Orwell and Fracking

In Pennsylvania the state legislature passed and the governor just signed into law HB 1950, a law regulating fracking. Fracking is the high-pressure injection of fluids into rock formations to free up fossil fuel for drilling. Besides water, there are a number of other fluids used in fracking. Lots of different chemicals are in these fluids, many of which raise health concerns.

Many environmentalists and local communities denounce the law because it removes from local communities their ability to restrict fracking in their communities. Besides the concerns of local communities, the law goes beyond the realm of oil and natural gas and into regulating the practice of medicine, and in so doing becomes truly Orwellian. If a doctor or other health professional determines that chemicals that entered the water supply due to fracking poisoned someone, that physician or other professional cannot alert others to the danger posed by the well water. As the law says, the health professional “shall maintain the information as confidential.” The companies doing the fracking can also get a written statement of confidentiality from the health professional or doctor.

Despite the dangers to others, the doctor can’t call the newspaper or local broadcast stations; he can’t alert other physicians; he can’t even let other persons living in the poisoned person’s household know about the poison. This runs counter to all of our traditions of public health and modern medicine. What if John Snow had been restricted from alerting nineteenth century Londoners to the dangers of that one cholera infected well? What if cigarette companies managed to get similar legislation passed in the 1950s just as the medical community was finding more connections between smoking and heart disease, cancer, and emphysema?

Among a government’s most essential functions is public health. The Romans had public health laws. Public health is in the bible, too*. If our governments abrogate responsibility for one of their essential functions to help the energy industries, what are they good for?

*Deuteronomy 23: 12-13: Designate a place outside your camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement.

The Endangered Species Act is Endangered

Last year the Obama administration proposed a serious curtailment of the Endangered Species Act. Currently a species is listed as endangered if its survival is “in danger of extinction in all or a significant portion of its range."

The administration wants to deemphasize the “significant portion” part of the law. To be listed for protection a species would need to be threatened with total extinction, not just extirpation of that species from an area where it now lives. An example of what this change to the law would mean is best given by Noah Greenwald of the Center For Biological Diversity. He says, “If this policy had been in place when the Endangered Species Act was passed, the bald eagle would never have been protected in any of the lower 48 states, because there were still a lot of eagles up in Alaska.”

            But there is a good development. A group of scientists and 87 conservation groups have petitioned the administration to maintain the current approach to protecting wildlife.

            Wildlife protection plummeted under George W. Bush. Under his administration only 60 species were listed for protection under the ESA. (His father’s administration listed 231.)
After such a poor performance, one would hope that the current administration would be much more committed to making a difference for the natural world. It is disappointing to find that Obama has not done so.

Though the Sea Is Rising, the Tide May Be Turning

A recent poll* conducted by the University of Michigan indicated that among the American public, the number of people who believe that humans are causing climate change has rebounded after declining in 2009. This is encouraging news.

            The survey found that 62% of respondents believed global warming was occurring, while only 26% held an opposing view. This 62% is the highest level since 2009, when 65% of respondents said they believed that climate change was occurring, the highest level of positive responses since this survey on climate change began several years ago.

            Curiously, almost 80% of Democrats believe in climate change, while less than half of GOP members said they believed in global warming. This is most likely because of organizations such as the Heartland Institute, which work to cast doubt on the science of global warming. Besides being aligned with large industries, professing a conservatism that maintains capitalism as a core of its ideology, and denying the existence of global warming, these groups are closely aligned with the GOP.

Also, for those who doubt that climate change is occurring, the fingerprints of the rhetoric used by the Heartland Institute and other organizations like them can be found in the responses of those who said they doubt the existence of climate change. With scientific work in global warming going back to the 1800s and the greater part of the science of climate change being quite solid, these organizations know that they cannot cast doubt on the science of global warming, nor can the deny the occurrence of earlier springs, melting glaciers, and the first frosts coming later in the fall. Rather, they attack and try to besmirch the reputations of the scientists investigating global warming. As Christopher Borick and Barry Rabe, authors of the report that summarizes the results of the poll say:

           

While Americans who think the planet is warming largely disagree with the premise that the media and climate scientists are overstating evidence about global warming, most citizens who do not see evidence of increasing temperatures on Earth believe that scientists and the press are distorting evidence on the matter. In terms of scientists, more than 8 out of 10 Americans who don’t think global warming is occurring believe that scientists are overstating evidence about global warming for their own interest.

After hundreds of years of scientific tradition, with its admitted setbacks and occasional instances of fraud, the group of scientists who investigate the workings of our atmosphere is overrun with dishonest investigators who distort evidence for selfish interests. That is what the Heartland Institute would have us believe. This is silly, but the survey shows that people believe it.

Other findings of the poll are interesting. More women than men believe that we are living in a warmer world, and though his name is bandied about when it comes time to discuss climate change, Al Gore has had very little influence on anyone believing or disbelieving in global warming.

The results of the survey are encouraging. With a greater percentage of Americans cognizant of the phenomenon of global warming, despite the efforts of the Heartland Institute and organizations like them, effecting policy changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may be a possibility. Still, much work needs to be done to raise awareness. The industry that impugns the reputation of climate scientists will continue with its assaults, and they have big money on their side. After that the greatest obstacle to mitigating climate change is institutional and societal inertia. That will be the big challenge.

*http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2012/02_climate_change_rabe_borick/02_climate_change_rabe_borick.pdf

Hypocrisy Spreads

My last couple of blogs have been about the Heartland Institute’s own Climategate scandal, how they were phished for internal documents that, among other things, revealed their plans to develop K-12 curricula that casts doubt on the phenomena and science of global warming. I also blogged about their subsequent hypocrisy in the aftermath of the scandal as well.

            The latest development in this story is that Peter Gleick, a noted scientist and president of the Pacific Institute, an organization that performs research and advocates for sustainability, has admitted to being the Heartland Institute’s phisher. Gleick has apologized for his actions and says that his judgment in the matter was clouded by “frustration with the ongoing efforts—often anonymous, well-funded and coordinated—to attack climate science and scientists … and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”[i]

            In this age of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, when all companies, organizations, and governments experience efforts to have their computers hacked or their personnel phished, as well as a time when everyone who uses a computer has his every internet click recorded and sold to advertisers and every person who walks down the street has his whereabouts and actions recorded on video, the relative merits of breaking a company’s security or invading a person’s privacy is an issue that I am still thinking about, so I don’t want to comment on Gleick, his actions, or his apology. A few have hailed him as a hero, while some excoriate him.

            I do want to point out the apparent hypocrisy that has spread beyond the Heartland Institute, particularly that of Megan McArdle. McArdle is a senior editor at The Atlantic and has excoriated Gleick.[ii] And yet while she wrote about the release of emails hacked from climate scientists at East Anglia back in 2009 and 2010, she expressed no such outrage.

            It might be added that the writing on the East Anglia brouhaha, she said that she thought the scientists had “massaged” the data[iii] and that the scientists’ work was otherwise compromised.[iv] (It might also be added that McArdle is a business and economics writer, with no background in science. So judge for yourself her ability to assess the science of climate change.)

            McArdle can be outraged over a breach of security, that Gleick so easily phished an organization that wants to infect our schools with anti-science poppycock. When that outrage is selective, however, that outrage is a bunch of poppycock as well.

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[i] Scientist Peter Gleick admits he lied to get climate documents Los Angeles Times 2/21/12 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-climate-documents-20120222,0,7220518.story

[ii] McArdle, Megan Peter Gleick Confesses to Obtaining Heartland Documents Under False Pretenses The Atlantic 2/21/12 http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/peter-gleick-confesses-to-obtaining-heartland-documents-under-false-pretenses/253395/

[iii] McArdle, Megan Climategate: Was Data Faked? The Atlantic 12/9/09 http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/12/climategate-was-data-faked/31540/

[iv] McArdle, Megan Climategate III: The Mystery of the Missing Data The Atlantic 12/1/09 http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/12/climategate-iii-the-mystery-of-the-missing-data/31110/

Heartland Hypocrites

Well, no one likes being caught with his pants down. So I have to confess that, although I think that the climate denialism that the Heartland Institute engages in is practically criminal, I do have at least a small amount of sympathy for the embarrassment they are going through right now. Looking through their website, much of what they say lacks credibility, at least in my eyes. I suppose that an incident like this will also affect the credibility they may have with some individuals who subscribe to their pro business stance.

            That’s gotta hurt.

            There is a very chagrined page on their website that attempts to do a little damage control. They are correct when they say that a ruse was used to gain access to their documents. So they have a right to be angry, as well as embarrassed. But they also go on and try to put themselves in the position of the moral high ground when they call for fairness. Toward the end of the page they say, “[H]onest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.”[i]

A call for fairness and giving someone the benefit of the doubt, however, has not been the Heartland Institute’s modus operandi. Toward the end of last year the institute had a “reaction” to the hacked emails of prominent climate change scientists (what they call the Climategate) saying that the scientists had “conspired to hide and manipulate data calling into question the theory of man-caused global warming.”[ii] Around the same time their tone was downright gleeful when they found that they had been mentioned a few of the hacked emails. They say they say that they “couldn’t be prouder” of the situation.[iii]

The institute never showed the slightest indignation that the scientists’ emails had been hacked, that they had been got at through cyber sleuth, nor did they call for, as they ask for themselves, “common decency and journalistic ethics.”

What makes this particularly odious is that these postings are from late last year, long after independent investigations, including one by the EPA, found that no data was manipulated or scientific shenanigans had occurred as they examined the hacked emails of the scientists and the circumstances surrounding them.

There is much to take note of here, chief among them being the Heartland Institute’s plans to create an anti-science curriculum to fit the political needs of their sponsors. And as they try to defend themselves, the Heartland Institute is only showing itself to be an organization of blatant hypocrites. 

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[i] Lakely, Jim Heartland Institute Responds to Stolen and Fake Documents 2/15/12 http://heartland.org/press-releases/2012/02/15/heartland-institute-responds-stolen-and-fake-documents

[ii] Singer, S. Fred et al Heartland Institute Reacts to ‘Climategate 2’ Emails 11/22/11 http://heartland.org/press-releases/2011/11/22/heartland-institute-reacts-climategate-2-emails

[iii] Lakely, Jim Heartland Institute Mentioned in Climategate Emails, Round 1 and 2(Part1) 11/28/11 http://blog.heartland.org/2011/11/heartland-institute-mentioned-in-climategate-emails-rounds-1-and-2-part-1/

The Real Climategate

Last month I blogged about the difficulty science teachers are having teaching the science of climate change. About 25 to 30 percent of teacher reported that parents, teachers, and members of their communities had in some way questioned whether climate change was happening or whether it was a phenomenon caused by humans.[i]

            As if this endemic resistance to their science curriculum weren’t enough, there has been a leak of documents from the Heartland Institute, an organization that promotes and serves business interests. A portion of the leaked documents outlines a plan to create curricula for public schools that cast doubt on the science of global warming. For example, one of the claims of the proposed school lessons would be that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.”[ii]

Depicting itself as libertarian in orientation, with interests in a wide range of public-policy issues, the Heartland Institute has worked in the past with Philip Morris, producing policy studies, op-eds, and radio interviews that tried to cast doubt on the scientific link between health problems, such as lung cancer, and secondhand smoke. They also support vouchers for schools, and the term “free-market solution” occurs a lot on their website.

In my pervious blog, I asked if there were organizations that were behind the resistance that science teachers were experiencing concerning climate science. I guess that there are not any right now, but that the Heartland Institute is stepping up to the plate to take on the science and the scientists that tell us that we are making a warmer world for ourselves.

Teachers have it bad enough with the resistance they are already experiencing to teaching climate science. If Heartland is successful and they produce this anti-science indoctrination for schoolchildren, it will only compound this problem.

I think this leak of documents, one that the Heartland Institute doesn’t deny—although they dispute the credibility of a couple pages of the leak—is the real scandal that should be called the Climategate.

           

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[i] http://environmentcontext.blogspot.com/2012/01/next-climate-change-battle.html

[ii] Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science New York Times 2/15/2012

Geoengineering Now Getting the Big Bucks

Geoengineering is the idea, and just an idea so far, of mitigating the effects of global warming by global-wide projects. One idea is to throw tons of sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere, much as volcanoes do, to deflect the incoming rays of the sun. The cooling would be similar to the chill the earth experienced after the eruption of Mount Saint Helens or when Krakatoa blew its top. Another idea is to deploy to the oceans great ships specifically designed to spew large volumes of seawater into the air, with the hope that the additional vapor will act much as the clouds do and cool the ever-warming earth. One almost science fiction scenario has us shooting large mirrors into orbit around the earth. Geoengineering seems very new, but the idea goes back at least to 1977, with the concept being considered in the very first issue of the journal Climate Change.[i]

Design proposed by engineer Stephen Salter of an unmanned ship that would spray seawater into the atmosphere. Image from What is Geoengineering? The Guardian 2/18/2011guardian.co.uk

These ideas scare me. Maybe not Cold War nuclear annihilation scary, but at least The Day the Earth Stood Still kind of scary. If you think about it, though, things are already scary. We’ve already been busy geoengineering the planet by inadvertently enriching the atmosphere of the earth with more and more CO2 and subsequently warming the planet, acidifying the oceans, and melting the glaciers. Research, at least computer modeling, has been performed on the different scenarios. At most what can be said about any one of the proposed actions is, like so many scientific papers say, more research needs to be done.

Klaatu, barada nicto? A computer generated image of a giant reflector. A solution to global warming?  Or The Day the Earth Stood Still? Image from NewScientist www.newscientist.com

Besides the normal skepticism that we should have of adding tons of sulfates to the atmosphere or putting aluminum bumbershoots in orbit, there are the political questions: what country or countries would take it upon them selves to initiate geoengineering? Would it be done through the UN? What if India wants to perform geoengineering and the Czech Republic does not? How would such a disagreement be resolved?

            Part of the objections that a lot of environmentalists raise with geoengineering is that it is a bandage over a more fundamental problem, that we are pumping CO2 by the billions of tons into the atmosphere every year. Ever more CO2 will mean ever more sulfates or giant parasols that we will have to put in the atmosphere or orbit.

            But geoengineering of some sort may be approaching a reality sometime soon. Some scientists, as well as others, have been calling for geoengineering programs for years. The difference now is that Bill Gates and a few other wealthy individuals are giving financial backing to some of these scientists.[ii]

            One thing to remember in any equation: once dollars enter the picture, things start to happen. Bill Gates may have the best of intentions. But a fundamental question is: Should a small number of wealthy individuals have such influence over policies and procedures that have global ramifications? There are some people, such as the Canadian tar sands billionaire, Murray Edwards,[iii] who are investing, and could possibly find further riches, through the profits provided by geoengineering. Should people like Murray be allowed to profit from fixing a problem that they are responsible for creating in the first place?

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[i] Marchetti, Cesare On Geoengineering and CO Problem Climate Change 1977, Vol. 1 Issue 1, p59

[ii] Videl, John The Guardian Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering 2/5/2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/06/bill-gates-climate-scientists-geoengineering

[iii] ibid