Moving the Goalposts -- Refusal to Negotiate

Impoverishment?  The latest denialist buzzword for refusal to negotiate

The key trait - if you want a job at Heritage or Fox or one of the outfits stoking the New American Civil War - is agility. The incantations that keep GOP ground troops fiercely loyal must be constantly refreshed. It's a lot like the tactics used by the brilliant confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest, or Persian horse archers who harried the Roman legions of Crassus. Keep changing direction! Never let your lumbering foe grapple with you, bringing to bear his devastating advantage in artillery -- called "facts."

Elsewhere we've seen how the climate denialist movement has dodged and weaved, with roots in the same advertising firms that declared: "tobacco is good for you" and "cars don't cause smog," and "what Love Canal?"

When it came to global warming, we first saw: "You scientists were predicting an Ice Age in the 1970s!" (A complete lie. There was one paper; the actual consensus at the time was seen in the flick Soylent Green, already deep concern about warming.)

What was the next incantation? It went -- "What warming? Glaciers are growing!"

This fell apart when clear satellite images were augmented by the stunningly beautiful and frightening film, Chasing Ice. And if you have not seen it yet, don't you dare call yourself an open-minded citizen.  I am serious. You are a dogmatic fool, if you cannot bring yourself to spend a dollar and 80 minutes seeing what's actually going on... and how Heritage and Fox lied to you.

Oh, but did I mention agility? As those smartypants science lovers ponderously brought facts to bear, the confederate cavalry did a sudden swerve to: "Of course it's getting warmer! Climate is always changing...naturally! But there's no evidence that humans are causing it."

This time, the sciencey types were quicker... as they got better in earlier phases of the Civil War. Charts of the extremely mild and stable Holocene Era, in which humanity was able to build civilization in a very calm and mild period... have been devastating the "it's always changing" hypnosis chant.  Anyway, if climate is "changing" away from Holocene Era stability, then it's time to take things really seriously, take reasonable precautions, maybe get ready.  Possibly even follow expert advice.

One might imagine this would corner General Forrest, at last. Oh, but never underestimate the agility of the panderers and pushers of Ailes-heimers disease.

== Moving the goal posts ==

There is nothing lower than a cheater... except a cheater who tries to pretend he never cheated.  The process I described, above, is called "moving the goal posts." And many of you out there have participated in this calumny. 

In fairness, it also happens all the time on the far left! Take the recent indignation over President Obama's "glacial" one-year transition toward rescinding the policy known as "don't ask, don't tell."  Those who decried that U.S. military policy toward gay service members were right to call the policy obsolete.  These goal posts needed moving! 

Still... does progress demand amnesia? That these very same activists  wanted and praised "don't ask, don't tell," as a huge reform over the discrimination that came before? Let me reiterate: "You adored "Don't ask, Don't tell," back in the 1990s.  Sure, push forward, but must you be so grouchy and bereft of memory or perspective?

This sort of thing happens all the time, on the left. Only with this difference. That shifting immediate goals can often be part and parcel of making necessary progress. It is the churlish refusal to admit that there's been progress, that makes this dishonest and a bit of a cheat.

Goal-moving cheaters on the right have no such excuse. For the Fox-crowd, it is simply a way to shift to the next propaganda lie, as soon as the last one proves untenable. Moreover, if you do this, it proves you are not a climate "skeptic," because genuine Skeptics ask questions with a receptiveness to getting actual answers.

They set a standard by which they would be willing to change their minds. Want an example? Richard Muller of UC Berkeley was a climate change gadfly for years, and a hero to denialists... until the mound of accumulating evidence rose to a level where he announced "all right, I am satisfied. Human activity is changing the climate and we need to adjust policies to mitigate the harm." 

At which point folks at Heritage and Fox who had been lionizing Muller abruptly denounced him as a member of the lemming-herd, "grant hugging" conspiracy of pointy-headed science conformist drones.*

== A huge, glaring example ==

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity. Faux “academic” institutions like Heritage and AEI have put forward offers of major grant money (originating with the Kochs and others) for eminent scientists to defect and become denialist shills. Very few have accepted, but here is one example.

“Documents show Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist who attributes global warming largely to variations in the sun’s energy, has accepted more than $1.2 million from the fossil-fuel industry but failed to disclose that in most of his scientific papers. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals.”

“Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.”

Oh, be proud.

== The goal posts move again! ==

So what's the latest incantation? The new climate-denialist incantation making the rounds is "impoverishment." And it goes to the heart of the American red-blue divide.

Even if we suppose that the scientists and the 99% of folks who actually know stuff turn out to be right -- that polluting human industry is rapidly changing the climate we all rely upon -- we should still do absolutely nothing about it!

Why? 

Because the only option being offered by the smartypants types is to forsake all power, all industry, trash our standard of living, and thereafter sit and shiver in the dark...

...until the final days of Armageddon end it all, so why suffer, when it's all gonna get used up, anyway?

Yep, that's what we want -- impoverishment. 

Amid the fastest rising prosperity the world has ever seen, with ever-greater fractions of the world's children going to school and coming home to electric lights, a fridge and sanitation, we "lib'ruls and libertarians" want to end all that progress and instead make everyone squat in chill-dimness.

Uh-huh. Riiiiight.

In fact, there are maybe a few thousand frenzied Earth-Firster types who want exactly that.  Dismal, fanatical cretins who remind us that the left contains some loonies, too. A ratio and a level of craziness almost one percent of what we see on today's mad right. (Yes, that numerous and that crazy!)

You conservatives out there -- (and I know there are many of you in my community, who are wise enough to come here now and then, despite the pain) -- please dig this now, carefully. And I look you in the eye as I tell you the bald truth...

... that when you claim us blue-sciencey types want "impoverishment" you are not only spreading an outright lie. You also thus make clear that you know no scientists.  Most of us, in fact, quite like modern comforts. Heck we invented most of the ones you like best.

In fact, almost no one is asking for "impoverishment" or to "shiver in the dark." That incantation is an excuse for what the Kochs and Saudis and carbon barons really want, which is utter refusal to negotiate.

== The absolute crux matter in climate change ==

I lay it on the line. This is not about whether or not there's warming.  This isn't even about whether or not humans are causing some, or all of the change in Earth's climate. Those are all distractions. 

The matter at stake here is purely and absolutely this --

--  refusal to even discuss practical, interim, moderate measures that we might take, just in case the warnings prove correct.

Think about it. If you received a warning about any other danger -- from lung cancer to an approaching asteroid -- you would take at least some reasonable, modest precautions early, just in case the worried experts turn out to be right. Even while seeking a second, third, fifth, hundredth opinion, you would heed advice and do something. You might cut down your smoking, or have NASA send out some investigating probes. You would at least support taking further tests and widening their scope.

But that is diametrically opposite to what's happened re: climate change. While demeaning science and moving goal posts, the right's adamant position has been to never put anything on the table. No increases in climate research. (Funds were slashed under the Bushes, satellites cancelled and NASA forbidden to look Earthward.)  No investments in energy efficiency.

Let's make this perfectly clear. Instead of draconian "impoverishment," most of what we need to do falls into the category of TWODA - or Things We Ought to be Doing Anyway... efficiency measures that would help us all, by saving billions off our energy bills even if it turns out that all the smart people are wrong about climate change.

Now ask yourselves this. Who, in their right minds, would oppose TWODA?

Only one group of individuals on this planet are benefiting from the relentless delaying tactics. From a propaganda campaign to rile up millions of Americans -- and Australians and Canadians -- to oppose even a hint of negotiation over moderate, just-in-case precautions that would also lower all our energy bills. Care to guess who those people are?

Why the very same carbon barons who own Heritage and AEI, who own Fox, and who get rich by delaying energy efficiency and tapping into your wallet, every single day.

=========

Addendum: 

*I love the "grant-hugging" bit! Have you ever seen Heritage or Fox back up this incantation-assertion - as journalists do - by listing the "climate change grants" that are supposedly bribing thousands of the smartest folks on the planet into conforming with a lib'rul party line?

Hint, no such list is possible, Indeed, many of the finest experts need no such piddling, five-figure "climate grants." They are already hugely well-funded, doing weather analysis and billion dollar, ten day forecasts that insurance, agriculture and other industries pay vast sums for. Oh, another funny thing; as we just saw in the case of Wei-Hock Soon, Heritage and AEI offer major grant bribes for any prominent scientist to come over and say whatever the Kochs and Saudis want them to say. Only a few, second rate takers, so far. So much for "Grant-hugging."

I reiterate, the folks who are dissed by folks as being clueless are the very same geniuses who can parse the Navier-Stokes equations and create brilliant cellular gas-vapor models, that transformed the old 4 hour joke of a "weather report" into today's ten-day miracle forecast..... can you do that?)

I know those folks. Plus others who have successfully modeled the climates of six planets!  They are smarter people than me and smarter than you too. 

See-it, believe-it proof… plus smart mobs and cool science

We'll start this time with CHASING ICE -- a documentary by and about one of the world's greatest adventurers, who spent years with his brave & hardy team designing, building and setting up some of the world's toughest cameras to endure the planet's harshest environments, all to track by time-lapse whether glaciers are growing or shrinking.  It's spectacular to watch, long before you finally get to see the hard-won footage.

This nature show is a game-changer. Watch it and make everyone you know watch it.  I saw an early version and it left everyone speechless in awe. Check local listings or find it on Amazon).  And yes, your  denialist uncle will find any excuse to avoid watching, because he will know in advance where this goes, where it has to go, where undeniable, bald-faced video footage takes anyone who has the basic curiosity and honesty to watch.

Oh… you have never seen anything till you've watched a chunk of glacier the SIZE OF MANHATTAN break off of Greenland and go belly up in a spectacular roar. Watch it 95% just to know there are still adventurers in the world who can bring home to us tales of wonder, worthy of Amundsen.  

== Tracing back the clock of life… TEN billion years? ==

Has the complexity of life been increasing along a path similar to Moore's Law?  If you trace-back the doublings of integrated circuit complexity, halving the number of transistors per chip every 18 months (Moore's Law) you get to zero around 1970… pretty much when it all started.  A similar back extrapolation was done with Hubble's Law, way back in the 1930s when the expansion of the universe was discovered, giving an early estimate for the Big Bang that was correct within an order of magnitude.  Now scientists have done the same thing with the expansion of the genome. And although this is only one possible measure of life-complexity, this particular trace-back yields shocking results. See: Moore's Law and the Complexity of Life in Technology Review.

If you discount the vast tracts of "redundant" DNA in mammalian chromosomes, then the log curve plots straight back in time, past eukaryotes and prokaryotes, to suggest that life had its origins… almost ten billion years ago.  Since the Earth itself is less than five billion years old, this suggests that either:

(1) life began de novo on Earth (the standard model) and then had a phase of exceptionally rapid genome growth (akin to the inflationary phase of expansion that some say followed the Big Bang), or

(2)  life began elsewhere and was seeded on the early Earth, in accordance with the Panspermia Theory of Arrhenius, and later Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. (As well as Heart of the Comet.)

An altogether fascinating prospect, either way.

== Science and the Spirit of Innovation ==

See 27 sci fi things that are coming true.  Such as a robot that can navigate an obstacle course, spray on skin, invisibility cloaks, 3-D printing of houses, chimera monkeys made from several embryos, artificial leaves, new, cheaper solar cells, and  exoskeletons!

Yet, are any of these advances as epochal as breakthroughs of the past? Has the engine of our innovation broken down? The incredible stodginess of Hollywood, these days, with remakes of remakes, is only matched by the stunning "me-too" notions seen in most net-web startups.  I run into it all the time.

Every decade since 1940 has seen the United states and its economy swayed by two major forces - a vast trade deficit that wound up being the great driver of world development, raising billions out of poverty around the world... and a wave of made-in-america innovative products and services that generated enough wealth to pay for it all.  From jet planes to rockets and satellites; from telecom and pharmaceuticals and fiber optics to xerography, CCDs and the internet, these breakthroughs came in rapid succession and enabled us to buy trillions of dollars worth of crap we never needed, thus uplifting the world.

That is, till the first decade of the 21st Century, when much of this engine stalled.  Is it simplistic to blame it on social matters like the culture war against science, waged especially hard during the Bush Administration? Of course that was a factor, at a time when extremes of both right and left preach cynical disbelief in the possibility of technology serving us in its traditional, problem-solving role.

That attitude is opposed by (among others) President Obama, who mentions sci-tech more often in speeches than any two other presidents, combined.  But there has to be more to it than that. A component that drives deeper than politics.

This article in the Economist, Has the ideas machine broken down? tries for perspective… and at least succeeds in offering background.

One thing you can do: Sign a petition to increase NASA's budget -- and support cutting edge developments in space and technology.  But above all, think about it!  Talk to others about re-igniting the can-do spirit.

==Bio-Science Miscellany==

A thoughtful, brief article  about the prospect of uplifting animal intelligence appeared recently in the Boston Globe, By Emily Anthes.

An absolute must-read about  the importance of the next frontier in biology and medicine, the Micro-Biome  ecosystem of bacteria and microbes who inhabit the human gut, skin, mouth etc.  Aldous Huxley wrote about this in a great novel 80 years ago. Today, both doctors and quacks are touting both real and fantasy cures that might arise from tailoring or re-building these symbiotic networks that are often wiped out or thrown into imbalance by excessive use of antibiotics.  Reinforcing the old saw that one generation's brilliant "solution" winds up creating new problems that the next generation must deal with.  So it goes.  (Get your own personal microbiome analyzed at uBiome.com).

Brain Scan Predicts Whether Convicts Will Re-Offend: Welcome To The Sci-Fi Future.  Activity in one very particular part of the brain shows a high correlation with recidivism. Men in the bottom half of anterior cingulate cortex activity were 2.6 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes and 4.3 times more likely to be arrested for nonviolent crimes. Should this become a factor in parole hearings?  The future is arriving.

Graphic shows how vaccines have changed our world.  And now yet more studies provide overwhelming refutation of the loony notion that vaccines cause autism. An area where the "left" is bona fide easily as cloud cuckoo as the right.

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a way to make genetic parts that can perform logic calculations.

Laser light to the prelimbic region of the prefrontal cortex apparently zaps away cocaine addiction – or conversely turned non-addicted rats into compulsive cocaine seekers. The effects were seen in rats gene-spliced to have light-sensitive neurons that can be turned on-ff by laser, hence, a different approach must be used for human therapies. Still, knowing which neurons are active in inhibition/addiction control could be of great value and there are other (e.g. magnetic) ways to have similar effects.

==Science and Society==

One of the latest TED talk sensations is Allan Savory, who has spent his life combatting desertification, and who now believes we've had it all wrong for two generations.  He claims that deserts are prevented, rather than created, by large herds of grazing animals.  His presentation is worth watching and the re-evaluation that he triggers is delicious to my contrarian mind!  On the other hand, it isn't hard for me to do a second, ornery veer and say "yes… but!"

Oh so many buts.  Like the fact that vast deserts clearly grew as human pastoralists were able to protect their herds from predators. Overgrazing is just as much a threat as undergrazing and Savory's technique requires the transient passage of large/dense herds of grazers, who stomp and fertilize an area without denuding it. A cavil that will require either intense supervision and daily management… or a return to predator-dense situations that keep the herds packed and moving.  Moreover the grasslands that he has restored are anything but "healthy" ecosystems in their own right.  Improved, but still denuded of trees by the very herbivore herds that Savory extolls. For true health you need at least partial coverage by trees, and that takes active management too, in order to protect them from the herbivores, like cattle, elephants and giraffes.

Finally, Savory's method emphasizes vast herds of cattle that are burdensome in their own right.  One of the hopeful prospects on our horizon will be vat grown meat.  If it can satisfy our appetites at three pounds of grain per pound of meat, then there will be more food and hope in the world, at far lower Karmic cost.   I will not let go of that hope… though I appreciate Savory's input of an eye-opening realization.  One that will do good!  Just let's not get carried away.

==Miscellaneous==

Read about one man's lifelong wrestling match with his atheism against religious heritage in the context of a scientific world. Sample an excerpt from The God Problem, by Howard Bloom, in Utne Reader.

Ever read a blog on chemistry that was hilarious? See this one about di-oxygen di-flouride… or FOOF.  Yes, it is as horrible a substance as it sounds!  And the blog is gut-busting… if your funny bone is tickled by something that makes water ice explode at minus two hundred celsius.

io9 offers you one of their great lists:  "Want to get smarter during your commute? There are a lot of fantastic podcasts that will teach you new things in a thoroughly entertaining way. Here are 13 podcasts that will expand your brain with cutting-edge science and cultural analysis."

== Smart Mobs and the Boston Bombings ==

Just one quick comment amid the mid-April terror crisis that has become all-too familiar in recent years. Evidently the FBI gets it and has called out a "smart mob"… or at least asked for public help identifying potential culprits in the Boston bombing from street video footage.  All may change, by the time this blog is posted, so I am putting off making my own appraisal.  But this could be a seminal moment, when all of society came to realize… we'll be better off when all citizens share in the power to see.