The Washington Post reports this jaw-dropper about the species homo “sapiens” sapiens:

In the worst wildfire season on record, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service ran out of money to pay for firefighters, fire trucks and aircraft that dump retardant on monstrous flames. So officials did about the only thing they could: take money from other forest management programs.

But many of the programs were aimed at preventing giant fires in the first place, and raiding their budgets meant putting off the removal of dried brush and dead wood over vast stretches of land — the things that fuel eye-popping blazes, threatening property and lives.

In the words of the patron saint of bad ideas, d’oh!

Can you imagine a species this insane? This would be even less frog-worthy than cutting the wind energy tax credit while continuing to subsidize oil drilling. Then again, as the overwhelming evidence makes clear, out, “Humans Are Not Like Slowly Boiling Frogs … We Are Like Slowly Boiling Brainless Frogs.”

You’ll be fascinated, but not surprised, to know just how nonsensically the wildfire budgeting for the Forest Service is done by Congress: The “traditional method that members of an appropriations conference committee use to fund wildfire suppression” is “averaging the cost of fighting wildfires over the previous 10 years.”

Forestry experts argue that this approach “is inadequate at a time when climate change is causing longer periods of dryness and drought, giving fires more fuel to burn and resulting in longer wildfire seasons.” Duh!

Remember global warming is already contributing to the worst wildfires “since the last ice age.” And here’s a figure from a 2010 presentation made by the President’s science adviser Dr. John Holdren, about conditions projected for mid-century:

So providing a budget based on ”averaging the cost of fighting wildfires over the previous 10 years” is going to fail in increasingly spectacular fashion, particularly since it has already begun to fail  spectacularly:

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If only team Obama had a powerful metaphor to undercut Romney’s effort to Etch-A-Sketch himself into a middle-class-loving moderate.

Oh wait, they do. But even though the Romney campaign has apparently changed its losing strategy of being an “extreme conservative,” team Obama has so far failed to respond with the obvious, winning strategy — labeling Romney the Etch-A-Sketch candidate for attempting to erase his numerous unpopular policy positions and redraw himself as a centrist.

Back in March, Romney strategist Eric Fehrnstrom made what was, until the “47%” video, the political gaffe of the year. He was asked about how his boss’s politics might change after he gets the nomination. “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign,” Fehrnstrom said, “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.”

Romney’s effort to recast himself with myriad untruths in the first presidential debate revealed that indeed Fehrnstrom was telling the truth.

I’ve been interested in this gaffe for two reasons. First, climate and energy are two of the major areas where Romney has shaken his position and started again — see, for instance, “Another Etch A Sketch Moment: In 2006, Romney Supported High Gasoline Prices To Discourage Consumption.”

In June, the NY Times had a scathing editorial, “Energy Etch A Sketch.” They point out that after Romney erased all the sensible energy and climate policies he had as governor, today “the policies he espouses would be devastating for the country and the planet.”

In last week’s debate, Romney said, “I love coal.” I guess it’s like one of those TV sitcom or movie romcom love affairs that began with really intense dislike, since back in 2003, then Governor Romney attacked coal jobs that “kill people.”

Second, my new book on persuasive communications – Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln and Lady Gaga — examines effective messaging, political gaffes, and the role of the figures of speech.

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by Dana Nuccitelli, via Skeptical Science

In the interest of full disclosure, many Skeptical Science team members are big fans of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog at The New York Times.  Silver runs a model which uses polling results and various other input factors (such as economic indicators) to predict election outcomes in the USA, with an impressive track record of accuracy.

Thus we were intrigued to hear that Silver had included a chapter on climate change in his newly-published book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t, particularly since we at Skeptical Science are often forced to explain the difference between signal and noise.  Having great respect for the work and climate-related opinions of Michael Mann (who Silver consulted in writing the book), we were also concerned to see his criticisms of Nate Silver’s climate chapter.

Nevertheless, Mann recommended that people read the book for themselves, praising much of the content.  So I did just that, and overall I believe that if we take Silver’s analysis a step further, we can learn a lot about the accuracy of climate models.  It’s also important to remember that, as Silver himself notes in the chapter, our basic understanding of how the climate works and how much it will warm in response to our greenhouse gas emissions is not just dependent on models.

Correlation is not Causation without Physical Connection

Silver’s climate chapter starts out very well, noting that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, and that determining climate change causation requires a physical understanding of the climate system.

“…predictions are potentially much stronger when backed up by a sound understanding of the root causes behind a phenomenon.  We do have a good understanding of the cause of global warming: it is the greenhouse effect.”

Failing to consider physics in trying to determine the cause of global warming has been the pitfall for many a climate contrarian, for example Roy Spencer, Craig Loehle, Nicola Scafetta, Syun-Ichi Akasofu, and many others, so Silver’s point is an important and relevant one.  It is easy to fall into the curve fitting trap.

Silver goes on to explain some of that fundamental physics as discussed in the IPCC report – that atmospheric CO2 has increased steadily and rapidly, that this CO2 increase will in turn increase the greenhouse effect and cause global surface warming (which we’ve known for well over a century), and that water vapor will amplify that global warming as a feedback effect, ultimately noting “The greenhouse effect isn’t rocket science.”

Healthy Skepticism or Noise?

After this good start, the chapter then proceeds to discuss what Silver considers the healthy form of scientific skepticism, noting that

“In climate science, this healthy skepticism is generally directed at the reliability of computer models used to forecast the climate’s course.”

Silver then discusses J. Scott Armstrong as an example of this type of healthy skeptic of science who is concerned about the accuracy of climate model predictions.  Armstrong is basically used to establish the ‘skeptic’ criticisms of climate models, though his arguments are very weak, basically boiling down to ‘climate models are too complex to be accurate.’  Armstrong also tends to focus on short-term noise rather than long-term trends, which Silver does eventually point out toward the end of the chapter.  After establishing Armstrong’s criticisms, Silver moves on to the more interesting part of the chapter, evaluating the accuracy of past climate models.

Testing Hansen’s 1988 Model Accuracy

Silver attempts to evaluate the accuracy of climate models by examining the model projections made by James Hansen in 1988 and the IPCC in 1990 and 1995. We should note here that Skeptical Science has evaluated many other temperature projections going back as far as Wallace Broeker’s 1975 paper in the Lessons from Past Predictions series, with the results summarized in Figure 1 (though not all of these are based on climate models).  Note that most of the accurate predictions have come from mainstream climate scientists and models, while the least accurate predictions have come from various ‘skeptics’.

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by David Roberts, via Grist

Yesterday evening on Twitter, I had this exchange:

That’ll teach me to ask for homework! (If you’re not familiar with Jay Rosen, you oughtta be — he’s the smartest press critic going.)

First, as I’m sure Rosen knows, there is no singular “energy journalism,” only various tribes with various beats. A quick taxonomy couldn’t hurt.

There are finance and business journalists who cover energy as a commodity business, tracking global supply and demand flows, prices, futures trading, all that sort of stuff. There are business and tech journalists who focus on cleantech. There are environmental journalists, who tend to cover energy (when they do it) through the lens of enviros vs. polluters. And there are political journalists who cover energy as a campaign and/or policy issue, sometimes as a specialty, more often as part of a portfolio.

There are journalists who straddle more than one of these tribes, but they are fairly rare — mostly what you have is a blind men and elephant situation. Each tribe has its own ambit, tropes, and habits of thinking, which persist through sheer vocational inertia.

What I’d like to see in all these varieties of energy journalism is a little bit more systems thinking, a greater sense of context. Humanity’s relationship with energy is changing in fundamental ways and lots of the familiar frames for energy coverage no longer make much sense, or at least are woefully inadequate.

Here are the three great energy challenges of the 21st century:

1. Maintain safe and reliable energy supply to developed countries, where demand is leveling off and infrastructure is aging.
2. Supply energy to the developing world, where demand is absolutely exploding, and to the one in three people in the world who have no reliable access to energy at all (“energy poverty”).
3. Rapidly and substantially reduce emissions of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.

Lots of energy journalists, especially of the political variety, operate as though only No. 1 existed. Biz and tech journalists are more likely to grapple with No. 2. As for No. 3, that’s an “environmental story” and so it’s left to environmental journalists, a tribe that has traditionally been science-focused and keenly, self-consciously nonpartisan.

This is the situation in energy journalism these days, and it isn’t serving readers well.

The combination of No. 2 and No. 3 puts us in an incredible bind as a species.

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