Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[Good2Golf]

OGBD, interested to know the reference for the 99.9999% CO2 production rate you quote.

Regards
G2G

 

[Kirkhill]

I am not going to get into a debate on GW, but, from a scientific point of view, the statement above is scary, and not the way one might think. In fact, it is scary because it supports that which it claims to refute.

Earth's geological time starts somewhere around 4.6 billion years ago. During the first billion year, as the earth cools down and is raked by mega volcanoes, it produces 99,9999% of its carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, pretty well all it will ever produce. Then about 2.7 billion years ago, we find the first evidence of bacteria's capable of photosynthesis producing oxygen - which requires a sufficiently high enough concentration to be noted in rocks of the era.

For men to then appear and in its whole history of only about 10,000 years, an insignificant amount of "geological" time - not even equivalent to a second in a day, to produce as much as 0.00022% of the CO2 is (to quote the Donald) "huge, a huge amount" in the shortest of time.

Thus, that sentence read in its proper scientific meaning does not debunk GW, but tends to support it.

C.Q.F.D.

Homo Habilis is identified at 2.4 Million years BP
http://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-habilis

Homo Erectus is identified as using fire for cooking in caves at 1.8 Million years BP
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/09-archaeologists-find-earliest-evidence-of-humans-cooking-with-fire

Homo Heidelbergensis is identified as slaughtering each other at 430,000 years BP
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32890697

And we shouldn't forget the contributions of bright sparks like these;

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3439042/Birds-prey-starting-fires-DELIBERATELY-Brown-falcon-dropped-smouldering-twigs-Australian-bush-smoke-mice-insects-say-researchers.html

 

[Loachman]

As I said, either rationalism and objectivity are paramount concerns of scientists or they are not. If they are not, it would be expected that most or all scientists and scientific bodies would readily prostitute themselves out to the highest bidder. The highest bidder in this debate are those with connections to the fossil fuel industries.

Scientists are neither more nor less human, neither more nor less rational, neither more nor less noble, neither more nor less corruptible, and neither more nor less susceptible to putting their own interests ahead of everything else, than the rest of us.

They require sufficient income to provide for a decent standard of living, just like anybody else, and their employment depends on satisfying their employers' demands and expectations.

Who is paying the salaries and expenses of the warmista scientists? Are they funding their own research through bake sales and the like? Doing it out of the goodness of their little hearts while begging for alms like monks of old? Hardly. People are benefitting from this Greatest Fraud Ever Perpetrated on the Human Race, and they are willing to fund those scientists that back them up.

China is free to pollute as much as it wants, while Western countries with much cleaner economies restrict themselves and toss "carbon taxes" and "cap-and-trade" regimes around. China is laughing. Western companies ship production and jobs to China where it's cheaper to do business. It is in China's best interest to quietly fund scare programmes. Our Oil Sands are a threat to middle-eastern oil-exporting dictatorships. They still have a ton of money to slip to those who will trash our production. Western governments direct where research money goes. Spooking populations into accepting greater and greater tax burdens is a very old ploy. Traditionally, war or the threat thereof has been the excuse. This is just a variation. If you truly believe that nobody is benefitting from warm-mongering, then you are incredibly naive.

Much more often (i.e. 97% or so) we see research that contradicts the claims of those connected to the moneyed interests.

This claim of consensus between 97% of scientists is a complete fabrication, and I have previously posted articles that prove it. See also the articles that I have posted below (the second is an older one, but I do not believe that it has been previously posted here). Now, you have applied that mythical percentage to not only the portion of the scientific community to which it has "normally" and dishonestly been applied, but to the amount of research that has been generated. It must be a wondrously universal figure indeed. That number does have some validity, but not in ways that you erroneously think. It appears in the two articles.

Regardless, that "consensus" has no basis in fact.

And no greater proportion of anti-warmist scientists are motivated by money than warmist scientists. They all have bills to pay. No lesser proportion of anti-warmist scientists are motivated rationalism and objectivity than warmist scientists.

Therefore since rationalism and objectivity are the motivating principles of the scientific world claims that counter those must be treated with greater skepticism.

This whole global warming/climate change has taken on the characteristics of a bad religion. Anyone who speaks against it is denounced as a heretic, and therefore those who know better fear to do so. People have lost jobs, lost research grants, been harassed, and had law suits launched against them for speaking the truth. If warm-mongers were so rational and objective, that would not be happening. Their arguments in favour of their position would suffice. They do not, however. To believe in man-made climate change requires one to disbelieve that big, bright thing in the sky that is the source of our warmth, and its cyclical activity. We will be able to prevent climate change when we can put a thermostat on the sun, and not before.

I've been summarily dismissed on this site by others for having the alleged "minority opinion", but in this case the evidence simply does not support the minority opinion here. Furthermore unlike government research where the supposed motivation for a contradicting claim is murky and ill-defined the AGW-skeptics have clear financial motivations for opining as they do.  I'm genuinely surprised so many give them so much good faith.

The over-riding motivation for disproving the outlandish claims of warmism is simply the truth, and nothing less.

http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/u-of-ts-decision-not-to-divest-from-fossil-fuels-is-still-all-wrong-about-climate-science

FP Comment

U of T’s decision not to divest from fossil fuels is still all wrong about climate science

Special to Financial Post | March 31, 2016 3:28 PM ET

With pressure mounting from the University of Toronto’s climate-alarmist community and off-campus environmental activists, university president Meric Gertler announced Wednesday that the school would not, despite their demands, be divesting itself from its investments in companies that produce fossil fuels. The U of T warmists are in a state of despair, just as they are at McGill, UBC, Dalhousie, and other schools where divestiture demands from student activists have ultimately been rejected.

The 43-page report reads almost as if it could be a blueprint for making the university a centre for climate activism

But Gertler’s position is not exactly a victory for those skeptics who perceive climate science as more complicated and debatable than environmental activists insist. As an apparent compromise, Gertler decreed that when choosing its investments going forward, the university would consider environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, including climate risk. This new approach, he wrote, "is consistent with the Committee's recommendation in favour of 'targeted' and dynamic divestment" - in the sense that he expects that the same fossil fuel companies targeted by the divestment activists would likely be ruled out for future investments under the new strategy.

Gertler’s 43-page report reads almost as if it could be a blueprint for making the university a centre for climate activism. It declares the existence of a "consensus that we must take action to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial average, if we are to avoid catastrophic impacts on the planet and humanity." The "reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in response," Gertler claimed, "is now well established and widely accepted."

But, as anyone familiar with the actual state of scientific acceptance of anthropogenic climate change is aware, no such consensus on projected catastrophic man-made climate change really exists. Most recently, in January, researchers from George Mason University surveyed the members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and found significant disagreement on the issue.

Surveys show there is no scientific consensus on catastrophic climate theories

The AMS survey might have been expected to show the opposite. One of the study's authors, after all, was among the six George Mason University professors who last year signed a letter, addressed to President Obama, calling on the administration to restrain climate skepticism and investigate organizations "that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America's response to climate change."

It is easy to see how this likely discouraged some climate skeptics from answering the survey. In fact, American climate blogger Anthony Watts (a skeptic) wrote that two of his colleagues received the survey but did not respond "because they didn’t believe their opinion or identity would actually be protected."

And yet, despite the fact that some skeptics were unwilling to participate, the survey’s results were far from unanimous. Of the 4,092 AMS members who responded (a 53.3 per cent participation rate), just two-thirds (67 per cent) believed that climate had changed in the past 50 years, and that the change was mostly or entirely caused by human activities. That’s a fair majority, but it is nothing close to a consensus. Furthermore, only half predicted that local climate change would be more harmful than beneficial in the next 50 years.

Other surveys suggest that many scientists are skeptical about the quality of climate science. A survey of climate scientists published in 2010 and authored by researchers with the Institute of Coastal Research found a significant lack of confidence in the ability of atmospheric models to deal with clouds and precipitation, and in the ability of global climate models to predict precipitation values and extreme weather for the next 50 years.

The survey also showed that climate scientists were more likely to view climate change as a political issue than a scientific one, and that many believed research over the past decade had been tainted by external politics. There was also disagreement on solutions to climate change: 42 per cent were more inclined towards mitigation while 28 per cent favoured adaptation.

These surveys show there is no scientific consensus on catastrophic climate theories. However, one wonders how much a scientific consensus is worth, anyways. Climate alarmists often claim that 97 per cent of scientists support their position, but as Ross McKitrick noted in the Financial Post last May, "the IPCC reported that 111 out of 114 model projections overestimated warming since 1998." As a percentage of inaccuracy, that happens to work out to 97 per cent, too.

Matthew Lau is a finance and economics student at the University of Toronto.

http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/climate-change-consensus-among-the-misinformed-is-not-worth-much

FP Comment

The con in consensus: Climate change consensus among the misinformed is not worth much

Ross McKitrick, Special to Financial Post | May 11, 2015 7:22 PM ET

Not only is there no 97 per cent consensus among climate scientists; many misunderstand core issues

In the lead-up to the Paris climate summit, massive activist pressure is on all governments, especially Canada's, to fall in line with the global warming agenda and accept emission targets that could seriously harm our economy. One of the most powerful rhetorical weapons being deployed is the claim that 97 per cent of the world's scientists agree what the problem is and what we have to do about it. In the face of such near-unanimity, it would be understandable if Prime Minister Harper and the Canadian government were simply to capitulate and throw Canada's economy under the climate change bandwagon. But it would be a tragedy because the 97 per cent claim is a fabrication.

Like so much else in the climate change debate, one needs to check the numbers. First of all, on what exactly are 97 per cent of experts supposed to agree? In 2013 President Obama sent out a tweet claiming 97 per cent of climate experts believe global warming is "real, man-made and dangerous." As it turns out the survey he was referring to didn't ask that question, so he was basically making it up. At a recent debate in New Orleans I heard climate activist Bill McKibben claim there was a consensus that greenhouse gases are "a grave danger." But when challenged for the source of his claim, he promptly withdrew it.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserts the conclusion that most (more than 50 per cent) of the post-1950 global warming is due to human activity, chiefly greenhouse gas emissions and land use change. But it does not survey its own contributors, let alone anyone else, so we do not know how many experts agree with it. And the statement, even if true, does not imply that we face a crisis requiring massive restructuring of the worldwide economy. In fact it is consistent with the view that the benefits of fossil fuel use greatly outweigh the climate-related costs.

One commonly-cited survey asked if carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and human activities contribute to climate change. But these are trivial statements that even many IPCC skeptics agree with. And again, both statements are consistent with the view that climate change is harmless. So there are no policy implications of such surveys, regardless of the level of agreement.

More than half acknowledge that their profession is split on the issue

The most highly-cited paper supposedly found 97 per cent of published scientific studies support man-made global warming. But in addition to poor survey methodology, that tabulation is often misrepresented. Most papers (66 per cent) actually took no position. Of the remaining 34 per cent, 33 per cent supported at least a weak human contribution to global warming. So divide 33 by 34 and you get 97 per cent, but this is unremarkable since the 33 per cent includes many papers that critique key elements of the IPCC position.

Two recent surveys shed more light on what atmospheric scientists actually think. Bear in mind that on a topic as complex as climate change, a survey is hardly a reliable guide to scientific truth, but if you want to know how many people agree with your view, a survey is the only way to find out.

In 2012 the American Meteorological Society (AMS) surveyed its 7,000 members, receiving 1,862 responses. Of those, only 52 per cent said they think global warming over the 20th century has happened and is mostly manmade (the IPCC position). The remaining 48 per cent either think it happened but natural causes explain at least half of it, or it didn’t happen, or they don’t know. Furthermore, 53 per cent agree that there is conflict among AMS members on the question.

So no sign of a 97 per cent consensus. Not only do about half reject the IPCC conclusion, more than half acknowledge that their profession is split on the issue.

The Netherlands Environmental Agency recently published a survey of international climate experts. 6550 questionnaires were sent out, and 1868 responses were received, a similar sample and response rate to the AMS survey. In this case the questions referred only to the post-1950 period. 66 per cent agreed with the IPCC that global warming has happened and humans are mostly responsible. The rest either don't know or think human influence was not dominant. So again, no 97 per cent consensus behind the IPCC.

But the Dutch survey is even more interesting because of the questions it raises about the level of knowledge of the respondents. Although all were described as "climate experts," a large fraction only work in connected fields such as policy analysis, health and engineering, and may not follow the primary physical science literature.

But in addition to poor survey methodology, that tabulation is often misrepresented

Regarding the recent slowdown in warming, here is what the IPCC said: “The observed global mean surface temperature (GMST) has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years.” Yet 46 per cent of the Dutch survey respondents – nearly half – believe the warming trend has stayed the same or increased. And only 25 per cent agreed that global warming has been less than projected over the past 15 to 20 years, even though the IPCC reported that 111 out of 114 model projections overestimated warming since 1998.

Three quarters of respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement "Climate is chaotic and cannot be predicted." Here is what the IPCC said in its 2003 report: "In climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible."

Looking into further detail there are other interesting ways in which the so-called experts are unaware of unresolved discrepancies between models and observations regarding issues like warming in the tropical troposphere and overall climate sensitivity.

What can we take away from all this? First, lots of people get called "climate experts" and contribute to the appearance of consensus, without necessarily being knowledgeable about core issues. A consensus among the misinformed is not worth much.

Second, it is obvious that the "97 per cent" mantra is untrue. The underlying issues are so complex it is ludicrous to expect unanimity. The near 50/50 split among AMS members on the role of greenhouse gases is a much more accurate picture of the situation. The phony claim of 97 per cent consensus is mere political rhetoric aimed at stifling debate and intimidating people into silence.

The Canadian government has the unenviable task of defending the interest of the energy producers and consumers of a cold, thinly-populated country, in the face of furious, deafening global warming alarmism. Some of the worst of it is now emanating from the highest places. Barack Obama's website (barackobama.com) says "97 per cent of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and man-made…Find the deniers near you - and call them out today." How nice. But what we really need to call out is the use of false propaganda and demagoguery to derail factual debate and careful consideration of all facets of the most complex scientific and policy issue of our time.

Ross McKitrick is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph, a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute.

 

[a_majoor]

Yup, Progressives just "love" science (part 1):

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/when-liberals-attack-social-science.html

Why Some of the Worst Attacks on Social Science Have Come From Liberals

By Jesse Singal

Alice Dreger, author of “Galileo's Middle Finger”
I first read Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science when I was home for Thanksgiving, and I often left it lying around the house when I was doing other stuff. At one point, my dad picked it up off a table and started reading the back-jacket copy. “That’s an amazing book so far,” I said. “It’s about the politicization of science.” “Oh,” my dad responded. “You mean like Republicans and climate change?”

That exchange perfectly sums up why anyone who is interested in how tricky a construct “truth” has become in 2015 should read Alice Dreger’s book. No, it isn’t about climate change, but my dad could be excused for thinking any book about the politicization of science must be about conservatives. Many liberals, after all, have convinced themselves that it’s conservatives who attack science in the name of politics, while they would never do such a thing. Galileo’s Middle Finger corrects this misperception in a rather jarring fashion, and that’s why it’s one of the most important social-science books of 2015.

At its core, Galileo’s Middle Finger is about what happens when science and dogma collide — specifically, what happens when science makes a claim that doesn’t fit into an activist community’s accepted worldview. And many of Dreger’s most interesting, explosive examples of this phenomenon involve liberals, not conservatives, fighting tooth and nail against open scientific inquiry.

When Dreger criticizes liberal politicization of science, she isn’t doing so from the seat of a trolling conservative. Well before she dove into some of the biggest controversies in science and activism, she earned her progressive bona fides. A historian of science by training, she spent about a decade early in her career advocating on behalf of intersex people — those born with neither “traditional” male nor female genitalia. For a long time, established medical practice was for the doctor or doctors present at childbirth to make the call one way or another and effectively carve a newborn’s genitals into the “proper” configuration, and in some cases to eventually prescribe courses of potentially harmful or unnecessary hormones. Sometimes the child in question was never even informed that they hadn’t been born a boy or a girl in the classical sense — indeed, sometimes even their parents weren’t. To the medical Establishment, all that mattered — even above patients’ physical and psychological health — was that young bodies fit neatly into one established gender category or the other.

Working together with a group of intersex activists, Dreger lobbied and educated tirelessly, eventually nudging the medical Establishment away from this protocol and toward a new, more humane norm in cases of genital malformation that don’t pose any health risk: Leave the kid’s genitals alone, allow them to grow up a little, and see what they and their family want to do later on. There doesn’t need to be a rush to assign gender and take aggressive medical action to enforce it.

Image
Eventually, as a result of burnout and other factors, Dreger’s work in this area waned, and she moved on to other projects. Through some of the social networks she had developed in her intersex work, she became interested in the broader world of scientific controversies, and began investigating them as thoroughly as possible — interviewing hundreds of people, chasing down primary documents, and so on. What she found, over and over, was that researchers whose conclusions didn’t line up with politically correct orthodoxies — whether the orthodoxy in question involved sexual abuse, transgender issues, or whatever else — often faced dire, career-threatening consequences simply for doing their jobs.

Two examples stand out as particularly egregious cases in which solid social science was attacked in the name of progressive causes. The first involves Napoleon Chagnon, an extremely influential anthropologist who dedicated years of his life to understanding and living among the Yanomamö, an indigenous tribe situated in the Amazon rain forest on the Brazil-Venezuela border — there are a million copies of his 1968 book Yanomamö: The Fierce People in print, and it’s viewed by many as an ethnographic classic. Chagnon made ideological enemies along the way; for one thing, he has long believed that human behavior and culture can be partially explained by evolution, which in some circles has been a frowned-upon idea. Perhaps more important, he has never sentimentalized his subjects, and his portrayal of the Yanomamö included, as Dreger writes, “males fighting violently over fertile females, domestic brutality, ritualized drug use, and ecological indifference.” Dreger suggests that Chagnon’s reputation as a careful, dedicated scholar didn’t matter to his critics — what mattered was that his version of the Yanomamö was “Not your standard liberal image of the unjustly oppressed, naturally peaceful, environmentally gentle rain-forest Indian family.”

In 2000, Chagnon’s critics seized upon a once-in-a-career opportunity to go after him. That was the year a journalist named Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. The book — and a related New Yorker article by Tierney — leveled a series of spectacular allegations against Chagnon and James V. Neel Sr., a geneticist and physician with whom Chagnon had collaborated during his work with the Yanomamö (Neel died of cancer shortly before the book’s publication). Among other things, Tierney charged that Chagnon and Neel had intentionally used a faulty vaccine to infect the Yanomamö with measles so as to test Nazi-esque eugenics theories, and that one or both men had manipulated data, started wars on purpose, paid tribespeople to kill one another, and “purposefully with[held] medical care while experimental subjects died from the allegedly vaccine-induced measles,” as Dreger writes.

These charges stuck in part because Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, two anthropologists who disliked Chagnon and his work, sent the American Anthropological Association an alarming letter about Tierney’s allegations prior to the publication of Darkness in El Dorado. Rather than wait to see if the spectacular claims in the book passed the smell test, the AAA responded by quickly launching a full investigation in the form of the so-called El Dorado Task Force — a move that led to a number of its members resigning in protest. A media firestorm engulfed Chagnon — “Scientist ‘killed Amazon indians to test race theory’,” read a Guardian headline — and he was forced to defend himself against accusations that he had brutalized members of a tribe he had devoted his career to living with and studying and, naturally, had developed a strong sense of affection for in the process. A number of fellow anthropologists and professional organizations came to the defense of Chagnon and Neel, pointing out obvious problems with Tierney’s claims and timeline, but these voices were drowned out by the hysteria over the evil, murderous anthropologist and his doctor-accomplice. Dreger writes that Chagnon’s “career had essentially been halted by the whole mess.” (Chagnon’s memoirs, published in 2013, are entitled Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists.)

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There was, it turns out, nothing to these claims. Over the course of a year of research and interviews with 40 people involved in the controversy in one way or another, Dreger discovered the disturbing, outrageous degree to which the charges against Chagnon and Neel were fabricated — to the point where some of the numerous footnotes in Tierney’s book plainly didn’t support his own claims. All the explosive accusations about Nazi-like activities and exploitation, and the intentional fomenting of violence, were simply made up or willfully misinterpreted. Worse, some of them could have been easily debunked with just a tiny bit of research — in one case, it took Dreger all of an hour in an archive of Neel’s papers to find strong evidence refuting the claim that he helped intentionally infect the Yanomamö with measles (a claim that was independently debunked by others, anyway).

In the end, Dreger published the results of her investigation in the journal Human Nature, recounting the full details of Chagnon’s ordeal at the hands of Tierney, and the many ways Tierney fabricated and misrepresented data to attack the anthropologist and Neel. Darkness Is El Dorado is still available on Amazon, its original, glowing reviews and mention of its National Book Award nomination intact; and Tierney’s New Yorker article is still online, with no editor’s note explaining the factual inaccuracies contained therein.

***

Dreger also recounts her earlier investigation into the controversy surrounding J. Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University psychologist and researcher of human sexuality and former chair of that university’s psychology department. In 2003, Bailey released The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, a book in which he relates the stories of several transgender women and promotes the theories of Ray Blanchard, a Canadian sex researcher with a long history of working with patients who were born anatomically male but hoped to undergo gender reassignment.

In his book, Bailey explains that Blanchard believed his patients who had transitioned, or who were hoping to, fit into two rather different categories. Some were “transkids” (a non-clinical term Dreger, not Bailey, uses): folks who were born as boys but had been very effeminate by societal standards since childhood, and who were attracted to men once they hit puberty. In these cases, Blanchard posited, access to sex and intimate companionship might have been one component of what eventually pushed them to start presenting as female. As Dreger explains, the fact that transkids come across so effeminate “means that their sexual opportunities are often limited while they are presenting themselves as men. Straight men aren’t interested in having sex with them because they’re male, and gay men often aren’t sexually attracted to them because most gay men are sexually attracted to masculinity, not femininity, and these guys are really femme.” Transitioning, then, gives transkids an opportunity to have the relationships with men they’d like to — because they’re effeminate, they can pass as women whom straight men find themselves attracted to.

The second, more controversial type of male-to-female transitioner posited by Blanchard consisted of folks with so-called autogynephilia. These individuals have usually presented as male for most of their lives and are attracted to women, but they discover along the way that they are sexually aroused by the idea of being a woman. They tend to transition later in life, often after having married women and started families.

There’s also a really important cultural component to Blanchard’s theory, as Dreger writes:

Blanchard’s taxonomy of male-to-female transexuals recognized the importance of sexual orientation in the gendered self-identities of both those who begin as homosexual males and those who experience amour de soi en femme [the French phrase for “love of oneself as a woman”]. However, he didn’t see sexual orientation as the only thing a male factors in when deciding whether to transition. He recognized that in one environment — say, an urban gay neighborhood like Chicago’s Boystown — an ultrafemme gay man might find reasonable physical safety, employment, and sexual satisfaction simply by living as an ultrafemme gay man. But in a very different environment — say, a homophobic ethnic enclave in Chicago — he might find life survivable only via complete transition to womanhood. Whether a transkid grows up to become a gay man or a transgender woman would depend on the individual’s interaction with the surrounding cultural environment. Similarly, an autogynephilic man might not elect transition if his cultural milieu would make his post-transition life much harder.
There is, to say the least, a huge amount going on here. But what’s key to keep in mind is that some transgender people and activists hold very dear the idea that they have simply been born in the wrong type of body, that transitioning allows them to effectively fix a mistake that nature made. The notion that there might be a cultural component to the decision to transition, or that sexuality, rather than a hardwired gender identity, could be a factor, complicates this gender-identity-only narrative. It also brings sexuality back into a conversation that some trans activists have been trying to make solely about gender identity — roughly parallel to the way some gay-rights activists sweep conversations about actual gay sexuality under the rug, preferring to focus on idealized, unthreatening-to-heterosexuals portrayals of committed gay relationships between clean-cut, taxpaying adults.

 

[a_majoor]

(Part 2)

But as Dreger explains, Bailey, being someone with a penchant for poking mischievously at political correctness, wasn’t too concerned about the political dimension of what he was arguing in his book. From a scientific perspective, he explicitly viewed the idea that “everybody is truly and easily assignable to one of two gender identities” as an oversimplification; part of his motivation for writing The Man Who Would Be Queen was to try to blow it up, to argue that transsexuality is more complicated than that. So it shouldn’t be surprising that some trans activists and allies didn’t appreciate the book’s argument — and they obviously have every right to disagree with Bailey and Blanchard’s views. What is surprising is just how big an explosion The Man Who Would Be Queen sparked, and how underhanded the campaign against Bailey subsequently got.

A small group of activists led by Lynn Conway, a transgender University of Michigan electrical engineer and computer scientist, and Andrea James, a trans activist, started going after Bailey shortly after the book’s publication. In allegations laid out on a large UM-hosted web page built by Conway, they charged that Bailey — as summed up by Dreger — “had failed to get ethics board approval for studies of transgender research subjects as required by federal regulation; that he had violated confidentiality; that he had been practicing psychology without a license; and that he had slept with a trans woman while she was his research subject.” Central to their argument was the idea that Bailey had dragged his trans subjects out into the spotlight without their consent, that he had callously manipulated them and used them for his own purposes — a particularly potent charge given that outing someone as transgender can, in the most extreme instances, put their life at risk given the scary levels of violence this population faces at the hands of bigots. (Conway’s website originally included Dreger’s own name on a list of trans activists and allies who were furious with Bailey over his book, even though, at that time, Dreger was only faintly familiar with the controversy and had never even expressed a public opinion on the issue. Dreger asked Conway to remove her name.)

James, in Dreger’s telling, went after Bailey with at-times-scary ferocity, engaging in a host of intimidation tactics: She posted photos of Bailey’s young daughter online with nasty text underneath (in one case calling her a “cock-starved exhibitionist”), sent angry emails to his colleagues, and quickly turned on anyone who didn’t join in her crusade — including some who said that they felt that their own life stories had been accurately and sympathetically captured in Bailey’s book. (James herself, Dreger reveals, acknowledged her own autogynephilia — using that exact word — in a 1998 letter.)

The allegations were so serious, and came in such a heaping quantity, that Bailey’s reputation was permanently tarnished in the eyes of many casual observers. What those observers can’t have known was his long-standing history of support for transgender people — he had used his perch as a researcher to advocate passionately for better treatment of this population and for improved access to gender-reassignment resources, and had even, at the request of one of the subjects in his book, written letters to physicians on behalf of a group of young trans women who were seeking reassignment surgery. Before the full weight of the controversy descended, The Man Who Would Be Queen had been nominated for the Lambda Literary Award’s 2004 prize in the transgender/genderqueer category for its textured, supportive portrayal of its transgender subjects. As a result of immense pressure — Deirdre McCloskey, a respected scholar of economics and history who wrote a memoir about her male-to-female transition, and who helped Conway and James go after Bailey, said nominating the book for the award “would be like nominating Mein Kampf for a literary prize in Jewish studies” — the organization voted to yank the nomination.

Just as she would later dive deep into the controversy that ensnared Napoleon Chagnon, Dreger devoted a huge amount of time to untangling what had really happened. It would take pages to even concisely summarize what she found — she eventually published her almost-50,000-word investigation in Archives of Sexual Behavior, in an article which starts, “This is not a simple story. If it were, it would be considerably shorter.”

But to get a flavor of the quality of the evidence amassed against Bailey by his critics, consider one charge: that Bailey had practiced psychology without a license. Conway, James, and McCloskey filed a formal complaint with the state of Illinois claiming that, since Bailey lacked a license as a clinical psychologist, he had violated state regulations by writing those letters in support of the young trans women seeking to transition. Not only was there no legal basis to the claim — if you don’t receive compensation for your services, which Bailey didn’t, you don’t even need a license to provide counseling in Illinois — but Bailey was completely forthright in his letters supporting the women, both about the fact that he had only had brief conversations with them (as opposed to having provided them with extensive counseling) and about his own qualifications and expertise — he even attached copies of his CV. “Presumably all this was why [Illinois] never bothered to pursue the charge,” writes Dreger, “although you’d never know that from reading the press accounts, which mentioned only the complaints, not that they had petered out.”

And that’s just one example. Over and over, in instances that covered every facet of the campaign against Bailey — including the charge that he had had sex with one of his subjects — Dreger discovered an astounding level of dishonesty and manipulation on the part of Bailey’s critics:

After nearly a year of research, I could come to only one conclusion: The whole thing was a sham. Bailey’s sworn enemies had used every clever trick in the book — juxtaposing events in misleading ways, ignoring contrary evidence, working the rhetoric, and using anonymity whenever convenient, to make it look as though virtually every trans woman represented in bailey’s book had felt abused by him and had filed a charge.
Of course, of all the right-thinking people who know, based on surface-level reporting or blog posts they read, that Mike Bailey is an anti-trans monster, only a tiny percentage are ever going to read, or even learn about, Dreger’s investigation. That’s the problem.

***

There’s a risk of getting too cute here, of drawing false, unwarranted equivalencies. In a sense, my dad was right in what he was getting at — conservatives have done a lot of damage to sound science in the United States. It’s conservative lawmakers and organizations who have refused to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change, who have rallied to keep evolution out of textbooks and comprehensive sex education out of classrooms, who have stymied life-saving research into stem cells and gun control.

But that’s in the world of politics and lawmaking, where conservatives often have a numerical advantage. In the halls of social-science academia, where liberals do, it’s telling that some of the same sorts of feeding frenzies occur. This should stand as a wake-up call, as a rebuke to the smugness that sometimes infects progressive beliefs about who “respects” science more. After all, what both the Bailey and Chagnon cases have in common — alongside some of the others in Galileo’s Middle Finger — is the extent to which groups of progressive self-appointed defenders of social justice banded together to launch full-throated assaults on legitimate science, and the extent to which these attacks were abetted by left-leaning academic institutions and activists too scared to stand up to the attackers, often out of a fear of being lumped in with those being attacked, or of being accused of wobbly allyship.

It’s hard not to come away from Dreger’s wonderful book feeling like we’re doomed. Think about all the time and effort it took her — a professionally trained historian as equipped as anyone to dig into complex morasses of conflicting claims — to excavate the full details of just one of these controversies. Who has a year to research and produce a fact-finding report that only a tiny percentage of people will ever read or care about? Who’s going to figure out exactly how some contested conversation between Mike Bailey and a young transgender woman in Chicago in two thousand whatever actually went down? Dreger herself is transparent about the fact that these days she can only afford to do what she does because her physician husband has a high-paying job at a medical school. There aren’t a lot of Alice Dregers. Nor are there, these days, a lot of investigative journalists with the time and resources to understand complicated debates involving controversial science. There is, however, a lot identity-driven content on the internet, because it’s easy to produce and tends to travel well. If you’re a writer or an editor looking for a quick hit, outrage at a perceived slight against some vulnerable group is a surefire bet.

While the false charges against Chagnon and Bailey were certainly helped along by the internet, neither episode occurred in our present age of bottomless social-media outrage. Imagine if the Bailey controversy dropped tomorrow. Imagine how various outlets, all racing to publish the hottest take and all forced to rely on only those sparse, ambiguous scraps of evidence that filter down in the first days of an uproar over an unfamiliar subject, would cover it. If anything, all the incentives have gotten worse; if anything, the ranks of dedicated, safely employed critical thinkers in a position to be the voice of reason have thinned. In all likelihood, the coverage today would be far uglier and more prejudicial than it was when the scandal actually broke.

Science can’t function in this sort of pressure-cooker environment. The way things are heading, with the lines of communication between scientific institutions and the general public growing increasingly direct (a good thing in many cases, to be sure), and with instant, furious reaction the increasingly favored response to anything with a whiff of injustice to it — details be damned —  it will become hard, if not impossible, for careful researchers unencumbered by dogmatic ideology to make good-faith efforts to understand controversial subjects, and to then publish their findings. Chagnon and Bailey, after all, were good-faith researchers. They had both demonstrated, in the way only years of diligent scholarly work can, that they were fascinated by and cared deeply about their subjects. In their published writing, both men surfaced and amplified stories about hidden communities that never would have reached the wider world otherwise. And yet all this work counted for zilch, because when controversy erupted, they fit an easy-to-process, irresistible story line: They were white men exploiting vulnerable populations for personal gain. Imagine being a young psychologist genuinely interested in transgender issues, with a genuine desire to study them rigorously. What would the Bailey blowup tell you about the wisdom of staking your career on that field of research?

We should want researchers to poke around at the edges of “respectable” beliefs about gender and race and religion and sex and identity and trauma, and other issues that make us squirm. That’s why the scientific method was invented in the first place. If activists — any activists, regardless of their political orientation or the rightness of their cause — get to decide by fiat what is and isn’t an acceptable interpretation of the world, then science is pointless, and we should just throw the whole damn thing out.

and what passes for science these days is less accurate than throwing darts at a piece of paper with random letters and numbers:

https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153658794008375

What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) who to vote for.

With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren't even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call "rational" or "irrational" comes from misunderstanding of probability theory.

 

[a_majoor]

Atlantic sea levels have been falling for the last six years. The formatting of the article makes it difficult to cut and paste, but the graphs and evidence is pretty clear. Just for juxtaposition the article contains an alarmist claim which has been thoroughly debunked by the real world evidence:

https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2016/03/23/falling-sea-level/

Schadenfreude is a wonderful word......

 

[biernini]

biernini, since you're on a roll answering everyone's questions, don't forget daftandbarmy's...

In any debate involving science if the writing is not peer-reviewed I don't tend to give it much of my attention: Too much time and effort to cut through the biases, editorializing, agendas and rhetoric for too little in return.

If the numbers provided by daftandbarmy and Oldgateboatdriver are even remotely accurate then I'm with OGBD; that's an astounding amount of CO2 in the geological blink of an eye.

 

[biernini]

[Scientists employed by governments] require sufficient income to provide for a decent standard of living, just like anybody else, and their employment depends on satisfying their employers' demands and expectations.

Demands and expectations?  I'm genuinely curious, since it's seemingly so obvious where is it explicitly written that governments want to prove AGW exists? What vested interest in government am I apparently completely overlooking does this satisfy?

By the way, here's the actual paper that your article badly misrepresents as some kind of profound skepticism from the American Meteorological Society. Here's a strongly repudiative statement from the authors's themselves about this misrepresentation.  And lastly here's a pretty choice quote from the study, for me at least:

While we found that higher expertise was associated
with a greater likelihood of viewing global warming
as real and harmful, this relationship was less strong
than for political ideology and perceived consensus. At
least for the measure of expertise that we used, climate
science expertise may be a less important influence on
global warming views than political ideology or social
consensus norms. More than any other result of the
study, this would be strong evidence against the idea
that expert scientists’ views on politically controversial
topics can be completely objective

 

[Kirkhill]

Demands and expectations?  I'm genuinely curious, since it's seemingly so obvious where is it explicitly written that governments want to prove AGW exists? What vested interest in government am I apparently completely overlooking does this satisfy?

.....

I believe the answer to your question of "what does government seek to justify?" is: government.

King, Duke, Marquess, Earl, Viscount, Baron, Baronet, Knight
Prime Minister, Minister, Deputy Minister, Assistant Deputy Minister, Associate Deputy Minister, Director-General, Director

Paychecks and influence.

 

[a_majoor]

Funny what happens to all these save the world schemes when you run the numbers:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/04/06/dont-be-fooled---elon-musks-electric-cars-arent-about-to-save-th/

Don't be fooled - Elon Musk's electric cars aren't about to save the planet
BJØRN LOMBORG
6 APRIL 2016 • 7:08PM

As Elon Musk presented the new Tesla 3, a fawning press announced that the “world-changing car” could “dominate” the market. Within days, 276,000 people had put down $1,000 to pre-order the car.

But the Model 3 doesn’t exist yet. There is no final production version, much less any production. Musk is “fairly confident” that deliveries could start by the end of 2017. But running on schedule isn’t Tesla’s strong suit. Meanwhile, Tesla’s current best-seller has been plagued by quality problems.

All of this might just be another iPhone vs Galaxy conversation – except that these vehicles are hailed as green saviours and so are subsidised to the tune of billions of pounds.

Before unveiling the car, Musk sanctimoniously declared that Tesla exists to give the planet a sustainable future. He pointed to rising CO₂ levels. He lamented that 53,000 people die from air pollution from transportation. Tesla, the story goes, is a lifesaver. Like other electric cars, it has “zero emissions” of air pollution and CO₂.

But this is only true of the car itself; the electricity powering it is often produced with coal, which means that the clean car is responsible for heavy air pollution. As green venture capitalist Vinod Khosla likes to point out, “electric cars are coal-powered cars”.

If the USA had 10 per cent more petrol cars by 2020, air pollution would claim 870 more lives. A similar increase in electric ones would cause 1,617 more deaths a year, mostly because of the coal burned.

If we were to scale this to the UK, electric cars would cause the same or more air pollution-related deaths than petrol-powered cars. In China, because their coal power plants are so dirty, electric cars make local air much worse: in Shanghai, pollution from more electric-powered cars would be nearly three-times as deadly as more petrol-powered ones.

Moreover, while electric cars typically emit less CO₂, the savings are smaller than most imagine. Over a 150,000 km lifetime, the top-line Tesla S will emit about 13 tonnes of CO₂. But the production of its batteries alone will emit 14 tonnes, along with seven more from the rest of its production and eventual decommissioning.

Compare this with the diesel-powered, but similarly performing, Audi A7 Sportback, which uses about seven litres per 100km, so about 10,500 litres over its lifetime. This makes 26 tonnes of CO₂. The Audi will also emit slightly more than 7 tons in production and end-of-life. In total, the Tesla will emit 34 tonnes and the Audi 35. So over a decade, the Tesla will save the world 1.2 tonnes of CO₂.

Reducing 1.2 tonnes of CO₂ on the EU emissions trading system costs £5; but instead, the UK Government subsidises each car with £4,500. All of the world’s electric cars sold so far have soaked up £9 billion in subsidies, yet will only save 3.3 million tonnes of CO₂. This will reduce world temperatures by 0.00001°C in 2100 – the equivalent of postponing global warming by about 30 minutes at the end of the century.  Electric cars will be a good idea, once they can compete – which will probably be by 2032. But it is daft to waste billions of pounds of public money on rich people’s playthings that kill more people through air pollution while barely affecting carbon emissions. The Tesla 3 is indeed a “zero emissions” marvel – but that is only because it does not yet exist.

 

[Retired AF Guy]

Funny what happens to all these save the world schemes when you run the numbers:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/04/06/dont-be-fooled---elon-musks-electric-cars-arent-about-to-save-th/

Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions, being interviewed on CBC Radio on his views on electric cars and the problems they produce.

 

[a_majoor]

Politicized science. People who wonder why scientists would prostitute themselves for false narratives should consider this:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/230886/

THE GOVERNMENT WAS CONTROLLED BY SPECIAL INTERESTS, AND PUSHED “SETTLED SCIENCE” THAT WAS FAKE AND DAMAGING: In 1972, a British scientist sounded the alarm that sugar – and not fat – was the greatest danger to our health. But his findings were ridiculed and his reputation ruined. How did the world’s top nutrition scientists get it so wrong for so long?

In 1980, after long consultation with some of America’s most senior nutrition scientists, the US government issued its first Dietary Guidelines. The guidelines shaped the diets of hundreds of millions of people. Doctors base their advice on them, food companies develop products to comply with them. Their influence extends beyond the US. In 1983, the UK government issued advice that closely followed the American example.

The most prominent recommendation of both governments was to cut back on saturated fats and cholesterol (this was the first time that the public had been advised to eat less of something, rather than enough of everything). Consumers dutifully obeyed. We replaced steak and sausages with pasta and rice, butter with margarine and vegetable oils, eggs with muesli, and milk with low-fat milk or orange juice. But instead of becoming healthier, we grew fatter and sicker.

Look at a graph of postwar obesity rates and it becomes clear that something changed after 1980. In the US, the line rises very gradually until, in the early 1980s, it takes off like an aeroplane. Just 12% of Americans were obese in 1950, 15% in 1980, 35% by 2000. In the UK, the line is flat for decades until the mid-1980s, at which point it also turns towards the sky. Only 6% of Britons were obese in 1980. In the next 20 years that figure more than trebled. Today, two thirds of Britons are either obese or overweight, making this the fattest country in the EU. Type 2 diabetes, closely related to obesity, has risen in tandem in both countries.

At best, we can conclude that the official guidelines did not achieve their objective; at worst, they led to a decades-long health catastrophe.

But despite all the talk about going after tobacco companies and “climate deniers,” the culprits here will face no consequences at all. Meanwhile, note the record of dermatologists in actively persecuting colleagues who suggested that sunlight might have benefits. How many people have sickened or died because of their lousy, but unbending, advice?

Then there’s the whole salt thing. . .

How much healthier would Americans be, if we’d followed the principles espoused by Gary Taubes and Mark Rippetoe — principles that were well-known 50 years ago, but discarded because they didn’t serve the interests of scientists and activists?

And getting access to billions of dollars of tax dollars is the other great benefit of prostituting yourself for the narrative.

 

[beirnini]

I believe the answer to your question of "what does government seek to justify?" is: government.

King, Duke, Marquess, Earl, Viscount, Baron, Baronet, Knight
Prime Minister, Minister, Deputy Minister, Assistant Deputy Minister, Associate Deputy Minister, Director-General, Director

Paychecks and influence.

I won't disagree that there are very likely positions and portfolios in the typical Western government that are probably not the best or most honest allocation of resources. As we've seen with the American Drug War Western governments are not above fabricating and maintaining some pretty awful fictions if it is politically expedient.  But to suggest that the primary objective of government and that which it engages in is first and foremost to justify itself borders on tautological at best, and paranoid lunacy at worst. Western democracies are not perfect but by definition they are not autocratic either: There is no need for a fundamental fable about a right to rule, divine or otherwise, to impose on the masses.

But putting that aside for a moment let's pretend that what you and your ilk say is true; that most or all scientists are little more than PR flacks prostituting their credibility to and for whomever pays their bill.  The first and most glaring problem with that supposition is that there's logically nothing to suggest that science produced or proffered by skeptics is any more convincing than that produced by those doing the alleged "dirty work" of government. In fact with such a supposition there's no such thing as scientific skepticism at all, just pure cynicism. The second problem with that supposition is that if most or all scientists are the equivalent of prostitutes there's a curious, self-defeating habit among most of them: In a world with many very rich, very well connected clientele comprising a large, significantly under served market (i.e. science in the service of the fossil fuel industries) most "prostitutes" intentionally get "syphilis" and "gonorrhea", they mutilate their faces and degrade their appearance and in general spurn most opportunities for better paid escort work with those rich clientele.

That's a curious thing to do as a prostitute, one should think.

 

[Lumber]

Politicized science. People who wonder why scientists would prostitute themselves for false narratives should consider this:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/230886/

And getting access to billions of dollars of tax dollars is the other great benefit of prostituting yourself for the narrative.

This article proves absolutely nothing.
1. It does not prove in any way that the mentioned diets that were recommended were the cause of the rise in obesity. I'll even go on an unsuported limb and say it was really the cause of expert marketing by food companies more than anything else;
2. It does not prove in any way that those scientists who had came up with that diet (or food recommendation, whatever you want to call it) had modified or falsified their data to fit some purpose;
3. It does nothing to disprove that perhaps those scientists truly did believe in their conclusions, but simply got it wrong.

Conclusion: I still trust scientists more than politicians. If they're going to prosititute themselves and just say whatever their boses want to, why do any research at all?

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

Lumber: It' is Thuc citing the incredibly biased and useless source "instapundit" as his sole support.

Nothing more need be said  ;D.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

The point is not that there were bad intentions- near as I can tell, everyone was genuinely concerned about health. The problem is- one guy got it wrong (it turns out), a herd mentality took over and no one challenged the underlying assumption that "fat is bad" for nearly 50 years.

Any of this sound even remotely familiar.....?

 

[Kirkhill]

Pluses SKT.

It is not that scientists, or politicians, or used care salesmen, are any more venal than the rest of us.  It is that they are subject to exactly the same pressures as the rest of us.  When confronted with the daily challenges of life, raising a family, paying the bills, the default setting is to do that which will most easily guarantee bread on the table.

And most often - that means going along to get along.

If somebody has already decided that the sun sets at dawn then it is simpler just to rewrite the dictionary and carry on as usual.

By the way, on the food side, Thuc isn't wrong.  These issues have been debated at least since I got out of university in the 70s.  You heard echoes of the debates in the high protein, high fat diets.  And in the beginning it was "Big Milk" that was being roasted for arguing that Butter was better than Margarine.  Now it is "accepted" that the "man-made" saturated fats (commonly known as trans-fats) are harmful while both "natural" saturated fats, like tallow, lard and butter are less harmful and might, like cholesterol, even be good for you.

Science is never settled.  Science is only a collection of opinions that seek to explain the situation.  Some of the models work some of the time.  Some of the models work most of the time.  Some models are just plain wrong.

An alternative to PJMedia - CNN on the US Food Guidelines for 2015 to 2020.  - New info.  New Opinions.  New Suggestions.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

The point is not that there were bad intentions- near as I can tell, everyone was genuinely concerned about health. The problem is- one guy got it wrong (it turns out), a herd mentality took over and no one challenged the underlying assumption that "fat is bad" for nearly 50 years.

Any of this sound even remotely familiar.....?

The body building/ weight lifting community has been sounding off on this since I started over 25 years ago.  The consensus has always been that if sugar had just been invented it would be a controlled substance for the not-so-good effects on the human body and it's addictiveness.

But hey,......just coal faces who do the job, not paid school monkeys......

 

[beirnini]

It is not that scientists, or politicians, or used care salesmen, are any more venal than the rest of us.  It is that they are subject to exactly the same pressures as the rest of us.  When confronted with the daily challenges of life, raising a family, paying the bills, the default setting is to do that which will most easily guarantee bread on the table.

That doesn't explain why most climatologists and the like are generally not offering their much sought after "services" to the fossil fuel industry.  Also if research scientists are little more than used car salesman are we really so comfortable with the idea that there is no such thing as scientific skepticism? As has been said, why bother doing any research at all?

And most often - that means going along to get along.

If somebody has already decided that the sun sets at dawn then it is simpler just to rewrite the dictionary and carry on as usual.

You obviously don't know any research scientists or have much of a clue about their motivations. Generally speaking their professional purpose is to challenge the scientific status quo. They dream of having high school science textbooks changed because of their research.

 

[Kirkhill]

No lad, I never met a research scientist in my life.

Best of luck to you.