Charts of the Day

by folkbum

1. How the health care bill helps:



2. What consensus looks like (via):



3. Keep in mind tonight:

McIlheran Watch: The wronger he digs, the deeper he gets

by folkbum

I am not a scientist. Patrick McIlheran isn't, either. But I read and check my sources carefully. For example, today in a blog posting, McIlheran cites energy-industry spokesman climate scientist Patrick Michaels to try to claim that peer-review is a bit more like Heathers than like Real Genius. Michaels has an op-ed in the Murdoch Finance Daily Wall Street Journal. I'm quoting the op-ed; the part McIlheran also quotes is in bold:

Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn't like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU's own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Mr. [Michael] Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," he wrote in one of the emails. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned.

Michaels establishes a clear timeline: He published in Climate Reearch -> Mann raised a stink about his paper -> Mann organized a boycott of CR -> the editors quit because Mann intimidated them. It fits the "climategate" narrative neatly and thoroughly reinforces McIlheran's deny-a-riffic worldview. It is, however, wrong.

In January 2003, Climate Research published a literature review by Drs. Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (working at the Harvard‑Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, not a climate-research outfit). Almost immediately, the people who wrote the literature reviewed by the Soon and Baliunas--and a host of others--started noticing things that weren't right, and writing to the journal. Other editors of the journal also complained (the duo submitted to the most overtly anti-global warming editor). In March 2003, Mann wrote the email in question; no boycott ensued, and, in fact, Mann also said, "the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper, which will be ignored by the
community on the whole." Sure, Mann's email also mentioned Michaels, but in passing--the conversation is clearly sparked by and about Soon and Baliunas. In May 2003, Cox newspapers--now McClatchy, one of the few purely journalistic endeavors left in publishing--dug deep to find that the paper had funding from the American Petroleum Institute and oil companies like Exxon, which raised more questions with the editors. This was followed in July by a statement from Mann and a dozen other scientists in another journal. Finally, at the end of July, a bunch of the editors resigned from CR because the publisher refused to let them respond without the consent of the one hinky editor, who of course refused.

Notice, none of the hubbub was instigated by anything from Patrick Michaels. The resignations and furor had nothing to do with any kind of bullying from Michael Mann, at least according to the contemporary accounts and the first-person accounts of the editors involved.

(Michals keeps writing, and McIlheran keeps quoting, to blame Mann and others for the resignation of a skeptical editor at Geophysical Research Letters, a resignation that had nothing to do with pressure from anyone: "I stepped down as GRL editor at the end of my three-year term," the guy wrote. "My departure had nothing to do with attempts by Wigley or anyone else to have me sacked.")

Now, I'm willing to cut McIlheran a little bit of slack, here, because one would like to think that Michaels knows his own biography well enough to, you know, write honestly about it. But here's Michaels, exaggerating his own role as Defender Of The True Discourse despite, of course, his own tainted past and his willingness now to play fast an loose with documented fact.

But that doesn't mean that McIlheran doesn't owe us another retraction and correction. Given that it took him two weeks, and an uncorrected-in-print-or-online op-ed in a Sunday paper, before he admitted he was wrong about one fundamental aspect of "climategate" (it was a "subtlety" that "slipped past" him), I expect this big fat error will go unmentioned, too.

McIlheran Watch: Behind and not quitting

by folkbum

Perhaps to avoid the buyout, Patrick McIlheran accepted a rewrite to his contract that requires him to dig deeper when he's wrong about something, as he keeps doing on the SwiftHack--"climategate," as the kids are calling it. (See 1, 2.)

Today he's at it again, talking up F. Jim (before he F's you!) Sensenbrenner and the Congressman's plan to swoop into Copenhagen and Save Humanity From The Scientists. F. Jim feels empowered to jet off (I wonder who's paying for it?) because someone's been feeding F. Jim the same lies about those stolen emails that McIlheran has been eating:

The e-mails, Sensenbrenner wrote, "demonstrate that a cabal of supposed 'cream-of-the-crop' climate scientists were indeed successful in getting editors of journals that had published contrarian views fired and that they conspired to boycott journals that did not bend to their wishes--therefore ensuring that such views would not be adequately represented in IPCC Assessment Reports."

McIlheran is quoting from a--wait for it--Fox News report about F. Jim's upped dander. Sadly, McIlheran, who claims to be a journalist and claims to have actual experience journalisming and indeed works at the largest purveyor of journalism in the state, fails again at Step One: Checking the Facts.

Start, for example, with the fact that none of the email writers successfully canned a single journal editor. There is the case of Hans von Storch, who resigned in protest from the journal Climate Research when ExxonMobile managed to plant a paper denying global warming, and von Storch was not allowed to write an editorial noting the errors in that paper. (An assistant editor went with him, too.) Sensenbrenner clearly is wrong, and McIlheran just lets it fly.

Move on, for another example, to the fact that the email writers did not keep anything out of the IPCC report. That's two in one sentence that McIlheran doesn't bother to check. Or maybe, as he tried to claim the other day, this is all just a "subtlety" that "slipped past" him.

The rest isn't any better; that McIlheran is offering the same lies under other people's names doesn't absolve him of the responsibility to get the basics right--especially when the facts are easy to find.

Factless McIlheran update

by folkbum

That is, McIlheran's the factless one, as we saw this morning.

To bring you up to speed: Yesterday, weeks after the facts of the matter became widely available, McIlheran runs an op-ed that gets a bunch of stuff wrong related to what the kids these days are calling "climategate," including the falsehood that the original data that the Climatic Research Unit used was all gone. The topper, of course, was that McIlheran claimed that head of the CRU, Phil Jones, explained--or perhaps predicted--in 1999 how to explain the "decline" in temperatures observed between 1999 and 2009.

In a blog posting today, McIlheran retracts some of that. Well, he doesn't retract it. He doesn't even bother to note that he was, you know, wrong about it. He says his lie was a--cough--"subtlety" that "slipped past" him. Seriously! Here it is:

Marc Sheppard at American Thinker points out a subtlety (one that had slipped past me) about the “hide the decline” imperative that researchers, trying to salvage the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming were under:

It wasn’t the decline in global temperatures over the past 10 or so years that needed hiding, Sheppard points out. “The decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists--those determined by proxy reconstructions.”

The Sheppard piece linked to proceeds to post graph after graph, produced by the scientists in question that show the proxy data next to the recorded temperatures for all to see! I think we should all want to play hide and seek with these guys, they're so bad at hiding.

And McIlheran repeats the other claim, too, that there's no way to check the data. At least, I think that's what this sentence is supposed to say: "And, now, the Climategate scandal--in which scientists at the forefront of the supposed “consensus” precluding further debate turn out to have manipulated data, suppressed contrary findings and in general behaved like activists rather than scientists--suggests that their predictions now are uncheckable, unfalsifiable--in short, not science but faith." Help me out if you can suss some sense into that. "Hide the decline" in grammaticality, if you will. (I loves me some dashes, but my general rule is no more than a pair in any given sentence.)

Or maybe the grammar checker is just a "subtlety" that "slipped past."

McIlheran Watch: Fact-checker needed, PLEASE!

by folkbum

Yesterday was Sunday, which means calumnist* Patrick McIlheran's op-ed tripe ran in the paper. As usual, it's cringe-worthy in its denial of reality and bending of facts.

McIlheran, like much of the wingnut contingent, is still going on about the thieved emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. To remind you all, the CRU is just one collection of scientists doing climate research, and even if everything they ever did turns out to have been cooked up in a late-night, pot-induced "wouldn't it be funny if ..." kind of scenario, there are still literally tens of thousands of other scientists doing independent research with their own observations and data in other parts of the world whose work still points in one, incontrovertible direction: Human activity affects the earth's climate.

But the emails are shiny and the new-scandal smell hasn't yet worn off, so McIlheran isn't ready to put them down. No matter that he seems to have absolutely no sense of what the science discussed in the emails means, he's willing to misread them and take phrases out of context to justify his pro-corporate, anti-Algore world view.

For example, he has repeatedly blogged in the last couple weeks about the jacked emails, and repeatedly gotten stuff wrong. He's written at least twice, for example, that "[t]he British center admitted it threw out its original data on which it pinned its predictions of disaster." Which is true--at some point in the 1980s the CRU moved from one office to another and opted not to haul its paper copies in the process. But McIlheran claims that means "other researchers, thus, cannot check the claims" of the CRU. Which is false, as the CRU does not do its own data collection, and all the paper it tossed 25 years ago was merely copies of data that exist other places and that, if you want, you can get for yourself.

McIlheran's falsity was corrected by commenters at his blog, but it doesn't seem to have helped, since he drops it into Sunday's column anyway: "Lest you think we can sort this out by re-running the numbers, it transpires that the center discarded its original data. Their predictions now are uncheckable, unfalsifiable--in short, not science but faith." Apparently it's McIlheran who's holding on to faith over fact--the faith that his preconceived prejudice against science outweighs the truth that the data are not missing at all.

And in Sunday's column he also includes this doozy:

The e-mails, leaked or hacked by unknown parties but acknowledged to be real, do not in themselves disprove man-made global warming. They do reveal these researchers, the experts who wrote the doom narrative, discussing among themselves how to manipulate data to make observations fit their predictions. One telling message from the unit's head is about how to "hide the decline" in observed temperatures, as global warming seems to have halted about a decade ago, something their models are unable to explain.

Leave aside for just a moment the fact that McIlheran doesn't know what "hide the decline" was actually referring to--or rather, he chooses to misrepresent what it means, because the accurate interpretation is not just all over the internet but also in the comments to his blog posts where he initially offered the bad reading of it.

Instead, consider that McIlheran chooses to apply "hide the decline" to the notion that, in his words, "global warming seems to have halted about a decade ago." I've included McIlheran's own links so that you can see for yourself just how baldly misleading McIlheran is being here. Really, there's no other way to describe it--McIlheran is blatantly lying to push his agenda (shocker!). How can you tell? The second of his two links notes that "the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 [. . .]. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius--in other words, a standstill." So temperatures overall have flatlined since 1999 (in some places, temps are higher, of course, and in some places, they're lower, but we're talking global average.)

Now check McIlheran's first link, the one to the email from Phil Jones at the CRU. Note the date: "Tue, 16 Nov 1999." That's right, ladies and gentleman, Patrick McIlheran, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's "Right Wing Guy," just accused Phil Jones of describing a method for "how to 'hide the decline' in observed temperatures" since 1999--in 1999. How does McIlheran explain this? Is Phil Jones a witch, maybe, and McIlheran would like to throw him in the lake to be sure? Or maybe Phil Jones got a fortune cookie in 1999 predicting flatlined temps. Magic eight ball? ESP? Time machine? What? I really want to know!

I realize that the Journal Sentinel is getting down to a bit of bare-bones staffing, but is there not one single person there responsible for checking facts? Surely someone clicked on the links McIlheran included in his own submitted op-ed and saw the absurdity of this. How does something that obvious get through?

* coined by iT

"Climategate"

by folkbum

People want comment? Sure. In the form of a deep thought:

Deep Thought
Apparently climate-change deniers who have hacked access to fifteen years' worth of scientists' emails can't find a smoking gun more powerful than one scientist admitting that he substituted actual thermometer readings in place of proxy measures for temperature in one of his papers.

Happy?

Deep Thought

by folkbum

Not one of the local conservative bloggers who used unusually cold days in September to mock "global warming" has noted the recent unusually warm days in November.

"Congratulations [...] on the expansion of your ecological experience."

by folkbum

That's the conservative response to global warming. Warm-weather species moving north to where you are? Congratulations on the expansion of your ecological experience, they say.

Can you imagine a few years from now? Malaria spreading across Eurpoe and the midwestern US. Congratulations on the expansion of your ecological experience.

The shoreline moves to where, for example, millions of people used to live in Bangladesh. Congratulations on the expansion of your ecological experience.

Great Britain freezes because melting polar ice fills the waters around the islands. Congratulations on the expansion of your ecological experience.

Feel free to add more in the comments. I have to brave the -5 degree weather to get to work now.

Al Gore's Press Conference in Palo Alto

By Keith Schmitz

My daughter and new son-in-law live in Palo Alto where Al Gore has an office. When word got out he was to be making an appearance, many places gave their employees the day off to come down and express their appreciation for Gore's honor. Here is Brian's blog from this afternoon:

After receiving the Tip from a friend the Kango Blogger news crew (3 people and one Digital SLR camera) traveled the 5 blocks to see if the tip was real.

With ~ 30+ news crews we figured that the former Vice President would soon be arriving. People from the community came out to catch a glimpse of Gore including some young children with signs.

For a few minutes we went down a hall labeled “Press” and were politely asked to leave.

But we heard a tip that he would be arriving on the other side of the building; this tip also proved true and we were able to catch a glimpse of Gore as we stepped out of his Mercedes sedan “Eco 10” (powered by bio-diesel)

The Vice President was very polite to the press, and to the locals who had come out to support him; he stayed briefly outside the Alliance for Climate Protection offices and shook the hands of the children and their parents and thanked them for their support.

The place was buzzing after Gore arrived; and we went down the hall to the press room, going to the back door entrance we were welcomed inside by the “Alliance for Climate Protection” staff (despite our lack of press badges), climbing some steps in the back of the room already crowded by 10-15 journalists) we waited for Al Gore to deliver his speech.

His spokesperson entered the room first saying that Mr. Gore would be coming in 2 minutes to give a short speech and that he would not be answering questions; when he arrived he was hailed by the sound of 60+ cameras snapping photo’s (which failed to cease throughout the five minute speech) and the glare of the lights.

First the former vice president acknowledged the Nobel Prize committee for selecting him the (shared) winner and announced that he would be donating the prize to combat the climate crisis; he also said that he would travel to accept the prize in person.

Then he spoke briefly about the continuing effects of global warming on the polar ice caps “polar scientists are now warning that at current rates the polar ice caps will be completely gone within 23 years” (or language very similar, this humble blogger is relying only on memory)

He then spoke from a place of his own passion delivering a call in the form of an African proverb

Gore said:

“There is an old African proverb, If you want to go fast; go alone, if you want to go far; go together we need to act both quickly and together if we are going to put an end to the climate crisis” (Again I quote from memory)

With that, he concluded the press conference and thanked everyone for coming.

As he walked out of the room he was met with shouts from the press “Mr. Vice President Do you plan to run for president after winning this award?… Mr Vice president!”

With that; he left the room and he went to a private meeting with members of the Alliance for Climate Protection.

His message was loud and clear it sends a strong message that this years’ Nobel Prize is awarded to Al Gore. The world’s most important institutions are recognizing the urgency of the problem that we all face, for my part; I hope that we are able to make the simple green choices that will make that difference.

Weatherman Tells You Which Way the Wind Blows

By Keith Schmitz

Kudos to Channel 4's weatherman Craig Koplien for stepping up on his blog to weigh in on the climate change issue and makes the obvious choice (though others in the employ of Journal Broadcasting will vehemently disagree and as their habit deride this):

I am not a climatologist, oceanographer, glaciologist, solar physicist or expert in any other field related to climate change or global warming. Nor are most meteorologists you see on TV across the United States.

Broadcast meteorologists are, however, the closest most of the public gets to people whose life's work is the study of global warming.

Therefore, it is our responsibility to be up to date on the research and conclusions made by those who are experts. This is imperative so we can present factual and unbiased information to our viewers.

Moreover, it is our responsibility to present information regarding global warming in a fashion that is consistent with the majority of the evidence presented by the experts and adopted by our professional organization, the American Meteorological Society (AMS).

Some broadcast meteorologists don't feel the same way. Some have instead chosen to ignore the evidence and present views contrary to those who have far greater expertise in the field. At the very least, it seems that those who take a position contrary to the prevailing view of the scientific community owe it to their viewers to admit this.

Two heavyweights in broadcast meteorology have recently written about this. Certified Broadcast Meteorolgists Bob Ryan of NBC-4 in Washington D.C., and John Toohey-Morales, AMS Commissioner on Professional Affairs, co-authored a guest editorial that appeared in the August 2007 edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

I agree with their points of view and conclusions.

Here is a sample of their conclusions:

Alarmingly, many weathercasters and certified broadcast meteorologists dismiss, in most cases without any solid scientific arguments, the conclusions of the National Research Council (NRC), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and other peer-reviewed research (that would be you State Rep Jim Ott -- R-Mequon).

As outlined in the CBM and CCM programs, a responsible broadcast and/or consulting meteorologist should continue to stay as informed as possible and look to the AMS for leadership. The “AMS Statement on Climate Change” recently adopted by the AMS Council should be required reading for all of us who communicate with the public or seek guidance on climate change. While some of us may disagree with its exact wording, the weight of the scientific evidence behind the Statement is very solid.

As the above indicates, this is an issue that will not be fully settled. But then again science doesn't work that way.

But at some point both the rational ability to sort out facts and a modicum of survival instinct has to kick in.

Rage Against the Machine

By Keith Schmitz

Why do they lie? Because it works.

For those of you who didn't receive the issue, Newsweek has a very important article on the manufactured dissent on the global warming issue by the doubt machine of the climate change deniers.

From the article:

Just last year, polls found that 64 percent of Americans thought there was "a lot" of scientific disagreement on climate change; only one third thought planetary warming was "mainly caused by things people do." In contrast, majorities in Europe and Japan recognize a broad consensus among climate experts that greenhouse gases—mostly from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas to power the world's economies—are altering climate. A new NEWSWEEK Poll finds that the influence of the denial machine remains strong. Although the figure is less than in earlier polls, 39 percent of those asked say there is "a lot of disagreement among climate scientists" on the basic question of whether the planet is warming; 42 percent say there is a lot of disagreement that human activities are a major cause of global warming. Only 46 percent say the greenhouse effect is being felt today.

The article goes on to dig deep into the manipulation of the American public by vested interests.

We see it all the time. We know that the facts are not kind to conservative "truths."

This is the 21st century. We can't run a country on myth and ever hope to be competitive.

Global Warming Answers

by folkbum

This morning I asked a serious question about global warming, and I got a few thoughtful answers. I wanted to know why conservatives are often downright hostile to the idea of global climate change. I don't think the answers I got are sufficient, but they deserve response from me.

First up, Dad29, in comments to that post, starts a trend. "Before 'solving' a problem," he writes, "make sure that it IS a problem; then determine whether the 'solution' will be efficacious, including unintended consequences." In the process, he denies that the noticeable changes in climate that scientists have observed are abnormal, caused by human behavior, or anything to worry about. I'm not sure what he does for a living, but when he consensus of the scientific community--the people who do do climate science for a living, is that Dad29's wrong on all three counts, I trust them, not him.

I said it was a trend; Rick Esenberg responds similarly:

It is one thing to observe an increase in global temperatures and even to accept the notion that human activity has something to do with it. It's quite another to buy into Gorean hysteria over what that means and what ought to be done about it. Contrary to Jay's assumption, there is no scientific consensus about that.

In other words, as Dad29 wrote, any "solution" to the problem may be worthless--or, at least, not worthwhile. In the process, Esenberg warns, there is a real danger of hysteria that will in the end only be costlyHe adds a "South Park" reference to make sure we get that point. This is echoed in an interesting post by Nick Schweitzer:

The fact that the problem exists and that human behavior contributes significantly to the problem is hardly proven science. The data is very much still open to interpretation. In fact, there has been a lot of cherry picking of data regarding what the climate was like centuries ago in order to "prove" the change. [. . .] What all of this has led to is a bad case of "do something syndrome". Before we actually know the scale, or even the real cause of the problem, people are all up in arms to just do something... anything. The problem, is that the scale of the problem (if it exists and we can change it) is so large that the cost of doing something is huge.

Schweitzer's "Do Something Syndrome" frame is clever and, indeed, representative of quite a lot of policy-making in Washington or Madison or any other capital you could name. But I don't think it, or the answers provided by Dad29 and Rick Esenberg, is an accurate way to describe the calls for action about global warming.

I think the problem may be that the three see this as an issue driven by environmentalists. Not that I have anything against them, but even I think of environmentalists as being an awful lot like Jesse of "I won't eat anything with a shadow" fame. When they stand around and scream "Do Something!" I might take a mild interest in what they have to say, but I'm not going to go out of my way to please them.

No, what worries me about global warming is not the level-five-vegan crowd, but the scientific community. See, as much as Dad29, Esenberg, and Schweitzer may hope that there is no proven causal link between human activity and climate change, fact is that there is (thanks to Seth for that link; I was going to use this one from The Guardian):

The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is being released in Paris next week. This segment, written by more than 600 scientists and reviewed by another 600 experts and edited by bureaucrats from 154 countries, includes "a significantly expanded discussion of observation on the climate," said co-chair Susan Solomon, a senior scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She and other scientists held a telephone briefing on the report Monday.

That report will feature an "explosion of new data" on observations of current global warming, Solomon said. [. . .]

The February report will have "much stronger evidence now of human actions on the change in climate that's taken place," Rajendra K. Pachauri told the AP in November. Pachauri, an Indian climatologist, is the head of the international climate change panel.

An early version of the ever-changing draft report said [. . .] "An increasing body of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on other aspects of climate including sea ice, heat waves and other extremes, circulation, storm tracks and precipitation."

And we needn't rely on a study that isn't out yet--most of the data in the report, it sounds like, is based on previously-published, peer-reviewed research. The notion that human behavior doesn't contribute to climate change is one clung to only by those with politics or paychecks riding on their denial.

In other words, Al Gore may make a convenient target as the face of the "Do Something Syndrome" crowd when it comes to global warming, but it isn't Gore's alarmist theatrics that ought to convince the skeptics. Rather, it's the studious, sober, and increasingly frequent calls by people whose names you will probably never hear again for us to take them seriously. To dismiss the issue--or the need to "do something"--as mere hype is dangerous.

Aside from calling my original essay a "rant" (I counted it among my "rambles," alas), Schweitzer's answer is, like Esenberg's, reasoned and even thought-provoking, especially in raising the necessity of balancing cost and benefit of taking action on global warming. But, in the main, I'm not particularly talking about them. Both seem to accept that something is happening to the climate, despite wavering on whether human activity has an effect of the speed or scope of that something and whether we need to change human behavior in response.

But in my reading of them, neither has ever exhibited the kind of outright hostility that prompted my original question, the personal attacks against anyone who deviates from the conservative party line or suggests that when a previously stable ice shelf breaks off into the the ocean it could be a sign. Those two weren't cheering on when a school district banned An Inconvenient Truth; they didn't call anyone names after 2006's calm hurricane season.

And that's what I'm really hoping someone can explain. It's one thing to debate the extent of our nation's response to global climate change; it's quite another to plug your ears and hurl insults anytime someone reminds you of cold, hard facts.

Global Warming Question

by folkbum

I did not watch the State of the Union speech last night; somehow, these things always seem to get scheduled during exam week and I have to give priority to that thing that pays the bills, you know? So I was busy reading mediocre exams while our mediocre president gave what was, by all accounts, a mediocre speech. I'll let Senator Webb, Senator Durbin, and Paul Soglin speak for me about the speech specifically, and I'll let occam's hatchet remind you of previous greatest SOTU hits.

But the speech does give me an excuse to ask a question that's been rattling around in my head for some time, and, if y'all don't mind, I would even appreciate a considered response in the comments below. It is this: Why are conservatives, particularly social conservatives, so invested in denying that global climate change exists?

There was a great deal of speculation in the run-up to the SOTU that Bush would finally recognize global warming and that people might be shocked at how "green" his speech would be. Turns out there was one measly sentence about global warming: "These technologies will help us become better stewards of the environment--and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change." Hardly a ringing endorsement of the last five years of Al Gore's life, but perhaps a step in the right direction. The right direction, of course, being an acknowledgement of reality.

But why should it be such a surprise--or even news--that Bush would mention global warming? There is no reason, other than the obstinance of many conservatives, particularly those in power, why this country hasn't taken the same steps forward that every other Western nation has in both recognizing that the problem exists and that our behavior contributes significantly to that problem.

Perhaps it's just because my greatest experience with the conservative right comes mostly from what I read in the Right Cheddarsphere that I haven't seen progress; for all I know, "green" fever has been sweeping the country and it's just taken a long time to hit the backwaters of conservative Wisconsin. But when global warming comes up for discussion, not only do many of the usual suspects deny that climate change exists, there is downright hostility toward the idea. (Don't believe me? Search for yourself--and that doesn't even turn up hostile hits from Fred or Peter's former and current blogs, whence the greatest venom spews.)

So I repeat my question: Why are conservatives, particularly social conservatives, so invested in denying that global climate change exists?

While certainly it's true that there is a smalll segment of the scientific community willing to deny the existence of global warming, surely that cannot be reason enough for conservatives to cling to. There is no question that often minorities of scientists can be right; consider that a mere half a century ago, only a tiny few geologists understood or promoted plate tectonics, something we all take for granted now. But the trick in these instances is to watch the movement--once scientists were able to read about, understand, and verify through their own experiments the concepts of plate tectonics, the scientific community shifted rapidly and solidly into consensus about it. The same has, in fact, happened when it comes to climate change: The minority denying its existence are the last holdouts in a community that has long since left them behind. (They hold out, perhaps, because of who signs their paychecks.)

So if it isn't the science, what is it? I can kind of see a reason why an economic conservative might, for example, be unwilling to allow government intervention to change behavior. They could figure that "the market" will get around to changing once the malaria-ridden bodies start piling up in the new swamps around Rhinelander. But that, also, is not reason enough to deny the existence of climate change or to be so hostile to the idea.

And, yes, personal convictions can certainly affect the way one views science. From the right, for example, I fully understand--even if I don't agree--why religious folk are so opposed to the theory of evolution, as its implications reject the foundation upon which much of their religion is premised: God created the earth and everything on it, and to suggest that human life, which they believe is made in God's image, is a mere accident of biology is quite literally sacrilege. And from the left, there are good reasons--if not scientific ones--for liberal academics to fight against evolutionary psychology^*; after all, it is only a short trip from "Men's brains evolved differently from women's brains" to "Men's brains evolved better than women's brains." And given our history with that sort of reasoning over the last couple of centuries, the warning bells are not unjustified.

But there is nothing--nothing--that I can see that justifies a rejection of climate change in the same way. What personal convictions are strengthened by such a denial? Unless it's possibly to assuage guilt over not driving a Prius--or perhaps leftover hostility to Al Gore--I can't imagine what it might be.

So, please, help me understand: What is it that drives them (or you, if you are one) not only to disregard what is painfully clear to the rest of us, but to vehemently and disparagingly attack anyone who says otherwise? What have you got invested in this denial that makes it impossible for them (or you) to either talk rationally about it or acknowledge the truth?

--

^* One of the things that bothers me most about the "Intelligent Design" crowd is their insistence that schools "teach the controversy." They have manufactured a controversy out of thin air, and then demand that it be presented--clever. But in doing so, they ignore the fact that, at any given moment, there is plenty of "controversy" within the scientific community. Evolutionary psychology over the last decade and a half is a perfect example; we can teach "controversy" without having to resort to phony ginned-up pseudo-science.