Dam Your Food Bowl

Yesterday I wrote about the new report on the viability of a "Top-End Food Bowl" in Australia.
The idea is to convert large swaths of land in the north to farm land, thus replacing the output lost from the (permanently?) drought-stricken Murray-Darling basin. As you can imagine, this promising idea has major implications for economic development in the region, as well as the country's ability to deal with climate change.  The new report seems to put the kibosh on the idea, but the debate is clearly not over.

This is turning into a useful example of the role of science in providing technical advice on a difficult policy issue. It is remarkable that, so far, we can see relatively clear distinctions being drawn between values and science as the debate proceeds. It is common to bury arguments over values underneath hard-fought battles over the validity of scientific studies.

Coverage in The Australian today reveals a number of concerns on the part of some participants. But these do not quarrel with the scientific conclusions regarding water availability in the North. They relate to the values framework within which the final conclusions were made. For example:

"The report is lightweight with a political focus towards green and indigenous issues," Senator Macdonald said.

This does not reflect an argument about the science behind the report's findings, but instead about agreed-upon values that structure the science-based response. For some, the failure to consider dams as an option is simply a reflection of environmental values that marginalize particular groups:

Nationals leader and Coalition regional development spokesman Warren Truss said the report drastically understated possible development, in part because "people with dreams were pushed aside" when the incoming Rudd government changed the make-up of the taskforce...

The accusation relates to the values of those who prepared the report, not the validity of the data that informed it. Perhaps this has something to do with the relative openness with which CSIRO seems to have approached their "science review" (which was commissioned to inform the final report). As they put it in the opening section:

This report reflects ... diversity. The 71 contributing authors and their sources have brought with them their particular expertise and, as people are wont to, their partialities and peccadilloes. The editors have not sought to conceal these; they are safer when exposed to light. Where interpretation exists, it is accompanied with information or data gathered from cited and accessible literature. Drawing from this, readers can make their own, perhaps divergent, interpretations. Needless to say, the views of the authors are their own, and not those of their respective employers.

Ruling Out Adaptation Options

For many researchers, an important component of "adaptation research" is the identification of options, or "pathways to adaptation." But of course, it's just as important to know what is not on the table. The front page of The Australian today has one such example:

NORTHERN Australia will never become an important food bowl to replace the drought-stricken Murray-Darling, despite massive irrigation plans and a billion litres of rain a year, a Rudd government taskforce has concluded.

You can find more background on the taskforce and its report here.

This report seems to contradict far more optimistic coverage in recent months (e.g. here, and here). It will be interesting to see if this sparks a science-based debate over the viability of the region.

From the perspective of a researcher, identifying options probably has mostly to do with what is technically feasible. But for those who would actually implement options, it is necessarily a much trickier balancing act involving a variety of values, economics, and of course, politics. The tricky part may be discerning where the technical ends, and the values begin. For example, in the article quoted above, we see that there is quite a bit of water in the Northern region of the country (my emphasis):

the north receives about a billion litres of rain a year, equivalent to eight-and-a-half times the annual runoff in the Murray-Darling Basin or 2000 times the capacity of Sydney Harbour.

... The CSIRO water study, presented to the taskforce last year, found there was not enough water to irrigate large swaths of land in the north without doing major damage to the rivers and the surrounding environment.

This concern will undoubtedly remain a central focus in debates over the development of the region. But a variety of other issues will compete with it, including Australia's food security, and the economic potential for Aboriginal groups and others.

IPCC and the money trail

John Tierney, of the New York Times, finds himself "in the unfamiliar position of defending Al Gore and his fellow Nobel laureate, Rajendra K. Pachauri." He's calling out what he sees as a cheap way of scoring points in climate change arguments:

Conflict-of-interest accusations have become the simplest strategy for avoiding a substantive debate. The growing obsession with following the money too often leads to nothing but cheap ad hominem attacks.

Tierney is right that sometimes you need commercial involvement in working out how to deal with complex issues like climate change. The National Research Council in the US commonly involves industry people in the preparation of its reports. But this does not in any way resolve the quite valid questions about Pachauri's connections, which are related to grant money and corporate profits, but also to the control of ideas and the prestige that comes with it. He basically points this out in later in the column (my emphasis):

There are, of course, notorious cases of corporate money buying predetermined conclusions, like the reports once put out by the Tobacco Institute to rebut concerns about smoking and cancer. But there has also been dubious work promoted by government agencies and foundations eager to generate publicity and advance their own agendas.

Exactly. Corporate involvement or not; money trail or not; conflict of interest is a serious issue that should be addressed by anyone in a position to give science advice.

I agree with Tierney's points about the money trail obsession. But let's not forget that this controversy could have been avoided if the IPCC had a policy for recognizing and dealing with conflict of interest. This is a pretty shocking oversight.

IPCC and Accountability

It may seem like all the controversy surrounding the IPCC these days is just more of the same battle between the "two sides" of the climate debate: the evil skeptics and the good people who believe in climate change. But that is not the case.

This is about the structure, role, and accountability of an extremely important and high profile institution: the IPCC. This piece in Der Speigel summarizes the problem quite well:

there is no code of conduct governing conflicts of interest for IPCC participants and leaders.

The lack of accountability in an organization of this importance is just astounding. The authors go on to make some broad recommendations:

It may be advisable to pause for wholesale institutional reform. The IPCC needs guidelines for the behavior of its officials, and those guidelines must be enforced. With a policy on conflict of interest similar to those in place in leading scientific advisory institutions, it seems obvious that the IPCC would need a new chairperson. The IPCC needs to adhere to its own standards for appointing experts and reviewing material that it reports. It needs to make its procedures for appointments more transparent. The IPCC peer-review should be made more robust, with quality assurance overriding deadlines. A formal mechanism should be put in place to correct errors after publication. Such reform will be a large and difficult task. But the credibility of climate science depends upon it.

I hope that we continue to see this kind of coverage of the IPCC. They need to recognize that it's not enough to get the science right. They need to get the science advice right as well, and that means avoiding conflict of interest and demonstrating accountability and transparency.

Whale War!

This video shows the latest escalation in the whale war. A Japanese whaling boat rammed a super-fancy speed boat driven by animal rights activists. This escalation in the long-running conflict has drawn a lot of attention today--it's all over the Australian news (e.g. here). Revkin just posted two videos. The one above from the perspective of the Japanese.

This one shows pretty clearly that the collision was an intentional move by the Japanese:


Whale meat is apparently delicious enough not only to kill these animals, but to risk serious harm or worse to humans as well.

Or, according to the Japanese, whale meat is scientifically interesting enough to possibly kill a few humans. They claim they are killing the whales for scientific research, but nobody believes them.

My question is, why is it necessary and in any way redemptive to use science as a shield for this activity?

Other controversies involving the use of animals in science usually involve a trade-off between supposed benefits for humans (through medical discoveries or identification of health hazards), and cruelty toward other living beings. What possible trade-off could the Japanese be offering in this context?

Another question: why science, and not some appeal to cultural tradition, such as that used by indigenous groups in Alaska? Is science somehow more legitimate regardless of its purpose?

I can't imagine these tactics on the part of activists are really helping. This kind of aggression starts looking to me like an affront to Japanese sovereignty, which is not the kind of thing that gets any nation to back down.

The Agenda of Science Magazine

Over at Klimazwiebel, Dennis Bray, has an interesting post about his experiences trying to get a letter published in Science Magazine. His frustrations are probably not atypical for authors that have been denied (and, as I know first hand, blogs are a great venue for venting, and getting the message out anyway). And upon denial, it's easy to examine assumed interests of the parties involved, and imagine hidden agendas and conspiracies.

Bray was trying to publish a letter in response to a very high-profile article by Naomi Oreskes, which claims to have demonstrated a scientific consensus on global warming. Bray's own survey work (discussed here, here, and here, among other places) has suggested a much more complicated state of affairs, and certainly calls into question the consensus idea. But Science didn't publish his letter in response to Oreskes. Why not?

Well, it's all speculation of course, but Bray's theory relates to the profit motive, and the need to please sponsors, many of whom run environmentally conscious ads in the magazine (many of which might be considered "greenwashing"). Bray concludes:

The question is, does Science’s quest for appropriate image come at a cost to content? Can the charges leveled against ‘industry’ funded research be applied to ‘we want to have a green image’ commercial (Science is a commercial enterprise) journal? Does advertising have a place in academic journals?

Whether or not these questions have any bearing on the publication of Bray's letter, I think it is interesting to examine the motives and the agenda of Science, and its parent organization, AAAS. However, I think Bray has misinterpreted the dynamics somewhat.

Politics of Impure Science

Today's LA Times is running an op-ed by my advisor, Dan Sarewitz, and Sam Therstrom of the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank). This piece addresses the problem of making science the "arbiter of the political debate."

Many people believe that science dictates appropriate policy action. This article challenges that notion:

The real scandal illustrated by the e-mails is not that scientists tried to undermine peer review, fudge and conceal data, and torpedo competitors, but that scientists and advocates on both sides of the climate debate continue to claim political authority derived from a false ideal of pure science. This charade is a disservice to both science and democracy. To science, because the reality cannot live up to the myth; to democracy, because the difficult political choices created by the genuine but also uncertain threat of climate change are concealed by the scientific debate.

What is the solution? Let politics do its job; indeed, demand it.

There is already discussion of this piece elsewhere in the blogosphere (see here, and here), so I recommend reading the whole thing and chiming in.

How AIDS might be like Climate Change

You often hear people argue that climate change affects everything, everywhere. An arguable statement in both senses of the word. But the assertion often leads to a far more delusional mindset, in which climate change is everything. Many people seem to believe that to solve climate change (as if that were possible) is to solve most of the problems of the world.

As Philip Stevens of the London-based International Policy Network discusses in a short article recently printed in the Australian, this mentality is dangerous. Especially when it becomes embedded in a large, powerful organization such as the UN.

Stevens sees an eerie similarity between recent calls for the creation of a massive UN entity that would "coordinate advocacy and policy on climate change" and the creation of UNAIDS in 1996:

Everybody's a Nazi!

Here's a headline that caught my eye today as I was updating the Headline Wall (more on that later):

Climate Deal Backers 'like Nazi appeasers.'

This genre of accusation is nothing new in the polarized world of climate politics, but it struck me that we may be witnessing a sort of Nazi accusation creep.

In August Roger Pielke highlighted a political speech in New South Wales in which climate skeptics were compared to Nazi appeasers. (Who then, asked Roger, are the Nazis?).

In late November, Lucia noticed footage of Hitler being played in the background during a discussion of "Climategate."

So now the deal supporters and the skeptics are appeasers, and the scientists are being compared with the Nazis themselves? By the time the smoke clears, will anyone have escaped the Nazi comparison?

Lucia would say that this is just more evidence in favor of Godwin's Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

Though obviously these examples are not confined to the virtual world, and the comparisons are multiplying. Perhaps we need a corollary along these lines:

As the discussion continues to grow, the number of involved parties avoiding Nazi or Hitler comparisons approaches 0.

Jon Stewart on ClimateGate: Don't Cut Corners!

As usual, Jon Stewart nails it.

More on Motive vs. Content

This National Journal interview with Judy Curry, an accomplished and respected climate scientist, is very insightful, and touches on the issue of motive vs. content, which I wrote about the other day. Here's a snippet:

NJ: Is the outside scrutiny from the skeptics making the science stronger?

Curry: Scrutiny from scientific skeptics makes the science stronger, either by identifying problems that can be addressed or by increasing confidence when problems and errors are not found. Scrutiny from [politically motivated] contrarians and deniers and the noise generated by such people do distract scientists from their real work... The scientists involved in the CRU emails are dismissing certain people as skeptics, assuming that they all have political motivations. Well, the motivation of the skeptic isn't really the point. The point is whether or not they have a valid argument.

NJ: Is the science community served well by ad hominem criticisms of the skeptics?

Curry: Absolutely not. Scientists should criticize the argument, not the person making the argument. The other fallacious criticism is "appeal to motive," looking for some link of the skeptics to the oil industry or advocacy group.... You [should] have to declare this, but it does not in any way disqualify you from doing research or publishing your papers.

Mann was on "The Diane Rehm Show" yesterday [Nov. 30]. He was very eloquent, but he was defending [an e-mail in which he suggested boycotting a journal that published an article questioning climate change by saying] it was a bad paper and besides, those people were affiliated with the oil industry. He really believes that's right, but medical research would stop if anyone who got their funding from the pharmaceutical industry could not publish their paper.

We don't really know how to behave in this politicized environment.... I don't think any of those scientists involved are out to be bad people. They think they have the moral high ground. Scientists just don't know how to behave in this politicized environment... and we really need advice from the social psychologists, historians and philosophers on how we should be dealing with this situation.

Motive and Source vs. Content

In my recent post on the CRU email hack, I wrote the following about the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

Obviously the motives of CEI are, as always, to detract from the credibility of climate science writ large, but that should not detract from the legitimacy of their core question, which relates to the conduct of public employees who should be accountable to taxpayers.

I also wrote this about the Wall Street Journal:

Whatever you think about climate change, and whatever you think about the motives of the WSJ, I hope that you agree with that point [about further investigation of the conduct of climate scientists].

I've been reflecting about the caveats I made in these statements about the motives of a conservative think tank, like CEI, and the credibility of a source like WSJ, which has history of editorials criticizing mainstream views of climate change. Why does it feel necessary to direct attention to what is actually being said, and away from the inferred motives?

Incriminating? Stupid? Both?

Following up on the CRU email post from yesterday, the Sunday Times has a column called "Flushing Out the High Priests of Climate Change," in which he argues that the behavior of scientists involved in the controversy "is not necessarily incriminating, but it is stupid."

...You can hardly blame busy scientists who have spent their lives amassing a pile of data, which they have interpreted in their own way, for not wanting to release it to people who want to rubbish it. Still, release it they should, and it is up to the scientific establishment to set out better ground rules and insist on more openness. The problem is that establishment science has no means of engaging with outsiders in the blogging age. It needs to wake up.

No wonder the public is confused. No wonder journalists have a choice between waiting for the occasional tablet of stone from the keepers of the global warming flame, or joining the newer, hipper fraternity of bloggers who snigger about ManBearPig, the bogus global warming monster in South Park’s skit on Al Gore. This polarisation means that a considered view on global warming is much harder to achieve, so in the end people simply go for the belief that feels right for them.
Working scientists may be grumpy about the unfairness, but far higher standards are expected of them than of the rude blogger-sceptics who are crowing about the embarrassment.
Tough. They should get over it. If the high priests of global warming want to convince us that we could face a man-made rise of 4C in the global temperature this century, then they have to engage with their critics instead of hiding away in their ivory towers.

Who's the Boss of Science?

[This is a cross-post from SoapBox over at Arizona State University's Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO).]

Thanks to the theft and publication of years worth of email from the Climate Research Unit (CRU), a major scientific center devoted to climate science, we now have an interesting picture of the at-times-questionable conduct of a number of top researchers in the field.The media and blogosphere are abuzz with commentary, analysis, and introspection from all corners. Initiatially there were two major narratives: