Touching a raw nerve with the anti-science tribe: Lawrence Torcello on climate misinformation

Lawrence Torcello must have touched a raw nerve with the anti-science tribe, at least judging from the abuse he is receiving for this article, (just google "Torcello" and "climate" and you'll see what I mean). In his article, Torcello starts from the 2009 earthquake that struck the city of L'Aquila, in Italy, causing hundreds of casualties. There followed a trial in which a number of Italian scientists were accused of criminal negligence and found guilty. In some cases, the judges were accused of "medievalism", but I noted in a comment to Michael Tobis blog that scientists, here, had been carried away by their fear of being labeled as "catastrophists" and ended up telling citizens that there was no reason to be worried because of a possible earthquake. The connection with the present debate on climate is evident and, here, Torcello examines it in depth.

13 March 2014, 6.17am GMT

Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent? 

Lawrence Torcello 

 

 

The importance of clearly communicating science to the public should not be underestimated. Accurately understanding our natural environment and sharing that information can be a matter of life or death. When it comes to global warming, much of the public remains in denial about a set of facts that the majority of scientists clearly agree on. With such high stakes, an organised campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent.
The earthquake that rocked L'Aquila Italy in 2009 provides an interesting case study of botched communication. This natural disaster left more than 300 people dead and nearly 66,000 people homeless. In a strange turn of events six Italian scientists and a local defence minister were subsequently sentenced to six years in prison.

The ruling is popularly thought to have convicted scientists for failing to predict an earthquake. On the contrary, as risk assessment expert David Ropeik pointed out, the trial was actually about the failure of scientists to clearly communicate risks to the public. The convicted parties were accused of providing “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information”. As one citizen stated:

We all know that the earthquake could not be predicted, and that evacuation was not an option. All we wanted was clearer information on risks in order to make our choices.

Crucially, the scientists, when consulted about ongoing tremors in the region, did not conclude that a devastating earthquake was impossible in L’Aquila. But, when the Defence Minister held a press conference saying there was no danger, they made no attempt to correct him. I don’t believe poor scientific communication should be criminalised because doing so will likely discourage scientists from engaging with the public at all.

But the tragedy in L’Aquila reminds us how important clear scientific communication is and how much is at stake regarding the public’s understanding of science. I have argued elsewhere that scientists have an ethical obligation to communicate their findings as clearly as possible to the public when such findings are relevant to public policy. Likewise, I believe that scientists have the corollary obligation to correct public misinformation as visibly and unequivocally as possible.

Many scientists recognize these civic and moral obligations. Climatologist Michael Mann is a good example; Mann has recently made the case for public engagement in a powerful New York Times opinion piece: If You See Something Say Something.

Misinformation and criminal negligence

Still, critics of the case in L’Aquila are mistaken if they conclude that criminal negligence should never be linked to science misinformation. Consider cases in which science communication is intentionally undermined for political and financial gain. Imagine if in L’Aquila, scientists themselves had made every effort to communicate the risks of living in an earthquake zone. Imagine that they even advocated for a scientifically informed but costly earthquake readiness plan.
If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism.

More deaths can already be attributed to climate change than the L’Aquila earthquake and we can be certain that deaths from climate change will continue to rise with global warming. Nonetheless, climate denial remains a serious deterrent against meaningful political action in the very countries most responsible for the crisis.

Climate denial funding

We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.

Criminal negligence is normally understood to result from failures to avoid reasonably foreseeable harms, or the threat of harms to public safety, consequent of certain activities. Those funding climate denial campaigns can reasonably predict the public’s diminished ability to respond to climate change as a result of their behaviour. Indeed, public uncertainty regarding climate science, and the resulting failure to respond to climate change, is the intentional aim of politically and financially motivated denialists.

My argument probably raises an understandable, if misguided, concern regarding free speech. We must make the critical distinction between the protected voicing of one’s unpopular beliefs, and the funding of a strategically organised campaign to undermine the public’s ability to develop and voice informed opinions. Protecting the latter as a form of free speech stretches the definition of free speech to a degree that undermines the very concept.

What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.

Robots pass the Turing test: they'll debate climate change for us

Given the level of the debate on climate change in the comments of blogs and on twitter, I am not surprised that robots can easily pass the Turing test in there. A 2010 report, reproduced below, tells of a pro-science chatbot, but I am sure that there are anti-science chatbots as well. Isn't it nice? So much hassle avoided! In the end, I hope they'll come back telling us who won. Wouldn't it be a good idea also to have drones fight wars among themselves for us?

Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense

By C. Mims - from the MIT technology review

When he tired of arguing with climate change skeptics, one programmer wrote a chatbot to do it for him.

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.

The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.
It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question – tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.

The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn’t at liberty to divulge.

Like other chatbots, lots of people on the receiving end of its tweets have no idea they’re not conversing with a real human being. Some of them have arguments with the chatbot spanning dozens of tweets and many days, says Leck. That’s in part because AI_AGW is smart enough to run through a list of different canned responses when an interlocutor continues to throw the same arguments at it. Leck has even programmed it to debate such esoteric topics as religion - which is where the debates humans have with the bot often wind up.

“If [the chatbot] actually argues them into a corner, it tends to be two crowds out there,” says Leck. “There’s the guns and God crowd, and their parting shot will be ‘God created it that way’ or something like that. I don’t know how you answer that.”

The second crowd, Leck says, are skeptics so unyielding they won’t be swayed by any amount of argumentation.

Occasionally, the chatbot turns up a false positive - for example, it has a complete inability to detect sarcasm. This proved to be a problem when a record heat wave hit L.A. last summer, causing innumerable tweets of the form “It’s 113 degrees outside - good thing global warming’s a myth!”
Leck always apologizes when AI_AGW answers someone who isn’t actually arguing about the science of climate change and then subsequently whitelists his or her account. The bot also has a kind of learning algorithm in it in that can be trained not to respond to phrases that cause false positives.
In the future, Leck would like to expand AI_AGW by giving it the ability to learn new arguments from the twitter feeds of others who debate climate skeptics - allowing it to argue into the ground an ever expanding array of anti-science tweeters who are unwilling or unable to look up the proper scientific literature themselves.

In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren’t even aware of their own ignorance.

Update: some guy on Hacker News sums it up better than I ever could.

Climate: another harassed scientist fights back

This 2011 Nissan commercial shows how important the polar bear has become as a symbol of the ongoing climate disaster

The polar bear has become a powerful symbol of the critical climate situation in which we are. No wonder that the powers that be have been attacking on that front. First of all, they have been denying that the polar bears are in trouble. More than that, they have been using one of the classic weapons in the anti-science war manual: personal attacks against single scientists.

Just as Michael Mann has been under fire for his "hockey stick" paleoclimate reconstruction, Charles Monnet, of the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has been threatened and legally harassed for his studies on polar bears. It is a sad story to read: the investigation on Monnett reminds Orwell's thought police or the polical commissioners of the Soviet Union who watched the work of scientists to ensure that it was consistent with the party line.

Just as Michael Mann did, Monnett fought back and the battle is now over with a settlement in which BOEM has agreed to pay Monnett a compensation and to to remove the letter of reprimand he had received from them.

It is a victory for science, although not a complete one. But if Monnett and Mann have fought back with some success, how many harassed young scientists have given up their studies on climate? Monnett himself comments the events with a certain sadness:

“Well, I’m sad, I guess. It’s been disappointing,” says Monnett. “As a young person, fresh out of graduate school, I was idealistic, and I thought that it would all be about the truth.”

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http://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-polar-bear-researcher-gets-100000-in-settlement-with-feds/

Ken Cuccinelli defeated in Virginia. A victory for science

Ken Cuccinelli, conceded defeat today in Virginia governor's race. One of the reasons for Cuccinelli's failure is certainly his denialist stance on climate. Among other things, as Virgina's attorney general, he had engaged in an illegal witch hunt that singled out University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann as target. But Mann refused to be intimidated and fought back and he recounts his experience as target of a political smear campaign in the book titled "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars." In a sense, Cuccinelli's defeat is Mann's victory.

A detailed analysis of the reasons for Cuccinelli's defeat can be found on "thinkprogress." It is clear, in any case, that extreme positions on climate and other issues can backfire and become a liability - as they did for Cuccinelli. So, the results in Virginia can be seen as an indication that something is changing in the political climate in the United States. Climate denialism is still strong in many sectors, but it may be in gradual decline.