The White House Blocked My Report on Climate Change and National Security/Defending Science...

Politics intruded on science and intelligence. That’s why I quit my job as an analyst for the State Department.

By Rod Schoonover
Dr. Schoonover was a senior analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department.
July 30, 2019

Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council. My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities. It was important work. Two words that national security professionals abhor are uncertainty and surprise, and there’s no question that the changing climate promises ample amounts of both.

I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations. And although I was uncomfortable with some policies of the Drumpf administration, no one had ever tried to influence my work or conclusions.

That changed last month, when the White House blocked the submission of my bureau’s written testimony on the national security implications of climate change to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The stated reason was that the scientific foundation of the analysis did not comport with the administration’s position on climate change.

After an extended exchange between officials at the White House and State Department, at the eleventh hour I was permitted to appear at the hearing and give a five-minute verbal summary of the 11-page testimony. However, Congress was deprived of the full analysis, including the scientific baseline from which it was drawn. Perhaps most important, this written testimony on a critical topic was never entered into the official record... (continues)==

SCIENCE SALON # 77

Dr. Lee McIntyre — The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience

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In this engaging conversation on the nature of science, Dr. McIntyre and Dr. Shermer get deep into the weeds of where to draw the line between science and pseudoscience. It may seem obvious when you see it (like Justice Potter’s definition of pornography — “I know it when I see it”), from a philosophical perspective it isn’t at all easy to articulate a formula for science that perfectly weeds out all incorrect or fraudulent scientific claims while still retaining true scientific claims. It really comes down to what Dr. McIntyre describes as a “scientific attitude” in an emphasis on evidence and scientists’ willingness to change theories on the basis of new evidence. For example, claims that climate change isn’t settled science, that evolution is “only a theory,” and that scientists are conspiring to keep the truth about vaccines from the public are staples of some politicians’ rhetorical repertoire. In this podcast, and in more detail in his book, McIntyre provides listeners and readers with answers to these challenges to science, and in the process shows how science really works.

McIntyre and Shermer also discuss:

• the strengths and weaknesses of Karl Popper’s “falsification” criteria for the line of demarcation
• how conspiracy theorists draw their own line of demarcation between their version of the conspiracy vs. that of others within their own community
• the problem of anomalies that are not explained by the mainstream theory and what to do with them
• McIntyre’s adventure at the Flat Earth conference
• Graham Hancock and alternative archaeology
• Creationists and why they are wrong (and how evolution could be falsified)
• similarities between Evolution deniers and Holocaust deniers
• anti-vaxxers and their motives
• climate deniers and why they’re inappropriately skeptical of climate science, and
• how to talk to a science denier of any stripe.

Listen to Science Salon via iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and Soundcloud.

Green burial

Rest Me in a Pine Box and Let the Fiddle Play

After helping her father have the homegrown funeral he planned, an environmentalist is designing her own.
By Mallory McDuff

“I hope to be around for a long time,” my father said, “but I’ve written my funeral plan so we’re all prepared.”

That morning, he’d cycled to the farm in Fairhope, Ala., where he volunteered in exchange for organic vegetables. My dad was 62 but could pedal faster than his four middle-aged kids. He had gathered us at our childhood home to share his goal of having a burial that relied on family and friends, not a funeral home.

After almost four decades of marriage, he was learning to live alone. Dad had lost his cycling partner when my mom was hit and killed by a teenage driver while biking to the same farm the month before. My father, a retired IBM salesman, wanted to make sure he — and we — were prepared for his death when the time came.

“First I’d like my body to rest in the bed under Mom’s quilt for four hours,” he said. “Then you can wrap me in linen tablecloths as a shroud and place me inside the casket. I’ve talked to my friend Jeff who’ll build my pine casket if I can’t do it myself.”

(continues)

The Trees Might Save Us Yet

A new study suggests that restoring forests could help reverse global warming.
By Margaret Renkl

...A new study recently sought to quantity the benefits that could be derived from planting trees in the coming cataclysm. A Times summary of the new report noted that “the planet could support nearly 2.5 billion additional acres of forest without shrinking our cities and farms, and that those additional trees, when they mature, could store a whole lot of the extra carbon — 200 gigatons of carbon, to be precise — generated by industrial activity over the last 150 years.” Planting trees, in other words, could go a long way toward saving us from ourselves. Although ecosystem changes may complicate the planting in this new climate, we have to try.

In Richard Powers’s magnificent novel “The Overstory,” which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, one character repeats a Chinese saying: “When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.”

Then she continues: “When is the next best time? Now.”

nyt

Why Donald Drumpf Suddenly Decided to Talk About the Environment

“Brazen” might as well be the official motto of the Trump Administration. Even so, it’s hard to top the most ecologically unsound President in modern American history giving a speech on Monday touting his environmental record while standing in the East Room of the White House beside David Bernhardt, the former oil lobbyist who is the Interior Secretary, and Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who is the administrator of the E.P.A.—both of whom have been trying to gut America’s environmental laws. Oh, and on the day when a rainfall described by local authorities as “historic” managed to flood the White House basement.

By now, we are used to Trump’s big-lie technique. Even by that standard, however, the claim that “we are working harder than many previous Administrations, maybe almost all of them,” on environmental protection will be believed by exactly no one for whom words have not yet lost their common-sense meaning. Trying to parse the nonsense of Trump’s speech sentence by sentence is silly, so concentrate instead on its underlying meaning: the oil companies clearly won a crucial battle with Trump’s election, postponing their moment of reckoning. (Less so the coal barons, whose decline was already too far advanced). But they clearly sense that they are losing the war, and more decisively than before. Trump’s big-man folly—withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, for instance, when it would have been easy enough to sabotage progress more quietly—has decisively discomforted the suburban voters that he must retain for reëlection.

By all accounts, it was the President’s pollsters who insisted on this strange talk, because they are desperately afraid that they are losing those independents (particularly women) who have come to fear the physical future that climate change is imposing. What does it mean, after all, to boast that we have the “cleanest air” ever, when wildfire smoke now obscures swaths of sky for large portions of the year? What does it mean to say the water is cleaner than it was in 1970, when water now drops from the sky in such volumes that insurance companies have begun to declare cellars “uninsurable?”

The absurdity of the whole enterprise is clear when you remember that Trump doesn’t even believe that global warming is real—he has stated this repeatedly. In that case, only fear of the polls could possibly drive him to stress that America’s carbon emissions are down (except for, um, last year, when they went, um, up). Why else would he care? So that’s craven as well as brazen. But cravenness is probably a good sign—it means that the school strikers and the divestment campaignersand the pipeline protesters and the marching scientists have carried the debate. The tiny minority of climate deniers currently wield federal political power, but it’s finally beginning to sink in with the broader public that climate change is the threat of our time. Among Democrats, that process is well advanced—by some measures, climate change is the No. 1 voting issue in the primary, and, indeed, they are announcing serious cash-on-the-barrelhead plans to do something about it. But Trump’s performance on Monday must indicate that it’s also increasingly the case among independents, the group that holds the key to his electoral future.

This is good not because it means that Trump will act—he won’t. It’s good because it means that if we move past Trumpism there’s at least a somewhat greater chance that the larger political system will move, too. But, at this point, it’s also hard to believe that political action will be swift enough or comprehensive enough to make a decisive difference. After all, the Obama Administration, which sincerely believed that climate change was real, succeeded only in replacing some coal-fired power generation with natural gas, which in turn succeeded only in replacing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions with heat-trapping methane emissions. (It’s not clear that total greenhouse-gas emissions budged at all during the Obama years.) If the G.O.P. maintains any political traction at all in the next dispensation, it will be hard to pass legislation like the Green New Deal, which represents precisely the scale of commitment needed to catch up with the out-of-control physics of global warming. If the Trump follies have lowered the bar to the point where a return to Obama-era politics is all that’s politically possible, then significantly slowing the rise of the planet’s temperature by federal action will remain difficult.

So it’s profoundly important that activists keep the pressure on other power centers, too: on state and local governments, and on the financial institutions that keep the fossil-fuel industry afloat. To use an unfortunately apropos metaphor, all that pressure will eventually force a hole in the dam. The political flop sweat that Trump was trying to mop up on Monday is a sure small sign of the coming deluge.

By Bill McKibben
July 8, 2019

Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker staff writer, is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College. His latest book is “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?”Read more »

NYer

Climate Change, as Explained by a Sex-Ed Teacher

Photograph from Everett

You have probably noticed some differences in our planet lately, and I want you to know that they are completely normal. Just like the changes that your body is going through, they’re part of a natural cycle. With all that’s happening, it’s important you stay calm, and know that any uncomfortable or strange sensations that may arise are part of a sometimes awkward, but absolutely predictable, process. Like your body, on some days, the entire outside world might appear alien to you. Is this really my planet? It looks and feels so different! I assure you, it most certainly is.

Some of you may notice body hair growing in funny places, or plants growing in seasons they never grew in before. Don’t let this alarm you. Simply buy yourself a razor and enjoy the fact that we still have flowers—they won’t be here forever! And, remember, if you cut yourself the first time you try to shave, don’t panic. Instead, take a tip from our international climate agreements and just put a Band-Aid on it.

At times, the weather might seem as unpredictable as your moods. You may not understand why you’re suddenly angry, or why it’s sunny and hot outside one minute and thirty degrees and snowing the next. Sometimes, it will feel like you’re your own worst enemy, and like the weather is literally trying to make packing for a weekend trip to the Catskills impossible. Take a deep breath, and calmly whisper to yourself, “This is all part of the change.”

You may be experiencing urges to do things you never did before, like kissing someone you find attractive. You might even fantasize about things you are ashamed of. Don’t worry—you are not alone! The earth also has new wants and desires. It craves sustainable energy and, for some reason, Priuses make it super horny. If you get overwhelmed, just remember: you don’t have to act on every impulse you have—like how we clearly don’t have to act on any of the carbon goals that we’ve set.

A lot of you are getting hotter than you used to be and are starting to perspire under your arms. At the same time, you might notice the outside temperature hitting record highs and miles of ice collapsing into the oceans. This is nothing to be embarrassed about! Can you imagine what would happen if the earth cried every time an ice cap melted? Our entire continent would be underwater by now. So, please, dry your eyes—we can’t afford the sea-level rise.

You are becoming a new person, and the earth is becoming a new planet. Be patient. Take baths. Journal. In just a few short years, you will be a woman, and Earth will be Mars. 

New Yorker

• Elizabeth Zephyrine McDonough is a writer, actress, and filmmaker living in Brooklyn.
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