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'Anti-science syndrome' plagues the right-wing as well as blogosphere

Note: Watts Up With That, one of the web's most anti-scientific blogs, is a finalist for the Weblog award "Best Science Blog." Even more farcically, early voting suggests Watts has a chance of winning (see here). Since the fine science blog Pharyngula is doing well in the voting, I'd now suggest voting for it.

 

In this post I'm going to present the general diagnosis for "anti-science syndrome" (ASS). Like most syndromes, ASS is a collection of symptoms that individually may not be serious, but taken together can be quite dangerous -- at least it can be dangerous to the health and well-being of humanity if enough people actually believe the victims.

One tell-tale symptom of ASS is that a website or a writer focuses their climate attacks on non-scientists. If that non-scientist is Al Gore, this symptom alone may be definitive.

The other key symptoms involve the repetition of long-debunked denier talking points, commonly without links to supporting material. Such repetition, which can border on the pathological, is a clear warning sign.

Scientists who kept restating and republishing things that had been widely debunked in the scientific literature for many, many years would quickly be diagnosed with ASS. Such people on the web are apparently heroes -- at least to the right wing and/or easily duped.

If you suspect someone of ASS, look for the repeated use of the following phrases:

Diesel technology has peaked

I just encountered a typical lay media puff piece about the 2009 diesel Jetta, which won the Green Car award this year.

Did you know that the next generation of diesel-powered cars and SUVs is 98 percent cleaner than diesels sold just two years ago?

No, but I also didn't know that the older models were that dirty!

Did you know these new clean diesels offer 23 to 43 percent better fuel economy than the same vehicle with a gasoline engine?

Sounds impressive! Until you go to the EPA green vehicle website and discover that the gasoline version with a standard transmission gets an air pollution score of 9 compared to this car's 6.

Skeptic screed on progressive news site recycles familiar myths

This post was co-written with David Roberts.

Recently Harold Ambler, climate crank and proprietor of TalkingAboutTheWeather.com, published an essay on Huffington Post replete with gross factual errors about the science of climate change.

Word is that this was an editorial slip-up on HuffPo's part; they don't typically provide a place for this kind of agitprop. The essay is gone from the site's portal pages and rumor has it The Huff herself may address the issue soon.

Regardless, the essay is out there getting skeptics all twitterpated (again). These folks can't find a scientific journal with two hands and a flashlight, but nothing escapes their RSS feeds.

So lets examine a few of the claims again. After all, the only thing hucksters need is for the rest of us to get tired of repeating the same damn truths over and over again. Right?

Right off the bat Mr. Ambler recycles a classic, one of the most durable and thoroughly discredited skeptic chestnuts:

Because it turns out that there is an 800-year lag between temperature and carbon dioxide [in the ice age record], unlike the sense conveyed by Mr. Gore's graph. You are probably wondering by now -- and if you are not, you should be -- which rises first, carbon dioxide or temperature. The answer? Temperature. In every case, the ice-core data shows that temperature rises precede rises in carbon dioxide by, on average, 800 years.

The basic science of atmospheric carbon dioxide is well explained in the IPCC reports and on numerous web sites, including in Grist's How to Talk to a Skeptic series. It's puzzling that it continues to confuse skeptics.

Newsweek once again deceives its readers about energy alternatives

Two Stanford scholars have taken to the pages of Newsweek to pen a piece on "clean coal" that embodies all the pretzel logic surrounding that subject.

It's called "Dirty Coal Is Winning" -- and the reason dirty coal is winning, we're told, is that we're not dumping enough money into the quest for clean coal. Oh, and those pesky environmentalists:

Environmentalists, in their opposition to coal of any kind, may provide the coup de grâce. Greenpeace, riffing on James Bond, is hawking a "Coalfinger" spoof on the internet and is deep in a campaign to stop all new coal plants. U.S. environmental groups recently announced a campaign to expose clean coal as a chimera. Thanks to such efforts, in the United States it's now nearly impossible to build any kind of coal plant, including tests of clean technology. As the world economy recovers, nations will once again turn to their old stalwart, dirty coal.

Damn greens! Their efforts to expose the fact that there's no such thing as clean coal are preventing us from creating something called clean coal. (But seriously: Can someone point to a bona fide test of coal with CCS that enviros prevented? Not "CCS ready," that is, but actual CCS?)

Notice, though, the unspoken premise here: Our choice is dirty coal or "clean coal." If we don't spend billions on "clean coal," we're stuck with dirty coal.

It says something extremely bad about our energy debate that you can write a piece in Newsweek that simply assumes that premise, without defense. Let's go down the same old path:

The staggering cost of new nuclear power

A new study [PDF] puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour -- triple current U.S. electricity rates!

This staggering price is far higher than the cost of a variety of carbon-free renewable power sources available today -- and 10 times the cost of energy efficiency (see here).

The new study, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power [PDF], is one of the most detailed cost analyses publicly available on the current generation of nuclear power plants being considered in this country. It is by a leading expert in power plant costs, Craig A. Severance. A practicing CPA, Severance is co-author of The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power (Praeger 1976), and former Assistant to the Chairman and to Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission.

This important new analysis is being published by Climate Progress because it fills a critical gap in the current debate over nuclear power -- transparency. Severance explains:

Is Toyota developing a purely solar-powered car?

An AP report is generating headlines around the world:

Toyota Motor Corp. is secretly developing a vehicle that will be powered solely by solar energy ...

According to The Nikkei, Toyota is working on an electric vehicle that will get some of its power from solar cells equipped on the vehicle, and that can be recharged with electricity generated from solar panels on the roofs of homes. The automaker later hopes to develop a model totally powered by solar cells on the vehicle, the newspaper said without citing sources.

Getting some electricity from rooftop PV panels isn't news, though it is a good idea, if only a "symbolic gesture" until panel costs drop sharply. (See also Treehugger's "Solar-Powered Toyota Prius Project.")

But there isn't enough rooftop area to run a car solely on rooftop solar cells. I don't see how it would work even for an ultra-lightweight short-range city car with a really big roof area -- an ungainly, unaerodynamic design. And don't forget, cars are often parked inside.

Rocker Neil Young says America can take lead in efficient autos

Dial up “Live Rust” on your MP3 player while you kick back to read Neil Young’s auto call to action over at Huffington Post. Young has gotten plenty of mileage lately off of his involvement with Team LincVolt, a 1959 Lincoln Continental outfitted to run on electricity. But if you’ve missed out on Young’s non-musical […]

The dumbest headline of 2009

On the very first day of 2009, the L. A. Times ran a story that already seems a lock to win the year's dumbest headline award. And dumbest subhead: "Recent moves by lame-duck officials, though frustrating to environmentalists, offer the president-elect time and political cover to deliberately craft rules on emissions, energy lobbyists say."

Yes, the LAT thinks that accelerating new coal plant construction, greenhouse-gas emissions, and the wanton destruction of the planet's livability will give Obama "breathing room to fight global warming."

You might just as well argue that waterboarding gives its victims "breathing room" -- after all, right after you have been waterboarded, you breathe like you have never breathed before, desperately gasping for air.

With heat pumps, smart cooperation is as important as technology

Commenter Pangolin made a point about the cost of ground source heat pumps, an energy-saving technology, in his comment about Hansen's open letter: "If I cluster installation of my geo-exchange systems (4 homes) I can realize significant savings in the greatest cost of the system, the drilling for the ground loop. If I bundle systems into neighborhood or block thermal-service units unit costs go down again."

Just so. To take an extreme example, a neighbor of mine had a ground source heat pump installed for $15,000 in a single-family residence (her home was ideal for the technology in a number of ways). Normally such systems run $20,000-$40,000. However, that cost can drastically be altered when shared. In 1992, a HUD Oklahoma apartment complex, Park Chase Apartments [PDF], installed heat pumps for 348 units for a cost of around $6,800 per unit -- about $10,000 per unit in 2009 dollars.

Even on the four-unit basis Pangolin mentions, the price could be lowered not only by a shared ground loop, but by shared pumps, and by timing installation to coincide with road repair, and placing the loop under the street. I suspect that done on the block level or even along a single street the length of a block, this could lower costs to $15,000 per unit.

This is not a technological change in the usual sense. But it makes use of smart cooperation to use technology more effectively. And this is only one of many cases where we can use cooperation to drastically lower the cost of the investments we need to make to replace fossil fuels. You can look at it as a form of technology if you want to. Certainly it is innovation -- an innovation in social relations rather than machines.

Why large future warming is very likely

A friend of mine from college emailed me the other day and expressed some skepticism about the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. It occurred to me that it would make a good topic for my next post.

So here is the reasoning that has led me to conclude that business-as-usual carbon dioxide emissions will lead to temperature increases over the next century of around 3 degrees C.

First, it has been known for over 150 years that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will increase the temperature of the planet. In fact, the very small number of credible skeptics out there, such as Dick Lindzen and Pat Michaels, are on record agreeing that adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will warm the planet. What they argue is that the warming will be very small. More on that later.

The conclusion that emitting greenhouse gases will result in warming does not rest on the output of climate models, but is a simple physical argument that predates the invention of the computer. And if you don't believe in physics, take a look at Venus. That planet features a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and consequently a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead.

So we know that adding carbon dioxide is going to warm the planet. This leads us to the real question: How much warming are we going to get?