P.Z. Myers Just Doesn’t Get It

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Update: Oops, sorry Dr. Myers

P.Z. Meyers Myers is one of the brightest and most interesting writers out there on the front lines of the evolution-creation wars. He’s obviously a very smart guy, who believes passionately that researchers have learned very important things that need to be incorporated into the way we, as a society, approach important problems.

So why, outside his own field, is he so absolutely blind to the research conducted by others?

Meyers’ Myers response to the Mooney–Nisbet piece in science about the use of “framing” as a tool in scientific communication is a crystalline example of the blowback Chris and Matt are receiving from scientists unwilling to accept the clear message of the small mountain of research on how things actually work at the science-media-policy-politics interface(s): the world doesn’t work the way they (the scientists) would like.

Meyers Myers hews to the “deficit model” – the public just doesn’t understand the science well enough, and we need to therefore fix that deficit. But we have a long history of failing at that task, despite the best efforts of people like Meyers Myers. In fact, if you look at the data, things are actually improving – but from an abysmally low baseline of public understanding of science to a slightly less abysmally low baseline of public understanding of science. To keep trying to do the same thing, over and over, that has failed in the past is pathological.

We live in a world in which most members of the general public, on most issues, most of the time, will not understand the science. Period. That’s the reality.

I too suffer from this pathology. I too have dedicated my career to trying to help the public better understand science. But I am increasingly recognizing that the sort of approach Meyer’s is advocating does not work, or at best is capable of only marginally moving things. It’s clear a different approach is needed.

Meyers’ Myers response is classically scientific – a sort of loading dock approach, in which scientists give information to the public. If this can only be done more effectively, he argues, progress can be made. But this ignores the very literature Nisbet and Mooney are citing, which shows why that doesn’t work.

That doesn’t mean there is not important work to be done in the area of science education, and improved science media coverage, which can have some effect over long periods. We must do everything we can to improve science education and the media’s performance. But it’s clearly insufficient.

Meyers Myers and his pals on the scientific loading dock would be well advised, if they really care about helping solve the problems they are working so hard to address, to spend some time in the social science literature Nisbet and Mooney are citing, rather than thinking they know better than the scientists who study the field. In ignoring the data and the literature that surrounds it, they’re making the same mistake they so rightly criticize their opponents for making – ignoring the science.

Florida Drought

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From Robert Clemson’s WaterCrunch, an update on Florida drought:

Southwest Florida usually receives 42 inches annually, however, they are missing 13 inches of rain since 2006. The area is now entering a dry season after a year of rainfall so far below normal it ranks as the state’s third-driest year on record. Only four inches of rain has fallen in the area since January which is about half of normal rainfall amount. Some have said that the Southwest Florida region needs three years of above normal summer rains to recharge its aquifers.

A reminder of the issue Kevin Vranes raised the other day that is a useful reminder to us myopic arid west droughtsters: “This is not just a western issue.”

I’ve created a new blogroll category for waterbloggers – added Clemson and Mike Campana in Oregon. If you know of any others, let me know.

On the Plus Side….

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Global warming could be economic boon for some:

The Sierra snowpack could melt earlier and faster than before. Droughts could last longer. We could see more rainy days, or less. Storms could become more powerful.

The science related to forecasting how global climate change will affect life’s most basic resource — water, and its supply, management and quality — has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. But no one knows exactly what will happen.

And in that quandary lies a kernel of opportunity.

“Huge,” was how Brent Haddad, an associate professor in the Environmental Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz, described the potential for consulting firms and others to gain business by advising water districts, flood protection districts, city governments, multinational corporations, large developers, universities and other entities on how to prepare for the effects of a warming world.

“The demand is growing,” Haddad said. “Water agencies are starting to take climate change seriously, so they’re looking for help”

Dust Bowl

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Dust BowlOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

It’s reasonable to think that most of the folks in sub-Saharan Africa didn’t celebrate the release of the latest grim Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report by heading out to the ballpark last night. But that’s what Lissa and I did, the beneficiary of a pair of free tickets to see our Isotopes play Omaha out at The Lab.

Given the stark headlines in the morning paper – Global Warming Heralds Slow Impending Doom, or words to that effect – it was fitting that L suggested extra layers, and brought a blanket. It was 44 degrees at game time, with a howling east wind blowing in from right that kept more than a few fly balls in the ballpark and more than a few fans up in the clubhouse drinking their beers rather than in their seats watching baseball. “Football weather?” my colleague Randy Harrison wrote in this morning’s paper. “It was more suitable for outdoor ice hockey.”

This morning, as I write this, it’s snowing here – proof that my colleagues’ routine taunt is true: that by writing about drought, I can make it rain, and that by writing about global warming, I can bring on cold weather. L and I felt the double whammy last night as we sat at the ballpark, huddled beneath the blanket, rain spitting down through the klieg lights.

It was storytelling luck that the two particular pieces of news highlighted in the image above right came together on the same day: the short term seasonal runoff forecast showing a snowpack shattered by dry March heat, and a long term suggestion that climate change is pushing us in that direction on a permanent basis. Richard Pipes’ photos of cracked mud and the bathtub ring at New Mexico’s largest reservoir tell the story far better than any of my words. Pictures work well for cognitive misers, I think.

Still, in terms of the theme of the disparity between first worlders’ and third worlders’ economic ability to adapt to climate change, I think the fact that L and I were able to traipse off to a ballgame on a Friday evening carries some metaphorical message. Looking out across New Mexico’s potential futures, as I understand the science and the development trends, it’s likely that a century from now there’s still going to be a robust city here and very likely baseball, or whatever is its 22nd century successor. There will be some unpleasantness between now and then as we confront the conflicts inherent in both trends. But very few of us and our descendants are likely to starve in the interim. Not so sure about the folks in sub-Saharan Africa.

I am sure, though, that if folks in sub-Saharan Africa did get tickets to a ballgame last night, they are not likely to have been so profligate as to leave in the sixth inning, as L and I did. That’s how I imagine the different between the first and third worlds – easier for us to waste without worry.

‘Topes won, 3-2.

Scientists Can Be Dense

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I love my scientist friends. They are endlessly generous with their time, patiently explaining to me the details of their work. But (can we talk frankly), they can be absolutely dense when it comes to understanding what happens at the interfaces between their words, my words, and the minds of readers.

I am going to print out hundreds of copies of the piece in tomorrow’s Science by Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney, to hand out to every scientist I meet:

[M]any scientists retain the well-intentioned belief that, if laypeople better understood technical complexities from news coverage, their viewpoints would be more like scientists’, and controversy would subside. In reality, citizens do not use the news media as scientists assume.

The Coming Dust Bowl

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Update: The paper is up, and Seager and his colleagues have put up an excellent web page explaining the results.
Story’s up over at the work site on Richard Seager’s paper being published on line by Science today:

Global warming is turning the Southwest into a permanent Dust Bowl, where the dry conditions of our worst 20th century droughts — the 1930s and 1950s — become the norm over the next century, according to new research.


Global warming will push our winter storm track, which brings the region much of its moisture, to the north, according to Richard Seager at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.

Seager’s results, published on line today by the journal Science, sent ripples through the western water community as they began circulating this week.

Paper should go up later today at ScienceExpress. Here’s the abstract:

How anthropogenic climate change will impact hydroclimate in the arid regions of Southwestern North America has implications for the allocation of water resources and the course of regional development. Here we show that there is a broad consensus amongst climate models that this region will dry significantly in the 21st century and that the transition to a more arid climate
should already be underway. If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought, or the Dust Bowl and 1950s droughts, will, within the coming years to decades, become the new climatology of the American Southwest.

What We Do With Water In The Desert

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DitchOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

I’m stretching the point a bit, but standing at the edge of an alfalfa field in Albuquerque’s South Valley this afternoon, I was reminded of Bruce Smith’s description in last Friday’s Science of the co-evolution of humans, dogs and the bottle gourd:

In Asia, for example, the domestication of two utilitarian species–the dog (for hunting) and the bottle gourd (for containers)–by ~12,000 years before the present (yr B.P.), did not so much involve deliberate human intervention as it did allow dogs and bottle gourds to colonize the human niche.

I’m abusing Smith’s point here, but I can’t help but marvel at the evolutionary success of the alfalfa plant. It started in Iran in the bronze age, and here it is, spread out over more than 4,000 acres of desert in the Middle Rio Grande Valley, making a good life for itself in this desert environment by exploiting our taste for milk and beef.

First, the alfalfa’s got to tame the river. The annual runoff can flood the whole valley floor, so the alfalfa got us to build levees and a big dam upstream to hold back the flood waters. Next, it needs a lot more water than nature provides. Up north of town, at a place called Angostura, the alfalfa got us to build a low dam to divert water out of the Rio Grande and into a spiderweb of irrigation ditches that envelopes the floor of Albuquerque’s central valley with the sort of beautiful ditch you see in the photo above.

The ditches are great for walking the dog, but we kid ourselves. The real reason the alfalfa had us build them is this. We have served our master well. Alfalfa field