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What else is Newsweek wrong about? Pushing Freeman Dyson’s pseudoscience

By Joe Romm on Apr 7, 2009 at 7:41 pm

[Please email Weisberg (at jacob.weisberg@slate.com) who was suckered by Freeman Dyson into writing one of the most uninformed pieces ever to appear in Newsweek.]

Suppose Freeman Dyson had said:

“Our nobly intended welfare programs may be encouraging dysgenics-retrogressive evolution through disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantage”¦ We fear that ‘fatuous beliefs’ in the power of welfare money, unaided by eugenic foresight, may contribute to a decline of human quality for all segments of society.”

Would he be the darling of the contrarian media crowd — feted with cover stories and credulous coverage (see NYT magazine profiles climate crackpot, Freeman Dyson, and lets him slander James Hansen “” while Revkin gives Dyson’s nuttiness a free pass and below)?  Or would he be vilified, the way William Shockley, the physicist who wrote those words, was — a reporter once called him “Hitlerite.”  Yet Shockley was a “brilliant scientist” like Dyson, and perhaps more so, since, unlike Dyson, a purely theoretical physicist fond of wildly impractical ideas like a rocket ship powered by detonating nuclear bombs or Reagan’s Star Wars plan, Shockley was an experimental physicist who won the Nobel Prize for helping to invent the transistor.

Suppose Dyson had said:

There is no doubt that the Nazis killed some Jews, but the killing was local, not systematic.

I’m guessing that Jacob Weisberg wouldn’t have added a paragraph to his new Newsweek article, “What Else Are We Wrong About?” labeling as myth the statement “The Holocaust was catastrophic.”  Yet Dyson’s blatant global warming denial — “There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global” is as false, as scientifically disapprovable, as claims the Holocaust never happened or was wildly exaggerated.  The whole damn planet is getting warmer — that’s why it is called global warming.  It is increasingly hard to find any large region — including the tropics and subtropics — that are not warming [click to enlarge]:

But the conservative disinformation campaign has made global warming denial acceptable to embrace for crackpot contrarians who want media coverage in a way that eugenics and Holocaust denial are not.  Yet such denial, when credulously repeated by a reporter acting as nothing more than a stenographer, poses a far graver risk to humanity since it encourages inaction, encourages us not to take the relatively low-cost steps — one tenth of a penny on the dollar — we must take immediately in order to prevent catastrophe.  And delaying action is exactly what Dyson is all about, as this absurd piece of journalistic malpractice in Newsweek by Weisberg makes clear:

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Politics

Caller who identifies as a veteran and McCain supporter takes Limbaugh to task for supporting torture.

By Ryan Powers on Apr 7, 2009 at 6:32 pm

On his radio show today, a caller who described himself as a McCain supporter who “served in the Marine Corps and the Army,” took Rush Limbaugh to task for supporting the use of torture on suspected terrorists. The caller said that Limbaugh and other conservative talkers’ support for torture led, in part, to Americans voting against Republicans last November:

CALLER: [It] was the torture issue. I’m a veteran. We’re not supposed to be torturing these people. This is not Nazi Germany, Red China, or North Korea. There’s other ways of interrogating people, and you kept harping about it — “It’s OK,” or “It’s not really torture.” And it was just more than waterboarding. Some of these prisoners were killed under torture. … Anyone who could believe in torture just has got to be something wrong with them.

Limbaugh attacked the caller as “ignorant” and “stupid.” Limbaugh then defended himself, first by claiming that “I don’t know of anybody who died from torture,” and then calling the suggestion that he supports torture “ludicrous.” Listen here:

At times Limbaugh has called torture an effective interrogation method and on other occasions dismissed the fact that it was used by U.S. forces as insignificant. And for the record, Human Rights First found that a number of detainees died after being tortured in U.S. custody.

Related Posts

Health

WSJ Reproduces Insurer Claims In Coverage Of New Medicare Advantage Regulations

By Igor Volsky on Apr 7, 2009 at 6:30 pm

wsj.jpgVanessa Fuhrmans’ and Jane Zhang’s Wall Street Journal write-up of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) decision to reduce subsidies to private insurers participating in the Medicare Advantage (MA) program adopts a decidedly pro-business perspective:

The cuts, announced late Monday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, are slightly less severe than the 5% reduction the federal agency signaled in February, but still raise concerns about what has been a critical source of profit growth for many health insurers…The cuts mean beneficiaries enrolled in the private plans could see higher premiums or cost-sharing amounts next year, depending on the extent to which insurers try to preserve the 3% to 5% profit margins they usually make on the plans. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, for instance, said it had calculated average monthly premium increases of $50 to $80 if the 2010 cuts were to go through.

A business paper relies on business sources to report on public policy, but this particular article reproduces insurer complaints of lower profit margins without questioning the efficacy of maintaining a policy that forces taxpayers to pay $1.30 to deliver a dollar to a subset 20% of Medicare beneficiaries.

The “profit growth” of private insurers may be the concern of WSJ reporters and the majority of their sources, but it is of little importance to Americans (and, one would hope, honest policy makers). The real question is: do the government’s over payments actually provide better care than traditional Medicare?

The short answer is “no.” A number of government reports and independent estimates have dampened the rationale for subsidizing MA plans. The extra federal dollars don’t improve health outcomes. They pad insurers’ bottom lines, raise costs for beneficiaries in the traditional Medicare program, squeeze both Medicare and the federal budget, and drain resources from more productive uses. Private fee-for-service Medicare Advantage plans, moreover, have exposed beneficiaries to serious financial risks.

It’s also unclear why MA plans that claim to coordinate care and operate efficiently can’t provide services at competitive rates. If they can manage care and the cost of care, why then do they need the extra federal dollars?

And why, more importantly, does a paper that presumably prides itself in preserving the free market place, not question a capitalist system that is funded on higher government subsidies to capitalist firms?

Politics

Right wing attacks ‘wealthy homosexual activists’ for pushing the ‘tyranny’ of marriage equality.

By Amanda Terkel on Apr 7, 2009 at 5:41 pm

For years, conservatives have attacked “activist judges” for ruling that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. Today, the Vermont legislation overrode a veto by Gov. Jim Douglas (R) and became the first state to approve same-sex marriage through the legislature — without the help of any courts. However, this fact didn’t deter the far right, which immediately began putting out statements decrying the “wealthy homosexual activists” who are driving this movement to dismantle “democracy.” A sampling:

Tony Perkins, Family Research Council: “Same-sex ‘marriage’ is a movement driven by wealthy homosexual activists and a liberal elite determined to destroy not only the institution of marriage, but democracy as well. Time and again, we see when citizens have the opportunity to vote at the ballot box, they consistently opt to support traditional marriage.”

Mathew Staver, Liberty Counsel: “By redefining marriage, the Vermont legislature removed the cornerstone of society and the foundation of government. The consequences will rest on their shoulders and upon those passive objectors who know what to do but lack the courage to stand against this form of tyranny.”

Concerned Women for America: “Vermont legislators’ futile attempt to replace God by vainly redefining marriage eerily follows how that first man and woman acted on the first temptation — and the root of all temptations — to act as if they were gods. That one decision by Adam and Eve to believe that they could ‘be like God’ separated them from God, destroyed the peace that they had experienced, and ushered in what some would call ‘unintended consequences’ of pain and destruction.”

Andrew Sullivan looks at the post “judicial activism argument” world.

Related Posts

Yglesias

Gates on the Defense Budget

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 7, 2009 at 5:35 pm

I’ve just gotten off a conference call with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in which he talked about the budget.

Probably the most notable thing he said was the stern words he offered for members of the military who may not be happy with some of the decisions he’s made. At first it was all sweetness and light with Gates remarking that “we had a process that was very inclusive” and observing that there were “a lot of meetings and a lot of dialogue on all this, and I think everybody knows that they had a chance to put their oar in and make their case” so everyone should be happy. But then he started to get real and said:

One of the concerns that I have had in the past has been the discipline in this building after the decisions get made; I understand that the chiefs in particular can give their professional military advice to the congress and to the president, but the fact is that for everyone else and, frankly, for them in terms of executing their positions once I have made my decision and the president has made his decision, that is the policy of this department . . . I don’t want to see any guerilla warfare on this . . . we have a chain of command.

In addition to tough talk, the specific bureaucratic plan of action is to portray the shift in spending priorities as, implicitly, a shift away from what folks inside the Beltway may like to what combatant commanders out in the field are asking for. Gates said that these aren’t cuts. Rather, it’s “reshaping” specifically the kind of reshaping “that the combatant commanders are asking for.” The process, he said, “is a lot about the warfighters, the combatant commanders and the fight they’re in.” Though he was quick to say that he believes his choices reflect not only the priorities of combatant commanders actively engaged in military action, but also those primarily tasked with “preventing war.”

On specifics, Gates said that the problem with the Army’s Future Combat Systems program isn’t just the cost. It’s that there wasn’t enough flexibility. Based on the operational lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s useful to have a broad range of different kinds of vehicles, and it wasn’t proving feasible through the FCS process to design a system that could replace the full spectrum of currently available vehicles.

Spectrum is an important concept. The weighting from regular to irregular warfare in the budget is undeniable, but Gates said he didn’t want to see it as a binary choice. Instead “there is a spectrum of conflict” and the goal of the force needs to be to be able to shift up and down the spectrum.

Conversely, Gates is holding on to the Littoral Combat System project for the Navy even though the program has had a lot of cost overruns and so forth. Gates said that despite the problems “I think it has a capability we just have to have.” Specifically, the promise of a ship that’s not only agile, but relative cheap on a per-ship basis is large. “You don’t need a $5 billion ship to go after pirates,” Gates said.

Yglesias

Internal Caucus Dynamics Pushing the GOP Ever-Further Right

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 7, 2009 at 5:25 pm

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Interesting post from Chris Orr on the internal dynamics inside the Republican caucus:

Take the House. John Boehner knows that he’s exceedingly unlikely to become Speaker in the foreseeble future, and that if the opportunity somehow arises, it will be due to events beyond his control–an economic collapse, a terrorist attack, etc. On a fundamental level, he’s not competing with Nancy Pelosi, but with Eric Cantor and Mike Pence and any other party rivals eager to displace him. As in a contested primary, the dynamic generally pushes away from the center, but here particularly so, because a) the moderate wing of the House GOP has basically ceased to exist; and b) none of these guys is likely to be in a position to influence Democratic legislation in any substantial way any time soon. Everyone tries to outflank everyone else to the right–zero votes on any Obama-supported bill! a hyperconservative budget with no numbers! a hyperconservative budget with made-up numbers!–because there’s no obvious, non-heretical way to establish yourself as a player otherwise. Denied the opportunity to govern (by their own intransigence as much as by the size of the Democratic majority), they have nothing to do but campaign 24/7.

I think this contains a lot of wisdom. That said, I do recall reading somewhat similar things when Nancy Pelosi took over as Democratic leader in the wake of the 2002 midterms. Democrats were losing seats. Those losses were reducing the caucus to only its safest and most liberal seats. Thus more liberal members were rising in the leadership. But this would lead only to the party losing more and more seats and thus becoming ever more marginal and left-wing.

And yet somehow Pelosi became Speaker in January of 2007.

Which is to say that while I think these dynamics are real, one should avoid the Beltway temptation to overstate the importance of ideology in determining election results and avoid the human temptation to extrapolate in straight lines. Big political changes can happen over the course of a couple of elections, especially during times when big dramatic events are happening in the real world.

Climate Progress

To The Washington Post Editors: George Will’s ‘Arctic Climate Research Center’ Is A Right-Wing Fabrication

By Brad Johnson on Apr 7, 2009 at 5:03 pm

The Wonk Room has sent the following note to George Will, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, and Washington Post Writers Group editor Alan Shearer:

George WillMssrs. Will, Hiatt, and Shearer:

I would like to call to your attention a factual error in Mr. Will’s February 15, 2009 column, “Dark Green Doomsayers.” I recognize that there was an extensive factchecking process of the column, but somehow a fabrication slipped through. Mr. Will wrote:

According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

There is no such organization.

The Arctic climate is a research area of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and the informal group of researchers does go by the label of the Polar Research Group.

However, “there is no such center at the University of Illinois,” the UIUC’s Dr. John Walsh has informed me in electronic correspondence. “There is a group of scientists and students working on Arctic climate, but no formal center.”

The existence of such an organization was first fabricated out of whole cloth by DailyTech’s Michael Asher, in a 1/1/2009 blog post entitled “Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979“:

The data is being reported by the University of Illinois’s Arctic Climate Research Center, and is derived from satellite observations of the Northern and Southern hemisphere polar regions.

I myself was guilty of trusting the Washington Post’s multi-layered factchecking process, and have incorrectly referred to the UIUC Polar Research Group as the Arctic Climate Research Center in my own writing about Will’s column. After noting that the phrase first appeared on a notoriously inaccurate blog, I checked the facts with a UIUC scientist. I have since corrected the error in my own work, including my suggested correction for “Dark Green Doomsayers,” which I sent to Mssrs. Hiatt and Shearer via electronic correspondence on Feb. 22, as yet to no reply.

The suggested correction, as amended:

George Will’s Feb. 15, 2009 column vaguely characterized a statement by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu on the threat of catastrophic snowpack decline in California due to global warming. Chu was referring to an end-of-the century scenario, not a near-term threat.

Will’s column claimed that experts cited a 2008 decline in “global sea ice” as evidence of man-made global warming. Scientists cited the observed decline in Arctic, not global sea ice.

Will’s column claimed that the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center said that global sea ice levels are “now equal to those of 1979.” Although the university said that global sea ice levels were “near or slightly lower than those of late 1979″ at the start of January, global sea ice levels are now eight percent below their levels in February 1979.

Will’s column claimed the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said “there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.” According to the WMO, global warming is continuing, with the past decade the warmest on record.

Will’s column argued that imminent global cooling was a predicted planetary catastrophe in the 1970s. There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that imminent global cooling was a threat.

Will’s column cited articles from Science magazine and Science News to imply the authors expected an imminent ice age. The Science article instead predicted an ice age within several thousand years, “ignoring anthropogenic effects.” The Science News article described climatology as an “infant science” and discussed predictions of manmade global warming that have since proven to be accurate.

Will’s column misidentified the source of global sea ice data as the “University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center.” The actual source was a working group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Atmospheric Sciences, informally known as the Polar Research Group.

The Washington Post and George Will regret the errors.

Despite publishing criticism of factual errors and distortions in “Dark Green Doomsayers” by Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, science journalist Chris Mooney, Secretary General of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization Michel Jarraud, Post blogger Andrew Freeman, and Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan, the Washington Post has yet to issue a single correction for Will’s column, syndicated in dozens of newspapers nationwide.

Update

Science journalist-bloggers Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer have filed corrections for their work.


Update

,The Way Things Break and
James Hrynyshyn have filed corrections.

Media

Posties Rebel Against George Will

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 7, 2009 at 4:52 pm

george_will_2.jpg

Here’s Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan writing in The Washington Post:

The new evidence—including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s—contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.

This is very good to see, and kudos for the writers are deserved.

That said, I can already see the Post‘s editors concocting a self-serving history here. In this history, Will published a controversial and widely-discussed column. Will’s ideological antagonists criticized the column viciously, but the Post did the right thing and stood by Will. They also published some different takes on the issue. And when new information came to light, it was duly reported in the news pages. What’s missing from this story is the fact that Will was misrepresenting the evidence all along. It’s true that the new data contradicts Will, but the old data never supported Will’s inclusion in the first place. Running the column was sloppy, and failing to respond in a substantive way when the problems were brought to the Post‘s attention was unethical and irresponsible.

In other good news, here’s Post weather blogger Andrew Freeman taking Will on.

Politics

Specter defends Limbaugh: ‘I like him.’

By Guest Blogger on Apr 7, 2009 at 4:43 pm

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), who is trailing Club for Growth president Pat Toomey in the polls for the 2010 GOP primary, has been lurching to the right recently, most notably by announcing last month that he will vote against the Employee Free Choice Act. On the Howard Stern radio show today, Specter took to defending Rush Limbaugh:

specter1.jpgSpecter: Do I like Rush Limbaugh? … Yeah, I like him [...]

Stern: He’s a crackpot? He’s an enemy of the country.

Specter: (laughing) Uh, no, he’s not. He’s expressing his opinion.

Stern: Senator, wait a second. In all seriousness. He wants the president to do poorly? Listen, I never voted for Bush, but I always wanted to see him do well. I’m an American. I want my president to be successful. Who says ‘I don’t want my president to do well?’ That’s anti-American!

Specter: Well I haven’t heard Rush Limbaugh say that. But there’s a lot of talk which is provocative.

It’s puzzling that Specter hasn’t heard about Limbaugh’s statement that he hopes Obama fails. The issue has been covered by blogs and the front pages of national newspapers for months. It even earned Limbaugh a spot on the cover of Newsweek. Or perhaps Specter is learning from the others who have criticized Boss Limbaugh and have then apologized to him.

- Matt Finkelstein

Yglesias

Debating Stimulus

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 7, 2009 at 4:07 pm

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Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen debate fiscal stimulus. Brad characterizes the disagreement:

Tyler worries that the U.S. economy faces deep problems of structural adjustment. I think that deep problems of structural adjustment melt away to normal annoyances whenever aggregate demand is high–that they appear to be insurmountable and painful difficulties only when aggregate demand is low.

I think that when considering these issues it’s perhaps useful to think back to 2006 and 2007. I don’t recall that many market-oriented economists were saying back then that there were huge underlying structural problems with the United States economy. I recall some people saying that, mostly on the left, mostly being dismissed as unduly pessimistic and/or motivated by partisanship, and generally now supportive of fiscal stimulus.

It always strikes me that the published versions of these debates seem a bit too fastidious. As best I can tell, the real dynamic of the debates here are that many people on the left hope and many people on the right fear that the coincidence of a major economic meltdown occurring shortly before an election in which progressive candidates did very well can lead to a lasting change in the policy environment. After all, when you engage in some temporary deficit spending the deficit could be temporary in two ways. The spending could vanish. Or taxes could be raised. Progressives hope, and conservatives fear, that much of the new deficit spending will prove popular and anchor expectations about levels of federal services.

This hope/fear is extremely realistic. It seems very unlikely to me that all of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s spending increases will actually be undone when the legislation expires.

That gives people who think that overall levels of taxes and spending should be lower strong reason to cast around for reasons why stimulus is a bad idea. Were conservatives in power and proposing stimulus via a temporary tax cut, I believe most of the people currently making fallacious arguments about Ricardian Equivalence wouldn’t be doing so. They’d be saying to themselves “even if this doesn’t work, it’ll probably lead to lower tax rates over the long term so whatever.” Nobody likes to believe that they’re just screwed, that the short-term economic situation dictates letting the political opposition unleash some of its long-treasured schemes.

Perhaps this drive to skepticism is leading market-oriented economists to uncover deep insights about structural shifts in the economy. It’s definitely leading many of them to embrace some wild nonsense, as per these Ricardian Equivalence fallacies. A thousand flowers are blooming, and maybe only 999 of them are wrong. But realistically I think all this is mostly driven by people who don’t like to idea of increased spending not wanting to believe that there are new, event-driven reasons that the people who’ve long favored increased spending are now righter than ever.

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