And now, the write-up:

Chris Mooney: The science has been coming in saying that global warming is real, human-caused, and it keeps getting stronger scientifically.

Chris Mooney is a journalist and the author of the 2009 book, Unscientific America. Mooney spoke about the reasons behind what he calls American inaction on climate change.

Chris Mooney: It’s a problem of politics plus media leading to inability to function on this issue. We’re a divided country and we handle science issues according to politicization and divisiveness, rather than according to what the science actually says.

Mooney pointed to the decline of print media, and the rise of political blogs. He believes good communication of science may now rest with scientists, themselves.

Chris Mooney: The scientific community is going to have to find new ways of getting that information out. Or else it may be the case that we can’t get society to act on the best scientific knowledge that we have. And that may be catastrophic.

He said that scientists have learned a powerful lesson about the need to communicate what they know with the public.

Chris Mooney: I think the scientific community is ready to change -in fundamental ways – how it engages with the public. That means one key part of the equation is going to be functioning better. Hopefully that will create a more scientific America, slowly.

In addition to his concern about the declining quality and quantity of vetted science news, Mooney talked about his belief that science media has suffered at the hands of a number of popular conservative blogs that he termed, ‘anti-science.’

Chris Mooney: It’s the kind of tactics being brought against science I haven’t seen before. It’s staggeringly frightening to watch how much of a revolt against science you can have in this country on an issue that’s politicized like that.

He said that at the same time, scientists have not reacted properly to the attacks against them.

Chris Mooney: Scientists are so worried about the fact that climate research and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are coming under brutal attack. There have been some mistakes made but nothing justifying the kinds of attacks that have come. My point is okay, the situation’s bad. What are you going to do about it? Because this is a new media world. You need to adapt to it.

Mooney spoke about “ClimateGate,” in which emails between climate scientists were hacked and made public.

Chris Mooney: Scientists needed to realize that capacity was there to create a semblance of scandal. They needed to respond immediately, loudly, and with one voice, saying, ‘Okay, we’re looking into these things, but these things are not fundamental to what we know. The science rests on many foundations.’
Written by Lindsay Patterson

Once again, the original podcast is here.

First, for the original clip of Rush’s extremism in all its glory, listen here:

I couldn’t resist asking for Revkin’s response to Limbaugh, which came at around minute 13:00 of the show. Revkin first set the stage for Rush’s performance as follows:

I was speaking about three very tricky things: population growth, United States consumer habits, and climate–in one riff. I was participating via video hookup with a Wilson Center event, and basically I said, “Look, if you’re going to go with the whole carbon-centric meme, and we’ll have carbon credits for this, that, and the other, and you live in America, where we’re heading from 300 million to 400 million people in the next 30 or 40 years, why shouldn’t a family get carbon credits for having fewer kids?”

It was what I would call a thought experiment. And that got picked up by some right wing blog, and that got picked up by Rush Limbaugh, who I’m sure never saw the original video thing….Just hearing the audio [of Limbaugh] is amazing. And of course I wrote a thorough critique of what he had said on DotEarth, and then he spent the next week nibbling, almost apologizing. Suicide is a realm you don’t go into, without having to draw a lot of ire from a lot of people who have actually experienced the loss of family members. So he almost apologized, but not quite.

Hey, why apologize when you’re Rush Limbaugh?

[For more Point of Inquiry, listen here, or subscribe here via iTunes.]

Science Literacy, the Nature of Science and Religion

Jon Miller: The Development of Civic Scientific Literacy in the United States

Sheril Kirshenbaum: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future

Murray Peshkin: Addressing the Public About Science and Religion

Judith Scotchmoor: Increasing our understanding of how science really works

Art Hobson: Physics Literacy for All Students

Our session will be moderated by Lawrence Woolf and you can read the abstracts online. I’m really looking forward to what I’m certain will be a very interesting discussion.

In Oregon…where there’s a known, extraordinary seismic risk, cities and communities are still not doing much to gird the buildings that matter most, like schools, to make them less likely to fall down and kill thousands of kids and teachers….essentially what you saw in Sichuan province, almost unavoidably will be seen in lots of places in Oregon, where there’s that extraordinary fault offshore, the Cascadia fault, that will generate an extraordinary earthquake, most likely in this century, pretty plausibly in the next few decades, if not tomorrow–that will destroy 1,200 schools. The schools are listed, they’ve been studied, we know where they are, the ones that are very likely or certain to fall down when that  quake hits. If my kids were in one of those schools, I’d be pretty energized.

Revkin goes on to discuss why we tend to ignore risks like these, even though there is no possible rational justification for it….you can listen here. The section begins around minute 23:30. And don’t forget to subscribe to Point of Inquiry on iTunes!

Meanwhile, to jon a discussion that has begun about the show, zip over here…

Altogether, 12 CUNY undergraduates–out of 101 applicants–received awards for their essays based on 2009 Nobel prize-winning work in chemistry, physiology and medicine, physics, and economics. First, second and third prizes in each category included an Apple iMac Computer, a Dell Mini 10 Netbook, and an Amazon Kindle.

The impetus for the competition, said Vice Chancellor Gillian Small in her opening remarks, came about when the 2009 Nobel winners were announced, and she was reading a recent book of essays titled Unscientific America, How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future.

“There is a distressingly large number of Americans who refuse to accept even the theory of evolution,” said Small, who envisioned the competition’s essays making Nobel work in science accessible to a larger audience.

What a wonderful idea. This is just more evidence–and it is everywhere–that despite some hold-outs, an emphasis on fixing science communication is the new trend within science itself…and these are just the kinds of initiatives that will spur along that change.

I was speaking to a contact of mine on Capitol Hill and we both agreed: there’s  been next to no public controversy about geoengineering yet, but the storm from enviros and others is certainly coming. But the green community is split. Some think even coming up with voluntary rules to govern work on the controversial topic is a bad idea. Most of the big organizations, even if they have kept quiet up till now, think scientists ought to begin to understand what the unthinkable would entail.

The ETC Group, an Ottawa-based civil society organization that’s been opposing various efforts in geoengineering since 2006, last week published an open letter opposing the upcoming privately organized meeting on geoengineering in Asilomar, California:

As civil society organizations and social movements working to find constructive solutions to climate change, we want to express our deep concerns with the upcoming privately organized meeting on geoengineering in Asilomar, California… The priority at this time is not to sort out the conditions under which this experimentation might take place but, rather, whether or not the community of nations and peoples believes that geoengineering is technically, legally, socially, environmentally and economically acceptable.

Without any international consensus as to whether geoengineering is an acceptable intervention in natural systems, the Climate Response Fund and its Scientific Organizing Committee’s discussion about “voluntary guidelines” is nonsensical. The Conference organizers — almost exclusively white male scientists from industrialized countries — are presuming that they have the experience, wisdom and legitimacy to determine who should or should not be invited into this conversation.

One of those people invited to the conversation was Diana Bronson of ETC. But Bronson told me in an interview that ETC “is a small organization with limited resources” and would be unable to attend. Moreover, she said, since ETC opposed the meeting’s stated goal of creating such voluntary guidelines, “there’s no reason for us to attend.”

(She also said that she had based her critique on the makeup of the meeting on who “she figured” would be attending, having not yet received the guest list. She well may be right about a racial/cultural weighting, but I note that in the same vein ETC attacked the Royal Society report last year on geoengineering before they had read a copy.)

A number of prominent environmental groups support the conference being held, including the Environmental Defense Fund. Two officials from that organization, which helped organize the meeting, will be attending, along with Steve Seidel of Pew Center on Climate, and Tom Lovejoy of the Heinz center — both centrist, nonpartisan environmental groups. In addition, Dave Hawkins of NRDC will be there, as will Paul Craig of the Sierra Club. “We thought it was important to have engagement by the NGO community,” Margaret Leinen, head of the Climate Response Fund, told me. That group is the main sponsor of the meeting.

(Friends of the Earth UK’s position on geoengineering research is here: I’ll analyze it in another post soon.)

Blogger Tim Harper of cientifica is particularly unimpressed with ETC’s stand:

There’s nothing like the mention of geoengineering to get environmental groups even madder than putting a wasps nest down their trousers and beating them with a cricket bat, and for good reason. The idea that we could do something about climate change that didn’t involve re-engineering the political system would mean that we don’t have to live in caves, grow beards and ride bicycles. More annoyingly, some kind of techno fix would deprive some groups of a platform for the various other anti capitalist/globalisation/consumer agendas that have somehow got mixed up with sustainability.

Harper’s critique might apply to ETC — I’m still trying to understand their motives, and this document, their longest explanation of their views on geoengineering, helps a little. (The document, a pretty useful summary of events to date in this fast moving field, represents an evolution of the group’s views on one key aspect: Bronson told me last year that she felt research into the concept was ok, provided that it not involve field trials. Now they say research into geoengineering “takes money away from real solutions on the ground.”)

But I don’t think it applies to the other mainstream environmental groups who have turned a wary eye toward geoengineering. As I say in Hack the Planet, environmental groups have been mostly quiet about geoengineering not for the ideological reason that they don’t want to fix the problem, but for strategic reasons. They’re worried that talk about geoengineering could distract from the solution even the biggest advocates of planethacking research want: immediate and drastic reduction of global man-made carbon emissions.

Details at The New York Times, Bad Astronomy and The Loom.

In this conversation with host Chris Mooney, Revkin discusses the uncertain future of his field, the perils of the science blogosphere, his battles with climate blogger Joe Romm, and what it’s like (no joke) to have Rush Limbaugh suggest that you kill yourself. Moving on to the topics he’s covered for over a decade, Revkin also addresses the problem of population growth, the long-range risks that our minds just aren’t trained to think about, and the likely worsening of earthquake and other catastrophes as more people pack into in vulnerable places.

I will have much more to say about the show soon enough–I’m proud of this one–but for now, listen and download here.

Fuck them [my co-blogger, our commenters, and I] all sideways with a rusty fucking knife.

Later:

The commenters are basically wetting themselves hoping Kirshenbaum comes down hard because people are saying she should be raped with a rusty knife, and Myers “likes it that way”.

I am a big proponent of free speech, however, this thread crosses the line by advocating sexual and physical violence. I have become accustomed to ignoring much of the ridicule I receive online, but keeping silent on this particular issue, is, in my mind, acceptance. Those who contacted me do not have a platform to publicly express their disgust, but I can. Rape is not a joke or game and the fact that these remarks were not removed perpetuates the notion that they’re okay.

Adam Bly and I shared a panel in 2008 at the AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy where he discussed the values of Seed Media Group. Further, as a former Seed blogger with many friends still on the network, I’m quite familiar with their stated mission:

Seed Media Group is committed to strengthening public interest in science and improving public understanding of science around the world.

I cannot see how the tone of commentary contributes to this goal. However, given the volume of emails I’ve already received, I’m certain it reflects poorly on Seed, science blogging, and science broadly.