In keeping with our role as a site that tries to deal with the science of climate change rather than the politics, we have specifically refrained from commenting on various politically-motivated legal shenanigans relating to climate science. Some of them have involved us directly, but we didn’t (don’t) want to have RC become just a blog about us. However, the latest move by Ken Cuccinelli, the Attorney General of Virginia, against Mike Mann and UVa is so ridiculous it needs to be highlighted to the widest audience possible.
For background, Rosalind Helderman at the Washington Post has covered most of the story. The last installment was that Cuccinelli’s attempt to subpoena 10 years of emails between 39 scientists and Mike Mann and ‘all documents’ residing at UVa related to four federal and one Commonwealth of Virginia grant, was thrown out by a judge because Cuccinelli did not provide any reason to suspect that fraud had occurred and that federal grants are not covered by the relevant statute. Without due cause, the AG is not allowed to investigate (and without such a restriction, there would be no end to politically motivated witch hunts).
Yesterday, Cuccinelli filed a new demand that takes this previous judgment into account. Namely, he attempts to give a reason to suspect fraud and only targets the Commonwealth grant – though still asks for 10 years of emails with an assortment of scientists. However, his reasoning should scare the bejesus of anyone who has ever published a paper on any topic that any attorney might have a political grudge against. For the two papers in question the fraud allegation is that the authors
… knew or should have known [that they] contained false information, unsubstantiated claims, and/or were otherwise misleading. Specifically, but without limitation, some of the conclusions of the papers demonstrate a complete lack of rigor regarding the statistical analysis of the alleged data, meaning the result reported lacked statistical significance without a specific statement to that effect.
So in other words, if you publish a result that might turn out to be statistically weak or with understated error bars – even if this was in no way deliberate and regardless if you were aware of it at the time – Cuccinelli thinks that is equivalent to fraud. And any grant that you apply for that even cites this paper would therefore be a false claim under the statute. Cuccinelli is specifically not stating that deliberate scientific misconduct must have occurred, all you need to have performed is an inadequate (according to him) statistical treatment or you made an unsubstantiated claim. If you want “unsubstainted claims”, Soon and Baliunas (2003) (cited approvingly by Cuccinelli) would be a great example of course. But more generally, this would clearly open up pretty much the entire literature to ‘fraud’ investigations since one can almost always improve on the statistics. You didn’t take temporal auto-correlation into account in calculating the trend? Cuccinelli thinks that’s fraud. You didn’t fully characterise the systematic uncertainty in the “unknown unknowns”? That too. You weren’t aware of the new data that showed an older paper was incomplete? Too bad. This is not just an attack on Mike Mann, it is an attack on the whole scientific enterprise.
However, as appalling as this reasoning is, Cuccinelli’s latest request is simply bone-headed because the grant in question, entitled “Resolving the scale-wise sensitivities in the dynamical coupling between the climate and biosphere”, simply has nothing to do with the MBH98 and MBH99 papers! Even if one agreed with Cuccinelli about their quality (which we don’t), they are not referenced or mentioned even obliquely. The grant was to look at how climate variability impacted land-atmosphere fluxes of carbon, water and heat and doesn’t involve paleo-climate at all. So even if, for arguments sake, one accepted Cuccinelli’s definition of what constitutes ‘fraud’, nothing associated with this grant would qualify. We doubt there could be a clearer demonstration of the inappropriateness of Cuccinelli’s case.
Well, maybe one. In the attachment to the subpoena, Cuccinelli repeats his claim that since Mann used the word “community” in a blog post here on RC, he must therefore be using “Post Normal” jargon, and that might be “misleading/fraudulent” in the context of a grant application. Really? Scientists who use the word “community” regardless of context are therefore to be suspected of fraud? This is just embarrassing.
It might be worth pointing out that under the Virginia Bar ethics guidelines, it states that:
A lawyer should use the law’s procedures only for legitimate purposes and not to harass or intimidate others.
We can only wonder when this will start to be applied to the current AG.
A noble cause, but doomed to failure. Largely, peoples’ ideology gets in the way. Also, the science behind AGW is not easily explained to a layperson. And then:
Scientists and their spokespeople have been trying to do that for at least the past 15 years. Problem is, the Noise Machine™, funded covertly by the likes of the Koch brothers:
The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama
is doing their best to undermine all efforts to communicate the seriousness of the AGW problem to the electorate. As others have pointed out, there’s a vested interest in maintaining the status quo to the tune of 1 billion dollars of *profit* per day rolling into the coffers of the fossil fuel industry.
They are all about delaying the development of alternate energy sources, and Cuccinelli’s latest ideology-driven witch hunt is just one small facet of their tactics.
My precious optimists (some of you), the important thing is that this discussion and other discussions are taking up valuable people’s time and energy. I’m not saying it isn’t necessary, just that it is a simple tragedy that good people are not doing the work that needs to be done, but trying to plough (plow) through the muck to get to the point that they are allowed to do the work that needs to be done. I’m not talking about the wonderful Dr. Mann and the rest of you who ARE continuing to work, though they too are affected, by the worldwide community of people of good will, empathy, and compassion.
We all know that the current model of continuous exploitation for the purpose of expanding consumption has burdened our planet with an already monstrous and expanding level of toxic situations. If you are like me, you also use consumptive stuff like ever bigger and better media despite knowing that each of us must reduce our footprint, out of necessity in many cases. Until we do the work to redesign necessity and the fuel that makes our lives possible we are headed for a serious meltdown. Local food, public transit, that kind of thing are in serious deficit.
This situation is unfolding in manifold and complex crises that are already costing everyone a lot of money, as mitigation of floods and fires, toxic sludge, and the like, is the most expensive way to deal with it. Unfortunately, it will continue to explode in scale and variety before anyone with confirmation bias will use their lying senses instead of their friends to observe what is going on. It will continue to fail to be too big to ignore for a good while yet.
I see a lot of people mentioning Joe McCarthy and I’m afraid they are right. I’m 62 and therefore too young (!) to have lived through that and WWII, which taught a generation a lesson we all should heed.
We live and die together, and as is pointed out in the article, it is now time to do everything and anything we can to dial down the blind hate.
PS. I saw a couple of days ago that the Pakistani situation is causing the military to look harder at alternative fuels, the noncombustible sort. Sad this was not done decades ago!
Oh dear, bad typo above: “they too are affected, BUT the worldwide community of people of good will, empathy, and compassion.”
We could wish affected by the community of thought and compassion would not be regarded as something to sneer at by those for whom hate is more important than agape.
Deconvoluter and Steve, These are valid points which I have considered. The answers are not easily solved as climate science can be very complex and confusing. I live in the middle of the USA and a huge portion of the population have bought into the propaganda of the talking heads that are financed by the Kochs and other like them. Education is the key, the question is how to get accurate information to the masses and get them to listen. True, getting the exposure that is needed is easier said than done. In this part of the country, it seems to be easier to change behavior by selling the patriotic aspects of energy independence as well as the economic aspects of savings through more sustainable practices, the problem is that this approach does nothing to increase the credibility of the scientific community in their eyes. I would like to see scientist like Dr. Mann interviewed in the national media. There are no easy answers!
Seriously, can we subpoena THEIR emails??!!
That would be awesome.
#140, Paul Tremblay
Key language from your link:
“The court found the state’s police power can be used to require mitigation of past, present and future adverse impacts.”
That’s another way of saying that the state can pass civil laws / regulations going back in time [ex post facto], forcing entities to make good on their past errors.
Much of the argument in Sinclair was about the arbitrary allocation of the fine, without any showing that the determination by the state of California was proportional to the actual total amount of lead paint produced by any manufacturer. The state picked a single year and assumed that it was representative of the history of the California paint market. Incredibly, the court approved this method to allocate the burden of the fines.
The majority of the fines collected are from oil companies, because of the past use of leaded gasoline, that’s why western states petroleum was in on the case. [Unlike the paint companies, which received only a minor fraction of the profits from lead paint, the oil companies benefitted from the bulk of profits from leaded gas – and continued to sell it in increasing volumes long after leaded paint was off the market.]
It’s not a products liability case. The theoretical framework of products liability law is founded on the notion that the consumers who use a product should pay more for dangerous products, and the higher prices to manufacturers should aggregate and be available to pay the claims of users of the products who are injured.
Higher prices will tend to reduce the use of dangerous products or make safer alternatives look comparatively cheap. [It’s an example of how the free market works best to resolve problems, when we have true-cost pricing.]
In the case of lead paint, the product can’t be legally sold anymore – so costs cannot be transferred to the consumer. There’s no way for the manufacturer to retroactively increase the price of it’s products to make titanium-based paint appear to be preferable to lead-based paint 60 or 70 years ago. The basis for product liability, as explained by the courts, does not exist.
The only identifiable consumer of the products still in existance, who it would make sense to retroactively tax for the use of these products, is the state itself.
The law is supposed to prospectively deter bad acts, not encourage particular actions for fifty years, wait thirty more, and then annually fine a party in perpetuity.
You may like the “justice” of going after the paint companies, rather than the state just paying the bill for its complicity in spreading lead throughout the poorer neighborhoods in California.
The problem with this approach is that it then establishes a precedent for an AG to go fishing for private individuals for behavior that was once thought legal [this includes climate scientists…].
It also sends the signal to manufacturers in California that they may be fined in the future for activity that’s legal today – even if the work is done to state specifications under a contract with the state. Is it any wonder why California has one of the highest unemployment rates, even though our system of higher education and location for trade is second to none. I read an article a few months back in the Sacramento Business Journal: approximately 90% of the jobs lost in the prior two years in California were in manufacturing.
#96 Re. Eric’s response
I looked up bipolar disorder in wikipedia, and from this I can hypothesize that bipolar weather may refer to a climate affective disorder and/or weather depressions that occur episodically, with periods of abnormally elevated energy levels that may, or may not, be associated with the depressions.
These episodes are usually separated by periods of “normal” weather, but in some cases the depressions and elevated energy levels may rapidly alternate.
This may explain to some degree elevated TC formation and activity deriving from tropical depressions, as well as the, although rare, occurrence of rapid successive TC’s that rolled of Africa across the Atlantic this season with short spans of normal weather in between?
Still waiting for more research on the matter but it is interesting. One must remember that correlation is not causation and there may be other factors involved ;)
Truly, climate science is the ultimate in interdisciplinary exploration!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder
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Fee & Dividend: Our best chance – Learn the Issue – Sign the Petition
A Climate Minute: Natural Cycle – Greenhouse Effect – Climate Science History – Arctic Ice Melt
This says it better than I could:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-labier/a-rising-social-psychosis_b_749079.html
extract:
Much of the ongoing debate in political, business and social/cultural arenas is rooted in an underlying disagreement about what best serves national interests and individual lives. Is it promoting the common good, or serving self-interest?
As interdependence and interconnection on this planet become ever-more apparent, new challenges and conflicts arise for personal life, the role of government and the conduct of business leadership. In response to these new realities, people’s attitudes and behavior are shifting more towards serving the larger common good; now necessary for successful, flexible and psychologically resilient functioning.
However, these shifts clash with a long-prevailing ideology, that the primary pursuit of self-interest best serves the public interest and personal success. That ideology has also prevailed in our views of adult psychological health and maturity. In essence, the pursuit of greed, self-centeredness and materialism have become the holy trinity of public and private conduct. ….
(please read the whole thing!)
#143, dhogaza:
“When you buy a business, you’re not only buying the assets, you’re buying the liabilities.”
You’re absolutely correct, but there’s a crucial difference. The example you cite, of leaking gas tanks, is hidden – but discoverable.
A person could look into public records and discover that a gas station had operated on the property in the past. The buyer could pay for a soils report. They could then get a quote to determine how much it would cost to clean up the soil and ask for an appropriate discount on the sales price.
A buyer of a business could do the same for pending lawsuits, etc. They could pay to have an engineer and attorney evaluate recent products and look for exposure to products liability claims.
The same was not true for the sale of these paint companies. Most of them were simply rented warehouses with a couple of vats and a few thousand gallons of titanium-based paint. There were few tangible assets. What was really being purchased was a brand name and a customer list [i.e. – goodwill].
I happen to have some knowledge about this topic because I did some work for the CA AG in this area when I was in law school.
Buyers of these paint companies had no way to predict that the law would change so dramatically to allow the state to retroactively fine them for producing a legal product.
Buyers had no way of determining what percentage of the total amount of white lead the target company had put into the stream of commerce during its glory years. They had no way to predict which year the state would later choose to be representative of the history of lead distribution in California.
Given that maybe 10% of a painting contract is for the paint, buyers had no way to predict that the entire retroactive fine would be applied to manufacturers.
Buyers had no way to predict that paint retailers [who marked up the products considerably] would be explicitly exempted from paying the fine.
Buyers had no way to predict that painting contractors [who took the bulk of the profits] would be exempted from paying the fine.
Given that products liability law is predicated upon the consumers paying higher prices for dangerous products, buyers could not predict that major consumers of lead paint [state and local government] would shift costs off of themselves.
As is often noted, the manufacturers of lead paint were aware that lead paint was dangerous – but so were the retailers, contractors, and institutional users.
Contractors did not use lead paint unless it was specified and a premium paid. Lead paint had higher up-front costs, but much lower maintenance costs, than titanium-based paint. The consumers [government schools and hospitals] benefitted financially from the use of lead paint. Under traditional models of liability, the user [government] bears a burden for its negligent choice to pay more for lead paint in order to reduce operating costs.
Of course, products liability would never be expected to be an issue for a buyer when, as in the case of paint companies, the products had been sold many years before – and statutes of limitation on the books precluded potential plaintiffs from filing lawsuits.
While I feel bad for kids with lead poisoning, I also feel bad for people who bought these paint companies for the sales network and found themselves blindsided with retroactive fines.
California’s lead paint scheme is conceptually similar to “land reform” in Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s government seized land from white farmers, using the logic that it had been stolen from the indigenous people decades before [I think a person could find merit in this type of ‘land reform’ without approving of the methods Mugabe used to seize and distribute the appropriated land.]. The problem is, many of the farms had been purchased at full market value just a few years before – after the buyers had been assured by the government that no such land reform would occur. The families who had lived on the ‘stolen’ land for decades received full value and left the country. Assuming land reform is wise, or morally justifiable, is it right to lay the burden at the feet of the party who just bought the farm ? How about the guy who buys a paint company ?
In the case of Zimbabwe, the seizures gutted the few property rights that existed in the country. Is it any wonder nobody wants to invest capital in Zimbabwe, now ? Businesses’ uncertainty of future liability in California will have a similar chilling effect on our economy.
Susan Anderson (158), the difficulty with that academically good thought is that self-interest is the natural, inherent and prevalent trait of humans (and animals and plants for that matter). From day one out of the birth canal a person is focused on self-interest. This might change a bit as life goes on to include a serious consideration of public interest, but self interest is still fundamental. The trick is to set up a society that helps to direct natural self-interests to endeavors that aid the public good (or at the minimum doesn’t detract from the public good). This is best done through laws, rules of enterprise, appropriate cost accounting and taxation, etc. Trying to persuade people born with only self interest that they really should be more interested in public good is a long long long row to hoe, its desirability not withstanding. The pursuit of greed, self-centeredness and materialism is not a holy trinity, it is what is — like gravity. The trick is to figure out how best to use it.
OT though not completely unrelated to the thread.
Rod B wrote: “… self-interest is the natural, inherent and prevalent trait of humans … people born with only self interest …”
The belief that “self-interest” is not only the “prevalent” trait of humans but that humans are naturally motivated by “only self-interest” and that altruism is unnatural and inhuman and must be forcibly imposed on human beings by “laws” is a dogma of certain fundamentalist religions like Ayn Rand’s so-called “Objectivism”.
However, it is not in accord with actual, scientific, empirical study of human beings — as well as other animals — which demonstrates that altruism is, in fact, a naturally occurring trait of social animals like human beings.
The argument that human beings are fundamentally and solely motivated by “greed, self-centeredness and materialism” has about as much validity as the notion of the “divine right of Kings”, and it is typically deployed for pretty much the same ends.
>>The problem with this approach is that it then establishes a precedent for an AG to go fishing for private individuals for behavior that was once thought legal [this includes climate scientists…].
No it doesn’t. That is just your over reaching libertarian ideology saying it is so. So far, the facts contradict your conclusion; if this precedent allowed for the AG to go on a fishing expedition, then why have the courts barred him once, and most likely will do so again?
Could you please stay on topic rather than spouting a lot of empty right-wing rhetoric, that leads you to make the laughable comparison California’s lead paint laws to Zimbabwe’s land seizure?
Rod B wrote “Susan Anderson (158), the difficulty with that academically good thought is that self-interest is the natural, inherent and prevalent trait of humans…self-centeredness and materialism is not a holy trinity, it is what is — like gravity”
Gravity can be measured and verified; self interest cannot be, namely because it is too vague a term to begin with. Whenever science is used to justify an ideology (think of Social Darwinism), you can almost be certain there is bad philosophy behind it.
Rod B.,
All social animals exhibit altruism to varying degrees–from ants and bees on up. Humans are social animals. This has been known since Darwin, and at least since the 1950s we khow we can even demonstrate mathematically that altruism can be an evolutionary advantage. Sorry, but your biology and psychology are about 2 centuries out of date.
Still worrying away at the legalese. You can access the law invoked here:
http://www.taf.org/virginiafca.htm
It was approved April 17, 2002. Although the grant application was made in 2001, the CID alleges that at least some payments were made in 2003, after the “Fraud Against Taxpayers Act” took effect. So it would appear that Cuccinelli’s theory is that the violation occurred in accepting payment in 2003, which gets around the ex post facto concern. But the actual motivation may be that the Act also includes an absolute limitation of ten years, which would eliminate any possible use of FATA against the “Hockey Stick” papers of ’98 and ’99.
That’s why Cuccinelli had to hang his legal hat on a paper that is utterly unrelated to his ‘real’ targets. (Never mend all the reasons why those targets are scientifically stupid at this point.)
Of course, that does leave him stuck with a pretty tenuous connection between the “target” and the lawsuit. “C” isn’t alleging that there’s anything wrong with the 2003 paper; just that the grant award may have been influenced by the earlier work, which of course was on Dr. Mann’s CV. But if the 2003 contract was fulfilled, I think the fraud allegation goes away completely. No harm occurred to the taxpayer; a paper on climate and biome was promised, received, and not even “C” is claiming there’s anything wrong with it.
And even the question about the CV per se is pretty tenuous: Dr. Mann really did co-author those papers, after all, no matter what the reaction in various quarters to them might, or might not, have been. Did the CV claim any more than that? I doubt it.
I really can’t help but think that, were I the judge asked to decide this, I’d work really hard on the most efficacious wrist slap I could come up with, in order to dissuade the AG from further egregious wastes of my time–and, ironically enough, taxpayer’s money!
“AGW science needs to be presented to the public by scientist without a perceived political bias.”
The problem is that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Stephen Colbert – transcript at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/30/1441/59811
This is beginning to sink in to the conservative political psyche, and they have painted themselves into a corner where the only way out is to attack science.
“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
http://www.paclii.org/pits/en/treaty_database/1947/4.html
Convention of the World Meteorological Organization [1947] PITSE 4 (11 October 1947) ENTRY INTO FORCE: 23 MARCH 1950 Depositary: The Government of the United States of America
The purposes of the Organization shall be:
(a)To facilitate worldwide cooperation in the establishment of networks of stations for the making of meteorological observations or other geophysical observations related to meteorology
(c)To promote standardization of meteorological observations and to ensure the uniform publication of observations and statistics;
(d)To further the application of meteorology to aviation, shipping, agriculture, and other human activities;
PART IX – TECHNICAL COMMISSIONS
Article 19 (a) Commissions consisting of technical experts may be established by the Congress to study and make recommendations to the Congress and the Executive Committee on any subject within the purposes of the Organization.
“UNEP is the designated authority of the United Nations system in environmental issues at the global and regional level.”
“The mandate and objectives of UNEP emanate from United Nations General Assembly resolution 2997 (XXVII) of 15 December 1972 and subsequent amendments adopted at UNCED in 1992, the Nairobi Declaration on the Role and Mandate of UNEP, adopted at the Nineteenth Session of the UNEP Governing Council, and the Malmö Ministerial Declaration of 31 May, 2000.” http://www.unep.org/resources/gov/, http://www.un-documents.net/a27r2997.htm
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by two United Nations Organizations, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme to assess “the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.” http://www.ipccfacts.org/history.html
All of this taken together means that under US Constitutional law, the IPCC reports have legal standing comparable to that of a policeman or other expert witnesses testimony; like a cop, the IPCC standing as an expert witness is presumed, and doesn’t need to be established. It’s up to the opposition to disprove their assertions; and it’s not a matter of “a priori” decision of whether the expert is right, but of where the “burden of proof” lies.
This is the reason that there is a coordinated attack on the science by conservatives-
http://www.oag.state.tx.us/oagnews/release.php?id=3484
“The State explained that the IPCC – and therefore the EPA – relied on flawed science…”
and the legal strawman that they are attempting to set up; that if Mann et al are wrong(and that includes conflating “wrong” with the least bit inaccurate, i,e, “statistical rigor”), because “Those climate scientists who control the final product…” of the IPCC “…are few in number” and “…through connections with Mann, they form a mutually supporting and reinforcing group, peer reviewing and co-authoring each other’s papers.” the the de jure position of the IPCC can be impeached.
re my #67 and #79 and adelady #91 and Vendica Decarian #94
There is indeed a conflict going on. Discussing how it might turn out is not the same as gloom and doom, though in reality, power seems to be swinging toward the reactionary side, as represented by Tea Party thinking and the playing to it as discussed in the lead article of this post.
I discuss a strategic shift in my #67 which is not at all giving up. It would be better described as taking a position that could lead to success in achieving the goal of reducing CO2.
The goal here is not to win a battle; it is to win a war. Winning the battle is fine, but that this should not be perceived as being the real victory.
Yes, battles and wars are metaphorical talk, but this seems useful here.
Standing forests of massive scale seem like a way to accomplish CCS (CO2 capture and sequestration) that will satisfy almost everybody.
I find it hard to understand why there is not great interest in such a plan from people who seem dedicated to reducing CO2. It might be satisfying to rail agains lobbyists and corporations, but maybe it is a better strategy to outflank them with a bold stroke to the heart of the matter. (Sorry for the military talk, but Napoleonic terminology seems useful in making the point.)
#166, Brian Dodge:
“All of this taken together means that under US Constitutional law, the IPCC reports have legal standing comparable to that of a policeman or other expert witnesses testimony; like a cop, the IPCC standing as an expert witness is presumed, and doesn’t need to be established. It’s up to the opposition to disprove their assertions; and it’s not a matter of “a priori” decision of whether the expert is right, but of where the “burden of proof” lies.”
This is a little off. Documents are not people. I believe that the IPCC reports are “learned treatises” under the Federal Rules of Evidence. [No need to resort to UN treaties, etc.] Normally, a writing by a third party would be inadmissable in court – because it’s hearsay. [hearsay is an out of court statement that’s alleged to be true…]
There is an exception from the hearsay exclusion for “learned treatises”, which are allowed into evidence, without testimony from the authors attesting to the truth / correctness of the document.
Somebody will have to explain to the court what the whole thing means. As you suggest, a party who disagrees with the proferred interpretation of the IPCC report would be wise to introduce their own expert evidence [testimony of experts, newer papers that missed the report deadline, etc.].
I’d post this to an open thread if we had one, but not too OT here–this just in from the UCS:
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/science_idol/
I suspect Cuccinelli’s barratry is driven by the same territorial factor that led him to cover the breasts of Liberty on Virginia’s Great Seal.
It’s a relatively small state, and there is only room for one boob in the Attorney General’s office.
We need to take practical actions. Not smart grid with all that hacker vulnerable computer technology and biofuels that are far too expensive to produce and which are still hydrocarbons.
Most people period do not really understand global warming, even many scientifically literate. Education is important of course. I am not suggesting we give up. To solve the actual issues of AGW relies upon building high voltage lines like they have done In Brazil, I believe, and elsewhere, and we need to use more steam, like in NYC. Steam pipes work great. But no one seeems to recall the technology has existed for sometime. That is where education has failed us all. The latest and greatest digital gadgets are not going to solve the problems and neither is science education that is too watered down or too technical for anyone to understand. Teaching science is an art. I too find these court attempts to be a waste of time. But we should not just be talking it to death. We ought to also stop carbon taxes and cap and trade which are also a waste of time and just as dangerous as Cuccinelli!
> people born with only self interest
Please, don’t take the bait. He knows what he’s doing.
Actually, as I understand it, there are some “people born with only self interest” — people who are absolutely, and apparently congenitally, devoid of any empathy or altruism at all. In the technical language of psychology they are referred to as “psychopaths” or “sociopaths”.
People only with self interest make me sick. I hope to see this planet and its inhabitants for the rest of my life and towards the end of my life I hope to see improvements in the way we handle society, technology and the environment.
The title of this piece is less than optimal.
Lewis Carroll may offer a better model than fishing, i.e., hunting.
In particular, Cuccinelli & Russell seem fond of hunting snarks, like defenseless state seals in dishabille. This is a fine pastime, to be sure, but there are many kinds of snarks. Some may turn out to be boojums…
In psychology the term socio-path is now avoided as to not encourage the behavior of clients, especially in forensic settings.
Some of you have mentioned that the Koch company funds global warming denialism.
This company funds the \Libertarian\ Cato Institute. Their global warming \expert\ is a Russian economist named Andrei Illarionov.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Illarionov
Illarionov claims that there is no link between CO2 and global warming.
He is a \former\ adviser to Putin. He used to work for Chernomyrdin, who was the head of the Soviet-era gas ministry, now called Gazprom.
Supposedly, the economist Andrei Illarionov had some falling-out with Putin over policy, so he ended up in a US think tank instead of at the pinnacle of power in Russia. Still, he continues to have some think-tank in Russia that spouts stuff about global warming.
These big communist bosses suddenly morphed into \Libertarians\ and ended up owning a mammoth gas company.
Russian Libertarians want to do what they did under communism–run and own everything under the sun with no accountability.
You might look at Illarionov’s Russian and English posts. I think a lot of this economist’s \science\ is picked up by these denialists. Perhaps it will even turn up in Cuccinelli’s arguments.
Illarionov’s stuff is in English at the Cato Institute and in Russian at the Institute for Economic Analysis. http://www.iea.ru/
Sometimes that Google translation tool is not terrible. You might look at all his graphs.
As I noted the other day, Cucccinelli’s dad is a career lobbyist for the American Gas Association who currently is an executive with a firm that touts his expertise in the gas industry and his \European\ clients.
I think it is very probable that the elder Cuccinelli’s clients include Russian gas companies, but the AG office won’t respond to questions about this.
There are lots of people in Russia whose jobs are to orchestrate political campaigns in other countries. They call this \active measures.\
They also try to discredit people using what they call \kompromat.\ Climategate appears to me to be Kompromat.
Until the propaganda campaign in support of denialism, the Kremlin’s biggest succes was the AIDS propaganda campaign. Kremlin propaganda outlets have a history of defaming scientists–their own and ours.
For complicated reasons, KGB chief Primakov finally admitted the KGB’s role in the AIDS campaign.
Izvestiya (3-19-92) reported:
\[Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov] mentioned the well known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists’ \crafty\ plots were fabricated in KGB offices.\
One more time: Izvestia (not me) confirmed:
\According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists’ \crafty\ plots were fabricated in KGB offices.\
The great Russian scientists did not collaborate in this disinformation.
Not infrequently, when the line changes, they do tell the truth and throw their collaborators under the bus, but this takes a long time.
The CIA has a good history of the AIDS campaign on-line called Opertion Infektion. You can see how these operations make use of Western conspiracy theorists.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol53no4/soviet-bloc-intelligence-and-its-aids.html
Periodically I email Cuccinelli’s minion W. Russell wrussell@oag.state.va.us
and ask him about the elder Cuccinelli’s business, which gave over 96,000 to the Attorney Generals’ campaign.
Here is what I found.
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/09/attorney-general-cuccinellis-daddy-and.html
I ask if the dad’s clients include Russian gas companies, what services the elder Cuccinelli is providing his clients, and if he is providing his clients with the services of our Attorney General.
Cuccinelli acts like global warming is some kind of nefarious plot by greedy, mendacious climate scientists. Really, this sounds like old communist propaganda to me. You can read the same garbage on the Russian tabloid Pravda from the mouth of a 9-11 Truther. That’s how dumb this is.
Cuccinelli is Catholic, and the Vatican says there is global warming. Catholic schools teach about global warming in science. I know his HS and his wife’s HS teach real science about global warming.
I ask W. Russell if the teachers in Catholic schools and the Pope are also greedy liars. They don’t answer that one, either.
You scientists are not doing climate science any favors when you bash Christians for being denialists. Evangelicals also support climate science. Christians are supposed to be good stewards of God’s creation.
Equating denialism with Christianity is part of the propaganda to fool ignorant Christians who don’t know their church’s stance on these issues or possibly some fundamentalist churches.
I have a Catholic friend who loves Cuccinelli. She got sort of quiet when I told her the Vatican says global warming is real.
Cuccinelli has also kidnapped the term “conservative.” The guy is a radical. What is he conserving? Our judicial system? The independence of scholarship? The planet?
The only thing he is conserving is his family’s money.
John Mashey
One has a clear legal duty to submit attorney generals committing barratry to the full force of the First Law of Snarkery :
” You distort, we deride.”
SecularAnimist (161), a newborn fresh out of the birth canal has one and only one sharply focused interest — self-interest of preservation. As time goes on changes are seen but they are predominately (not entirely) one of cooperation and compromise, not altruism. And cooperation mainly because the guy earlier solely focused on self interest discovers that his self interest and preservation actually improves if he doesn’t autonomously try to kill every human that comes over the hill.
I did not say people are “solely motivated by “greed, self-centeredness and materialism” ” I did say it is innate and fundamental — because it is.
reCAPTCHA: rearrole love ???
Ray Ladbury (164), Ot from the OT, but can’t resist. You say, “…can demonstrate mathematically that altruism can be an evolutionary advantage.” What do you mean “can be?” It is or it isn’t. If you assert that altruism is demonstrated mathematically to be evolutionary, you need to change your smokes brand. I never said people (or animals or plants) never show altruism. They do. Some die for others. Just not often. And not fundamentally or innately.
Kevin McKinney (165), good info, especially the name, “Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.” There has got to be a pony in there that can get every Congressman, the President, and Cuccinelli himself, the latter which ought to be a slam dunk — even though I said such doesn’t exist!
Brian Dodge, shirley you jest…
I looked it up in Wikipedia and one of the first things it says is that barratry is a misdemeanor in Virginia. Hmm.
With the bit about “Post Normal science” on the last pages of the order, Cuccinelli’s argument harks back to a classical witch hunt:
Knight: What makes you think he is Post Normal?
Villager #3: Well, he turned me into a hockey stick.
Knight: A hockey stick?!
Villager #3 (defensively): I got better.
Crowd: Burn him anyway! Burn him! Burn him!
Knight: Quiet! There are ways of telling whether he is Post Normal.
Crowd: Are there? What are they?
Knight: Tell me, how do Post Normals think scientific quality is achieved?
Villager #2: Through consensus in a peer community.
Knight: And who else speaks of ‘community’?
Villager #1: More Post Normals!
Villager #2: Soccer moms.
Villager #3: ‘Community’… communi… Communists!
Knight: Exactly! So, logically…,
Villager #1: If he… uses the word ‘community’… he’s a Commie.
Knight: And therefore…?
Villager #2: A soccer mom?
Villager #1: And a Post Normal scientist!
Crowd: Burn him! Burn him!
Sort of, anyway. The original (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3jt5ibfRzw) made a lot more sense.
Thanks to Eli, I saw this good editorial today.
Rod B., I direct you to the work of one William Hamilton, evolutionary biologist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Hamilton
Hamilton showed that in populations with a high degree of genetic relation, altruistic behavior actually promotes survival of the altruistic individuals genetics even if it decreases the chances of survival or reproduction of the altruistic individual. It has been verified for social insects and also social mammals (e.g. naked mole rats). It is thought that all social animals probably exhibit some degree of altruism toward their hive/pack/tribe… in part due to this phenomenon.
For altruism toward unrelated individuals, one can use game theory to illustrate whether a particular strategy yields an evolutionary and/or social advantage.
The reason I say “can be” is because not all altruistic strategies are advantageous in an evolutionary sense. Nonetheless, humans owe their moral sense mainly to their nature as social animals.
Rod B wrote: “… a newborn fresh out of the birth canal has one and only one sharply focused interest — self-interest of preservation …”
Your comment is interesting, in as much as it is usually critics of “libertarianism” who assert that it is little more than infantile narcissism dressed up as an ideology.
185
Cuccinelli seems to experience difficulty in distinguishing between Post-Normal science, which he’s against, and Pre-Norman science which he’s for.
Professor Mann has an excellent op-ed in today’s Washington Post:
Further to Ray Ladbury@187, there are at least two other mechanisms that can make altruism advantageous in an evolutionary sense:
1) The “Handicap Principle”: it can be a way of showing your quality to potential sexual and social partners: “Look how fit I am, I can afford to sacrifice my immediate interests to help others” (of course there need not be any conscious recognition that this is what the altruist is doing).
2) Reputational effects. Again in relation to others selecting you as a sexual or social partner, would you rather partner with a psychopath, or someone who actually cares about others and so is likely to take your preferences and interests into account? Of course, altruism can be faked, but that means there is selection pressure for the detection of such fakery.
I’m afraid, Rod B., your belief that we’re all basically selfish is completely outmoded as far as science is concerned: it survives only because it fits right-wing ideology. Of course, it’s quite possible that right-wingers are unsoundly generalising from their knowledge of themselves.
JM 171: We ought to also stop carbon taxes and cap and trade which are also a waste of time and just as dangerous as Cuccinelli!
BPL: Carbon taxes or a cap and trade scheme are probably the only way global disaster can be averted.
JM 175,
What I tell you three times is true!
192 BPL cap and trade and those taxes are part of the liberal agenda.
How about tax breaks to companies providing cleaner burning green plants so people can get to work on it? Raising taxes only stops corporations from hiring. We are very much still in a recession regardless of what some economists state. Make them green since factories are much bigger emitters than vehicles but use tax breaks instead to encourage it.
[Response: You should consider that the moment you say something like “liberal agenda” your objectivity is thrown into immediate suspicion by those focused on solving the problem rather than political “agendas”. Not surprisingly from you, this is completely off topic (not to mention highly questionable in substance)–no more on it whatsoever.–Jim]
USA Today: Wegman is Being Investigated
According to USA Today, “Officials at George Mason University confirmed Thursday that they are investigating plagiarism and misconduct charges made against a noted climate science critic.”
In my previous blog post, Wegman-gate: Alert Congress & the Media, I asked readers to alert the media and their elected officials about the Wegman Report. As detailed in John Mashey in Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report, the Wegman report was “a facade for a PR campaign well-honed by Washington, DC ‘think tanks’ and allies, underway for years.”
I hope you will join me in writing to media and government contacts to ask them:
“USA Today is covering this story. Maybe you should look into this also?”
I have made it very easy for you to contact the press here.
181, Rod B. If you assert that altruism is demonstrated mathematically to be evolutionary, you need to change your smokes brand.
I assume that “to be evolutionary” in this quote means “to have a reproductive advantage”.
It has been demonstrated mathematically, and in the journal Science, no less. I hope to find the cite later today.
Jacob Mack wrote: “… cap and trade and those taxes are part of the liberal agenda …”
Both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade are methods of capturing the costs of the damages caused by carbon pollution and requiring those responsible for the pollution to pay those costs. Is that what you mean by a “liberal agenda”?
Do you prefer the status quo, where polluters can externalize those costs and thereby force the rest of us to pay them, while the polluters enjoy the profits?
I’m glad you are not my next-door neighbor, since you would probably want to dump your garbage in my yard and make me deal with it, and if I insisted that you really should pay to have it properly disposed of, you would scream about my “liberal agenda”.
[Response: I know you’re just responding, but it’s OT, no more on it please. Thanks–Jim]
195: Scott: Do you happen to know if Wegman had federal or Virginia state funding for the work in question?
As per my comment in #175:
“In particular, Cuccinelli & Russell seem fond of hunting snarks, like defenseless state seals in dishabille. This is a fine pastime, to be sure, but there are many kinds of snarks. Some may turn out to be boojums…”
Following Scott in #195, let us recall that Cuccinelli’s latest relies quite heavily on the Wegman Report. We now have WaPo, noting connection, ending with:
“We’ve asked Cuccinelli’s office for reaction to news of the GMU investigation and we’ll bring you any response we receive.”
“It’s a snark!”
…
“It’s a boo-“
Further to my #185, re: the post-normal ramblings of the Virginia
Attorney General [AG]:
The AG’s, ehem, argument linking Mann with post-normal science does
not only involve logical fallacy, but also an apparent misreading of a central tenet of the post-normal science argument. The Civil Investigative
Demand [CID] states at p. 26:
“Scientific quality under this theory is achieved through consensus in a peer community.”
In support, the CID cites Funtowicz and Ravetz 2003, pp. 7 and 9–11. (The latter is a mis-cite, pages 9–11 are the references and a blank page.)
But FR03 argue the point that maintenance of quality in post-normal science “depends on open dialogue between all those affected”, and so requires the involvement of an extended peer community of stakeholders, citizens’ juries, consensus conferences and whatnot. Not just classical peer review by and consensus among professional scientists. Omit “extended”, as does the AG, and post-normal science sounds, well, pretty much like good ol’ normal science.
Ref: S. Funtowicz and J. Ravetz, “Post-Normal Science”, Internet Encyclopaedia of Ecological Economics, International Society for Ecological Economics, February 2003, PDF at http://www.ecoeco.org/pdf/pstnormsc.pdf