Trying to Shut up Hansen

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Andrew Revkin has a story on the New York Times web site about restrictions NASA is trying to place on outspoken climate scientist James Hansen:

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. “They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,” he said.

(Hat tip Roger Pielke Jr.)

Daybook

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reading 1: Donald Wilhite’s “Drought: A Global Assessment”. Wilhite, in his introduction, clearly lays out the climate-societal vulnerability link: “Thus the incidence of drought could increase because of a change in the frequency of the physical event, a change in societal vulnerability to water shortages, or both.”

reading 2: Via Roger Pielke the Younger, a paper by Reiner Grundman on Scientific Consensus and Leadership. Grundman seems to argue that a relative lack of scientific activism on climate change is part of the reason climate/greenhouse policy hasn’t moved off the dime. More blogging on this after I reread the paper, as I was a bit sleepy last night plowing through it.

stuff I wrote elsewhere: Local folks get one of the first peeks at stardust (sub. req.): “`It’s kind of humbling to think that this planet— and all the planets— (are) made up of that dust,’ Rietmeijer said.”

word of the day: pissant – This seems rooted in a Scandinavian word describing the the urine-like stench of formic acid from an anthill. “Pismire,” an old English term for an ant, is one of its ancestors.

Why I Love Cocoposts

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I was feeling a little subversive yesterday morning when I posted Strunk and White’s advice for bloggers. It amused me. But since it drew such varied and amusing ripostes, it’s worth defending why I it struck me.

At the risk of abusing S&W’s point, I do not think bloggers should not have and share opinions. It’s a question of how you do it.

Read Coco. She doesn’t say: “I think Greg Payne’s new Transit Watch program is a really really bad idea.” Coco instead leads you through the argument with a series of clever observations, a bit of nuance and a wink and a nod. It’s an effective style of rhetoric, and more fun to read.

I do not hold up my own work as an example here. My journalistic background makes me uncomfortable having and sharing opinions. My affinity for Strunk and White here may be a tad defensive.

Go read Coco.

Pundits for Hire

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Paul D. Thacker, in a New Republic piece, tags Steven Milloy, the “Junk Science” king, with the paid-pundit spray can, that so recently smeared our old friend Michael Fumento:

But, whereas Scripps Howard fired Fumento and apologized to its readers, Fox News continues to look the other way as Milloy accepts corporate handouts. And it’s not just the ExxonMobil money. Milloy has a long history of taking payment from industries that have a stake in the science stories he writes. The ethical standards are clear. “Not disclosing this is wrong,” says Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The real question, then, is why Fox News continues to employ Milloy. Or, in the words of James Hansen, a climate scientist and the head of nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “The question is, ‘Why does a major news organization employ such a hack?'”

The interesting bit here is that, while the economic connection to Fumento’s enthusiasm for Monsanto was only recently revealed, Hansen and Thacker have a point about Milloy. His role as a corporate PR shill is well known. Why does Fox keep carrying his work?

Meanwhile, Fumento paid Inkstain’s pathetically few readers a visit last night to let us know that he’s back in the game. And that he thinks I’m a loser. And maybe a pissant. He was a little ambiguous on that last one.

Advice for Bloggers

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Strunk and White offer this advice for bloggers:

Unless there is a good reason for its being there, do not inject opinion into a piece of writing. We all have opinions about almost everything, and the temptation to toss them in is great. To air one’s views gratuitously, however, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case, and which, in any event, may not be relevant to the discussion.

Listening to the Economists

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Nature, in an editorial in tomorrow’s edition, argues that the IPCC is falling short in not including the lateste economists have to offer in it’s next assessment round:

The inclusive nature of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is currently preparing its fourth assessment of global warming for publication late next year, has further encouraged economists and climate scientists to work together. The resulting effort has shed useful light on how economic growth, lifestyle changes, international trade, and investment in the energy sector might influence greenhouse-gas emissions. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is untangling the impacts of various possible mitigation actions in order to credibly estimate their actual impact on economics, climate and society.

Unfortunately, for the purposes of its impending fourth assessment, the IPCC won’t manage to incorporate the economists’ latest thinking on these different ’emissions scenarios’. The ‘Special Report on Emissions Scenarios’ that will accompany the assessment was developed in the late 1990s and rests on a number of assumptions that many economists view as outdated or simplistic.

Ignoring Inconvenient Facts

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Roger Pielke Jr. links to a report on a study that identified a remarkable ability of our brains to ignore inconvenient facts:

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

The study offers a clear empirical basis for a phenomenon I’ve anecdotally identified in my own experience: the way liberals accuse us (the mainstream media) of a conservative bias, while conservatives accuse us of a liberal bias.

It also goes a long way to explain the scientization identified by Sarewitz: the ability of both sides on a contested issue to find science that supports their argument, while successfully ignoring or explaining away the science raised by the other side.

I like Roger’s snark:

If this study is correct then those “junk science” and “war on science” folks will each probably find a way to ignore or discount its conclusions! But on a deeper philosophical note, does this mean that those who allege that either Republicans or Democrats are worse abusers of science are in fact themselves abusing science?

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

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From Fred Stutzman:

The student, whose sexual orientation was known to administrators, and agreed to live a closeted life along the lines of a particularly draconian set of rules, was ultimately expelled when he chose to signify his interest in the same sex in the Facebook.

(via dcm)

(update: 12:30 p.m. MST – Fred seems to have taken the post down for some reason.)

2005 Temperatures

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A commenter asks: “By the way, I wonder when we’re going to get a warmer year than 1998?”

NASA’s GISS team answers today with some updated numbers: “The year 2005 may have been the warmest year in a century, according to NASA scientists studying temperature data from around the world. ”

No surprise here, as the GISSers said the same thing a month ago based on Dec.-Nov. numbers. And I’m hesitant to hang too much on a single year, whether it’s 1998 or 2005, given both the issue of ENSO variability (El Nino years tend to be warmer) and the fuzzy error bars on the numbers that make an explicit “record” hard to pin down. What matters more is the underlying trend. But since you asked….