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he authors disagree with Lever-Tracy's observation that the lack of interest in climate change among sociologists is driven by a widespread suspicion of naturalistic explanations, teleological arguments and environmental determinism.

While conceding that Lever-Tracy's observation may be partially true, the authors argue that more important processes are at play, including cautiousness on the part of sociologists to step into a heavily politicized debate; methodological differences with the natural sciences; and sensitivity about locating climate change in the longue durée.

Secondly, while Lever-Tracy argues that "natural and social change are now in lockstep with each other, operating on the same scales," and that therefore a multidisciplinary approach is needed, Grundmann and Stehr suggest that the true challenge is interdisciplinarity, as opposed to multidisciplinarity.

Thirdly, and this possibly the most striking observation of the article, Grundmann and Stehr challenge Lever-Tracy's argument that natural scientists have successfully made the case for anthropogenic climate change, and that therefore social scientists should cease to endlessly question this scientific consensus on the basis of a skeptical postmodern 'deconstructionism'.

As opposed to both Lever-Tracy's positivist view and the radical postmodern deconstructionist view, Grundmann and Stehr take the social constructivist view, which argues that that every idea is socially constructed and therefore the product of human interpretation and communication. This raises the 'intractable' specters of discourse and framing, to which we will return in a second.

Finally, Lever-Tracy holds that climate change needs to be posited "firmly at the heart of the discipline." Grundmann and Stehr, however, emphasize that "if this is going to [be] more than wishful thinking, we need to carefully consider the prospects of such an enterprise."

The importance of framing climate change in a way that allows it to resonate with the concerns of the average citizen is an issue that the Breakthrough Institute has long emphasized. Especially the apocalyptic politics of fear that is often associated with climate change tends to have a counterproductive effect on public opinion. Realizing this, Grundmann and Stehr make an important warning to sociologists: "the inherent alarmism in many social science contributions on climate change merely repeats the central message provided by mainstream media." In other words, it fails to provide the kind of distantiated observation needed to approach the issue with at least a mild degree of objectivity or impartiality.

While this tension is symptomatic of many social scientific attempts to get involved, we propose to study these very underlying assumptions. For example, we should ask: Does the dramatization of events lead to effective political responses? Do we need a politics of fear? Is scientific consensus instrumental for sound policies? And more generally, what are the relations between a changing technological infrastructure, social shifts and belief systems? What contribution can bottom-up initiatives have in fighting climate change? What roles are there for markets, hierarchies and voluntary action? How was it possible that the 'fight against climate change' rose from a marginal discourse to a hegemonic one (from heresy to dogma)? And will the discourse remain hegemonic or will too much pub¬lic debate about climate change lead to 'climate change fatigue'?

In this respect, Grundmann and Stehr make another crucial observation: "the severity of a problem does not mean that we as sociologists should forget about our analytical apparatus." Bringing the analytical apparatus of sociology back in, the hunting season for positivist approaches to knowledge and nature is opened. Grundmann and Stehr consequently criticize not only Lever-Tracy's unspoken adherence to a positivist nature-society duality, taking instead a more dialectical Marxian approach to the relationship between man and his environment, but they also criticize her idea that incremental increases in our scientific knowledge of climate change and its impacts will automatically coalesce into successful and meaningful policy responses.

Political decisions about climate change are made on the basis of scientific research and a host of other (economic, political, cultural) considerations. Regarding the scientific dimension, it is a common perception (one that Lever-Tracy seems to share) that the more knowledge we have, the better the political response will be. This is the assumption of the linear model of policy-making that has been dominant in the past but debunked time and again (Godin, 2006). What we increasingly realize is that knowl¬edge creation leads to an excess of information and 'objectivity' (Sarewitz, 2000). Even the consensual mechanisms of the IPCC lead to an increase in options because knowledge about climate change increases.

Instead, Grundmann and Stehr propose to look carefully at how we frame climate change socially and whether the hegemonic climate discourse is actually contributing to successful political action or hampering it. Defending this social constructivist approach from the unfounded allegation that it would play into the hands of the climate skeptics, the authors note that defining climate change as a social construction ... is not to diminish its importance, relevance, or reality. It simply means that sociologists study the process whereby something (like anthropogenic climate change) is transformed from a conjecture into an accepted fact. With regard to policy, we observe a near exclusive focus on carbon dioxide emissions. This framing has proven counter productive, as the Hartwell paper and other sources demonstrate (see Eastin et al., 2010; Prins et al., 2010). Reducing carbon emissions in the short term is among the most difficult tasks. More progress could be made by a re-framing of the issue, not as an issue of human sinfulness, but of human dignity. [emphasis added]

These observations allow the authors to come full circle, arriving right back at their first observation about the real reasons why sociologists have so far kept silent on climate change. Somehow, "there seems to be the curious conviction that lest you want to be accused of helping the fossil fuel lobbies and the climate skeptics, you better keep quiet."

And there is another, related aspect of discussions about eugenics that should be at the forefront of our consideration: what was particularly objectionable about American and Nazi early 20th century eugenics is that the state, not individuals, were to make decisions about who could reproduce and who couldn’t. Savulescu continues: “to grant procreative liberty is the only way to avoid the objectionable form of eugenics that the Nazis practiced.” In other words, it makes all the difference in the world if it is an individual couple who decides to have or not have a baby, or if it is the state that imposes a particular reproductive choice on its citizenry.

but then Savulescu expands his argument to a point where I begin to feel somewhat uncomfortable. He says: “[procreative liberty] involves the freedom to choose a child with red hair or blond hair or no hair.”

Savulescu has suddenly sneaked into his argument for procreative liberty the assumption that all choices in this area are on the same level. But while it is hard to object to action aimed at avoiding devastating diseases, it is not quite so obvious to me what arguments favor the idea of designer babies. The first intervention can be justified, for instance, on consequentialist grounds because it reduces the pain and suffering of both the child and the parents. The second intervention is analogous to shopping for a new bag, or a new car, which means that it commodifies the act of conceiving a baby, thus degrading its importance. I’m not saying that that in itself is sufficient to make it illegal, but the ethics of it is different, and that difference cannot simply be swept under the broad rug of “procreative liberty.”

designing babies is to treat them as objects, not as human beings, and there are a couple of strong philosophical traditions in ethics that go squarely against that (I’m thinking, obviously, of Kant’s categorical imperative, as well as of virtue ethics; not sure what a consequentialist would say about this, probably she would remain neutral on the issue).

Commodification of human beings has historically produced all sorts of bad stuff, from slavery to exploitative prostitution, and arguably to war (after all, we are using our soldiers as means to gain access to power, resources, territory, etc.)

And of course, there is the issue of access. Across-the-board “procreative liberty” of the type envisioned by Savulescu will cost money because it requires considerable resources.

imagine that these parents decide to purchase the ability to produce babies that have the type of characteristics that will make them more successful in society: taller, more handsome, blue eyed, blonde, more symmetrical, whatever. We have just created yet another way for the privileged to augment and pass their privileges to the next generation — in this case literally through their genes, not just as real estate or bank accounts. That would quickly lead to an even further divide between the haves and the have-nots, more inequality, more injustice, possibly, in the long run, even two different species (why not design your babies so that they can’t breed with certain types of undesirables, for instance?). Is that the sort of society that Savulescu is willing to envision in the name of his total procreative liberty? That begins to sounds like the libertarian version of the eugenic ideal, something potentially only slightly less nightmarish than the early 20th century original.

Not to mention that rich people can provide better health care, education and nutrition to their children and again no one is questioning their right to do so. Wouldn't a couple of inches be pretty negligible compared to getting into a good school? Aren't we applying double standards by objecting to this issue alone? Do we really live in a society that values equal opportunities? People (may) be equal before the law but they are not equal to each other and each one of us is tacitly accepting that fact when we acknowledge the social hierarchy (in other words, every time we interact with someone who is our superior). I am not crazy about this fact but that's just how people are and this has to be taken into account when discussing this.

Increasing nuclear power in the EIA reference scenario from a 17% to 43% share of electricity implies, in round numbers, about 300 new nuclear power plants by 2035.***  If you do not like nuclear you can substitute wind turbines or solar thermal plants (or even reductions in electricity consumption) according to the data provided in The Climate Fix, Table 4.4.  The magnitude of the task is the same size, just expressed differently.

One nuclear plant worth of carbon-free energy every 30 days between now and 2035.  This does not even consider electrification of some fraction of the vehicle fleet -- another of President Obama's goals -- which presumably would add a not-insignificant amount to electricity demand. Thus, I'd suggest that the President's clean energy goal is much more of the aspirational variety than a actual policy target expected to be hit precisely.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Sir Paul Nurse knows more about genetics than I do. It is, after all, where the field in which he won his Nobel prize. As for science, sure, Nurse has the advantage over me there, too. He has a PhD. He’s a science graduate and I’m an arts graduate. But then I’ve never pretended otherwise. My case is not that I “James Delingpole have taken a long hard look at the science of global warming and discovered through careful sifting of countless peer-reviewed papers that the experts have got it all wrong.”

What I am saying, and I say almost every day, is that the evidence is not as robust as the “consensus” scientists claim; that there are many distinguished scientists all round the world who dispute this alleged “consensus”; that true science doesn’t advance through “consensus” and never has; that the Climategate emails threw the peer-review process into serious doubt by demonstrating how eminently corruptable it is; that there are many vested interests out there determined and able to spend a great deal of money by making out that the case for catastrophic, man-made global warming is much stronger than it is. And on these specific issues I can reasonably claim to be better informed than Sir Paul Nurse, regardless of how many PhDs he has, because I’ve spent much more time than he has researching them and because they are not issues which require an exclusively scientific knowledge to understand. They just require the basic journalistic skill of being able to read and analyse.

For instance, slide 23 shows a Google search for “liberal social psychologist,” highlighting the fact that one gets a whopping 2,740 results (which, actually, by Google standards is puny; a search under my own name yields 145,000, and I ain’t no Lady Gaga). You then compared this search to one for “conservative social psychologist” and get only three entries.

First of all, if Google searches are the main tool of social psychology these days, I fear for the entire field. Second, I actually re-did your searches — at the prompting of one of my readers — and came up with quite different results. As the photo here shows, if you actually bother to scroll through the initial Google search for “liberal social psychologist” you will find that there are in fact only 24 results, to be compared to 10 (not 3) if you search for “conservative social psychologist.” Oops. From this scant data I would simply conclude that political orientation isn’t a big deal in social psychology.

Your talk continues with some pretty vigorous hand-waving: “We rely on our peers to find flaws in our arguments, but when there is essentially nobody out there to challenge liberal assumptions and interpretations of experimental findings, the peer review process breaks down, at least for work that is related to those sacred values.” Right, except that I would like to see a systematic survey of exactly how the lack of conservative peer review has affected the quality of academic publications. Oh, wait, it hasn’t, at least according to what you yourself say in the next sentence: “The great majority of work in social psychology is excellent, and is unaffected by these problems.” I wonder how you know this, and why — if true — you then think that there is a problem. Philosophers call this an inherent contradiction, it’s a common example of bad argument.

Finally, let me get to your outrage at the fact that I have allegedly accused you of academic misconduct and lying. I have done no such thing, and you really ought (in the ethical sense) to be careful when throwing those words around. I have simply raised the logical possibility that you (and Tierney) have an agenda, a possibility based on reading several of the things both you and Tierney have written of late. As a psychologist, I’m sure you are aware that biases can be unconscious, and therefore need not imply that the person in question is lying or engaging in any form of purposeful misconduct. Or were you implying in your own talk that your colleagues’ bias was conscious? Because if so, you have just accused an entire profession of misconduct.

What seems obvious is sometime just wrong.  This of course is why we actually do research.  So why is it that we shouldn't make what seems to be an obvious connection between these papers and recent disasters, as so many have already done?

First, the Min et al. paper seeks to identify a GHG signal in global precipitation over the period 1950-1999.  They focus on one-day and five-day measures of precipitation.  They do not discuss streamflow or damage.  For many years, an upwards trend in precipitation has been documented, and attributed to GHGs, even back to the 1990s (I co-authored a paper on precipitation and floods in 1999 that assumed a human influence on precipitation, PDF), so I am unsure what is actually new in this paper's conclusions.

However, accepting that precipitation has increased and can be attributed in some part to GHG emissions, there have not been shown corresponding increases in streamflow (floods)  or damage. How can this be?  Think of it like this -- Precipitation is to flood damage as wind is to windstorm damage.  It is not enough to say that it has become windier to make a connection to increased windstorm damage -- you need to show a specific increase in those specific wind events that actually cause damage. There are a lot of days that could be windier with no increase in damage; the same goes for precipitation.

My understanding of the literature on streamflow is that there have not been shown increasing peak streamflow commensurate with increases in precipitation, and this is a robust finding across the literature.  For instance, one recent review concludes: Floods are of great concern in many areas of the world, with the last decade seeing major fluvial events in, for example, Asia, Europe and North America. This has focused attention on whether or not these are a result of a changing climate. Rive flows calculated from outputs from global models often suggest that high river flows will increase in a warmer, future climate. However, the future projections are not necessarily in tune with the records collected so far – the observational evidence is more ambiguous. A recent study of trends in long time series of annual maximum river flows at 195 gauging stations worldwide suggests that the majority of these flow records (70%) do not exhibit any statistically significant trends. Trends in the remaining records are almost evenly split between having a positive and a negative direction.

Absent an increase in peak streamflows, it is impossible to connect the dots between increasing precipitation and increasing floods.  There are of course good reasons why a linkage between increasing precipitation and peak streamflow would be difficult to make, such as the seasonality of the increase in rain or snow, the large variability of flooding and the human influence on river systems.  Those difficulties of course translate directly to a difficulty in connecting the effects of increasing GHGs to flood disasters.

Second, the Pall et al. paper seeks to quantify the increased risk of a specific flood event in the UK in 2000 due to greenhouse gas emissions.  It applies a methodology that was previously used with respect to the 2003 European heatwave. Taking the paper at face value, it clearly states that in England and Wales, there has not been an increasing trend in precipitation or floods.  Thus, floods in this region are not a contributor to the global increase in disaster costs.  Further, there has been no increase in Europe in normalized flood losses (PDF).  Thus, Pall et al. paper is focused attribution in the context of on a single event, and not trend detection in the region that it focuses on, much less any broader context.

More generally, the paper utilizes a seasonal forecast model to assess risk probabilities.  Given the performance of seasonal forecast models in actual prediction mode, I would expect many scientists to remain skeptical of this approach to attribution. Of course, if this group can show an improvement in the skill of actual seasonal forecasts by using greenhouse gas emissions as a predictor, they will have a very convincing case.  That is a high hurdle.

In short, the new studies are interesting and add to our knowledge.  But they do not change the state of knowledge related to trends in global disasters and how they might be related to greenhouse gases.  But even so, I expect that many will still want to connect the dots between greenhouse gas emissions and recent floods.  Connecting the dots is fun, but it is not science.

Jessica Weinkle said...

The thing about the nature articles is that Nature itself made the leap from the science findings to damages in the News piece by Q. Schiermeier through the decision to bring up the topic of insurance. (Not to mention that which is symbolically represented merely by the journal’s cover this week). With what I (maybe, naively) believe to be a particularly ballsy move, the article quoted Muir-Wood, an industry scientists. However, what he is quoted as saying is admirably clever. Initially it is stated that Dr. Muir-Wood backs the notion that one cannot put the blame of increased losses on climate change. Then, the article ends with a quote from him, “If there’s evidence that risk is changing, then this is something we need to incorporate in our models.”

This is a very slippery slope and a brilliant double-dog dare. Without doing anything but sitting back and watching the headlines, one can form the argument that “science” supports the remodeling of the hazard risk above the climatological average and is more important then the risks stemming from socioeconomic factors. The reinsurance industry itself has published that socioeconomic factors far outweigh changes in the hazard in concern of losses. The point is (and that which has particularly gotten my knickers in a knot) is that Nature, et al. may wish to consider what it is that they want to accomplish. Is it greater involvement of federal governments in the insurance/reinsurance industry on the premise that climate change is too great a loss risk for private industry alone regardless of the financial burden it imposes? The move of insurance mechanisms into all corners of the earth under the auspices of climate change adaptation? Or simply a move to bolster prominence, regardless of whose back it breaks- including their own, if any of them are proud owners of a home mortgage? How much faith does one have in their own model when they are told that hundreds of millions of dollars in the global economy is being bet against the odds that their models produce?

What Nature says matters to the world; what scientists say matters to the world- whether they care for the responsibility or not. That is after all, the game of fame and fortune (aka prestige).

Even so, I expect that we will again see Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg in German politics, and Germany will then re-engage a debate over science, politics, trust and legitimacy

That paper, like a lot of research, required a lot of effort.  So it was very disappointing to E&E in the years that followed identify itself as an outlet for alternative perspectives on the climate issue. It has published a number of low-quality papers and a high number of opinion pieces, and as far as I know it never did get ISI listed.

Boehmer-Christiansen's quote about following her political agenda in running the journal is one that I also have cited on numerous occasions as an example of the pathological politicization of science. In this case the editor's political agenda has clearly undermined the legitimacy of the outlet.  So if I had a time machine I'd go back and submit our paper elsewhere!

A consequence of the politicization of E&E is that any paper published there is subsequently ignored by the broader scientific community. In some cases perhaps that is justified, but I would argue that it provided a convenient excuse to ignore our paper on that basis alone, and not on the merits of its analysis. So the politicization of E&E enables a like response from its critics, which many have taken full advantage of. For outside observers of climate science this action and response together give the impression that scientific studies can be evaluated simply according to non-scientific criteria, which ironically undermines all of science, not just E&E.  The politicization of the peer review process is problematic regardless of who is doing the politicization because it more readily allows for political judgments to substitute for judgments of the scientific merit of specific arguments.  An irony here of course is that the East Anglia emails revealed a desire to (and some would say success in) politicize the peer review process, which I discuss in The Climate Fix.

For my part, in 2007 I published a follow on paper to the 2000 E&E paper that applied and extended a similar methodology.  This paper passed peer review in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Pielke, Jr., R. A. (2007), Future economic damage from tropical cyclones: sensitivities to societal and climate changes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 365 (1860) 2717-2729 http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2517-2007.14.pdf

Over the long run I am confident that good ideas will win out over bad ideas, but without care to the legitimacy of our science institutions -- including journals and peer review -- that long run will be a little longer.

From 2005-2007 I conducted interviews of 7 former science advisors to the US president, who had served presidents from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush.  What we learned from them suggests that we should not be too surprised by what has happened in Australia. Our analysis of those interviews concludes as follows (PDF): The position of science advisor has evolved and changed over the past half-century, as has both science and government. The experiences of the science advisors that we were fortunate to visit with chronicle those changes. Underneath the anecdotes and stories that describe presidents over the past half-century is a deeper story, one of the long-term decline of the influence of the president’s science advisor while at the same time, the importance of expertise to government has increased tremendously. The decline of the science advisor, juxtaposed against the rise of government expertise, provides ample reason to reconsider the future role of the presidential science advisor, and to set our expectations for that role accordingly.

Professor Sackett's departing advice is well worth heeding: When quizzed about what improvements could be made to the role of chief scientist, Professor Sackett said it was the Government's responsibility to clarify what role the chief scientist should play. "I think the responsibility rests firmly with the Government to make it, to decide how the role of chief scientist for Australia will fit into the variety of advice that it receives on matters of science"

R. A. Pielke, Jr. and R. Klein (2009). The Rise and Fall of the Science Advisor to the President of the United States. Minerva 47 (1) 7-29, doi: 10.1007/s11024-009-9117-3.

this truth, which economists hold self-evident: Relative to a status quo of no or limited international trade, permitting full free trade across borders will leave in its wake some immediate losers, but citizens who gain from such trade gain much more than the losers lose. On a net basis, therefore, each nation gains over all from such trade.

In their work, economists are typically are not nationalistic. National boundaries mean little to them, other than that much data happen to be collected on a national basis. Whether a fellow American gains from a trade or someone in Shanghai does not make any difference to most economists, nor does it matter to them where the losers from global competition live, in America or elsewhere.

I say most economists, because here and there one can find some who do seem to worry about how fellow Americans fare in the matter of free trade. In a widely noted column in The Washington Post, “Free Trade’s Great, but Offshoring Rattles Me,” for example, my Princeton colleague Alan Blinder wrote: I’m a free trader down to my toes. Always have been. Yet lately, I’m being treated as a heretic by many of my fellow economists. Why? Because I have stuck my neck out and predicted that the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of millions of American workers over the coming decades. In fact, I think offshoring may be the biggest political issue in economics for a generation. When I say this, many of my fellow free traders react with a mixture of disbelief, pity and hostility. Blinder, have you lost your mind? Professor Blinder has estimated that 30 million to 40 million jobs in the United States are potentially offshorable — including those of scientists, mathematicians, radiologists and editors on the high end of the market, and those of telephone operators, clerks and typists on the low end. He says he is rattled by the question of how our country will cope with this phenomenon, especially in view of our tattered social safety net. “That is why I am going public with my concerns now,” he concludes. “If we economists stubbornly insist on chanting ‘free trade is good for you’ to people who know that it is not, we will quickly become irrelevant to the public debate. Compared with that, a little apostasy should be welcome.

The success suggests that socialbots could manipulate social networks on a larger scale, for good or ill. "We could use these bots in the future to encourage social participation or support for humanitarian causes," Hwang claims. He also acknowledges that there is a flip side, if bots were also used to inhibit activism.

The military may already be onto the idea. Officials at US Central Command (Centcom), which oversees military activities in the Middle East and central Asia, issued a request last June for an "online persona management service". The details of the request suggest that the military want to create and control 50 fictitious online identities who appear to be real people from Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is not clear, however, if any of the management of the fake identities would be delegated to software. A Centcom spokesperson told New Scientist that the contract supports "classified blogging activities on foreign language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US".

Hwang has ambitious plans for the next stage of the socialbot project: "We're going to survey and identify two sites of 5000-person unconnected Twitter communities, and over a six-to-12-month period use waves of bots to thread and rivet those clusters together into a directly connected social bridge between those two formerly independent groups," he wrote in a blog post on 3 March. "The bot-driven social 'scaffolding' will then be dropped away, completing the bridge, with swarms of bots being launched to maintain the superstructure as needed," he adds.

The Wall Street Journal's examination of scraping—a trade that involves personal information as well as many other types of data—is part of the newspaper's investigation into the business of tracking people's activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.

Some companies collect personal information for detailed background reports on individuals, such as email addresses, cell numbers, photographs and posts on social-network sites. Others offer what are known as listening services, which monitor in real time hundreds or thousands of news sources, blogs and websites to see what people are saying about specific products or topics.

One such service is offered by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal. Dow Jones collects data from the Web—which may include personal information contained in news articles and blog postings—that help corporate clients monitor how they are portrayed. It says it doesn't gather information from password-protected parts of sites.

The competition for data is fierce. PatientsLikeMe also sells data about its users. PatientsLikeMe says the data it sells is anonymized, no names attached.

Nielsen spokesman Matt Anchin says the company's reports to its clients include publicly available information gleaned from the Internet, "so if someone decides to share personally identifiable information, it could be included."

Internet users often have little recourse if personally identifiable data is scraped: There is no national law requiring data companies to let people remove or change information about themselves, though some firms let users remove their profiles under certain circumstances.

perhaps it would have been nice to not side-step the question of why are these games, as a whole, important as art. Considering this is the first major American art institution to put on a video game show, I would have liked to see a more powerful statement about the medium.