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The Only Way To Understand Climate Change In A Post-Truth World

The Only Way To Understand Climate Change In A Post-Truth World

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Seeing terms like “post-truth” and “alternative facts” gain traction in the news convinces me that politicians, media workers, and readers could benefit from a refresher course in how science helps us understand the world. Reporting on science is difficult at the best of times. Trying to communicate complex ideas and distill entire studies into eye-catching headlines and brief stories can open the door to misinformation and limited understanding.

Recent headlines about a climate study, “Shifting patterns of mild weather in response to projected radiative forcing,” in the February 2017 issue of Climatic Change illustrate the predicament. Some news outlets implied the study showed countries such as Canada and the U.K. would benefit from increasingly frequent “mild weather days” brought on by climate change. Many failed to convey the true take-home message: Climate change will have devastating consequences for human civilization.

Just ask the study’s author, Karin van der Wiel, a research scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. She studied the frequency of mild weather days as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. She found a few countries, mostly in the mid-latitudes, will experience slightly more frequent mild weather—defined as days between 18° and 30°C with less than one millimeter of rain and dew point temperature not exceeding 20 C.

But that’s not the whole story.

“The climate is changing in many places over the world and these changes are ongoing now,” Van der Wiel said in an email. “Globally, mild weather is decreasing and in many locations summers are going to be increasingly too hot and too humid to be considered mild. These are not desirable changes.”

Van der Wiel chose to examine climate change and mild weather rather than extreme events such as floods, wildfires, and drought to make it easier for people to relate to the issue and inspire them to learn more.

“I am happy the research was picked up so widely; that way more people hopefully will learn that climate is changing the weather near them and in the coming decades,” she said, adding, “mild weather is not the only important thing in climate change, and therefore the other, more alarming aspects of climate change should not be forgotten.”

Van der Wiel points out that mild weather isn’t necessarily good, as it can also create negative conditions.

“If there are projected changes in mild weather, that means there are changes in temperature, precipitation, and/or humidity,” she said. She noted that although mild weather could create more opportunities for things such as outdoor recreation, it could also have negative consequences like changing snowmelt patterns and threatening water resources.

Mild weather at the wrong time and place can be disastrous. The wildfire that devastated Fort McMurray last year reached city limits on a mild weather day, with an average temperature of 22.1 C and no precipitation, after several weeks of unseasonably warm and dry weather.

“Mild weather is not good for everything,” Van der Wiel wrote. “If you like skiing, increasing mild weather is bad. We haven’t investigated the coincidence of wildfires with mild weather, but such a link might exist and would indicate again that climate change is something the global community should try to mitigate as much as possible.”

This research is an important piece of the emerging narrative about the impacts of climate change, but we must consider it in the context of all the work on climate. Prior to her work on mild weather, Van der Wiel studied extreme precipitation and flooding in the U.S. She has since moved to a project investigating climatic conditions that could negatively affect agriculture, to determine if it’s possible to warn farmers and communities in advance of bad crop years.

Science is the most useful tool we have to adapt to climate change and avoid its worst outcomes. But it requires critical thinking and a big-picture perspective to ensure we consider all available evidence. With so many people scrolling through social media feeds for news rather than reading entire articles, facts and clarity can become elusive. It’s up to us all—media and consumers alike—to dig deeper for the full story.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. 

IMAGE: Environmentalists demonstrate near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, as the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) continues at Le Bourget, December 12, 2015. REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol

The Serial Prevarications Of The Reality TV President

The Serial Prevarications Of The Reality TV President

There is almost nothing real about “reality TV.” All but the dullest viewers understand that the dramatic twists and turns on shows like “Bachelor” or “Celebrity Apprentice” are scripted in advance. More or less like professional wrestling, Donald Trump’s previous claim to fame.

Welcome to the reality TV presidency. Nothing President-elect Trump says is to be taken literally, nor evaluated for its truth content. His surrogates have made that clear. Once and future sidekick Corey Lewandowski recently admonished journalists at Harvard University.

“This is the problem with the media,” he scolded. “You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes—when you have a conversation with people…you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

So when Trump claimed that he saw Muslims in Jersey City celebrating 9/11 on TV, he was just blowing smoke like some guy in a bar.

And so what if he kept his opposition to invading Iraq a secret?

When Trump denied mocking disabled reporter on national TV… Well, who are you going to believe, the president-elect or your lying eyes?

Then there’s the president-elect’s latest whopper. Providing zero evidence, he claimed that “millions of people” voted illegally last November, and that “serious voter fraud” had taken place in Virginia, New Hampshire and California—three states he lost.

Otherwise, see, Trump believes he’d have won the popular vote decisively, instead of trailing Hillary Clinton nationally by 2.5 million votes—a bit more than 2 percent. Far from being the people’s choice, Trump eked out the narrowest electoral win in U.S. history.

An ordinary egomaniac would fake humility and try to win the citizenry over. But that’s not the Trump way. When journalists challenged his assertion, try to believe that the future president re-tweeted one “Filibuster,” a Beverly Hills sixteen year-old: “Pathetic—you have no sufficient evidence that Donald Trump did not suffer from voter fraud, shame! Bad reporter.”

No, and nobody can prove that there are no unicorns in Oklahoma. Or that Melania Trump isn’t a Russian spy. Is it that Trump has no grasp of elementary logic or that he believes most voters don’t? Either way, the nation is screwed. Bad president-elect!

GOP stalwarts—Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Reince Priebus—were all over the talk shows making variants of the same claim: just because there’s no evidence of voter fraud doesn’t mean it might not be true.

Sure, and Melania Trump might be Vladimir Putin’s lover.

Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers tried to stop Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s (pointless) Michigan recount by arguing “[a]ll available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.”

But it was left for Trump spokesblonde Scottie Nell Hughes to push this nonsense to its ultimate end. Appearing on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, Hughes chastised unimaginative pundits: “One thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people who say ‘facts are facts,’— they’re not really facts….Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true.

“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, as facts.”

Certainly not in Trumpworld. To be fair, it wasn’t clear Hughes thinks this is a desirable state of affairs. But she was reacting to a question about James Fallows’ blog at The Atlantic, documenting and rebutting Trump’s serial prevarications. Last time I checked, the list was up to 155.

Things are getting serious. Fallows posted one American diplomat’s reaction to Trump’s voter fraud falsehood:

“Embassy staff in China or Russia are bound to be told, ‘It doesn’t look like your governmental system is doing so well, does it? See, your future President is saying that your elections are rotten with fraud.’

“What could our people then say? For the sake of truth and the honor of the country, they can’t agree; but to disagree is to call their future boss a flagrant public liar. That he is in fact such a liar is, in that situation, beside the point. Our ability to advocate for our country is being recklessly endangered simply to satisfy Trump’s vanity.”

Meanwhile, hippy-dippy leftists used to be accused of feckless relativism. Now it’s so-called “conservatives” who argue against objective standards of evidence and proof.

Writing in 1943, Orwell thought it all came down to power-worship. Contemplating Hitler and Stalin, he wrote that “If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”

But for all the boasting and bullying of Trump supporters, Americans do expect better of their president. Already mistrusted by the majority, if Trump doesn’t clean up his act—a psychological impossibility, I fear—they’ll soon want to change the channel.

IMAGE: Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump looks out at Lake Michigan during a visit to the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin August 16, 2016. REUTERS/Eric Thayer/File Photo

5 Idiotic Trump Moments This Week

5 Idiotic Trump Moments This Week

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet. 

We don’t want to alarm you or anything, but it’s beginning to look like Donald Trump does not know how this whole president-ing thing works. And since he has the curiosity level of a pet rock, chances don’t seem great that he’ll be learning anytime soon.

His week was a combination of gaffes, bizarre confessions, and weirdly tone deaf phone calls that appear to be setting off international incidents. He seems to miss campaigning, and held a rally in Ohio to crow again about all the other people he vanquished when he beat Hillary. He tweeted how he’s going to just unconstitutionally toss flag burners out of the country. (Whee, this presidenting thing is fun!) And he also took the time to oh-so-presidentially tweet his detail-free “big announcement” about how he’s going to step back from running his companies, so no more “conflicts of interest!” Poof, they’ll just magically disappear.

Here are 5 of his headscratchingly stupid moments during the week that was:

1. He had a succession of bizarre and tone-deaf phone convos with foreign leaders.

Though he is an avowed teetotaler, the President-elect appears to be doing the equivalent of drinking and dialing world leaders this week, or at least drinking and picking up the phone, if he can be believed that the Taiwanese president called him, not the other way around. By all appearances, he did not have the foggiest notion that speaking with Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen might cause a teeny problem with China, or that it broke four decades of diplomatic protocol.

Protocol schmotocal, he might say. He’s a rule breaker, a rebel, which is so much easier when you just don’t bother to inform yourself about the rules. Freedom from knowledge is just so darn liberating.

Earlier in the day, he had spoken with the murderous Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte, who is rapidly becoming an international pariah. But Trumpie described the conversation as “engaging and animated.” Frighteningly, the two aspiring authoritarians share a view about the violence with which the drug war must be waged. Duterte just pretty much has people murdered, about 4800 of them so far.

And a brief chat with the Pakistani Prime Minister was all Trump needed to make a complete about-face about that nation. The country he once described as “not our friend,” he suddenly claimed was “fantastic.”

See? Easy peasy, this presidenting thing.

2. He appointed a fellow conspiracy theorist to powerful post at helm of Health and Human Services Department.

It’s bad enough that Donald Trump himself is a sucker for a good conspiracy theory  (birtherism, massive amount of voter fraud, etc…), but now he seems to be surrounding himself with conspiracy theorists as well, (well, conspiracy theorists and billionaires.)

Georgia Rep. Tom Price is just about the most disastrous pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services that can be imagined. He is not only a sworn foe of Obamacare; he opposes Medicare and will seek to dismantle it given half the chance. He is a doctor, a so-called upholder of the Hippocratic Oath, but opposes all forms of government involvement in medicine, which he, of course, calls socialism.

But Price does not just have vile plans to dismantle the nation’s safety net, he has nutty ideas as well. Granted, being a medical doctor is no inoculation against being a whacko, look at Ben Carson, but Price has been touted as a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). This horrifyingly right-wing group of ideologues masquerading as men and women of science  “to fight socialized medicine and to fight the government takeover of medicine.” It’s members are urged to refuse to treat Medicare patients and the group rejects required vaccination programs in schools. That’s not just evil. It’s colossally stupid for anyone with a passing acquaintance with public health.

It’s hard to know which cabinet appointment to be most horrified by this week, but Price might have beat out predatory banker Mnuchin at Treasury, and bottom feeder Wilbur Ross at Commerce. Unlike those two blatant profiteers, Price has been put in charge of a henhouse he seems intent on destroying.

3. He held a bizarre campaign rally in Ohio, appearing to be stuck in a time machine from three weeks ago.

The Donald called the event in Cincinnati on Thursday a “thank you” rally, but it was eerily similar to his campaign rallies, and he kind of forgot the whole thank you part. The crowd chanted “Lock her up,” any time Hillary Clinton’s name came up, which it did because the Trumpster bragged about the great fun he had “fighting” and beating her. He pranced and preened about the stage, basking in the glow of adoration, revisiting old grudges and spouting nationalism. “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship,” Trump said apropos of nothing. “We pledge allegiance to one flag. And that flag is the American flag.” That spurred the crowd’s other favorite chant, “U-S-A, U-S-A.”

No one seemed the least bit convinced when he read off the teleprompter to call for some sort of unity now that he will be president, because he said so. “It is time and the people are angry,” he rambled. “They are angry. And they are going to get together.” They are going to get together because he said so. The hall was so silent you could hear a pin drop.

But before he pursues all that unity stuff, he just wanted to make fun of a weeping woman, and spent some time mocking ABC’s Martha Raddatz for her choked up performance on election night. “How about when a major anchor who hosted a debate started crying when she realized that we won? How about that?” he grinned. Then like a cruel 9-year-old with developmental delays he imitated her sobs, saying “No, tell me this isn’t true.”

Very presidential.

4. He told this truly baffling story about the Carrier deal apparently unaware that it makes him look more awful than usual.

In Indiana to gloat about his supposed genius deal to save maybe a thousand jobs at the Carrier conditioning plant, which was accomplished through huge tax breaks and corporate giveaways, Trump addressed a roomful of the factory workers. He decided this might be a good time to mention he really hadn’t intended to keep those Carrier jobs from going to Mexico in the first place. Huh?The president-elect recounted how he had been watching the nightly news—“I won’t say which one because I don’t want to give them credit”—when a “gentleman worker, a great guy, handsome guy” invoked a promise Trump had supposedly made on the campaign trail. The man, a Carrier employee, said that Trump had vowed to keep the Indianapolis factory open. “I never thought I made that promise—not with Carrier. … I made it for everybody else,” Trump confessed. But why?

Seems like a little bit of a diarrhea of the mouth problem.

5. One of his surrogates just flat out confirmed that facts don’t matter any more.

The Trump era helped usher in the “post-truth” world we now find ourselves living in. The tweeter in chief spreads unfounded conspiracy theories, spins minor victories into major coups, and, yes, as we have seen, sometimes in an unguarded moment spews some accidental truth about how he can’t believe how many people actually believe anything he says.But still, you’re not supposed to just come out and say that truth and facts don’t matter. You’re supposed to stake out some “truthiness” even for your thinnest of ideas. But damned if CNN Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes didn’t manage to confirm all of our worst fears this week when she said, “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts,” on the Diane Rehm Show on WAMU, an NPR affiliate.

She was explaining the truth according to Trump to her fellow aghast panelists when it comes to the tweeter in chief’s claim of, “millions of fraudulent voters,” a claim which is both false and stupid particularly when you’re fighting a recount effort.

Here is what she purported to be her logic: “Mr. Trump’s tweet amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up.

If your brain now hurts from all the stupid, you are not alone.

IMAGE: FILE PHOTO –  Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump attends a campaign rally in at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa, Florida, U.S. November 5, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri