vitiated stragedy & enervation

complex, sclerotic, complacent, transparent, daemonic, inevitable, psychotic, impenetrable ... so.

ENJOY POVERTY! (while it lasts)
Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

the view from here is ... ghastly ...

temperature going up, phytoplankton going down, endocrine disruptors in the drinking water, the American Senate has apparently been purchased outright by big oil & coal, and the k-k-Canadian government engages in petty ideological exercises around the census and finally getting ready to ditch William Elliott, not because he obfuscated and lied about the death of Richard Dziekanski but because he can't seem to play nicely with his captains in the Ottawa sandbox - not a surprise is it? a house divided cannot stand ... whatever ... 'Nero fiddles while Rome burns' ... there is a psychological term for this kind of behavior isn't there? displacement is it? cognitive dissonance? simple avoidance?

there are some optimists around still, this week's issue of Nature tells us, "Producing enough food for the world's population in 2050 will be easy," which I am glad to hear,

and the Toronto Post Carbon group, paraphrasing Pacala & Socolow, continue to think that some number of 'wedges' will solve things, this Polyanna optimism doesn't have any stroke with me - I'm sorry to say it because I wish it did, and even a believable optimist like Lester Brown is still thinking in terms of growth, grant you he only says, "decoupling economic growth" except that decoupling is well shy of what's needed, decoupling is in another realm altogether, when are these people going to wake up?

and every last one of the decent authors is screaming "Look at ME!" and trying to sell books or speaking engagements or both,

Bill McKibben with his, "Twenty years ago, in 1989, I wrote the first book for a general audience about global warming ..." and then Stephen Schneider dies and I remember his The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival, in 1976 yet, doh!?

Look at ME! Look at ME!
Look at MY biggest ever in the world 350.org!
Look at MY biggest ever action! (October 24 2009)
all good, except it's not about YOU Bill! (she can bake a cherry pie quick as you can wink your eye ...)

then watching wazzername ... Vandana Shiva talking with Gwynne Dyer (intro, Gwynne, Vandana, Vandana) ... well, it wasn't a conversation exactly, rude mouthy feminist bitch is what she showed herself to be, Dyer just had to laugh, I saw Elizabeth May do the same thing to him a month or so ago, oh well ... nonetheless he times his latest editorial on the issue to coincide with the second edition of Climate Wars, I dunno, maybe if you don't behave this way you get called names by your buddies in the biz? is that it? or you figgure that more cash will ease your children's pain? use it to buy handguns? dunno,

one good thing is happening, I have a little garden on my windowsill, it used to be just an aloevera, and then a ginger root that looked like it might grow, and then I added a yam that sprouted on my counter-top and I could not bear to trash it so I cut off the growing end and stuck it in there, Lo and behold! yams turn out to be vines! they grow their way UP if there is anything there to hold them, who knew?

the window is beside the stove so I often watch my garden grow, and I saw the first tendril try to creep up, until it fell over ... and I thought, "well, how about a stake then?" up it went like Jack in the Beanstalk! and three more stakes on top of that, and now the stem has gone beyond the windowframe entirely! and two more are coming, I feel like the Little Prince with his baobabs and his rose! ahhh, and I begin to worry about blights and nutrients,

just a natural-born parent I guess :-)

some words are easy to misunderstand, vitiated could be having to do with 'vita' but in the OED it is "depraved, corrupted, impaired, infected, spoiled," and enervation is "wanting in strength of character, spiritless, unmanly, effeminate," stragedy I made up by smerging 'strategy' & 'tragedy' :-)

"Oh howe are the myghtie ouerthrowen." (v 19 and yes, there was an English bible before the KJV), I looked up to the Globe and Mail for so long, oh my, there you go - lesson learned I guess, this week a Globe pundit, Paul Waldie, says of the NOAA monthly State of the Climate report that they "hope to blunt some growing skepticism about climate change," you have to read the thing carefully to see Waldie's roots in The National Post, Growing skepticism!?! SAY WHAT!?! you bumbling incompetent nincompoop!

(meanwhile, over at the National Post itself, it's do-se-do and allemande left, and you have to laugh as they excoriate this very phrase 'growing numbers' :-)

but at the Globe things just get worse, yesterday, on the editorial page yet (enigmatically titled 'e-tourism-john-31' - the 'john' part is tongue in cheek is it?), they shill the Tar Sands for all they are worth ... well (one wonders) what are they worth? like Roxy Roller they're getting Tar Sand on their knees in the back alley giving enthusiastic blow jobs to Alberta politicians (up to and including Stephen Harper I assume), and what is an enthusiastic blow job worth these days? those oil boys know to the penny is my bet.



some smart guy who knows how to store ammunition to last 50 years or so is buying up semi-automatic 22 cal. handguns and stashing them for his kids, not me, self-centred bastard, I will be honoured if I can muster as much grace as Ivan Illich or Sister Dorothy and let some part of it end with me, I probably can't, oh well ...

here's something on-topic, came to me today, out'a the black and into the blue, from Greenspiration! about the EDO Decommissioners who stuck a carbon-steel stick into the spokes of the war-mongers' bicycle and got away with it, it seems like a total game-changer to me yet it has never appeared on the pages of the liberal newspapers I read, not the Globe, not the New York Times, not even the Calgary Herald :-)

"and I hope that you die, and your death will come soon, I'll follow your casket, in the pale afternoon, I’ll watch while you’re lowered down to your death bed, and I’ll stand o’er your grave 'til I’m sure that you’re dead."

Military components factory ransacked in Gaza protest, Mark Townsend, Saturday 17 January 2009 - Nine people held after break-in at plant near Brighton allegedly making parts for Israeli missiles.

Activists plead lawful excuse for causing damage at arms factory, Rob Evans, Monday 7 June 2010 - Brighton factory 'decommissioned' to prevent civilians being killed by the Israeli military in Gaza, court told.

Activists cleared over Brighton weapons factory raid, BBC, Friday 2 July 2010 - Seven anti-war activists have been cleared of plotting to damage a Brighton weapons factory after claiming to be preventing Israeli war crimes.

Inquiry after Hove Crown Court judge's summing up, BBC, Tuesday 27 July 2010 - Complaints that a judge made anti-Israel comments while summing up in the Hove Crown Court trial of seven anti-war activists are being investigated.

more on this next week, I will maybe even think about it all and see if I can't get some perspective,

be well.


Postscript:

TTT - Tummy Touches Table ... or Tin, Tantalum and Tungsten? ... and Gold of course, ummm ... it's complicated, a tradeoff then? is that it? here are a few videos from Basta! Enough!: I'm a Mac and I've Got a Dirty Secret, Conflict Minerals 101, and John Prendergast.

Oldman Zubah says:

A wise man does not test the depth of a river with both feet at the same time.

When bad luck catch you even rotten banana can break your teeth.

If you don't want tail to touch you, don't go to monkey dance.

When your black chicken gets lost, you start searching for it before darkness falls.

from a Sierra Leone news site (located in New Jersey).

Poverty could be whatever it was that Jesus Christ meant by 'poor in spirit' in his beatitudes, could be the factual poverty of the favelas in Rio that drives men out to sell snacks on the highways at rush-hour, the kind of poverty that laughs at itself, the kind that hides in shame, I don't know.


Appendices:
1-1. Gadget makers forced to look at links to Congo conflict, Peter Svensson, July 26 2010.
1-2. Death by Gadget, Nicholas Kristof, June 26 2010.
2-1. The Earth is hotter than ever, global warming is real, researchers warn, Paul Waldie, July 29 2010.
2-2. e-tourism-john-31, Globe Editorial, July 31 2010.
2-3. Bad science: Global-warming deniers are a liability to the conservative cause, Jonathan Kay, July 15 2010.
3. Plankton, crucial to the planet for food and oxygen, in deep trouble;, Seth Borenstein, July 29 2010.
     3a. Global phytoplankton decline over the past century,
          January 21 2010, Boris Worm et al.
          Nature keeps this securely locked up, $35US to spring it, maybe later ...
4. When Smart Parties Make Stupid Decisions, Paul Saurette, Jul 23 2010.
5. Coal, oil win again, Gwynne Dyer, July 27 2010.
6. Chemicals in Red Deer, Oldman rivers warp fish gender, Gwendolyn Richards, July 30 2010.
     6a. some background: Endocrine disruptor, Theo Colborn & her book Our stolen future.
     6b. TEDX - The Endocrine Disruption Exchange.
     6c. Endocrine Disruption - The Male Predicament, 35 min. video with Theo Colburn.

Other important links:
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN, Subcomandante Marcos aka Delegado Cero.

Renzo Martens, Enjoy Poverty trailer, official site (but empty), some talk about it at Artobserved, frieze & A Prior.

Rachel Garrard and her recent Geometric Void .

last but not least: Kwesi Abbensetts & Miss Numa.

reminds me of a woman I knew in Rio, in her heels she was taller than me, we were walking down the Ipanema main-drag one night late and she said to me, "you know, a fat gringo walking around here at this time of night with a black girl draws the heat," and then she said, "but it's ok, I know how to fight and I'll protect us,"

another night, so hot no one could sleep, we went down at 2AM with her kids to the beach at Arpoador, "it's ok," she said, "the cops are here, see?" and sure enough there were a couple'a guys in the little police cabin, we swam, the kids buried me in the sand, we played circle-tag, somebody was still there selling beer & coco water, kids wrapped up and sleeping in their kangas ... ahh ... saudades ...

someone had written 'CALMA' on the rocks there, got that right ...



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Gadget makers forced to look at links to Congo conflict, Peter Svensson, July 26 2010.

New regulations aimed at easing violence could also deprive many of necessary income, and imperil chances of economic stability

Does that smart phone in your pocket contribute to crime in the depths of Africa? Soon, you'll know: A new U.S. law requires companies to certify whether their products contain minerals from rebel-controlled mines in Congo and surrounding countries.

It's a move aimed at starving the rebels of funds and encouraging them to lay down their arms.

But experts doubt the law will stop the fighting. Furthermore, they say, it could deprive hundreds of thousands of desperately poor Congolese of their incomes and disrupt the economy of an area that's struggling for stability after more than decade of war.

“For many, many people, it's the only livelihood they have,” said Sara Geenen, a researcher at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, who just returned from a trip to the Kivu provinces in eastern Congo.

At issue are three industrial metals — tin, tantalum and tungsten — and gold. Tin is used in the solder that joins electronic components together. Tantalum's main use is in capacitors, a vital component in electronics. Tungsten has many uses, including light-bulb filaments and the heavy, compact mass that makes cell phones vibrate.

Exports of these metals from eastern Congo have been the subject of a campaign by non-profit advocacy groups for a few years, one that's borne fruit with the addition of a “Conflict Minerals” provision to the financial regulation legislation that U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law Wednesday.

Advocacy groups, the United Nations and academic researchers such as Ms. Geenen agree that the mines fund rebel groups, homegrown militias and rogue elements of the Congolese army.

But academics say the advocacy groups have been overselling the link between the mines and violence, such as when John Prendergast, the co-founder of the Enough Project, told 60 Minutes last year that minerals are the “root cause” of the fighting.

“The fight is not a fight over the minerals,” said Laura Seay, an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College in Atlanta, who studies and visits Congo. “The minerals are used to fund some of the fighting, but it's not a fight for control of the mines.”

Sasha Lezhnev, a consultant to the Enough Project and the director of an organization that tries to rehabilitate child soldiers, agrees that the fighting wasn't originally about the minerals. But Mr. Lezhnev said that has changed.

“The minerals are the chief driver and fuel for feeding the flames out in the East now. One of the main results of the military operations over the last year has been for one armed group to take control of minerals from the other armed group,” Mr. Lezhnev said. “You have many people displaced from their homes because mines are being set up.”

The U.S. law forces companies to report annually whether their products contain any of the four “conflict minerals” from Congo. Nine surrounding countries are included as well, out of concern that minerals might be smuggled out of the Congo to obfuscate their origin.

If companies find that they use minerals from any of the ten countries, they need to have an audit done to determine “with the greatest possible specificity” which mine they're from.

Companies can label their products as “conflict free” if they manage to prove that their products don't contain minerals that directly or indirectly finance or benefit armed groups in any of the ten countries.

Nicholas Garrett, a consultant who's studied the issue with funding from the British and Dutch governments, worries that companies will take the easy way out and avoid buying minerals from the region entirely — even if they are conflict free. He estimates that one million people are dependent on the mining industry in eastern Congo.

John Kanyoni, who represents minerals exporters in Congo's North Kivu province, said business is already down because two major buyers of tin ore, Britain's Amalgamated Metal Corp. and Belgium's Traxys, have pulled out because of the “conflict minerals” campaign. That means miners, traders and the Congolese government's tax receipts are suffering, Mr. Kanyoni said.

Mr. Lezhnev acknowledges that a complete pullout by minerals buyers would do more harm than good. What the Enough Project really wants, he said, is reliable tracing of the supply chain and certification of the origin of minerals. That way, buyers could still do business with legitimate mines.

“We don't want (buyers) to disengage,” he said. “We want them to take a hard look at where their materials are coming from, but also contribute to positive change out in the region.”

Various groups have already started projects to trace the minerals back to their sources. The process is hampered by the lack of government control in parts of the region and by corruption where there is government control.

Two years ago, Intel Corp. started to alert its tantalum smelters, who turn the ore into the metal, that they will have to start certifying that their ores don't come from “conflict mines.” The process adds minor costs to the supply chain, spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, on the order of a penny per part.

ITRI is running a pilot project to see whether the ores can be traced, but much remains to be done, especially because U.S. companies could need to certify the origin of their metals as early as next year.

“It's obviously a very difficult environment to work in,” ITRI spokeswoman Kay Nimmo said. “We need to have enough time to put the system into place. Otherwise, it essentially will be an embargo on the trade.”



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Death by Gadget, Nicholas Kristof, June 26 2010.

An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo. With throngs waiting in lines in the last few days to buy the latest iPhone, I’m thinking: What if we could harness that desperation for new technologies to the desperate need to curb the killing in central Africa?

I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.

Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.”

Yet now there’s a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these “conflict minerals” out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia.

A humorous new video taunting Apple and PC computers alike goes online this weekend on YouTube, with hopes that it will go viral. Put together by a group of Hollywood actors, it’s a spoof on the famous “I’m a Mac”/”I’m a PC” ad and suggests that both are sometimes built from conflict minerals.

“Guess we have some things in common after all,” Mac admits.

Protesters demonstrated outside the grand opening of Apple’s new store in Washington, demanding that the company commit to using only clean minerals. Last month, activists blanketed Intel’s Facebook page with calls to support tough legislation to curb trade in conflict minerals. For a time, Intel disabled comments — creating a stink that called more attention to blood minerals than human rights campaigners ever could.

Partly as a result, requirements that companies report on their use of conflict minerals were accepted as an amendment to financial reform legislation.

A word of background: Eastern Congo is the site of the most lethal conflict since World War II, and is widely described as the rape capital of the world. The war had claimed 5.4 million deaths as of April 2007, with the toll mounting by 45,000 a month, according to a study by the International Rescue Committee.

It’s not that American tech companies are responsible for the slaughter, or that eliminating conflict minerals from Americans’ phones will immediately end the war. Even the Enough Project, an anti-genocide organization that has been a leading force in the current campaign, estimates that only one-fifth of the world’s tantalum comes from Congo.

“There’s no magic-bullet solution to peace in Congo,” notes David Sullivan of the Enough Project, “but this is one of the drivers of the conflict.” The economics of the war should be addressed to resolve it.

The Obama administration also should put more pressure on Rwanda to play a constructive role next door in Congo (it has, inexcusably, backed one militia and bolstered others by dealing extensively in the conflict minerals trade). Impeding trade in conflict minerals is also a piece of the Congo puzzle, and because of public pressure, a group of companies led by Intel and Motorola is now developing a process to audit origins of tantalum in supply chains.

Manufacturers previously settled for statements from suppliers that they do not source in eastern Congo, with no verification. Auditing the supply chains at smelters to determine whether minerals are clean or bloody would add about a penny to the price of a cellphone, according to the Enough Project, which says the figure originated with the industry.

“Apple is claiming that their products don’t contain conflict minerals because their suppliers say so,” said Jonathan Hutson, of the Enough Project. “People are saying that answer is not good enough. That’s why there’s this grass-roots movement, so that we as consumers can choose to buy conflict free.” Some ideas about what consumers can do are at raisehopeforCongo.org — starting with spreading the word.

We may be able to undercut some of the world’s most brutal militias simply by making it clear to electronics manufacturers that we don’t want our beloved gadgets to enrich sadistic gunmen. No phone or tablet computer can be considered “cool” if it may be helping perpetuate one of the most brutal wars on the planet.



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The Earth is hotter than ever, global warming is real, researchers warn, Paul Waldie, July 29 2010.

Scientists hope findings will debunk some growing skepticism about climate change

More than 300 scientists from around the world, including several Canadians, hope to blunt some growing skepticism about climate change with a new report that says global warming is a fact and the Earth is hotter than ever.

“The conclusion is unmistakable – yes, the planet is warming,” said Derek Arndt, a co-editor of the report, called State of the Climate, which was published by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

“The facts speak for themselves, and speak simultaneously,” said Mr. Arndt, who runs the Climate Monitoring Branch at NOAA. “And, they all point toward the same conclusion – the globe is warming.”

The report – co-edited by researchers in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia – pulled together data from 10 climate indicators measured by 160 research groups in 48 countries. The scientists compared the figures decade by decade as far back as possible, more than 100 years in some cases. They concluded 2000 to 2009 was the warmest decade ever, and the Earth has been growing warmer for 50 years. Each of the past three decades – 1980s, 1990s and 2000s – was the hottest on record, the researchers said.

This year is shaping up to be even warmer. For the first six months of 2010, the combined global land and ocean temperature was the warmest on record, according to the NOAA.

The study is the most extensive ever done by the agency and it comes after controversy erupted last year when leaked e-mails purported to show that scientists at a world-leading climate institute in Britain had fudged research. Three investigations have concluded that the researchers at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit did not tamper with data or interfere with the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming.

Mr. Arndt said the NOAA report is meant to be a kind of medical check-up for the planet in which measurements are taken and the results documented. He said it will be up to others to draw conclusions about why climate change is occurring and what should be done about it. “This is basically a broad and comprehensive telling of what’s going on with the climate system,” he said.

Nonetheless, he said he was personally taken aback by how all 10 indicators clearly showed the Earth is heating up. “Seeing them standing next to each other, kind of nakedly, and pointing to the same conclusion, it very much jumped off the page at me... Absolutely, yes, we live in a warming planet.”

Of the 10 measurements, the report said seven are rising – air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, air temperature over oceans, sea level, ocean heat, humidity and the temperature of the troposphere, which is the atmosphere closest to the Earth’s surface. Three indicators are declining – Arctic sea ice, glaciers and spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere. All of which point to a warming trend.

The past decade was 0.6 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1960s, and 0.2 degrees warmer than the 1990s, the report found. While that may seem small, Mr. Arndt said, the planet has already been changed. “Glaciers and sea ice are melting, heavy rainfall is intensifying and heat waves are more common. And, as the new report tells us, there is now evidence more than 90 per cent of warming over the past 50 years has gone into our ocean.”

The researchers also found the retreat of mountain glaciers, an important signal of climate change, continued for the 19th consecutive year in 2009. The cumulative loss of the past 30 years is “equivalent to slicing 13 metres off the top of the average glacier,” the study said. The majority of glaciers in every region surveyed receded last year. For example, of the 88 glaciers examined in Switzerland, 81 had retreated, two advanced and five were stable last year. Of the 93 glaciers in Austria, 85 receded, seven didn’t move and one advanced.

As for Canada, the report noted the mean temperature for 2009 was 0.8 C above normal, tying 1988 as the 14th warmest year since nationwide records began in 1948. The warmest year was 1998, which was 2.5 C above normal. For the decade as a whole, “it is clear that the 2000s was the warmest decade out of the six that are available for this national study, with an average temperature of 1.1C above normal.”



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e-tourism-john-31, Globe Editorial, July 31 2010.

An advertising campaign by the environmental organization Corporate Ethics International is urging Americans to “rethink Alberta” as a travel destination. The group has indicated it will also seek to tar the reputation of Alberta in the United Kingdom. Those planning an August break this year should take heed of the “Rethink Alberta” campaign – that is to say, if they were not planning to holiday in Alberta, they should think again.

The alarmist TV ad creates the impression that Alberta is a virtual wasteland, 661,848 square kilometres of toxic sludge, poisoned aboriginals and dead ducks. It is as grossly distorted as it is misdirected. While the group’s target is ostensibly the oilsands industry, it instead attempts to cripple the province’s tourism industry, an industry that is in no way complicit with oilsands development and which, indeed, has an enormous stake in the preservation of Alberta’s natural beauty. In other words, it is attacking an industry with interests allied to its own.

But just as the Islamist call to boycott Danish products after the publication of the Mohammed cartoons excited a global surge in blue cheese sales, so should Corporate Ethics International’s campaign to boycott Alberta tourism inspire travellers this August to visit a province with some of the most striking and varied geography and some of the finest extant ecosystems on the continent. Here are a few suggestions:

■ Royal Tyrrell Museum/Dinosaur Provincial Park/Canadian Badlands: a striking landscape of hoodoos and coulees amid the rolling prairies. Dinosaur Provincial Park became a World Heritage Site in 1979. The Royal Tyrrell Museum, near Drumheller, is the finest dinosaur museum in the world.

■ Icefields Parkway: Extending 230 km between the town of Jasper and Lake Louise, it runs through some of the most spectacular mountain landscapes on Earth, all within the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site, recognized by UNESCO in 1984 for its outstanding natural beauty.

■ Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump/Bar U Ranch/Fort McLeod: Head-Smashed-In was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981 for its cultural, archaeological and scientific value. Nearby is Fort McLeod with The Fort – A North West Mounted Police and First Nations Interpretive Centre. The Bar U Ranch National Historic Site has preserved the home site of one of the most important ranches in the Canadian West.

There are numerous other destinations in Alberta, the Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, Victoria Settlement and Trail, Elk Island National Park, West Edmonton Mall, indeed too many attractions to list here. Go see for yourselves. Take an Alberta break.



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Plankton, crucial to the planet for food and oxygen, in deep trouble;, Seth Borenstein, July 29 2010.

WASHINGTON—Despite their tiny size, plant plankton found in the world’s oceans are crucial to much of life on Earth. They are the foundation of the bountiful marine food web, produce half the world’s oxygen and suck up harmful carbon dioxide.

They also are declining sharply.

Worldwide phytoplankton levels are down 40 per cent since the 1950s, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The probable cause is global warming, which makes it hard for the plant plankton to get vital nutrients, researchers say.

The numbers are both staggering and disturbing, say the Canadian scientists who did the study and a top U.S. government scientist.

“It’s concerning because phytoplankton is the basic currency for everything going on in the ocean,” said Dalhousie University biology professor Boris Worm, a study co-author. “It’s almost like a recession ... that has been going on for decades.”

Half a million datapoints dating to 1899 show that plant plankton levels in almost all the world’s oceans started to drop in the 1950s. The biggest changes are in the Arctic, southern and equatorial Atlantic and equatorial Pacific oceans. Only the Indian Ocean is not showing a decline. The study’s authors said it is too early to say that plant plankton is on the verge of vanishing.

Virginia Burkett, the chief climate change scientist for the U.S. Geological Survey, said plankton numbers are worrisome and show problems that cannot be seen just by watching bigger more charismatic species like dolphins or whales.

“These tiny species are indicating that large-scale changes in the ocean are affecting the primary productivity of the planet,” said Burkett, who was not involved in the study.

When plant plankton plummet, as they do during El Nino climate cycles, sea birds and marine mammals starve and die in huge numbers, experts said.

“Phytoplankton ultimately affects all of us in our daily lives,” said lead author Daniel Boyce, also of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “Much of the oxygen in our atmosphere today was produced by phytoplankton or phytoplankton precursors over the past 2 billion years.”

Plant plankton — some of it visible, some microscopic — help keep Earth cool. They take carbon dioxide, the key greenhouse gas, out of the air to keep the world from getting even warmer, Boyce said.

Worm said when the surface of the ocean gets warmer, the warm water at the top does not mix as easily with the cooler water below. That makes it more difficult for the plant plankton, which are light and often live near the ocean surface, to get nutrients in deeper, cooler water. It also matches other global warming trends, with the biggest effects at the poles and around the equator.

Previous plankton research has relied mostly on satellite data that goes back only to 1978. But Worm and colleagues used a low-tech technology, disks devised by Vatican scientist Pietro Angelo Secchi, in the 19th century. These disks measure the murkiness of the ocean. The murkier the waters, the more plankton.

It is a proxy the scientific community has long accepted as legitimate, said Paul Falkowski of Rutgers University, who has used Secchi disk data for his work.

He and other independent scientists said the methods and conclusions of the new study made sense.



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When Smart Parties Make Stupid Decisions, Paul Saurette, Jul 23 2010.

The Harper government's decision to make the long-form census voluntary is terrible policy, but there is method in their madness.

The government’s decision to replace the mandatory long census with one that is voluntary is terrible policy. That much is obvious. The information gathered from the long census and its analysis is invaluable data that is essential to helping numerous crucial sectors of society make smart decisions that increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our society.

It is a crucial resource, for example, that helps businesses do everything from planning the placement of new retail outlets to determining which TV programs are canned. It also is somewhat important to the everyday experience of Canadians insofar as it allows various layers of government to make evidence-based decisions about things like optimal traffic light timing, how many hospital beds should be funded and where they should be located, or where public health authorities should target their efforts in the case of a flu pandemic.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Economist recently published a 15-page special report on the importance of data and data mining. The report framed data mining as the equivalent of the knowledge economy’s new gold rush and argued that increased data gathering and its transparent release by governments holds the potential to significantly and concretely improve both GDP and a variety of other quality of life indicators in many countries.

It is also very clear that making the long census voluntary substantially reduces the robustness and reliability of the data collected – potentially making it unrepresentative and unreliable at best, and at worst making it profoundly misleading and entirely incompatible with previous decades of data.

This is why virtually everyone who deals with the knowledge economy – from senior bank analysts to business groups to municipalities to advocacy groups to social statisticians – has spoken with a unanimous voice against this shift in policy. This is why the head of StatsCan resigned rather than accept a policy such as this. This is why there are now reports emerging that senior members of the Conservative caucus may have been strongly opposed to the decision. This is why even the National Post couldn’t support the decision, calling it “profoundly undignified governance.”

The unanimity of condemnation, however, leaves us with a much harder question to answer. If it is so obviously bad policy, why did the government decide to do it? And why was it announced now, in the doldrums of summer when even the passing of an omnibus budget-cum-a-bunch-of-other-unrelated-legislation bill barely raised notice across the land?

If we want to answer that question, we have to enter the realm of educated speculation. And in this territory, it’s always wise to follow the lead of the great detective himself, the esteemed Sherlock Holmes, and start by ruling out all those possible reasons that clearly weren’t the basis for the decision.

It doesn’t seem, for example, that this decision is the result of the government importing best practices from other countries. None of our peer countries are breaking down the door to introduce voluntary census forms as a cutting edge data collection practice.

Nor can it really be a consequence of the government’s much vaunted focus on “accountability” – since accountability requires reliable data and evidence-based analysis to ensure that the money it spends on programs actually achieves its objectives.

And it certainly can’t be one of the promised deficit slaying tactics, since StatsCan has estimated that it will cost anywhere from an extra $5 to $30 million to offer a voluntary long census that still ensures anything even remotely resembling reliable data.

The Harper government's decision to make the long-form census voluntary is terrible policy, but there is method in their madness.

The government’s decision to replace the mandatory long census with one that is voluntary is terrible policy. That much is obvious. The information gathered from the long census and its analysis is invaluable data that is essential to helping numerous crucial sectors of society make smart decisions that increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our society.

It is a crucial resource, for example, that helps businesses do everything from planning the placement of new retail outlets to determining which TV programs are canned. It also is somewhat important to the everyday experience of Canadians insofar as it allows various layers of government to make evidence-based decisions about things like optimal traffic light timing, how many hospital beds should be funded and where they should be located, or where public health authorities should target their efforts in the case of a flu pandemic.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Economist recently published a 15-page special report on the importance of data and data mining. The report framed data mining as the equivalent of the knowledge economy’s new gold rush and argued that increased data gathering and its transparent release by governments holds the potential to significantly and concretely improve both GDP and a variety of other quality of life indicators in many countries.

It is also very clear that making the long census voluntary substantially reduces the robustness and reliability of the data collected – potentially making it unrepresentative and unreliable at best, and at worst making it profoundly misleading and entirely incompatible with previous decades of data.

This is why virtually everyone who deals with the knowledge economy – from senior bank analysts to business groups to municipalities to advocacy groups to social statisticians – has spoken with a unanimous voice against this shift in policy. This is why the head of StatsCan resigned rather than accept a policy such as this. This is why there are now reports emerging that senior members of the Conservative caucus may have been strongly opposed to the decision. This is why even the National Post couldn’t support the decision, calling it “profoundly undignified governance.”

The unanimity of condemnation, however, leaves us with a much harder question to answer. If it is so obviously bad policy, why did the government decide to do it? And why was it announced now, in the doldrums of summer when even the passing of an omnibus budget-cum-a-bunch-of-other-unrelated-legislation bill barely raised notice across the land?

If we want to answer that question, we have to enter the realm of educated speculation. And in this territory, it’s always wise to follow the lead of the great detective himself, the esteemed Sherlock Holmes, and start by ruling out all those possible reasons that clearly weren’t the basis for the decision.

It doesn’t seem, for example, that this decision is the result of the government importing best practices from other countries. None of our peer countries are breaking down the door to introduce voluntary census forms as a cutting edge data collection practice.

Nor can it really be a consequence of the government’s much vaunted focus on “accountability” – since accountability requires reliable data and evidence-based analysis to ensure that the money it spends on programs actually achieves its objectives.

And it certainly can’t be one of the promised deficit slaying tactics, since StatsCan has estimated that it will cost anywhere from an extra $5 to $30 million to offer a voluntary long census that still ensures anything even remotely resembling reliable data.

First, this policy shift makes a lot more sense if you consider the overarching suspicion towards “statistical” or generalized knowledge that exists in many strains of the contemporary conservative movement in Canada. Much has been made recently of the “populist” tone of conservatism in Canada. But there is remarkably little thoughtful analysis of exactly what that means in our current political landscape. One element that has gone entirely unnoticed is the existence of what I have elsewhere referred to as “epistemological populism.”

Now the last thing that most people would imagine existing underneath the obstreperous chatter of conservative talk radio, blogging, and punditry is a coherent theory of knowledge. And yet, if you listen closely, there is a remarkably consistent epistemology expressed throughout much of the conservative discourse in Canada.

I call it epistemological populism because it is a theory of knowledge that assumes that the most reliable and trustworthy type of knowledge is the direct individual experience of “common” people – the lessons of which can be unproblematically universalized. In such a theory, the more numerical, general, and statistical the analysis, the less trustworthy it is. For as we all know, our own eyes never lie but numbers can say whatever they want them to say.

So cutting off the nose of Statistics Canada to spite its face isn’t a mistake or a regrettable tradeoff of the new policy. It may well be one of the central points of the exercise. The point isn’t that this is a tactical outreach to appease the (very) few voters who actually complain about the long census. The point is that it’s an ideological outreach to the conservative base at a much deeper, philosophical level. For while many voters won’t notice or care, it will resonate deeply with certain swathes of voters by communicating to them that this government shares their suspicion of stats and the pointy-headed, out-of-touch academics who analyze them.

In this sense, this policy is both a reflection of a populist epistemology and a way of reassuring certain conservative segments that while the government may be spending 40 fiscal quarters wandering in the supposedly non-conservative desert of deficit spending, it hasn’t forgotten where it came from or where it’s going.

But Harper is an economist by training, isn’t he? Isn’t his personal brand precisely that he is a man of the numbers? Moreover, many of his key policy advisors have been people who profoundly appreciate the importance of quantitative analysis, whether in the aid of winning leadership contests, building up war chests, or calculating parliamentary vote probabilities. Surely these decision makers understand the value of numbers?

Of course they do. In fact, it is precisely (and only mildly paradoxically) their complex appreciation of the value and power of numbers that is a second factor explaining this decision.

One of the core beliefs of many conservative intellectuals and activists is that decades of Liberal dominance in Ottawa has created an octopus-like configuration of arms-length organizations with mandates to mine statistical data (much of it collected by StatsCan) to discover inequalities and other structural patterns, and then to lobby the government and Canadian society to reduce these inequalities through social programs. This drives many conservatives up the wall for many reasons. If you don’t believe me, try raising it with your conservative friends at a dinner party when the conversation lulls.

For conservative activists and intellectuals who take the long view, what is most galling about this state of affairs is not just the possibility that the knowledge and analysis produced directly leads to increases in the size of the government. That is bad enough. But what is truly infuriating to them is the suspicion that these types of knowledge play a role in actively cultivating non-conservative values and a public philosophy that acknowledges a role for government in addressing and reducing certain structural inequalities of society. This, they believe, is a major impediment to the conservative hope of creating a culture and public philosophy in which inequality is viewed largely as a natural outcome of individual choices and where individuals, not governments, take it upon themselves to bootstrap their way up.

The importance of rectifying this perceived situation is no mere afterthought for many conservatives. In fact, for many, it is a central concern. Take Tom Flanagan, a central architect of the new Conservative party and long-time and very influential advisor to Harper. A few years ago he published Harper’s Team, a book largely devoted to describing the mechanics of partisan politics and the rise of the Conservative Party of Canada.

In the concluding chapter, however, he briefly raises his gaze from the nuts and bolts to explain why he, a political theorist, chose to devote a significant amount of time and energy to the realm of concrete politics:

Winning elections and controlling the government as often as possible is the most effective way of shifting the public philosophy. Who would deny that Canada’s present climate of opinion has been fostered by the Liberal Party’s long-term dominance of federal institution? If you control the government, you choose judges, appoint the senior civil service, fund or de-fund advocacy groups, and do many other things that gradually influence the climate of opinion.

This is a remarkable statement. Flanagan is suggesting that, for him at least, the importance of party politics and winning elections isn’t so much about any one concrete political issue or the need to rectify specific policies or grievances. Instead, he is suggesting that electoral victory is important primarily as a tool in the service of a much greater and longer-term ideological goal: the transformation of the broad public philosophy of Canada and the cultivation of an enduring set of conservative values and philosophical principles in Canadians.

Once one appreciates that this perspective is quite likely shared by some of the key decision-makers in the current government, the policy shift towards a voluntary long census makes a lot more sense. Not only does it signal the government’s sympathy with the populist epistemology of many conservative voters, in the longer-term, it will also likely have very important and longstanding political effects by significantly hampering the influence of a wide variety of advocacy groups.

How will it do this? By reducing not only the availability but also the credibility of the data that such groups can marshal. As the climate debate has recently shown, even the merest suspicion of the reliability of statistical numbers is often enough to muddy any debate into a tie, even when the vast preponderance of scientific opinion is on one side of the debate. In this sense, the less available and reliable the StatsCan numbers (for example, those that identify income inequity growth or the continued existence of the double day for many women), the harder it will be for advocacy groups to convince Canadians that these are important issues.

The less visible these structural issues are, the less likely it is that advocacy groups will be able to persuade Canadians that government programs are necessary. The less government programs seem necessary, the less government itself seems valuable. And the less government itself seems valuable, the more likely it is that conservative market-oriented values and principles can flourish.

This interpretation isn’t a conspiracy theory. Nor is it the unearthing of a “hidden agenda” (at least in the way that most media analysis uses that term). Rather, it is simply the way that conservatives themselves think and talk about the role of ideas in politics. Many conservatives, (as do many progressives) profoundly understand the political importance of ideas, values, knowledge, and numbers. Appreciating the importance of these elements certainly isn’t rocket science or arcane knowledge passed down by secret political sects – political analysts have been talking about it for centuries if not millennia.

Moreover, it is almost impossible to reflect on the U.S. experience over the last 40 years and not conclude that winning the war of ideas can offer significant returns for political movements. Flanagan is thus only one example of the many influential conservative politicians, activists, and think tankers who have been explicitly planning what exactly conservatives need to do to win that war and capture the institutional structures and resources that dot the ideological battleground.

Once we understand this larger context, the move to make the StatsCan long census form voluntary seems less like an inexplicable misstep and more like another moment in a rather coherent, thoughtful, and patient strategy that includes a variety of seemingly inexplicable and/or costly moves the government has made over the last couple of years, ranging from the elimination of the Court Challenges Program, to the cuts to the Status of Women, to the fight over public financing of parties, to the Rights and Democracy debacle. There were, of course, other interests and stakes wrapped up with each of these decisions. But they are also incremental attempts to cut off what conservative activists see as government funded ideological appendages that promote values and a public philosophy they disavow.

Many argue that changing the census policy is simply an example of the government acting the bully – arbitrarily enforcing bad policy because they are too short-sighted and stubborn to appreciate the consequences of this policy. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Rather than underestimating the importance and impact of this policy, the government understands precisely the central role this change has in their long-term goal of cultivating a very different political culture in Canada. In this sense, one is tempted to suggest that the current Canadian government is far more astutely postmodern in its practical navigation of the politics of knowledge than most of the lefty profs and social justice advocates who are routinely denounced as exemplars of the politicization of knowledge.

Given a choice, Tom Flanagan and the decision-makers of the Conservative party would probably much prefer being cast as clueless bullies to being portrayed as sophisticated postmodernists. But in this case, the numbers don’t lie. This is a profoundly ideologically and philosophically motivated skirmish initiated by people who are highly attuned to the importance of the battle of ideas and the politics of knowledge. If you don’t understand this, you’ll likely continue to believe that the government’s decision to fight so hard to push this through is crazy. When in reality, they’re actually being crazy like a fox.



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Coal, oil win again, Gwynne Dyer, July 27 2010.

also at The Star: The last resort on climate change, August 2 2010, and at GwynneDyer.com.

     It may seem premature to talk about last-ditch measures to deal with runaway climate change, but Ben Lieberman has it right. Lieberman, an energy expert at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think-tank, responded to the news that the U.S. Senate will not pass any climate legislation this year by saying: "It's pretty clear that no post-Kyoto treaty is in the making -- certainly not in Cancun, and maybe not ever."

     The Cancun meeting next December is where the optimists hoped to untangle the mess left by last December's abortive climate summit in Copenhagen and create a new treaty to replace the Kyoto accord, which expires in 2012. It was always a slim hope, but the U.S. Senate has decisively crushed it. Big Coal and Big Oil win again.

     The U.S. Senate is one of the more corrupt legislative bodies in the Western world, so this comes as little surprise. Few senators take direct bribes for personal use, but very many believe that they will not win re-election unless they accept cash donations from special interests like the fossil-fuel industries. Taking the cash obliges them to vote in defence of those interests. Pity about the public interest.

     As Senate majority leader Harry Reid put it: "We know that we don't have the votes." The Democrats control 59 out of 100 seats in the Senate, but some of their more vulnerable members have been picked off by the fossil-fuel lobby, so there will be no serious climate legislation in the United States before the mid-term Congressional elections in November. And it's not likely going to get better after November.

     The likelihood that the Democrats will emerge from the November Congressional elections with a bigger majority in the Senate is approximately zero. The probability is that the balance will tilt the other way, perhaps a little, perhaps a lot. Either way, that means no climate legislation in the United States until after the next Congressional election in November 2012.

     Maybe President Barack Obama will be back in office in early 2013 with a bigger majority in the Senate, but that's the earliest hope for any legal U.S. commitment to cut its emissions -- and it's far from sure even then. Until the United States makes that commitment, you may be sure that none of the rapidly growing economies like China, India and Brazil will make it either. So the climate goes runaway.

     Not right away, of course. We won't actually reach the point of no return (+2 degrees C higher average global temperature) until the late 2020s or the early 2030s. But we will be committed to that outcome much sooner, because with every year that passes, the cuts that we would need to make to hold the temperature below that level become deeper. Eventually, in practice, they become impossible to achieve.

     Before the current recession, global emissions of greenhouse gases were growing at almost three per cent per year, and they will certainly return to that level when the recession ends. To come in under +2 degrees C, we need to be reducing global emissions by at least two per cent by 2012: a total cut of around five per cent each year, assuming that economies grow at the same rate as before.

     That would be hard to do, but not impossible. As the years pass, however, and the emissions continue to grow, it gets harder and harder to turn the juggernaut around in time. On the most optimistic timetable, there might be U.S. climate legislation in 2013, and a global climate deal in 2014, and we start reducing emissions by 2015.

     By then, we would need to be cutting emissions by five or six per cent a year, instead of growing them at three per cent, if we still want to come in under +2 degrees C. That's impossible. No economy can change the sources of its energy at the rate of eight or nine per cent a year. So we are going to blow right through the point of no return.

     Plus two degrees C is the point of no return (and every government has recognized it as such) because after that the additional warmth triggers natural processes that speed the warming. The permafrost melts and emits enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. The warming oceans lose their ability to absorb carbon dioxide. After that, just cutting human emissions won't stop the runaway warming.

     The only way to avert that disaster that currently offers any hope is geo-engineering: direct intervention to hold the actual global temperature increase below two degrees C, no matter what happens in the short term to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

     There are various suggestions on the table. Maybe we could create a kind of sunscreen in the stratosphere by putting some sulphur dioxide gas up there. Maybe we could thicken up the clouds over the ocean so they reflect more sunlight. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But nobody has done serious field trials of these techniques, and it's high time that they started. We are probably going to need them.

     Welcome to the last ditch.



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Chemicals in Red Deer, Oldman rivers warp fish gender, Gwendolyn Richards, July 30 2010.

U of C scientists find more females downstream

Chemicals polluting two rivers in southern Alberta are causing a type of minnow to bend its gender, scientists at the University of Calgary have discovered.

Man-made and naturally occurring chemicals in the Oldman and Red Deer rivers are likely behind the feminization of the long nose dace minnow, which has also seen an increase in the percentage of female fish in areas downstream from communities, the study found.

The study analyzed the water for more than 24 contaminants commonly found in water or rivers affected by human and agriculture activity, including synthetic estrogens, pesticides, flame retardants, chemicals used to make plastics and steroids from cattle farming.

At 14 of 15 locations where they ran tests, researchers found males had higher levels of a protein normally found only in the blood of females, which is used to produce eggs.

Study co-author Hamid Habibi, director of the Institute of Environmental Toxicology at the university, said the protein should be undetectable in male fish.

"It is good evidence these fish are responding to estrogen-like compounds in the environment," he said. "The fish are telling us what is going on in that environment."

Habibi said some of the chemicals are coming from farms and feedlots but are also likely entering the rivers from sewage treatment plants that are failing to remove the contaminants from the waste water.

The research also showed an increase in the numbers of female fish downstream from Lethbridge and Fort Macleod. Upstream, researchers found female fish made up 55 per cent of the population. Downstream, 85 to 90 per cent of the long nose dace minnow population is female, Habibi said.

Study co-author Lee Jackson, executive director of Advancing Canadian Wastewater Assets, said the chemicals that have the potential to harm fish were found in about 600 kilometres of river.

"The situation for native fish will likely get worse as the concentration of organic contaminants will become more concentrated as a response to climate change and the increase in human and animal populations," Jackson said.

Habibi said he hopes the results of the study will prompt others to follow up with examinations of how communities downstream are affected.



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Bad science: Global-warming deniers are a liability to the conservative cause, Jonathan Kay, July 15 2010.

Have you heard about the “growing number” of eminent scientists who reject the theory that man-made greenhouse gases are increasing the earth’s temperature? It’s one of those factoids that, for years, has been casually dropped into the opening paragraphs of conservative manifestos against climate-change treaties and legislation. A web site maintained by the office of a U.S. Senator has for years instructed us that a “growing number of scientists” are becoming climate-change “skeptics.” This year, the chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation gave a speech praising the “growing number of distinguished scientists [who are] challenging the conventional wisdom with alternative theories and peer reviewed research.” In this newspaper, a columnist recently described the “growing skepticism about the theory of man-made climate change.” Surely, the conventional wisdom is on the cusp of being overthrown entirely: Another colleague proclaimed that we are approaching “the church of global warming’s Galileo moment.”

Fine-sounding rhetoric — but all of it nonsense. In a new article published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, a group of scholars from Stanford University, the University of Toronto and elsewhere provide a statistical breakdown of the opinions of the world’s most prominent climate experts. Their conclusion: The group that is skeptical of the evidence of man-made global warming “comprises only 2% of the top 50 climate researchers as ranked by expertise (number of climate publications), 3% of researchers in the top 100, and 2.5% of the top 200, excluding researchers present in both groups … This result closely agrees with expert surveys, indicating that [about] 97% of self-identified actively publishing climate scientists agree with the tenets of [man-made global warming].”

How has this tiny 2-3% sliver of fringe opinion been reinvented as a perpetually “growing” share of the scientific community? Most climate-change deniers (or “skeptics,” or whatever term one prefers) tend to inhabit militantly right-wing blogs and other Internet echo chambers populated entirely by other deniers. In these electronic enclaves — where a smattering of citations to legitimate scientific authorities typically is larded up with heaps of add-on commentary from pundits, economists and YouTube jesters who haven’t any formal training in climate sciences — it becomes easy to swallow the fallacy that the whole world, including the respected scientific community, is jumping on the denier bandwagon.

This is a phenomenon that should worry not only environmentalists, but also conservatives themselves: The conviction that global warming is some sort of giant intellectual fraud now has become a leading bullet point within mainstream North American conservatism; and so has come to bathe the whole movement in its increasingly crankish, conspiratorial glow.

Conservatives often pride themselves on their hard-headed approach to public-policy — in contradistinction to liberals, who generally are typecast as fuzzy-headed utopians. Yet when it comes to climate change, many conservatives I know will assign credibility to any stray piece of junk science that lands in their inbox … so long as it happens to support their own desired conclusion. (One conservative columnist I know formed her skeptical views on global warming based on testimonials she heard from novelist Michael Crichton.) The result is farcical: Impressionable conservatives who lack the numeracy skills to perform long division or balance their checkbooks feel entitled to spew elaborate proofs purporting to demonstrate how global warming is in fact caused by sunspots or flatulent farm animals. Or they will go on at great length about how “climategate” has exposed the whole global-warming phenomenon as a charade — despite the fact that a subsequent investigation exculpated research investigators from the charge that they had suppressed temperature data. (In fact, “climategate” was overhyped from the beginning, since the scientific community always had other historical temperature data sets at its disposal — that maintained by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, most notably — entirely independent of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, where the controversy emerged.)

Let me be clear: Climate-change denialism does not comprise a conspiracy theory, per se: Those aforementioned 2% of eminent scientists prove as much. I personally know several denialists whom I generally consider to be intelligent and thoughtful. But the most militant denialists do share with conspiracists many of the same habits of mind. Oxford University scholar Steve Clarke and Brian Keeley of Washington University have defined conspiracy theories as those worldviews that trace important events to a secretive, nefarious cabal; and whose proponents consistently respond to contrary facts not by modifying their hypothesis, but instead by insisting on the existence of ever-wider circles of high-level conspirators controlling most or all parts of society. This describes, more or less, how radicalized warming deniers treat the subject of their obsession: They see global warming as a Luddite plot hatched by Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and Al Gore to destroy industrial society. And whenever some politician, celebrity or international organization expresses support for the all-but-unanimous view of the world’s scientific community, they inevitably will respond with a variation of “Ah, so they’ve gotten to them, too.”

In support of this paranoid approach, the denialists typically will rely on stray bits of discordant information — an incorrect reference in a UN report, a suspicious-seeming “climategate” email, some hypocrisy or other from a bien-pensant NGO type — to argue that the whole theory is an intellectual house of cards. In these cases, one can’t help but be reminded of the folks who point out the fluttering American flag in the moon-landing photos, or the “umbrella man” from the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination.

In part, blame for all this lies with the Internet, whose blog-from-the-hip ethos has convinced legions of pundits that their view on highly technical matters counts as much as peer-reviewed scientific literature. But there is something deeper at play, too — a basic psychological instinct that public-policy scholars refer to as the “cultural cognition thesis,” described in a recently published academic paper as the observed principle that “individuals tend to form perceptions of risk that reflect and reinforce one or another idealized vision of how society should be organized … Thus, generally speaking, persons who subscribe to individualistic values tend to dismiss claims of environmental risks, because acceptance of such claims implies the need to regulate markets, commerce and other outlets for individual strivings.”

In simpler words, too many of us treat science as subjective — something we customize to reduce cognitive dissonance between what we think and how we live.

In the case of global warming, this dissonance is especially traumatic for many conservatives, because they have based their whole worldview on the idea that unfettered capitalism — and the asphalt-paved, gas-guzzling consumer culture it has spawned — is synonymous with both personal fulfillment and human advancement. The global-warming hypothesis challenges that fundamental dogma, perhaps fatally.

The appropriate intellectual response to that challenge — finding a way to balance human consumption with responsible environmental stewardship — is complicated and difficult. It will require developing new technologies, balancing carbon-abatement programs against other (more cost-effective) life-saving projects such as disease-prevention, and — yes — possibly increasing the economic cost of carbon-fuel usage through some form of direct or indirect taxation. It is one of the most important debates of our time. Yet many conservatives have made themselves irrelevant in it by simply cupping their hands over their ears and screaming out imprecations against Al Gore.

Rants and slogans may help conservatives deal with the emotional problem of cognitive dissonance. But they aren’t the building blocks of a serious ideological movement. And the impulse toward denialism must be fought if conservatism is to prosper in a century when environmental issues will assume an ever greater profile on this increasingly hot, parched, crowded planet. Otherwise, the movement will come to be defined — and discredited — by its noisiest cranks and conspiracists.




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