Collide-a-scape

In yesterday’s NYT, I learned that Alan Alda has taught scientists how to use improvisational acting techniques so they can be better communicators.

Alda explains:

The idea is you can’t really communicate ideas unless you know what’s going on in the other person’s mind.

This is not the Donald Duck I grew up with! Oh, lordy, Carl Zimmer peels back the curtain on freaky duck sex. And not just the evolutionary scoop. He’s got slow motion video, too. All set up by this killer lede:

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises.

Great, next time I’m in the Magic Kingdom, I’m keeping Donald and Daisy away from the kids.

During George W. Bush’s two terms, environmentalists and archaeologists complained (with justification) that the oil & gas industry was allowed to run roughshod over Western public lands. I wrote a bunch about this for numerous magazines, from Audubon and Mother Jones to High Country News and Archaeology.

The same question arose in all these stories: can natural gas development coexist harmoniously with the preservation of scenic, environmental and cultural resources? Well, anyone who followed this issue during W’s era would obviously answer no, and that’s because the deck was stacked in favor of the oil & gas industry. Drilling permits were handed out like M & M’s. The two main overseers of Western public lands, the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service, exerted negligible regulatory oversight, with terrible consequences for wildlife, air quality, and ancient archaeology. There was no “multiple use” balance at all. One use took precedent over all others: gas drilling.

So now we have a new Administration that is promoting a different form of energy development. And guess what? That same question is popping up again, as this NYT story illustrates. But this time, the conflict is not over drilling rigs, but over whether solar and wind farms can coexist in spectacular places like the Mojave desert. As Todd Woody writes in his Times story, this latest debate over multiple use on public lands

encapsulates a rising tension between two goals held by environmental groups: preservation of wild lands and ambitious efforts to combat global warming.

Not only is the desert land some of the sunniest in the country, and thus suitable for large-scale power production, it is also some of the most scenic territory in the West. The Mojave lands have sweeping vistas of an ancient landscape that is home to desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, fringe-toed lizards and other rare animals and plants.

This new debate is likely to be fractious in the environmental community, pitting climate change advocates against preservationists.  There will also be rich doses of irony, courtesy of Cape wind opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is upset that Senator Diane Feinstein has kept renewable energy projects from going forward in areas of the Mojave desert that are slated to become National Monuments. Kennedy indignantly tells the Times:

This is arguably the best solar land in the world, and Senator Feinstein shouldn’t be allowed to take this land off the table without a proper and scientific environmental review.

You have to admire his chutzpa.

In the way this issue is now playing out–at least with respect to the Mojave lands–there are some interesting parallels beween the Bush Administation’s energy policy by executive decree and Senator Feinstein’s legislative fiat powers. As the Times notes:

Mrs. Feinstein heads the Senate subcommittee that oversees the budget of the Interior Department, giving her substantial clout over that agency, which manages the government’s landholdings. Her intervention in the Mojave means it will be more difficult for California utilities to achieve a goal, set by the state, of obtaining a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020; projects in the monument area could have supplied a substantial portion of that power.

It’ll be interesting to see how environmental magazines cover this, including the one I worked at for nearly ten years, until 2008. Climate change is  the big environmental issue of our time; it really has overtaken all other issues, especially in the larger national debate. So it stands to reason that a headlong clash between competing environmental goals will provide much fodder for continuing coverage by environmental journalists.

As I said, we’ll see.

The reinvention of journalism in the digital age is happening, let there be no mistake about that. Yet, despite the promise of crowdsourcing, hyperlocals and even the Huffington Poacher, it’s not as if anyone has figured out how to make newspaper reporting as we know it economically viable on the web. Hence the unending stream of buyouts, closures of foreign bureaus and elimination of news beats.

I recognize that the old print edifice is decayed and anachronistic. Yes, we waited too long to replace it. So now that it is collapsing, does this mean journalism as we know it is disappearing? Well, for some fields, this appears to be the case, as a recent discussion on the state of science journalism indicates. But some fields are also finding welcome mats laid out at other edifices, such as those provided by think tanks.

I find this intriguing, though hardly ideal. But if professional journalistic standards can be transferred over, then perhaps think tanks can help ease the print to digital transition.

The LA Times has an amusing profile on Arianna Huffington, in which she said this howler:

Our site is not built around the freebie.

In the next breath, she also said this, apparently with a straight face:

Our site is built around very hard-working editors and reporters who do all the curating and aggregating and original content.

I don’t have a problem with the Huffington Post being a link farm for poached journalism. (I do have a problem with it being a prominent forum for anti-vaccine crusaders like Jim Carrey and Bill Maher. Sure, let them publish their views, just put something up there that balances out their nuttiness. That’s where those “hardworking editors” come in.) But for Huffington to claim that her site is not built on the “freebie” is sheer chutzpa.

In a short, snappy video interview with Nature, Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider veers between hope, resignation, and realism. He makes a good case for what can be salvaged from Copenhagen, and why that matters. Along those lines, he offers this clever twist on an over-used phrase:

We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the mediocre.

In other Copenhagen news, I see there’s been some leakage that Bill McKibben calls a “smoking gun. Speaking to what’s revealed in the leaked document, McKibben is quoted at Dot Earth:

There’s a parade of world leaders standing up here today and speaking on and on and on about proposals that’ll keep us below 2 degrees and pretending that the stuff on the table has any hope of doing that.And the U.N. itself knows that it’s going to go at least 50 percent hotter than they’re pretending.

So if he’s right, that got me thinking: forget about all the sideshows outside, wouldn’t it be great if there was an actual reality show about the negotiations. It might not be as entertaining as the Osbornes, but it sure would be illuminating.

In recent years, as newspapers have severely downsized and/or gone under, much of the concern has focused on investigative reporting. But the call to action has been taken up by numerous foundations and individual donors, who have helped launch well-funded and well-staffed new media outlets, such as Pro Publica.

There appears to be no such equivalent call to action for science journalism. As NYT science writer Natalie Angier said recently to Poynter about her profession:

It’s basically going out of existence.

To which Tom Yulsman dryly notes,

This isn’t exactly breaking news.

And which leads me to wonder again why science journalists aren’t rising to the challenge and making a case for their own Pro Publica’s. Let’s not sit around and bemoan what’s lost. The denuded newspaper landscape is going to become more barren and forlorn in years to come. Magazines like Discover and Scientific American can only plug so many holes, and in any case, they are a different beast than a newspaper, which traditionally has provided regular “beat” coverage of science.

So there’s this tremendous need for new outlets to spawn a new era of science journalism. Yet, I’m not aware of any pioneering new media initiatives that are filling the science journalism vacuum, much less a groundswell of concern for the profession.

In that same Poynter article, Mariette DiChristina, Scientific American’s editor-in-chief, says:

It behooves us in science journalism to make it clear to readers why science matters to them.

Absolutely, but if science journalism as a “beat” is withering because of continuing newspaper cutbacks, which is obviously the case, then it also behooves science journalists to convince funders and other institutions (such as universities) to help rescusitate it–on the web.

There’s an interesting exchange over at The Oil Drum about the legacy of President Carter’s infamous 1977 energy speech. For my money, this commenter (who also posts essays at The Oil Drum), is spot on:

It is almost impossible to quantify the damage that this one speech did to the very real need for a modern restructuring of the advanced world’s energy systems. Such is the terrible damage caused by false alarm. To this day, that time period (the late 1970’s), that speech (the Carter energy speech) and that period of press hysteria has ingrained into my mind the absolute need to be cautious about making or accepting hysterical pronouncements of “we are running out of oil”, “by the year XXXX we will consume more oil than we can produce {you actually heard this said in the 1970’s, but of course on a worldwide basis it is a statistical impossibility) and all such claims that the end is nigh.

There can be nothing more damaging, NOTHING, than false alarm. It destroys for decades the credibility of the perhaps well intentioned campaigners issuing the warning, it destroys support for the cause (whatever cause it may be) among the most able and dedicated potential recruits to the cause, it gives the enemies of the cause needed ammunition to rip apart the cause on the sword of it’s own words.

I have always believed, and still do, that Jimmy Carter was and is one of the most honorable politicians in American hitory, one of the few men of absolute conviction and decency to ever become President of The United States of America.

I also believe that the speech he gave on energy on the fateful day was one of the most damaging speeches ever given, to the future of the United States, to the future of rational planned transition to a modern energy system, and by extension, to the future health and prosperity of the world.

Jimmy Carter armed the enemies of modern energy, he destroyed the credibility of those who knew the need for change and modernization was real and imperative, and he drove a generation away from taking seriously one of the most serious issues of our era. No enemy could have done as much damage to the cause of a real humane transition away from our enslavement to fossil fuel as this friend of the cause Jimmy Carter did by way of a poorly researched, poorly thought out false alarm. His hysteria helped waste a third of a century.

Any cautionary lessons here for climate catastrophists? Will people be making similar observations about the climate crisis in thirty years?

I’m not a fan of cross-posts, because it muddies the blog waters. So when environmental ethicist Ben Hale guest blogs for the Wonk room at the Center for American Progress  (CAP) or he’s cross-posting from Climate Progress to his own site, I have to wonder if this is an implicit endorsement of CAP’s views on climate policy, which then colors how I read Ben’s posts.

Ditto for Roger Pielke Jr., when his posts get cross-posted over at The Breakthrough blog, but at least Roger has an actual affiliation with Breakthrough. And he’s not guest blogging for them, so far as I can tell. They just take the posts they like from Roger on occasion and slap them up on their site.

So Is Ben Hale a proxy blogger for CAP, enlisted to advance their views? I don’t think so. But then I read something like this from Ben, about why Copenhagen is important:

Something is happening, even if laws emerging from Copenhagen have few teeth. When a legally-empowered representative of a nation commits that nation to doing something, that legally-empowered representative isn’t simply performing, but in performing is simultaneously forging that commitment. And that’s a big deal.

And so I read this and wonder, is Ben drinking the CAP water? He might as well be cross-posting that over to Joe Romm’s site too. Because that’s the kind of ethereal rationale for the significance of Copenhagen you’re likely to read over at Climate Progress. Never mind reality, it’s the symbolism that counts. We’re making progress!

Ben, that perception thing cuts both ways, you know.

Should the Washington Post’s value as a newspaper be measured solely by the content on it’s op-ed pages? This seems to be the yardstick that Tim Lambert, a widely read climate blogger, uses in a current post, titled,

The Washington Post can’t go out of business fast enough

Now why would he wish that? Well, he’s pissed off that the Post published Sarah Palin’s ridiculous commentary on “climategate” and continues to publish George Will’s whacky opining on global warming.

Let me be clear: it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize Palin and Will, but I have to confess, I don’t understood all the anger and scorn heaped on the Post for providing them with a forum. These are opinion columns we’re talking about here, not news stories or even offical newspaper editorials.

And opinion columns, by their nature, are highly subjective, highly biased, and yes, can be hugely misleading. If you were a liberal during William Safire’s decades as a NYT columnist, you were probably often infuriated by what you read. But I don’t recall anyone wishing the Times went belly up because Safire had wrote yet another whopper of a column on the Democrats.

To put it another way, as one commenter to Lambert points out:

Opinion pieces are allowed to be lacking in factual accuracy; most readers are probably aware of this.

And most readers are also “probably aware” of the political and/or ideological orientation of op-ed columnists. That frame of reference is how most of us come to any column by well known pundits or politicians. So we process opinion columns differently than we do news stories. We tend to think that a news story is presenting information in a more evenhanded manner than an op-ed column. Yet I think the critics who yell foul over Will and Palin are are not making this distinction. They would have a better case with someone like Lou Dobbs, who combined news and opinion at CNN in a way that gave biased commentary the veneer of being supported by factual reporting.  There’s no such veneer with Will and Palin.

Anyway, why on earth would Lambert be willing to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, when the WaPo provides valuable climate reporting from the likes of Juliet Eilperin and perspective from the Capital Weather Gang’s Andrew Freedman? Tim, I just don’t get the wholescale dismissal of an entire newspaper because you think the Post shouldn’t publish certain viewpoints, no matter how skewed they may be.