The Profitability of Obfuscation
Bad Astronomer Phil Plait debunked the notion of an approaching ice age recently, a spurious theory based on misconceptions regarding the sun's magnetic cycle:
The Sun has a magnetic cycle, its magnetic field waxing and waning in strength roughly every 11 years. The strength and complexity of the solar field governs a lot of the surface activity, including sunspots, solar flares, prominences, and coronal mass ejections.
Right now, in 2011, we’ve just left a period of an extended minimum, and the next max is due in late 2013 and early 2014. . . .
At this point you may be asking, so what? If the Sun has fewer sunspots and no flares, what difference does that make here on Earth? And how could it possibly trigger an ice age?
Yes, a good question. Plait goes on to explain that an especially quiet period for the sun, the Maunder Minimum, correlated roughly with the Little Ice Age, and that many interpret that correlation as possibly causative. Plait points out the problems with that correlation, noting that "(the) effect from [sunspot warming] is very small, not enough to significantly change the Earth’s temperature on their own." Though he does propose a slight contributing factor the Maunder Minimum might have had on the Little Ice Age (involving ozone and the jet stream), he pretty much debunks the solar cycle and ice ages in general.
Which is great, but. . . .
He starts this post by denying that any ice age is coming, and does so to stave off a very pernicious side effect any news item like this will provoke:
Can this mean the Earth itself will literally cool off, slipping into an ice age?. . . .
The answer - spoiler alert! - is almost certainly "no". I want to make sure that’s clear, because I will bet essentially any amount of money that some climate change denial sites will run with this story and claim that we don’t need to worry about global warming.
(I emphasized)
He's right, of course. Climate change denialists abound. Some are sincerely convinced that there is no way humans could change the climate. Others, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway note in great detail in their book The Merchants of Doubt, are in it for a combination of ideology and cold, hard cash. Oreskes and Conway follow the careers of a handful of scientists who started doubt mongering for the tobacco companies and later used their tactics to undermine all manner of environmental regulation:
For the tobacco industry, of course, the goal was to protect profits. . . .
But what about the scientists who helped their effort? What was this about for . . . scientists who made common cause with the tobacco industry?
One answer has already emerged . . . : these scientists, and the think tanks that helped to promote their views, were implacably hostile to regulation. Regulation was the road to Socialism - the very thing the Cold War was fought to defeat.
(Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Merchants of Doubt, Bloomsbury Press, 2010, p. 162.)
Sadly, these denying scientists and those darned think tanks have all but gagged the mainstream media, as this Bill McKibbon opinion piece points out:
Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.
It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas - fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been - the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected.
It's a sad state of affairs. How did it get so bad?
Back to Phil. In his post, he doesn't stray much from the science of the sun and its effects on our fair planet. Why? Because he's an astronomer. He's an expert in the sun, not an expert in other branches of science, and therefore cannot be expected to know the relevant research that could inform his logic and conclusions.
Sadly, this very sensible restraint on Dr. Plait's part doesn't apply to everyone. On the protagonists followed by Oreskes and Conway, one should note that they were physicists with Cold War connections to the halls of power . . . physicists who opined on topics as diverse as climatology, oncology, epidemiology. Their opinions became the basis for the their later obfuscations, even though they were not technically experts in these fields.
Why? It bears repeating: "Regulation was the road to Socialism - the very thing the Cold War was fought to defeat." They were, clearly and simply, fighting for a higher power, the antithesis of Socialism - free market capitalism. And, in many cases, participants in this capitalism helped fund their fight. Why wouldn't the companies threatened with regulation support these scientists? After all, money given to that fight would (as it had in the past) thwart regulation and allow the companies a future of business as usual. A quick napkin calculation of the difference between profits before and after any given regulation should provide a good estimate for how much money these companies could invest in obfuscation, in generating and merchandising doubt.
Doubt proves a sound investment.
So I'm going to do what Phil could not. I'm going to cite more science that should get the conversation on Our Weird Weather back to very well could be the heart of the cause: us.
Phil's post deals with minimizing the actual predicted effects of the solar cycle, no matter what strange correlation there might have been between observed sunspots and the planet's average climate. Are there other pieces of evidence that might correlate with that Little Ice Age? Why, yes, yes there are.
In his book The Biochar Solution, Albert Bates notes that the population of South and North America might have been quite a bit greater than previously estimated, especially that of South America. He translated an account of a Spanish team assigned to explore the land from the Andes mountains east. In very early 1500, they found the headwaters of the Amazon, built a raft, and set out. They nearly died simply from starvation. You see, their usual methods of survival were proven moot because they were surrounded by so many damned people. They described cities filled with millions of people along the Amazon, very well defended, that defied their plans to put to shore in unpopulated gaps along the shore and steal food. If true, this puts the estimated population of S. America at well over a billion.
When influenza and smallpox ravaged these populations - reducing the billion people by up to 99% - the impact on the land would have been far more catastrophic:
So great was the burst of vegetation over open fields and mounded cities in the Western Hemisphere that the carbon drawn from the air to feed this greening upset atmospheric chemistry. Analysis of the soils and lake sediments at the sites of both pre-contact population centers and sparsely populated surrounding regions reveals that the reforestation of land following the collapse drew so much carbon out of the atmosphere so rapidly that Europe literally froze.
That period of global cooling, which was most intense from approximately 1500 to 1750, is known as the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age ended the Medieval Warm Period that corresponded to the time when the Amazon was not jungle, but tall white cities with many miles of wharf-front, wide causeways extending inland, and highly cultivated societies.
(Albert Bates, The Biochar Solution, New Society Publishers, 2010, p. 35.)
I sort of hypothesized about this earlier, but used a much smaller data set from Jarod Diamond's Collapse. I guess I was right. Other researchers confirm this hypothesis, among them ice core researcher William Ruddiman:
What Ruddiman grasped is that the climate response to the hand of man is far more sensitive than had previously been imagined. Every plague and pestilence in history allowed forests to re-emerge - by bring populations low, fallowing farms, and decreasing burning of peat, coal, and wood. The longer and deeper the plague, the more time the climate had to recover.
Looking at the past 2000 years and factoring in volcanism, Ruddiman could see the fingerprint of plague on changes to atmospheric, carbon - the cool Roman Era (200 BCE to 600 CE), the Medieval Maximum (900-1200), and the conquest of the Americas (1500-1900).
(Bates, ibid, pp. 65-66.)
So, how would I get this information widely spread or even discussed openly? I have no money, no war chest I could tap to pressure more media outlets to talk about this connection Ruddiman discovered. Even if I did, there is no way I could outspend the think tanks. They have the advantage over mere mortals like myself.
And so I have become more than resigned. The forces of profit will continue to rape, pillage and plunder the legal and extra-legal means to continue their quarterly goal setting, no matter what the interests of Actual Humans might be. This rape will continue with the media, which will distort actual science and bury any bits of it that might apply toward, say, regulation. Given the cosmic gap between my and their resources, I must settle back in bemused observation and take comfort in what I can, perhaps in the humor I can extract from the horror. Just like George used to do.
"...I would admit that somewhere underneath all of this there is a little flicker - of a flame - of idealism that would love to see it all change but it can't, it can't happen that way, and [as for] incremental change, it just seems like the pile of shit is too deep."
- George Carlin
The Sun has a magnetic cycle, its magnetic field waxing and waning in strength roughly every 11 years. The strength and complexity of the solar field governs a lot of the surface activity, including sunspots, solar flares, prominences, and coronal mass ejections.
Right now, in 2011, we’ve just left a period of an extended minimum, and the next max is due in late 2013 and early 2014. . . .
At this point you may be asking, so what? If the Sun has fewer sunspots and no flares, what difference does that make here on Earth? And how could it possibly trigger an ice age?
Yes, a good question. Plait goes on to explain that an especially quiet period for the sun, the Maunder Minimum, correlated roughly with the Little Ice Age, and that many interpret that correlation as possibly causative. Plait points out the problems with that correlation, noting that "(the) effect from [sunspot warming] is very small, not enough to significantly change the Earth’s temperature on their own." Though he does propose a slight contributing factor the Maunder Minimum might have had on the Little Ice Age (involving ozone and the jet stream), he pretty much debunks the solar cycle and ice ages in general.
Which is great, but. . . .
He starts this post by denying that any ice age is coming, and does so to stave off a very pernicious side effect any news item like this will provoke:
Can this mean the Earth itself will literally cool off, slipping into an ice age?. . . .
The answer - spoiler alert! - is almost certainly "no". I want to make sure that’s clear, because I will bet essentially any amount of money that some climate change denial sites will run with this story and claim that we don’t need to worry about global warming.
(I emphasized)
He's right, of course. Climate change denialists abound. Some are sincerely convinced that there is no way humans could change the climate. Others, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway note in great detail in their book The Merchants of Doubt, are in it for a combination of ideology and cold, hard cash. Oreskes and Conway follow the careers of a handful of scientists who started doubt mongering for the tobacco companies and later used their tactics to undermine all manner of environmental regulation:
For the tobacco industry, of course, the goal was to protect profits. . . .
But what about the scientists who helped their effort? What was this about for . . . scientists who made common cause with the tobacco industry?
One answer has already emerged . . . : these scientists, and the think tanks that helped to promote their views, were implacably hostile to regulation. Regulation was the road to Socialism - the very thing the Cold War was fought to defeat.
(Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Merchants of Doubt, Bloomsbury Press, 2010, p. 162.)
Sadly, these denying scientists and those darned think tanks have all but gagged the mainstream media, as this Bill McKibbon opinion piece points out:
Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.
It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas - fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been - the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected.
It's a sad state of affairs. How did it get so bad?
Back to Phil. In his post, he doesn't stray much from the science of the sun and its effects on our fair planet. Why? Because he's an astronomer. He's an expert in the sun, not an expert in other branches of science, and therefore cannot be expected to know the relevant research that could inform his logic and conclusions.
Sadly, this very sensible restraint on Dr. Plait's part doesn't apply to everyone. On the protagonists followed by Oreskes and Conway, one should note that they were physicists with Cold War connections to the halls of power . . . physicists who opined on topics as diverse as climatology, oncology, epidemiology. Their opinions became the basis for the their later obfuscations, even though they were not technically experts in these fields.
Why? It bears repeating: "Regulation was the road to Socialism - the very thing the Cold War was fought to defeat." They were, clearly and simply, fighting for a higher power, the antithesis of Socialism - free market capitalism. And, in many cases, participants in this capitalism helped fund their fight. Why wouldn't the companies threatened with regulation support these scientists? After all, money given to that fight would (as it had in the past) thwart regulation and allow the companies a future of business as usual. A quick napkin calculation of the difference between profits before and after any given regulation should provide a good estimate for how much money these companies could invest in obfuscation, in generating and merchandising doubt.
Doubt proves a sound investment.
So I'm going to do what Phil could not. I'm going to cite more science that should get the conversation on Our Weird Weather back to very well could be the heart of the cause: us.
Phil's post deals with minimizing the actual predicted effects of the solar cycle, no matter what strange correlation there might have been between observed sunspots and the planet's average climate. Are there other pieces of evidence that might correlate with that Little Ice Age? Why, yes, yes there are.
In his book The Biochar Solution, Albert Bates notes that the population of South and North America might have been quite a bit greater than previously estimated, especially that of South America. He translated an account of a Spanish team assigned to explore the land from the Andes mountains east. In very early 1500, they found the headwaters of the Amazon, built a raft, and set out. They nearly died simply from starvation. You see, their usual methods of survival were proven moot because they were surrounded by so many damned people. They described cities filled with millions of people along the Amazon, very well defended, that defied their plans to put to shore in unpopulated gaps along the shore and steal food. If true, this puts the estimated population of S. America at well over a billion.
When influenza and smallpox ravaged these populations - reducing the billion people by up to 99% - the impact on the land would have been far more catastrophic:
So great was the burst of vegetation over open fields and mounded cities in the Western Hemisphere that the carbon drawn from the air to feed this greening upset atmospheric chemistry. Analysis of the soils and lake sediments at the sites of both pre-contact population centers and sparsely populated surrounding regions reveals that the reforestation of land following the collapse drew so much carbon out of the atmosphere so rapidly that Europe literally froze.
That period of global cooling, which was most intense from approximately 1500 to 1750, is known as the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age ended the Medieval Warm Period that corresponded to the time when the Amazon was not jungle, but tall white cities with many miles of wharf-front, wide causeways extending inland, and highly cultivated societies.
(Albert Bates, The Biochar Solution, New Society Publishers, 2010, p. 35.)
I sort of hypothesized about this earlier, but used a much smaller data set from Jarod Diamond's Collapse. I guess I was right. Other researchers confirm this hypothesis, among them ice core researcher William Ruddiman:
What Ruddiman grasped is that the climate response to the hand of man is far more sensitive than had previously been imagined. Every plague and pestilence in history allowed forests to re-emerge - by bring populations low, fallowing farms, and decreasing burning of peat, coal, and wood. The longer and deeper the plague, the more time the climate had to recover.
Looking at the past 2000 years and factoring in volcanism, Ruddiman could see the fingerprint of plague on changes to atmospheric, carbon - the cool Roman Era (200 BCE to 600 CE), the Medieval Maximum (900-1200), and the conquest of the Americas (1500-1900).
(Bates, ibid, pp. 65-66.)
So, how would I get this information widely spread or even discussed openly? I have no money, no war chest I could tap to pressure more media outlets to talk about this connection Ruddiman discovered. Even if I did, there is no way I could outspend the think tanks. They have the advantage over mere mortals like myself.
And so I have become more than resigned. The forces of profit will continue to rape, pillage and plunder the legal and extra-legal means to continue their quarterly goal setting, no matter what the interests of Actual Humans might be. This rape will continue with the media, which will distort actual science and bury any bits of it that might apply toward, say, regulation. Given the cosmic gap between my and their resources, I must settle back in bemused observation and take comfort in what I can, perhaps in the humor I can extract from the horror. Just like George used to do.
"...I would admit that somewhere underneath all of this there is a little flicker - of a flame - of idealism that would love to see it all change but it can't, it can't happen that way, and [as for] incremental change, it just seems like the pile of shit is too deep."
- George Carlin