String on the Bulletin Board

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ~~Isaac Asimov (1980)

Three separate things popped up in my Facebook feed one day last week, all from different sources, and on completely different topics, yet in my mind they were connected by one common thread: the failure of sources of news and information to adequately inform the public about serious issues of the day, and the failure of the public to be curious enough to actually find out what's going on.

The first thing that came up was David Corn's article in Mother Jones about the Russia investigation.  In it he observed that

The media coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal … has yielded a flood of revelations. Yet the news reporting tends to focus on specific components of an unwieldy and ever-expanding story... It is hard to hold on to all these pieces and place them into one big picture. These revelations do not emerge in chronological or thematic order. They arrive as part of the fusillade known as the daily news cycle... Attempting to track this whole damn thing … can make one feel like Carrie Mathison on Homeland. Do you even have enough string or enough space on the bulletin board?

I don't get a lot of news from TV.  I don't have cable, and the only broadcast news I really watch is PBS, and that only occasionally.  But I do watch the online version of The Rachel Maddow Show during my lunch break -- she does her research -- and she's been covering this story from the beginning. Watching long term has made me feel I have a general grasp on the story.  I can pretty well see how the pieces fit, and I'm not confused when a new piece is dropped in. But, I can't say I could explain it all to a 5th grader. It's pretty complex. Still, I believe the key to understanding this (and anything, really) is, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, to be curious without judgement. I don't have a problem with an editorial point of view, but at least try to get your facts straight.

I don't know if it's true or not, I heard the story years ago that the Secret Service combats counterfeiting by becoming intensely familiar with real money, not by examining counterfeit money.  The story goes that they are put in a vault where they count large sums of money incessantly for days. When they are done, they know what real money looks like, what it feels like, and how it smells. Knowing real money that intimately, they can spot a counterfeit bill a mile off. I'm never going to know about anything in the news as thoroughly as that because I'm not involved in it day in and day out, but I can at least try to understand basics. I appreciate Mr. Corn's article because it lays out the basic core of the story, and warns us against the pointless distractions.

I had a pastor years ago who pointed out that if someone gets up during the service and leaves the room, our mind doesn't just say, "Oh, someone is leaving the room."  Our mind says, "Why is that person leaving the room?" and then tries to answer itself. I think that that's where conspiracy theories come from: gaps in our knowledge and understanding get filled in with information from uninformed/misinformed sources. And as David Corn once wrote,

"The problem with these contrived conspiracy theories is that they obscure the facts...

Or, as Mrs. Iselin said to her husband in The Manchurian Candidate, "Are they saying, 'are there any Communists in the Defense Department?' Of course not. They're saying, 'how many Communists are there in the Defense Department.'"

The next thing that came up was this little item of twitterature from my friend Allen, which he not only posted on his wall, but also in a private message to me:

Now, at first I just took this as a rhetorical question.  I mean, after all, if I owe Allen five dollars, and he owes Agnes five dollars, and she owes Lilianna five dollars, and Lilianna owes me five dollars, then collectively we owe twenty dollars, even though that debt doesn't increase or decrease any of our assets. But OH-EM-GEE the comments.
  Joshua says:

Rothschild and their chronies (sic) print paper and use it to pay us to be slaves to gather up all the resources and knowledge for them. Then when it all collapses and we’re killing each other because of some political agenda the rich will sit in their golden 100 acre size bunkers and laugh and ride out the storm they created while we depopulate. 

I could show more, but it seemed they were all like that. Yes, income inequality is a severe problem in this country and elsewhere, but our own economic history shows us that  it has to do with tax policy, banking regulations, and campaign finance laws, and not with nefarious Jewish dynasties printing paper money.

The last thing that came up has been around forever (and debunked innumerable times.)  It's a video of the late John Coleman, a long time meteorologist, and a co-founder of The Weather Channel discussing his views on climate change. Mr. Coleman has no background in climate science, nor has he ever published a scientific paper on that or any other topic. Yet he is considered credible, via his (short) relationship to The Weather Channel, even though meteorology is to climatology what psychology is to brain surgery.

Now, I've written about the basics of climate change science before, but I think it's necessary to repeat it here.

Our atmosphere is made up of mostly nitrogen, a lot of oxygen, and other gases in smaller amounts.  Most radiation from the sun passes right through our atmosphere because it has a short wavelength.  The radiation heats the ground and then is emitted as long wave radiation.  This is the same kind of heat you feel from a hot sidewalk.  Water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane  molecules in the atmosphere absorb long wave radiation, which causes them to vibrate.  The vibration produces heat, which is then radiated throughout the atmosphere.  

     Water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane are referred to as greenhouse gases (even though the physics behind greenhouses is quite different,) and they are what keeps our planet warm.  Without them, the radiation from the sun would bounce right back into space, and Earth would be a much colder place.  The opposite is also true, which is what we're concerned about today.

   All of this is just basic physics, and has been known since the 1850s.  Starting in 1859, an Irish physicist by the name of John Tyndall started publishing papers describing long wave radiation absorption by certain gases, and for a long time he was believed to be the original discoverer of the phenomenon.  But recently it was discovered that an American scientist named Eunice Foote had published a paper to that effect in 1856.  Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius postulated in 1896 that a significant increase in carbon dioxide could cause global temperatures to rise, but it wasn't until the 1950s that scientists started getting concerned enough to start monitoring temperatures around the world.  By the 1970s, US Department of Energy started getting concerned that increased industrialization would produce global warming, although at the same time, there was also a small group of scientists who believed that the pollution in the atmosphere (aerosols) would reflect the sun's radiation out into space, thereby causing global cooling.  But by the 1980s, temperature data showed that cooling was not happening, and the 1980s wound up being the warmest decade on record.  By 1997, it was determined that there was enough evidence that action needed to be taken.

Mr. Coleman, in this video, is asserting that there is no consensus among scientists on global warming, that the Democrats are in charge of funding science research and they only give money to scientists who support the Democrats' hypothesis on global warming, that 31,000 scientists signed a petition that invalidates global warming. He says that he's a scientist and that the science is on his

side. There is no significant man made global warming, and no reason to expect any in the future. Climate change is not happening.

What Mr. Coleman does not explain (though maybe he does elsewhere) how the Democrats got control over scientific funding in other countries, or how long they've had control of a branch of science that has been around for more than a century. Or why he thinks the Democrats would pay more for bad research than, say, an oil company. Or why there were only 39 actual climate scientists among the fictional and historical characters and Spice Girls on the petition he mentioned.

In the video, Brian Stelter, the host, asked David Kenny, the CEO of The Weather Channel's parent company, whether he was concerned that Mr Coleman was "using his title as cofounder to try to give attention to something that is misleading, that's inaccurate?" I do, and I think it's working. He wants us to believe, as Youtuber Potholer54 put it, that scientists are

...faking millions of points of data in thousands of scientific papers in dozens of different scientific fields and cross-matching them so that they all tell a story that is 180° opposed to reality AND making sure no one blabs about it.

And because of his status, people believe him.

We should all be mature enough to want to understand what's happening in nature, in politics, in economics, and acknowledge when something is right and when it's wrong. Isaac Asimov spoke of the "cult of ignorance" winding through politics and culture. That cult is enabled by unclear reporting, bogus information, and, honestly, just pure laziness. But true information is out there, and it's easier to find than it ever was before. We just need enough string.