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.

Reading List 12-04-15

Our Ayn Randian dystopia: Here’s the secret five-step plan to privatize everything

Post-Ayn-Rand, in the growing era of neoliberalism, with Ronald Reagan blurting “government is the problem” and Margaret Thatcher proclaiming “There is no such thing as society,” once-respected institutions like public education and public transportation were demonized as “socialist” and “Soviet-style.” The message has been repeated so often by the business-backed media that the general public began to believe it.  - Paul Buchheit

The GOP Ignores the Bigger Terror Threat—From the Right

The threat posed by ISIS is real and must be forcefully addressed. But if these Republicans truly want to keep us safe, why don’t they ever raise the issue of right-wing terrorists? After all, as The New York Times reported just a few months ago, “Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims.”
The reality, of course, is that talking about scary Muslims plays great with the GOP base. - Dean Obeidallah

A reassessment of socialism: many questions

 I was just at a conference that looked at the importance of Piketty’s most recent book for the future of capitalism.  In talking about it, several participants mentioned the VoC literature. The acronym refers to the literature dealing with the “varieties of capitalism”. That made me think of the fact that for the first time in history the entire globe is capitalist. In effect, for the first time in history, capitalism, defined as a system of  the private ownership of the means of production, free wage labor, and rational pursuit of profit, does not have to share the globe with the “varieties of feudalism” or “varieties of socialism”. It has won.  -Branko Milanovic  

The Lesson Of Trump Is You Should Argue With Your Own Team

When know-nothing movements put know-nothing politicians into power, this power gets squandered on garbage like debt ceiling standoffs, auditing the fed, and phony attempts to repeal Obamacare that lack an actual idea of what they’d replace it with. Republicans with less power but a more coherent and intelligent idea of what to do with it would probably be better off. - Adam Ozimek

How Republican ‘Thought Police’ Enforce Climate-Science Denial

Brooks presents the situation as a “vast majority” of GOP politicians that understand climate science cowed into submission by an angry minority. Perhaps the vast majority of Republican politicians who confide their private beliefs to Brooks feel this way, but this is probably not a representative cross section. It is clear that a large proportion of party elites proclaim themselves to be climate-science skeptics for reasons purely of their own volition. Nor is this sentiment confined to talk-radio shouters. Esteemed chin-strokers and collectors of awards, like George F. Will and Charles Krauthammer, broadcast their disdain for the findings of the climate-science field.
The rise of Trump, and his increasingly cartoonish lies, has framed the Republican Party as split between the Establishment and the kooks. But on the climate issue, at least, the kooks are the Establishment. The “sophisticated” arguments about climate change that appear in prestigious conservative organs contain childish ignorance. - Jonathan Chait

Reading List for 10-28-15

The Fake News Food Chain, in which real journalists aren’t able to recognize that the politicians they’re interviewing are parroting garbage factoids from Fox‘s land of make-believe.

After Company Raises Minimum Salary To $70,000, Revenue And Profits Double, in which we discover that Gravity Payments benefits from basic economic principles.  You can read a related article from a while back here.

Brownback satisfaction rating at 18%; Democrats targeting Senate seats, in which 61% of Kansans think the Governor's signature tax policies have either been a "failure" or a "tremendous failure."

Billionaire Hobby Lobby owners probed in looting of artifacts for Bible museum, in which the Customs Department finds suspicious packages en route to OKC.

Can taxing the rich reduce inequality? You bet it can!   in which we learn something we learned 50+ years ago.

GOP candidates stumble badly on fake historical quotes, in which a lot of candidates go all David Barton in their campaign speeches. 

"The official response here in Oklahoma is based on pedestrian self-interest about how important the energy sector is here on an economic level and just basic ignorance. It’s important to note that the state has a low college graduate rate and has cut education funding the most of any state in the nation in the last several years. This is the state that has produced the world’s most infamous global warming denier, U.S Sen. Jim Inhofe, and is home to The Oklahoman, one of the most conservative major metropolitan newspapers in the country. The newspaper supports Inhofe and ridicules anyone concerned about this issue.
"Oklahoma will go down in history as a world cesspool of ignorance and corporate greed as the planet is slowly but surely destroyed. Hyperbole? I see nothing here certainly and not much in the world that’s happening that makes me feel such a statement is over the top."  Dr. Kurt Hochenauer

Evidence, People. It's All About The Evidence.

So, a friend of mine posted this article to his Facebook wall today.  It's from a website called Right Wing News, and the headline reads,
That Changing Climate Change: Arctic Sea Ice Sees ‘Huge Increase'
The article is short, saying, "Global warming religionists don’t want to talk about the growing amount of Arctic sea ice. It ruins their religious beliefs. But reality seems to note that sea ice is growing at a quick pace and will be back to 1980s levels in the next few years.
"Once again we thank the website Real Science for this info:

'There has been a huge increase in the amount of old, thick Arctic sea ice over the last three years. This is due to a change in winter winds, which is now preserving the ice rather than pushing it out into the North Atlantic.
If this trend continues, the ice will be back to 1980’s levels within about five years.
Climate criminals will not report this, because it is their job to create propaganda for the White House – not discuss facts.'

"Boy does this put a dent in the left’s global warming religion."

That's it, except for a graphic which was also taken, without any kind of legend, from the Real Science article. So we click on the link and go to the Real Science article to get the scoop.  It is also a short article.  It says,

"There has been a huge increase in the amount of old, thick Arctic sea ice over the last three years. This is due to a change in winter winds, which is now preserving the ice rather than pushing it out into the North Atlantic.

If this trend continues, the ice will be back to 1980’s levels within about five years. 
Climate criminals will not report this, because it is their job to create propaganda for the White House – not discuss facts." 

That's it.  That's the complete article.  No measurements, no data, no links to scientific papers.  Fully substantiated by the author's own opinion.  And somehow, this is supposed to "put a dent in the left’s global warming religion."

Meanwhile, back at the REAL Real Science webpage: 

Figure 3. Monthly June ice extent for 1979 to 2015 shows a decline of 3.6% per decade relative to the 1981 to 2010 average.

 

All backed up by measurements, data, and decades of research.  The way it should be.

I"ll See Your Reasons, And Raise You Measured Data

I found it.
Actually I just ran across it accidentally while reading the econoblogs and following links, but I had been wondering if there was a simple presentation of this somewhere.

A Facebook friend of a friend had commented on my friend's post saying that volcanos produce way more carbon dioxide than humans.  This was in the context of global warming isn't real because, you know, reasons.  There was a strong suggestion that she believed that the thousands of climate scientists around the globe over the last several decades had somehow failed to account for the amount of CO² produced by volcanos, and possibly other natural sources, in their measurements, and that, since she knew about this and they didn't, that she had knowledge superior to the so-called experts.

Okay, that sounded a bit more contemptuous than I intended, but I'm going to let it stand.

My reading last night led me to this article, which had the following graphs.

  The black line in each graph represents actual measured temperatures, and the red line in the top graph represents the median temperature predicted through modeling.  The top graph represents both natural and man made contributions to greenhouse gasses.
    The bottom graph removes the man made contributions from the equation, the blue line representing the median temperature predicted through modeling.  This chart would cover everything natural, like volcanos, cow farts, and forest fires.
   So yes, it seems that someone has indeed taken the time to figure out how things would be if we weren't around to screw things up.