From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.
An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.
…However, carbon dioxide fertilization isn’t the only cause of increased plant growth—nitrogen, land cover change and climate change by way of global temperature, precipitation and sunlight changes all contribute to the greening effect. To determine the extent of carbon dioxide’s contribution, researchers ran the data for carbon dioxide and each of the other variables in isolation through several computer models that mimic the plant growth observed in the satellite data.
Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect, said co-author Ranga Myneni, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University. “The second most important driver is nitrogen, at 9 percent. So we see what an outsized role CO2 plays in this process.”
The Economist has a short piece on climate change and politics that is as obvious as it is interesting. The partisan divide on climate change began in 1997 “when a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, threw his weight behind the UN effort to introduce mandatory caps for greenhouse-gas emissions.” Political support of science often has nothing to do with scientific literacy (as the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale has demonstrated). “Knowledge of science makes little difference to people’s beliefs about climate change,” the article states, “except that it makes them more certain about what they believe. Republicans with a good knowledge of science are more sceptical about global warming than less knowledgeable Republicans.” Climate change also seems to a concern of the privileged: “The rich are more concerned about climate change than the poor, who have many other things to worry about. A giant opinion-gathering exercise carried out by the United Nations finds that people in highly developed countries view climate change as the tenth most important issue out of a list of 16 that includes health care, phone and internet access, jobs, political freedom and reliable energy. In poor countries—and indeed in the world as a whole—climate change comes 16th out of 16.”
What is perhaps most interesting is that despite the gaps in percentage, the trends tend to be the same for Republicans, Independents, and Democrats.
Golden rice was possible only with genetic engineering. The crop was stalled for more than ten years by the working conditions and requirements demanded by regulations…For example, we lost more than two years for the permission to test golden rice in the field and more than four years in collecting data for a regulatory dossier that would satisfy any national biosafety authority. I therefore hold the regulation of genetic engineering responsible for the death and blindness of thousands of children and young mothers.
This comes from Ingo Potrykus’ rather famous article in a July 2010 issue of Nature and is a written slap in the face to anti-GMO activists and the politicians who embrace them. This opposition has been described as partisan, though the anti-science stances of various parties are much closer than we often assume. I was reminded of the above quote after reading an article in Newsweek discussing new biotechnology and its opposition:
In 2012, a new tool was invented that revolutionizes how scientists can examine—and manipulate—plant genetic processes. It’s called CRISPR-Cas9, and unlike its predecessors in the world of genetic modification, it is highly specific, allowing scientists to zero in on a single gene and turn it on or off, remove it or exchange it for a different gene. Early signs suggest this tool will be an F-16 jet fighter compared with the Stone Age spear of grafting, the traditional, painstaking means of breeding a new plant hybrid. Biologists and geneticists are confident it can help them build a second Green Revolution—if we’ll let them.
…The process can easily modify plant DNA without changing the plant’s essence—except to make it tastier, more nutritious, quicker to market, easier to ship, machine-pickable, less needy of water and/or able to flourish in a heat wave. And we can do it for big companies and small, the world at large and isolated communities…In the old days, relying on hit-or-miss natural processes to breed plants took many years. Norman Borlaug, father of the first Green Revolution—a hugely successful effort to improve food-crop productivity in poor countries that began in the 1940s and eventually doubled or even quadrupled what many plants could produce—needed almost two decades to create a better wheat variety. With CRISPR-Cas9, we can compress that development cycle to a few days or weeks.
And yet, the activists continue to protest:
“Mexico, where maize was first domesticated, must now import it to meet local demand because activists there will not allow genetically modified organism hybrids. Mexico’s maize growers get yields 38 percent lower than the world average and three times below the U.S., where 90 percent of the maize crop is an insect-resistant GMO hybrid. Mexico’s fields are beset by such crop ravishers as the corn earworm, black cutworm and fall armyworm, which cost the country up to half its crops and incite farmers to spray their land with thousands of tons of chemical insecticides.”
“The European Union has approved just one genetically modified crop, a type of maize used for animal feed. The reasons are political and bureaucratic: A majority of member countries must approve a biotech plant, and anti-GMO sentiment runs strong in places where phrases like naturel and natürliche are more about what’s been done for centuries than what it actually means for something to exist in or be caused by nature.”
“The notion of GMOs has spooked environmental groups such as Greenpeace, which has resisted GMOs with violent action, including destroying an experimental Golden Rice field last year in the Philippines. This despite the fact that Golden Rice is being offered to the world by a nonprofit, with no commercial stipulations, and is likely to save many lives.”
““No GMO” is now being embraced by consumer brands; the ascendant “fast-casual” chain Chipotle posts just such a sign in its restaurants. It makes sense: If over two-thirds of Americans think GMOs are unhealthy, declaring yourself GMO-free is a lucrative proposition. Local governments are also weighing in. Vermont now demands that all GMO foods sold there be labeled as such. Two rural counties in Oregon have banned GMO crops within their borders.”
The article ends with a quote from Gengyun Zhang, head of life sciences for BGI (China’s giant state-sponsored genetic engineering center): “With today’s technology, I have no doubt that we can feed the world.” Considering that the number of scientists who think GMOs are safe is slightly higher than those who think climate change is mostly due to human activity, perhaps we should give science a chance and activists the cold shoulder.
I stand by my assertions that although you can know what happens to any individual species that you modify, you cannot be certain what will happen to the ecosystem.
Also, we have a strange situation where we have malnourished fat people. It’s not that we need more food. It’s that we need to manage our food system better.
So when corporations seek government funding for genetic modification of food sources, I stroke my chin.
Yet even though I’m in favor of GMOs, I think he’s perfectly fine signalling caution about the difficulty of studying cause/effect within whole ecosystems and potential political/corporate interests in science. As scientists and engineers, we should always be questioning how our theories and models can be inaccurate or inadequate, and as human beings, we should always be wary of outside influences on science. Yet by Bill Nye’s own standards, he’s a denier. There are no studies to indicate environmental problems with GMOs, and if the amount of corporate and political influence in GMOs worries Bill Nye, he should be equally suspicious about climate change.
As a practicing engineer, this is what drives me bonkers about many supposed science advocates who brook no dissent on their chosen topics. You either find out that they have little known reservations about other topics where the science is “clear” (like Bill Nye), or they have zero reservations or skepticism about anything scientific consensus says, in which case they are professing the most anti-scientific belief possible (like Neil DeGrasse Tyson). The heart of science is realizing that all theories are provisional, that at best our theories can be well attested, never absolutely proven true. Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of science, believed that:
Scientific theories…are not inductively inferred from experience, nor is scientific experimentation carried out with a view to verifying or finally establishing the truth of theories; rather, all knowledge is provisional, conjectural, hypothetical—we can never finally prove our scientific theories, we can merely (provisionally) confirm or (conclusively) refute them; hence at any given time we have to choose between the potentially infinite number of theories which will explain the set of phenomena under investigation. Faced with this choice, we can only eliminate those theories which are demonstrably false, and rationally choose between the remaining, unfalsified theories. Hence Popper’s emphasis on the importance of the critical spirit to science—for him critical thinking is the very essence of rationality. For it is only by critical thought that we can eliminate false theories, and determine which of the remaining theories is the best available one, in the sense of possessing the highest level of explanatory force and predictive power.
I suppose people will now want to know what I believe about climate change, or conversely, if I say nothing people will probably start assuming. I know the earth is warming up. That’s not very hard to measure. I know that humans contribute to that warming. Again, not very hard to measure nor controversial. I do not know, though, to what extent humans contribute to the warming, nor to what extent reducing our greenhouse gas output a reasonable amount would actually slow this warming. That’s where the science of the matter gets difficult, because now we’re dealing with a whole ecosystem (like with GMOs), and sussing out cause and effect in a whole ecosystem is tricky. So currently, I have no strong opinion one way or the other. We could be contributing greatly to warming. Or our input could be modest. Modeling these effects and predicting warming rates is finicky to say the least.
Then when we get to the politics and economics of global warming, the situation is even messier. Will carbon taxes actually reduce greenhouse gas output in any significant amount worth the economic costs? Can we even reduce our greenhouse gas output any appreciable amount that won’t send the American public into shock? This is where global warming gets beyond my expertise.
So generally I just support measures that benefit us anyways with the side effect of combating greenhouse gas output. I support monitoring and regulating pollution output. I support continuing research into alternative energy sources, which isn’t just solar and wind for the record. We have geothermal, hydroelectric, wave energy, biomass, and more. I realize many of these methods are limited in their production capacity, location, and reliability, but they are capable of producing power amounts that aren’t insignificant.
More importantly, I support nuclear power, which has none of the above limitations. Now this is where all the talk about supporting science gets really odd. Nuclear power plants have a very good safety record (despite what the news says), and engineers are constantly working to make them better. On top of that, add the context of nuclear safety versus other sources of power. On top of that, add some perspective on radiation amounts (yes I cited XKCD). On top of that, add the oft cited dire effects of global warming. In that context, how can opposing nuclear power be anything short of anti-scientific and ridiculous, using the vocabulary abundant in discussion of global warming? And yet, people do it. Many climate scientists are jumping on board the nuclear train, but there’s still plenty of opposition. People proclaim the inviolability of scientific consensus in one context and then turn around to challenge it in a different context.
So, what general principles can we derive from this long-winded analysis? I would say people need to be able to simultaneously hold two seemingly contradictory concepts in their mind: Science is a quest for understanding the natural world, and science can never finally prove anything. With that knowledge, we should respect the explanatory power of science but also realize that science relies fundamentally on a critical spirit. We cannot crush dissent, nor should set ourselves up as arbiters of what constitutes “valid” dissent, which is really just crushing dissent by a different name. Rather, we must continually attempt to falsify our own theories, and if they survive the continuing ordeals, we can begin to call them well attested. But even then we must not close our minds, even as we defend theories we believe to be well attested. Newtonian physics reigned 300 years before general relativity showed up.
How do these principles look practically? I would say they manifest themselves in simultaneously laying down what we know while maintaining a spirit of humility. For example, I have defended evolution numerous times contra creationism. I don’t resort to telling people they’re scientifically illiterate (even though people who try to tell a chemical engineer how the 2nd law of thermodynamics “actually” works might qualify). I don’t demand they accept the consensus of science over their doubts (which would be horrifically anti-scientific). Rather, I just tell them what I know and demonstrate the explanatory power of evolution. You’d be surprised how well that works. Even if people don’t change their minds right then and there, it gets their minds thinking, and it allays their fears that I have an ulterior motive for defending evolution.
I believe these principles would serve science advocacy well. There is no contradiction between lacking absolute certainty and seeking scientific knowledge. In fact, the two work together. By realizing our own limitations, we can continually revise our understanding to better reflect what we see and what we know of the natural world. To say that we have finally and definitively figured out the answers ends the scientific quest and permanently extinguishes the scientific spirit.
Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece by Dr. Judith Curry, former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the President of the Climate Forecast Applications Network. The gist of the article is simple: global warming predictions based on current models are predicting unrealistically high levels of climate change. The real levels–based on observational models–are much lower.
Continuing to rely on climate-model warming projections based on high, model-derived values of climate sensitivity skews the cost-benefit analyses and estimates of the social cost of carbon. This can bias policy decisions. The implications of the lower values of climate sensitivity in our paper, as well as similar other recent studies, is that human-caused warming near the end of the 21st century should be less than the 2-degrees-Celsius “danger” level for all but the IPCC’s most extreme emission scenario.
This slower rate of warming—relative to climate model projections—means there is less urgency to phase out greenhouse gas emissions now, and more time to find ways to decarbonize the economy affordably. It also allows us the flexibility to revise our policies as further information becomes available.
To me, this represents a moderate and mature approach to climate change. Curry’s work neither denies global warming nor the human factor in causing global warming. It simply suggests that climate models are biased upwards, and that we might have more time. Time that could be used to develop more sophisticated solutions to a post-carbon economy. This is really important given news like (just as an example) the announcement from Lockheed Martin that they are just 5 years away from a prototype nuclear fusion reactor.
I just finished reading Tim Flannery’s Here on Earth, which was the most eloquent and serious defense of the Gaia Hypothesis I’ve ever read, so I really like the idea of greater human responsibility for our environment. I just think we’ll do a better job of living up to that responsibility if we have (1) a little less partisanship and (2) a deeper understanding of the relevant science. A little more time can help.
Hank Campbell at Science 2.0 has a great post on natural gas and climate change. After noting that the IPCC reported that methane has 23x the global warming effect as CO2 (though CO2 lasts longer), Campbell mentions a couple recent studies “that methane will cause global warming regardless of CO2″:
What changed? Well, CO2 emissions went down, and it wasn’t due to the $72 billion in taxpayer money which included solar panel subsidies or the afterthought of wind power or the other get-rich-quick schemes in alternative energy we have tried since 2009 – it even happened without nuclear power, the best and most viable zero-emissions energy of them all. It also happened without banning existing energy. The big change instead came because America switched to natural gas, and that was thanks to science and the free market. Due to that switch, energy emissions haven’t looked this good in 20 years. Coal emissions haven’t looked this good in 30 years.
Believe it or not, to environmental fundraisers, that is a really bad thing.
With CO2 emissions dropping, activists have started to wind up the machine against methane and they note it is worse than CO2 – without mentioning that it is short-lived or that it is the primary component in cleaner natural gas. Instead, ‘natural’ is being removed from the term completely and replaced with ‘shale’.
The answer to climate change according to many environmentalists is to just throw money at it:
Environmentalists…who know nothing at all about how real innovation works think they can just throw money at one thing and penalize another and capitalism magic happens. The real world, outside of academia and fundraising brochures, is a lot messier. Like evolution, innovation has starts and stops, sometimes it tries a few times and fails. What has never worked is assuming that if we spend 100X as much money, the process will go 100X as fast.
Environmentalists should be happy. Unfortunately, many are too busy worried about their pet agendas.
The whole global warming issue is pretty controversial, and one of the reasons for that is that–no matter what the consensus on the science might be–there’s actually a long and convoluted path from “human carbon emissions make the world warmer” to answering the question “what should we do about it?”
One of the big uncertainties, of course, is the cost-benefit analysis of policies designed to slow global warming. That’s what the Freakonomics guys did in one of their chapters from Super Freakonomics, and their conclusion was that–assuming climate change is real–there might not be any policy to stop it that is worth the cost. That claim, as you can imagine, landed them in some hot water.
But there are other uncertainties as well. So the planet gets warmer. So ice at the poles melts and sea levels rise, right? Well, maybe not so fast:
It’s a nagging thorn in the side of climatologists: Even though the world is warming, the average area of the sea ice around Antarctica is increasing. Climate models haven’t explained this seeming contradiction to anyone’s satisfaction—and climate change deniers tout that failure early and often. But a new paper suggests a possible explanation: Variability in the heights of ocean waves pounding into the sea ice may help control its advance and retreat.
That’s Carolyn Gramling writing for Science. She goes on to summarize the paper’s theory: warmer climate means lower waves, lower waves means less pounding on sea ice, less pounding on sea ice means slower melting to the point where (as noted above) sea ice in Antarctica is actually growing instead of shrinking.
The reality is that the Earth’s atmosphere and land and ecosystems and the sun’s radiation all work together to form a very, very, very complex system full of all kinds of negative and positive feedback loops that we know nothing about. This is just one example. Ice has been growing since at least 1979 despite projections, but no one had a clue. Now they have one but it is, of course, still just a clue. As science goes: this is great. When the data doesn’t line up with your predictions, it means you’re not understanding something and you have a chance for a new discovery.
But as a basis for expensive, global policy-making goes, this is not so great. The one thing all policies to thwart global warming have in common is making energy more expensive which will have the effect of lowering growth which will have the effect of keeping more people in the developed world in poverty for longer. We can be much more certain about that then we can about the corresponding threat from global warming. After all, we can’t even predict if the sea levels will rise at all, let alone by how much, so how can we begin to make a careful evaluation of the cost/benefit of policies to mitigate this unknown danger?
The consensus on global warming is often trotted out as a cudgel with which to beat skeptics, but this isn’t really effective once you step back and realize that climate change, itself, is only one part of a much, much more complex puzzle.
This post will be a little bit more free-form than what I usually write. So buckle up, we’ve got some ground to travel.
What The Elders Know
I read a story as a kid that stuck with me. It was about a team of 1990s archaeologists who decided to excavate a 1950s landfill just to get an objective measurement for what ordinary, everyday life was really like 4 decades before. When they dug up the trash, they found human remains. Skeletons. First it was just a couple, and they thought it might have been mob violence, but then they found more and more. Something horrible had happened in this town, just 40 years ago. But it was forgotten to history. The elderly folks of the community, the only ones who would know the secret of what had happened, came to the digging site and stood staring at the excavation. Saying nothing. Whatever had happened, no one would ever know because they never broke their silence.
At the time, the story mostly just made me reconsider what we know, really know, based on our limited first-hand experience. But it also planted this idea of a group of people who are bound together by some common knowledge that they have that nobody else does.
I realize there’s a sinister spin to that tale, and that’s not what I’m going for. It’s just that idea that there are experiences that no one can tell you about. You can’t understand unless you’ve been there yourself. And, if you have been there, no explanation is necessary. From what I understand, combat is like that. I’ve read books, like On Killing, that describe some of the effects, but it’s really just enough for me to know that I don’t really get it. And, as a non-military guy, never will. Veterans understand something I can’t comprehend.
In my experience, being married is like that, too. Marriage, for me and my beloved wife, has been really, really hard at times. From talking to our close friends we’ve learned that that’s pretty common. All the couples that I know well enough to have discussed this with describe going through harrowing bad times that shook their faith in themselves, their spouse, their marriage, and pretty much everything they believed in. And nobody warned us. Nobody told us how bad it could get, and probably would get. I think partially that’s because we just forget–the bad times are already receding into memory for me–but I think it’s also just because you can’t convey what it’s like to someone who hasn’t been there. And you certainly can’t simultaneously convey how much it’s going to hurt and how much it’s still going to be worth it. There’s just nothing to say.
It’s true of raising kids, too. There are a lot of parenting jokes, and even before I was parent I more or less got them, but the most traumatic, mundane experiences of being a parent–like the sheer terror of holding a little baby that is sick and can’t tell you what’s wrong–there’s just absolutely no way to convey that feeling to someone who hasn’t been there. There’s deep connection between parents that crosses pretty much every other social boundary you can think of. I’m reminded of Jerry Holkins’ description of the birth of his son. Holkins writes often excessively vulgar comics about video games for a living. He’s a West Coast atheist with a troubled family history who jokes about porn, who never went to college, and who has a multi-million dollar company that runs giant conventions in Seattle, Boston, Australia, and now San Antonio. So, other than that we’re both geeks, we don’t have a lot in common. But when he described the way he felt after watching his wife deliver their son, I knew that there was one deep, defining experience we had in common:
I am not trying to jostle for primacy over the birth act, the utter valor of which is indelible – I’m fairly certain the credit is going to the right people. There is, however, a parallel experience that I never hear much about, something amazing and profound about the helplessness, the desperation of events which are perhaps a million long miles beyond your control. I just want to find other fathers and, looking at them across the aisles in the grocery store, hold my right fist aloft. I am with you.
There are lots more experiences like this, as well. I think of all the times I got advice from mentors–friends and family with more experience than me–about life decisions. What to study in school, whether to buy a house, what to do with my career, how to follow my passions. Time and time again I’ve found that some of the most important advice was always the advice that, no matter how much I earnestly wanted to learn from these people, I just couldn’t follow. I couldn’t follow it because I couldn’t even understand it. It didn’t compute. I might have thought I understood, but I lacked the perspective and the context to see when and how it applied in my life. I only figured out, years and mistakes later, what it was that they had been trying to tell me.
All of this means that the older I get the more I respect my elders. They’ve been there. They’ve been through a lot of the big experiences but also just the accumulated weight of life under uncertainty. They’ve been on the ride longer. The highs, the lows, what changes, what stays the same. I think they know things, things that maybe I won’t be able to understand until I get there myself. My father’s father passed away too young. As the years go by, I find that I miss him more. Not less. I wish he were here.
Maybe he could help me make sense of this crazy world.
Sound and Fury
Let me be clear about what I mean when I say “this crazy world.” I mean the world is full of people who hold such absolutely wildly divergent opinions and perspectives that if you try to get out there and really understand what’s motivating them all your brain feels like it might break under the strain. Humans handle complexity primarily through abstraction. We find patterns, drop the details, and hold onto the narratives. But when the thing that interests and concerns you is precisely the narratives and paradigms that other people are seeing the world through, abstraction is easier said than done.
Here, enough generalities, lets get to some specifics.
Just a few hours ago, a friend posted an article from Mother Jones about How Gun Extremists Target Women. It starts with the experiences of Jennifer Longdon, a woman who uses a wheelchair because she was permanently paralyzed when a random assailant shot her and her fiancee for no apparent reason. Since becoming a vocal advocate for more gun control laws, she has been spat upon, cursed at, threatened, and even had some guy jump out of the bushes at night and spray her with a realistic-looking water gun. My friend’s comment when he posted the article was just, “Wow. Um, wow.” I guess he believes this is accurate of a small but vocal minority of gun rights activists? My first reaction was that, hey, I’ve been involved in this movement for years (only loosely, but still) and I’ve never seen any behavior like that.
Except that, hours later, I realized that I kind of had. On one particular gun forum I used to hang out at things got way out of hand in a heated debate and next thing you know people are trying to use the real world to intimidate their ideological foes, everything from digging up personal photos to threatening civil and criminal action. I don’t think death threats were involved–and none of the participants were women–but it was ugly enough that I still have screenshots saved on my computer more than 5 years later just in case I ever need to defend myself.
Let’s move on rather than analyze. What else have we got? Oh, how about this gem from the Daily Mail about how a respected climate scientist with over 200 publications joined the board of a skeptical organization (the Global Warming Policy Foundation) because:
I thought joining the organisation would provide a platform for me to bring more common sense into the global climate change debate. ‘I have been very concerned about tensions in the climate change community between activists and people who have questions.
So, he tried to bring some reason and cross-partisan talk to a contentious and serious debate? Big mistake. Next thing you know he’s being harassed online and it got to a point where an American co-author of a paper pulled out because he refused to be associated with someone who was associated with a skeptical organization, even if the person had joined the skeptical organization to try and temper it. Not good enough. Professor Lennart Bengtssen lasted a grand total of three weeks in his new position before the pressure forced him to resign.
Or how about the rash of colleges that have withdrawn invitations to commencement speakers because students protested against allowing anyone who was insufficiently ideologically pure to contaminate their ears. It’s gotten to a point where The Daily Beast[rerf]Not exactly a bastion of conservative sensibilities.[/ref] published an article with the headline proclaiming that The Oh-So-Fragile Class of 2014 Needs to STFU And Listen to Some New Ideas. Olivia Nuzzi writes about how Christine Legarde (head of the IMF) got uninvited from Smith College’s commencement in the same month that Condoleeza Rice pulled out of a speaking gig at Rutgers. (Nuzzi doesn’t mention a third example that we covered at Difficult Run: Brandeis decided that Ayaan Hirsi Ali didn’t deserve an honorary degree after all.)
Wait, wait. There’s more. How about Neil deGrasse Tyson slamming philosophy–yes, the entire discipline of philosophy as ‘useless’. A quick review of his comments is instructive. He frames it as an objective, and pragmatic stance (i.e. non-ideological) but seems to lack the philosophical sophistication to realize that far from brushing philosophy off, what he’s actually doing is engaging in a purge of the wrong kind of philosophy. Materialist reductionism? That’s fine. It’s just all those other kinds of philosophy that are useless. I guess he has so dogmatically accepted his own particular philosophical stance that he’s forgotten it isn’t an unyielding element of the fabric of the objective universe. It’s just the particular brand of philosophy he happens to prefer.
Meanwhile, the UN is trying to get pro-life perspectives classified as “torture.” No, really. The Center for Reproductive Rights submitted a letter stating that:
CRR respects the right of each individual to freedom of religion and acknowledges the importance of religious institutions in the lives of people, including the role they may play in ensuring respect for human dignity. As with any party to an international human rights treaty, however, the Holy See is bound to respect, protect, and fulfill a range of human rights through its policies and its actions. As such, this letter focuses on violations of key provisions of the Convention against Torture associated with the Holy See’s policies on abortion and contraception, as well as actions taken by the Holy See and its subsidiary institutions to prevent access to reproductive health information and services in countries around the world.
So, freedom of religion is a nice idea, but if it entails opposition to abortion then you’re in contravention of the Convention against Torture. Uh… OK?
And, as long as we’re hitting pretty much every hot-button issue of the day, let’s move right along to gay rights and Hollywood’s Sex Abuse Cover Up. Describing the wall of silence about growing allegations of sexual abuse of children by Holywood elites, conservative writer Andrew Klavan observed simply that:
If these [people accused of pedophilia] were conservatives, if these were priests, if they were religious people, this would be a huge story. But as it is, it’s gonna get swept under the rug unless more people come forward.
The article describes sexual abuse detailed by Corey Feldman (of Boy Meets World) in his new memoir, abuse that started when he was 11, along with allegations of abuse against director Bryan Singer and then an absurdly white-washed version of history in the film Kill Your Darlings. The film is supposedly a biopic centering on Lucien Carr, who assembled the original Beat Generation. It portrays Carr’s professor David Kammerer as a kind of mentor and possible romantic interest. The reality? Kammerer was a pedophile stalker who sexually abused Carr to such an extent that, when Carr finally fatally stabbed his tormenter with a Boy Scout knife, the history of abuse convinced the judge to be lenient in sentencing him. That history–the real history, according to Carr’s family–is swept under the rug. Maybe this is about preserving the image of the gay community during the height of the gay rights movement, but hey: Hollywood has been a safe haven for child rapists of the heterosexual persuasion too, so maybe it’s just a generic “Your rules don’t apply here,” kind of thing.
I started with a kind of anti-conservative example, then moved onto a series of anti-liberal examples, so now let’s get back to conservative nuttiness. This YouTube video hails from 2007, so it’s not new, but it was stomach churning for me to watch.
In it, a Hindu guest chaplain tries to offer the opening prayer in the Senate when he is shouted down by Christians saying stuff like “forgive us Father for allowing the prayer of the wicked which is an abomination in your sight.” You’d think folks who tend to think God had a hand in founding this nation might have more reverence for the principles of tolerance and religious freedom that went into it. Well, I’d think that. If I weren’t so cynical.
Here’s what these examples all seem to have in common to me. It’s not about politics. It’s not even about a particular issue. It’s about the idea that we shouldn’t be tolerant of views that contradict our own. It’s about the idea that we should squelch views that we disagree with, rather than engage them. Gun rights proponents issue death threats to paralyzed women who disagree. Climate scientists sabotage the careers and reputations of one of their own when he so much as appears to depart from the orthodox view. College kids block speakers who might disagree with them from being able to speak. The Catholic Church (and, by extension, anyone who is pro-life) gets labeled as a torturer in contravention of international norms and human decency. Hollywood directors silence their critics and rewrite history to protect the reputation of favored groups and individuals. Christians won’t even let a man pray just because he has a different faith.
Look, I’m on all sides of these issues (and maybe off the charts on a couple of them), but that’s just my point. It’s not about the issues. This is not civilized, rational, healthy behavior. Here’s my absolute favorite one, though. It delves deep, deep into crazy town to showcase a meeting of Anarcho-Syndicalists getting shut down because Students of Unity refused to allow one of the anarchist professors to speak. (Warning: video has lots of swearing.)
I actually got curious to figure out what was behind the kerfuffle. Apparently Students of Unity are mad that anarchist Kristian Williams wrote some stuff that included “survivor shaming” and “survivor doubt” and that constitutes “violence.” Williams isn’t feminist enough, and needs to be “accountable for all the people who feel unsafe by the words [she chooses].” I did a little Googling to find the offending piece. It’s called The Politics of Denunciation. It’s absolutely fascinating and spooky to read, because in it Williams writes against exactly what I’ve been describing. She takes a stand against those who try to pre-empt differing views from ever being expressed at all.
The particular target she has in mind is the idea that a survivor of an attack (like sexual assault) must be the only voice allowed to speak at all:
Under this theory, the survivor, and the survivor alone, has the right to make demands, while the rest of us are duty-bound to enact sanctions without question. One obvious implication is that all allegations are treated as fact.
So what she’s saying is that, “Hey, just because someone accuses someone else of sexual assault, it doesn’t automatically mean that whatever that person said is automatically true and that no other perspective is relevant.” Seems pretty tame. But the more general argument she makes is that quashing differing views is a bad thing to do:
While attempting to elevate feminism to a place above politics, the organizers’ statement in fact advances a very specific kind of politics. Speaking authoritatively but anonymously, the “Patriarchy and the Movement” organizers declare certain questions off-limits, not only (retroactively) for their own event, but seemingly altogether. These questions cannot be asked because, it is assumed, there is only one answer, and the answer is already known. The answer is, in practice, whatever the survivor says that it is.
It seems like a very obscure, tiny, fringe discussion, but it’s actually not. It’s the same pattern as every single example I’ve expressed so far. Someone claims to be above politics (like Neil deGrasse Tyson is above philosophy) but in fact they are just trying to elevate a very particular political statement beyond question and thereby silence all dissenting views. Williams argued that we should make room for multiple viewpoints. And for that she and her whole panel were shouted down and silenced.
Nowhere To Turn
It may seem that I’m focusing on some weird, esoteric issues. And I’ll definitely admit that what dragged me down this rabbit hole in the first place was my attempt to delve deeper into the SFWA controversy I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. That, in turn, spawned the article that I wrote about trigger warnings. I took a mostly conservative view in those posts because that’s who I am, but maybe the saddest thing about this whole controversy is that, from where I’m standing, there are no good guys and bad guys. I’d love to just toss my hat in with the conservatives and feel like I have a home, but I can’t. I can’t because–much as I have no beef with folks like Wright, and Torgersen, and even Correia–the more I dug into what Vox Day had said (and he’s the conservative who really got the liberals angry in the first place) the more I decided that a lot of what the liberals said about him is true. The central allegation is that he’s a racist, and it’s based on comments that he made about an African-American writer N. K. Jemisin. So I found the blog post in question, and I read it. Here’s the money paragraph:
Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males. If one considers that it took my English and German ancestors more than one thousand years to become fully civilized after their first contact with advanced Greco-Roman civilization, it should be patently obvious that it is illogical to imagine, let alone insist, that Africans have somehow managed to do the same in less than half the time at a greater geographic distance. These things take time.
In other blog posts, Vox Day denies being a racist. I can see he might be trying to get off on a technicality, something like “it’s not about race, per se, it’s just that civilization takes time, and Africans have been exposed to (Greco Roman) civilization for a shorter period of time.” Yeah, I’m not buying it because Vox Day is obviously not arguing in good faith. He talks about the “greater geographic distance” it would take for Africa to become civilized (let’s just not even touch that one for a moment) when the person he is calling “half-savage” was born in Iowa.
So there’s your microcosm of what is wrong with the world. We’ve got just enough folks like Vox Day to enable folks like the Students of Unity who shouted down Kristian Williams to feel justified in trying to intimidate anyone into silence who disagrees with them.
And that’s why I want to ask those old folks–those elderly men and women with decades’ worth of life lessons I haven’t experienced yet–is it always like this? I wish someone could tell me it’s gonna get better–or at least that it’s been worse–because it’s kind of lonely and scary to feel that not only have the loonies taken over the asylum, but they broken down the walls, invaded city hall, and taken over there, too.
Because, yeah, I’d love to chalk this up to upstart young idiots not knowing any better and how every generation always thinks the generation after them is going to destroy the world. And that might work for all those stories of college undergraduates protesting against speakers they don’t want to hear or Students of Unity shouting down anyone they don’t like, but Vox Day is not a kid. The gun control opponents who spit on Longdon are not kids. The Center for Reproductive Rights is not, to my knowledge, run by kids. The Christians who shouted down the Hindu chaplain didn’t sound like kids. These are grown ups, in theory at least, and they are occasionally in positions of real power.
And yeah, every generation thinks the world is going to hell in handbasket once the next generation starts to take over, but every now and then they’re right, aren’t they? Sometimes the sky is falling.
Me, I guess I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing. I’ve got my views, and they are mostly conservative, but I also believe in tolerance and intellectual diversity. Maybe it’s foolish and naive, but I like the idea of having noble ideological adversaries that I oppose, but that engage in a fight that has rules and principles. So, although it’s not as loud or as exciting or as clear-cut as what other sites can offer, that’s what we’ll keep doing here at Difficult Run.
One More Thing: About that Right to Free Speech
XKCD recently had a comic about the right to free speech.
Mouse over text: “I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.”
Technically, of course, it’s correct. But it’s a deeply disturbing view. The right to free speech has always been more than a strict legalism in American culture. It’s always been about more than just the freedom from government censorship. It has always involved a culture of tolerance. A view that not only is the government legally prohibited from regulating speech, but also that we as Americans ought to relish our chaotic, free-wheeling, marketplace of ideas. No, there’s no law that says people have to listen to you and there never should be. No, there’s no law that protects people from being free from other people telling them that they think their speech is crap. And again: there never should be. But when a bunch of people get together and use their own freedom of speech to silence someone they don’t like: it’s a violation of who we are as Americans even if it’s not technically a violation of someone’s legal rights.
Randall Munroe (author of XKCD) is right on the letter of the law, but he’s wrong on the spirit. I don’t know exactly where to draw the line, and I’m not saying we should never boycott. We have a comment policy here at Difficult Run, after all. Communities need to regulate what is and is not considered acceptable for that community. But I just wish that tolerance–real tolerance of genuinely conflicting ideas–was something that more communities would actively choose to embrace. Not because the law requires them to do so, but just because it’s the right thing to do.
[V]irtually every major national environmental organization continues to reject nuclear energy, even after four leading climate scientists wrote them an open letter last fall, imploring them to embrace the technology as a key climate solution. Together with catastrophic rhetoric, the rejection of technologies like nuclear and natural gas by environmental groups is most likely feeding the perception among many that climate change is being exaggerated. After all, if climate change is a planetary emergency, why take nuclear and natural gas off the table?
While the urgency that motivates exaggerated claims is understandable, turning down the rhetoric and embracing solutions like nuclear energy will better serve efforts to slow global warming.
So concludes an excellent op-ed in The New York Times. I remember reading in The Economist a couple years ago that America’s CO2 emissions had decreased largely due to fracking and the shale gas boom. Yet, many environmentalists continue to object to both natural gas and nuclear power as solutions to climate change.
Just one more reason why I think a serious scientific issue has been hijacked by political agendas.
There is a great post over at the Newton Blog on RealClearScience about Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who was the Father of the Green Revolution. It demonstrates the difference between the Green Revolution and Green Imperialism. Starting in Mexico, he toiled “for endless hours in the lab and in the fields to breed a wheat plant that was resistant to disease, thick-stemmed, and enormously productive.” Mexico’s wheat yield was six times higher in 1963, sixteen years after Borlaug’s arrival. Ninety-five percent of Mexico’s wheat was of “Borlaug’s dwarf variety.” Developing nations began sowing Borlaug’s crop. The results? “Global yields skyrocketed. Starvation rates decreased. Doom was postponed.”
Yet, environmental lobbyists attempted to block Borlaug’s expansion into Africa. They even convinced the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation to cut funding. While Borlaug was able to boost Ethiopia’s wheat yield to record levels, Africa is still steeped in starvation.
“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists…” he told The Atlantic. “If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
But the post doesn’t stop there. It captures perfectly what is often wrong with environmental debates:
As with most debates, this one comes down to intrinsic values. From our lofty position in the developed world, we have the luxury to value the fallacious image of pristine, untouched nature over feeding ourselves. Hunger simply isn’t something that most of us are familiar with.
“These people have never been around hungry people,” Borlaug says of people like this. “They’re Utopians. They sit and philosophize. They don’t live in the real world.”
Proselytizing is easy. But try doing it when you’re starving.
From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.
get yields 38 percent lower than the world average and three times below the U.S., where 90 percent of the maize crop is an insect-resistant GMO hybrid. Mexico’s fields are beset by such crop ravishers as the corn earworm, black cutworm and fall armyworm, which cost the country up to half its crops and incite farmers to spray their land with thousands of tons of chemical insecticides.”
, that describe some of the effects, but it’s really just enough for me to know that I don’t really get it. And, as a non-military guy, never will. Veterans understand something I can’t comprehend.
