Hi, I’m teofilo.  As Keith mentioned earlier, I will be guest-blogging for him this week.  As he also mentioned, I am currently a graduate student in urban planning (at Rutgers) and have also worked seasonally at Chaco Canyon.  People often see that combination as rather incongruous, but I think it actually makes a lot of sense, and part of what I’ll be doing here this week is trying to show how the two go together.  I’ll especially be focusing on the concept of societal collapse, which is something that gets discussed a lot in both archaeology and planning, at least in certain circles.  Chaco has often been drawn into these discussions as an example of collapse in the archaeological record that can be useful as a cautionary example in dealing with current challenges such as climate change.  That’s reasonable enough, but I think there are some pretty serious problems with the ways some people have tried to bring Chaco into the modern collapse/sustainability conversation.  I’ll be discussing that in more detail in the days to come.

I do have my own blog, Gambler’s House, which focuses on Chaco but also discusses Southwestern archaeology more generally along with a wide variety of related subjects.  Most of the posts I do there are rather different from the sort of thing I’ll be doing here, so I doubt I’ll be doing much cross-posting this week, but if you’re interested in this stuff there’s plenty more to see over there.

Anyway, I’m glad to be here, and I thank Keith for the opportunity to expand my horizons a bit and engage with a different sort of audience than I’m used to.  It should be an interesting week.

Maybe I’m whistling Dixie with this modest attempt to bridge the climate divide. Consider what Nicholas Kristof wrote last year, in an op-ed column titled, The Daily Me:

there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

What greater proof than most climate blogs. And if you disagree, just spend a few moments reading the comment threads at WUWT and Climate Progress, two of the most popular blogs on opposite ends of the climate spectrum. The question I explored with Bart Verheggen and Lucia Liljegren in Part 2 of our conversation (here’s Part 1) was why their own blogs didn’t attract the same huge readership as WUWT and Climate Progress.

After all, if we want to ratchet down the hyperbole and partisanship in the climate debate, shouldn’t we be paying greater attention to bloggers like Lucia and Bart, both who write in a civil tone and often dive deep into the vexing subtleties of climate science issues? If we paid more attention to them, wouldn’t that help elevate the public discussion?

Here’s the second and final part of our conversation.

Keith: Why does the climate debate seem so antagonistic in the blogosphere? Why isn’t there more civil, nuanced dialogue?

Bart: I think the blogosphere is not made for nuance. It draws in people who are more opinionated, sometimes to the point of their opinions being set in stone. Of course the internet is very anonymous. The more extreme commentators are very anonymous. That’s another thing.

Lucia: Bart, what percentage of your commenters do you think are anonymous? I’m sure a lot of mine are.

Bart: Maybe a third are anonymous or pseudonymous. I’m not sure.

Lucia: I’m not sure either. Mine might be a third, too.

Keith: How can we then raise the level of debate, given that the extremes on both sides seem so strident, in part because of anonymity?

Bart: Yeah, that’s a tricky one.

Lucia: One of the problems with seeking a way to raise the debate is also the question of…if someone becomes more moderate and nuanced, will they just lose all their audience. It’s not as if I’m thinking, I want to have audience, so I’m going to write posts with titles like ‘Godwin’s Law Alert: Monckton cries “Goebbelian”‘ or “Joe Romm offers a (lame) bet!”. I write those because I think the titles are appropriate.

Bart: Exactly. And I’ve seen that with blogs—and I’ve noticed myself—that the things that get most viewers and most discussions are the posts that are a bit more polarizing and perhaps even playing a little on another person. Those are the posts that get the most exposure. I think it was some well known climate blogger who wrote once, what’s the point of a blog, if you don’t write in a little bit of a sharp tone, or something like that. Blogs are kind of made to put a sharp edge on your words. Like who’s going to read something with a lot of nuance?

Keith: But I think Andy Revkin is fairly nuanced at Dot Earth. He seems to be trying to facilitate serious discussion. And he’s got quite an audience. Of course he’s got the NY Times imprint, too. But even if you took Andy away from the Times, don’t you think he’d still have a good audience?

Lucia: Well, there is something in the blogoshphere, that once you have critical mass, you won’t lose your readership…but if Andy Revkin were reincarnated as somebody else,with no reputation, and he’s not from the NY times and started a blog like that, he might very well have great difficulty attracting a large audience. You’d like to think that that’s not true, but it is unfortunately the case that it is extremely difficult for people to start a blog, be nuanced, write long posts and get lots of people coming to the blog.

Keith: I wonder to what extent the blog format exacerbates ill will and misunderstanding between people. Because we process written communication differently than we do the kind of real-time conversation we’re having now.

Bart: I think that’s true, because I sometimes see examples [on blogs] where I see people reacting to someone else and I think to myself, hey, you’re reading something into it that the other person didn’t necessarily mean, or your’re prejudging. The blog format is definitely very conducive to blowing those things out of proportion and misunderstanding each other.

Keith: Recently Judith Curry suggested something that I found intriguing:

Maybe we should try a “blog of bloggers” whereby the blog owners from across the spectrum participate in a dialogue, perhaps with a few invited guests, and then the dialogue can be continued also at the individual blogs with the commenters. The polarization will be difficult to overcome, but I think with the waning of climategate that the blogging community is looking for something new, maybe this is a fertile time for cross-camp communications.

What do you both think of that?

Bart: I thought it was a great idea when I read it.

Lucia: I thought it was a great idea, too. Now we just have to figure out how to do it. (laughs). How would we implement it? That’s not to say it can’t be done. I think it would be a useful thing.

**ENDNOTE**

I’d like to hear from readers on Judith Curry’s “blog of bloggers” idea. Is such a thing even viable? Additionally, please offer suggestions on how to make the bloggy climate debate more civil and constructive.

Are traditional journalists who take a vow of objectivity walking around like libido-suppressed priests? Except that reporters struggle to keep a lid on their opinions? Here’s Matt Welch, a former UPI reporter, on the Helen Thomas eruption:

I am tempted to feel bad for an 89-year-old lady getting caught in what might be passed off as a senior moment, but there’s no reason to believe that her statement and tone don’t reflect her basic views.

They also, I believe, reflect an interesting, under-appreciated, and ultimately impermanent media phenomenon: The longer someone is submerged in what they and their organizations regard as traditional “straight” reporting, the more gruesome the results are when the gloves come off.

Welch’s hypothesis is worth considering in the blog age, in which “straight” mainstream reporters are increasingly shedding their neutrality belt. While I think he’s on to something, I also think his journalistic psychoanalysis goes a bit too far:

Straight reporters have been taught for six decades to submerge or even smother their political and philosophical views in the workplace. Like all varieties of censorship, this process creates resentment and distortion. Whatever it is that you feel prevented from saying, you will be more likely to scream once given the chance.

As for myself, this blog does serve as both my shingle on the web and a platform for expression. But mostly I do it to keep myself intellectually engaged in a variety of topics that interest me. Not to vent my spleen. I tend to have long deadlines as a freelance magazine writer. And I usually teach one course every fall and spring semester at NYU. So this blog is an outlet that allows me to participate in the daily conversation.

On that note, I’m aiming to serve up less opinion and instead use the space more as a forum for those who have varying (and informed) opinions on the subjects that interest me, like climate change and sustainability. I’ve been experimenting along those lines the last few months and will contintinue to do so.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to foster constructive dialogue that is inclusive and welcoming of diverse perspectives, please do share them in the comments. Over the next few days, you’ll notice some changes in the site, including a comment policy that will set out civility guidelines. And there are great exchanges coming up between some very smart people, so stay tuned.

I’m ambivalent about the value of blog comments. Part of me loves Andrew Sullivan’s blog because he spares us from having to wade through the bushels of crap he undoubtedly receives– though Sullivan often highlights and edits the best of his reader emails in a way that provides excellent counter-perspective to a particular topic or thread.

The other part of me enjoys reading comments at Dot Earth, Real Climate, or academic sites, such as Savage Minds (even though I’ve lately been critical of them), because the comments are generally intelligent.

But at so many blogs the majority of comments are either 1) inane, 2) rah, rah, 3) churlish. They add little value to the original post. They don’t foster constructive conversation.

And I haven’t even started in about comments to newspaper stories. Troll around there for a few minutes and you’re bound to drown in a cesspool of nasty bile. It’s not the best face of humanity.

Still, as a journalist, I mine blog comments the way I mine policy papers, journals, goverment docs. There’s always buried jewels for the taking. And ocassionally, revealing debates break out in a comment thread that sometimes take on a life of their own. There’s value in that.

For anyone interested in how to become a quality commenter, this post is worth a read.

Every penny ante blogger with big dreams latched on to this piece in the WSJ a few weeks ago, specifically this line:

It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.

Forget it. Clay Shirky, who has major cred, writes that the WSJ piece is “worthless as a guide to the economics of blogging.”

Can any of you Joe “catastrophe” Romm loyalists explain the purpose of the Tom Friedman seal of approval at the top of Climate Progress? I mean, all of you regular Rommians already know how “indispensable”  the blog is, right? Or is the Friedman liplock meant for new tourists? Is that supposed to cinch the deal for them?

Is this a common practice in blogland, to prominently billboard a positive review right under the header? It feels like something you’d see in movie ads, or on the back of book covers.

And no, I’m not jealous. Honestly. I’m way too new at this. I’m happy when I see a few new RSS subscribers each week. (I seem to have lost so many of you right after I dissed Ed Abbey. Come back. It’s not my fault Abbey was a racist misanthrope.)

Anyway, Joe, no worries, I’ll keep coming back for the infotainment. Nobody does primal screeds like you.

I’ve been chewing over this column by Nicholas Kristof since yesterday. Of course, he’s not the first to observe the central paradox of our revolutionary new medium: it gives us infinitely more and varied perspectives, yet it also abets increasingly polarized debate.

Kristof, in ruing the latter, gets the big picture right. But in making his argument he conflates two very different problems associated with digital media. He writes:

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

That is certainly true. But it’s important to distinguish between online news and opinion. They are two different avenues of the web. If our current web habits hold, then, yes, they both lead down tunnels of our own making, but they are still two very different tunnels.

Now I will state outright: that the internet gives us more news outlets to choose from is inarguably a good thing. The problem, however, is in how we consume this digital news. A commenter on Kristof’s blog astutely pointed this out:

One of the great pleasures of my day is the daily ritual of reading newspapers vitually cover to cover. I read everything, or at the very least scan articles about topics in which I really have little interest. While my adult children tell me they get the same news online, I know that is not true. They get little blips of information; they don’t click on anything beyond their immediate interests; they seldom read the kind of long investigative reports that can be found in world class newspapers.

Now that’s an entirely different problem than the one Kristof next associates with blogs. He writes:

there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

But this is not really the fault of blogs; that we gravitate to our own echo chambers is a commentary itself on human nature.

The ramifications for healthy public debate–be it on global warming, stem cell research, or a Presidential election–are important to consider, especially as we complete the transition from print to a digital world.