Uncommon Ground

Chris Bertram calls it "outright gibberish". Intellectual quackery is how I'd describe it. Describe what you ask? Intelligent design creationism. And calling it quackery isn't my idea. Read Steven Poole's review of "Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge To Darwinism". Here's the paragraph that Bertram quotes:

... Fuller happily adopts ID's rhetorical tactics: speaking of biologists' "faith"; forgetting to mention (or merely being ignorant of) the wealth of evidence for evolution in modern biology that wasn't available to Darwin himself; and even muttering about the "vicissitudes" of fossil-dating, thus generously holding the door open for young-Earth creationists, too. The book is an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to "action at a distance", except that the distance is in time rather than space. It's intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name.

In case you don't remember who Steve Fuller is, he's a sociologist who specializes in science and technology studies at the University of Warwick. He appeared as a witness in the Dover trial tying to defend the iindefensible, i.e., trying to convince Judge Jones that intelligent design creationism is a legitimate scientific hypothesis.¹ According to Poole, he embarrassed many of his colleagues in science and technology studies.

His amazingly bad new book is not likely to reassure them.

 

Emma Marris didn't much like "Sizzle"

Ultimately, one is left wondering what the film aims to do. Does it argue that climate change is real, or discuss how we might convince people that it is? At the end of the film, Olson heads off to the editing studio to make a coherent story out of his footage. If only we had got to see that version.

That's similar to the reaction many of the folks at Scienceblogs.com who reviewed it on Tuesday. Not all. Sheril Kirshenbaum had this to say:

There are many layers to Sizzle. While at times I laughed out loud (especially when climate change skeptic and cameraman Marion was on screen), other moments are quite thought provoking, encouraging us to reexamine who has been educating society about climate change and how.

After reading some of the reviews, Chris Mooney wrote:

In my view, what's so great about Sizzle is the way it asks us to look hard at the insularity of our pro-science community--and the disconnect between the science world and other walks of life, other parts of American culture. In this context, doesn't the fact that many science bloggers are slamming it--and misunderstanding it--simply validate the film's central point?

Orac's response to Mooney's post (he hasn't seen the movie yet) was included this:

I don't know if Sizzle was a good story or not because I haven't seen it yet, but I do know that whenever I see someone dismiss criticism as people "not getting it" or being humorless putzes who can't relate it strikes me as lazy and defensive. From many of the reviews I read, my fellow ScienceBloggers were bending over backward to give the movie the benefit of the doubt and to try to understand its message. Several of them just didn't think it was all that funny.

My take?

In "Sizzle" Randy Olson asks three questions: (1) Has the earth warmed over the last century and a half? (2) Are human activities responsible for a large part of that warming? (3) Can we do anything to stop it? Anyone who's read the IPCC reports will answer "Yes" to all three questions. Now read this and guess where it comes from.

Once considered a problem mainly for the future, climate change is now upon us. People are at the heart of this problem: we are causing it, and we are being affected by it. The rapid onset of many aspects of climate change highlights the urgency of confronting this challenge without further delay. The choices that we make now will influence current and future emissions of heat-trapping gases, and can help to reduce future warming. Likewise, our decisions on whether and how to adapt to the degree of warming that is already inevitable can help us reduce the impacts of future warming.

Many projects designed to reduce carbon emissions focus on reducing the rate of deforestation or on replanting of forests that were harvested in the past. In yesterday's PLoS Biology Jack ("Francis") Putz and his colleagues point out that following improved forest practices can also have a very large effectt. Specifically, by adopting practices associated with reduced impact logging in tropical forests (planning of log landings, planning of roads, construction of bridges and water culverts, planning of skid trails, marking of future crop trees, directional felling, and liana cutting) the authors estimate that carbon emissions could be reduced by 0.16 gigatons per year.

To put that in perspective, total CO₂ emissions in 2005 were 28.2 gigatons. A reduction of 0.16 gigatons per year would make that an even 28 gigatons, a reduction of about about 0.7%. That may not sound like a lot, but consider this. During the 1990s ttopical deforestation was responsible for about 1.5 gigatons of CO₂ emissions annually (source). A reduction of 0.16 gigatons would represent about 10% of the total emissions associated with tropical deforestation. Suppose we could reduce deforestation rates by 50% by 2050, the annual reduction in CO₂ emissions would be about 0.5 gigatons.¹ Now reduced impact logging is looking very promising. It would eliminate almost 1/3 as much CO₂ as an ambitious program to reduce deforestation. Better yet, if we combined a 50% reduction in deforestation with reduced impact logging, the total annual savings would climb to 2/3 of a gigaton, or over 15% of the total reduction in CO₂ emissions necessary to stabilize atmospheric concentrations at 450ppm.²

In the interest of sharing good news when there is some, here's an item from Toronto's Globe & Mail:

One half of Ontario's vast boreal forest will be permanently protected from mining and other resource development projects as part of a sweeping plan unveiled by Premier Dalton McGuinty to combat climate change.

The government will protect at least 225,000 square kilometres from development, representing one half of the boreal region in the far north and an area 1.5 times greater in size than all the Maritime provinces combined, Mr. McGuinty said Monday at a news conference. This land will be off limits to any resource projects and restricted to tourism and traditional aboriginal uses, such as hunting and fishing, he said.

The region constitutes about 40% of Ontarios land area. Or to look at it in a way that may be easier for those of us in the U.S. to relate to, 225,000 square kilometers is an area roughly the size of the entire state of Minnesota. That's a lot of forest protected from resource development. The area will continue to be available for tourism and for traditional uses by first nations and Métis, like hunting and fishing.

If you're interested in other reviews of Sizzle, there's a long list of them (some good, some not so good) at ScienceBlogs.com.

Two years ago Randy Olson brought us Flock of Dodos, which examined the debate between those who think intelligent design creationism should be included in school science curricula and those who don't.¹ The film makes a powerful case that we, i.e. evolutionists, are part of the reason that intelligent design creationism has been so successful. Proponents of ID connect with people in ways that we don't. Sizzle argues that scientists are part of the reason that that climate skeptics have been so successful.

Let me clear. By "successful" I don't mean "successful in raising challenges that affect the overwhelming scientific consensus." I mean "successful in raising challenges that allow non-scientists to think that there are credible reasons to doubt the consensus." Proponents of ID and climate skeptics seem like nice, ordinary people. They talk in language that other ordinary people can understand. We talk like scientists, because we are.

After a production meeting in which Randy proposes a PowerPoint presentation for the movie because his cameraman kept interrupting and ruining the interviews,¹ his mother (Muffy Moose) sneaks out of the meeting with his cameraman and soundman for a night on the town. They tell her that Randy's movie is in trouble, and she tells Randy that he needs to listen to them. Soon they're off to New Orleans and the lower 9th ward to see how the richest country in the world recovers from a disaster.

Randy has a Ph.D. in marine biology. He's smart enough to know that (a) the connection between any single weather event and climate change is very indirect and tenuous and (b) there is (so far as I can tell) still legitimate debate about the extent to which climate change will increase the frequency and severity of hurricanes.² But the visit to the lower 9th ward is the most powerful part of the movie. It brings home the impact that global climate change could have on us, particularly when I read on Sunday yet another sign of Katrina fatigue: a memorial planned for the victims of Katrina is stalled. Colorful maps like the one to the left persuade me that we have a problem, but even though I'm a science geek,³ I find film from the lower 9th ward more emotionally compelling.

Remember that "academic freedom" bill that passed in Louisiana? Remember what that famously liberal newspaper the Wall Street Journal had to say about such bills in May? Carl Zimmer has the lastest over at The Loom.

We're all for open and objective discussions of scientific theories, right? Who wouldn't be? If your kids are taking physics in high school, you want them to read critiques of gravity, right? After all, shouldn't they know that there are some serious weaknesses in the theory of gravity? Right? For instance, the theory of gravity says that gravity makes things fall down. But planets don't fall into the sun. They go around it. So which is it-down or around? Clearly the theory of gravity is deficient. Right?

Wrong, of course. You don't teach critical thinking with patent nonsense.

Absolutely. And patent nonsense is exactly what our friends at the Discovery Institute are peddling.

TEN kilometres above the earth, the Pope delivered a message to the people of Sydney: the world is God's creation and humanity needs to safeguard it against the ravages of climate change.

His message, unexpected and delivered in Italian, called for a spiritual response to the environmental crisis and asked Catholics to find "a way of living, a style of life that eases the problems caused to the environment". ("Pontiff's plea to youth: go green," The Age, 14 July 2008)

The Vatican is installing solar cells to produce renewable energy, and it's working with a carbon offset company to establish a forest in Hungary large enough to offset its carbon footprint. The Evangelical Environmental Network is a group of evangelical protestants preaching the same gospel. Nick Matzke nailed it in his review of The Creation:

If conservationists are serious about making their case to evangelicals, they should have the goal of getting biodiversity on the front cover of Christianity Today, the leading evangelical newsmagazine. ... The key is convincing evangelicals that extinction is a moral outrage, something at least as senseless and horrible as book burning. Extinction should be viewed as stealing from future generations.

My copy of Conservation arrived a couple of days ago.The cover story is "The problem of what to eat" - and it is a problem. Natasha Loder points out that eating locally doesn't do much to reduce your carbon footprint. Over 80% of the carbon footprint associated with food consumption is associated with producing the food, not transporting it. Citing results from a study by Weber et al.,¹ she points out that "foregoing red meat and dairy use one day a week achieves more greenhouse gas reductions than eating an entire week's worth of locally sourced foods."

So if you're concerned about what your eating habits are doing to the climate, eat less red meat and dairy.