« Author: Hale, B. »

Fewer Endangered Species
   in Author: Hale, B. | Biodiversity | Biodiversity | Environment | Science + Politics | Sustainability March 22, 2008

Soylent Green
   in Author: Hale, B. | Environment | Health | Science + Politics January 16, 2008

Lieberman-Warner
   in Author: Hale, B. | Climate Change | Energy Policy | Environment December 05, 2007

So-kalled WiFi research
   in Author: Hale, B. | Health | Risk & Uncertainty | Testing November 20, 2007

The Technological Fix
   in Author: Hale, B. | Climate Change | Disasters | Environment | R&D Funding | Science + Politics | Technology Policy November 15, 2007

The Young and the Mindless
   in Author: Hale, B. | Climate Change | Disasters | Journalism, Science & Environment | Science + Politics November 01, 2007

Why James Watson could use a bit of training in ethical theory
   in Author: Hale, B. | Education | Science + Politics | Science + Politics October 18, 2007

The Misdirection of Gore
   in Author: Hale, B. | Climate Change October 17, 2007

Fewer Endangered Species

Hey, amazing. The world is getting safer for critters. Dirk Kempthorne, Secretary of the Interior, hasn't declared a single animal or plant species endangered or threatened since he took office in 2006. What a relief! Just eight years ago, animals and plants were going down like bowling pins. Now they're thriving. Maybe all that development wasn't so bad after all.

Bridge, anyone?

Soylent Green

This was too rich not to mention, though it doesn't have all that much to do with science and technology. Evidently, the House cafeteria has just gone green. They now offer a wider selection of vegetarian options, cage free eggs, and hormone free milk. This has some lobby groups (namely, the egg and milk lobbies) in a twist.

Read the NY Times article.

The lobbyists seem to think that the restaurant operators are "hooked by propaganda of animal rights groups." So this raises a question: What's the grub? Either it's the case that industry eggs and cage free eggs, or industry milk and hormone free milk are absolutely, categorically equivalent, on both moral and non-moral grounds; or it's not. If there is absolutely, categorically no moral distinction between the two, then there's always the possibility that the two options are distinct on, say, preference grounds. In either case, the important observation is that there is some difference relevant to the decision-making of the restaurant operators: whether it be that the offerings come from American or Chinese chickens, wild or farmed fish, or (yes) fat or skinny farmers.

The last issue, you might reply, smacks of irrelevance. Who cares if the farmer is fat or skinny? Maybe there are even justice issues here: if, say, a restaurant operator chooses chickens from the fat farmer, on grounds that the farmer is fat, maybe this is due to a deeply embedded anti-skinny bias; or perhaps an affirmative action-laced agriculture bill. But these considerations are no more irrelevant to the restaurant operator's decision than any other considerations. They're all factors; and they need to be argued for. Positively. Not negatively.

Lobbyists who argue against the practice of greening one's food options once the decision has already been made are stuck with the hard line: that there is no difference whatsoever. That's plainly false, just as it is false that there is no difference whatsoever between food brands or between food that comes from Guatamala or Iowa. Now that the decision has been made, the burden of proof is on the lobbyists to demonstrate that there is absolutely, categorically no relevant difference between the several options. By my reckoning, that'll be mighty hard, since differences like the living conditions of chickens plainly matter, even if not morally, at least to some people. Maybe that's why someone would revert to inane strategies like suggesting that cafeteria operators are "hooked by propaganda."

Foodfights like this can only be made of people.

Lieberman-Warner

Not only was there an announcement from Bali, but S. 2191 went from the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to the full senate. That's a pretty big deal too. It's endorsed by a variety of environmental groups, including the Apollo Alliance, Defenders of Wildlife, Environmental Defense, League of Conservation Voters, National Environmental Trust, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, The Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists and The Wilderness Society.

Who knows how it'll fare, but I thought it possibly worth commenting on this tired minority response from some guy in Oklahoma.

Yep. It'll cost money. Whether that'll deal a devastating blow to "American families, American jobs, and the American way of life" is harder to judge.

Say, just what is the "American way of life" anyway? For that matter, what are "American jobs"? I won't even ask about "American families." That one sure created a stir in the last election.

Anyone care to take a stab at a definition? Props if you can offer a coherent answer without begging the question.

So-kalled WiFi research

Last week it was the Journal of Geoclimatic Science and benthic bacteria, this week it's the Australasian Journal of Clinical Environmental Medicine and autism. The Sokal phemonemon is back with a vengeance, though this time it appears to be just plain fakery.

Matt Drudge has is viewers linking to an article that was, for a short stint this afternoon, published on the Computer Weekly website. The article warned of the dangers of WiFi for children. It cited an article by Dr. George Carlo in the Australasian Journal of Clinical Environmental Medicine claiming that WiFi causes heavy metals to be caught in brain cells. Only problem? Journal no existy.

Here's a slightly cynical overview. You can also check out the authors at the
Quackometer.

The Technological Fix

On Monday we had Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus kindly give a lecture on their new book Break Through. It was great to have them stop by, and nice to have an opportunity to get answers to questions about their book. Turnout was in the 100 range, judging by the size of the room. If you haven't read the book yet, you can either buy it, camp out in Borders with a cup of joe, or check out a three minute overview given by Geoff McGhee and Andrew Revkin of the NY Times covering the "New Environmental Centrists."

I want to respond to at least one of their claims, as well as a claim that appears to be circulating in the blogo-ether as what Revkin is calling the "Centrist" position, regarding the thought that we should encourage technological fixes to our problems. The reason I want to respond to this claim is both because I think it's right; and because I think it's, well, not right.

So let's talk about technological fixes.

I'm something of a technology buff. I like gadgets. I like science. And I like what technology does for me and the world. I also like what came about as a result of the ramped up R&D funds during the nineties. Moreover, I've never been totally enthusiastic about some of the neo-luddite language that once passed as environmentalist, so I agree with Shellenberger and Nordhaus (S&N) that we should all be encouraging, funding, supporting, and promoting technologies that help our civilization and our country advance. In fact, I also agree that environmentalists should be considerably more aspirational than desperational.

S&N argue persuasively that the "politics of limits" -- which is, roughly, the idea that regulation can serve as a cure-all to the world's environmental problems -- ought to be replaced with a "politics of possibility" -- which is kind of hopeful thinking about new possible worlds. Their argument runs primarily along political strategy lines and is buttressed by many studies that show that Americans don't respond well to the pessimism and "scare tactics" of environmentalism. The book's central idea should be familiar to anyone who has read their earlier work, Death of Environmentalism. In the end, it hangs on this dichotomy of political orientations: limits versus possibility.

And in this dichotomy lies the problem. It's a false concretism, supported mainly by S&N's choices of what counts as an environmental issue. Much of their book is geared to address concerns that relate to climate change. That's fine and well, of course, because climate change is one of the major hurdles that has been motivating the environmental movement for the past ten years or so. But it is also true that environmentalists have been dealing with many more problems than climate change for quite some time now. To declare the death of environmentalism, or to suggest that the positive panacea to the chicken-little environmental frame of mind is through technological and economic fixes, and that these fixes run contrary to the politics of limits, is to undermine a critical ethical thread that runs through environmental thinking altogether.

The greatest real-world instance of this thread is the relatively wide range of environmental issues that don't fall under the category of climate change; that were, prior to Al Gore and the Prius, central environmental issues. Here I'm thinking of issues like deforestation, desertification, extinction, habitat encroachment, water depletion, and so on. Environmental issues span the gamut, and many of them deal with human activities in and around nature. These issues can never be handled by technological or economic fixes, precisely because they are not problems of technical or economic failure. Some issues, for instance, relate to the problem of urban sprawl or to overconsumption, which cannot possibly be solved by appeal to technological or economic fixes. The "over" in 'overconsumption' isn't determined by what other people don't have (though that, surely, is part of it); it's determined by how much a person is entitled to and how much a person can reasonably use. Even Locke recognizes prohibitions against spoilage. These are primarily ethical and philosophical notions.

A second problem is that many of the classic environmental issues, among which climate change is only one, are best characterized as conflicts of interest, not just between two actors, but also between one actor and the environment. I want a cherry dining set, you want a cherry dining set, and there ain't enough cherry growing fast enough to give us both what we want. Moreover, when I take that cherry for my cherry dining set, I deprive the world of that cherry tree. In this case, it's not just any cherry tree; it's that cherry tree; that cherry tree under which Harold kissed Maude, under which Abe told his truth, under which Erma held her bowl. So too for many environmental problems: I want a ski slope, so I take that mountain. I want a fountain, so I take that reservoir. I want a McMansion development, so I take that open space. Taking specific features of nature yields particularized conflicts of interest; but even more than this, particularized clashes over what is and what is not permissible. Again, permissibility is an ethical issue, only loosely and tangentially related to the so-called "politics of limits."

What I'm expressing here isn't at all pessimism about technology. Far from it. As I've said, I like and support technological innovation. I'd even root for a budget that included a lot of it. I'm hoping to point out that S&N's "politics of limits vs politics of possibility" dichotomy has many rough edges; inattention to which heralds a premature call for the death of environmentalism.

For more on this, my colleague Michael Zimmerman, Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Environmental Studies Program, as well as an outspoken advocate of an expansively multidisciplinary approach to environmental issues, Integral Ecology, has his own new blog and has further comments on S&N here: http://integralecology-michaelz.blogspot.com/

The Young and the Mindless

As virtually anybody who has flipped on the news in the past ten days knows, residents of Southern California have experienced something not unlike Dante’s fiery sixth circle of hell. Short story: Big fire, at least fourteen dead, 138 injured, a million displaced, and billions of dollars in property damage. Shorter story: pretty awful. As usual, speculations about causal origin immediately spread (like wildfire) throughout the modern mess media. Fox news reported several times, presumably non-speculatively, that the fires might have been deliberately set by Al Qaeda. Scary stuff. On the other end of the spectrum, Matt Drudge slung the mud that some high-level producer at CNN had circulated a memo that commentators should use the fires to “push” the Planet in Peril series, but that they shouldn’t do so “irresponsibly.” Here’s an illuminating series of comments from the ever-entertaining Free Republic. Today, as a matter of fact, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming is holding a hearing on the intensity and frequency of forest fires as tied to global warming. Coincidence? Probably not.

Sigh. It would appear from the shenanigans that nothing is immune from politics.

It came to light yesterday that a young boy, age uncertain, in what can only be described either as a child’s act of pyro-curiosity or as a defiant act against an overly paternalistic Smokey the Bear, has claimed responsibility for -- wait for it -- playing with matches. Denying Smokey’s sage advice, the boy was being a boy; and playing with matches. As most kids with scout badges know, playing with matches can cause forest fires. So here we have our cause of the fire. Or at least we have one cause of one of the fires.

Now that we know that a careless young boy was the cause of so much heartache, we are left with the undesirable question of how to make sense of this news. There are plenty of ways to think about kids who play with matches. Discussion in many circles (probably not far from the sixth circle) has already shifted to arguments about whether the boy should get the gallows or the guillotine. That’s a point for a different but not unrelated discussion. For some reason, however, it appears that many are inclined to view this revelation as one that confirms the absurdity of whatever offensive political view was brought to bear on explanatory accounts of the event. Progressives are calling foul on terror-mongers and reactionaries are calling foul on chicken-littles.

Let’s talk about causes below the fold.

Start with a bit of cocktail party name-dropping: our homeboy Aristotle. As his Physics is one of the mainstay texts in your library -- it is in your library, isn’t it? -- you’ll probably recall that Aristotle identifies four causes: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final cause. For those sad souls who’ve lost their copy of Aristotle in the fire, you can read philosopher Marc Cohen’s notes on the causes here. (They’re pretty good.) These causes are more or less each supposed to provide answers to the question: What causes X? You don’t really need to understand all four causes in order to get the point I’m going to make, just that they each provide plausible answers to the question “what causes X” and that they don’t necessarily run at odds with one another.

What caused the fire? Good question. Fire is kind of tricky, but let’s aim for a plausible answer. It has come to our attention that what caused the fire was a little boy who was playing with matches. That answers some questions, but it doesn’t answer all of our questions. For instance, we know that a boy caused the fire, so it appears that a human was behind the event. That’s our efficient cause. We also know that matches caused the fire, so somehow there was some material causal chain unrelated to humans. That’s our material cause. Along with this, we know that there was low-lying brush and some high branchy-trees, creating a nice little furnace for our fire. So there we have our formal cause as well. What we also know is that what caused the fire was a lot of dry branches and stuff, all of which ‘likes to burn’, which is a natural cycle of any forest. That sounds pretty reasonable too: our final cause. A quartet of causes leading to a cacophony of disaster.

If we stop at the beginning, with the efficient cause, we see that our questions quickly open up along the axis of responsibility. Was the boy really aware of what he was doing? Did he have intent? Could he have done otherwise? Was the boy trained by Al Qaeda? And so on, and so on. We could go on for quite a long time down this road. I say, spare him the gallows. It’s likely that he’s just a normal kid.

Those questions, I daresay, are a pretty divergent distraction from the much more central question that readers of this blog will likely seek an answer for. What readers here probably want to know is the underlying formal cause, the reason that Southern California went up like Bambi’s bedroom. Joseph Romm has a pretty informative essay suggesting that global warming may be partly responsible. I’m not qualified to judge Romm’s science, but I find his argument plausible. Just as with the axis of responsibility, we could go on for quite a long time down that road too. Formal causes are pretty hard to nail down.

What strikes me as important here is not which of the many different kinds of causes are responsible for the fire. We can come up with several explanations, none of which are contradictory. No, what’s important is that we recognize that we can’t just wipe other causal explanations off our list when we’ve identified a single causal explanation like, say, a child with a matchbook. Setting aside the thought that the fires could have been set by a single young boy or several young terrorists-in-training, there is the important question about what formal arrangement facilitated the event. These formal causal explanations run independently of efficient causal explanations (not to mention material causal explanations or, gads, final causal explanations). Formal causal explanations are what are at issue when people point the finger at climate change.

Though Aristotle’s taxonomy of causes is pretty outdated -- okay, very outdated -- what I like about it is that it clarifies the multidimensionality of causes, pulling us in a direction away from searching for the elusive “root cause.” All ye who embark on that search, as they say, might as well abandon hope.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program: http://www.smokeybear.com/

Why James Watson could use a bit of training in ethical theory

I'll make this short, but check this out:

Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners

Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really"

Yep. You read that correctly. What James Watson doesn't understand is that "all of our social policies" are expressly not "based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours."

Almost none of our social policies are based on intelligence, and they would smack of absurdity if they were. Many of our social policies are based on the protection of individiually held and eventually satisfied or thwarted preferences, which are somehow interpreted as indications of individual welfare; or, and this is a big 'or', respect for persons; both of which have little to do with intelligence. Respect for persons applies to all people, regardless of intelligence -- precisely because intelligence, like height, eye color, hair length, gender, and so on, is irrelevant to the overarching moral concern of human dignity.

In some rare cases, as when one must operate heavy machinery like an automobile or a jumbo jet, or as when one holds another person's health in her hands, we require licensing; but even licensing requirements are not structured around intelligence so much as they are structured around a capacity to fulfill a given set of tasks, like driving a bulldozer.

The Misdirection of Gore

--> UPDATE: Team Gore responds to the allegations discussed below.<--

:::::::::::

Over the past few weeks, Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" has gotten attention not only because he has been awarded a Nobel, but also from the British judiciary. In response to a court case brought against the school system after it made the film available to its teachers, a judge in Britain found that the film is permitted to be shown in schools, but that it must also be accompanied by scientific guides that go into further depth on the claims in the film. Here's an article describing the case: BBC News.

What's interesting is the extent to which this response is being spun by many journalists as a blow against the scientific accuracy of Gore's film (and, consequently, a win for those who view global climate change as primarily a political issue). See here: The Times, ABC News, The Washington Post, The Telegraph, and many others, as well as the BBC article I cite above. For intelligent and must-read commentary on sloppy and irresponsible journalism, read this, from Deltoid.

But first, let's pick this lede apart.

According to reports, many of which have been trumpeted on the DrudgeReport, a lorry driver reportedly has won his case against Al Gore's film because a judge decided (determined, declared) that some of the statements in Al Gore's film are scientifically inaccurate. Not 'misleading', mind you, but scientifically inaccurate. The above commentary at Deltoid demonstrates this report about the judge's verdict to be patently false: the judge only cited the alleged nine errors as 'errors'. He did not rule on their content at all.

I think there are other worrisome outcomes of such reporting, and that's what I wanted to gripe about here. At worst, some, but not all, of Gore's comments are misleading. But if Gore's comments are only misleading, they just need clarification, which is presumably provided in the guide (link below). The nine claims of misleadingness (reported in some papers as scientific inaccuracies) are, as it turns out, largely related to implications resulting from images superimposed over dialogue, as when one uses the word 'like' to issue an example. For instance, there is a moment in the film where images of Katrina are shown over dialogue suggesting that hurricane intensity may increase due to warming. Such implications apparently aggravate people-who-play-meteorologists-on-TV, like CNN's Rob Marciano.

So let's ask these questions: was Katrina a hurricane? Was it intense? And did it have dire implications for human beings? I think the answer to all of those questions is 'yes', though some may beg to differ. Seems to me that the choice of Katrina images was clearly aimed to illustrate a point, not to fallaciously imply or declare causality. Would any other images serve to illustrate that point? Perhaps. Would a cartoon of a hurricane? Not likely. Or perhaps the word 'hurricane'? Unlikely as well. Or what about a different hurricane, like Dean or Humberto or Ingrid? Possibly, but probably not as poignantly. The depiction of images from Katrina seems like a pretty reasonable illustration to me, though it has been spun by many people into an implied causal relationship.

In a way, using Katrina to illustrate this point is like offering up the claim that cigarettes result in millions of lung cancer deaths while superimposing a picture of an expansive cemetery. It's preposterous for folks like Marciano to claim that somehow the speaker is misleading the audience into believing that all people buried in that cemetery had died of lung cancer. Just so, it's preposterous to claim that this moment in the film is somehow scientifically inaccurate. (Just so, it'd be preposterous of a reader to claim that I had accused Rob Marciano of saying something about smoking deaths.) A causal relationship was never implied in the first place (disregarding, for the time being, questions about causality and observation).

Further, if the charge is as reported -- that the claims are scientifically inaccurate -- then the charge is itself misleading. It suggests (or implies) either that the whole documentary is false (or scientifically inaccurate) or that some portions of the documentary are false (or scientifically inaccurate), just as when a finger is pointed at an accused and that accused is presumed guilty from the wag of the finger.

Finally, if the charge is only that Gore's comments are misleading, the charge stands as a charge of misleadingness, not a correction or clarification of what's misleading about the statements. This is an old trick of the sophists: to sully the speaker by indicting his expertise without actually working constructively or charitably to strengthen the argument. In short, it's a fallacy.

Luckily, the guide offered (and now mandated by a judge) to teachers in the UK school system spells this all out. Check it out here.

Personally, I think the guide, and even the court decision, is a victory. It clarifies important concerns that the film glosses over (presumably for editorial as well as illustrative purposes) and it certainly makes the film more engaging for students. It is, in this respect, a useful pedagogical aid. Far from being a corrective for inaccuracies and misleading claims, it's an attempt to help students think critically about their role in the climate. Just read it. I think it's pretty clear that students who engage in this discussion before, during, and after the film will come away with a richer sense of the climate concerns than before. Much thanks to Gore and the British Government for that.