Cross-posted at:
Unbossed.
Yesterday, I set upon the way myth is being used to create a new American political tool . Today, I found this:
Possibly for the first time ever, a chair of a Senate committee, one Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), invited a science fiction writer to advise the committee (Environment and Public Works), on science facts--in this case, the facts behind climate change. The author in question? None other than our old friend, Michael Crichton...
Unreal.
First, remember that Inhofe was the idiot who said:
...much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science. The threat of catastrophic global warming the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people...
I'm not going to go into just how much of an jerk Inhofe is - I think you're already aware of that - and Real Climate does a great job of tearing down everyone of his inane arguments HERE. But Crichton....I mean....he's a SCIENCE FICTION WRITER NOT A SCIENTIST!
Crichton's latest book "State of Fear" is essentially about how eco-terrorists are using the hype of global warming to further their own personal goals. The book is crowned with footnotes aimed at convincing readers of his scientific bona fides. Crichton's hero, Richard John Kenner--an MIT professor of geoenvironmental engineering battles the eco-terrorists across the globe and continually lectures the reader on the basics of climate science. Crichton provides actual scientific citations to back up Kenner's contrarian arguments in his footnotes. But they are far from real. Some of his citations refer to actual scientific publications. But most often, they distort the work of scientists who accept the mainstream scientific view that human greenhouse gas emissions fuel global climate change. Chris Mooney points to the following example (one of many):
Kenner highlights the case of this famed African peak--a favorite of climate-change skeptics--in the process of debunking concerns that global warming is causing glaciers to retreat. Kilimanjaro has melted ''because of deforestation,'' Kenner says, not global warming: ''The rain forest at the base of the mountain has been cut down, so the air blowing upward is no longer moist. Experts think that if the forest is replanted the glacier will grow again.'' Again, Crichton supplies references. But UMass-Amherst climatologist Douglas Hardy, a coauthor of the 2004 paper on Kilimanjaro cited, says Crichton is distorting his work. Crichton is doing ''what I perceive the denialists always to do,'' says Hardy. ''And that is to take things out of context, or take elements of reality and twist them a little bit, or combine them with other elements of reality to support their desired outcome.''
For example, while the case of Kilimanjaro does seem more complicated (with factors like drier conditions and less cloud cover also implicated in its glacial retreat), Hardy notes that for other glaciers, especially in tropical latitudes, ''the link is very clear between changes in tropospheric temperature and [glacial retreats].'' And even in the case of Kilimanjaro, Hardy adds, climate change may be playing a role.
As for the notion that replanting the forest at Kilimanjaro's base will help the glacier to grow again, Hardy says: ''The forests need replanting for many reasons, but I think that [Crichton's] idea is preposterous, without some larger-scale changes.''
At the end of the book, Crichton gives us an author's message. In it, he gives us his estimate, ~0.8 C for the global warming that will occur over the next century and claims that, since models differ by 400% in their estimates, his guess is as good as theirs. This is a crock. Real Climate points out that:
The current batch of models have a mean climate sensitivity of about 3 C to doubled CO2 (and range between 2.5 and 4.0 degrees) (Paris meeting of IPCC, July 2004) , i.e an uncertainty of about 30%....the biggest uncertainties about the future are the economics, technology and rate of development going forward. The main cause of the spread in the widely quoted 1.5 to 5.8 C range of temperature projections for 2100 in IPCC is actually the different scenarios used. For lack of better information, if we (incorrectly) assume all the scenarios are equally probable, the error around the mean of 3.6 degrees is about 60%, not 400%. Crichton also suggests that most of his 0.8 C warming will be due to land use changes. That is actually extremely unlikely since land use change globally is a cooling effect (as discussed above). Physically-based simulations are actually better than just guessing.
In an appendix, Crichton compares global warming to the 19th Century eugenics movement. He argues, that since eugenics was studied in prestigious universities and supported by charitable foundations, and now, so is global warming, they must somehow be related. Huh?
The worst thing about Crichton, is that he doesn't understand how science works (he is, sadly, like most Americans,). He also confuses the way science is done with the way science-based public policy is made. Scientists can continue to debate and argue the details, but public policy process can't wait, for small, inconsequential disputes to be settled between the consensus view and the outliers. Think of if we did that with a flu vaccine, or the use of a certain chemical food additive.
When Crichton and Inhofe got together, the spouted the same old litany of stupidities like the claim that scientists were proclaiming an imminent ice age in the 1970s (not true), the claim that the 1940s to 1970s cooling in the northern hemisphere disproves global warming (no, it doesn't), the claim that important pieces of the science have not been independently reproduced (yes, they have), the claim that global climate models can't reproduce past climate change (yes, they can), the claim that climate can't be predicted because weather is chaotic (wrong...).....blah, blah, blah...
Sen. Jeffords was, and rightly so, sickened at the way the committee sought testimony:
Mr. Chairman, given the profound human suffering and ecological damage along the Gulf Coast, why are we having a hearing that features a fiction writer as our key witness? Some may accuse me, as a policy maker, of falling into the exact policy trap that Mr. Crichton's book critiques -- being too focused on the consequences of the recent large scale natural disasters and our nation's policy response to them.
My point here is not to go into yet another round of arguments in the science or veracity of climate change. Instead, I want to make the same point I did yesterday: In the past five years we've now crossed a threshold of myth and stepped into an unreality where fact and fiction intertwine to create an America of stories where nothing is real, science is dead and the truth is relative. The Right-Wing has taken the American public for the ultimate Post-Modern roller coaster ride.
Real Climate says that:
Crichton seemed to imply [in the Congressional testimony] that "prediction" (such as that provided by weather or climate models) is useless in the decision making process. (As an aside, we wonder how Gray, who is largely known for prediction of hurricane behavior based on (statistical) modeling, felt about this?). We fundamentally disagree. All science is about observation, understanding and prediction. When those predictions work, you make new predictions. When they don't, you revisit the observations, attempt to improve your understanding of the underlying processes, and make a new prediction. And so on. In the case of climate models, this is complicated by the fact that the time scales involved need to be long enough to average out the short-term noise, i.e. the chaotic sequences of 'weather' events. Luckily, we have past climate changes to test the models against. Even more to the point, successful climate predictions have actually been made in past Senate hearings. The figure at the end of this comment by Jim Hansen demonstrates that projections of global mean climate presented in a 1988 senate hearing (17 years ago) have actually been right on the money...
The real question we are faced with is not whether humans are changing climate. The science on this is clear and we know that. What we need to deal with is: what do we do about it?!? A Congressional committee concerned with energy should be a key player in exploring policy options to deal with the global warming threat. But when they bring forth a fiction writer - and one who is well-known to distort the research - they do the American people a despicable disservice.
Again, Chris Mooney:
Naomi Oreskes, a science studies scholar at the University of California, San Diego, recently analyzed more than 900 scientific articles listed with the keywords ''global climate change,'' and failed to find a single study that explicitly disagreed with the consensus view that humans are contributing to global warming. While such literature may exist, it appears minimal.
That hasn't stopped Crichton from expounding his views in recent speeches, including a talk on ''Science Policy in the 21st Century'' held late last month at the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution's Joint Center for Regulatory Studies in Washington, D.C. In an appendix to ''State of Fear,'' Crichton frets about ''Why Politicized Science is Dangerous.'' But he may himself have provided a case study.