Google and the quote doctors

I see no substantial differences between the cut up quote and the original. The original certainly appears to be supporting unethical behavior.

The full quote starts by saying scientists must say the whole truth and include everything science requires them to. Then he goes on to say, in an effort to “make the world a better place”, scientists need to minimize their doubts and basically spin the results. Extremely hard to make that look any worse regardless how the malformed quotations break MLA standards.

I am stunned to find myself in agreement with jet here. Hoping that you can be honest really isn’t nearly good enough. As a scientist, and moreover one working in an applied field (forensics) in which my credibility is my livelihood, I would have to say that Schneider really jammed his foot way into his mouth with that quote, and I would like to think that he would have regretted saying it even if the quote hadn’t had such an interesting subsequent history.

That last bit is just sophistry. What he is endorsing is finding a balance between effective and honest. IE. lie, but only when you really really need to make your point to “see the world a better place”.

And on a side-note this is one of the main detractors of Lomborg, so now you have to wonder if what he said about Lomborg was just being “effective”?

There’s a simple solution. If for whatever reason you don’t feel you can talk to a reporter without saying something misleading in order to make a nice neat story, then don’t talk to reporters. The idea that a scientist has a “responsibility” to push a particular public-policy optiion, as opposed to a responsibility to the truth, is corrupt. If I were seen to play fast and loose with the truth in the pursuit of a desired result then my testimony would quickly becone useless to the side that subpoenaed me.

jroth, that “witty” remark is pure crap. For example, not only am I am very far from being a “global warming denialist”, but I have little doubt that statments like Schneider’s actually play directly into the hands of the denialists. Indeed the subsequent history of the quote, whether doctored or not, makes that point very nicely. Once you do anything to compromise your credibility, it’s damned hard to get it back, and that’s a serious disservice to the very cause you support. It’s even more tempting for some people in my field to give the prosecutors what they want than it is for a research scientist to give the reporters what they want, but it’s a temptation that must be resisted.

It seems like those who would like to defend Simon tend to cut the quote half-way and claim he is only speaking of the fundamental conflict between appealing to laypeople and being scientifically rigorous. They seem to completely ignore the second part of the quote in which he posits a fundamental conflict between being honest and being effective.

Simon explicitly suggests that scientists may feel justified in omitting doubts that they have about the validity of the claims they make. That is dishonesty, plain and simple.

I’d agree that the cut-up version is not terribly different from the original. It is outrageous to suggest that scientists ought to capture the public imagination without being 100% honest. Hoping that this will end up being the case simply isn’t enough.

No, he says he HOPES we are both. Again, that’s just not good enough. He just shouldn’t have said that. Look, I’m sure he is a terrific guy and an excellent scientist, but he said something dumb. It happens. But there’s no point in trying to deny it.

If you read Schneider as saying that “we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have”, you must also read him as saying “we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts”.

“No, he says he HOPES we are both. Again, that’s just not good enough.”

What should he have said? “I do decree it thus – from this day on, every scientist, on this or any other planet (or in interplantery space) will be both HONEST and PERSUASIVE. Or face the wrath of Stephen!”

It occurs to me that Stephen Schneider should have said
“As scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. When we are asked to give our opinion on matters we think are important, we consider nothing but this promise, and are always only driven by the desire to present our subject in all its wondrous complexity.”

ray, he should simply have stopped with the first sentence in the full quote. The suggestion that it is appropriate even to consider “offer[ing] up scary scenarios, mak[ing] simplified, dramatic statements, and mak[ing] little mention of any doubts we might have”, and that there is some balancing that needs to go on between that and accurately summarizing the state of the science, merely ended up damaging his own credibility (and worse yet, that of his colleagues) as an advocate of policy measures to deal with warming. So he got the worst of both worlds- he advocated compromising what should be the prime directive for a scientist, yet not only failed thereby to advance, but probably in fact retarded the cause he feels so deeply about. Hard to see how that could be a smart move.

“Since the consequences of policy decisions will be large, the public deserves a firm well thought out explanation from the scientist they trust.”

Which the public will never get from the media. And the public and politicians wouldn’t understand the ifs, ands, and buts anyway (not that it lets the press off the hook).

“[H]e said something dumb.”

He said something honest and true that plays badly as a soundbite in a political “debate.” Funny, that.

My comments are here.

OK, can I say that 2+2=4 and stop or do I have to clarify that under some assumptions the result could be 11?

Not only personally annoyed, but look at the damage those remarks have subsequently done to his own cause. I don’t know how anybody could not realize that saying it the way he did was a significant faux pas. He would have done better to admit he made a mistake and apologize.

Ray wrote:
What should he have said? “I do decree it thus – from this day on, every scientist, on this or any other planet (or in interplantery space) will be both HONEST and PERSUASIVE. Or face the wrath of Stephen!”
I think Steve Lavonne means that scientists must always resist the temptation to make simplified statements about life and death matters since there are always scientific uncertainties and underlying complexities. They must eschew the life of the body for the pure life of reason.

Abb1–
exactly how often do you use base 3?

I’m a scientist, not a politician. And why was anybody interested in interviewing Scheidner in the first place? Because HE is a scientist, not a politician. To attract attention by claiming to speak as a scientist, and then actually to speak like a politician, is unethical. And unwise- he gave ammunition to his enemies (that, John Emerson, is also a reality of American political discourse).

In what I read about global warming, earth scientists of the various sorts usually believe it’s real (with scattered exceptions). Opponents of global warming tend to be economists, ideologues, and futurologists, plus a grab bag of scientists from unrelated fields.

So you’re annoyed that he said “I hope that means being both” instead of saying “We must be both”, or “but we must ignore these human impulses”.

Personally, I’m annoyed that he considers it a balancing act. What he should have said is that scientists should be as effective as possible within the bounds of honesty, but those bounds may not be violated or stretched in the service of ‘effectiveness’ for two reasons — first, because it violates the most fundamental principles of science, and second because when these ‘stretchers’ are revealed (and, sooner or later, they will be) they will tend to undermine credibility and, therefore, effectiveness.

Yes, the quote doctoring is unethical, but even so, the differences between the two versions are not so very great. The undoctored version is bad enough.

BTW, I’m not a global warming skeptic (though I am skeptical of the most extreme scenarios). I am a Kyoto skeptic, though–the U.S., China, and India are not going to sign on, the E.U. is not meeting its targets, New Zealand is facing huge carbon-trading expensese. Kyoto is a dead letter, I think.

Lastly, it’s worth noting the issue of ‘balancing’ effectiveness and honesty is not limited to global warming–it comes up all the time (GM crops, fertility treatments, secondhand smoke, fast food, … ) The problem of blurring the lines between science and advocacy is widespread.

exactly how often do you use base 3?

Well, exactly, and perhaps this is what he means by “all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts”. Sientists do simplify, there’s no way around it, and especially when they popularize they simplify and dramatize all the time; that’s just the nature of the beast.

Re #33, that’s precisely right, and that’s the reason why embellishment of the kind Schneider hinted at is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. When you have the facts on your side, pounding the table will only tend to draw attention away from the fact that you have the facts on your side. People expect scientists to be objective, and there is inevitably a backlash if they’re caught playing fast and loose in order to be advocates.

To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.

I’m a scientist too, and I don’t find this acceptable. I’ve also dealt with the question of how to get science across to the public, and this isn’t the way to do it. Much less is it the way to say you’re doing it.

Unfortunately, scientists tend to oversimplify when considering tactics for communicating with the public, and this is one example of it. Other examples are comments #6 and #15. Being accustomed to including all the qualifying details in scientific discourse, they may feel that any simplification is inherently dishonest, so you might as well go all the way with dishonesty and do anything you can to put your views across.

That’s a view that ignores the complexity of communication, and, as some commenters have noted, opens one to some bad backlash.

It’s possible to be honest and get one’s scientific point across simply, but it can take a considerable amount of work.

Steve, Rush Limbaugh always has ammunition. He makes stuff up if he has to. Schneider made a reasonable statement about the nuances of introducing science into public discourse, and the hacks attacked him. While he did make a tactical errors, it’s no big deal because the slime machine never has trouble finding something to work with.

You sound like the kind of scientific purist I was talking about on the DeLong thread. A scientifically-well-informed person speaking on a scientific issue he’s knowledgeable is BOTH a scientist AND a politician. What he says will be different than what he would say in a purely scientific context, as he acknowledged and as any reasonable person would acknowledge. It is ALSO different from what a scientifically uninformed person says about the issue, and that’s the value of what he says.

Schneider’s mistake here was in being straightforward and honest about what he was doing, on the assumption that he was dealing with people of good will. What people are really saying he should have done is to be more dishonest and less forthcoming. That’s what the right wing does — they pretend to be speaking scientifically when they’re not, and they pretend to be scientists when they’re not.

If being a “scientific purist” means I don’t like to lie (or deliberately mislead, which amounts to the same thing), I’ll happily plead guilty. As I said, my credibility is my livelihood. Someone who is “both a scientist and a politician” is in the same position- as Schneider found out the hard way.

The funny thing is, Schneider wrote something in perfect candor and honesty–and is being pilloried for it.

The thing is, unless you are a scientist, just about everything you think you know about science is a product of simplified scenarios and dramatic statements, often with little mention of any doubts some may have. That’s the way lay science writing works. I was once a very good science writer (grown rusty now from a slight career change) and I can tell you that the difference between what I read in Astrophysical Journal or heard at the AAS meeting and what made it into the pages of Discover was pretty large. It wasn’t wrong, but it was definitely a product packaged and targeted to non-specialist readers who didn’t have the time or background to handle (the journal) Nature red in tooth and claw.

To this extent, Schneider is simply recognizing that this is the way science diffuses to the wider world: toy models, catch phrases, imperfect analogies. You may think that you have a better handle on the issues than this, and can toss off impressive sounding examples of recent findings, but really, unless you’ve spent half a decade or more studying the topic as part of your job, you’re just faking it. And by castigating Schneider for trying to present the science in a way that you, me, and your Aunt Tillie can handle, people are really trying to shut out that entire line of information.

If people won’t act because the raw science is too complex to comprehend and then scream when the science gets boiled down to an understandable nugget, then the underlying message is that someone wants people like Schneider to sit down and shut up.

That Schneider’s adversaries (indeed, humanity’s adversaries) have chopped and twisted his words to their own purposes is no reason to criticize Schneider for telling the truth. Hell, they have proven willing to misrepresent anything and everything. Furedi, Simon, Lomborg and the rest are the ones whose credibility seem to be shot.

While I was composing my comment, John Emerson asked for someone else to jump in. I think Steve Labonne is doing a good job of representing the kind of communication scientists must do.

Schneider was aware of the difference between political and scientific discourse, and (mistakenly thinking that he was dealing with people of good will) he commented honestly on the difference.

His statement was picked up by polemicists, publicists, and futurologists who did not have to think about that difference, since they were not scientists at all, and they used it against him. In effect, the non-scientists were trying to stink up the place so that the scientists would leave, and the non-scientists succeeded reasonably well in this.

I would argue that to the extent Schneider was being honest (and I think he was), he was also being extremely naive. There isn’t a dichotomy between presenting scientific findings in a generally understandable way and being honest. Unfortunately, many scientists are so steeped in the discourse of their part of the world that they emotionally react to any other sort of discourse and feel that it is dishonest.

AS other commenters have noted, that opens them up to justified charges of politicization and abandoning their scientific principles

I did not intend to assert that Schneider himself has shaded the truth in his public pronoouncements (frankly I don’t know enough about the science involved to make a judgement on that, even if I were familiar in detail with his public statements on warming.) But I do know that as soon as he allowed himself to even to posit a balancing act between accuracy and telling a good story, he trespassed onto ground where an ethical scientist should never go. There is no “double ethical bind” for someone who’s simply commited to being ethical, period.

John, I wrote the previous reply before seeing your latest (#50). To that one I will simply say, you’re an idiot, and like all idiots you’re sabotaging your own argument, such as it is.

As to the nonsense about political naivete, the Bush Iraq experience is a perfect counterexample. Selling your policies in a less than honest way may seem, and sometimes even be, very expedient in the short term, but eventually it nearly always comes back to bite you in the ass. Those who seem jealous of the Right’s apparent abiliity to get away with lies may want to ponder this lesson. Lately we’ve gotten so used to the climate of dishonesty in our politics that we may be tempted to believe that the only solution is to fight fire with fire, but that conclusion needs to be examined a lot more critically.

Isn’t the real problem with this passage that it is utterly tautological? The last sentence seems only to say that in order to be both truthful and effective, we should be both truthful and effective?

“you’re an idiot, and like all idiots you’re sabotaging your own argument, such as it is.”

Words to live by, Steve.

“Selling your policies in a less than honest way may seem, and sometimes even be, very expedient in the short term, but eventually it nearly always comes back to bite you in the ass.”

I agree what the Bush administration did to sell the war was dishonest. But who, exactly, is advocating dishonesty?

OK, let’s try this:

The funny thing is, Schneider wrote something in perfect candor and honesty—and is being pilloried for it.

The thing is, unless you are a scientist, just about everything you think you know about science is a product of simplified scenarios and dramatic statements, often with little mention of any doubts some may have. That’s the way lay science writing works. I was once a very good science writer (grown rusty now from a slight career change) and I can tell you that the difference between what I read in Astrophysical Journal or heard at the AAS meeting and what made it into the pages of Discover was pretty large. It wasn’t wrong, but it was definitely a product packaged and targeted to non-specialist readers who didn’t have the time or background to handle (the journal) Nature red in tooth and claw.

To this extent, Schneider is simply recognizing that this is the way science diffuses to the wider world: t o y m o d e l s, catch phrases, imperfect analogies. You may think that you have a better handle on the issues than this, and can toss off impressive sounding examples of recent findings, but really, unless you’ve spent half a decade or more studying the topic as part of your job, you’re just faking it. And by castigating Schneider for trying to present the science in a way that you, me, and your Aunt Tillie can handle, people are really trying to shut out that entire line of information.

If people won’t act because the raw science is too complex to comprehend and then scream when the science gets boiled down to an understandable nugget, then the underlying message is that someone wants people like Schneider to sit down and shut up.

That Schneider’s adversaries (indeed, humanity’s adversaries) have chopped and twisted his words to their own purposes is no reason to criticize Schneider for telling the truth. Hell, they have proven willing to misrepresent anything and everything. Furedi, Simon, Lomborg and the rest are the ones whose credibility seem to be shot.

Thanks, Steve. You yourself are an idiot about political discourse and about the ways that political information is actually disseminated — things about which you apparently know nothing at all. You’re well advised to stay out of politics in the future. (Your attempt at tactical advice strikes me as particularly laughable — Limbaugh doesn’t need ammunition, he makes it up if he has to.)

An oddity of the whole thread is that the same people have been saying that Schneider should have been more purist (never shading the science) and also more dishonest (never admitting out loud that, inevitably, scientists in politics have to shade the science).

But I do know that as soon as he allowed himself to even to posit a balancing act between accuracy and telling a good story, he trespassed onto ground where an ethical scientist should never go.

I don’t think that Schneider posited a dichotomy, as you said further up. But there’s a tension. In order to function in politics, scientists have to understand how politics works, and they have to learn how to function in the political realm. That’s what Schneider was commenting on. And there IS a balancing act, whether you think there is or not.

Economists who go into politics all know that they have to speak differently, and in fact they do all run the risk of damaging their scientific reputation. This is what people were talking about on DeLong, with regard to Krugman. Some believed that scientists should never smirch themselves with politics, which I regard as a horrendous belief. Others believed that scientists should maintain their purism when doing politics, which I regard as equally ludicrous.

This started as a thread about the malicious selective quotation of Schneider by many hacks. A peculiarly inept group of commentators seems to have derailed it.

And yes, Steve. You did call a lot of people liars: If being a “scientific purist” means I don’t like to lie (or deliberately mislead, which amounts to the same thing), I’ll happily plead guilty.

“Regardless, he should have foreseen the inevitability of the “maximally pessimal” reading and realized how bad it would look.”

In other words, it was a bad PR move, even though it was the truth. I can buy that.

John Emerson,

‘Schneider’s mistake here was in being straightforward and honest about what he was doing, on the assumption that he was dealing with people of good will. What people are really saying he should have done is to be more dishonest and less forthcoming.’

No. What people are saying is that he shouldn’t endorse lying in the name of advancing this or that public policy.

His willingness to admit that he is a liar is admirable. I say that without a trace of irony.

I just disagree with the notion, that as a matter of course, we must and should lie in order to be effective. I do not think that is true.

Perhaps it is but I do not believe that is. That belief does not indicate that I lack good will and it does not make me liar.

Steve, you failed to see that what Schneider said was being misrepresented by a bunch of non-scientist hacks, and you refused to try to understand what he was actually saying. Instead you endorsed their smear and (laughably) accused Schneider of being naive and tactically careless.

You have advocated an unrealistically strict standard for scientists in politics — a standard which will not be applied to non-scientists misrepresenting science to the public — and you have called anyone who violates those standards a liar. You have advocated the utterly ludicrous theory that dishonesty in politics is usually punished in the end.

The caution you advocate for other scientists is not at all evident in your own statements here — you really swing quite wildly. I do not think that scientists in general should stay out of politics, but I think that you should.

Idiot.

A scientist not only can be an advocate but should be, when the particular field is one that impacts directly on the public weal. It’s just that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. Schneider at the very least left himself wide open to charges of advocating the wrong way, and the dishonesty of many of those who are beting him over the head with this quote doesn’t excuse him. As ckr said, he handed them the stick.

I would add, though, that when a scientist is speaking as an advocate, caveat auditor. Before you act on his / her words, check the actual state of the literature as best you can. Science is not supposed to function via the argument from authority, though human nature being what it is that argument does sometimes tend to carry more weight than it should.

The nonsense in the media about the Lancet study provides a dose of reality. Here you have a good (considering the circumstances) study with the necessary ifs, ands, and buts. And it was ripped apart.

If scientists communicate to the public through meticulous journal articles, science will have little role in shaping public policy. Communicating the bottom line–and including a non-technical assessment of how robust your results are is important–while saving the technical disclaimers for an academic journal is not “lying.”

The truth of the Lancet study will shine through long after the liars have been consigned to the dustbin of history. One needs to think beyond just the next news cycle or two, if one wants to build anything lasting.

One needs to think beyond just the next news cycle or two, if one wants to build anything lasting.

Scinetifically, yes. Politically, no. Stay out of politics, Steve.

John Emerson has it exactly right — the distinction is between different kinds of discourse, different ways of talking. There is a scientific-academic style that is deliberately understated and cautious, and which depends on an educated audience to understand the larger implications of whatever you’re pointing out. If people don’t have a framework that lets them see the implications, what do you do? One of the things that you can do is provide an example of how something like global warming might play out.

The original quote may have been injudicious but, read carefully, is completely reasonable and endearingly self-critical. It is only because the guy is *not* a hack that he recognizes the tension. And if the Schneider quote is really a problem as it stands, why do opponents prefer to use doctored versions of it?

“The truth of the Lancet study will shine through long after the liars have been consigned to the dustbin of history.”

That may be long after the point when it could change the conduct of the war in Iraq. One could term this a problem.

Certainly the general public won’t discern that bright shiny truth without scientific communication (either directly to a lay audience or to reporters), then or now or years down the road.

“The trouble with Dem politicians is that they don’t have the cojones to publicly call out the Republicans on their lies while citing chapter and verse…”

And standard errors and confidence intervals? Whatever.

People won’t act if the raw science is too complex to comprehend. But when people such as Schneider try to put things in a manner that the average reader can understand, there are those that scream bloody murder. Schneider wasn’t advocating lying–rather, he wanted to highlight the potentially perilous implications of a complex mathematical models and hard to decipher data.

If he’s not allowed to do this–nor presumably are science writers and journalists–then where precisely is the public supposed to gain its understanding of scientifically laden issues? If resorting “scary scenarios” and “simplified, dramatic statements” is forbidden, how are the 99.9 percent of humanity that has not spent years studying climate science supposed to understand what’s going on?

That Schneider’s adversaries (indeed, humanity’s adversaries) have chopped and twisted his words to their own purposes is no reason to criticize Schneider for telling the truth. Hell, they have proven willing to misrepresent anything and everything.

[apologies if my previous posts finally make it through moderation]

Another comment with IDiocy as the example since I’m very familiar with it- the biggest plague in press coverage of this stuff is “he said, she said” coverage. It is admittedly very difficult to get the press to print anything about the actual state of the science, but the attempt has to be made, otherwise all the naive public sees is “dueling experts”. Chapter and verse, yea even unto standard errors and confidence intervals where appropriate, is exactly what “we” have and “they” don’t, and underplaying it, or undermining our own credibility as honest purveyors of it, would be a very serious political mistake.

jlw, again that is an extremely charitable gloss on what Schneider actually said. People are just not really confronting the placing of “honesty” on one side of the scale and “effectiveness” on the other. That is not a good thing either to say or to do. That’s not chopping or twisting, it’s citing what he actually said.

The Lancet study could have changed the tactics used in the war. I believe the authors hoped as much. Alas, that would have demanded quality media coverage and an effective response to uninformed critics.

(I believe the US military is actually doing better now about avoiding civilian casualties, maybe in part because of the surveys but mostly for other reasons.)

I think that the Lancet study is a pretty good piece of evidence that Steve’s method would not work. History is littered with the skeletons of high-minded scientists who thought that people wanted to know the truth.

Schneider, alas, does use the word “honest”, but he’s being over-scrupulous. What he was proposing was not dishonesty, but the normal kind of advocacy that everyone in the public realm uses. It’s stuff that wouldn’t fly within science, and Schneider allowed his own residual guilt to cause him to accuse himself.

You seem to have forgotten about the school board election. The IDiots were trounced, every single board member was defeated.

Steve:

Read my comment at #51 (now out of limbo!), but the basic point is that my job was once to move information from Astrophysical Journal and Icarus to the pages of Discover and The Sciences. What Schneider describes is that essential process, whether it’s disseminating ideas about changes in the global climate or new theories of making planets.

Does some subtlety get lost along the way? Sure. But that’s not the same as lying, and to say that it is betrays a misunderstanding of the way we come to know the stuff we think we understand.

Everybody’s an expert these days, and the internet has sold people on the illusion that they can drink the truth straight from the hose. But unless you are capable of reading, say, the Los Alamos preprint server (or whatever it’s called these days) you can’t really handle the raw truth. So you need guys like Schneider (and me) to slip it to you in slightly sweetened spoonfuls.

jlw, did you see yourself as balancing “being honest” against “being effective” in that process? I should think, and hope, not. Why is it so hard for people to admit that Schneider, at minimum, made an extremely unfortunate choice of words?

I doubt that Steve’s interpretation of the Dover elections is correct. We could poll residents to see how many people changed their mind about evolution due to the trial. I suspect, instead, voters didn’t want their school board’s effort and their tax dollars wasted on what they felt was a peripheral issue.

Either way, Dover was great fun, but media coverage was not as extensive as I’d have hoped and ID is very much alive (see “Classes Questioning Evolution Take Hold” on the front of today’s WSJ, about college ID courses).

I have no problem whatsoever with Mr Schneider and his statements, provided that he prefaces every public statement or writing with a clear indication as to whether the statement is motivated by “honesty” or “effectiveness,” allowing his audience to ignore the latter and focus on the former.

Yes, it’s very much alive, and despite the constant frustrations like execrable press coverage, we biologists will continue to fight it with the facts. And we’ll win and keep winning, and the IDiots really aren’t doing well even in the skirmishes. For eample, the last time Kansas had a state board that played these games, teh IDiots were turned out in the following election, and there were none of the other issues that wage slave cited re Dover. I wouldn’t bet against Kansas repeating that cycle. A lot of people in Kansas are quite upset about the effect of this nonsense on economic development and will be quite motivated to work for their defeat again. And the kangaroo trial the board organized in what they thought was defense of its “standards” will hurt the IDiot members when they run for re-election, precisely because there is now a public record with carefully facts on one side and clumsy, readily exposed lies on the other. Anybody who doesn’t realize the value of this is really clueless about the fight against ID. Trust me, people like PZ Myers don’t need political advice from any of you.

Steve:

Having dealt with many hundreds of scientists on this sort of problem, I can tell you that “honest” as is being used by Schneider at the end of the extended quote is not the same as “honest” in terms of how many cookies were left in the jar.

Some researchers will wail and whine if you leave out any of “the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts.” Doing so could be seen as being “dishonest” and sure, might lead to an unsubtle and imperfect understanding of the topic. But including all those hems and haws just gunks up the works, and you wind up losing people like my sister, a nurse. So you have to balance providing an imperfect understanding against providing no understanding at all.

And that’s the thing: by providing the greatest understanding to the greatest number of people, you invariably have to sand the edges and apply a bit of polish. If you find that intolerable or not being “honest” then perhaps you as a citizen need to examine how well versed you are on every topic and only speak on those with which you have perfect understanding, and only with extreme, jargon-filled precision.

How do biologists communicate to the public? From today’s WSJ:

Leslie McFadden, chair of earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico, who led a successful fight there to re-classify a course on intelligent design from science to humanities: “You can’t teach whatever you damn well please. If you’re a geologist, and you decide that the earth’s core is made of green cheese, you can’t teach that.”

I like this, even though it’s arguably not fair to ID–ridiculous as it is, ID’s not that unhinged. It’s an accurate metaphor, exactly what Schneider brings up as a solution to the “double ethical bind” in his APS response. Of course, Schneider cannot claim that degree of certainty for his conclusions (since little in science is as well-established as evolution), so he recommends “metaphors that succinctly convey both urgency and uncertainty.”

By the way, I always hate making a point by pulling out the dictionary, but of the eight definitions of honest in the third edition of the Am. Heritage Col. dictionary, only two deal directly with lack of deceit. There’s a fundamentalist strain of thinking common in America that each word has only one meaning, but I think it’s pretty clear that Schneider was using “honesty” in terms of fairness or integrity rather than in opposition to lying.

jlw, in my time I’ve seen all kinds of horsebleep presented by scientists in the press to justify getting lots of grant money; how many times has the cure for cancer been just around the corner? I’ve experienced the academic-science system from the inside, I’m not naive, and I know damn well there’s a lot of this kind of BSing that goes way beyond simply not being overly persnickety. Furthermore, all scientists that I’ve encountered know it and can be privately quite tart about this phenomenon. It’s usually worst when large amounts of money are involved but political commitments certainly can sustitute for money. Which of us is really being naive here? I’m with eudoxis.

Wage slave, if scientists fighting ID limited themselves to that kind of comment and ceased making the strenuous efforts they actually do make to get accurate information to the public, they would be far less effective. And I bet Prof. McFadden would be the first to agree. (And actually, ID really is that unhinged. The closest thing to a respectable docment it’s produced, Behe’s book, is full of nonsense and blatant misrepresentation from start to finish. And everything else out there is far worse still. Global warming denial almost looks good in comparison.)

Google has been mentioned only twice so far in the context of this article. I will provide a third. How difficult would it be to design a search that compares one excerpt with any number of variants? Plagiarism-detecting software is said to exist already, so what would it take to have Google provide a somewhat similar service that would track – as mentioned above – the permutations of a given text? This would be a really interesting tool for certain kinds of research.

Eudoxis:

You say the topic isn’t about media coverage, but Schneider makes it perfectly clear that it is. He writes, “To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage.” And from that follows all the dreaded sweetening.

But I think you misunderstand my point about that. The choice isn’t between some Platonic Truth and a debased version trafficked by science writers and other low lifes. It’s between communicating from one scientist to another within the rules of scientific discourse (journal articles, conference talks, etc.) and communication between a scientist and the wider public. To effectively communicate between scientists and the public, you have to use different kinds of language and provide different kinds of examples or models. Only the most pigheaded would see that as being untruthful.

As per my point at #116, I think much of the controversy stems from various meanings embedded within the word honest and, indeed, the different ways that we use the word truth. We all see ourselves as upright individuals and dedicated to Truth, so it’s easy to get indignant about this subject. But until we see CNN running sessions from APS meetings or the Paducah Sun reprinting articles from Cell in their entirety, science in the public sphere is gonna be presented in a diluted/sweetened/processed/polyunsaturated form.

Steve, if all you were saying was that “honest” was a badly-chosen word, I agree with you.

But that wasn’t all you were saying. You were accusing him of advocating dishonesty, and he wasn’t. You were implicitly accusing a lot of scientific advocates in public life of being liars, and they aren’t liars. You didn’t name names, but your general description maligns a lot of good people.

You have furthermore completely ignored the context of the debate, which is the way that Schneider’s words were opportunisticaly distorted by a bunch of unscientific hacks whose standard of honesty is far lower than Schneider’s. If you weren’t accepting their interpretation of what Schneider had said (but I think that you were), you were at least blaming the victim for making it easier for the goons to attack him. Yopu should have said something about the goons themselves. (And the goons ALWAYS find a way to attack).

Oppenheimer was a scientist turned antinuclear activist – not just scientists but human beings as well. He said: “I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Was that a lie?

abb1, I’m not aware of any instance in which Oppenheimer stretched the scientific truth to support his position. Are you? The unadorned reality of what nuclear weapons can do was quite horrible enough. So, if you think I disagree with you, I don’t.

Everyone should read the Cato link. The Cato people are, as I said, economists, ideologues, and futurologist, not climatologists or scientists of any kind. Two thirds of their piece is standard hackery and aspersions Schneider’s motives and those of his co-authors. The scientific third is weak, unimpressive, and conjectural.

Well, Steve, you are perfectly entitled to be hung up on the word “honest” and to banish all potential uses of the word other than dictionary definitions 2 and 4a.

But at least admit that you then really aren’t interested in what Schneider was saying, and instead only want to know how to use his words as a cudgel. It would be sad to hear this, though, since for all of your pigheadedness on the topic, you don’t seem to be a bad guy. And if someone like you has given up on public discourse as a means for understanding (rather than as a battleground for political power) then we may be closer to lost than I’ve feared.

Up to a point, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and even Mondale practiced the kind of scrupulosity Steve advocates. (I’m not sure that he’d be quite satisfied with what they did, but they all surpassed their rivals by far). All of them were heavily ridiculed for exactly that, and all of them lost.

Steve should stay out of the politics biz.

Fine, jet, you poor abused little thing. I was mean to you.

But you did factually misrepresent the original scope of the debate. Read the original CT post.

Well, I mean, once one becomes an activist – and this Schneider guy suggests that one should – then that’s what you do: you advocate your position, you emphasize arguments in favor of your position, you minimize arguments against, you polemicize.

Again, I agree that it’s kinda controversial whether a scientist should be involved in advocacy related to his field of expertise; I agree that it casts doubts on his objectivity, but what’s the alternative? He obviously feels that the status quo is extremely perilous. That is his expert opinion.

There I go again. Someday I’ll learn to never bullshit someone who knows more than I do ;)

Regardless of Lindzen’s familiarity with “truth”, the last 6 years have born out complaints against Schneider’s Scientific American article attacking Lomborg. Schneider’s attack was pure spin, distortion, and his being “contextually challenged”. But that’s par for the course, as I’ve yet to read an attack on Lomborg that didn’t follow Schneider’s lead.

wage slave-

Providing an inventory of articles is certainly a good idea and convenient, but what this leads to is doing a fairly substantial amount of research to develop an informed opinion. That’s great and all, but it would be nice if there were some intermediary ground b/w press releases and lots of research. A good scientist should be able to provide a summary of the state of the science by referencing well-represented theories or pivotal studies. However, I don’t think that you can just switch b/w the pundit and the scientist hats. I don’t trust a pundit to accurately describe the state of the science and I find it difficult to trust a scientist who acknowledges that he frequently speaks as a pundit.

Mpowell, I think that you just described an utterly insoluble dilemma. If you’re not a swcientist yourself, you have to trust someone else. If it’s a policy issue with a significant scientific aspect, that person has to be a politically informed scientist or a scientifically-informed politician.

While so far the discussion here about “wearing two hats” has focussed on the tension and difficulties resulting from that, I’m convinced scientists who get involved in policy matters can learn a lot from it. There really can be a positive outcome — look at Keynes. (I think that there Stiglitz and Krugman both learned a lot once they started looking at concrete policy outcomes).

John Emerson,

I agree that its quite a dilemma, but I’m not sure its as bad as you make it out to be. I’m not convinced that a scientist has to be politically informed- or at least not participate in political discourse the way that Schneider recommends- to contribute to my understanding of the political debate.

For example, it seems to me, that a climatologist could say that the science supports that claim that chemical X causes climate change, and that w/ current trends that change will be temp Y w/ uncertainty Z over the next 100 years. Statements like these can help inform w/o attempting to provide policy solutions. But if the same scientist also makes claims that highlight the worst-case outcomes I think it clouds the issue.

I have a particular view of the ideal political discourse where pundits make arguments for different policies and when the political issue is very scientifically-based they reference statements from scientists that reasonable people from both sides of the debate can acknowledge as being mostly reliable. Obviously we are not there, but is this view too hopeful to be useful? Or would we benefit by at least aiming for it?

I just reread some of Steve’s early posts, and found that his field is forensic science (type uspecified).

Forensic scientists are defined as neutral arbiters, as I understand. Even so, they often become “players” — certain of them specialize as prosecution witnesses, others as defense witnesses. Nonetheless, I agree that a forensic scientist’s credibility depends on his reputation for impartiality.

So he’s right that Schneider forfeited his arbiter status. The way he defined what he was doing, Schneider was functioning as a scientifically informed advocate, like a lawyer, and not as a neutral arbiter, like a forensic scientist.

Steve apparently believes that only the arbiter role is legitimate for scientists, and not the advocate role. I disagree.

Our judgement of the value of what Schneider was doing depends on the validity of the science he uses and the rightness of the cause he’s advocating, just as with a lawyer advocate. It doesn’t depend on whether he’s taking the neutral arbiter role or not.

The lawyer’s form of advocacy is a pretty good comparison here, as is the politician’s form of advocacy. You compare them to other advocates, not to neutrals, and judge them by the specifics of what they’ve done, not on whether or not they’ve done something they weren’t trying to do.

Just wondering when effective and honest became mutually exclusive. Indeed, it strikes me that one’s honesty makes one’s argument effective.

Bad link, jet.

Cato is a cheesy advocacy group. The Cato link you gave was mostly cheesy gossip and snide remarks. No fear was involved on my part. Before clicking it I had feared that there would be some substance, but I needn’t have.

I know CrookedTimber authors are very learned people, with very interesting lives, and vast pedigrees, which of course makes their time extremely valuable. But I do wish they participated more in the free-for-all that occurs in the aftermath of controversial post (okay mad props for Belle for always wading in and slugging it out). For instance, this post of John Quiggin’s had very nearly the same response as his last post about a year ago, to which he links, on this same subject. Now the respondents here very neatly lined up to opposing sides on if the doctored versions were in the same spirit as the original version. We went through the pains of parsing the semantics, of challenging intentions, and perhaps even questioning the existence of god (okay, just kidding, but we did meander off topic and never made it back on topic). We of course all value John Quiggin’s reasonings on this or we wouldn’t all keep coming back. So I do wish the impressive minds of CT would participate a bit more, and perhaps Quiggin himself might explain why Schneider is being treated poorly or at least mock those who say he’s not.

1. OK, here’s the scenario. In response to the claims by the Flat Earth Society, I — a physicist/geologist, say — am being interviewed by the newspapers, and am being asked, “Is the earth round or flat?”. I *know* that the earth is isn’t quite round. It is an oblate spheroid. Actually, it isn’t even that, given the mountains and the valleys; it is an extremely complicated three-dimensional solid. I consider, “It is closer to round than flat,” but then imagine a sentence in the stoty, “The professor seemed uncertain and diffident — I got the impression that he wasn’t really sure it is round.” I then consider, “It is an oblate spheroid,” and then imagine the headline, “The professor says plague on both houses — the earth is neither round nor flat.” I finally say, “The earth is round,” but feel a bit dishonest in saying something that isn’t quite true. I think of stalwarts like Steve Labonne, feel that I have let them down and brought dishonor to science.

2. Here’s another scenario. I am a nuclear engineer in the 50’s. The military-industrial complex is pushing nuclear power like the cococola company is pushing their cola. I think the safety problems are being underestimated. I think that not enough attention is being paid to safety. I try to interest newspapers in the problems, and I don’t want to scare anyone by presenting worst case scenarios, so I present the information with all the caveats, including that a bad accident, while not highly likely, is possible. The newspaper guy shrugs his shoulder — why bother about stuff that is not highly likely, and with all my caveats, their readership would simply be uninterested. I finally decide to write a book in which I highlight the bad scenario, dramatize it. I also say that the scenario is not highly likely, but could happen. The book is a best seller, and congressmen demand action to make reactors safe. I feel guilty and feel that I have let science down, because I have had to present the worst case, scary scenario, to get action. Even though all I said in the book was that it *could*, not *would* happen, I still feel guilty. I can’t look at my nuclear engineering colleagues in the eye, since obviously I have failed in my scientific objectivity.

In the above two cases, in some senses of the term “honest,” I have been dishonest.

I just reread Schneider’s full statement
…
Alas, Schneider did use the word “honest”, so he seemed to be confessing to lying.
…
Suppose he’d written…

Quite a remarkable degree of double-think. Perhaps if you continue that process of reading _closely and accurately_, you could find the _true_ meaning of what he wrote. Perhaps it’s a stock tip, or a commentary on Hamlet?

What was written was an advocacy of dishonesty, or at least selective honesty. If he wants to recant that, admit to a slip of the tongue, then he is free to do so.

soru

Not Jet.
Soru.
My apologies.

What Schneider advocated was dishonest by the scientific standard and would not be acceptable in a scientific context. It was not dishonest in a public-policy context; he was using the same argumentative and persuasive methods that everybody in politics uses.

You, and Schneider, can’t have it both ways, John. If he wants to talk like a politician, he forfeits the special regard due to a scientist speaking objectively within his field of expertise, and has only the same credibility as any other politician. Good luck with that. I personally, in my “naivete”, actually do think that in fact the incautious behavior of some people like Schneider has something- far from everything, but something- to do with the success of the right-wing smear campaign to convince the public that anthropogenic warming is a myth. When the confused public thinks it just sees non-objective advocates on both sides, it does not feel compelled listen to the side that wants it to make inconvenient choices. Yes, the right will resort to sleazy tactics no matter what, but it still makes little sense to hand them additional ammunition. In my “naive” opinion, at any rate.

Steve, as I said, Schneider did forfeit his “neutral arbiter” status when he bbecame and advocate. By and large, though, neutral arbiters in politics are mythical; it’s something we wish we had, so that we could avoid the messiness of politics, but not something that often exists. (In fact, those who make the claim to be neutral arbiters in politics most often are just stealth partisans, and it is scarcely possible to be neutral on most political positions; at best you end up taking a centrist consensus position, which is NOT neutral. Politics, in other words, is inevitably adversarial, and the dream of someone coming in from outside politics and settling things for us is really unrealistic.)

Schneider did not forfeit his claim to be a scientifically well-informed advocate. The people he was arguing with were, without any excpetion that I know of, also advocates. Some of them may have been as well-informed as Schneider, but most anti-environmentalists I run into are publicists, ideologues, and economic fantasists who are winging it on the science.

You have a foolishly binary point of view on this. Either someone is a scrupulous scientist, or else he’s “just the same as any other politician.” Can’t you see the stupidity of that? A scientifically well-informed politician is DIFFERENT than a scientifically ill-informed or misinformed politician. I presume that your problem is a pure dislike of politicians. If you want a country without politicians, go to Saudi Arabia or China. In our country big decisions are made by public political processes, not by objective administrators, and you need politicians for that.

I have conceded that Schneider should not have used the word “honest”. That’s your tactical “handing them ammunition” argument. But you really don’t mean that. Your criticism of Schneider goes far deeper than tactics. (Your suggestion that the Democrats would do better if they followed your advice is laughable.)

The carefully and scrupulously written stuff about global warming has been out there for years. It never gets past the wonks and the Greens. Schneider was talking about an attempt to bring these ideas to the attention of a wider public, and more power to him.

Anyone who hopes for an objective, neutral, nonpolitical authority to decide substantive political issues has failed to understand how politics works. Ordinary voters looking for that kind of thing tend to get suckered. When you make this misleading ideal the standard for scientific participation in politics, you show your own ignorance.

The strict standards you propose are only applied to liberals and Democrats. The Republicans just don’t care. There’s an internal pressure in the direction you suggest from high-minded liberals, but conservative and libertarian hacks, as you can see from this thread, are more than willing to chip in and impose on us a strict standard which they would never dream of accepting for themselves. They use whatever ammunition they have, but being scrupulous doesn’t protect us because if they don’t have anything valid they’ll make things up.

I really don’t think you’re grasping the problem. Look, I’m Joe Sixpack, and one the one hand I hear Scientist A feeding scary global-warming scenarios to the press while openly admitting he’s functioning as an advocate and not sticking strictly to science, and on the other side I hear industry-shill “Scientist” B telling me that A’s stories are a load of horse-hockey and pointing me to A’s public admissions that he’s willing to color the scientific truth for advocacy purposes. A wants me to give up my SUV, B tells me to go right ahead and buy the even bigger one I have my eye on. Since A has made it so easy to dismiss his objectivity as a scientist, then even if I grasp that B isn’t objective either, what on earth is going to persuade me that I should listen to him rather than to B? I’m going with B- he’s telling me what I want to hear and as far as I can tell, he’s no more or less objective than A.

It’s delusional to think we can win by playing “their” game. They’ll always be better at it. We’ll be guaranteed to lose, and we won’t even hold the high ground from which we can assail the Republican War on Science. Once again, in my “naive” opinion.

The one saying Schneider is a shill is you, Steve. Not Joe Sixpack. And the right wing shills will also say that Schneider is a shill. You have been wrongly maligning Schneider all along. Thanks a lot, buddy.

Meanwhile the honest scientists you respect will be writing the same sober reports as ever, and Joe Sixpack will be unaware that they even exist. A garbled version might reach NPR, where they quite likely will give equal time to an anti- environmentalist shill who will use various radio tricks to make the scientist look bad.

Speaking for Barbar, Schneider was proposing that he would be an advocate, and you’ve been smearing him all along for that reason. You make your living as a neutral expert wiutness, and apparently it’s your dream that political issues will be settled by neutral expert witnesses stepping in, but it’s never been that way. It’s always been advocates doing the work.

Global warming is an uphill fight, as you said, because it’s inconvenient and requires sacrifice. The rest of what you say is fantasy.

Godddammit, stop telling me I’m smearing Schneider- you’re using sleazy Republican tactics yourself. I’m saying no more about Schneider than what YOU SAID YOURSELF in the words of yours that I quoted in #165. I’m not interested in having a Fox News-style “debate” with you.

At this point it’s obviously useless to imagine that you’ll actually try to think through what I argued and come up with a coherent response. Sayonara.

If scientists don’t offer up the scary scenarios that get people’s attention, who will? As far as I can see, if you think, say, that global warming will result in sea-level rises of some number of meters, and you look at the map and notice how many cities are within (X + storm surge) meters of sea level, it’s the height of irresponsibility (and even dishonesty) not to point out that global warming could inundate some number of populate centers. It’s as if the epidemiologists who picked up the association between smoking and lung cancer should have made sure that their work stayed quietly between the pages of learned journals.

Of course, as a sometime science writer and onetime lab worker, I’m biased here. I know that by the Strong Schneider Standard, almost all scientific papers are “dishonest” — the abstracts certainly are. There are always things authors leave out or gloss over in trying to communicate their results. That’s why a scientific paper isn’t just a trancript of people’s lab notebooks and whiteboards.

My rule for compression: anyone who knows what details have been left out should also be able to see that those details don’t affect the final conclusion. And that’s where I don’t see people like Schneider fitting the role of “dishonest” in the global-warming debate…

Steve, I have about as much respect for you as you do for me. You are useless and harmful whan it comes to politics. You stupidly endorsed other peoples’ smears of Schneider, agreeing with them that he’s advocating lying. You’ve put out a lot of doubletalk about “tactics” and “handing them weapons”, but that’s not what you mean. What you mean is that he was advocating lying and thus was a liar.

The hacks are happy to accept your endorsement of their smear, though they would never think of holding themselves to your standard.

Schneider confessed to dishonest science, and he shouldn’t have, because that was a gimme for the bad guys. But what he was doing was not dishonest politics or dishonest advocacy. It was an attempt at an effective political presentation of the scientific material. That’s a fairly simple argument, but you’re a bonehead. I’m glad to see the last of you too.

Your whole stupid argument hinges on that one word, “honesty”. What he was advocating doing — dramatizing things, leaving the doubts to talk about later — was not dishonest in the politics context in which he was operating. It was what every single peron in politics does. But it was not something that would fly in a scientific journal.

Soru, are you saying that the chlorofluorocarbon ban happened without advocates?

Soru, are you saying that the chlorofluorocarbon ban happened without advocates?

No, it happened without the benefit of dishonest, Fox News style advocacy. To the best of my knowledge, everyone involved held honesty as a standard to aspire to, not an unfortunate disadvantage to be worked around.

soru

Soru, I am not talking about Fox-style advocacy and neither was Schneider. And I do remember that there were some vivid scare stories about skin cancer going around during that debate. Normal political PR was used.

The reason this quote has stayed alive is Schneider has, on occasion, been accused of spinning things.

Bullshit, Jet. The reason the quote has been kept alive is because Schneider has been involved in a political debate all that time. As the original post here pointed out, Schneider’s adversaries started out by making up a quote, and most of them have track records worse than Schneider’s.

There are lots of fake quotes out there, and they “stay alive” because they do the job. The cheesy CATO thing you linked to wasn’t strictly fraud, but it mostly consisted of attacking the character of the envirnomentalists, which is the normal anti-environmentalist strategy. So whine all you want when I say bad things about you.

Schneider’s understanding of the science caused him to become a advocate. But to the CATO people, as soon as he became an advocate, he was just as sleazy as them (an opinion Steve shares) and “the truth must be somewhere in between”. Conservatarians don’t try to be right any more, they just try to prove that their opponents are equally bad.

“Almost everyone agreed” — basically you mean Steve plus a lot of anti-Schneider hacks. This thread is not a sample.

And you just said, this very minute, that making up quotes is basically OK if there’s just a difference of “nuance”, and that only true believers object. That’s as bad as anything Schneider’s been accused of.

Why should I take you seriously as an arbiter of honest political debate.

This entire discussion proves Schneider’s point exactly.

“We must make little mention of any doubts that we may have.”

Ironically enough, this quote itself is a mention of doubt. He is acknowledging that scientific journals and mainstream news sources have different standards. In science, you need to lay out all the evidence and go into all the detail and caveats. In the news media, you get a short sound bite.

What happens when Schneider acknowledges this? It gets jumped on as proof that scientists admittedly “stretch the truth” when they talk about climate change.

I guess he was wrong — obviously mentioning every single caveat is a good PR move, and you can count on your opponents not to amplify the doubts so as to twist the results.

People should read the Rich Puchalsky link from the beginning of the post. Schneider discusses the quote in some detail, which eliminates much of the need for speculation about what he is advocating exactly.

And Jet, there is an obvious difference between the full quote and the short quote. The tension in the full quote is between including all the caveats and providing simplified scenarios. The tension in the short quote is between being honest about what is going to happen and stretching the truth to provoke action.

Barbar,
Interpretation of the quote is still wide open. You want to answer this definitively, then examine how Schneider applied this quote to himself. Did he mislead to promote his stances, or did he simply streamline to remove unwarranted doubt? You can start by reading January 2002’s edition of Scientific American.

Soru, you haven’t established that the proponents of a chlorofluorocarbon ban used different debating tactics than those proposed by Schneider. I remember very well that there was a lot of dramatic stuff thrown out in that debate.

I can’t be sure whether you just came in late, or whether you are deliberately misrepresenting what’s been said, but neither Schneider nor any of his defenders is advocating Fox-news type falsehood and demogogy. We’re just advocating putting together a dramatic, memorable, persuasive political case different than, and more simplified than, the case which would be made at a scientific conference.

Interpretation of the quote is still wide open.

Postmedernism rears its ugly head. Jet LOVES wide-open interpretations.

The first phase of the “Ozone War”, which ran from about 1972 to 1978, actually resembled the AGW debate in many respects. The scale of the issue was much smaller, of course. Dupont, ICI, and others mounted an enormous PR campaign devoted to emphasizing the scientific uncertainties. They hired a British atmospheric scientist, Richard Scorer, to travel around the U.S. giving talks and debating the proponents of the CFC-ozone hypothesis (including an appearance on W. F. Buckley’s Firing Line.)playing the Richard Lindzen role. Robert Abplanalp, the inventor of the thingumajig on top of aerosol spray cans, even called the Chancellor of UC Irvine and tried to get him to put pressure on Rowland. On the other side, there was a movie called “Day of the Animals”, about animals driven crazy by UV coming through a depleted ozone layer, that by all accounts was even kookier than _The Day After Tomorrow_.

One major difference was that the affected industries didn’t use astroturf back then – they lobbied openly. Another was that they actually put a major amount of funding into primary scientific research on the issue, and in doing so used mechanisms that insulated the researchers from pressure. (The industry money was administered by a neutral agency established by the American Chemical Society, which solicited and evaluated grant proposals through a peer-review process.) In the end, much of the scientific support for the hypothesis came out of this work.

The second phase, which followed the discovery of the Antarctic Ozone Hole, began in similar fashion, but the results of the 1987 AAOE mission were so overwhelmingly decisive that the affected industries did a quick somersault (having prepared the ground by research into CFC alternatives during the interim period.) This, together with the industry-funded research mentioned above, led to the conspiracy theory popular in the early 1990’s, to the effect that the halocarbon industries had staged the whole thing so that they could collect windfall profits from the new CFC substitutes. (The proponents of this theory argued that the patents on CFC’s were “running out” – in fact, they had expired many decades ago.)

Jet said: “I now have coffee all over my tie.”

Well, jet, do you really have coffe all over your tie? You really should not drink coffe near your computer, you know. But I believe that you made a poetic exaggregation.

That’s fine by me, though, because it doesn’t change what you are actually saying. Nor, perhaps, does condensing a 30-page text on human-affected global warming to “It happens, and it’s Bad” change what it’s actually saying.