Arquivo mensal: maio 2011

>On Birth Certificates, Climate Risk and an Inconvenient Mind (N.Y. Times, Dot Earth Blog)

ciência, clima, ideologia, Incerteza, linguagem, meteorologia, mudança climática, opinião pública, previsão, psicologia, retórica

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April 28, 2011, 9:23 AM
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

As Donald Trump tries to milk a last bit of publicity out of the failed “birther” challenge to President Obama, it’s worth reading a fresh take by an Australian psychologist on the deep roots of denial in people with fundamentalist passions of whatever stripe. Here’s an excerpt:

[I]deology trumps facts.
And it doesn’t matter what the ideology is, whether socialism, any brand of fundamentalist religion, or free-market extremism. The psychological literature shows quite consistently that a threat to one’s worldview is more than likely met by a dismissal of facts, however strong the evidence. Indeed, the stronger the evidence, the greater the threat — and hence the greater the denial.
In its own bizarre way, then, the rising noise level of climate denial provides further evidence that global warming resulting from human CO2 emissions is indeed a fact, however inconvenient it may be. Read the rest.
The piece, published today on the Australian news blog The Drum, is byStephan Lewandowsky of the School of Psychology at the University of Western Australia.
Of course, just being aware that ideology can deeply skew how people filter facts and respond to risks begs the question of how to make progress in the face of the wide societal divisions this pattern creates.
It’s easy to forget that there’s been plenty of climate denial to go around. It took a decade for those seeking a rising price on carbon dioxide emissions as a means to transform American and global energy norms to realize that a price sufficient to drive the change was a political impossibility.
As a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found, even when greenhouse-gas emissions caps were put in place, trade with unregulated countries simply shifted the brunt of the emissions elsewhere.
When he was Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair put it this way in 2005: “The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge.”
My choice, of course, is to attack the two-pronged energy challenge the world faces with a sustained energy quest, nudged and nurtured from the top but mainly fostered from the ground up.
And I’m aware I still suffer from a hint of “scientism,” even “rational optimism,” in expecting that this argument can catch on, but so be it.
10:11 a.m. | Updated For much more on the behavioral factors that shape the human struggle over climate policy, I encourage you to explore “Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life,” a new book by Kari Marie Norgaard, a sociologist who has just moved from Whitman College to the University of Oregon.
Robert Brulle of Drexel University brought the book to my attention several months ago, and I invited him to do a Dot Earth “Book Report,” to kick off a discussion of Norgaard’s insights, which emerge from years of research she conducted on climate attitudes in a rural community in western Norway. (I’d first heard of of Norgaard’s research while reporting my 2007 article on behavior and climate risk.)
(I also encourage you to read the review in the journal Nature Climate Changeby Mike Hulme, a professor of climate at the University of East Anglia and the author of “Why We Disagree about Climate Change.”)
Here’s Brulle’s reaction to Norgaard’s book:
As a sociologist and longtime student of human responses to environmental problems, I’ve seen reams of analysis come and go on why we get some things right and some very wrong. A new book by Kari Norgaard has done the best job yet of cutting to the core on our seeming inability to grasp and meaningfully respond to human-driven climate change.
As the science of climate change has become stronger and more dire, media coverage, public opinion, and government actions regarding this issue has declined. At the same time, climate denial positions have become increasingly accepted, despite a lack of scientific evidence. Even among the public that accepts the science of global climate change, the dire circumstances we now face in this regard are consistently downplayed, and the logical implications that follow from the scientific analysis of the necessity to enact swift and aggressive measures to combat climate change are not followed through either intellectually or politically.
Instead, at best, a series of half measures have been proposed, which though they may be comforting, are essentially symbolic measures that allow the status quo to continue unchanged, and thus will not adequately address the issue of global climate change. Thus attempts to address climate change have encountered significant cultural, political, and economic barriers that have not been overcome. While there have been several attempts to explain the lack of meaningful action regarding climate change, these models have not developed into an integrated and empirically supported approach. Additionally, many of these models are based in an individualistic perspective, and thus engage in a form of psychological reductionism. Finally, none of these models are able to coherently explain the inter-related phenomena regarding climate change that is occurring at the individual, small group, institutional, and societal levels.
To move beyond the limitations of these approaches, Dr. Norgaard develops a sociological model that views the response to global climate change as a social process. One of the fundamental insights of sociology is that individuals are part of a larger structure of cultural and social interactions. Thus through the socialization processes, we construct certain ways of life and understandings of the world that guide our everyday interactions. Individuals become the carriers of the orientations and practices that constitute our social order. A disjuncture between our taken-for-granted way of living, such as the new behaviors necessitated by climate change, are experienced at the individual level as identity threats, at the institutional level as challenges to social cohesion, and at the societal level as legitimation threats. When this occurs, there are powerful processes that work at the psychological, institutional, and overall society level to maintain the current orientations and ensure social stability. Taken together, these social processes create cultural and social stability. They also create, from the view of climate change, a form of social inertia that inhibits rapid social change.
From this sociological perspective, Dr. Norgaard takes on the apparent paradox of climate change and public awareness; as our knowledge about the nature and seriousness of climate change has increased, our political and social engagement with the issue has declined. Why? Dr. Norgaard’s answer (crudely put) is that our personality structures and social norms are so thoroughly enmeshed with a growth economy based on fossil fuels that any consideration of the need to change our way of life to deal with climate change evokes powerful emotions of anxiety and desires to avoid this issue. This avoidance behavior is socially reinforced by collective group norms, as well as the messages we receive from the mass media and the political elite. She develops this thesis through the use of an impressive array of sociological theory, including the sociology of the emotions, cultural sociology, and political economy. Additionally, she utilizes specific theoretical approaches regarding the social denial of catastrophic risk. Here she skillfully repurposes the literature on nuclear war and collective denial to the issue of climate change. This is a unique and insightful use of this literature. Thus her theoretical contribution is substantial and original. She then illustrates this process through a thick qualitative analysis based on participant observation in Norway. In her analysis of conversations, she illustrates how collective denial of climate change takes place through conversations. This provided powerful ground truth evidence of her theoretical framework.
This is an extremely important intellectual contribution. Research on climate change and culture has been primarily focused on individual attitudinal change. This work brings a sociological perspective to our understanding of individual and collective responses to climate change information, and opens up a new research area. It also has important practical implications. Most climate change communication efforts are based on conveying information to individuals. The assumption is that individuals will take in this information and then act rationally in their own interests. Dr. Norgaard’s analysis course charts a different approach. As she demonstrates, it is not a lack of information that inhibits action on climate change. Rather, the knowledge brings about unpleasant emotions and anxiety. Individuals and communities seek to restore a sense of equilibrium and stability, and thus engage in a form of denial which, although the basic facts of climate change are acknowledged, the logical conclusions and actions that follow from the information are minimized and not acted upon. This perspective calls for a much different approach to climate change communications, and defines a new agenda for this field.

[Note: people interested in this line of argument should follow the work done by researchers at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), at Columbia University, @ http://cred.columbia.edu.] 

Danzing sobre comunicação, inteligência e tortura

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O debate é marcado por certa visão interna americana sobre o valor social do aparato de inteligência, mas há pontos interessantes sobre comunicação e política, relevantes para pesquisa na área.

Five Reasons Why Torture Did Not Help U.S. Forces Find Bin Laden

5-3-2011

By David Danzig – http://www.humanrightsfirst.org

The AP reported: “Current and former U.S. officials say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, provided the nom de guerre of one of bin Laden’s most trusted aides. The CIA got similar information from Mohammed’s successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Both were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics inside CIA prisons in Poland and Romania.”

Since Bin Laden’s death, Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former Vice President, and other proponents of “enhanced” interrogation techniques have taken to the air waves to trumpet this bit of news, but there is every reason to believe that torture actually hindered, rather than helped, U.S. efforts to find Bin Laden. Here are five of them.

1) It’s not so simple

Khalid Sheik Muhammed (KSM) did not talk, according to the AP, when he was tortured, but rather months later when he was questioned using humane interrogation techniques.

When asked on “Morning Joe” if KSM had provided information on the courier due to torture, John Brennan, the President’s Counter Terrorism advisor said, “not to my knowledge.” Brennan was later asked on FOX News if KSM and al-Libi had provided the initial information about the courier. “If only it were that simple,” he said.

2) KSM did not tell us everything he knew

KSM and al-Libi almost certainly concealed a great deal of information about the courier who ultimately led US forces to Bin Laden. Indeed, Bin Laden was killed in the town where Al Libi used to live. Al Libi’s role was to prepare safe houses for Al Qaeda leaders like Bin Laden, and the courier has been described repeatedly as “a confidant of Khalid Sheik Muhammed.” Yet all CIA interrogators were able to learn was a nickname for him. As compared to what they could have learned, this is not very impressive.

A senior US official told reporters that it was only four years later that US forces learned the courier’s real name and location.

3) Interrogators say that using torture does not make a detainee reveal the whole truth later

Some will argue that it was only thanks to the waterboarding that KSM and al-Libi were willing to talk at all. This notion is rejected by the more than 75 interrogators, questioners and debriefers with the military, the FBI and the CIA who I have spoken to in depth about this subject since the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib. I have yet to speak to a professional interrogator who believes that torture is an effective means of questioning suspected terrorists.

Jack Cloonan who served on the FBI’s Osama Bin Laden unit for 6 years told me that during an interrogation (or what the FBI calls an interview) the goal was to, “work towards the objective of getting this person to cross the threshold and become, in effect, a traitor to their own cause.”

According to Cloonan, “the Al Qaeda people that I dealt with were all very sophisticated in terms of their language skills and understanding of what was at stake.” Cloonan said that it essentially became a question of whether he could offer the detainee enough of what he wanted (protection for his family, more lenient sentencing/incarceration etc.) to convince him to talk. “They struggled,” he said, “with whether or not I was being truthful and I was going to honor everything I said.”

If you gave the detainee any reason not to trust you, there is no negotiation, Cloonan explained. The detainee won’t be willing to bargain with giving up his knowledge in exchange for something the interrogator can provide. He simply won’t trust you. Torture, Cloonan says, shatters any possibility for trust. “It changes the dynamic,” Cloonan said. “And once you have gone down that path, in my experience there is no going back.”

4) We simply do not know how much more helpful KSM and Al Libi might have been if they had been interrogated solely using humane methods that have been proven to be effective

In the war on terror, the most wanted men to date have been captured thanks to intelligence developed by interrogators who do not use abuse.

I once showed Joe Navarro a former FBI special agent who used to teach questioning techniques, a TV clip of the FOX show “24” featuring Jack Bauer torturing someone while yelling “where is the bomb?” and asked him why that sort of tactic would not work on high value detainees. “That’s ridiculous,” said Navarro. “I want to know everything that a detainee knows. I don’t simply want to know where the bomb is! I want to know who funds him and how? Where are their safehouses? Who else does he know? What does he know that I don’t even know to ask about?” The dynamics of a torture session make for good TV because the detainee delivers the info in a short sound bite. But in the real world, interrogators who use abuse put themselves in a position where detainees will, at best, provide them with only limited information.

Consider other high profile captures and kills in the war on terrorism. The former insurgent who fingered Saddam Hussein voluntarily drew his U.S. interrogator a map showing exactly what spider hole the former dictator was hiding in. And the Al Qaeda operative who pointed US forces to Al Zarqawi, the former head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, told his interrogators the name of Zarqawi’s spiritual advisor and what kind of car he drove. (Ultimately coalition forces followed the advisor’s car to Zarqawi.)

This level of cooperation is unthinkable if torture is used. And it leaves one wondering if we might have found Osama Bin Laden earlier if KSM and al-Libi had been interrogated by the FBI’s subject matter expert or another interrogator committed to using humane techniques from the start.

5) The optics of the US using torture do not help in the larger struggle

Consider the case of Nasir Abbas, a former high-level terrorist who worked with Jemaah Islamiya (JI), the Indonesian terrorist group responsible for the Bali bombings.

Abbas was captured by Detachment 88, an Indonesian police task force so committed to using humane techniques that its interrogators often begin interrogation sessions by praying together with detainees as “fellow muslims.” Abbas, as he explains, in a best selling book recently released in Indonesia decided, in part thanks to his treatment by police authorities, that the way that JI engaged in killing innocent civilians was wrong. He provided the Indonesian police with dozens of leads and it is thanks to his – and other former JI operatives’ conversion – that officials say they have been able to substantially reduce the threat from JI.

How many chances has the U.S. had to convert someone like Nasir Abbas to our side?

How potent a weapon might it be to have a former Al Qaeda operative announce publically that he thinks that what Al Qaeda does is wrong and that he was wrong about his captors? (And for that matter how helpful might it be to have found a well-placed Pakistani in the town where Bin Laden was holed up who was willing to rat him out simply because it was the right thing to do.)

I am sure that the Liz Cheney’s of the world would say that this outlook is naive and that these trained killers would never turn on their comrades. To them, I can only say that I am sure that the directors of Detachment 88, in Indonesia, and the interrogators who led us to Saddam Hussein and Al Zarqawi faced the same criticism.

David Danzig is a senior advisor to Human Rights First