I would not have thought that mocking a very large pool of your potential customers was a winning ad strategy. But Clorox seems to think it makes sense:

I haven’t found anybody yet who isn’t offended by that in some way, including, as it does, various offensive stereotypes of “housewives.”

And if that isn’t enough mockery for you, play the shorter videos below that one on Clorox’s “Green Works” website, where they make light of “conflict diamonds,” An Inconvenient Truth, “gluten-free” food and BPA.

Oh, and they never actually mention their products! I can’t say that I ever thought of Clorox as a producer of green products — and these videos make it rather unlikely I’ll be trying any of them any time soon.

Satire is a risky business, especially if you yourself don’t belong to the group being satirized and your satire can easily be taken instead as offensive. Seth MacFarlane found that out at the Academy’s awards with his tasteless “We Saw Your Boobs” musical number. As Andrew O’Hehir put it in his Salon piece, “I’ll tell you what’s funny“:

[MacFarlane] stumbled into a well-known problem with irony, which is inherently unstable. Anytime you say something you supposedly don’t mean, people are likely to take you at your word – and then you no longer control “what you meant” in the first place. Whether MacFarlane intended his shtick as absurdist or satirical humor is now irrelevant, because it came out as a more hurtful variety.

The results of {the study “NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax”} implied that conspiratorial thinking is linked to climate denial, and hence might emerge in turn to defend climate denial against cognitive analysis – and that’s what happened, as we document in “Recursive Fury.”

by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky via Skeptical Science

Our paper Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation has been published. The paper analyzed the public discourse in response to an earlier article by Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (LOG12 for short from here on), which has led to some discussion on this blog earlier.

Refreshingly, the journal Frontiers makes all papers available for free with no paywall. Another unique feature of this journal is that readers can post comments directly beneath the abstract. Unfortunately this has led to the posting of a number of misrepresentations of the paper.

In this post, I’ll be addressing some of these misconceptions (but being careful to practise what I preach, will adopt the principles of the Debunking Handbook when I debunk the misconceptions). So here are some key facts about the Recursive Fury paper:

Conspiracy theorists are those who display the characteristics of conspiracy ideation

Yep, just stating the obvious, right? Recursive Fury establishes, from the peer-reviewed literature, the traits of conspiracist ideation, which is the technical term for a cognitive style commonly known as “conspiratorial thinking”. Our paper featured 6 criteria for conspiratorial thinking:

1. Nefarious Intent: Assuming that the presumed conspirators have nefarious intentions. For example, if person X assumes that blogger Y colluded with the New York Times to publish a paper damaging to X, then X presumes nefarious intent on the part of Y.
2. Persecuted Victim: Self-identifying as the victim of an organised persecution.
3. Nihilistic Skepticism: Refusing to believe anything that doesn’t fit into the conspiracy theory. Note that “conspiracy theory” here is a fairly broad term and need not involve a global conspiracy (e.g., that NASA faked the moon landing) but can refer to small-scale events and hypotheses.
4. Nothing occurs by Accident: Weaving any small random event into the conspiracy narrative.
5. Something Must be Wrong: Switching liberally between different, even contradictory conspiracy theories that have in common only the presumption that there is something wrong in the official account by the alleged conspirators. Thus, people may simultaneously believe that Princess Diana faked her own death and that she was assassinated by MI5.
6. Self-Sealing reasoning: Interpreting any evidence against the conspiracy as evidence for the conspiracy. For example, when climate scientists are exonerated of any wrong-doing 9 times over by different investigations, this is reinterpreted to imply that the climate-change conspiracy involves not just the world’s climate scientists but also the investigating bodies and associated governments.

We then went on to identify responses to LOG12 that exhibited these criteria. Our analysis was entirely based on whether or not public statements conformed to the criteria just listed—we made no comment on the merit of any criticism (except in cases where speculations were plain wrong).

A common misrepresentation of Recursive Fury is articulated by one commenter who says “conspiratorial ideation is defined in such a way that any criticism of LOG12, whether true or false, comes under that heading.” Actually, our criteria for conspiracist ideation come from a number of peer-reviewed examinations of conspiratorial thinking and have nothing to do with the substance of any criticism of LOG12. Our objective in Recursive Fury was to demonstrate that some of those criteria arguably applied to the public discourse surrounding LOG12. It does not follow that any criticism of LOG12 involves conspiratorial thinking. Of course not. But if some (not all) critics of a paper on the role of conspiratorial thinking in science denial engage in, well, conspiratorial thinking in response, that’s of scholarly interest.

The criteria for conspiracist ideation are applicable without regard to a statement’s truth or falsity. Recursive Fury is not about defending LOG12. On the contrary, this latest paper puts on the scholarly record many criticisms of LOG12 that had previously been limited to blogs, and it did so without evaluating or rebutting the substance of those criticisms. Some defence!

A few critics have complained that we didn’t include their methodological critiques of LOG12. Such critiques do not fit the conspiracist criteria, which is why they weren’t included. Those critics are welcome to submit rejoinders or comments on LOG12 to the journal in question.

A range of different conspiracy theories are posted in Recursive Fury

Recursive Fury reports and analyzes a number of conspiracy theories regarding LOG12. These range from “global climate activist operation” to “ringleader for conspiratorial activities by the green climate bloggers,” to Stephan Lewandowsky receiving millions of dollars to run The Conversation.

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The great English satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was, of course, not thinking of climate science deniers when he wrote:

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

This is of a kind with the Upton Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

And this is not entirely dissimilar to the quote widely attributed to Mark Twain (as Al Gore does in An Inconvenient Truth): ”It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” But there appears to be no actual evidence Twain ever said it or something close to it. Who actually said it first remains something of a mystery.

Finally, and only partially unrelated, we have my favorite Swift quote, which I use to begin the discussion of the figure of speech “Enigma” in my book Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga:

There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof, I hope, there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentence is printed in a different character, shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either of wit or sublime.

I do hope you will hold me to that same standard!

With the few strokes of a pen on Monday, President Obama created five new national monuments, and took an important step towards establishing a stronger public lands conservation record for his presidency. The package of monuments created with the longstanding authority granted to presidents by the 1906 Antiquities Act includes the first landscape of any real size protected by this administration, the 242,500 acre Rio Grande Del Norte National Monument.

The administration still has a lot of ground to make up if it is to achieve a proper balance between the amount of public land it has leased for oil and gas development and the amount it has permanently protected. That goal, giving permanent protection to public land areas equal in size to what is drilled, is endorsed by the Center for American Progress and was ably amplified by former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt during an important early February speech. As CAP has pointed out, President Obama’s record on public land conservation is far weaker than his recent White House predecessors.

Even so, President Obama appears to be gaining some enthusiasm for the conservation powers he can use to circumvent a hostile House of Representatives and satisfy the public’s thirst for protecting prized federal lands from inappropriate commercial development. The Antiquities Act, which gives the president broad authority to designate monuments and has been used by 16 of the 19 presidents since Theodore Roosevelt signed it into law, is one of those powers.

There are other actions the president can take without waiting for any say so from Congress.

In western Colorado, he can protect more than 100,000 acres of spectacular country revered for its hunting, fishing, clean water, and ranching by simply having the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management let 61 oil and gas leases expire in the next few months. Since purchasing the ten-year leases on national forest land in the Thompson Divide in 2003, oil and gas companies have mostly sat on them, moving to get actual development permits only recently.

Now those permits are soon to expire, and residents and public officials have mobilized to protect the Thompson Divide permanently. Local landowners and others have raised $2.5 million to buy back the leases, and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) has introduced legislation to withdraw all public land in the 221,000 Thompson Divide area from mineral leasing while protecting valid existing leases.

The few energy companies that have bothered to respond to the citizens’ coalition offer of $2.5 million have spurned it. If the BLM has the good sense to reject industry requests for extensions on the leases, those oil and gas companies might get more reasonable about negotiating a buyout. With a buyout, Bennet’s legislation could protect most of the area forever.

To the west in Utah, President Obama has another opportunity. He can reverse some of the destructive actions of the previous administration which in its waning months issued long range plans governing public and commercial uses for some 11 million acres of BLM-managed red rock canyon country. Those plans, typically in effect for 15 or 20 years, offered up 80 percent of those public lands to oil and gas, and designated 20,000 miles of dirt paths open to motorized travel.

Sued by conservation groups in a case that is still in federal court, the Obama administration has defended those land management plans. It should instead seek a settlement with the conservation groups and agree to revise the plans to better protect some of the most spectacular public landscapes in the U.S.

Tom Kenworthy is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund

 

According to a new cost-benefit analysis by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), a switch from burning oil for heat to burning switchgrass biomass would cut down on both energy costs and carbon emissions for homes in the northeastern United States.

What’s especially significant is that study’s accounting of carbon emissions considered the entire life cycle of switchgrass, from crop planting, to growing, to harvesting and production. It still found switchgrass pellets yield a significant reduction in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions compared to both heating oil and natural gas, as well as a cost saving of just under $7 per gigajoule of heat compared to oil:

[T]he researchers calculated that using switchgrass pellets instead of petroleum fuel oil to generate one gigajoule of heat in residences would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 146 pounds of CO2e. Using switchgrass pellets instead of natural gas to produce one gigajoule of heat in residences would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 158 pounds of CO2e.

Substituting switchgrass pellets for fuel oil for home heating would also save money. Totaling all costs associated with installing an appropriate residential heating system and fuel consumption, Adler’s team concluded that each gigajoule of heat produced using switchgrass pellets would cost $21.36. Using fuel oil to produce the same amount of heat would cost $28.22. The savings would be less in a commercial facility, because capital costs for a commercial biomass boiler, storage, and fuel-handling equipment are five times greater than the costs for components that use fuel oil.

According to the team’s calculations, heating with switchgrass pellets would continue to be less expensive even if switchgrass production costs rose 200 percent and the price of fuel oil dropped 70 percent.

There some important caveats, to this as Clean Technica points out: First, the cost savings apply primarily to properties that are replacing old and outdated heating equipment, and thus will be investing in new equipment regardless. As noted above, the capital costs will significantly diminish savings for commercial rather than residential properties, though they won’t obliterate them. Second, the point applies to heating oil specifically — replacing gasoline with switchgrass biofuel would be difficult to justify currently, and replacing coal with switchgrass for electricity generation would significantly drive up energy costs. Third, the finding is specific to the Northeast region only.

But for the Northeast specifically, the ARS cites research indicating that by 2022 enough sustainably harvested biomass will be available to compensate for the entire regions demand for heating oil. That would save consumers something in the range of $2.3 to 3.9 billion in fuel costs per year, and cut the region’s carbon emissions by 5 percent. The finding also dovetails with President Obama’s “Better Buildings Initiative,” which aims, among other things, to take advantage of buildings and infrastructure with existing upgrade needs in order to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy bills. Finally, unlike other more widespread biofuels based on corn, for example, switchgrass has the economic and moral advantage of not doubling as a food source for humans.

So those caveats shouldn’t be interpreted to dismiss the importance of ARS’s analysis. The market is a huge and complex system, and how different people in different areas meet their energy needs are organic and myriad — how they move those needs from fossil fuels to renewable sources will be equally diverse. For the American Northeast, switchgrass for home heating looks like a compelling part of the mix. Every bite at the apple counts.

By Bill Becker, via Huffington Post

In its new assessment of America’s infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) found that much of it is aging and substandard. Among the systems needing repairs are dams, levees and storm water controls that are important to protecting the American people from the growing impacts of climate change.

At a time when government funding is strained, can nature offer some of the protection that engineered structures were built to provide? And can nature do it at lower cost? I asked three of the United States’ premier experts on ecosystem services: Keith Bowers, president of Biohabitats Inc. in Baltimore; Dr. Bob Costanza, the ecological economist who coauthored one of the world’s first assessments of the economic value of ecosystem service; and Prof. Ed Barbier, a prolific author on the topic and a professor of economics at the University of Wyoming.

In Part 1 of the interview, we discussed how ecosystem services should be defined and how we can better quantify their value.

Q: Are there examples where ecosystems actually reduce pressure on local government budgets – in other words, on taxpayers?

Bowers: Yes. The classic example is the water supply system for New York City. Instead of upgrading and building new water treatment facilities, the City decided to invest in protecting the source of the water in the Catskills. As a result they have saved billions of dollars while indirectly protecting a whole host of ecosystem functions and services that are enjoyed by the region at large.

There are other examples around the world including the protection and restoration of mangrove wetlands that protect against storm surges along coastal areas while also providing the nursery grounds for the shrimping and seafood industry. We are also recognizing that tree canopy in urban environments modifies the microclimate and absorbs storm water, greatly reducing energy demands and the need for extensive storm water collection and treatment systems.

Q: What cities are making the most effort these days to utilize ecosystems and their services? Who are the leaders?

Bowers: Federal clean water regulations are driving many cities to begin utilizing ecosystem services to assist them with meeting performance criteria. It’s great to see that many cities are beginning to embrace what we call green infrastructure — that is, using natural systems and their processes to replace gray infrastructure — the pipes, roads, walls, and concrete that we have been using for the past 100 years. Cities with aging infrastructure are beginning to turn to green infrastructure as a viable, and in most cases, a cost-competitive and more effective alternative to conventional gray infrastructure. This is especially true when you begin to calculate the natural capital, or the ecosystem services that green infrastructure provides on top of its primary use.

Q: With all their benefits, ecosystems need to be understood as assets in our states and communities. Has anyone done an inventory of ecosystem services?

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Twice a year, a group of experts release a ranked list of the world’s most powerful computers called TOP500. It is likely that the new list in June will have a new member of the Top 10 of the Top 500: a computer dubbed Pangea. Its output is is 2.3 petaflops. A petaflop is a quadrillion “floating-point operations per second.” Today’s desktop computers deal in gigaflops, or billions.

The system is the fastest commercially-owned computer in the world. The other faster computers on TOP500′s list are owned by governments or academic institutions and therefore used for research.

Pangea is owned by Total SA, the fifth-largest oil and gas company in the world. So the supercomputer will not be changing the future of health care IT like former Jeopardy champion Watson or revolutionizing climate projections and weather research like supercomputers at NCAR and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It will be searching for oil and gas, according to Reuters.

Pangea helped analyze seismic data from Total’s Kaombo project in Angola in just nine days, instead of the four and a half months it would have taken with its previous computer, Philippe Malzac, IT director at Total’s Exploration division, told Reuters:

Total trumps British rival BP with the 2.3-petaflop supercomputer. BP said last December it was building a 2 petaflop supercomputing facility in Houston, Texas.

“Our competitors are also working on these kind of algorithms, but we think this is giving us a head start,” Malzac said.

The price of the system is undisclosed, but it will cost nearly $20 million per year just to run Pangea. The technological achievement may be impressive, but the reality is that oil and gas reserves are finite and getting more expensive to extract, while renewable fuels like wind and solar are getting cheaper to utilize.

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a lead author on the third IPCC Assessment Report, explained last month in Slate that it is getting harder and more expensive to squeeze oil out of the ground.
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Here are five pieces of energy legislation that are likely to occupy Congress’ time before they directly address climate change. [National Journal]

• Energy Efficiency: The House has started a bipartisan caucus aimed at passing energy efficiency legislation—bills that would require buildings that provide the same amount of light and heat with less fuel, for example.
• Offshore Drilling: Murkowski, the panel’s ranking Republican, has introduced a bill with Democrat Mary Landrieu of Louisiana that would expand offshore drilling, give coastal states a taste of the profit, and require some of the money to go toward development of renewable energy.
• Nuclear Waste Storage: Proposals to build an interim “medium-term” nuclear-waste dump were also stalled until this year, as the most likely site for such a facility is New Mexico. But Bingaman, the New Mexican who chaired Senate Energy and Natural Resources, was not a fan. Now that he’s retired and been replaced by Wyden—whose state has a closed nuclear-power plant that still stores radioactive waste—plans for a “medium-term” nuclear-waste storage dump are suddenly on the move.
• Ethanol Reform: There’s growing opposition to the provisions of a 2005 law mandating that oil refiners blend an increasing share of plant-based ethanol into the nation’s gasoline mix…. Given those pressures, there’s a growing coalition of strange bedfellows—the oil industry, environmentalists, food manufacturers, and antipoverty groups—pushing for the law to be reformed. To that end, Upton and Waxman are working on a series of white papers aimed at opening up the issue for debate and, they hope, legislative action.
• Hydropower: In January, House Republicans brought to the floor a bill to speed construction of small hydropower plants in the Pacific Northwest…. Wyden has introduced a companion measure in the Senate. Members of both parties in both chambers are optimistic about its prospects.

Could the cooler spring have something to do with the dramatic Arctic sea ice loss seen this year? Scientists think so. [Guardian]

If you want to know what’s happening to clean energy, watch the Renewable Energy Standard fights in the states. [Washington Post]

Dave Roberts writes of the non-inevitability of fossil fuels, and how important it is to say this explicitly. [Grist]

More on Sen. Whitehouse’s “straw poll” of the U.S. Senate on the idea of pricing carbon. [LA Times]

A tax on carbon could bring the prices of goods into line with their true costs. [New York Times]

Australia merged its Climate Change Department with several other departments. [The Australian]

Global warming is leading to larger plants, more pollination, and increased allergies. [Fox 11 Reno]

The EPA has created the Hydraulic Fracturing Research Advisory Panel, which will peer-review the agency’s research on fracking. [The Hill]

U.S. shale gas will be exported and used to heat homes in Britain, according to a deal struck yesterday. [Guardian]