Lethal Heating: 05/24/16

24/05/2016

Climate Scientists Are Now Grading Climate Journalism

The Guardian - Daniel Nethery* | Emmanuel Vincent*

Climate Feedback provides a venue for climate scientists to evaluate the accuracy of climate news stories

F grade and a sad smilie, written in red letters in a spiral pad. Photograph: Alamy

The internet represents an extraordinary opportunity for democracy. Never before has it been possible for people from all over the world to access the latest information and collectively seek solutions to the challenges which face our planet, and not a moment too soon: the year 2015 was the hottest in human history, and the Great Barrier Reef is suffering the consequences of warming oceans right now.
Yet despite the scientific consensus that global warming is real and primarily due to human activity, studies show that only about half the population in some countries with among the highest CO₂ emissions per capita understand that human beings are the driving force of our changing climate. Even fewer people are aware of the scientific consensus on this question. We live in an information age, but the information isn't getting through. How can this be?
While the internet puts information at our fingertips, it has also allowed misinformation to sow doubt and confusion in the minds of many of those whose opinions and votes will determine the future of the planet. And up to now scientists have been on the back foot in countering the spread of this misinformation and pointing the public to trustworthy sources of information on climate change.
Climate Feedback intends to change that. It brings together a global network of scientists who use a new web-annotation platform to provide feedback on climate change reporting. Their comments, which bring context and insights from the latest research, and point out factual and logical errors where they exist, remain layered over the target article in the public domain. You can read them for yourself, right in your browser. The scientists also provide a score on a five-point scale to let you know whether the article is consistent with the science. For the first time, Climate Feedback allows you to check whether you can trust the latest breaking story on climate change.

An example of Climate Feedback in action. Scientists' comments and ratings appear as a layer over the article. Text annotated with Hypothesis is highlighted in yellow in the web browser and scientists' comments appear in a sidebar next to the article. Illustration: Climate Feedback

Last year the scientists looked at some influential content. Take the Pope's encyclical, for instance. The scientists gave those parts of the encyclical relating to climate science a stamp of approval. Other "feedbacks," as we call them, have made a lasting impact. When the scientists found that an article in The Telegraph misrepresented recent research by claiming that the world faced an impending ice age, the newspaper issued a public correction and substantially modified the online text.
But there's more work to be done. Toward the end of the year the scientists carried out a series of evaluations of some of Forbes magazine's reporting on climate change. The results give an idea of the scale of the problem we're tackling. Two of the magazine's most popular articles for 2015, one of which attracted almost one million hits, turned out to be profoundly inaccurate and misleading. Both articles, reviewed by nine and twelve scientists, unanimously received the lowest possible scientific credibility rating. This rarely occurs, and just in case you're wondering, yes, the scientists do score articles independently: ratings are only revealed once all scientists have completed their review.
We argue that scientists have a moral duty to speak up when they see misinformation masquerading as science. Up to now scientists have however had little choice but to engage in time-consuming op-ed exchanges, which result in one or two high-profile scientists arguing against the views of an individual who may have no commitment to scientific accuracy at all. Climate Feedback takes a different approach. Our collective reviews allow scientists from all over the world to provide feedback in a timely, effective manner. We then publish an accessible synthesis of their responses, and provide feedback to editors so that they can improve the accuracy of their reporting.
We've got proof of concept. Now we need to scale up, and for that we need the support of everyone who values accuracy in reporting on one of the most critical challenges facing our planet. Climate Feedback won't reach its full potential until we start measuring the credibility of news outlets in a systematic way. We want to be in a position to carry out an analysis of any influential internet article on climate change. We want to develop a 'Scientific Trust Tracker' – an index of how credible major news sources are when it comes to climate change.
We're all increasingly relying on the internet to get our news. But the internet has engendered a competitive media environment where in the race to attract the most hits, sensational headlines can trump sober facts. We're building into the system a new incentive for journalists with integrity to get ahead. Some journalists are already coming to us, asking our network of scientists to look at their work. We want readers to know which sources they can trust. We want editors to think twice before they publish ideological rather than evidence-based reporting on global warming.
On Friday 22 April 2016, more than 170 countries signed the Paris climate agreement. But this unprecedented international treaty will lead to real action only if the leaders of those countries can garner popular support for the measures needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The fate of the Paris deal lies largely in the hands of voters in democratic countries, and we cannot expect democracies to produce good policy responses to challenges of climate change if voters have a confused understanding of reality.
Scientists from all over the world are standing up for better informed democracies. You can help them make their voices heard. We invite you to stand with us for a better internet. We invite you to stand with science.

*Daniel Nethery is the associate editor and *Emmanuel Vincent is the founder of Climate Feedback. Climate Feedback is launching a crowdfunding campaign today. To support this initiative please visit the campaign page.

Links

What Will It Take For People To Care About Climate Change?

New Statesman - Laurie Penny

A record-breaking heat wave in Rajasthan reveals how badly we lack the necessary infrastructure to cope with the human suffering climate change is already causing.

The question of whether or not climate change is real is rapidly becoming less urgent than what can be done to alleviate the human suffering it is causing. In Rajasthan, north-west India this week, the mercury hit 51 degrees celsius (123°F). That's the hottest temperature on record in the country. Hospitals are swamped with patients suffering heatstroke and dehydration. The year's harvest is shrivelling in the ground. People are cooking to death on public transport. Yesterday, a camel left alone in the sun went mad and chewed its owner's head off. That's how hot it is in Rajasthan right now.
In rural areas, where there is no electricity, no fresh water, nothing to cool you but the breeze, citizens are demanding that the government take responsibility and offer relief, provide shelter, water and basic cooling facilities. That's the sort of heroism that should be unnecessary in the middle of a heatwave: it takes enough energy to lobby local bureaucracy at the best of times, let alone when it's hot enough that livestock have become homicidal.
I've been obsessed with this story for days, because it's my personal nightmare. I loathe the heat. The cold, at least, can usually be escaped; heat leaves me drained and frightened. I can't sleep under duvets. I become a limp dishrag in summer, and temperatures of over thirty degrees celsius regularly see me with my head in an open refrigerator, cursing my grandparents' decision to become citizens of a country that does not consider air conditioning a necessary artefact of civilisation. But air conditioning is also upsetting: when the merciful roar of the high-energy unit kicks in, you can practically hear the sizzling fossil fuels soothing you with the cool breeze of complicity. In the heat, all I can do is overthink. I would not cope in Rajasthan. I can barely cope with Brighton in July.
The British national sport of complaining about the weather is becoming increasingly insensitive. After three centuries of merrily conquering other nations and building bonfires out of their resources to light our way to a place of power in a burning world, we are still inhabiting one of the only landmasses where the weather isn't actively trying to kill us all the time. Pleasant as it is to carp and moan every time the temperature moves outside the ten-degree range I happen to find comfortable, the temperate, drizzle-through-the-sunshine British climate is pretty much as good as it gets, on a global scale. In fact, on that same global scale, Britain has some claim for having had the most benefit out of fossil fuels for the least climate cost. If we're not going to cough up reparations, the least we can do is stop whining.
I mention all this for two reasons. Firstly, because the manifestations and implications of climate change are frightening wherever you happen to live, and I find sprinkle of weak humour makes the whole thing bearable, makes me less likely to panic and tap out of the entire discussion as something that's not relevant to me right now because for the meantime, at least, I'm comfy indoors and it's raining outside.
Secondly, because when the lives and livelihoods of so many are at stake – when the topic for discussion is not tens or thousands but millions of people actually cooking in the unnatural heat – you run into a phenomenon that rationalists call "scope insensitivity". Let's say that my nightmare is overwhelming, inescapable heat. I can imagine, viscerally, physically, how it might feel to be trapped in a 51 degree outdoor oven. I can be scared and outraged that there are no emergency shelters being built, no cool water on offer, that so little is being done to alleviate that suffering, when I picture one, or two, or ten strangers sweltering through it.
But the knowledge that the population of Rajasthan is 73.5 million does not make me 73.5 million times as frightened outraged. My heart cannot hold that much heat-terror. That's not how the human heart is designed. And that's what scope insensitivity is: on a species level, it is psychologically extremely difficult to summon the appropriate level of empathy and translate that empathy into action.
That doesn't mean it's not useful – vital – to try. Our understanding of urgency has got to scale up. Any useful response to the growing climate crisis will require precisely the sort of collective action on a global, state and local level that neoliberal governments around the world have turned their faces from, either actively destroying the necessary infrastructure to cope with human suffering or refusing to build it in the first place. In a burning world, the time has surely come for lifesaving infrastructure in which everyone is invested.
As climate change becomes a reality for billions of people all over the world, what are the demands going to be? In Rajasthan, the immediate need is obvious: for tents, cold water, more reliable electricity, contingency plans to deal with coming food shortages, and better provision of amenities for rural communities. The longer-term need is much like everyone else's: for the governments of the world to earmark enough resources to tackle the human effects of the inhuman weather we're all going to be suffering through in the decades to come.
The question is no longer whether man-made climate change is actually a thing that's happening. That's not because the issue has been resolved in the minds of evangelical naysayers and their fuel tycoon besties. It's because if you're standing in front of a burning house, the issue of who lit the match can be tabled for the meantime, while we decide how to get the kids out.

Links

Why Has Climate Change Disappeared From The Australian Election Radar?

The Conversation - David Holmes

AAP/Lukas Coch

Two weeks into a protracted election campaign, it is looking ever-more likely that climate change is to be placed way down the order of business – at least for the major parties.
The contest over climate change that characterised the previous three elections seems to have disappeared off the political radar despite the issue being more urgent than ever. Since the Paris climate summit, global average temperatures continue to break month-on-month records.
Just a few weeks after the summit, the North Pole was briefly not even able to reach freezing point – in the middle of winter. And just this month, Cape Grim surpassed a 400 ppm baseline minimum.
Then there is the truly frightening climate spiral developed by Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading. It shows what an El Niño amplified global temperature has climbed to. The spiral assumes a tight-knit but ever-expanding ball until April 2015, when the spiral line starts to separate dramatically from the ball. This year it careers dangerously close to the 1.5℃ threshold.

Climate spiral. Ed Hawkins

The diminishing political and media spiral on climate
While global temperatures may be spiralling out of control, the opposite appears to be happening with the climate issue attention cycle in Australia.
Apparently, climate is less important than jobs and growth – or, in Labor's case, health and schools.
A big part of this change in political climates is undoubtedly the Paris summit itself. The political triumphalism of the summit belies the scientific pessimism of so many climate scientists and activists.
Kevin Anderson from Manchester University's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research even declared the summit to be "worse that Copenhagen", in that it is based on out-of-date science, does not include aviation and shipping, and includes negative emissions in its scenarios for achieving abatement.
On the other hand, after the collapse of talks at Copenhagen, some activists see no choice but to climb aboard with the Paris agreement, insofar as it at least signifies a mainstream seachange in action – even if the actual measures are inadequate. The INDCs that came out of the conference still put the world on a path to 3.5℃.
Yet so many politicians from around the globe have sought to convince their constituents that the climate problem is all but solved. The Coalition is banking on such a sell to the Australian electorate as it gambles with a climate attention minimisation strategy. Much of this sell has been left to the "best minister in the world" Greg Hunt, both before and after the Paris summit.
Hunt has already claimed success on meeting the 2020 target, and with strategies to meet the 2030 target.
Little of the Government's progress in meeting the 2020 target is due to reducing emissions. Rather it has been the reduction in land-clearing, consumer-driven domestic solar, and the decline in manufacturing that have been decisive in meeting the 2020 targets.
The Guardian's Lenore Taylor has pointed out that while the Coalition is bringing back the "carbon tax" scare campaign of 2013, its own scheme would have to draw on the "safeguard mechanism" component of Direct Action – which is itself a disguised ETS – to have any chance of meeting the targets.
Short of leaning on this mechanism, the only other option the Coalition has is to increase the taxpayer-funded emissions reduction fund to a level that would make a mockery of any claims to budget responsibility.
Add to this the fact that recent academic research on Direct Action has reaffirmed its status as a form of corporate welfare that is allocated to projects that would have happened anyway. And all this is in an Australia that has increased its already high emissions 3% since 2000.

Shifting voter attitudes on climate
But have Hunt's strategies worked on the Australian electorate? Not according to a recent ReachTEL poll of 2,400 respondents on May 9, which revealed that 56% believed the government needed to do more to tackle global warming.
64% said they would be more likely to vote for a party that has a plan to source 100% of Australia's electricity from renewable sources like wind, solar and hydro in the next 20 years.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull seems to have switched off his personal barometer on climate as an issue that is too politically fraught. In 2010, he said:

We know that the consequences of unchecked global warming would be catastrophic … We as a human species have a deep and abiding obligation to this planet and to the generations that will come after us.

But since then, Turnbull appears to have sacrificed his convictions to the climate-illiterate backbench of his party.
Labor has not done much better. While it has more ambitious 2030 abatement targets than the Coalition, it has been particularly silent in reminding voters of its climate policy alternative.

Labor and the Greens
Both major parties have opted to entrench their duopoly by not going after big targets on any of the issues that are usually recycled at election time.
Instead, much airtime has been spent in the opening weeks of the campaign attacking the Greens. Liberal ministers take every opportunity to pillory any alliance between the Greens and Labor. Last week, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann told Fairfax Media:

We see them very much on a unity ticket. In our judgement, Labor and the Greens are now on an anti-business, anti-jobs, and anti-growth unity ticket.

In the same week, Turnbull labelled Labor's proposal to double the intake of refugees as a "gesture to the Greens" on the back of Immigration Minister Peter Dutton's attack on the Greens' asylum-seeker policy.
But, curiously, Labor and the Greens are at war themselves, or at least they are desperately giving the appearance they are. According to Michael Cooney from the Labor thinktank the Chifley Research Centre and Ben Oquist from the Australia Institute, Labor and the Greens have attacked each other because nearly every inner-city seat the Greens have a chance of winning for the first time are Labor-held.
The Greens are also distancing themselves from Labor because they want to capture the anti-politics vote. This is best achieved by showing yourself to be radically different from the major parties.
Labor, on the other hand, is almost forced into attacking the Greens because of the long-run stigma that News Corp papers have attached to any such alliance. During the first days of the election campaign, the Daily Telegraph and The Australian were jumping in with stories that no major party would ever form government with the Greens.
In contrast to the 2013 election campaign, the Tele even had a pro-Labor story "Save Our Albo" over the Greens' challenge to Anthony Albanese's inner-city seat of Grayndler.
But nothing much has changed. Back in the 2010 federal election, the The Australian declared the pride with which it had smashed any alliance between the Greens and Labor, and that the Greens:

… should be destroyed at the ballot box.

In October the same year Rupert Murdoch referred to the "bloody Greens" as a party that would ruin Australia's economic prosperity.
What is clear to the Coalition, Murdoch, and big business in Australia is that Labor and the Greens must be permanently isolated from each other in a sustained ideological crusade. Failing to achieve this would spell nothing short of game over for the Coalition.
The entire crusade, which is based on castigating the Greens as a loony left party that would bring down the Labor Party, requires so much journalistic theatre, compared to what could more easily be done with the Liberal-National Party marriage of convenience. One is a party of agrarian socialists, and the other a party serving mining capital and finance capital. But News Corp has been particularly disciplined at ignoring any of the tensions that these parties have had over the years.
Were Labor to form an alliance with the Greens it could take great leadership on climate. But there are a great many forces arraigned against them achieving a left-progressive coalition.
Whether the Labor Party has the courage to come out and challenge the Coalition to a contest over climate remains to be seen.
The Greens, for their part, are making many more inroads into this election than the last. They certainly have the strongest climate policy, with a renewable energy target of 90% by 2030. The ReachTEL poll referred to earlier shows the Greens have four times the primary vote than the National Party.
The Greens know that for under 30 voters they are already matching the primary vote of the major parties, and that a core platform of strong action against global warming is a big part of this support. Whether the major parties can ignore this support that springs from climate will be one of the biggest gambles of this election.

Links