Shaping Tomorrow's World From climate change to peak oil and food security, our societies are confronted with many serious challenges that, if left unresolved, will threaten the well-being of present and future generations, and the natural world. This website is dedicated to discussion of those challenges and potential solutions based on scientific evidence and scholarly analysis. How to build support for climate policies? <p>Our paper, entitled <a href=""><em>&ldquo;The effect of framing and normative messages in building support for climate policies&rdquo;</em></a>, was recently published in the open-access journal <em>PLoS ONE</em>. The paper reports a media analysis of the framing of Australia&rsquo;s carbon pricing scheme along with two studies exploring approaches to building public support for reducing emissions. The abstract for the paper reads as follows:</p> <p><em>Deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are required to mitigate climate change. However, there is low willingness amongst the public to prioritise climate policies for reducing emissions. Here we show that the extent to which Australians are prepared to reduce their country's CO<sub>2</sub> emissions is greater when the costs to future national income are framed as a &ldquo;foregone-gain&rdquo;&mdash;incomes rise in the future but not by as much as in the absence of emission cuts&mdash;rather than as a &ldquo;loss&rdquo;&mdash;incomes decrease relative to the baseline expected future levels (Studies 1 &amp; 2). The provision of a normative message identifying Australia as one of the world's largest CO<sub>2</sub> emitters did not increase the amount by which individuals were prepared to reduce emissions (Study 1), whereas a normative message revealing the emission policy preferences of other Australians did (Study 2). The results suggest that framing the costs of reducing emissions as a smaller increase in future income and communicating normative information about others' emission policy preferences are effective methods for leveraging public support for emission cuts.</em></p> <p><strong>Reducing emissions and the &ldquo;worse-off&rdquo; fallacy</strong></p> <p>Our paper builds on previous work by <a href="">Hatfield-Dodds and Morrison</a> (2010) who found that a significant minority of Australians believe that taking action to reduce Australia&rsquo;s carbon emissions will cause future incomes to decrease. However, this perception is misguided because most economic modelling indicates that cutting emissions will not reduce incomes&mdash;it will merely slow the rate at which incomes rise. Indeed, as noted <a href="">elsewhere</a>, Australian Treasury modelling (<a href="">Johnson</a>, 2008) indicates that reducing emissions by 90% will still result in average national income, per person, rising from its current level of $50,000 to $80,000 by 2050.</p> <p>The researchers suggested that this &ldquo;<em>worse-off&rdquo; fallacy</em>&mdash;the misbelief that people will be financially &ldquo;worse-off&rdquo; by reducing emissions&mdash;could be a pivotal factor underpinning people&rsquo;s reluctance to support climate policies. They further speculated that this misperception might be the consequence of a bias in the way that the economic impacts of reducing emissions are communicated to the public.</p> <p>To understand this putative bias, we need to examine the distinction between two different approaches to framing a negative outcome. A negative outcome can be framed either as a<em> loss</em> or a <em>foregone-gain</em>.&nbsp; The distinction between the two is best illustrated with an example:</p> <p>(1) <em>&ldquo;Reducing Australia&rsquo;s emissions would mean that national income per person would be about 1.7% lower by the year 2020 than it would be without emissions cuts.&nbsp; This is equivalent to a cost of $1000 per person.&rdquo; (Loss frame)</em></p> <p>(2) <em>&ldquo;Reducing Australia&rsquo;s emissions would mean that national income per person would increase from its current level of $50,400 to $54,900 in 2020.&nbsp; This increase is $1000 lower than without emission cuts.&rdquo; (Foregone-gain frame)</em></p> <p>In the two above examples, the cost of reducing Australia&rsquo;s emissions is objectively identical&mdash;viz. $1000. However, in (1) the cost is judged as an out of pocket expense. Since no information is conveyed about how incomes will change in the future, relative to today, the cost is interpreted with reference to one&rsquo;s current income level, potentially leading one to infer that reducing emissions will cause future incomes to decrease below present levels. By contrast, in (2) the same cost is judged as a reduction in a future gain. Although reducing emissions incurs a (relatively small) cost, it is apparent that incomes will nevertheless continue to rise above current levels.</p> <p><a href="">Hatfield-Dodds and Morrison</a> suggested that the &ldquo;worse-off&rdquo; fallacy might arise because most communications about the economic impacts of reducing emissions are cast within a loss frame. However, they did not provide any concrete evidence to substantiate this claim.</p> <p><strong>Evidence for the communication bias</strong></p> <p>In our paper, we provided this evidence by performing a search of major Australian newspaper articles for communications regarding the future costs of Australia&rsquo;s carbon pricing scheme&mdash;more commonly known as the &ldquo;carbon tax&rdquo;. We examined 1,481 articles from major Australian news outlets published over a two year period and classified them according to whether the future costs of reducing Australia&rsquo;s emissions were framed as a loss or a foregone-gain. Our analysis revealed overwhelming support for the communication bias: communications that used a loss frame outweighed communications that used a foregone-gain frame by a staggering ratio of 10:1.</p> <p>Thus, the communication bias is real and may be undercutting efforts to raise public support for reducing emissions. Having demonstrated the existence of a communication bias, we then set about exploring whether public support for climate policies could be increased by reframing the costs of reducing emissions as a foregone-gain.</p> <p><strong>The power of (re)framing</strong></p> <p>In two studies&mdash;one with university students and a second with a representative Australian community sample&mdash;participants were presented with several emission reduction policies that varied in terms of their future cost to national income and the extent to which they reduced Australia&rsquo;s carbon emissions. To make our studies ecologically valid, the policies were based on real economic modelling conducted by the Australian Treasury (<a href="">Johnson</a>, 2008). The primary manipulation in both studies was that for one group of participants, the costs of the policies were framed as a loss, whereas for a second group the objectively equivalent costs were framed as a foregone-gain.</p> <p>We anticipated that policy support would be higher in the latter group than the former, and across both studies that is precisely what we found: people were willing to reduce Australia&rsquo;s emissions to a greater degree&mdash;and incur larger monetary sacrifices&mdash;when the policy costs were framed as a foregone-gain, compared to a loss.</p> <p><strong>The power of social norms</strong></p> <p>In conjunction with our framing manipulation, we also examined whether it would be possible to increase support for emission cuts by harnessing the known power of social norms to influence behaviour (<a href="">Rivis &amp; Sheeran</a>, 2003). Social norms refer to people&rsquo;s perceptions of how others behave in different social contexts, such as how much people tip waiters in restaurants, how much alcohol people consume at social gatherings, and how much people donate to charities.</p> <p>Social norms are powerful motivators of behaviour because when people are uncertain about how to behave in a particular social context&mdash;e.g., how much to tip the waiter in a restaurant, or how much to reduce emissions&mdash;social norms provide information about what behaviour is most suitable.</p> <p>Prior research has shown that exposing individuals to normative messages that highlight social norms can reduce household energy consumption (<a href="">Allcott</a>, 2011) and littering (<a href="">Cialdini, Reno, &amp; Kallgren</a>, 1990). Normative messages have also proved effective at increasing recycling (<a href="">Schultz</a>, 1999) and conservation amongst hotel guests (<a href="">Goldstein, Cialdini, &amp; Griskevicius</a>, 2008). We therefore reasoned that normative messages might also be effective at raising support for emission cuts.</p> <p>In our first study, support for reducing emissions was high. Thus, there existed amongst the group of participants a social norm of strong support for reducing Australia&rsquo;s emissions. We capitalised upon this in our second study by providing one group of participants with information about the frequency with which participants from our initial study chose the different emission reduction policies.</p> <p>We found that people exposed to this social-norming information were willing to reduce Australia&rsquo;s emissions to a greater degree than a second group who received no such information. Thus, seeing that most other Australians in our first study supported strong action on climate change caused these participants to increase the amount by which they were also willing to reduce Australia&rsquo;s emissions.</p> <p><strong>Conclusions</strong></p> <p>As one of the world&rsquo;s largest emitters of greenhouse gasses (<a href="">per capita</a> and <a href="">per kWh produced</a>) and contributors to global climate change, Australia bears a heavy burden of responsibility to reduce its emissions. However, there is generally low willingness amongst the public to prioritise climate policies for reducing emissions. We have shown that this resistance may&mdash;in large part&mdash;be attributable to a misperception that climate policies are more costly than they are in reality, brought about by a communication bias in which the costs of such policies are framed overwhelmingly as a loss. We demonstrate that reframing those costs as a reduction in a future gain significantly increases policy support. Moreover, crafting social-norming messages that effectively communicate this high level of support also constitutes an effective method for increasing support for emission reductions. We conclude therefore that framing and normative messages represent two successful approaches by which climate policy communicators can raise levels of support for reducing emissions in Australia and elsewhere.&nbsp;</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>References</strong></p> <p>Allcott H (2011) <a href="">Social norms and energy conservation</a>. Journal of Public Economics 95: 1082&ndash;1095.</p> <p>Cialdini RB, Reno RR, Kallgren CA (1990) <a href="">Theory of normative conduct: Recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places</a>. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58: 1015&ndash;1026.</p> <p>Goldstein NJ, Cialdini RB, Griskevicius V (2008) <a href="">A room with a viewpoint: Using social norms to motivate environmental conservation in hotels.</a> Journal of Consumer Research 35: 472&ndash;482.</p> <p>Hatfield-Dodds S, Morrison M (2010) <a href="">Confusing opportunity costs, losses and forgone gains: Assessing the effect of communication bias on support for climate change policy in the United States and Australia</a>, CCEP working paper 9.10, Centre for Climate Economics &amp; Policy, Crawford School of Economics and Government, The Australian National University, Canberra.</p> <p>Johnson D (2008) <a href="">Australia&rsquo;s low pollution future: The economics of climate change mitigation</a>. Canberra: Treasury.</p> <p>Rivis A, Sheeran P (2003) <a href="">Descriptive norms as an additional predictor in the theory of planned behaviour</a>: A meta-analysis. Current Psychology 22: 218&ndash;233.</p> <p>Schultz WP (1999) <a href="">Changing behavior with normative feedback interventions: A field experiment on curbside recycling.</a> Basic and Applied Social Psychology 21: 25&ndash;36.</p> <div> <hr size="1" /> </div> Tue, 10 Feb 2015 19:00:00 EST The EU Science Advisor: Greenpeace and Climate Denial <p>After being rumored for some time, the E.U. has now <a href="">abolished the post of Chief Scientific Adviser</a>. I have been following this from a distance, and although there may be some nuances that I am unaware of, my first reaction is that I am <a href="">in agreement with Mark Lynas</a>, namely that</p> <blockquote> <p>&ldquo;This is a dark day for science in Europe. Instead of having scientific advice at the heart of European policymaking, the Juncker Commission clearly wants to remove any person who might bring inconvenient scientific truths to the top EU table. Sadly, this is all too consistent with European moves to back away from evidence-based policymaking &ndash; if you can&rsquo;t change the science you muzzle the scientists or keep them out of the room when powerful people are taking decisions.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <p>It is also clear that this move was undertaken in response to a concerted lobbying effort by various groups who opposed the position by noting:</p> <blockquote> <p>&ldquo;&hellip;The post of Chief Scientific Adviser is fundamentally problematic as it concentrates too much influence in one person, and <em>undermines in-depth scientific research and assessments</em> carried out by or for the Commission directorates in the course of policy elaboration.&rdquo; [Emphasis added]</p> </blockquote> <p>The language may sound familiar: Opposition to a scientific position by claiming that the position undermines science. Straight out of the playbook of the <a href="">Merchants of Doubt</a>. Straight out of the tobacco industry&rsquo;s strategy to call their opposition to medical research &ldquo;sound science&rdquo;&mdash;which of course it was not.</p> <p>So who was doing the lobbying, and who claimed that a Chief Scientific Adviser undermines scientific research?</p> <p>It was Greenpeace.</p> <p>Greenpeace and a number of other environmental organizations that <a href="">co-signed a letter</a> to the President-elect of the European Commission, Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker.</p> <p>Bob Ward succinctly summarized the implications of this:</p> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"> <p>When NGOs pick and choose which science to accept, they are no better than climate change 'sceptics'.</p> &mdash; Bob Ward (@ret_ward) <a href="">November 13, 2014</a></blockquote> <script src=""></script> <p>Indeed.</p> <p>Does this mean there can be no public debate about GMOs, and that &ldquo;science&rdquo;, however it is best defined in this instance, should have the final word?</p> <p>No, far from it, in the same way that a disembodied appeal to &ldquo;science&rdquo; cannot solve the risk from climate change. Ultimately, we have to make decisions about policies and those decisions require debate with input from all stakeholders and the public&mdash;whether they are &ldquo;skeptic&rdquo; about climate change or GMOs or not.</p> <p>The problem arises when the politics&mdash;and their offshoot, so-called &ldquo;skepticism&rdquo;&mdash;seek to influence or deny the science rather than addressing the policies that deal with the scientific evidence.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s one thing to argue against Monsanto or against a carbon trading scheme, but quite another to seek to muzzle inconvenient scientists or to get rid of an advisory position altogether.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s one thing to oppose corporate profits but quite another to destroy a field experiment involving GMOs, <a href="">as Greenpeace has done in Australia</a>.</p> <p>Unfortunately, at least at first glance, in the GMO arena Greenpeace and its allies seem to have taken a page from the playbook of operators whom they would implacably oppose on other issues, such as climate change.</p> <p>The irony is distressing, but it also underscores that, psychologically, cognitively, and politically, <em>science denial is denial is denial is denial</em>. Wherever it happens to be pointing.</p> Thu, 13 Nov 2014 12:45:00 EST Air travel and 21st century fears <p>Air travel shows robust and sustained <a href="">growth</a> of 4 to 5% per year, and Airbus <a href="">anticipates</a> that air traffic will continue to grow at just under 5% annually.</p> <p>The International Air Transport Association (IATA), the organization of the world&rsquo;s airlines, <a href="">expects</a> to see a 31% increase in passenger numbers between 2012 and 2017, with total annual passenger numbers rising to just under 4 billion by the end of that period.</p> <p>Such growth, it has been <a href="">estimated</a>, would require more than 29,000 new passenger and cargo aircraft with a value of more than US$ 4 trillion. Another estimate <a href="">states</a> that the number of aircraft in service in 2011 will double by 2031.</p> <p>Two concerns &ndash; two fears &ndash; have the ability to derail this growth in the 21<sup>st</sup> century, for different reasons and across different timescales. These concerns are the spread of Ebola virus (and future contagious diseases) and climate change.</p> <h2>Ebola virus</h2> <p>Ebola virus disease is an acute, often fatal illness in humans which first <a href="">occurred</a> in remote villages in Central Africa in 1976. It is transmitted to humans from wild animals, and in the human population through transmission from human to human. The average Ebola case fatality rate is about 50%; such rate has <a href="">varied</a> between 25 and 90% in previous outbreaks.</p> <p>The present outbreak in West Africa &lsquo;is the largest and most complex Ebola outbreak&rsquo; since Ebola was first discovered. As the World Health Organisation (WHO) <a href="">notes</a>,</p> <blockquote> <p>[t]here have been more cases and deaths in this outbreak than all others combined. It has also spread between countries starting in Guinea then spreading across land borders to Sierra Leone and Liberia, by air (1 traveller only) to Nigeria, and by land (1 traveller) to Senegal.</p> </blockquote> <h4>Transmission during air travel</h4> <p>The incubation period of Ebola is from 2 to 21 days. People become infective with the onset of symptoms. The primary mode of transmission is from <a href="">person to person</a> through &lsquo;direct contact with infected, symptomatic persons or their body fluids/secretions.&rsquo;</p> <p>WHO notes that infected persons have travelled internationally and that more Ebola cases &lsquo;might be exported to non-affected countries.&rsquo; It also notes the possibility &lsquo;that a person who has been exposed to the Ebola virus and developed symptoms may board a commercial flight,&rsquo; and that such persons &lsquo;should seek immediate medical attention upon arrival, and then be isolated to prevent further transmission.&rsquo;</p> <h4>Liability issues: More the contagion of fear of contagion &hellip;</h4> <p>WHO further states that risks to fellow travellers in a situation where a person who has been exposed to Ebola and then travels on a commercial flight are very low. It should also be <a href="">noted</a> that those who are contagious don&rsquo;t have a chance to infect many other people before they are isolated during treatment. However, WHO does recommend &lsquo;contact tracing&rsquo; in such circumstances.</p> <p>Air travel by those exposed to Ebola virus raises the question of airline liability for passenger death or injury.</p> <p>Liability for bodily injury or death of a passenger on board an international flight is determined by reference to international aviation treaties. The 1929 <a href=""><strong>Warsaw Convention</strong></a> was the first of these treaties. The most recent is the 1999 <a href=""><strong>Montreal Convention</strong></a>, and it is the treaty that will most likely apply to a passenger&rsquo;s journey.</p> <p>Article 17 of the <a href=""><strong>Montreal Convention</strong></a> provides that a carrier:</p> <blockquote> <p>&hellip; is liable for damage sustained in case of death or bodily injury of a passenger upon condition only that the accident which caused the death or injury took place on board the aircraft or in the course of any of the operations of embarking or disembarking.&nbsp;</p> </blockquote> <p>Death or injury must be caused by an &lsquo;accident.&rsquo; The most widely and generally accepted definition of an accident is set out in the decision in <a href=""><strong>Air France v Saks</strong></a>, in which the US Supreme Court stated that liability under Article 17:</p> <blockquote> <p><em>&nbsp;</em>&hellip; arises only if a passenger&rsquo;s injury [or death] is caused by an unexpected or unusual event or happening that is external to the passenger.</p> </blockquote> <p><em></em>It would seem, then, that a health condition or a pre-existing injury that <a href="">worsened</a> as a result of air travel would not be an &lsquo;accident&rsquo; for the purposes of the Montreal Convention. Moreover, as the UN aviation body, ICAO, and others have <a href="">stated</a>,</p> <blockquote> <p>The risk of transmission of Ebola virus disease during air travel is low. Unlike infections such as influenza or tuberculosis, Ebola is not spread by breathing air (and the airborne particles it contains) from an infected person. Transmission requires direct contact with blood, secretions, organs or other body fluids of infected living or dead persons or animals, all unlikely exposures for the average traveller.</p> </blockquote> <p>Nonetheless, it appears that Ebola fears have already affected the financial performance of the world&rsquo;s carriers. Last week US airline shares <a href="">fell</a> by up to 6% &lsquo;as part of an overall market slump&rsquo; due in part to fear of Ebola.</p> <h2><a href=""><strong>'Mucking up the planet'</strong></a><strong></strong></h2> <p>Another fear or concern which has the ability to derail aviation growth is climate change. It is <a href="">considered</a> that air travel is &lsquo;the most carbon- intense form of travel.&rsquo;</p> <p>No matter what the aviation industry does to reduce emissions, it will be outweighed by growth in air travel, according to <a href=""><strong>a new analysis</strong></a>. Growth will trump emissions cuts even if significant (and contentious) measures come into force to try and curb emissions &ndash; and those measures are decades away at best.</p> <p>Last year, <a href=""><strong>researchers calculated</strong></a> that total aviation emissions in 2006 were 630 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, and that by 2050, those emissions are projected to be between 1,000-3,100 million tonnes depending on how much air traffic grows, and how successfully we can tackle emissions with measures like improved fuel efficiency, biofuels, and emissions trading.</p> <h4>&lsquo;The last flight I ever take&rsquo;</h4> <p>The <a href=""><strong>new report</strong></a> referred to above by researchers at the University of Southampton shows there is not much the aviation industry can do to reduce emissions &ndash; and indeed it has not done much to date. ICAO lacks the legal authority to force airlines to cut emissions and, as the study&rsquo;s authors point out, it relies on &lsquo;voluntary cooperation and piecemeal agreements.&rsquo;</p> <p>If the status quo is maintained, civil aviation is <a href=""><strong>forecast</strong></a> to become an increasingly significant contributor to global emissions.</p> <p>As the meteorologist and journalist Eric Holthaus has <a href="">said</a>,</p> <blockquote> <p>I realized, just now: This has to be the last flight I ever take. I&rsquo;m committing right now to stop flying. It&rsquo;s not worth the climate.</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>&nbsp;</strong></p> Fri, 7 Nov 2014 07:20:00 EST Naomi Klein in Oxford <p>Naomi Klein spoke in Oxford a few days ago on invitation of COIN, the <a href="">Climate Outreach Information Network</a> in the UK. Her talk was in the <a href="">Sheldonian Theatre</a>, the official ceremonial hall of the University of Oxford&mdash;a ceremonial building indeed that added much to the enjoyment of the evening. Naomi drew a large crowd&mdash;of more than 800, so I have been told&mdash;and the event was very interesting indeed.</p> <p>Dr. Adam Corner, the COIN Research Director, <a href="">has already offered his thoughts on the event</a> and Naomi Klein&rsquo;s latest book, <a href="">This Changes Everything</a>. He &ldquo;found the ambition of the book (to radically curb the excesses of &lsquo;extractivist&rsquo; growth-based capitalism) compelling, but the means by which these ends could be achieved disappointingly lacking in inspiration.&rdquo;</p> <p>I cannot comment on the book overall as I have not read it yet beyond the early chapters, but for me the evening in Oxford raised the following questions, issues, or resolutions:</p> <ul> <li><em>Capitalism is a subject for discussion. </em>The topic of a conversation can often tell us more about the world than the arguments that are launched for or against a particular position. For example, the fact that climate scientists now vigorously debate whether one extreme weather event or another might be attributable to climate change&mdash;as for example in a recent special issue of the <a href="">Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society</a>&mdash;tells us that climate change is no longer a distant threat but that it is happening all around us. Why? Because 10 or 20 years ago no one would have seen fit to have that debate. The fact that we <em>have</em> the debate tells us all we need to know&mdash;climate change is happening now. Likewise, the fact that the words such as &ldquo;capitalism,&rdquo; &nbsp;&ldquo;inequality,&rdquo; and &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; have found their place in mainstream public discourse tells us all we need to know&mdash;we are at the cusp of a paradigm shift.</li> <li><em>What&rsquo;s unrealistic is to ignore reality. </em>If the solution to climate change really involves the demise of the neoliberal paradigm, isn&rsquo;t that an extremely unrealistic endeavor? Isn&rsquo;t climate change bad enough without having to trade in a one ideology for another one? Klein&rsquo;s rejoinder to those legitimate questions was quite insightful, I thought: What&rsquo;s unrealistic isn&rsquo;t the replacement of neoliberalism with something else, what&rsquo;s unrealistic is to ignore the physical reality of this planet which has become a central pillar of neoliberalism. </li> <li><em>How to move forward? </em>Like Corner, I am ambivalent about what follows from Klein&rsquo;s analysis or indeed what she has to recommend. Perhaps paradoxically, I can agree with several seemingly incompatible positions: On the one hand, I have enough faith in markets to believe that pricing of externalities, or <a href="">Pigovian taxes</a>, may be sufficient to yield a transformation to a low-carbon economy. It wasn&rsquo;t that long ago (in a nearly-geological time scale at least) that I was a principal of a software company at a time when MS-DOS 2.0 and an 8087 numeric co-processor were considered a breakthrough&mdash;the comparison with today&rsquo;s information technology is so breath-taking that it augurs well for the speed with which markets could decarbonize the modern economy if given the incentive to do so. On the other hand, I have little faith in the current assortment of political &ldquo;leaders&rdquo; and their ability to introduce the legislation and leadership required to make markets function for the benefit of future generations. Opposition to neoliberalism, and its ultimate demise, may therefore be the only way in which climate mitigation can be achieved. On that view, any action that nibbles away at the prevailing neoliberal paradigm and its underlying fundamentalist view of free markets may indeed be considered climate activism. </li> <li><em><a href="">To Change Everything we Need Everyone</a></em>. Yes.</li> </ul> <p><em>&nbsp;</em></p> Sun, 12 Oct 2014 22:00:00 EST The Australian's Disappearing Comissar <p><span style="color: #ff0000;"><strong>Update </strong>3 October 11:33: Apparently there are two versions of the AP story, the earlier of which contained no mention of the Australian heatwave. This information was revealed by Seth Borenstein in a Twitter exchange which is recorded </span><a href=""><span style="color: #ff0000;">here</span></a><span style="color: #ff0000;">. If <em>The Australian</em> relied on the earlier version, they would not have removed anything, and the remainder of this post is therefore irrelevant to their reporting in this instance. We now look forward to <em>The Australian </em>updating their AP report to reflect the elements that are of such obvious importance to Australia.</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Graham Readfearn <a href="">reports</a> on <em>The Australian'</em>s coverage of the recent research that examined the link between climate change and recent weather extremes. <em>The Australian</em> calls itself the "heart of the nation", although it is not always clear what nation this is referring to. It is unlikely to be Australia given that <em>The Australian</em> reprinted an AP piece on the extreme-weather research. That is, they reprinted most of it, with the exception of the following:</p> <blockquote> <p>The report seeks to find how much and how man-made warming has influenced the weather, said NOAA research meteorologist Martin Hoerling, an editor of the report.</p> <p>The influence on Australia&rsquo;s hottest year in more than a century is glaring, the report&rsquo;s editors said.</p> <p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s almost impossible&rdquo; to explain Australia&rsquo;s hot 2013 without climate change, said Peter Stott of the United Kingdom&rsquo;s meteorology office, another report editor.</p> </blockquote> <p>Yes, they left out anything relating to Australia. This editorial strategy can be <a href="">readily expressed in pictorial form:</a></p> <p><img src="" alt="" width="630" height="840" /></p> Fri, 3 Oct 2014 09:56:00 EST Putting a price on carbon: Why not a carbon tax? <p>In Australia there has never really been a debate about the merits of particular policy instruments available to governments &ndash; price-based or quantity-based ones &ndash; to mitigate the effects of climate change.</p> <p>Climate change <a href="">mitigation</a> involves reducing GHG emissions, reducing the rate and magnitude of global warming. Many of the impacts of climate change can be reduced or delayed by mitigation. The main economic requirement for effective mitigation is to put a price on carbon.</p> <p>At the moment we don&rsquo;t generally pay for the current and future costs of our emissions. Thus, Lord Stern refers to a climate change <a href="">'market failure'</a>. As one economist <a href="">puts it</a>,</p> <blockquote> <p>we need to correct this market failure by ensuring that all people, everywhere, and for the indefinite future face a market price for the use of carbon that reflects the social costs of their activities. Economic participants [governments, firms, people] &hellip; need to face realistic prices for the use of carbon if their decisions about consumption, investment, and innovation are to be appropriate.</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>Qantity or price-based instruments?</strong></p> <p>The question is whether to rely on quantity-based or price-based instruments. A price-based instrument is a carbon tax. A tax sets a price on carbon, and emitters choose how much to emit; an emissions trading scheme (ETS) sets a total quota for emissions; emitters &ndash; the market &ndash; work out the price.</p> <p>An ETS is a quantity-based instrument, the most common example of which is a cap-and-trade system. The <a href="">Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS)</a>, a proposed Australian ETS which was to have begun on 1 July 2011, was never implemented. And national ETS legislation &ndash; the Clean Energy Act &ndash; has been <a href="">repealed</a> with effect from 1 July 2014.</p> <p>Given the failure of emissions trading at the national level and its (now) near-absence at the state level in Australia, we set out here how a carbon tax could work and some of its advantages. <a href="">New research</a> confirms additional carbon tax advantages.</p> <p>A carbon tax could begin at a relatively low level (so as to avoid disruption) and would increase steadily, and predictably, over time, providing incentives to affected corporations to lower emissions, and encouraging those corporations to use energy more efficiently &ndash; encouraging the move to lower emissions technology.</p> <p>And while there are a number of points at which to impose a carbon tax, there is some agreement that the most simple, efficient way is for it to be introduced as close to the source of the fuel as possible &ndash; that is, as far upstream in the energy supply chain as possible.</p> <p>One result of an upstream approach is that increased costs would be passed along by suppliers and would be borne, ultimately, by consumers; they would be passed into downstream prices of electricity, for example.</p> <p>It is <a href="">argued</a> by those on both the left and the right that a carbon tax would provide government revenue which could then be used to reduce or offset other forms of taxation, primarily corporate and personal income taxes, thus making a carbon tax &lsquo;revenue neutral.&rsquo; Revenue from a carbon tax could also be used to subsidise alternative fuel industries and projects.</p> <p><strong>Arguments for a carbon tax</strong></p> <p>Arguments that can be made for the imposition of a carbon tax, both in isolation and as against an ETS, include the following:</p> <p><strong>&nbsp;</strong>1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Taxation is a proven instrument. Countries have used taxes for centuries, and their properties are well understood. For Yale University&rsquo;s Nordhaus, such advantages are even clearer when compared to the operation of an international ETS. As he <a href="">says</a>,</p> <blockquote> <p>tax systems are mature and universally applied instruments of policy ... By contrast, there is no experience &ndash; as in zero &ndash; with international cap-and-trade systems [although that&rsquo;s not quite true now] ... [I]t would be ... perilous for the international community to rely on an untested system like international cap-and-trade to prevent dangerous climate change ...</p> </blockquote> <p>2.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Taxes capture revenue more easily than quantitative instruments, and are less costly. Tax infrastructure is in place; pre-existing collection mechanisms exist. Taxation has lower administrative and compliance costs than does carbon trading.</p> <p>3.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Taxation is more <a href="">direct and transparent</a> than emissions trading (so it&rsquo;s said), and affords less opportunity for corruption; money moves from polluters directly to the government. And a carbon tax provides price certainty and stability (as opposed to permit price volatility) and a fixed price for carbon emissions across all economic sectors and markets.</p> <p>The <a href="">argument for carbon taxation</a> is concisely made by Harvard economist Richard Cooper:</p> <blockquote> <p>Decisions to consume goods and services made with fossil fuels are made by over a billion households and firms in the world. The best and indeed only way to reach all these decision makers is through the prices they must pay. If we are to reduce CO2-emitting activities, we must raise the prices of those activities. Levying a [tax] &hellip; does that directly.</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>New research &ndash; why taxes are better</strong></p> <p><a href="">Recent research</a> from Stanford Law School shows that vital information necessary for the design of cap and trade systems is unavailable to those making climate policy and that, while accurate emissions forecasts are needed to set the cap, energy models &lsquo;are not up to the task.&rsquo;</p> <p>This is not the case with regard to carbon taxes. The Stanford research <a href="">shows</a> that such taxes &lsquo;don&rsquo;t require the same level of information about future emissions in order to create real policies.&rsquo; Further,</p> <blockquote> <p>[c]arbon taxes are likely to produce emissions reductions relative to baseline emissions with greater certainty than a cap-and-trade because a real carbon tax will always create incentives to lower emissions while real cap-and-trade may not.</p> </blockquote> <p>There is also <a href="">news</a> from the United States for adherents of emissions trading schemes. Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland plans to introduce legislation in the US House of Representatives that would result in permits purchased by coal, oil and natural gas corporations for each tonne of carbon in the fuels they sell being auctioned. All of the proceeds would be &lsquo;returned straight to the American people as equal dividends for every woman, man and child.&rsquo;</p> <p><em>The New York Times</em> <a href="">asks</a> whether the bill &lsquo;stand[s] a snowball&rsquo;s chance in the partisan hell of Washington.&rsquo;</p> <p>The answer is no.</p> Mon, 29 Sep 2014 08:15:00 EST "Libertarian ideology is the natural enemy of science" Always? <p>The <em>Guardian </em>carried an interesting and incisive piece yesterday under the headline &ldquo;<a href="">Libertarian ideology is the natural enemy of science</a>.&rdquo; From gun control to health care to climate change, there are indeed many arenas in which scientific evidence clashes with libertarian (and conservative) worldviews: To illustrate, even though the data show that if you are a victim of an assault, you are between 4 and 5 times <em><a href="">more likely to be fatally shot </a></em>if you had a gun available than if you didn&rsquo;t have a gun, this evidence is generally dismissed by American libertarians and conservatives. They also dismiss the fact that after Australia introduced stringent gun control in 1996, <a href="">accelerated declines in firearm deaths were observed</a>.</p> <p>So not only do libertarians dismiss the problem, they also ignore the solution.</p> <p>Similarly, the relationship between right-wing politics and the rejection of the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change is established beyond much doubt, and we all know that this often involves an element of conspiratorial thinking: a <a href="">particularly colorful illustration of this tendency erupted this week in Australia.</a></p> <p>Yesterday&rsquo;s <em>Guardian</em> piece comes hard on the heels of other bad scientific news for conservative and libertarian ideology: During the past week, we learned that conservatives show <a href="">higher levels of psychopathic personality traits</a> than non-conservatives, and we also learned that lower intelligence in childhood is associated with increased prejudice later in life, with the mediating variable being <a href="">greater endorsement of right-wing socially-conservative attitudes</a>.</p> <p>Ouch.</p> <p>One likely reason that this relationship with intelligence is observed is because right-wing ideologies offer simplistic and well-structured views of society, which makes them particularly attractive to people who find uncertainty and ambiguity overwhelming. Or, as Herbert Wray put it, &ldquo;<a href="">smart people are more capable of grasping a world of nuance, fluidity and relativity</a>.&rdquo;</p> <p>Let&rsquo;s explore that nuance and relativity a bit more.</p> <p>For people on the political left it may be tempting to use the recent results to equate conservatism with low intelligence, psychopathy, racism, anti-scientism, or nutty conspiratorial thinking. Although those links can be justifiably drawn on the basis of existing data, this package is a bit too neat and simple and smacks itself of the simplification purportedly associated with right-wing ideologies.</p> <p>So let&rsquo;s look at the other side of the ledger and look at &ldquo;the right&rdquo; in the nuanced manner that is so cherished by the political left:</p> <ul> <li>We need to differentiate between libertarianism and conservatism: Although the two are often lumped together (as in the <em>Guardian</em> piece and as I have thus far in this post), and even though the constructs are <a href="">often highly correlated</a>, recent research <a href="">has begun to differentiate</a> between libertarians and social conservatives. This differentiation can be crucial, as for example in one of my recent studies that examined <a href="">attitudes towards vaccinations</a>. </li> <li>Although conservatism is typically associated with more dogmatism overall, the picture changes when people&rsquo;s &ldquo;belief superiority&rdquo; is probed with respect to specific hot-button issues. Belief superiority refers to the belief that one&rsquo;s position is more correct than someone else&rsquo;s, and in <a href="">a recent study</a> it has been found to be associated with political extremity rather than one particular ideology. Specifically, very liberal people were as convinced of the superiority of their views on government help for the needy as highly conservative people were convinced of the superiority of their view regarding voter identification. Less politically committed individuals on both sides of the spectrum showed a more moderate preference for their own opinion.</li> <li>There is some evidence that even racial prejudice might have more to do with an implicit presumption of attitudes than race per se. That is, the greater prejudice against African Americans that is routinely and reliably observed among conservatives might at least in part result from the <em>attitudes</em> that African Americans are presumed to hold&mdash;for example, African Americans are known to predominantly endorse affirmative action and welfare, two issues on which conservatives hold strongly opposing views. Thus, black skin does not trigger prejudice, but black skin signals likely attitudes that, in turn, trigger prejudice. To illustrate, <a href="">in one recent study</a>, when conservatives and liberals had to rate their impressions of an African American who either endorsed or rejected welfare, what was found to matter was the match of attitudes <em>and not race</em>: Liberals&rsquo; negative impressions of a conservative African American were indistinguishable from conservatives&rsquo; negative impressions of a liberal African American, and correspondingly, both groups&rsquo; enthusiasm for African Americans of their own conviction was also indistinguishable. Importantly, this symmetry can co-exist with greater overall prejudice among conservatives&mdash;as indeed it did in this study!&mdash;which is measured without providing information about a specific person&rsquo;s attitude, thereby forcing people to rely on inferred attitudes of a target group.</li> <li>Finally, and most relevant to the role of scientific evidence in society, there is the large body of work by <a href="">Dan Kahan and colleagues</a> which shows that liberals are as susceptible to cognitive shortcuts and biases as their conservative brethren&mdash;except that those biases are expressed in different directions. For example, liberals and conservatives will misinterpret hypothetical <a href="">data on gun control</a> to suit their own biases with equal flourish. (This work remains to be reconciled with the notion that conservatism is associated with lesser cognitive functioning. I am not aware of the existence of any reconciliation, and I consider this issue unresolved and in need of further research).</li> </ul> <p>What, then, is the relationship between scientific evidence and political attitudes? Is <a href="">libertarian ideology the natural enemy of science</a>?</p> <p>The answer has three parts: First, conservative and libertarian ideology is undoubtedly at odds with much scientific evidence. Large bodies of solid scientific evidence are being rejected or denied on the basis of ideology, arguably with considerable detriment to society. Second, there is little doubt that liberals and progressives are equally capable of rejecting scientific evidence that challenges their worldviews, using the same well-understood processes of motivated cognition as their conservative brethren. Third, one of the most wicked problems ever to have confronted humanity, climate change, is not being addressed at present because the solutions involve challenges to conservative and libertarian worldviews. Those worldviews are not natural enemies of science; they are enemies of science because of the particular historical context in which conservative cultural cognition expresses itself at the moment.</p> Sat, 30 Aug 2014 16:00:00 EST Responding and Adapting to Climate Change: A Meeting at the University of Bristol <p><em>&ldquo;Uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty &hellip; so why should we bother to act?&rdquo;</em></p> <p>Who hasn&rsquo;t heard politicians or media personalities appeal to uncertainty to argue against climate mitigation? And indeed, why should we interfere with the global economy when there is uncertainty about the severity of climate change?</p> <p>Some 20 leading experts from around the world will be <a href="">meeting in Bristol late in September</a> to discuss the implications of scientific uncertainty on the proper response to climate change.</p> <p>This is particularly crucial because in contrast to the widespread public perception that uncertainty is an invitation to delay action on climate change, recent work suggests that scientific uncertainty actually provides an impetus to engage in mitigative action. Specifically, the greater the scientific uncertainty, the greater are the risks from climate change.</p> <p>This conflict between people&rsquo;s common perceptions of uncertainty and its actual implications is not altogether uncommon, and there are many situations in which people&rsquo;s risk perception deviates from best scientific understanding.</p> <p>The Bristol meeting brings together scientists and practitioners with the goal of (a) developing more effective means to communicate uncertainty and (b) to explore how decision making under uncertainty can be better informed by scientific constraints.</p> <p>To address the scientific, cultural, health, and social issues arising from climate change requires an in-depth and cross-disciplinary analysis of the role of uncertainty in all of the three principal systems involved: The physical climate system, people&rsquo;s cognitive system and how that construes and potentially distorts the effects of uncertainty, and the social systems underlying the political and public debates surrounding climate change.</p> <p>The results of the meeting will become publically available through scientific publication channels, with the details to be announced closer to the time of the meeting. In addition, two attendees at the meeting will be presenting public lectures at the University of Bristol:</p> <p class="greenbox"><strong>Friday 19 September, 6:00-7:30 pm. <em>Dogma vs. consensus: Letting the evidence speak on climate change.</em></strong></p> <p>In this Cabot Institute public lecture, we are pleased to present John Cook, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, and owner of the Skeptical Science blog, in what promises to be a fascinating talk.</p> <p>In 2013, John Cook led the Consensus Project, a crowd-sourced effort to complete the most comprehensive analysis of climate research ever conducted. They found that among relevant scientific articles that expressed a position on climate change, 97% endorsed the consensus that humans were causing global warming. When this research was published, it was tweeted by President Obama and received media coverage all over the world, with the paper being awarded the &ldquo;best article&rdquo; prize by the journal <em>Environmental Research Letters</em> in 2013. However, the paper has also been the subject of intense criticism by people who reject the scientific consensus. Hundreds of blog posts have criticised the results and newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe have published negative op-eds. Organisations who deny or reject current science on human-caused climate change, such as the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK and the Heartland Institute in the US, have published critical reports, and the Republican Party organised congressional testimony against the consensus research on Capitol Hill. This sustained campaign is merely the latest episode in over 20 years of attacks on the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming. John Cook will discuss his research, both on the 97% consensus and on the cognitive psychology of consensus. He will also look at the broader issue of scientific consensus and why it generates such intense opposition.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p class="greenbox"><strong>Tuesday 23 September 2014, 6 pm to 7.30 pm. <em>The Hockey Stick and the climate wars&mdash;the battle continues&hellip;</em></strong></p> <p>In this special Cabot Institute lecture, in association with the Bristol Festival of Ideas, Professor Michael E Mann will discuss the science, politics, and ethical dimensions of global warming in the context of his own ongoing experiences as a figure in the centre of the debate over human-caused climate change.</p> <p>Dr. Michael E Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center. He is author of more than 160 peer-reviewed and edited publications, and has published books include<em> Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming</em> in 2008 and <em>The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines</em> in 2012. He is also a co-founder and avid contributor to the award-winning science website</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Readers interested in attending the talks should register for John Cook <a href="">here</a> and for Michael Mann <a href="">here</a>.</strong></p> Tue, 12 Aug 2014 17:50:00 EST Well-estimated global warming by climate models <p>Has global warming &ldquo;stopped&rdquo;? Do models &ldquo;over-predict&rdquo; warming? There has been much recent talk in the media about those two questions. The answer to the first question is a fairly clear &ldquo;no.&rdquo; Global warming continues unabated.</p> <p>To illustrate, for the coverage-bias-corrected data published by <a href="">Cowtan and Way</a> last year, the temperature trend for the last 15 years up to and including 2013 is significant&mdash;in the same way that the trend was significant for the last 15 years in 2000 and in 1990. So from any of those vantage points, the Earth has warmed significantly during the preceding 15 years.</p> <p>One thing that <em>has</em> changed since 2000 is that <a href="">more heat is now going into the oceans</a>&mdash;rather than the atmosphere&mdash;and at an accelerating pace. Or as Dana Nuccitelli <a href="">put it recently</a>:</p> <blockquote><a href=""> </a> <p>&ldquo;The rate of heat building up on Earth over the past decade is eq<a href="">u</a>ivalent to detonating about 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs per second. Take a moment to visualize 4 atomic bomb detonations happening every single second. That's the global warming that we're frequently told isn't happening.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <p>Let&rsquo;s turn to the second question: Have models over-estimated the rate of warming? This question has a more nuanced but quite fascinating answer.</p> <p>We begin by noting that the observed global temperature increase remains comfortably within the 95% envelop of model runs, as shown in the figure below, which is taken from a recent <a href=""><em>Nature Climate Change</em> paper by Doug Smith</a>.</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="" alt="" width="400" /></p> <p>Now, arguably, the observed temperatures for the last decade or so are tending towards the lower end of the model envelope (note, though, that this figure does not plot the coverage-bias-corrected data from Cowtan and Way, which would raise the final observed temperatures and trends slightly).</p> <p>Does this then mean that the models &ldquo;over-predict&rdquo; warming?</p> <p>Not exactly.</p> <p>To understand why the answer is no, we need to consider three issues.</p> <p>First, it will be noted that occasional brief excursions of observed temperatures outside the 95% model envelope are not unusual new&mdash;and indeed the most recent excursion occurred when the Earth warmed <em>faster</em> than the models. This is the result of natural variability and represents short-term disturbances that do not affect the underlying long-term trend.</p> <p>Second, we need to consider the <em>expected</em> relationship between the models&rsquo; output and the observed data. This is a profound issue that is routinely overlooked by media commentators, and it pertains to the common confusion between climate projections and climate forecasts.&nbsp;Climate forecasts seek to <em>predict</em> the climate over a certain range, taking into account natural variability and&mdash;similar to a weather forecast&mdash;modeling the evolution of the climate from a known starting point and taking future internal variability into account. For example, the UK Met Office publishes decadal forecasts, which are explained very nicely <a href="">here</a>.</p> <p>Climate <em>projections</em>, by contrast, seek to describe the evolution of the climate in the long run, irrespective of its current state and without seeking to predict internal variability. The figure above, like all figures that show model output to the end of the century, plots projections rather than predictions. Because projections have no information about the phase (sequence and timing) of internal climate variability, there is no expectation that any particular projection would align with what the Earth is actually doing. In fact, it would be highly surprising if global temperatures always tracked the center of the model projections&mdash;we expect temperatures to jiggle up and down within the envelope. To buttress this point, <a href="">recent work by Mike Mann</a> and colleagues has shown that warming during the most recent decade is well within the spread of a model ensemble.</p> <p>Finally, we need to consider the reasons underlying natural variability, both in the models and in the planet&rsquo;s warming trend. One of the major drivers of this variability involves the El Ni&ntilde;o &ndash; La Ni&ntilde;a oscillation in the Pacific, which determines how much heat is taken up by the oceans rather than the atmosphere. La Ni&ntilde;a conditions favour cooler temperatures whereas El Ni&ntilde;o leads to warmer temperatures. The animated figure below from <a href="">Skepticalscience </a>&nbsp;illustrates this nicely:</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="" alt="" width="400" /></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The figure clarifies that internal climate variability over a short decadal or 15-year time scale is at least as important as the forced climate changes arising from greenhouse gas emissions.</p> <p>Those three issues converge on the conclusion that in order to meaningfully compare model projections against observed trends, the models must be brought into phase with the oceans. In particular, the models must be synchronized with El Ni&ntilde;o &ndash; La Ni&ntilde;a.</p> <p>The evidence has been mounting during the last few years that when this synchronization is achieved, the models capture recent temperature trends very well.</p> <p>At least four different approaches have been pursued to achieve synchronization.</p> <p>One approach relied on specifying some observed fields in the climate models while they are &ldquo;free&rdquo; to evolve on their own everywhere else. For example, <a href="">Kosaka and Xie</a> showed than when the El Ni&ntilde;o-related changes in Pacific ocean temperature are entered into a model, it not only reproduced the global surface warming over the past 15 years but it also accurately reproduced regional and seasonal changes in surface temperatures. Similarly, <a href="">Matthew England and colleagues</a> reproduced observed temperature trends by providing the model with the pronounced and unprecedented strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades&mdash;and the winds in turn lead to increased heat uptake by the oceans.</p> <p>A second approach involved initialization of the model to the observed state of the planet at the beginning of a period of interest. <a href="">Meehl and Teng recently showed</a> that when this is done, thereby turning a model projection into a hindcast, the models reproduced the observed trends&mdash;accelerated warming in the 1970s and reduced rate of surface warming during the last 15 years&mdash;quite well.</p> <p>The third approach, by <a href="">Gavin Schmidt and colleagues</a>, statistically controlled for variables that are known to affect model output. This was found to largely reconcile model projections with global temperature observations.</p> <p>The fourth approach was used in a paper by James Risbey, myself, and colleagues from CSIRO in Australia and at Harvard which appeared in <a href=""><em>Nature Climate Change</em> </a>today.</p> <p>This new approach did not specify any of the observed outcomes and left the existing model projections from the CMIP5 ensemble untouched. Instead, we select only those climate models (or model runs) that happened to be synchronized with the observed El Ni&ntilde;o - La Ni&ntilde;a preference in any given 15-year period. In other words, we selected those models whose projected internal natural variability happened to coincide with the state of the Earth&rsquo;s oceans at any given point since the 1950&rsquo;s. We then looked at the models&rsquo; predicted global mean surface temperature for the same time period.</p> <p>For comparison, we also looked at output from those models that were furthest from the observed El Ni&ntilde;o - La Ni&ntilde;a trends.</p> <p>The results are shown in the figure below, showing the Cowtan and Way data (in red) against model output (they don't differ qualitatively for the other temperature data sets):</p> <p><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="" alt="" width="500" height="175" /></p> <p>The data represent decadal trends within overlapping 15-year windows that are centered on the plotted year. The left panel shows the models (in blue) whose internal natural variability was maximally synchronized with the Earth&rsquo;s oceans at any point, whereas the right panel shows the models (in gray) that were maximally out of phase with the Earth.</p> <p>The conclusion is fairly obvious: When the models are synchronized with the oceans, they do a great job. Not only do they reproduce global warming trends during the last 50 years, as shown in the figure, but they also handle the spatial pattern of sea surface temperatures (the figure for that is available in the article).</p> <p>In sum, we now have four converging lines of evidence that highlight the predictive power of climate models.</p> <p>From a scientific perspective, this is a gratifying result, especially because the community has learned a lot about the models from those parallel efforts.</p> <p>From another perspective, however, the models&rsquo; power is quite distressing. To understand why, just have a look at where the <a href="">projections are heading</a>.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Udpate 21/7/14, 9am: The date in the post was initially misspelled and should have read July rather than June.</p> Sun, 20 Jul 2014 18:25:00 EST The Frontiers Expert Panel <p><strong>Updated below: 17 April 2014</strong></p> <p>When<em> Frontiers</em> retracted our paper &ldquo;Recursive Fury&rdquo; (available at <a href=""></a>) they were very clear that the journal &ldquo;&hellip;did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study.&rdquo;</p> <p>The journal has since issued several conflicting positions, and their <a href="">latest statement</a> raised a concern about identification of &lsquo;human subjects&rsquo; that can only be considered an ethical issue. &nbsp;</p> <p>Not only does this latest statement depart from journal&rsquo;s previous public stance&nbsp;and signed agreements, but it also deviates from the opinions of <em>Frontiers&rsquo;</em> own expert panel that they appointed last year to examine the issues surrounding Recursive Fury.</p> <p>Concerning the subject and consent issue, that expert panel concluded:</p> <h3><strong>&nbsp;</strong><strong><em>Participant Status and Informed Consent</em></strong></h3> <blockquote> <p>The question of participant status is an important and complex one.&nbsp;&nbsp;It turns on the question of whether an individual&rsquo;s (identifiable or not) postings to blogs comprise public information and therefore do not fall under the constraints typically imposed by ethics review boards.&nbsp;&nbsp;The issue is currently under debate among researchers and publishers dealing with textual material used in scientific research. Advice was sought from the leading researcher on web-based psychological studies and his response was that &ldquo;<strong>among psychological and linguistic researchers blog posts are regarded as public data and the individuals posting the data are not regarded as participants in the technical sense used by Research Ethics Committees or Institutional Review Boards.&nbsp;&nbsp;</strong><strong>&nbsp;</strong><strong>This further entails that no consent is required for the use of such data.</strong>&rdquo;&nbsp;&nbsp;Although this view is held by many researchers and their ethics boards, it is by no means a unanimous judgment and it is to be expected that legitimate challenges, both on ethical and legal grounds, will be raised as web-based research expands in scope.&nbsp;&nbsp;<strong>But to the charges that Fury was unethical in using blog posts as data for psychological analysis, the consensus among experts in this area sides with the authors of Fury.</strong>&nbsp; <br />(Emphasis added.)</p> </blockquote> <p>The consensus among experts is further reflected in the fact that the research was conducted with ethics approval by the University of Western Australia.</p> <p>The consensus among experts in the area is that scholarly analysis of public speech can be conducted without requiring consent.</p> <p>The University of Western Australia agreed with this consensus.</p> <p>Frontiers <a href="">publicly agreed</a> with this consensus.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p class="greenbox">Update 17 April 2014:</p> <p class="greenbox">Some commenters have, quite reasonably, asked me to release the entire expert report. I cannot do so because it is still strictly confidential.</p> <p class="greenbox">I released the above section of the report because it spoke directly to an issue on which <em>Frontiers</em> made public statements that were irreconcilable with both an agreement they signed and their own expert report. This was done after extensive legal consultation and after inviting the journal to correct its latest public statements. I posted this unabridged relevant section only after the journal declined the invitation to set the record straight.</p> <p class="greenbox">If it weren&rsquo;t for these special and legally vetted circumstances, I would have honoured the confidentiality of this report as I have honoured all other agreements. The confidentiality of the remainder of this report remains in full force.</p> Wed, 16 Apr 2014 07:20:00 EST Clarifying a revisited retraction <p><em>Frontiers</em> has issued a further statement on the retraction of our paper &ldquo;Recursive Fury&rdquo; (available at <a href=""></a>). This statement is signed by their editor in chief. It cannot be reconciled with the contractually agreed retraction statement signed by the journal and the authors on 20<sup>th</sup> March.</p> <p>Whereas the agreed retraction statement clarified that the journal &ldquo;&hellip;did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study&rdquo;, the <a href="">latest statement</a> raises a concern about identification of &lsquo;human subjects&rsquo; that escapes classification as anything other than an ethical issue.</p> <p>This latest statement renders inescapable the following two conclusions:</p> <ol> <li>As detailed previously, <em>Frontiers</em> made no mention of their concern for human subjects throughout the past year during which they focused exclusively on the risk of defamation. It thus appears that the journal withheld its true concerns from us for a year or that they failed to discover those concerns until recently. </li> <li>The journal signed a retraction statement that they are now explicitly contradicting.</li> </ol> <p>The latest statement furthermore claims that &ldquo;all efforts were made to work with the authors to find a solution.&rdquo; What that statement omits is the fact that we submitted another paper to <em>Frontiers</em> in January 2014 that was completely de-identified and that did not permit anyone to ascertain the identity of the people whose public statements were analyzed.</p> <p>If <em>Frontiers</em> were concerned about identification of &lsquo;human subjects&rsquo;, why did they decline publication of a paper that was de-identified and written in compliance with their specific criteria to resolve this issue? The only grounds offered for this declination were continued concerns about defamation.</p> <p>This declination sits uneasily with the journal&rsquo;s current public focus on &lsquo;human subjects.&rsquo;</p> <p>Whatever might have caused the journal to take multiple and conflicting public positions on their most widely-read paper, the evidence that they were at the receiving end of intimidation and bullying has become impossible to overlook with the growing number of individuals who are publicly claiming to have done so.</p> Sun, 13 Apr 2014 04:30:00 EST The analysis of speech <p>What constitutes legitimate analysis of speech?</p> <p>This question has been brought into sharp focus by the most recent position of the journal <em>Frontiers</em> that they put out last Friday. This statement claimed that our paper <em>Recursive Fury</em> (<a href=""></a>), had been retracted because it &ldquo;<a href="">did not sufficiently protect the rights of the studied subjects</a>.&rdquo; This seemingly stands in contrast to the contractually-agreed retraction statement, signed by legal representatives of the journal and the authors, that <em>Frontiers</em> &ldquo;&hellip;<a href="">did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study</a>.&rdquo;</p> <p>It is helpful that the <em>Frontiers</em> affair involved two contrasting ways in which speech was being used by the various participants. Let us therefore analyze those two ways in turn.</p> <h3><strong>The complainant(s).</strong></h3> <p>Although we have destroyed all correspondence and documents involving the allegations against us at the request of <em>Frontiers</em>, and although now, a year later, our recollection of those events is minimal, <a href="">Graham Readfearn</a> has put something about the allegations into the public domain that has received little attention to date.</p> <p>Readfearn states that the complaints against us alleged &ldquo;malice&rdquo; on the part of the authors in various ways. As far as I understand it, malice is a legal term meaning an improper motive in making a statement; and, if proved in Court, removes some defenses to charges of defamation.</p> <p>In the present context, it is most relevant that the accusations of malice against John Cook, one of the authors of <em>Recursive Fury</em>, were based on his apparent sanctioning of &ldquo;vile commentary&rdquo; against the complainant and other bloggers.</p> <p>Indeed, the material cited in support contains irate statements that none of the authors of <em>Recursive Fury</em> would countenance.</p> <p>None of the authors made those statements.</p> <p>One will fail to find anything like those comments on Cook&rsquo;s blog, <a href=""></a>: None of the more than 88,000 public comments posted there to date contain anything that could be remotely construed as vitriolic or polemical&mdash;that&rsquo;s because 7000 comments were deleted by moderators owing to their inflammatory content.</p> <p>So where did the &ldquo;vile commentary&rdquo; come from and how did John Cook &ldquo;sanction&rdquo; it?</p> <p>The vile commentary was made by third parties unconnected to <em>Recursive Fury </em>on a private forum that was password-protected, and whose purpose was to permit open and completely uncensored discussion among a small group of collaborators. Those comments were posted in the expectation of privacy, and they became public only through a criminal act&mdash;a hack attack on <em>Skepticalscience</em> that has been explored in <a href="">great forensic depth</a>.</p> <p>John Cook neither wrote those comments, nor could he be reasonably expected to moderate them. They were made in private and became public by an illegal act by parties unknown.</p> <p>What John did was to host a private forum on which other people vented their anger. If that is malice, then so would be inopportune comments by your friends at an illegally wire-tapped dinner party. You better censor what your guests say in case your next party is bugged, lest you be accused of malice.</p> <p>The complainant&rsquo;s conduct follows a common pattern in the <a href="">Subterranean War on Science</a>: Use of private correspondence obtained by an illegal act to construct allegations against scientists. Except that in this case, to allege malice against John Cook, hackers trolled through two years of his private conversations and found exactly nothing.</p> <p>Zip. Zilch. Bupkis.</p> <p>All the hackers and trolls could find were <em>other</em> parties expressing anger in the expectation of privacy. I cannot think of clearer evidence for the <em>absence</em> of malice in John Cook&rsquo;s conduct.</p> <p>I nonetheless think there might be evidence of malice here.</p> <p>Maybe some readers can spot it.</p> <h3><strong>The authors of <em>Recursive Fury</em>. </strong></h3> <p>Recursive Fury was conducted with ethics approval (of course!) and <em>Frontiers</em> entered into a contractual agreement for the retraction that noted that their review &ldquo;&hellip;<a href="">did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study</a>&rdquo;.</p> <p>And what did <em>Recursive Fury</em> do? It presented a narrative analysis of public discourse in the blogosphere in the aggregate. We did not categorize anyone into anything, we categorized statements.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s all.</p> <p>This is the difference between saying "Joe is a racist" and saying "When Joe and Fred get together in a bar at night their discourse contains racist elements based on application of the following scholarly criteria." Now, we could have withheld the sources of all those statements, thereby anonymizing the analysis and protecting the identity of those who feel that their public statements are too fragile to survive scholarly scrutiny.</p> <p>However, we considered this unwise in light of the pervasive allegations against (climate) scientists that they are &ldquo;hiding data.&rdquo;</p> <p>Folks, we did not hide the data.</p> <p>We made them all available. And they are still here: <a href=""></a>.</p> <p>By the way, there are ample precedents for this kind of work, including other hot-button issues such as anti-Semitism. Yes, there is a scholarly paper out there that analyzes the public speeches of contemporary Austrian politicians for their anti-Semitic undertones. (I am not linking to that study here, lest the researcher be caught up in the turmoil of requests for his/her data, or requests to destroy the data, or requests to provide ethics approval, or his/her entire email correspondence during the last 13 years.)</p> <p>Here then is the crucial question about the analysis of speech that arises from the <em>Frontiers</em> affair:</p> <p>Are public statements by people who knowingly made them in public, subject to scholarly analysis? Or is it only stolen correspondence by third parties made in the expectation of privacy that can be used to allege malice on the part of someone who never said anything malicious himself?</p> <p><a href="">In Whose Hands the Future?</a></p> Wed, 9 Apr 2014 07:20:00 EST Revisiting a Retraction <p>The journal <em>Frontiers</em> retracted our &ldquo;<a href="">Recursive Fury</a>&rdquo; paper on 21 March. <em>Frontiers</em> withdrew Recursive Fury <a href="">due to legal fears</a>, not academic or ethical reasons. The paper&mdash;probably the most widely-read article ever published by <em>Frontiers</em>&mdash;can now be found at <a href=""></a>.</p> <p>The retraction was accompanied by the following statement:</p> <blockquote> <p>&ldquo;In the light of a small number of complaints received following publication of the original research article cited above, Frontiers carried out a detailed investigation of the academic, ethical and legal aspects of the work. This investigation did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study. It did, however, determine that the legal context is insufficiently clear and therefore Frontiers wishes to retract the published article. The authors understand this decision, while they stand by their article and regret the limitations on academic freedom which can be caused by legal factors.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <p>This statement was the result of negotiations between the lawyer for <em>Frontiers</em> and a legal representative of the authors in the U.K., and it formed part of a formal retraction agreement signed by both parties. Although we <em>disagreed</em> with the journal&rsquo;s decision, we were provided with sufficient information to <em>understand</em> it. Our position on the decision was shared by <a href="">officers of the Australian Psychological Society</a> and other organizations, such as the <a href="">Union of Concerned Scientists</a>.</p> <p>Although there has been considerable <a href="">media attention, </a>the authors have made few public comments since the paper was retracted. I have continued to serve as a co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of <em>Frontiers</em>, I accepted a reviewing assignment for that journal, and I currently have <a href="">another paper in press</a> with <em>Frontiers</em>. After the retraction, I was approached by several <em>Frontiers</em> editors and authors who were dismayed at the journal&rsquo;s decision. In all instances I pointed out that I continued to serve as author, reviewer, and co-editor for <em>Frontiers</em>.</p> <p>A few days ago, the journal released <a href="">another statement about the retraction</a> on their website. This recent statement raised several points that were new to us and that can be interpreted as a departure from the earlier, contractually-agreed retraction statement. Because of the public interest in this issue I draw attention to three issues that are most in need of disambiguation. (I defer other issues that deserve correction to future posts):</p> <p>First, in its most recent statement, the journal seemed to imply that the paper was retracted because it &ldquo;did not sufficiently protect the rights of the studied subjects.&rdquo; This stands in contrast to the contractually-agreed retraction statement, signed by legal representatives of both parties, that <em>Frontiers</em> &ldquo;&hellip;did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study.&rdquo; It also sits uneasily with public statements by <em>Frontiers&rsquo;</em> lawyer, such as<a href=""> &ldquo;Frontiers is concerned about solid science and it's obviously a regret when you have to retract an article that is scientifically and ethically sound&hellip;</a>&rdquo;</p> <p>Second, in its recent statement <em>Frontiers</em> also stated that it had received no (presumably legal) threats. This claim sits uneasily with the public statement of at least one individual who explicitly stated that he <em><a href="" target="_blank">had threatened</a></em> the journal. Moreover, another complainant publicly alleged defamation, and asserted that the journal's apparent concern with &ldquo;defamation liability&rdquo; was justified: Details were <a href="">provided by Graham Readfearn earlier</a>. The journal&rsquo;s recent claim also sits uneasily with the contractually-agreed retraction statement, which ascribed the retraction to an &ldquo;insufficiently clear&rdquo; legal context. <a href="">I pointed out earlier</a> that this legal context involved English libel laws in force prior to 2014. Those laws were sufficiently notorious for their chilling effect on inconvenient speech for <a href="">President Obama to sign a law</a> that makes U.K. libel judgments unenforceable in the U.S.</p> <p>Third, the journal revealed the existence of a new paper that we submitted in January 2014 and that according to their latest statement &ldquo;did not deal adequately with the issues raised by <em>Frontiers</em>.&rdquo;</p> <p>To resolve those discrepancies between retraction-related statements requires a brief summary of events.</p> <p>During a Skype conversation on 14 June 2013, representatives of <em>Frontiers</em> informed me that they had decided that there were no academic or ethical grounds for a retraction of Recursive Fury, but that changes might have to be made to the paper to safeguard against the legal risk of defamation. I agreed that I would &ldquo;&hellip; work towards a constructive solution with you [<em>Frontiers</em>] to get the paper re-posted when it is ready,&rdquo; even though no such risk of defamation had been identified by the relevant officers of my host institution at the time, the University of Western Australia.</p> <p>On 28 August 2013 I was informed by <em>Frontiers</em> that their analysis of the defamation risk&mdash;under English libel laws&mdash;had found the risk to be too great for the journal to carry the article, and that it would have to be retracted. This decision was accompanied by an invitation to submit a replacement article that dealt with the issues identified in the various reviews and assessments.</p> <p>We submitted a replacement article on 1/1/14, by which time English libel laws had changed significantly. It is worth considering this replacement article in some detail because it went beyond the initial <a href="">Recursive Fury</a> in the following ways:</p> <ul> <li>Our narrative analysis was independently verified and further refined by a philosopher and a historian of science.</li> <li>We conducted two behavioral studies with na&iuml;ve and blind subjects who were not aware of the background or purpose of the study, and who responded to anonymized web content. Those studies (a) confirmed the classification of hypotheses reported in Recursive Fury and (b) showed that na&iuml;ve observers rated the web content extremely high (i.e., modal response was the top end of the scale) on dimensions related to conspiracist thinking but not on an attribute relating to the quality of scholarly critique.</li> <li>Our narrative analysis was anonymized (by paraphrasing verbatim public statements until they no longer yielded hits in Google) to prevent identification of individuals while retaining the integrity of the study. </li> </ul> <p><em>Frontiers</em> rejected this replacement paper on 12 February, claiming that it failed to deal adequately with the defamation issue. Our (English) legal advice clarifies that defamation cannot arise if individuals &nbsp;cannot be identified in the minds of a &ldquo;reasonable reader.&rdquo; It must also be noted that the laws in England changed significantly on 1/1/14 to now include explicit provision for the protection of peer-reviewed science.</p> <p>To sum up:</p> <p>Throughout the entire period, from March 2013 until February 2014, the only concern voiced by <em>Frontiers</em> related to the presumed defamation risk under English libel laws. While the University of Western Australia offered to host the retracted paper at <a href=""></a> because it did not share those legal concerns, <em>Frontiers </em>rejected an anonymized replacement paper<em> </em>on the basis that non-identifiable parties might feel defamed.</p> <p>No other cause was ever offered or discussed by <em>Frontiers</em> to justify the retraction of Recursive Fury. We are not aware of a single mention of the claim that our study &ldquo;did not sufficiently protect the rights of the studied subjects&rdquo; by <em>Frontiers</em> throughout the past year, although we are aware of their repeated explicit statements, in private and public, that the study was ethically sound.</p> <p>This brings into focus several possibilities for the reconciliation of <em>Frontier&rsquo;s</em> contradictory statements concerning the retraction:</p> <p>First, one could generously propose that the phrase &ldquo;did not sufficiently protect the rights of the studied subjects&rdquo; is simply a synonym for &ldquo;defamation risk&rdquo; and that the updated statement therefore supports the contractually-agreed statement. This is possible but it puts a considerable strain on the meaning of &ldquo;synonym.&rdquo;</p> <p>Second, one could take the most recent statement by <em>Frontiers</em> at face value. This has two uncomfortable implications: It would imply that the true reason for the retraction was withheld from the authors for a year. It would also imply that the journal entered into a contractual agreement about the retraction statement that misrepresented its actual position.</p> <p>Third, perhaps the journal only thought of this new angle now and in its haste did not consider that it violates their contractually-agreed position.</p> <p>Or there are other possibilities that we have not been able to identify.</p> Mon, 7 Apr 2014 08:52:00 EST Recursive Fury: A Summary of Media Coverage <p>The journal <em>Frontiers</em> retracted our &ldquo;<a href="">Recursive Fury</a>&rdquo; paper some time ago not for academic or ethical reasons <a href="">but owing to legal fears</a>. The paper can now be found at <a href=""></a> because the University of Western Australia has come to a different risk assessment and sees no reason not to host the paper.</p> <p>There has been quite a flurry of media activity since the retraction, and a complete listing can be found over at <a href="">Skepticalscience</a>. This post highlights some of the mainstream coverage and provides some of the more notable quotes:</p> <ul> </ul> <h3><a href="" target="_blank">Contrarians bully journal into retracting a climate psychology paper</a></h3> <ul> </ul> <p>Blog Post published by <em>The Guardian</em> on 22 March 2014</p> <p>Dana Nuccitelli:</p> <blockquote> <p><em>It's unfortunate that the Frontiers editors were unwilling to stand behind a study that they admitted was sound from an academic and ethical standpoint, especially since UWA concluded the paper would withstand a legal assault. This series of events should be a wake-up call to editors and publishers that they must remain resilient to organized campaigns by the blogosphere. Academics can no longer be confident that the Frontiers staff will stand behind them if they publish research in the journal and are subjected to similar frivolous attacks. Frontiers may very well be worse off having lost the confidence of the academic community than if they had called the bluffs of the contrarians threatening frivolous lawsuits.</em></p> <p><em>Fortunately, several journals and organizations have stood up against this type of contrarian bullying. The journal Environmental Research Letters easily withstood the campaign against </em><a href=";" target="_blank"><em>our consensus paper</em></a><em>, and the Australian Psychological Society has been very supportive of Lewandowsky and his team, </em><a href=";" target="_blank"><em>as has the Association for Psychological Science.</em></a><em>&nbsp;</em></p> <p><em>These groups offer a good example for journals to follow when subjected to organized bullying from contrarians trying to censor sound but inconvenient research.<br /> <br /> </em></p> </blockquote> <ul> </ul> <h3><a href="" target="_blank">Recursive furies, hurt feelings or confected outrage </a></h3> <ul> </ul> <p>Blog Post published by HotWhopper on 22 March 2014<br /> <br /></p> <blockquote> <p><a href=";"><em>Frontiers in Psychology</em></a><em> is an open access journal that says:</em></p> <p><em>Our grand vision is to build an Open Science platform that empowers researchers in their daily work and where everybody has equal opportunity to seek, share and generate knowledge.</em></p> <p><em>By all accounts the journal could be viewed as taking a step backwards from that "grand vision" by caving into people who object to research.</em></p> <p><em>...</em></p> <p><em>The University of Western Australia is standing by the paper. &nbsp;It's probably a lot bigger than the Frontiers in Psychology journal and almost certainly has </em><a href=";"><em>more expertise in law</em></a><em>.</em><em>&nbsp;</em></p> </blockquote> <p>&nbsp;</p> <ul> </ul> <h3><a href="" target="_blank">Journal pulls paper due to &ldquo;legal context&rdquo; created by climate contrarians</a></h3> <ul> </ul> <p>Magazine published by Ars Technica on 22 March 2014<br /> <br /> The article cites Michael Kenyon,<em> the Frontiers </em>lawyer, as follows:</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Frontiers</em><em>&nbsp;is concerned about solid science and it's obviously a regret when you have to retract an article that is scientifically and ethically sound.<br /> </em><em>&nbsp;</em></p> </blockquote> <ul> </ul> <h3><a href="" target="_blank">Academic journal bows to pressure from climate deniers</a></h3> <ul> </ul> <p>Magazine published by Salon on 22 March 2014, citing Kim Heitman, the UWA&rsquo;s General Counsel:</p> <blockquote> <p><em>&lsquo;I&rsquo;m entirely comfortable with you publishing the paper on the UWA web site. You and the University can easily be sued for any sorts of hurt feelings or confected outrage, and I&rsquo;d be quite comfortable processing such a phony legal action as an insurance matter.&rsquo;</em></p> <p><em>&mdash;&nbsp;Kimberley Heitman, B.Juris, LLB, MACS, CT, General Counsel, University of Western Australia</em></p> <p><em>Thanks to Heitman, the study </em><a href=""><em>can still be found</em></a><em> at the University of Western Australia&rsquo;s website; a second study conducted by Lewandosky, which replicated the results of the first in a representative U.S. sample, remains where it was posted </em><a href=""><em>at PLoS ONE</em></a><em>. <br /><br /></em></p> </blockquote> <ul> </ul> <h3><a href="" target="_blank">A Conspiracy Theory Researcher Falls Victim to Conspiracy Theories: Intimidated Journal to Retract Lewandowsky Paper</a></h3> <ul> </ul> <p>Blog Post published by the Union of Concerned Scientists on 21 March 2014</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Such a retraction would reflect badly on the journal and may set a terrible precedent. Papers should be withdrawn based on significant concerns with the quality of the research, not based on threats.</em></p> <p><em>...</em></p> <p><em>This is yet another example of why researchers, journals, and universities need to be sufficiently prepared to effectively respond to outside scrutiny of their work. Sometimes that scrutiny is warranted and adds to public understanding, but in other cases, such as this one, it can be distracting and frivolous.<br /> </em><em>&nbsp;</em></p> </blockquote> <p>This is not the only scientific organization to be dismayed at the retraction; officers of the Australian Psychological Society have likewise expressed their distress at the retraction of <a href="">Recursive Fury</a>, as I discuss in <a href="">this video</a>.</p> <ul> </ul> <h3><a href="" target="_blank"><br />The paper they don&rsquo;t want you to read!</a></h3> <ul> </ul> <p>Blog Post published by Pharyngula on 21 March 2014</p> <p>PZ Myers</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Steve McIntyre wrote a&nbsp;&ldquo;strongly worded&rdquo;&nbsp;&ldquo;formal letter&rdquo;&nbsp;demanding that the&nbsp;&ldquo;defamatory&rdquo;&nbsp;article be removed, and accusing the authors of malice. Further, they complained that analyzing the content of blog posts and comments, public, openly accessible work, was an ethics violation.</em></p> <p><em>Ludicrous as those claims are, Frontiers in Psychology is apparently about to fold to them. For shame.</em></p> <p><em>You know, my university had a meeting with our institutional lawyers yesterday &mdash; I was called in to attend the information session for some reason, like having a reputation as a trouble-maker or something &mdash; and I was impressed with their professionalism and their commitment to actually defending the faculty and staff of the university. I guess not every organization is lucky enough to have good lawyers of principle.<br /> </em><em>&nbsp;</em></p> </blockquote> <ul> </ul> <h3><a href="" target="_blank">Science Journal Set To Retract Paper Linking Climate Change Scepticism To Conspiracy Theorists After Sceptics Shout Libel</a></h3> <ul> </ul> <p>Blog Post published by Desmogblog on 20 March 2014</p> <p>Graham Readfearn</p> <blockquote> <p><em>In McIntyre's complaint letters (seen as</em><a href=";"><em> item numbers 95 and 99 on the </em><em><span style="text-decoration: underline;">FOI</span></em><em> document</em></a><em> release), the Canadian blogger uses quotes hacked from a private forum of the Skeptical Science, founded University of Queensland academic John Cook and co-author on the Recursive&nbsp;study.</em></p> <p><em>McIntyre cites the quotes in an attempt to demonstrate &ldquo;malice&rdquo; against him, even though none of those quotes were written by any of the authors of the&nbsp;paper.<br /> <br /> </em></p> </blockquote> <ul> </ul> <h3><a href="">Liability fears drive psychology journal to retract climate study </a></h3> <ul> </ul> <p><br />Blog Post published by Scholars and Rogues on 24 March 2014</p> <blockquote> <p><em>&hellip; the fact that an informal group of critics was able to force the retraction of an ethically and academically sound study will embolden others to turn this into a legal tactic against research they disagree with. &hellip;</em></p> <p><em>And in the process, those critics are demonstrating yet again that the conclusions of all three studies are correct: there is correlation between being a conspiracy theorist and believing that climate disruption is a hoax or scam.<br /> <br /> </em></p> </blockquote> <ul> </ul> <h3><a href="">'Conspiracist' climate change study withdrawn amid legal threats</a></h3> <ul> </ul> <p>Sydney Morning Herald 2 April 2014 (this also ran in the Canberra Times and the Brisbane Times)</p> <p>Peter Hannam</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Kim Heitman, a lawyer for the UWA, said the university had done its own risk analysis before publishing the paper online. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s no reason to take it down,&rdquo; Mr Heitman said. </em></p> <p><em>&hellip; </em></p> <p><em>The university, though, had also received plaudits from around the world for its decision to publish the paper. &ldquo;I couldn't list them,&rdquo; Mr Heitman said. &ldquo;And I wouldn't list them, having regard to the fact that anyone who issues a 'thanks UWA' will probably get their own enquiry.&rdquo;</em><em> <br /></em></p> </blockquote> <ul> </ul> <h3><a href="">The journal that gave in to climate deniers' intimidation</a></h3> <ul> </ul> <p>The Conversation 2 April 2014</p> <p>Elaine McKewon</p> <p>This piece was written by one of the reviewers of the original paper and it tells her side of the story. She concludes:</p> <blockquote> <p><em>In any event, the journal&rsquo;s management and editors were clearly intimidated by climate deniers who threatened to sue. So Frontiers bowed to their demands, retracted the paper, damaged its own reputation, and ultimately gave a free kick to aggressive climate deniers.</em></p> <p><em>&nbsp;I would have expected a scientific journal to have more backbone, certainly when it comes to the crucially important issue of academic freedom.</em></p> </blockquote> <p><em>&nbsp;</em></p> <p>By and large, the mainstream media coverage seems to have picked up on what&rsquo;s really at issue here, namely academic freedom and editorial intimidation by a small band of vociferous individuals.</p> <p>The Recursive Fury retraction is just one visible instance of such intimidation. <a href="">Subterranean campaigns</a> against inconvenient scientific articles by climate deniers have become increasingly frequent and they deserve to be exposed in order to safeguard the public&rsquo;s right to be informed about the risks it is facing from climate change.</p> <p><a href="">In whose hands the future</a>?</p> Fri, 4 Apr 2014 11:00:00 EST More Bandwidth for 'Recursive Fury' <p>One of my most widely read papers, "<a href="">Recursive Fury</a>", was recently retracted by the journal Frontiers even though they found no academic or ethical problems with the paper. The reasons underlying this decision are outlined <a href="">here</a> and <a href="">here</a>.</p> <p>Because of the paper's popularity, I made it available after its retraction on a server hosted by the University of Western Australia, accessible under the short link <a href=""></a>. The demand on the paper appears to have been so large that this relatively small server could not always cope with the traffic. At one point, it took me more than 2 minutes to download the pdf.</p> <p>I apologize for the inconvenience.</p> <p>Predictably, the technical difficulties with accessing the paper have given rise to some wild speculations about its existence or well being. No need to apologize for that: more confirmation of the well-established fact that <a href="">denial of science often involves a measure of conspiratorial discourse</a> never goes astray.</p> <p>To resolve those bandwidth-related technical difficulties, the paper has now been moved to a more focal server within the University of Western Australia, and the UWA web manager has kindly created a special link to the paper that identifies its host more clearly: <a href=""></a>.</p> <p>I hope that this resolves any technical difficulties.</p> Tue, 25 Mar 2014 08:03:00 EST