One of my disappointments with the net is the proliferation of politicized pseudo-science sites. They have the same relationship to science that economic think-tanks have to economic policy. In each case they are advocacy organizations that use the concepts and language of a discipline to promote a purely political agenda. They are rife with sins of commission and omission, especially the tried and true techniques of selective use of data, selective citation and quotation, and biased exaggeration.

One of the sites I've criticized for this before is SciDevNet and the editor David Dickson. The site claims:

The overall aim of the Science and Development Network (SciDev.Net) is to enhance the provision of reliable and authoritative information on science- and technology-related issues that impact on the economic and social development of developing countries.

But it never delivers as promised. Instead it provides unreliable information selected to advance a political agenda. A previous post, Hedonic Materiality, criticized Dickson for this intellectual crime.

The Kyoto protocol won't prevent climate change. The models on which the protocol is based show negligible effects from the proposed limits. It isn't just that [UK science advisor David] King made a foolish analogy between climate change and terrorism, it is also that his science advice is laughably false. The Kyoto protocol isn't science based, it is purely political.

David Dickson, while seemingly developing a reasonable thesis that science advice should be distinguished from political views, uses the editorial to advance political views, dismissing the positions of the Bush administration as nothing but political ideology.

In A wake-up call for Washington Dickson persists, making the same foolish and biased claims, cherry picking comments from similarly biased "authorities" to make it seem as if SciDevNet was providing "reliable and authoritative information on science".

. . . there is strong evidence to suggest that, following several years that have been relatively quiet on the hurricane front, an increase in storms was to be expected as little more than the result of a natural 30-year cycle in hurricane intensity.

But that misses the point. Whatever the sceptics may argue, the case linking climate change — and its potentially destructive effects, particularly in the developing world — both to violent storms and to human activity is now accepted by most of the experts in the field.

To ignore this conclusion is now a political, rather than a scientific, act. Just as the Bush administration's decisions have been to ignore warnings of the potential perils facing New Orleans and the surrounding regions. . .

It is already clear that the Bush administration has inflicted significant political damage on itself by refusing to take either warnings of the storm threat to New Orleans — or calls for adequate preventive action — sufficiently seriously. . .

If the broader lessons of the tsunami are now, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, at least being absorbed in Washington, it will have been a small silver lining to the catastrophe that hit New Orleans last week.

Every part of this is misleading, false or worse. The variation in storms due to normal cycles is of a much greater magnitude than that anticipated by some climate models. It is unpredictable if, when or where storms will come ashore and actually cause damage. But most of all, the consequences of development in risky locations that have always been subject to storm damage are a far, far greater concern.

No one is ignoring the narrow minded climate hysterics, but all responsible governments and sensible thinkers are considering the whole issue rather than obsessing on just a portion of the problem. In America this was as true of previous administrations as it is of the Bush administration. They vary in style and tone but have very similar policies. Bush didn't create the problems of New Orleans and the region, and it is just plain stupid to assert that he did or that other administrations were somehow better. The only valid ding would be that Bush did not correct a long standing error, that he carried on as others had mistakenly done. This, obviously, is one of many things Bush, like his predecessors, did not correct.

But it isn't just that it is a complex issue with many more considerations than predictions of future climate change, it is also an issue of governance style. The US is less authoritarian than most other nations, less centralized and has a division of powers and responsibilities. This isn't an accident, it is by design to avoid the types of problems other nations have had with national collapse after misadventures by "leaders". The local and state governments have heavy responsibilities and the people of the region have the ultimate responsibility. They have boots on the ground and eyes on the prize. It isn't someone else's job to take care of them, to do their thinking and observing for them. Which is a good thing or else you end up with basket cases such as we now see in France. (see Paris Is Burning).

David Dickson is merely another predator, a ghoul who tries to capitalize on every natural disaster to advance a political agenda. SciDevNet has nothing at all to do with ensuring that "individuals and organizations in the developing world are better placed to make informed decisions", it is just another group of opportunists with an agenda that is at best disconnected from good information but more often in the business of peddling misinformation to support an inimical political agenda.

It would be great if some site existed that actually did what SciDev.Net claims to do. This is especially true for highly politicized issues like climate change. Instead we have a spinning industry, whole segments of national and international institutions solely devoted to misinforming the world in service of failed policies such as the Kyoto protocol.

""National efforts to implement the Climate Change Convention and to prepare for the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol have already resulted in emission reductions," [acting head of the secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Richard Kinley] said of the pact that requires 35 industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent by the year 2012. Compared to 1990 levels, their GHG emissions were down 5.9 per cent in 2003."

Let's take a look at the data in the report. Russia's decrease in emissions alone accounts for more that the alleged decrease of all 35 countries taken as a group. In other words, if we look at 34 countries rather than 35 (i.e., the 35 minus Russia) there is in fact a net increase in emissions. Perhaps the press release should have said, "Russia Reduces GHG Emissions, Other 34 Taken as a Group See Increases." It gets worse if you include states formerly part of the Soviet Union. If we also remove Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine then the remaining 29 states see an increase in greenhouse gas emissions of 4.7%.

If Bush and his predecessors declined to participate in such an insane system that would not have had a useful effect on climate change even if the participants had done as they agreed to do, then good on them. It seems to me that they are in fact taking the issue much more seriously than wankers such as Dickson. They have done better analysis and adopted better policies. To deal with the climate change predicted by our best models requires much more than political wheezes like Kyoto that accomplish nothing yet cost a fortune. Kyoto is not about climate change. It is merely a power grab by bureaucrats that uses climate change as an excuse to seize control of things they could not convince anyone to allow otherwise.

We need science sites that make sense. These folks wouldn't know the truth if it bit them on the butt, and wouldn't tell the truth if you shoved splinters under their fingernails. What both the developed and the developing world needs is sites that honestly try to provide good information. All main stream media organizations are laughably biased, dedicated to misinformation in service of their political agendas. Even those we might hope would be less tainted due to diminished commercial pressures - such as PBS/NPR and BBC - are so heavily skewed that it is simply impossible to glean any useful information from their offerings. You need to already know the subject and have the secret decoder ring to even figure out what they are trying to say, and so know what they are concealing or distorting. As bad as these are the commercial media such as the NYT and the Groan are worse. Even science journals have degenerated to the point that they are often merely advocacy organizations. We end up with circular authority where one biased site cites another which in turn does the same, creating an impression of increased authority when it is actually just a mob in an echo chamber, devoid of critical thinking or useful analysis.

Has it always been this way? I suppose so, though it's difficult to know. The past is so often concealed by histories, just so narratives that are only incidentally related to the past they purport to describe.

Update:

John Atkinson has an energetic post at chiasm that provides a counterpoint to the pathetic efforts at SciDevNet. The post discusses the Methane To Markets policy initiative - good policy supported by good science that has the potential to have a significant effect on GHG forcings while helping developing countries to develop.

In between various technical meetings, the partnership announced that its membership has expanded to include 17 countries (from 14 a year ago) that together account for 60 percent of the world's methane emissions (greater than the proportion of CO2 emissions covered by Kyoto Protocol targets!). As a highly promising international treaty to reduce emissions of a critical greenhouse gas, AND as a rare treaty that demonstrates that environmental improvement and economic growth in developing countries can go hand in hand, coverage of Methane to Markets from environmentalists as well as mainstream news sources has been overwhelming -

OH wait, there's been like ZERO coverage of this! Maaaybe because it's not as ambitious/well-publicized as Kyoto (and these green journos don't have time to do much research), but I think also maaaaybe because it doesn't fit with their lazy narrative about how Bush/America is Destroying the Environment while the more enlightened EU is Saving the Environment. This kind of obvious political bias is a double loser - it reveals the partisan agenda of the source, thus reducing its credibility among the independent-minded, and it reduces the incentive for the Bush administration to make the effort to undertake useful environmental initiatives in the future. Why, politically speaking, bother doing good work if it's just going to be ignored anyway? . . .

OK, so 1) focus on critical, yet feasible methane reductions in the short term and 2) make sure we stay on track to develop technologies that can make a big dent in CO2 emissions in a couple of decades (which is OK, b/c CO2 stays in the atmosphere for 100 years, compared to a 10-year lifespan for methane - thus, reductions today have a relatively small effect on the total atmospheric concentration). Sounds like a pretty workable, realistic long term plan, given what we know about climate (which may be substantially revised between now and then, natch), especially when we compare it to Kyoto, which is neither effective nor feasible. Green journos and other public/bloggic commentators concerned about climate change should not only criticize the Bush administration when they think it deserves criticism; they should praise it when it deserves praise. Methane to Markets deserves praise.

It's a longish post with good supportive commentary and links to more that does a good job of highlighting the scientific issues that make the M2M initiative praiseworthy.