Collide-a-scape

As reported in Nature, two leading ecologists are calling on their colleagues to publish negative study results. Richard Hobbs, a plant biologist and the editor-in-chief of the journal Restoration Ecology, explained to Nature:

The subject of what constitutes ’success’ in restoration has been actively debated over the last few years, but it is only recently that a few people have discussed the merit of examining ‘failure’ as well.

To that end, Hobbs has just added a new section in Restoration Ecology called “Set-backs and Surprises.”

As discussed in the Nature article, a similar plea to shine a light on failures was made by ecologist Andrew Knight, in a recent letter to the journal Conservation Biology:

The lack of publication is a massive problem in conservation. Firstly, it reflects the fact that the vast majority of researchers are focused on publishing papers as opposed to ‘doing’ conservation. Secondly, as a result of the first point, we have bred several generations of conservation biologists who know absolutely nothing about implementing action.

That can’t be good.

On a practical level, though, how would highlighting research failures help make better conservation policy in, in say, the halls of Congress, or in federal agencies?

David Bruggeman at Prometheus suggests that scientists should not worry:

While policymakers are often focused more on the successes than what didn’t work, they do respond to lessons learned.

Per that new “miscellaneous” item attached to the recent credit card bill, Carl Hiaasen is painfully hilarious:

Like many other Americans, every time I take my family to a national park I find myself thinking: Wow! If I only had a gun . . .

The whole column is a must-read.

Earlier this week, Curtis Brainard at CJR’s The Observatory wrote an excellent appraisal of the cacophonous debate over the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Brainard neatly summarized the two contradictory narratives and the main protagonists.

To help navigate what Andy Revkin recently called “the fog of climate policy,” Brainard suggests that newspaper editorial boards should be weighing in on the Waxman-Markey bill (only a handful have thus far):

These editorials are incredibly valuable to readers trying to make sense of the myriad voices ringing out on the news pages.

I’m not so sure that’s the best way. After all, most editoral pages have a particular ideological slant. I’d argue that more independent thought and less ideology would better help people reach an informed decision.

Would climate change have greater urgency in the public mind if we started talking more about adaptation? I realize many climate advocates fear that such a discussion is a slippery slope to non-action.

But it needn’t be. In fact, I believe that more stories and chatter about the growing humanitarian concerns of near-term climate change fallout would help make climate change less abstract to people.  That said, it seems the lines of debate are already forming somewhere between this story from Reuters:

Climate change kills about 315,000 people a year through hunger, sickness and weather disasters, and the annual death toll is expected to rise to half a million by 2030, a report said on Friday.

And this UN dispatch from Mozambique:

A detailed study of the effects of climate change on Mozambique has confirmed what many experts feared: unless immediate action is taken, the country will be overwhelmed by the impacts of cyclones, floods, droughts and disease outbreaks.

There are obvious problems with both storylines. The former is based on a new report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, which in today’s NYT, Roger Pielke Jr. calls a “methodological embarrasment.”  At Prometheus, Pielke expands on why he believes the report will end up being counterproductive. In short, he asserts:

The report will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed.

As for the Mozambique story, I wonder how it will be possible to distinguish between natural weather disasters and those caused by climate change. When is a cyclone or drought triggered by climate change and when is it a naturally ocurring event?

As for global warming-induced disease outbreaks, that is a totally legitimate concern. As a recent lancet editorial pointed out,

there is a massive gap in information, an astonishing lack of knowledge about how we should respond to the negative health effects of climate change.

Somehow, I doubt the new report from the Global Humanitarian Forum is what Lancet had in mind. In the absence of solid data and better assessment, it seems the simplistic disaster storyline will prevail for some time.

Is is possible to judge a book by its title?

Roger Pielke, Jr. believes so. But he’s making much ado of nothing in this post, which Marc Morano has, ironically, turned into a splashy and hugely misleading headline on Climate Depot.

Here’s the quick background: at Seed magazine, Michael Mann participated in a forum on climate change “framing,” in which he explained the reasoning behind the title of a recent book he co-authored, called “Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming.” As Mann freely admits:

The purists among my colleagues would rightly point out that the potential future climate changes we describe, are, technically speaking, projections rather than predictions because the climate models are driven by hypothetical pathways of future fossil fuel burning (i.e. conceivable but not predicted futures). But Dire Projections doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. And it doesn’t convey — in the common vernacular — what the models indicate: Climate change could pose a very real threat to society and the environment. In this case, use of the more technically “correct” term is actually less likely to convey the key implications to a lay audience.

Now remember, we’re talking about the title of book–not the content. As with newspaper, magazine, and yes, blog post headlines, there is a certain amount of creative license that is deemed appropriate for book titles. (That doesn’t mean a book about apples should be called oranges.) Headlines and book titles need not be “technically accurate,” but they do need to be catchy to grab roving eyes.

Yet Pielke seems to believe that Mann’s rationale for his book title exposes a major transgression:

Penn State climatologist Michael Mann explains why it was necessary to misrepresent what the IPCC does on the cover of his co-authored book…As one of those “purists” who would like to receive information that is technically “correct” I probably can judge that book by its cover.

That would be a mistake, just as it would be a mistake to judge a newspaper story solely by its headline. If you’re still not convinced, just ask any reporter.

Yeah, the catastrophe card is played by both sides, that’s for sure.

The indispensable one, boxed into a corner by Roger Pielke, Jr., and  The Breakthrough Institute, does something rare:

Yes, my thinking on rip-offsets has evolved, primarily because I have spent the last few months talking to leading experts, domestic and international, including the chief climate negotiator for a major European country.

As one reader to Climate Progress noted,

‘Evolved’ is an interesting way of putting it.

This observation on human behavior by a park ranger is something to think about next year at Yosemite or Yellowstone, when guns in national parks potentially become as ubiquitous as water bottles:

People don’t leave their problems at home when they go to recreate.

One archaeologist has a bold plan to take back his profession from Hollywood and The History Channel:

The ghost of Indy is hard to stamp out. Everywhere archaeologists gather, we complain about how archaeology is portrayed in pop culture: it’s sensationalistic, cheesy, misleading, schlocky! It gives people the wrong impression of what archaeology is.

This last existential verb is the source of our trouble. We archaeologists know what archaeology is, and refuse to let anyone define it except us. But the cat has always been out of the bag: archaeology has cast a giant shadow on the public imagination from the moment it first emerged as a profession. And the nature of shadows is to distort, and shift, and show us what we want to see. On that note, I offer you two propositions about the discipline.

1) In the popular imagination, archaeology is a form of science fiction.
2) Archaeologists should embrace this, and start writing science fiction that promotes their vision of the past and agenda for the present.

I don’t imagine this idea will go over well with archaeologists but the author makes a compelling case that should at least give some scientists a better appreciation of the relationship between pop culture and history.

Last summer, Bill McKibben argued in Orion magazine that global warming is

essentially a literary problem. A technological and scientific challenge, yes; an economic quandary, yes; a political dilemma, surely. But centrally? A crisis in metaphor, in analogy, in understanding. We haven’t come up with words big enough to communicate the magnitude of what we’re doing.

That’s about to change, but perhaps not exactly as McKibben envisioned. Via Garry Peterson at Resilience, I learn that climate change is now the subject of compelling theater in London.

However, as Robin McKie at The Observer recently noted, it is not climate change itself in the new play that is “riveting stuff,” but rather “the human and cultural reaction to it.”

That kind of drama, as opposed to typical Hollywood fare, or a clever verbal metaphor, allows people to process global warming on a human level. In a slow-moving crisis such as climate change, where the worst consequences are thought to be decades away, perhaps such artistic drama will prove the best impetus for collective action.