Andrew Zolli reports that on May 28th of next year The Day After Tomorrow, an environmental disaster movie featuring abrupt climate change, will be released by Fox to a blizzard of publicity and media events. It had to happen, it's a proven revenue generating formula as well as being politically, if not scientifically, sound.

Phillip Stott at EnviroSpin Watch recently linked this Caltech Michelin Lecture by Michael Crichton which traced a history of sloppy thinking and pseudo-science accompanied by massive media efforts and political opportunism. It's nothing new in history but seems to have become more media savvy though less intellectually or scientifically defensible in recent decades.

Crighton blames Frank Drake for fathering this recent line of opportunistic science poseurs because of his Ozma project and the false but exciting signal from space he detected and the subsequent organization of the SETI conference. His original sin was the Drake equation.

N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL

A nonsense equation since none of the terms of the equation could even in theory be determined. It was all subjective bias reminiscent of arcane Medieval religious debates of the ineffable. It wasn't important, didn't really offend real scientists, and though debunked by a few most didn't think it worth either the effort or the reputation as a mudge. But Crichton cites these events as the beginning of something ugly:

The fact that the Drake equation was not greeted with screams of outrage-similar to the screams of outrage that greet each Creationist new claim, for example-meant that now there was a crack in the door, a loosening of the definition of what constituted legitimate scientific procedure. And soon enough, pernicious garbage began to squeeze through the cracks.

The load of garbage to follow is perhaps best exemplified by the Nuclear Winter hoax perpetrated by Richard Turco, Carl Sagan and others. Though the National Academy of Sciences had stated that the dust effects of nuclear war would be minor and the Office of Technology Assessment reported that assessment was not possible the Swedish Academy of Sciences speculated that dust and smoke from fires would reduce sunlight for weeks or more. That was enough for Sagan and company to develop their own implicit Drake type equation:

Ds = Wn Ws Wh Tf Tb Pt Pr Pe ... etc

(The amount of tropospheric dust=# warheads x size warheads x warhead detonation height x flammability of targets x Target burn duration x Particles entering the Troposphere x Particle reflectivity x Particle endurance…and so on.)

Like the Drake equation the assertions of Sagan were based on a series of variables that could not be quantified, leaving only subjective bias to plug into the equation. With their fervid imaginations and fears (or entrepreneurial and political instincts) running wild they plugged with abandon and pronounced that a (relatively small) 5,000 megaton exchange of nuclear bombs would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, a value more than 3 times as large as that of ice ages.

That the scientific assertions were preposterous wasn't relevant because the claims were made in the popular media, in magazines and on late night talk shows, and was echoed by a troupe of like minded poseurs, such as Paul Ehrlich, who had their own exploitive hustles in progress. The damning phrase, the gaping wound widened from the crack Drake had opened in the doors of science, was voiced by Ehrlich: "What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists".

As Crichton says:

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

We probably don't need to review the history of consensus from flat earth theories to plate tectonics to bolster Crichton's observation. Neither wishing nor believing nor powerful political patrons can make the earth young or Lysenkoist biology true. Polls mean nothing in science in the short run but are negatively correlated with truth in the long run.

Polls are important in politics and we have steady stream of political opportunists in our history that has grown to a torrent in recent times. In addition to Sagan and Ehrlich, others such as Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, Donnella Meadows, Garret Hardin - all icons of the modern environmental "movement" - have chosen to use the media and politics to accomplish objectives not supported by their pseudo-science.

This article, A Whole Earth View of the Environmental Movement, written for GBN by Peter Warshall, encapsulates the key problem with environmentalism today. It is an accurate enough account of the political movement but that's the problem. It's a political movement. It has little to do with environmentalism, it's about politics and power. It is the displacement of useful environmental thinking and policies by politicized efforts based in paleo-ideology using the environment as a wedge issue to advance an otherwise disconnected and sometimes antithetical agenda. They don't gather empirical evidence of system functioning and propose interventions that ease malfunctions, they gather evidence of system malfunctions and use them to justify seizing political control. Their objective is to thwart their political opponents rather than manage the system well. It's about wining power.

The luminary of this expansive thinking was Rachel Carson and her 1962 book, Silent Spring. She encapsulated many of attributes of environmentalism. She was a woman; a scientist; wrote with scholarship, heart, and a populist pen; a government employee who challenged government authority; a teacher of how the invisible world (DDT metabolism) interconnected us with non-human creatures (birds) on global-local scales; a prophet warning of the long-term impacts of human ingenuity; and a passionate activist to reduce harms.

Carson is a deity for the environmental political movement but not an effective environmentalist. Her work was sloppy, jumped to incorrect conclusions, terrified millions and served us poorly. Few of her claims have ever been substantiated and most have been disproven repeatedly. But the worst part is her historical revisionism for political advantage.

DDT isn't a horror foisted onto humanity by unthinking scientists. It was one step in a progression of increasingly benign methods of pest control for a world that suffered far, far more disease, privation and death from those pests than the pesticides. The pesticides used prior to DDT were based on far more dangerous chemicals including arsenic and lead which are harmful or fatal in fairly small doses and persist in the environment. To this day DDT is still the least harmful way to control deadly pests such as malaria causing mosquitoes in tropical countries.

The progression to safer pesticides continues. The useful story a responsible educator concerned with the environment could have taught was that progression rather than the horror stories Carson told, but that wouldn't have advanced the agenda of grasping political power. We need to mature a bit, to develop our sales resistance skills and learn to debunk and ridicule demagogues such as Carson and her followers. Their deceits and exaggerations lead to bad environmental policy and divert us from more useful activities. We lose twice; we get bad policies on some things and do nothing on others.

Without pesticides we wouldn't have our comfy civilization. The chemicals of the industrial revolution helped us to manage our age old enemies that killed our children and seniors, brought famine and plague, repeatedly smashed civilizations all over the world. Antibiotics, medicines and pesticides are related technologies that together have been great good things that enabled modern society. They are all pharmaceuticals in a sense. When used appropriately they yield great benefits though misuse can be damaging.

None of this is a secret. Every informed thinker knows these things and increasingly the general public is becoming aware of them too. Everyone at least senses the basic falseness of the positions of the environmental political movement and distrusts them to varying degrees. As with any politicized issue it becomes a pick-your-poison decision between competing political groups which transparently deceive the public to gain power, wealth and beautiful lovers. It's business as usual. Caring for the environment is an age old, deeply held value of the vast majority of humans but support for the environmental movement falls far, far short of this majority. By politicizing these issues the environmental movement has soured the public and harmed the environment. They have become our greatest environmental problem, the largest impediment to developing effective environmental policy.

But, this is politics and show business.

In the tradition of Sagan and Ehrlich - with a nod to the Swedish Academy
In the footsteps of Mead, Carson and Meadows - with a nod to the Club of Rome
Coming soon to a theater near you, opening nationwide in late May, 2004
Global Warming: The Movie - with a nod to IPCC.

Though they seem silly and venal, motivated by lust for money and power, enviro-hustlers may in part be victims of their own deformed mental processes, helplessly emotional and unreasonable, blinded by a wiring flaw in their brains that reverses appearances. A passage in Neal Stephenson's recent Quicksilver, set (partly) in preindustrial Britain, mused about the conservatism and pessimism of the age as demonstrated by mediocre academics. It was as if they were peering into the wrong end of a sort of telescope and instead of seeing far away things with increased size and clarity, they saw near things alarmingly reduced. The effect was an inversion of order, the conviction that the history of life was a regression from a golden age to barbarity and impending catastrophe, when any honest accounting would have to conclude that life had gotten ever better since we scurried naked and vulnerable from the garden. The wrong-way peering of doom mongers, predicting the end with tedious regularity, especially in years that end in 666 or 000, continues unabated. It's not about science, it's religion, a social methodology to comfort the mis-wired souls unable to gaze on reality and smile. We can feel compassion for them but we really do need to keep their sweating palms off the levers of power. They shouldn't operate dangerous machinery in their impaired conditions.

UPDATE: 12/15/2003

Ophelia Benson posts on the use of hot media to advance scientifically dubious claims at Notes and Comment. Here's a taste:

You don't decide facts by debating them, you decide by considering the evidence. Sometimes that also involves debate, when the evidence is not clear-cut, but does it involve debate with the general public, or with people who know something of the subject? Should we open everything up to debate as long as someone somewhere has made a scary claim about it? What if someone who's forgotten to take her Lithium for awhile decides that toothbrushes cause high blood pressure - should we debate whether or not to stop brushing our teeth? If someone decides seatbelts make men impotent and women deaf, should we debate whether or not to stop using seatbelts? Why should we take the MMR scare seriously when there is no evidence for it?

This is a different side of the issues discussed earlier in that scientists aren't using the media to advance this shaky theory. In this case the media is doing a solo act. It's as if their role in advancing the shaky theories of some scientists has elevated them to being peers of scientists and they are now advancing theories of their own.

UPDATE: 12/16/2003

Brad DeLong is using the Drake Equation to teach his children that math can be fun. The crack widens.

» Political Science from Crumb Trail
There's been a fluury of commentary about The Day After Tomorrow. See this old post from last December when it was announced. Everyone at least senses the basic falseness of the positions of the environmental political movement and distrusts them to v......[read more]
Tracked: May 1, 2004 06:55 PM