Guest essay by Charles Battig, M.D. VA-Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment
American popular culture has scattered nuggets of perceived wisdom. In order to understand and perhaps explain our continuing frustration with getting more of the American public and politicians to accept the reality of climate issues, I invoke “Cool Hand Luke.” In that 1967 film the prison warden tells Luke: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach…”
Both short statements encapsulate the problem of getting out and accepted the scientifically validated climate information labored over by so many at this site and at other similar sites. Both the mainstream press and government officials are particular challenges. The public-at-large seems to be getting the message that our weather events are not deserving of prime-time concern.
The media loves an attention grabbing headline too much to concede the climate panic button re-set for any event, real or imagined. Our political ruling class and its corporate sycophants are entwined in a mad love and financial embrace that validates “love is blind.” They are blind to any facts of climate research that might threaten their profitable symbiotic relationship.
This conundrum of effective communication of validated scientific fact became of great concern and dismay to Julian Simon. “Hoodwinking the Nation” (1999) was Julian’s last published book, and is just 140 pages. 
He was the eternal optimist which made him a rare bird amongst those of the “dismal profession.” Perhaps he is best remembered to the general public for his 1980 wager with Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich had insisted that a basket of commodities would become more expensive over the next ten years because they would become scarcer as increased global population depleted natural reserves. Simon bet the opposite. His inherent optimism reasoned that more people meant more opportunities for new discoveries which would result in cheaper costs of exploration and extraction. For him, people and their potential discoveries were the “Ultimate Resource.” Fortuitously, Simon won the bet.
In “Hoodwinking the Nation,” Julian describes his successful 1980’s effort to debunk the prevalent claim of the day that urbanization of U.S. farmland was creating a potential shortage of food for the U.S. and its food exports. By 1984, Julian’s analysis of the government’s own data showed that there was no such thing as a vanishing farmland crisis…it was all a scam. The Soil Conservation Service, the National Agricultural Lands Study, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture all reversed their earlier scarcity claims. Julian was proved correct, yet the press “did nothing to uncover the scam.” In the section, “A postmortem,” Julian describes his attempt to understand this lack of interest by the press to publicize the factual good news. His finding: “When shown the facts, these journalists usually say that even if cries of an environmental danger are somewhat overblown, they contain the germ of truth.” I think that this reality is still valid today. The media are pre-disposed to look for “false bad news” or to fabricate it to catch a headline.
The remainder of the book attempts to define and explain this whole phenomenon of good news being crowded out by false bad news. Why is the public pre-disposed to believe things are getting worse, even if facts prove otherwise? Some chapter headings identify the dilemma: “Chapter 1: What Do Americans Wrongly Believe about Environment, Resources, and Population,” “Chapter 4: Why Does the Public Not Hear Sound Environmental Thinkers?” “Chapter 9: How Psychology Affects the Evaluation of Trends,” and “Chapter 10: Why Do We Hear Prophecies of Doom from Every Side?”
These same questions and his answers are just as timely today as writers here and elsewhere lament the fact that they have won the scientific climate debates fairly at numerous climate conferences and conventions, yet the press and politicians, as well as competing academics, refuse to acknowledge their findings. In the contests of political propaganda, emotional appeals have an unfair, but proven advantage over scientific facts. Parents and politicians succumb to images of cute children waving “clean air’ banners. Do not think that arguments centered on climate sensitivity, relative risk, and negative feedback loops will prevail in that arena.
It is encouraging that the public-at-large has continued to rank “climate change issues” at the bottom of possible concerns, and so there is hope that persistent repetition of verifiable facts is finding receptive ears. The Internet was not yet prime-time in Julian’s day, but now it provides an end-run about a mainstream media intent on scares and not science.
So “Cool Hand Luke,” we have come a long way with the ability to communicate. However, we have yet to conquer the: “some men you just can’t reach…” Significant progress there rests upon voting out of office those we cannot reach by reason alone.
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While I appreciate the attempt, the author seems to have fundamentally misunderstood the Cool Hand Luke quote. The word “communicate” in that instance had to do with those in power using coercion, backed by the threat of force to get people, particularly those like Luke, to think a certain way. That certain way has to do with obedience more than anything else. It has nothing to do with truth. Fast forward to today, and you have the Warmenistas using the word “communicate” in much the same way, although their tactics more involve the use of psychology and mind-games to try to demolish skepticism. What skeptics are doing is more along the lines of truth-telling. Slowly, thanks to sites like this, and Mother Nature herself, the truth is winning. But, the big guns, particularly the ipcc are still in the hands of the Liars.
Bruce Cobb says: August 8, 2014 at 5:05 am
+1
@dbstealey. Oh, so we have a professional politician then. Called you out, didn’t I? You ought to know better than anyone what the average right wing voter in America thinks about basic religious tenets and creation versus evolution. I bet you did not run on a platform of “Genuflect to Darwin!”
As an atheist, and an attorney, I am constantly amazed at all the laws not yet repealed in this country requiring a belief in God and an afterlife to run for political office. This despite the US Constitution clearly stating the contrary and the Supreme Court in 1961 saying all such state laws are unconstitutional. Here is what my own state constitution still says on the matter:
Tennessee’s State Constitution, Article 9 Section 2
“No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.”
There are many states that have similar language in their constitutions, especially in the South where such laws are nearly universal.
I doubt the right wingers who run my state will propose an amendment to this provision anytime soon, though they have had 50+ years to do since the US Supreme Court decision.
REPLY: David G. Mills, I don’t give a rats butt what you are, however, you are off-topic and disrupting the thread. No more comments on politics, religion, etc from you then. – Anthony
I believe that the press is wedded to the notion that western society in general and the US in particular are fundamentally bad. So even if the bad news isn’t as bad as once believed, they will keep pushing the bad news, because it fits into the narrative they are trying to preach.
Jim Francisco says:
August 7, 2014 at 6:51 pm
Wayne Delbeke says:
August 7, 2014 at 6:11 pm
Old Seadog:
CAGW will never be denied by the media. CAGW … “will not end with a bang, but a whimper”.
Just like acid rain and the ozone hole did.
Except that those scares haven’t ended. The reason that UK is shutting down coal fired generation plants is not due to ‘AGW’ it is due to the EU Large Combustion Plants Directive http://www.defra.gov.uk/industrial-emissions/eu-international/lcpd/
“What does the LCPD do?
The LCPD aims to reduce acidification, ground level ozone and particles throughout Europe by controlling emissions of sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) and dust (particulate matter (PM)) from large combustion plants (LCPs) in power stations, petroleum refineries, steelworks and other industrial processes running on solid, liquid or gaseous fuel.
These pollutants are major contributors to acid deposition, which acidifies soils and freshwater bodies, damages plants and aquatic habitats, and corrodes building materials.
(my bold)
So even though the science has been falsified, and the press is no longer interested, the bureaucratic imposition of ‘defenses’ against a non-existent threat continue even to the extent of causing brown outs or black outs and forcing the UK ‘Government’ to set up acres of diesel generators that can be started to keep lights on – and polluting far far more than the coal fired generators ever would.
If you think for one moment that when AGW slides off into the sunset falsified by science, and the next chapter of Agenda 21 is activated by Common Purpose, that the bureaucrats of EPA and the EU will stop imposing regulations against a non-existent threat – then you have a very naive view of these controlling bureaucracies. Every single regulation and tax on ‘carbon’ emissions will need to be explicitly outlawed by act of congress or the EU commission or they will continue. Unfortunately, the dogged persistence and ‘engrenage’ of bureaucrats will never be matched by the transient interest of politicians and the bureaucrats know this.
When lambasting politicians about CO2 derived global warming, people should not forget the courts’ role in this. Judges and lawyers have the same difficulty as politicians judging the work of scientists and especially so when it comes the admissibility of scientific evidence and opinion. Here is the applicable Federal Rule of Evidence regarding the admissibility of scientific opinion and most state rules copy it verbatim or substantially copy it.
Rule 702. Testimony by Expert Witnesses
A witness who is qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education may testify in the form of an opinion or otherwise if:
(a) the expert’s scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue;
(b)the testimony is based on sufficient facts or data;
(c)the testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods; and
(d)the expert has reliably applied the principles and methods to the facts of the case.
There are three landmark US Supreme Court cases, regarding the admissibility of scientific opinion and they are collectively known as the Daubert trilogy. Wikipedia has a good discussion on Daubert and the two other cases after Daubert applying the Daubert rule.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard
And here is the basic criticism of the judge as gatekeeper of scientific evidence:
“The responsibility to assess scientific relevance has shifted from highly trained expert witnesses to judges deficient in science education. The “Daubert” ruling furthermore admits the possible introduction of non-peer reviewed data and conclusions. This increasingly shifts the burden of scientific judgement onto judges who have not had an education which would enable them to properly evaluate such data.”
Notice the bias in favor of peer review and although not mentioned here, the bias in favor of the consensus of peer reviewed literature. In reality, my experience as a personal injury litigator for 35 years, is what happens customarily, is that courts rely on the consensus of peer reviewed papers as their only basis for admitting scientific evidence.
Furthermore, judges in my experience, truly are “deficient in scientific education.” I would say appallingly deficient. They and their legislative counterparts are in the same box. Hoodwinking them is not that difficult.
Scarcity is one of the more abused technical topics by under-informed pseudo experts. It tends to pull in predictions and opining from unrelated disciplines and by doing so they set themselves up as an easy mark. The fact that they get away with such unprofessional behavior for decades on end has parallels in climate science predictions and distinguishes these two areas as double standards for conduct. They should be lumped in with other journalist musing topics and not misrepresented as science or even qualified expertise as in Paul Ehrlich opining about commodity markets that he knew very little about.
I agree with AndyWest2012’s that a new, positive, and psychologically appealing narrative, is needed to reverse the current CAGW psywar campaign. Somehow, true scientific and logiical hypotheses need to be supported by good marketing as well as the publication of data and arguments against CAGW on sites such as WUWT. Because the federal government and its teat-suckers have an unlimited supply of tax dollars and “free” money from the treasury/Federal Reserve cabal, this will take the financial backing of people with big money but no attackable conflict of inteAest, hard to come by. Hopefully one day the tide will turn and the rats will desert the sinking ship of CAGW. In the meantime, we can stay positive, support the truth, go out and protest, and keep up to date on WUWT.
Also, about the quality of journalism today, all one needs to do is read a copy of USA Today. When I was in college long ago, the word on campus was that Engineering students had the highest SAT scores and the lowest GPAs, and (with my apologies to those outstanding teachers and reporters among us) the Education majors had the lowest SATs and highest GPAs. Friends tell me that at their college, Journalism was made up primarily of students who couldn’t cut it in Education. Bear in mind that back then there were no curricula in General Studies, Sports Management, Politial Activism, Community Organization, etc.
davidgmills says:
Oh, so we have a professional politician then.
A lawyer being critical of an office holder selected by a majority of the voters? Well, lawyers have a reputation for being hypocrites, and mills does his part to uphold that reputation.
As… an attorney…
Yes. We know.
Mills says:
…I guess I disprove everything said about the left wing and disprove the hypothesis that the left wing thinks anthropogenic CO2 causes global warming.
You are late to the party, so you disprove nothing. Richard Courtney has said the same thing for many years now. But I guess you can add, “Me too!”
Here in Montana a group of six PHDs named Acton (Astro-Geophysics,Astronaut), Grimsrud (Analytical &Atmospheric Chemistry), Running (Forest Ecophysiology, Nobel Laureate), Six (Forest Entomology), Smith (Zoology) and Strode (Analytical Chemistry) have penned an epistle stating that “climate change is a reality”. This takes the form of a letter to the editor and has apparently been published widely in the state. Probably no one would argue with the quoted phrase, but the devil is in the details.
There are the usual references to “97% of scientists…”; “temperatures will increase between 5 to 10 degrees…”; “global warming is already disrupting…”; “the challenging environment we’re passing on to our kids….”; “more extreme and expensive storms, floods, and fires….”; etc.
What is their goal? They say it is time to move from debate to solutions and support the EPA’s recently released Clean Power Plan while admonishing politicians to “formulate solutions commensurate with the gravity of the issue at hand”. The Doctors conclude by saying that “The views stated are our personal views”. That’s probably why there are no scientific cites in the article. Read it at http://www.bitterrootstar.com/
The topic of this post, and the sentiments expressed in the comments in this thread are at the heart of the “battle” of CAGW in our world today – the winning of the hearts and minds of those in politics and even more so those that vote them into positions of authority (while we in the US still are able to do so). This is accomplished by the Catastrophists as we have seen, through a monopolistic control of the message to the masses via the various media. It is in this battle that the warministas (being apparently very well-funded) have been enjoying victory after victory – in your neighborhood, in the city/township council, your state legislature – and as we have seen, up to the top post in the good ol’ US of A – and around the globe. The truth must continue to be told regarding the uncertainties of the CAGW narrative, enlightenment must come to those being held in the dark, and hearts and minds opened to the truth on this subject. It is indeed a battle. Exposing the lies, obfuscations, half-truths, methods of coercion, through all means of propaganda promulgation – show them to be what they actually are – will continue the turning of the collective public mind away from where we are now – to future victory in the battle for truth. I for one have access to hearts and minds in what I do in my chosen profession – and I am attempting to provide (hopefully without bias) an alternate viewpoint to those I engage to the CAGW narrative – the URL for WUWT being one of the most powerful tools in this attempt to spread the truth. I find it a source of great satisfaction, when someone I have opened up to a “contrarian” point of view – who up until that point had consumed the Evil Red Liquid of Death (that is, the Kool-Aid of CAGW) and swallowed it without vetting the narrative – approaches me with a broadened point of view that questions that which up until that point was taken as truth – that human use of fossil fuels will lead catastrophically to a run-away warming of the earth. Even if they have not been fully pulled from the mire of Catastrophism in Climate, at least I can leave the encounter with a modicum of satisfaction that I, at least in some small way have provided an alternative to the CAGW propaganda machine. As I am sure most of you are as well. Thanks to Mr. Watts for providing the avenue of this website for gaining a broader viewpoint on this subject. And thanks to all of you other warriors in this great battle.
Claude Harvey says:
He eventually responded, “I don’t care if what they’re saying is true or not. It it would be good for the environment, I favor it.”
Aside from the obvious lack of concern for reporting facts accurately, what’s additional sad here is that he can’t see that if (a) what they are saying about CAGW is not true, then (b) it calls into question what they’re saying is good for the environment.
The example of loss of farmland being an overblown exaggeration is actually an example of identifying a problem and devising policies to mitigate the problem. Sprawling cities were, and still to some extent, consuming surrounding farmlands but most of these population centers began rezoning the nearby rural farm areas to preserve the nearby farms. Incentives to cluster and use urban/suburban areas more efficiently is now the norm. Problem was identified and problem was addressed. This is quite contrary to your story line of saying there was never a problem to begin with.
It is sad to see all this effort being put into making sure people don’t become better educated about the issues surrounding climate change.
CAGW has become part of modern mythology. It is embedded like a tick on a coon hound in every entertainment from TV, movies, music, or theater production, every advertisement and promotional or PR campaign from all levels of commerce. It’s in every newspaper and almost every broadcast or cable news program. Most tellingly it is pervasive in our public education system, from preschool to post-doc and has been for well over a generation, probably close to two.
Rationality can never really turn this tide because the young skulls full of mush have been successfully indoctrinated to believe that it is not important what something they hear makes them think, but only how it makes them feel. Mostly they want the rest of us to feel guilty always, which allows them to feel self righteous and sanctimonious because only they “really care”.
Of course, this is just as those who chose this “crisis” as their all purpose bludgeon to beat the world into accepting that they are truly our destined overlords wanted this to play out. They knew from the start that the “science” was only pretext. For each of their ballyhooed “Climate Summits” there was great weeping and gnashing of teeth as they repeatedly failed to achieve any meaningful agreements to address globally this looming catastrophe, but buried beneath the faux outrage each one was accompanied by a few hundred $million allocated to fresh UN bureaucracies which immediately commenced to sling new regulatory webs like Spidey on crack. The upshot is that, although the “science” is falling apart like a cheap suit, the IPCC and our EPA are proceeding apace and at this point it will truly take a miracle to derail them.
Reaching the Public
Hundreds of studies by competent scientists have indisputably proven that the Carbon Dioxide-Global Warming theory is false, and yet simplistic, calamitous statements from the warmists continue to abound, and the public seems as committed as ever to this scam. Scientific logic and common sense are losing the battle.
The problem may be that scientifically unaware people cannot believe that “97% of climate scientists” could be wrong, or that they would intentionally corrupt science and lead us into this disastrous folly. Perhaps it is time to put aside scientific proofs, give up arguing that the climate is not warming, and forget the claims that current variation in climate are actually normal, and concentrate on the intentions and motives that drive this incredibly destructive, politically determined scheme.
It’s not as if they were hiding their objectives, or their plans to tear down the entire social structure of the free world. The website @ur momisugly (http://www.c3headlines.com/global-warming-quotes-climate-change-quotes.html) has dozens of direct quotations from high up UN bureaucrats as well as NGO officials explaining why the present culture is unsustainable. There are quotations from far, far left politicians as well as far, far out university professors and just plain misanthropes explaining why we can no longer prosper, some say even exist.
See http://www.futilethoughtsrandommatters.net
Ursula K. LeGuinn in her 1969 Hugo/Nebula Award winning “The Left Hand of Darkness”
“…Truth is a matter of imagination.
The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling…”
“The story is not all mine…I am not sure whose story it is…it is all one [story]…”
“…if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice…you can choose the fact you like the best…none of them are false…it is all one story.”
This is why the Alarmists want to control “the story”.
It’s why they want to find the BEST way to COMMUNICATE “the (science) story”.
They want one voice : theirs (no altered voice can be allowed).
They want one set of facts : theirs (no altered facts can be represented).
They want no debate because there can be no debate.
There can be nothing else to choose – there can be no altered choice.
There can be only one choice: theirs,
“@ur momisugly Sturgis. The left wing has been duped by a bunch of scientists with PhD’s after their names who publish in prestigious peer reviewed journals. The right wing on the other hand has been duped by a bunch of religious creationists who believe the world was created 6,000 years ago. If I am going to be duped, at least I would think it better to be in the first group of dupees.”
The former has done considerable financial damage to the World and endangered the lives of millions of people. The latter is quaint and out of touch, but harmless.
The way to counter that argument is to remind them of the 97% (?) of nutritional scientists who willfully misled the public for decades about the benefits of carbs. vs. fats.
davidgmills says:
August 7, 2014 at 7:01 pm
@ur momisugly Sturgis. The left wing has been duped by a bunch of scientists with PhD’s after their names who publish in prestigious peer reviewed journals. The right wing on the other hand has been duped by a bunch of religious creationists who believe the world was created 6,000 years ago. If I am going to be duped, at least I would think it better to be in the first group of dupees.
When given a questionnaire on a political or other topic, conservatives are very good at guessing how liberals would respond; liberals are terrible at guessing conservatives’ responses. Liberals have 2 values, Fairness and Suffering Prevention; conservatives have 5, including those 2 and 3 others (Liberty, Respect for Traditions, Morality;
The result is that liberals think in cartoons and caricatures. Your post above is a fine example.
The measurement uncertainty surrounding the global average radiative forcing, the energy that heats &/or cools the earth, is +/- 5 W/sq m. That’s a total uncertainty bandwidth of 10 W.
Hold that thought.
The radiative forcing attributed to mankind’s CO2 output is 1.6 W/sq m, less than 2% of the uncertainty band.
How can anybody model or predict future warming and climate change based on a number that is completely lost in a data Oort cloud of noise, that is trivial in the normal ebb and flow of the global radiative forcing?
It’s pretty obvious by now – they can’t.
Nick Reality, The measurement uncertainty surrounding anthropogenic CO2 is a slight .25, not nearly as impressive as your 10 for net anthropogenic components than contain many things other than just CO2. The real “uncertainty” may be with the net anthropogenic components but that is a distraction from the elephant in the room of anthropogenic CO2 which is not uncertain at all.
davidgmills says:
August 8, 2014 at 6:18 am
Here is a perfect example of “some men you just can’t reach”. Your citing the following with disdain and stating you are an atheist speaks volumes.
“Tennessee’s State Constitution, Article 9 Section 2
“No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.”
The irony couldn’t be thicker. This paraphrases the gatekeeper’s “law” used by your CAGW friends!! It even has the word “den_ies in it. And on top of it all you are an atheist, yet accept, holus bolus the warmist creed despite solid and growing evidence to the contrary! At least there is no evidence that there isn’t a God.
I’m afraid this catches you out – as an attorney you should be ashamed. You guys are supposed to be good at logic aren’t you?