These brings me to the subject of this post. At the end of a lecture in one of my classes very recently, the professor of said class took issue with a section of the textbook we, and he, had been assigned to work from. We had been discussing thermodynamics, and the textbook in question used the greenhouse effect, a main driver of anthropogenic global warming, as a real world applicable scenario to work off of.

The professor of the class took issue with this. He went on what I will only describe as a rant about the fallacy of global warming, throwing out several “facts” that are incredibly wrong and misleading, and in general using his classroom as a soap box for his personal beliefs urging the students to take climate science with a grain of salt.

This bothered me quite a bit as you might imagine. First and foremost what bothered me was that a person of authority was using a classroom as a platform for spreading their personal beliefs and misinformation. He works at a public university funded by tax payers and the money with which his students pay him. It is not a place for him to preach his beliefs for a number of reasons, including the fact that climate change is far outside the bounds of his science and daily work.

Inside my head during this episode I am screaming in an attempt to shout him down as I can see around me my peers are writing down his words as notes alongside the days lesson. I did not raise a vocal objection however, because I felt that it was not my place to do so, regardless of the professor’s error.

Instead, I wait and compose a blog post that will reach the eyes of none of the people who were present in aforementioned lecture. Oh well.

The follow “facts” that I will refute were presented as facts, and I am not reading into them further than were offered by my professor.

1.) A common talking point amongst AGW deniers is the, “when I was a kid they were predicting an ice age from global cooling!” argument. My jaw almost hit the floor when my professor offered this as a counter to the textbooks information on climate change.

There is a famous article that is brought up time and time again on this issue by deniers, a 1974 Time magazine article entitled “Another Ice Age?“. As far as I can see, this is the only ‘evidence’ most AGW-deniers bring to the table as far as the 1970′s global cooling theory is concerned. This is typically brought up to show that climate science has been wrong before and they are wrong now.

You may have noticed, but Time magazine is not a science publication. It is not peer-reviewed, it is not a source of empirical research.

So the actual science going on during the 70′s should back this up, correct? They didn’t make this information up, right? They didn’t make up the information, but they didn’t, and people today in retrospect don’t, look at the whole picture. For a snapshot of climate science of the day we can turn to RealClimate who has a post available looking at the science that was going on during that time.

The post hinges on an article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society where climatologists look back at the climate science going on during that time. The article, “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” can be found here (pdf).

From the RealClimate post…

“During the period we analyzed, climate science was very different from what you see today. There was far less integration among the various sub-disciplines that make up the enterprise. Remote sensing, integrated global data collection and modeling were all in their infancy. But our analysis nevertheless showed clear trends in the focus and conclusions the researchers were making. Between 1965 and 1979 we found (see table 1 for details):

• 7 articles predicting cooling
• 44 predicting warming
• 20 that were neutral

In other words, during the 1970s, when some would have you believe scientists were predicting a coming ice age, they were doing no such thing. The dominant view, even then, was that increasing levels of greenhouse gases were likely to dominate any changes we might see in climate on human time scales.”

This should be enough to deflate any argument on such nonsense, but for safety, we can dig deeper. Why were there ANY studies that indicated the globe cooling?

To people familiar with climate science, the concept of global dimming may not be foreign to you. To those not, global dimming is the process by which the Earth’s total intake of radiation from the sun is diminished by increased amounts of aerosol particles in the Earth’s atmosphere. These particles raise the Earth’s albedo, causing sunlight to be reflected back into space, causing cooling. (For a little more albedo related climate stuff, feel free to read one of my previous entries)

The source of these particulates? Volcanoes, other geothermal processes, but mostly human industrial activities. The time period we’re talking about is a time of rampant industrial growth, and one of immature climate science.

Smog, amongst other things, is composed of aerosols.

So we have these two forces working against each other, global dimming and global warming. In reality the globe was warming this whole time, but the warming of the globe was being masked the cooling we can now attribute to global dimming.

From the AMS paper.

“Refinements, using data on aerosols from volcanic eruptions, showed that while cooling could result,the original Rasool and Schneider paper had overestimated cooling while underestimating the greenhouse warming contributed by carbon dioxide (Schneiderand Mass 1975; Weart 2003). Adding to the confusion at the time, other researchers concluded that aerosols would lead to warming rather than cooling (Reck1975; Idso and Brazel 1977).

It was James Hansen and his colleagues who found what seemed to be the right balance between the two competing forces by modeling the aerosols from Mount Agung, a volcano that erupted in Bali in 1963. Hansen and his colleagues fed data from the Agung eruption into their model, which got the size and timing of the resulting pulse of global cooling correct. By 1978, the question of the relative role of aerosol cooling and greenhouse warming had been sorted out. Greenhouse warming, the researchers concluded, had become the dominant forcing (Hansen et al. 1978;Weart 2003).”

It’s a dead argument. Any person using it as a backing answer to their argument is ignorant to the facts, whether willingly or naively, is a different question, but the point is, they’re wrong.

This bothered me quite a bit as my professor is an extremely intelligent man, and has masterful command of the science he teaches. His actions however left me very disappointed in his abuse of his position. His intelligence in regards to his own profession also shows that just because someone is an authority on something, doesn’t mean they’re an authority on everything.

I am going to make this a 2 part post since this post is running very long. I hope to post the conclusion later this week sometime, but I’m not promising anything.

Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a ‘world-killing’ event
by Terrence Aym

Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.

It’s clearly a sensationalist piece of writing, and a quick read through of the article should be enough to turn anyone off of it. The reaction to the article on B9 was not unsurprising, the average user their shows little penchant for critical thinking (as some might remember), so I posted a small list of reasons to be skeptical of the claims of the article and left. I went on with my day and forgot about it.

Later that night, I hopped online again and was browsing another forum that I frequent and found the same link. This time on a forum with an average age and intelligence that far outstrips that of the young punks of the B9. I offered my small debunk again, a little more concerned. Shortly there after I was IM’d by a friend who was talking with another friend on the phone about the same article. This alarmed me a bit, because I first looked at the article and laughed to myself because it was so poorly written, yet other people were reading this article going “Oh shi…”

So, maybe someone will come across the blog, and maybe the tips I am about the lay out might help them in the future. I will just kind of go over some stuff in the article that stuck out to me almost immediately, and maybe some more nuanced things to look for too.

1.) The first thing that rose alarm bells was the parent website of this article, Helium. I had never heard of that website, so the first thing I did was Google around to see the reputation of the website and get some general info on to what exactly it is. The first sign that something less than great was going on at Helium is when you type Helium.com into the search bar on Google and one of the first recommendation is “Helium.com scam”. A little more digging and you find websites like this, which have some very telling information…

Helium.com is basically earning money through advertising and paying out a fraction of these earnings to writers. They ask writers to come and submit articles. Anyone can write for Helium, there is no application process, no filtering system, you just write something (whether good or bad) and submit it into the Helium system. It is immediately published on the Internet for the whole world to see. Writers can submit articles, poetry, recipes, or even their point of view on a wide variety of topics.

Knowing this; JUST this is enough to disregard the whole thing. It’s the same reason you don’t source Wikipedia in your academic writings. Anything on this website is not peer-reviewed, edited or fact checked at all (I guess that isn’t true, but there is no way to prove it). Anyone can put anything they want on that website. It’s just as easy way to pretend that your writings have validity because they aren’t on a blog.

2.) Second requires actually reading through the article. There are a collection of sources at the bottom of the article and none of them are necessarily bad sources. They are academic sources, they are real news reports by reputable news sources, and a documentary from the BBC and the History Channel, each. The academic sources are solid and secure, the news reports are verified, and while I wouldn’t consider the BBC and The History Channel as bastions of empirical science, their information is probably sound.

The problem is that these sources seem to be little more than an attempt by Mr. Aym to make his article appear valid. He uses the sources to set up a potential scenario, and then leaves all of everything else unsourced.  He sets up the theories of prehistoric extinction, and the role that methane gas bubbles may have played and then basically writes a story about what HE says is going on in the gulf. The list of sources at the bottom are just an attempt to make the careless reader confident in the authors assertions.

“Reports, filtering through from oceanologists and salvage workers in the region, state that the upper level strata of the ocean floor is succumbing to greater and greater pressure. That pressure is causing a huge expanse of the seabed-estimated by some as spreading over thousands of square miles surrounding the BP wellhead-to bulge. Some claim the seabed in the region has risen an astounding 30 feet.”

This  falls into the area of unsourced stuff that hurts his argument, but it’s one of the most ridiculous in the article. There is no source for any of these assertions, no names, no way to follow-up on these claims other than to go there which is now illegal to do so.

“More evidence? A huge gash on the ocean floor—like a ragged wound hundreds of feet long—has been reported by the NOAA research ship, Thomas Jefferson. Before the curtain of the government enforced news blackout again descended abruptly, scientists aboard the ship voiced their concerns that the widening rift may go down miles into the earth. “

Another  deceptive piece of writing. The link in this paragraph doesn’t go to evidence or anything supporting what he claims, it just links to a PDF file on the NOAA’s website that is brief overview of the ship and what it does, and he falls back to his government cover-up immediately, and again, absolutely no way to check his claims.

3.) Along with bad sourcing, is terrible leaps of logic.

“The bottom line: BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling operation may have triggered an irreversible, cascading geological Apocalypse that will culminate with the first mass extinction of life on Earth in many millions of years.

The oil giant drilled down miles into a geologically unstable region and may have set the stage for the eventual premature release of a methane mega-bubble.”

This is broken because it implies that Deepwater Horizon is the only deep water oil drilling platform out there. It’s not, and there are plenty of them that have been operating for a while.

Image provided by The Swordpress using data from the Minerals Management Service.

“The media has been kept away from the emergency salvage measures being taken to forestall the biggest catastrophe in human history. The federal government has warned them away from the epicenter of operations with the threat of a $40,000 fine for each infraction and the possibility of felony arrests.

Why is the press being kept away? Word is that the disaster is escalating.”

This is conspiracy theory 101, here. Yes, the government is keeping the media away from the clean up operations. Yes, it is a crummy thing to do. However, Aym uses it as an unknown to mold to his liking. Conspiracy theorists love working with unknowns, ANYTHING can be happening there now since we have no coverage of what is actually happening. In spite of this, Aym has ‘word’ that it’s because this doomsday scenario is escalating. In reality, it is damage control for the government, for BP, for the Coast Guard and everyone else who has shown incompetence in their response to this mess.

The majority of the rest of the article is taken from a couple of documentaries by the BBC and History Channel, with their ideas and concepts applied to the gulf region, peppered with the news articles we’ve already read about the catastrophe that is the oil spill. The news articles are real, and they are absolutely terrible, but the main focus of this article is just junk. If any high school student turned this in for a class assignment, they would fail. If any college student turned this in, they would probably be put on academic probation as well as failing. It’s terrible, dishonest writing.

Therefore, it is very worrying to me at how many people took this at face value (currently 42,000 + people have “liked” this article on Facebook) when it falls apart completely under the smallest of investigation. With what we’ve looked at here, it should be unsurprising therefore, to find that Terrence Aym, the article’s writer is a conspiracy nut. Searching his name on Google will find it tied to all sorts of ridiculous things, a lot of them posted to Helium. My theory is this guy writes sensationalist stories in hoping to get a lot of hits, and to then to get paid by Helium for that traffic.

You find his name tied to a lot of conspiracy linked, super right-wing, tea party and other such websites, posting quick previews of his articles and leaving a link to his Helium page. He has tons of stuff out there and it seems like he finally landed the big one.

So hopefully if you read through this swamp of crap, you might be a little more prepared the next time you see a sensationalist news story that is on someone’s blog or on some other disreputable website. Everything on the internet is not bad, but a lot of it is and you have to be able to filter this kind of stuff.

If you’re interested, here is a debunking of this article using real facts and science.

“We’re still waiting on the final inquiry to finish, but it very likely it will be in the same house as the two which have already concluded.”

I wrote this a couple months ago in this post about the ‘Climategate’ phenomenon. I’m not going to go into that, since I already have in depth in the aforementioned post, but just a quick update.

The third inquiry has indeed come to it’s conclusion, and like I suspected, it echoes the thoughts of the first two inquiries. No wrong doings.

“Conclusion of the Investigatory Committee as to whether research misconduct occurred:

The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor, Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University.

More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.

The decision of the Investigatory Committee was unanimous.”

Deniers have an idea that controversy exists where there is none. I like to stress in these discussions however, that doesn’t mean that there is no controversy where climate change is concerned. Quite the contrary actually, there is tons of controversy and conflict, but it resides within the consensus that man is causing irreversible harm to the environment.

One of these conflicts came to my attention just the other day with the publishing of this article on Scientific American.

“Modern Farming Helped Forestall Global Warming

Modern high-yield farming lowered the amount of greenhouse gases pumped into the Earth’s atmosphere toward the end of the 20th Century by a massive amount, according to a surprising study from researchers at Stanford University.”

Coming fresh off of Bill McKibben’s Eaarth, I was a bit confused by this article. For those who haven’t read Eaarth, McKibben spends a lot of energy on the topic of agriculture, particularly how destructive modern farming is and how organic farming could reach the yields of modern farming without the environmental side effects using various innovative methods.

McKibben’s ogranic approach is controversial in itself. I know a lot of vegans and vegetarians (I am a vegetarian myself) and it is a very common belief that anything to do with modern/industrial/factory is bad. I share some of this belief, I think that the farming of meat as it is done now is immoral as well as incredibly CO2 intensive and therefore bad for the environment. However, I don’t follow the line of thought that genetically modified food is bad.

There is plenty of evidence that genetically modified food is more nutritious, better for the environment and requires less pesticides than traditional seeds. The backlash against GM foods in my opinion, comes from the supposed despicable actions of the GM mega corporation Monsanto.

That will lead down a road I don’t REALLY wish to discuss right now though. McKibben hardly mentions GM foods anyway (other than to take a jab at Monsanto). His assault is against the C02 intensive process of modern farming, and how inflated and large it has become. Therefore it is very interesting to see an article come to light that says that modern farming may have been one of the major stalling factors of global warnings onset.

The main idea in the article is that the efficiency of modern farming in terms of the amount of product that can be grown on a piece of land led to much less deforestation in the name of farming. The innovations of modern farming, including GM seeds and other techniques, also known as the green revolution, increased the amount of food per acre enough to lessen conversion of forests to farmland.

“Every time forest or shrub land is cleared for farming, the carbon that was tied up in the biomass is released and rapidly makes its way into the atmosphere,” said Burney, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford.

A co-author of the paper at Stanford, Steven Davis, added that the evidence points to spending on agricultural research as one of the best and cheapest ways to prevent new emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

To conduct the study, the academics looked at agricultural production between 1961 and 2005 and compared it to hypothetical models that estimated the amount of land that might have been converted if not for the so-called “green revolution” in modern farming. They found that improvements kept at least 317 billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere and possibly as much as 590 billion tons.”

So, modern farming is not the evil that is painted by so many, but it would be foolish to consider it perfect. Even though it is efficient in ways that farming before it wasn’t, it is terribly inefficient in other ways as McKibben suggests. 70% of the fresh water used on the entire planet, yearly is for irrigation (we’re running out of water, by the way). The system of GM seeds and the pesticides created for them drastically reduces the biodiversity of plants we eat, making them more susceptible to disease and possibly extinction.

Even though modern farming prevented a lot of C02 release, it still is a VERY C02 intensive process. Apart from the large machinery used in farming, we have a bad habit of growing all of our various crops in single spots. Here in Illinois we grow a lot of corn and beans. If you reside in a place outside of the ‘corn belt’ your corn and other products come from here. The shipping and processing of corn is a major producer of C02. Corn may grow better in Illinois, but it doesn’t make sense to grow it ONLY in corn belt states, McKibben argues.

On the other hand, do we have a model of high yield organic farming? There are studies that say so, but in practice, would it work?

Either way, modern farming is not a sustainable future for agriculture and requires a lot of attention, but I’m not entirely sure organic farming is the correct answer. Maybe a combination of both? Maybe new approaches altogether? It is not a certain future either way.

A little background before digging into Eaarth; Bill McKibben was the first person to write a book about global warming for a general audience in 1989, that book was The End of Nature. Since that time McKibben has become one of the most famous environmental journalists in the world. 20 years ago, he though that simply presenting the argument for anthropogenic global warming would stir people into action. Now he writes because we did not take action and there are, and will be consequences for that lack of action.

The entire premise for Earth is stated in the title: Making a Living on a Tough New Planet. This new planet, McKibben argues, is the Earth we live on, but due to the changes on that planet, it is not the Earth he grew up on. The Earth as it exists now is different, so to make that point, this new Earth has a different name: Eaarth. Very similar, but just slightly different, much like the new planet we live on.

There are quite a few things I really liked about the book, but also a few things I wasn’t so hot on. What I don’t really like, and I feel like I should put this right up front as it could potentially damage your consumption of this book, is the pacing. The first half of the book is loaded to the brim with depressing statistics, stories and overwhelming sense of failure. It’s not until the second half of the book that we get to the more uplifting ideas and see the silver lining in it all.

I actually think that a person not prepared for this could become overwhelmed and just become apathetic to the whole issue, like so many are, and if you stop reading/listening there, you will lose the whole thing.

I feel as if McKibben should’ve sprinkled the good and bad together throughout, rather than beat you over the head with it and then nurse your concussion, but it really does make the second half of the book quite a pay off in it’s current form.

Things I like very much are the wide breadth of issues discussed, from climate change, sustainability and the politics of the issues to the lesser talked about points of the effects on the developing world, agriculture and the spread of disease. His ideas for change are the best part of the book, in my opinion. Decentralization of services, removal of subsidies within industrial agriculture and fossil fuel markets, and reliance on local community and self sustainability. Anyone who wants to up the punx can get behind it.

His ideas for change aren’t hard proposals and things that we will actually need to combat what is to come, and he never says they are, but they are seeds to be planted in public consciousness . They are instead abstract ideas that show us how we might combat the hardships of our future and small cases of it in effect now.

It’s very clear to anyone that reads this I believe that McKibben is writing with the very worst in mind most of the time (though he states otherwise occasionally), but in the scenario’s in his book, I think it is neccesary given that he points out how wildley conservative the scientific estimates of the effects of global warming have been historically and how they’ve been very wrong.

Since I did experience this book via audioform, I don’t have a list of his sources to check out. Very few things I heard sounded out of bounds with my understanding of the science, however. I will probably buy a hard copy sooner or later to reread, and check out some of the sources, because there are some very interesting facts and data referenced that I was unaware of before (would like to say these here, but my mental bookmarks have failed me and it’s hard to skim an audio book unfortunately).

If you want to know more about this book and Bill McKibben, I suggest listening to the two part interview Scientific American did with him for their podcast.

I highly reocmmend checking it out.

Amazon
Audible

Even if you spend little to no time researching climate change or it’s causes, it’s been impossible to escape some exposure to it, and from that exposure, most people will tell you than climate change is happening because of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. That is one part of it, one very crucial part of it, but many people are unaware of how large the issue is, or how complicated it can be. Because of that, it is often frustrating to deal with climate change deniers because of how limited their attack on the issue is, they’ll crow about the divergence problem and how scientists are all part of a massive conspiracy until they’re blue in the face, but they will rarely tackle many other sides of the issue. For instance, I have never ran across deniers talking about carbon’s effect on the Earth’s albedo.

What is the albedo? In astronomical terms, albedo is measurement of how much light is reflected off of something back into space. In other words; an astronomical body’s brightness. Light materials reflect more radiation than dark materials and objects. Dark materials absorb more radiation than light materials and objects. As you learned in school, objects have color because they absorb different frequencies of the visible spectrum, and reflect others into our eyes and blah blah blah, we see color.

The oceans grow warm because their dark blue color absorbs much of the radiation the sun throws at us, the arctic is bitter cold because most of the heat thrown at it from space is reflected back by the very bright snow. Bright white clouds reflect light back into space, the dark pavement and buildings we build everywhere absorb heat. Even the contrails left by jetliners are a significant source of reflected light as shown by the grounding of all flights on September 11th.

So that’s albedo. Maybe you can see where this is going already if you don’t already know.

The burning of fossil fuels releases CO2 into the atmosphere, and those large quantities of CO2 trap radiation in our atmosphere warming up the planet, but there is another mechanism at play that is very rarely discussed in my experience.  I think will come into play a lot more frequently in coming months and years, however. When fossil fuels burn, they release black carbon into the atmosphere, also known as soot. When this soot is kicked up into the atmosphere, it is pulled into the strong, turbulent winds of the upper atmosphere and they are blown all over the globe. Unlike CO2, this soot settles out of the atmosphere onto the ground in relatively short order.

White glacier with high albedo on the left; dirty, lower albedo glacier on right.

A lot of the soot, settles in the cold areas of our planet, combining with dust and minerals sucked up from all over the planet which also happened to fall there. This combination of particles forms a gritty substance called cryoconite. The critical part here is, than these cryoconite granules only become dark when soot is added to them, and even more important-

“Even though cryoconite is composed of less than 5 percent soot,” he says, “it is the soot that causes it to turn black.” The darkness decreases the albedo, or reflectivity, of the ice, which increases the absorption of heat; that in turn increases the amount of melting.” – Nat Geo feature [link]

It doesn’t take a lot of this soot to have things turn south really quickly. This is dangerous because as mentioned above, these dark additions to the otherwise very, very bright glaciers, cause them to heat up. As they heat up, they speed up melting, which stimulates more heat absorption due to the uncovering of more of these cryoconite granules with the additions of new ones. It starts a positive feedback loop, or a point of no return; Once a tipping point is reached, it spirals out of control and nothing can be done about it.

Holes melted in glacier by cryoconite deposits.

This is not exclusive to glaciers, it applies to sea ice as well. As regions of once permanent sea ice melt, the dark ocean waters below them are exposed to sunlight which heat those waters up, which stimulates further sea ice melt. Another feedback loop.

These feedback loops are so dangerous not because we’re afraid of losing all of our ice (well we are, many ecosystems are dependent on the ice), but because of the effects a large amount of cold freshwater pouring into our oceans would mean. It would raise sea levels world wide, and more importantly even, would be the slowing of the gulf stream, which has a very violent history.

Climate change is much more complex them some deniers would have you believe. It is a giant interlocking machine of independently changing variables, many of which we are tinkering with to dangerous levels.

I suggest reading the National Geographic article linked above if you’re still reading. It’s an interesting look at the phenomenon. Go buy the magazine if you want to see some absolutely stunning picture to go along with it.

Now, after several failed attempts to quell the oil leak as it spills and spreads across the Gulf of Mexico, we’re looking at an ecological disaster that could potentially dwarf the disaster that was the Exxon Valdez oil spill of the 90′s. Despite assurances by BP that any oil spill from this wellhead wouldn’t reach the shores before their cleanup would allow it, we now have oil and tar washing ashore in almost all of the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico.

Those are the facts. There is no arguing them. The economies of the effected areas are being ground to a halt, the rare and fragile wild life of the barrier islands and coastlines are in serious danger, and there’s no end in sight.

There’s a lot to debate on the issue, whether you’re for or against further off shore drilling, who should take what share of the blame etc. One thing that cannot be debated is that this is a terrible economical, ecological tragedy. However, there are some people who bathe so thoroughly in their ignorance and ineptitude that they will say things so stupid that it’s hard to believe. Unfortunately for people who like to champion reason and scientific thought, those persons happen to have a very large base of people listening to them.

Fortunately, I am not talking about the man from Colorado who wants everyone to pray away the oil, but I am talking about Rush Limbaugh and like minded mouthpieces saying very stupid things. Sarah Palin is still promoting offshore drilling while this debacle is still going on; Gene Taylor, House Representative from Mississippi compared the oil spill to spilled chocolate milk, says public is over-reacting; Conservative Bill Kristol’s reaction is to drill closer to the shoreline; These are all really stupid things to say in light of what is happening, but as always, Rush Limbaugh takes the cake.

Rush believes the oil spill was caused by “environmentalist wackos” to move forward their agenda as John Kerry and Joe Lieberman’s Climate and Energy bill fast approached, even though at the time, nobody had any idea what actually blew up the Deepwater Horizon. We now know that the redundancies put in place on the oil rig to stop such a blowout, failed, causing an explosion. This isn’t surprising at all as Rush will say anything so long as it backs his political beliefs. I’m sure he wasn’t happy to report such a catastrophic failure in something he promotes so heavily without taking a swing at the ‘regime’.

That’s stupid enough as it is, but it doesn’t end there. Rush is also spewing forth this dribble that, unfortunately, I’ve seen floating around in other places as well.

“The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and left out there,” Limbaugh said. “It’s natural. It’s as natural as the ocean water is.”

This is even stupider, but for some reason people latch on to it. I’m not sure why, but maybe because there is a parcel, the tiniest bit of truth to it. Otherwise it is a giant extrapolated argument from ignorance.

First off, oil is natural, it’s created via natural mechanisms over millions of years. We all learned that in grade school. What is also true is that the Gulf of Mexico has lots of oil leaked into it naturally every year, via oil seeps. Oil seeps occur where oil and other hydrocarbons have broke free though fissures in rock or have been released via natural methods of erosion. This happens above ground, it happens under the ocean, it is the biggest source of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

In fact, that article I just linked, this one, has been quoted around quite a bit in response to this oil spill and the repercussions it could have for the offshore drilling oil industry. So we will use that as our basis, as there is obviously some absence of reading comprehension regarding this article.

“Oil that finds its way to the surface from natural seeps gets broken down by bacteria and ends up as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. So knowing the amount of fossil fuel that turns to carbon dioxide naturally is important for understanding how much humans may be changing the climate by burning oil and gas.”

The punching of thousands of fists into the air can be heard upon reading this quote. However, let’s put that in perspective.

“On water, oil has this wonderful property of spreading out really thin,” said Mitchell. “A gallon of oil can spread over a square mile very quickly.” So what ends up on the surface is an incredibly thin slick, impossible to see with the human eye and harmless to marine animals.”

That, is not this.

The natural oil seeps which form natural oil slicks are so small that they are broken up and naturally dismantled without damaging the environment or our economies which depend on the health of the ocean. The natural oil seeps look nothing like the oil that is gushing from this blown out wellhead.

“To get an estimate of how much oil seeps into the Gulf each year, the researchers took into account the thickness of the oil-only a hundredth of a millimeter, the area of ocean surface covered by slicks, and how long the oil remains on the surface before it’s consumed by bacteria or churned up by waves.”

One hundredth of a millimeter thick, we’re looking at parts of the spill being several millimeters thick by BP’s estimation, and CENTIMETERS thick by independent analysis. That is 100 times larger (at the most conservative estimates) than the oil seeps taken into account in the calculations made by that article. Now let’s consider than the entirety of the Gulf of Mexico is over 600,000 square miles and that the oil slick is at the very least 2,500 square miles, and that in the space of an entire year, “twice the Exxon Valdez” worth of oil seeps into the Gulf. The current estimates of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico from this ONE site, are predicting that it will put more oil into the Gulf than one Exxon Valdez at least. Half of the entire natural seep every year in one small spot of the Gulf of Mexico. That’s like saying that your house can withstand some strong winds every now and then, so lets put it in front of a tornado.

Nature is the biggest polluter of the Gulf of Mexico, but nature has evolved to combat it’s own pollution. It’s not prepared to take an added 10-12 million gallons of oil.

So what we’re looking at is a concentrated oil slick in a small area that happens to be moving onshore in areas where it will devastate the economies and wildlife those regions depend on. The outrage is not exclusive to environmentally conscious people, the livelihood of millions of people are at stake who depend on the environment.To not act in cleaning it up would not only be irresponsible, it would be downright stupid, and it’s stupid and irresponsible to seed those ideas in the heads of those who do not want look for the information or who cannot find it themselves.

]]> http://reasonedassault.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/disinformation-of-an-oil-spill/feed/ 1 reasonedassault http://reasonedassault.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/theyre-trying-to-do-what-now/ http://reasonedassault.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/theyre-trying-to-do-what-now/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 21:47:27 +0000 Tyler http://reasonedassault.wordpress.com/?p=75 ]]> So recently on the world famous Bridge 9 Board, there appeared a thread entitled “lab to create a star in california”. Avoiding the obvious jokes that could be made, there was a link to a news article from CNN (found here), followed by a statement from the thread creator.

“I dont know why, but shit like this freaks me out. Creating a star on Earth? I see nothing but bad news”

My first thought was, there is no way that a credible news organization named their article that, my second thought (upon opening the thread) was that science should be kept away from mainstream outlets of information. Not really, but it just bugs me when people look at harmless, often AWESOME science news and decide that it is bad because of what they’ve seen in sci-fi movies or what other ignorant sensationalists have told them. The rest of this thread was riddled with similar posts to the original poster’s comment with a few beacons of rationality sprinkled in between. Let’s dive in than, shall we?

First off,  CNN was indeed not stupid enough to call their article “Lab to create star in California”, the article’s actual title, “Can world’s largest laser zap Earth’s energy woes?”,  is much smarter and actually helps to describe what the article, and we, will be talking about.

“Scientists at a government lab here are trying to use the world’s largest laser — it’s the size of three football fields — to set off a nuclear reaction so intense that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth.”

In my head, this is were 99% of the people who read this article stopped before weighing in with their wisdom. It’s not entirely their fault though, CNN is a business and they have to sell the content they have.

“The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s formula for cooking up a sun on the ground may sound like it’s stolen from the plot of an “Austin Powers” movie. But it’s no Hollywood fantasy: The ambitious experiment will be tried for real, and for the first time, late this summer.

If they’re successful, the scientists hope to solve the global energy crisis by harnessing the energy generated by the mini-star.”

Things like that don’t exactly help. What they are talking about of course, is (as stated in the article) nuclear fusion. Obviously, that is not as flashy and intriguing of hooks to put into your articles as most people have heard of nuclear fusion. We’ve all seen the videos of nuclear bombs exploding, and we’ve seen the videos of the hydrogen bombs exploding. The first nuclear bombs utilized nuclear fission for their power, the later, much more powerful hydrogen bombs used nuclear fusion.

They of course aren’t talking about using bombs to create energy, but it is merely an article describing our latest attempts to harness the power of nuclear fusion in a controlled environment like we’ve done with nuclear fission for years.

The star metaphor is made because stars are bright and powerful because they are basically gigantic nuclear fusion powerplants floating in space.

Fortunately enough for us, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab is not building a star on Earth, but simply attempting to create a controlled nuclear fusion reaction.

A lot of the numbers in that article sound scary and dangerous, and taken out of context, they will do that.

“If all goes well, the resulting reaction will be hotter than the center of the sun (more than 100 million degrees Celsius) and will exert more pressure than 100 billion atmospheres. This will smash the hydrogen isotopes together with so much force and heat that their nuclei will fuse, sending off energy and neutrons.”

Such quotes have lead to assertions that no human construction could contain such heat and pressure, or that it will melt a hole into the center of the Earth. Those of course, are not true or close to being true.

In fact, as far as things that are really hot on Earth, the US Department of Energy’s Brookhaven Institute has already clobbered the Lawrence National Laboratory. In April 2005, the DOE’s analysis of results from their particle super-collider found that by smashing gold atoms together at near the speed of light, they had created a ‘perfect liquid’ which had temperatures 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, or 4 trillion degrees Celsius.The Brookhaven National Lab is still here, there is not hole in the Earth and we all made it through just fine.

This experiment in nuclear fusion has nothing on that. Also, let’s remind ourselves that if we want to get sensational comparing things to temperatures in the sun, the corona is the hottest part of the sun, not the center.

Making the point even more moot is the size of this reaction, which again, can be found in the original article.

“The star being cooked up in Livermore this summer is expected to die 200 trillionths of a second after it’s ignited, Van Wonterghem said.

And it will measure only 5 microns across, which is several times smaller than the width of a human hair.”

Try to comprehend a trillionth of a second. Chances are, you can’t.

Let’s toss another roadblock in the way just for fun.

Say we wanted to create a star here on Earth for some reason. You need a lot of mass to ignite a star, a whole lot. The Sun accounts for 99% of the mass in the entire solar system, but there are plenty of smaller stars in the universe with less mass than our Sun though, so maybe that’s not a fair comparison. Let’s look at the next biggest body in our solar system, the gas giant, Jupiter.

Jupiter is sometimes called a failed star because of how massive it is. Jupiter is over 300 times more massive than the Earth, and even at its immense size, the theoretical lower limits for nuclear fusion to occur and ignite a star is 75 times the mass of Jupiter. So if we were going to build our own star, where do you propose we get all of this hydrogen and helium to fire our own star? It’s impossible (until of course we are a much more technologically advanced space faring species). This would also of course seriously mess up the solar system in the process due to the gravitational effects and other things that I am not qualified to talk about.

People who haven’t been living under a rock might realize how similar this is to all of the noise about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider awhile back, where people were concerned that scientists at CERN might accidently create a black hole that would consume the Earth. It is unqualified people talking about things they understand very little.

We are a species who likes stories. Our imaginations tend to take over where rational thought should often be used. CNN knows we like stories, that’s why they wrote their article the way they did; to get people’s minds racing and sharing the story with people they know. To the normal, non-scientific populace, stories are always going to be more interesting than what often is the truth.

Anyway, you can learn a lot more about the Lawrence National Laboratory and their plans to move the field of nuclear fusion forward by listening to this podcast from Scientific American where they visited the lab and discuss the future of nuclear fusion.

Let’s cross our fingers though as nuclear fusion may be the key to solving all of our energy problems and could be key in fighting climate change.

Finally, we can talk about what I wanted to talk about all along. The British Chiropractic Association vs. Simon Singh.

Who is the British Chiropractic Association? The British Chiropractic Association is the largest association for chiropractors in the UK and acts as a kind of home base for the profession. They provide much literature and information for their associated chiropractors as well as “encourage and maintain high standards of conduct, practice, education and training within the profession in the UK.”

Who is Simon Singh? Simon Singh is a science writer, author, journalist, TV producer with a background in writing about alternative medicine with his book ‘Trick of Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial‘ which he co-wrote with the world’s first professor of Complementary Medicine, Ezard Ernst. Simon writes for the British newspaper, The Guardian, which is where our story begins.

In April 2008, with it being the annual Chiropractic Awareness Week, Simon Singh posted an article on the Guardian entitled “Beware the spinal trap” addressing his concerns and feelings about chiropractic.  The awareness he promoted was, as you might expect, contrary to the awareness the BCA and alike organizations were going for.

His article was sharp, he pulled no punches in making his case against chiropractic. He is studied in the subject and has quite a repertoire of science at his disposal to make his points plainly and clearly. It starts out lightly with information stating that the premise of chiropractic is poor, moves on to studies that prove how ineffective it is, and rounds it off discussing the dark secret of chiropractic; the deaths caused by chiropractic adjustments.

It’s very clear to anyone that the BCA wouldn’t be happy about this, so it’s no surprise that they responded swiftly. So, like is common the science and medicine communities, they defended theirselves with facts and science, right?

No, the BCA filed a libel case against Simon Singh. Rather than defending theirselves on their own merits, which they cannot, because peer-reviewed scientific literature in favor of chiropractic is little to none, they opted to sue Simon using Britain’s flawed libel laws. Instead of saying Simon is wrong and here is how, they decided to silence him by suing him for defamation. Very telling isn’t it?

The Guardian offered the BCA the opportunity to refute the science in their paper, but they refused, saying their beef was not with the Guardian, but Simon Singh himself. The Guardian stepped back (since the terrible laws mean that either way win or lose, they were going to be spending a lot of money), and Simon prepared for battle.

What part of the article was singled out as defamation?

“This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.” [Beware the spinal tap]

Over a year later, the preliminary hearing of the case was held to determine the meaning of his comments and the article. This preliminary hearing would be a critical blow to Simon as the judge ruled that the article was wrote as fact, and not an opinion piece (which to me it clearly is, it’s not so different from what I write here). This meant that Simon would have to defend his article not as he wrote it, but as someone else interpreted it. Here is what Simon had to say on the subject in his detailed account of the issue.

“In other words, according to this ruling, my article accuses the British Chiropractic Association of deliberate dishonesty in promoting fake treatments as a matter of fact. This is unfortunate for various reasons.

First, although I feel that chiropractors are deluded and reckless, I was not suggesting that they are dishonest.

Second, it is very hard to defend such a meaning – showing that a treatment is not backed by evidence is one thing, but showing what was inside the mind of an association is quite another.”

This put him in a very difficult spot as you can see, which is exactly what the BCA wanted. They simply wanted to bleed him into silence, and intimidate those who would speak out like him. Fortunately for us, and for Simon, he is a tough guy. He decided to go to the court of appeals (who rarely overturn hearings on meaning).

Meanwhile, while Simon was fighting the unreasonable ruling of his case, the skeptical community, besides offering him financial support for his endeavor (which he did not accept), were helping out in their own ways. Skeptics of Britain began filing complaints against chiropractors nationwide after it was discovered that chiropractors could not not make claims that conflict with previous rulings by the Advertising Standards Authority. In a matter of weeks, over 1/4th of the chiropractors in Britain were under investigation, including some of the BCA’s officers.

The BCA, under pressure from their critics to release their evidence for the effectiveness of chiropractic, released a set of 29 studies in which they claimed supported chiropractic. These studies are quickly torn apart by science bloggers worldwide, citing hypocritical analysis by the BCA, cherry picking data, poorly designed studies and ignoring studies against their assertions. Edzard Ernst, co-writer of Simon’s book mentioned above, had this to say about the studies released by the BCA.

“Although the content of the British Chiropractic Association’s list is important, its omissions are perhaps even more so. At least three relevant randomised controlled trials and two systematic reviews are missing from it. Arguably, these are the most rigorous papers in this area, but they fail to show that chiropractic is effective. The omissions are all the more curious as the association apparently knew of these articles.^“

This again shows that the BCA had nothing, and now, rather than just ignoring Simon’s article and continuing on business as usual, they have thousands of skeptics and scientists dogging their every move.

While this is all blowing up in the BCA’s face, Simon had busied himself with the appeal of the preliminary hearing. As long as the initial ruling holds, the BCA have their trump card, and the skeptics and critics have their clear message from the courts.

April 1st of this (rather a cruel day to announce this) year, it was ruled that Simon Singh would be allowed to defend his article as ‘fair comment’, that is to say, his article is his opinion, and not fact.

This left the BCA with nothing. They had no science to back up their case, Simon would be able to defend his case as his opinion, using the scientific data available to back up that opinion. Not to be one’s to bow out gracefully, the BCA say they intend to bill Simon Singh for the time and money spent hiring additional people dealing with the headache caused by all of the complaints levied at their constituents by the bloggers I mentioned above. Very classy.

However, on April 15th the BCA dropped it’s libel case against Simon Singh.

Although the defense was very costly to Simon, it has done a lot. First and foremost it has put a spotlight on Britain’s poor libel laws, but more importantly to me, it showed how impactful the skeptical community can be. From day one they showed their support for Simon and worked alongside of him to combat the BCA’s intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy.

It is a great story that I am happy to share with anyone who wants to read it. It’s a huge message to skeptics and pseudoscience lovers everywhere. The truth will set you free.

I’d like to close with the close of Simon’s article which was the beginning of all this hubbub, and is the crux of why skepticism and rationality is so important.

“Bearing all of this in mind, I will leave you with one message for Chiropractic Awareness Week – if spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.”

When we last left this discussion, it was on the point of saying how often chiropractic clashes with mainstream science and medicine, and how that is bad. Why do they clash so frequently though? Lets investigate the basics of chiropractic and see for ourselves.

Subluxations (misalignment of vertebrae) disrupt the flow of the body’s Innate Intelligence causing illness. Chiropractors realign the vertebrae to fix this disruption.

First, the subluxation.

In medical definitive terms, a subluxation is a partial dislocation of a joint. A luxation therefore, being a full joint dislocation.

Chiropractic subluxation definition:

A lesion or dysfunction in a joint or motion segment in which alignment, movement integrity and/or physiological function are altered, although contact between joint surfaces remains intact. It is essentially a functional entity, which may influence biomechanical and neural integrity.

Chiropractic definition is much wider because, conveniently for them, everyone suffers from subluxations. It’s part of their sales pitch. This sentence appears on thousands and thousands of chiropractic websites.

“Subluxations are so common that they can be considered an epidemic-nearly everyone has them.”

Everyone having subluxations is quite frightening, particularly if we look at medical definition of it.

Now take into account that chiropractors deal with vertebrae and we’ve got a very scary scenario. Are my vertebrae really that damaged or out of alignment? Well, no.

That is why the chiropractic definition is so wide and vague.  Chiropractic subluxations aren’t even detectable on x-ray, even though it is common practice to x-ray a patient. Only a trained chiropractor can diagnose your subluxations.

It is very convenient for them that way. So if they can’t visually see them in an x-ray, how do they diagnose them?

Well it’s hard to say. It seems to be an industry secret. There are pages online describing how the diagnoses happen, but they are very vague and not very informative and mostly deal with chiropractors having a trained touch. Conveniently, everyone has subluxations, and those subluxations are only diagnosable by a select number of people.

What about the Innate Intelligence?

This is where I think things kind of go off the rails completely. Innate Intelligence is the key part of chiropractic theory, as it is what the subluxations supposedly disrupt. When creating chiropractic, Palmer dipped into his knowledge of pseudoscience and metaphysical spiritual beliefs to put together his idea of Innate Intelligence. Chiropractors claim that Innate Intelligence is a kind of life force that is responsible for the organization, maintenance and healing of the body. It is present in all living things and is entirely pseudoscience.

The intelligence we’re talking about is the “knowledge” that every living entity is born with, and which allows it to adapt to the environment in order to survive. If you put a plant on a window sill, in a day or so it will have turned its leaves to face the light. Turn the plant around and in another day or so, it again will have turned its leaves to receive the light it needs to maintain its normal functions. [link]

Ignoring the fact that there is a recognized and understood mechanic for the above described, photoprediodism, chiropractic’s use of this philosophy allows everything that is wrong to be theirs to treat. Such an umbrella term like Innate Intelligence allows every mechanism of the body, discovered otherwise to fit the description. This is why chiropractors claim to be able to treat everything from back pain to attention deficit disorder. This cornerstone of chiropractic beliefs also keeps it far away from the world of science where evolution, and ideas such as homeostasis and germ theory have much more elegant, testable explanations.

A traditional doctor will make a diagnosis and can, and will, treat very specific things related to your injury, disease, infection or what have you. A chiropractor just has to manipulate your spine to fix the subluxation and let the Innate Intelligence flow again.

What about their treatment, their vertebrae adjustments?

Chiropractors adjust the vertebrae to correct the subluxation allowing the Innate Intelligence to flow freely once again. They fix these subluxations using minimal force.

Chiropractors select the technique which will most effectively correct subluxations with a minimum of force. The “art” of adjusting requires skill and training rather than brute strength.

That is rather good, I can’t imagine anyone thinking that putting tons of pressure on one’s spine is ever a good thing. Dr. Stephen Novella of Science Based Medicine agrees.

A study carried out by Edmund Crelin, Ph.D. investigated the amount of force necessary to displace vertebral bones of the spine in order to cause impingement of a spinal nerve. The study was carried out on six corpses within 8 hours after death. His conclusion was that the amount of force necessary to actually displace the vertebra was great enough to break the spine, arguing strongly that chiropractic manipulation cannot significantly affect spinal alignment, and that misaligned spines do not caused pinched nerves (Crelin, 1973).

Well that does not sound good. In essence chiropractors methods and theories are basically wrong scientifically. The amount of force required to cause a spinal subluxation is enormous and dangerous, as is the force to manually adjust said subluxations. That hasn’t stopped them though, and as long as people continue to visit chiropractic offices, or until laws and regulations are passed, nothing will stop them.

Hopefully it is a little more clear now why chiropractic is complete nonsense. I haven’t done a very comprehensive or bullet proof examination, but there is a lot of information out there to read if you’re curious. Websites such as Chirobase and Science Based Medicine have tons of information about chiropractic and the science against it. Next time I will dive into the issue of the British Chiropractic Association vs. Simon Singh which will hopefully be much easier to digest now that we have the neccesary background information.

Until next time,