Holiday Reading

So I’ve been cross-eyed with the flu this week, which is finally ebbing. Even more interesting, the whole family got equally sick at the same time. I think one of our neighbors put a skull and crossbones on our front door. I shuffled out to get the mail one day and another neighbor, caught in the stairwell, cowered into a ball until I passed by. I grunted at her and she whimpered.

Or that part could have been one of my feverish dreams.

Anyway, in between my periods of semi-consciousness, I’ve tried to stay current with various posts, comments, and stories. In case you missed them, here’s a bunch that are worth taking a look at.

As Charlie Petit notes:

Two long features out this week provide a serious, handy, collective guide to the yin and yang of observational climatology’s primary jobs these days ““ explaining and measuring global warming.

Those would be by Justin Gillis in the NYT and Tom Yulsman in Climate Central. (Gillis follows up his terrific piece with this post, titled “Your Piece of the Keeling Curve.”)

The role of evangelicals in the global warming debate has gotten a lot of recent play in the climate blogosphere. Grist had some dueling perpsectives and Judith Curry stirred the pot with this Q & A. (I’ve occasionally covered this angle.)

Urbanists got something meaty to chew on with this NYT magazine story by Jonah Lehrer (who is on quite a roll). Shaun at Ecological Sociology provides additional context.

David Owen kicks up a storm with this New Yorker piece on the Jevons Paradox. Some liked it. Others not so much. To me, Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations gets it about right:

energy efficiency is often oversold as a policy panacea. Many energy efficiency policies that are sold as win-wins aren’t actually so once you account for all the costs. But to argue that promoting energy efficiency invariably undercuts progress toward curbing resource demand and greenhouse gas emissions is wrong.

Brad Johnson from the Center for American Progress scratches an itch:

There’s also the enviro-journalist cabal that have complicated reasons for muddying the science, that reflect decades of being manipulated by propagandists.

I asked him to elaborate on these “complicated reasons.” Alas, no response. (Anybody else who can’t stop scratching this itch want to give it a shot?)

Fred Pearce, writing in Yale Environment 360, says the real good news out of Cancun is recognition

that the UN negotiations are truly broken could be the key to unlocking a Plan B. There is growing evidence that countries are willing to do unilaterally what they refuse to commit to at the UN.

There’s much more but hey, it’s a holiday, so enjoy the time with your friends and loved ones. Josh insists.

7 Responses to “Holiday Reading”

  1. Huge Difference says:

    Charles Komanoff’s response seems the most interesting, and makes me wish I was able to read the entirety of the original piece.
     
    I don’t see much difference between Jevons Paradox and Induced Traffic, which is what I most commonly hear environmentalists and progressives used to explain why they are against free widening projects.

  2. Huge Difference says:

    Whoops, that should be freeway widening projects.
     
    (Why are my comments being tossed back into the moderation queue again?)
     
    Hey, glad you’re feeling better.

  3. Eli Rabett says:

    You might get a hint by reading
    <a href=”http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/12/the_chicago_tribune_chronic_lyme_disease.php”>
     
    I’ll put a large piece here which captures Brad’s point
     
    One criticism actually appeared in the Knight Science Journalism Tracker’s blog in the form of post written by Paul Raeburn, former senior editor for science at Business Week, former science editor at the Associated Press, author of three science books, and director of a university science journalism program, entitled Chicago Tribune off balance on chronic Lyme disease. For the most part, it’s an article complaining about the journalism of the article. Boiled down to its essence, Raeburn’s complaint is the opposite of what we skeptics, scientists, and supporters of science-based medicine complain about all the time about journalists, namely that Callahan and Tsouderos did not fall into the trap of false balance, did not give undue credence to pseudoscience, and did not “tell both sides” as though they had equal or roughly equal credence. Indeed, Raeburn says just that much in the very last paragraph of the article:

    In short, what Callahan and Tsouderos have done is to argue that chronic Lyme disease can’t exist because the people who say it does are nuts.
    A far better approach would have been to report the evidence, pro and con, and to quote the most persuasive advocates for and against chronic Lyme disease-not the least persuasive. And to give both sides equal time to speak.

    The first sentence, of course, is a massive straw man argument. That is not what Callahan and Tsouderos were doing at all. Seriously. I reread the entire Tribune Lyme article, and nowhere did they say or imply that believers in chronic Lyme disease are nuts. Of course, this is a frequent complaint that people who have been victimized by quackery use: That critics of quackery are calling them crazy. This sort of retort is common whenever it is pointed out that conditions that could well have a strong psychological overlay do, in fact, have a strong psychological overlay; those suffering from it will cry that you’re calling them crazy. Remember when I discussed Morgellon’s disease? Same thing. It’s an easy attack, a veritable cheap shot, though. Yes, sometimes it’s true, but far more often in my experience it’s a cheap shot.
    As for the last paragraph, I can’t find a better distillation of the “tell both sides” mantra. Again, in the case of a genuine scientific controversy, this is not an unreasonable approach. However, it is not controversial in medicine that chronic Lyme disease is almost certainly not a result of actual chronic infection and that long term antibiotics don’t do any good and can cause harm.
    Raeburn also has a bit of difficulty in defining what does and does not constitute a legitimate medical authority:

    Again and again, Callahan and Tsouderos give far more space to advocates making questionable claims than they do to experts who refute those claims, allowing the serious case for chronic Lyme disease, whatever that might be, to be buried under the dubious claims of advocates.
    The reporters go on and on impuguning patients and advocates without ever telling us whether there is a debate among legitimate experts about whether Lyme disease might assume a chronic form.

    Could it be, perhaps, because there aren’t really any legitimate scientific experts who support the idea that long term chronic antibiotics are useful for the entity that is chronic Lyme disease? Could it be because randomized clinical trials have been done and don’t support the efficacy of long term antibiotics to treat category 4 Lyme disease? Indeed, after pointing out that the nation’s largest organization for specialists in infectious disease concluded that there is “no convincing biological evidence” for a Lyme infection that persists after treatment and continues to sicken and that three panels of experts from the Infectious Diseases Society of America and one panel from the American Academy of Neurology came to the same conclusion, namely that the diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease is suspect at best and that treatment with long term antibiotics is ineffective and risky, Callahan and Tsouderos write:

    The evidence against the effectiveness of long-term antibiotic therapy is especially strong — supported by four randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials.
    Patients in three trials receiving long-term antibiotic therapy did not do significantly better than those receiving placebos. In one other trial, patients receiving antibiotics felt significantly less fatigued than those receiving the sham treatment, though many of the antibiotic patients figured out they were receiving medicine, a grave flaw in the study.

    this post from Orac and especially the comments from Pam Weintraub, starts at about comment 63
     
    Otoh, like Pam you might not.

  4. Keith Kloor says:

    It’s hard to tell what you mean by this lazy cut and paste job. But then I went had a quick look at the Orac post and the comment by Pam, and this is something that sounds interesting. But to do it justice, I’d have to read all the relevant articles, starting with the Chicago Tribune piece.

    I haven’t closely followed the chronic lyme disease issue, but based on memory, I seem to recall there isn’t much to it. I remember reading a Times magazine story way back that challenged its legitimacy and I distinctly remember the blowback from many readers.

    Anyway, so what are the “complicated reasons” the “cabal” gets it wrong? And try typing a little slower so I can understand what you say, for a change. Most of your comments come off either rushed or cryptic, or rudely dismissive. Occasionally, you hit the trifecta.

  5. harrywr2 says:

    “There is growing evidence that countries are willing to do unilaterally what they refuse to commit to at the UN.”
     
    Coal is 70 cents/MMBtu in Wyoming, $4/MMBtu on most of the eastern seaboard in the US, $5/MMBtu in Europe and $5.50/MMBtu in Asia.
    The last 8 years has seen coal prices increasing 20% per year compounded annually. If the current trend continues Solar PV will be cheaper then coal by 2020 in most of the world even if the cost of Solar PV doesn’t go down.
    Coal has ceased being the ‘cheapest form of energy’ for the vast majority of the world and the situation doesn’t appear to be a ‘temporary spike’ as it did in 2008 but a long term trend.
    New Mantra – ‘Save Our Wallets’.
     
     

  6. Sashka says:

    FWIW, I found Gillis’ article close to worthless b/c it is so trivial. The blog post is much better though. To that I have a (almost rhetorical) follow-up question:
    What is the percentage of tenured professors in climatology (in USA) who occupy less than a 3-bedroom houses and own less than 2 cars in their families?
     

  7. Jack Hughes says:

    Thanks for the links and hope you’re feeling better now.
     
    I’ve not seen the Climate Progress site before so I followed a few links around and about. I found the exact mirror image of my own take on the BBC. They describe a right-wing place spreading denialist disinformation. Fronted by arch-denier Richard Black. Truly a parallel universe.
     

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