. This past week provided a prime example of one tactic – intentionally lying about what a study says. Let’s take a closer look at how this works.

Recall that the climate denial industry, in their role as lobbyists, are well-experienced in manipulating public opinion. Going back to the days of tobacco companies denying smoking causes cancer, they learned to develop a network of “manufacturers” (i.e., to manufacture doubt), “spreaders” (to get the doubt out there), and “repeaters” (to saturate the blogosphere with misinformation). This process was described earlier.

The misinformation process is often employed to spread their own non-science opinions, other non-peer-reviewed and unsupported blog posts, and the occasional paper they get through the peer-review process. But it works also when they want to spin (i.e., misrepresent) the findings of actual real scientific papers by actual real climate scientists. Such is the case this past week when the blogosphere became saturated with a false conclusion drawn from a presentation made at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting held in Wales.

One paper – not yet published or peer-reviewed, merely presented at a scientific meeting for discussion – noted that the study authors used a model that concluded solar activity conditions by the 2030s could be similar to the solar activity conditions experienced during the Maunder Minimum. That was the extent of their conclusions.

The Maunder Minimum was a period of time popularly linked with the “Little Ice Age,” a perhaps overzealous term given to a period of excess cooling in some parts of the world (mainly the UK) from around 1550 to 1850.

But here’s the thing.

[Continue reading on The Dake Page]

The above is a partial cross-post of a full article on The Dake Page. Please click on the link above to read further. Thanks.

David J. Kent has been a scientist for over thirty years, is an avid science traveler, and an independent Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and the e-book Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time. He is currently writing a book on Thomas Edison.

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How Scientific Peer-Review Works – The Series (from The Dake Page)

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Huh CommunicationEarlier this year I posted a series of articles explaining what scientific peer-review is, and what it isn’t. The series was very popular so I’ve decided to create this single post that links to all the previous ones.

In Part 1 we gave a basic definition of peer-review, described the process, what it is expected to accomplish, and what it is not expected to accomplish. In a nutshell, scientists conduct research and then write that research up in a formal paper (including methods, results, how the statistics were done, conclusions, and some discussion of what it all means). The paper is then submitted to a scientific journal, whose editors send it out to other scientists in the field who are capable of reviewing it for clarity, content, and value to expanding our collective knowledge. The reviewers don’t validate or invalidate the work, just make sure it meets some basic scientific principles and complete enough for others to 1) know what the researchers did, and 2) replicate it.

Part 2 looked at how peer-review can go wrong. Standards for scientific journals can differ, with some being akin to Ivy League colleges while others may be less stringent. The relatively rare problem of “pal-review” (common among climate deniers) was examined, as was the difficulties caused by some (but not all) of the new “open access journals.”

[Read Part 3 and Part 4 on The Dake Page]

The above is a partial cross-post of a full article on The Dake Page. Please click on the link above to read further. Thanks.

David J. Kent has been a scientist for over thirty years, is an avid science traveler, and an independent Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and the e-book Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time. He is currently writing a book on Thomas Edison.

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Katharine Hayhoe at the Citizens’ Climate Lobby 2015 (from The Dake Page)

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CCL logoThis week the Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) held its 6th annual International Conference in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. In addition to being a climate scientist, Hayhoe is an evangelical Christian, which generally would be irrelevant to the discussion except that she, with her husband, pastor Andrew Farley, wrote A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions. The fact that most religions have acknowledged the science was emphasized this past week with the release of the Pope’s climate and environmental encyclical last week.

Dr. Hayhoe offered several valuable points during her presentation, several of which are worth expanding upon.

Most scientists are conservative: Conservative in the true sense of the term, not the hijacked definition of “conservatism” that is prevalent in today’s political circles. Scientists, and science in general, are inherently conservative. Science is built on incremental gains in knowledge derived over time from thousands of scientific studies looking at ever smaller pieces of the puzzle. With respect to climate science, rather than be “alarmist” (as climate deniers falsely claim), scientists actually have traditionally downplayed the risks from climate change. In fact, as more and more data are collected, and as we see climate change impacting Arctic sea ice, land-based ice sheet melting, and other visible signs of change, the data have clearly shown scientists that have been underestimating the dangers.

Scientists are hesitant to speak out: Historically, scientists have tended to stay in their “ivory towers” doing research, either in the laboratory or out in the field. They have left the communication of the science to others (e.g., journalists, teachers), and done the same for policy decisions (policy-makers). Part of the reason is that policy-making isn’t particularly interesting to scientists, but part of it is because scientists have been so often attacked for simply documenting the science. You can ask Galileo about how trying to communicate science worked out for him, or in more recent times you can ask climate scientists like Ben Santer, Jim Hansen, and Michael Mann, all of whom have been viciously and falsely attacked by climate denier lobbyists.

The data are out there: One common fallacy is that the public will understand the need to take action if only we can just get more of the science to them. While communicating science to the public can often be difficult, the problem isn’t a shortage of information or the lack of trying to get it across. Just in the last two years there have been a swarm of “state-of-the-science” reports, including (but not limited to) the IPCC AR5, the US Climate Assessment, a National Academy of Science/Royal Society report, and many others. All have the same basic message:

“warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and “human influence has been the dominant cause of the warming.”

So the public has the information it needs to understand. Many do understand, while others either are too busy living their lives to care (which is perfectly fine) or choose to deny the science (which is not fine).

[Read the rest at The Dake Page]

The above is a partial cross-post of a full article on The Dake Page. Please click on the link above to read further. Thanks.

David J. Kent has been a scientist for over thirty years, is an avid science traveler, and an independent Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and the e-book Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time. He is currently writing a book on Thomas Edison.

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The Pope’s Climate Encyclical and Why Climate Deniers are Their Own Worst Enemy (From The Dake Page)

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Pope climate encyclicalIt should go without saying that when you deny reality long enough, eventually reality makes you look foolish. Climate deniers have been denying the science behind man-made climate change for so long that they have lost even the illusion of credibility. They have become their own worst enemy, and as such have put themselves on a path of complete irrelevancy.

Deniers have chosen this path, of course. By blatantly denying even the most basic science and by egregiously promoting the most obvious and ludicrous falsehoods, deniers have marginalized themselves to the point of inconsequentiality. Deniers now find themselves being taken as seriously as Donald Trump’s presidential run. Yes, they have become that buffoonish.

And alone.

Deniers used to hide behind ideological blinders, seeking protection for their anti-science beliefs in the arms of “conservatives,” the “religious,” and “Republican” comfort groups. Now deniers find themselves in a category among themselves. In contrast, intellectually honest and informed people who identify within these traditional labels no longer provide cover for denial.

Religions do not condone denial of the science

This point is brought home as Pope Francis, leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, issues the Vatican’s papal encyclical on climate change and the environment. [Here is a summary of the main points; and here is the full letter, in English] In it the Pope acknowledges the unequivocal science demonstrating human activity is causing our climate to warm, and that the changes observed and coming present a significant risk to humanity.

Let me stop here and reinforce this to make it clear, because this is a point that climate deniers have intentionally tried to confuse as they attack the Pope.

[Continue reading the full post on The Dake Page]

The above is a partial cross-post of a full article on The Dake Page. Please click on the link above to read further. Thanks.

David J. Kent has been a scientist for over thirty years, is an avid science traveler, and an independent Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and the e-book Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time. He is currently writing a book on Thomas Edison.

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The People’s Republic of Chinese Chemicals and The Puppet Suit

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No, this isn’t the name of some bizarre new Chinese opera or dance troupe, it’s a mashup of two new posts on The Dake Page and Hot White Snow. The former has a book review of The People’s Republic of China Chemicals; the latter a response to a microfiction writing prompt. Excerpts are below with links to the full originals.

Peoples Republic of ChemicalsBook Review: The People’s Republic of China Chemicals by William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs (The Dake Page)

An important book, poorly written. The People’s Republic of China Chemicals purports to reveal how the offshoring of American manufacturing to China helped China become the most polluted country on the planet. It does achieve that goal, though perhaps in spite of itself. While the title suggests a discussion on chemicals, the vast preponderance of the book is focused on the massive air pollution problems in China. This isn’t surprising given the authors’ previous collaboration, a book about the smoggy days of Los Angeles.

The early chapters provide some historical background on China’s dynastic rule and frequent invasions by the Japanese, the British, and others, as well as its own political infighting. Their overly rosy characterization of Mao’s various attempts to control everything once he and the communists took over is somewhat naïve – or at the very least, incomplete – but they generally capture the essence of how China came to set itself up as the world’s factory. The authors’ explanation of how entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and various bilateral and multilateral trade agreements spurred the rapid growth of industry and economy, while perhaps overly rancorous, is well done.

In short, the book documents through rapid-fire detail and personal anecdote the rise of Chinese manufacturing and with it the extraordinary increase in coal-based pollution. The authors relate how bad the air pollution has become, and the subterfuge of the Chinese government to deny its existence even as giant screens in Tiananmen Square broadcast barely visible images of splendid panoramic vistas through the gritty air.

[Continue reading on The Dake Page]

HalloweenThe Puppet Suit (Hot White Snow)

“Well, you clean up nice.”

Apparently she had never seen him in a suit before. But here he was, dressed up like some Wall Street tycoon in hopes of making an impression. Unfortunately, the interview hadn’t gone as well as the suit made him look. It was fine until the interviewer pulled out the puppets. Not what he expected for an investment firm, for sure. When the guy started using the puppets to explain how his firm and other “too-big-to-fail” firms had manipulated the global financial meltdown and still took multi-million dollar bonuses…

I walked out.

[See the original and the writing prompt this is response to on Hot White Snow]

Also watch for my new book on Thomas Edison. A companion to Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity, EDISON is due out in early 2016 from Sterling Publishing.

David J. Kent has been a scientist for over thirty years, is an avid science traveler, and an independent Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and the e-book Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time. He is currently writing a book on Thomas Edison.

Follow me by subscribing by email on the home page.  And feel free to “Like” my Facebook author’s page and connect on LinkedIn.  Share with your friends using the buttons below.

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How Climate Scientists Can Communicate the Science to the Public (from The Dake Page)

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Huh CommunicationLast week we took a look at how climate scientists can communicate the science to policy-makers, so today in Part 3 we’ll look at how scientists can communicate directly with the public. Together these are a three-part series on how to communicate climate science to all three target audiences – other scientists, policy-makers, and the public.

Communicating with the public is actually the most important of the three target audiences, and the one that scientists are least likely to have spent much time doing in their careers. And that’s a shame because policymakers (notwithstanding the disproportionate influence of lobbyists and rich campaign donors) are most influenced by public opinion. It is the public who are the real drivers of change. It is they who give policymakers permission (or pressure) to take action. If enough of their constituents demand action, they will act.

But reaching out to the public is inherently more difficult for scientists. Scientists, like all professionals, have usually spent considerable time (and expense) getting specific education, training, and life experience in their area of expertise than the general public. In these days of specialization it seems we all have our expertise, whether it be in some climate related science, economics, brain surgery, law, plumbing, or bridge design. Each field builds up its own set of jargon, technical words that have specific meanings within their field but may have no meaning to anyone outside that field (or worse, mean something completely different outside the field).

So it’s critical to reach out to the public, but scientists have to do so in ways that can be understood and are meaningful. Here are a few examples, though this by no means should be considered an exhaustive list:

1) Speak at libraries, churches, schools, etc.: Talk about science in a church? Of course. I was recently in a church whose stained glass windows included one celebrating several of our greatest scientists – Albert Einstein, George Washington Carver, and others. Libraries, churches, and schools all have one thing in common – they are places where the community comes together to learn. Off to give a talk about your area of specialty.

[Continue reading items 2 through 5 on The Dake Page]

The above is a partial cross-post of a full article on The Dake Page. Please click on the link above to read further. Thanks.

David J. Kent has been a scientist for over thirty years, is an avid science traveler, and an independent Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and the e-book Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time. He is currently writing a book on Thomas Edison.

Follow me by subscribing by email on the home page.  And feel free to “Like” my Facebook author’s page and connect on LinkedIn.  Share with your friends using the buttons below.