Arquivo da tag: Opinião pública

Jô Soares entrevista Ricardo Augusto Felício sobre mudanças climáticas + comentário de Alexandre Costa

14/05/2012Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, discurso ambiental, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mídia, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsão, Sensacionalismo, Visualidaderenzotaddei

Programa Jô Soares, dia 02 de maio de 2012

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Comentário de Alexandre A. Costa, um dos mais respeitados meteorologistas do Brasil, sobre a entrevista:

A Negação da Mudança Climática e a Direita Organizada (10 de maio de 2012 – postado no Facebook)

Vocês devem ter assistido ou ouvido falar da entrevista recentemente veiculada no programa do Jô, com o Sr. Ricardo Felício que, mesmo sendo professor da Geografia da USP, atacou a comunidade de cientistas do clima, esboçou uma série de teorias conspiratórias e cometeu absurdos que não fazem sentido científico algum como as afirmações de que “não há elevação do nível do mar”, “o efeito estufa não existe”, “a camada de ozônio não existe”, “a Floresta Amazônica se reconstituiria em 20 anos após ser desmatada” e chegou ao auge ao apresentar uma explicação desprovida de sentido para a alta
temperatura de Vênus, apresentando uma interpretação totalmente absurda da lei dos gases.

Enfim, o que levaria uma pessoa que, a princípio é ligada à comunidade acadêmica, a postura tão absurda? Primeiro, achei tratar-se de alpinismo midiático. Como o currículo da figura não mostra nenhuma produção minimamente relevante, achei apenas que bater no “mainstream” fosse uma maneira de chamar atenção, atrair publicidade, ganhar fama, etc. Ingenuidade minha.

Após uma breve pesquisa, encontrei este trecho de entrevista de Ricardo Felicio disponível em http://www.fakeclimate.com/arquivos/EntrevistasImprensaFake/EntrevistaAqGloFINAL.pdf:

Entrevistador: “Você conhece alguma instituição que apóie o seu pensamento? Como ela funciona? E o que ela faz?” Ridardo Felício: “Recomendo que procurem, aqui no Brasil, a MSIa – Movimento de Solidariedade Ibero-Americana.”

Mas quem é essa MSIa? Um grupo de extrema-direita especialista em teorias conspiratórias e em ataques ao Greenpeace (“um instrumento político das oligarquias internacionais”), ao Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Terra — MST (“um instrumento de guerra contra o Estado Brasileiro), o Foro de São Paulo (“reúne grupos revolucionários que objetivam desestabilizar as Forças Armadas”), a Pastoral da Terra, etc. Eu mesmo fui no site dessa organização e a última desse pessoal é uma campanha contra a Comissão da Verdade, a favor dos militares (“A quem interessa uma crise militar”)! Para quem quiser conhecer os posicionamentos desse pessoal, basta checar em http://www.msia.org.br/

Eis que um pouco mais de busca e achei o Ricardo Felicio sendo citado (‘”A ONU achou um jeito de implementar seu governo global, e o mundo será gerido por painéis pseudocientíficos””) onde? No site http://www.midiasemmascara.org/ do ultra-direitista Olavo de Carvalho…

Parece ser sintomático que às vésperas do final do prazo para veto do Código ruralista, alguém com esse tipo de vínculo (a MSIa se associa à UDR) venha dizer que se pode desmatar a Amazônia que a mesma se regenera em vinte anos… É interessante que a acusação de uma agenda “ambientalista”, “comunista”, de “governança internacional” ou qualquer que seja o delírio que os negadores da mudança climática colocam ao tentarem politizar-ideologizar a questão apenas mostram de onde vem essa politização-ideologização e com que matiz.

Como costumo dizer, moléculas de CO2 não têm ideologia e absorvem radiação infravermelho, independente da existência não só de posições políticas, mas até dos humanos que as expressam. O aumento de suas concentrações na atmosfera terrestre não poderiam ter outro efeito que não o de aquecimento do sistema climático global. Negar uma verdade científica óbvia então só faz sentido para aqueles que têm interesses atingidos. E fica claro. Esse senhor, que academicamente é um farsante é, na verdade, um militante de direita. Parafraseando aqueles que tanto o admiram, precisa aparecer na mídia sem a máscara de “professor da USP”, “climatologista”, etc., mas sim com sua verdadeira face.

Alexandre A. Costa, Ph.D.
Professor Titular
Mestrado em Ciências Físicas Aplicadas
Universidade Estadual do Ceará

A Negação das Mudanças Climáticas e a Direita Organizada – Parte II: Mais Revelações (13 de maio de 2012 – postado no Facebook)

Não é difícil continuar a ligar os pontos, após a aparição do Sr. Ricardo Felício no programa do Jô Soares. Por que alguém se disporia a se expor ao ridículo daquela forma? Como alguém seria capaz de, na posição de doutor em Geografia, professor da USP e “climatologista”, assassinar não apenas o conhecimento científico recente, mas leis básicas da Física, conhecimentos fundamentais de Química, Ecologia, etc.? O que levaria alguém a insultar de forma tão grosseira a comunidade acadêmica brasileira e internacional, principalmente a nós, Cientistas do Clima?

O que pretendo mostrar é que para chegar a esse ponto, é preciso ter motivações. E estas, meus caros, não são de mera vaidade, desejo pelo estrelato, etc. É uma agenda.

Para os que quiserem continuar comigo a rastrear a motivação por trás dessa tal entrevista, peço que visitem, mesmo que isso dê a eles alguma audiência, o repositório dos vídeos do pop-star tupiniquim da negação das mudanças climáticas em http://www.youtube.com/user/TvFakeClimate. Lá, os links são para o conhecido site http://www.msia.org.br/ do “Movimento de Solidariedade Íbero-Americana”, cujo nome pomposo esconde o neo-fascismo LeRouchista, especializado em teorias conspiratórias e manipulação e inimigo visceral, como se pode ver em seu site, do MST, do movimento feminista, do movimento de direitos humanos, da Comissão da Verdade, etc; para o não menos direitoso http://www.midiaamais.com.br/, cujos artigos não consegui ler até o fim, mas que são de ataques de direita a Obama, de ridicularização do movimento dos moradores do Pinheirinho, em SJC, de combate à decisão do STF em considerar as cotas constitucionais e, claro, negação da mudança climática e ataques ao IPCC, etc,; um site anti-movimento ambientalista de nome http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/, que por sua vez contém links neo-fascistas como “vermelho não” (http://vermelhosnao.blogspot.com.br/search/label/verdismo), que por sinal está fazendo a campanha “Não Veta, Dilma”, ou especializados em teorias conspiratórias como http://paraummundolivre.blogspot.com.br/ e até diretistas exóticos, defensores da restauração da monarquia em Portugal (http://quartarepublica.wordpress.com/) ou neo-salazaristas (http://nacionalismo-de-futuro.blogspot.com.br/).

Como coloquei em diversos momentos, não é a escolha política-ideológica que faz com que alguém tenha ou não razão em torno da questão climática. Tenho colegas em minha comunidade de pesquisa que simpatizam com os mais variados matizes político-ideológicos (o que por si só já dificultaria que nos juntássemos numa “conspiração”… como é mesmo… ah!… para “conquistar uma governança mundial da ONU via painéis de clima”, tipo de histeria típico da direita mais tresloucada dos EUA). A questão do clima é objetiva. Os mecanismos de controle do clima são conhecidos, incluindo o papel dos gases de efeito estufa. As medições, os resultados de modelos (atacados de maneira desonesta pelo entrevistado), os testemunhos paleoclimáticos, todos convergem. E dentre todas as possíveis hipóteses para o fenômeno do aquecimento do sistema climático, a contribuição antrópica via emissão de gases de efeito estufa foi a única a permanecer de pé após todos os testes. Constatar isso independe de ideologia. Basta abrir os olhos. O tipo de política pública a ser aplicada para lidar com os impactos, a adaptação às mudanças e a mitigação das mesmas, aí sim… é um terreno em que as escolhas políticas adquirem grau de liberdade.

O problema é que, para uma determinada franja político-ideológica, no caso a extrema-direita, há realmente incompatibilidade com qualquer agenda ambiental que possa significar controle público sobre o capital privado. Há também uma necessidade de ganhar respaldos afagando desejos escondidos da opinião pública (como o de que nada precisa ser feito a respeito das mudanças climáticas) e fazendo apelos ao nacionalismo (típico dos Mussolinis, dos Hitlers, dos Francos, dos Salazares e de tantas ditaduras de direita na América Latina) – ainda que eventualmente isso signifique adotar um discurso falsamente antiimperialista. Com esses objetivos “maiores”, que incluem sabotar a campanha pelo veto presidencial sobre o monstro que é o Código Florestal aprovado pelos deputados, para que compromisso com a verdade científica? Para que ética e tratamento respeitoso em relação aos demais colegas de mundo acadêmico?

É impressionante como aqueles que nos acusam de “fraude”, “conspiração”, etc., na verdade são exatamente os que as praticam. Como coloquei em outros textos que escrevi sobre o assunto, é preciso desmistificar cientificamente os pseudo-argumentos apresentados pelos negadores (e isso tenho feito em outros textos), mas como bem lembra o colega Michael Mann, eles são como a hidra. Sempre têm mais mentiras na manga para lançarem por aí e não têm preocupação nenhuma em apresentarem um todo coerente em oposição aos pontos de vista da comunidade científica. Interessa a eles semearem confusão, ganharem espaço político, atrasarem ações de proteção da estabilidade climática, darem tempo para os que os financiam na base (ainda que possa haver negadores não ligados diretamente à indústria de petróleo e outras, mas já ficou evidente a ligação desta com a campanha articulada anti-ciência do clima em escala mundial). A pseudo-ciência e a impostura intelectual são as cabeças da hidra. O coração do monstro é a agenda político-ideológica. Mas a espada da verdade é longa o suficiente para ferir-lhe de morte!

Alexandre A. Costa, Ph.D.
Professor Titular
Mestrado em Ciências Físicas Aplicadas
Universidade Estadual do Ceará

Em Defesa da Ciência do Clima (10 de maio de 2012 – postado no Facebook)

Tenho me preocupado muito com os ataques feitos recentemente à Ciência do Clima, dentre outros motivos, porque estes tem se constituído num amálgama estranho que reúne o Tea Party, a indústria petroquímica e pessoas que parecem acreditar numa grande conspiração imperialista para, ao impedir que queimem suas reservas de combustíveis fósseis, a periferia do capitalismo se “desenvolva”, o que, com o perdão da palavra, já é per si uma visão absolutamente tacanha de “desenvolvimento”.

Mas essa não é uma questão ideológica, mesmo porque se o fosse estaria eu distante de Al Gore. É uma questão científica, pois moléculas de CO2 não têm ideologia. O que elas são dotadas, assim como outras moléculas (caso do CH4 e do próprio vapor d’água), é de uma propriedade da qual não gozam os gases majoritários em nossa atmosfera, que é a de um modo de oscilação cuja frequência coincide com a de uma região do espectro eletromagnético conhecida como infravermelho. A retenção do calor é uma consequência da presença desses gases (mesmo tão minoritários) na atmosfera terrestre. Não fosse por eles, a Terra teria temperatura média de -18 graus, em contraste com os moderados 15, para não falar do papel dos mesmos em mantê-la entre limites amenos. A Terra não é Mercúrio que, por não ter atmosfera, devolve livremente a energia absorvida do Sol na porção em que é dia, levando-o a contrastes de temperatura de 430 graus durante o dia e -160 graus à noite. Felizmente, tampouco é Vênus, cuja cobertura de nuvens faz com que chegue à sua superfície menos energia solar do que na Terra, mas cujo efeito estufa, causado por sua atmosfera composta quase que exclusivamente por CO2, eleva sua temperatura a praticamente constantes 480 graus.

Desconhecer essas idéias científicas simples, de que o CO2 é um gás de efeito estufa (conhecido e medido por Tyndall, Arrhenius e outros, desde o século XIX), com mecanismo bem explicado pela Física de sua estrutura molecular; ignorar o conhecido efeito global que o CO2 tem sobre um planeta vizinho, o que é bem estabelecido pela astronomia desde o saudoso Sagan, não faz sentido, especialmente no meio acadêmico, onde encontram-se alguns dos negadores mais falantes. A esses eu gostaria de lembrar de algo básico no método científico. De um lado, a ciência não tem dogma, nem verdades definitivas. Suas verdades são sempre, por construção, parciais e provisórias (que bom, senão viraria algo chato e tedioso como, digamos, uma religião). No entanto, por outro lado, o conhecimento científico é cumulativo e, nesse sentido, não se pode andar para trás! Só quando uma teoria falha, se justifica uma nova e esta não pode ser apenas a negação da anterior, pois precisa ser capaz de reproduzir todos os seus méritos (caso da Mecânica Clássica e da Relatividade, que se reduz à primeira para baixas velocidades).

Não é uma questão de crença. “Monotonia” à parte, é ciência bem estabelecida, bem conhecida. Tanto quanto a Gravitação Universal (que também é “apenas” uma teoria) ou a Evolução das Espécies.

INJUSTIÇA, DESRESPEITO E SUBESTIMAÇÃO

Os Cientistas do Clima tem sofrido ataques, com base em factóides que em nenhum momento se assemelham à realidade de nossa área. Nenhuma Ciência é hoje tão pública e aberta. Quem quiser, pode obter facilmente, na maioria dos casos diretamente pela internet, dados observados do clima, que demonstram claramente o aquecimento global (www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/ dentre outros), dados de modelagem que estão sendo gerados agora e que certamente subsidiarão o 5o relatório do IPCC (http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/data_portal.html) ou dados de testemunhos paleoclimáticos, que servem para analisar o clima do passado (www.ncdc.noaa.gov). Pode obter os relatórios do IPCC, emwww.ipcc.ch e seguir as referências, revisadas e publicadas em sua esmagadora maioria, principalmente no caso do Grupo de Trabalho que lida com as Bases Físicas do Sistema Climático, em revistas de grande impacto, sejam gerais (Science, Nature), sejam da área. Duvido que, em nossas universidades, cheias de laboratórios com convênios privados, sejam na engenharia de materiais ou na bioquímica, haja um segmento tão aberto, que tenha o desprendimento de sentar à mesa, compartilhar dados, levantar o estado-da-arte em sua ciência e elaborar coletivamente um relatório de síntese. Duvido! Desafio!

Os cientistas que participamos desses painéis não somos “representantes de governos”. Nada é criado ou inventado nesses painéis, além de uma síntese da Ciência que é produzida de maneira independente e publicada na literatura revisada por pares. Os que participam da comunidade acadêmica podem, inclusive, se informar melhor com facilidade, junto a colegas da comunidade científica brasileira que participaram e participam das iniciativas do IPCC e do PBMC sobre o funcionamento desses painéis, antes de emitir opinião, para que não terminem, na prática, difamando o que desconhece. Algumas pessoas, sem a menor conduta crítica em relação aos detratores do IPCC, repete-lhes a verborragia, quando poderiam ser céticos em relação aos “céticos”.

Mas não o são. Em nenhum momento, questionam as reais motivações de dois ou três (felizmente, são tão raros) que assumem a conduta lamentável da negação anti-ciência, ou por serem abertamente corruptos e serviçais da indústria petroquímica ou, simplesmente, por terem uma vaidade que não cabe no papel secundário que cumpririam caso estivessem, como nós, desprendendo, em geral quase anonimamente, enorme energia para colocar tijolo por tijolo no edifício da Ciência do Clima. É preciso saber distinguir entre o ceticismo honesto, genuíno, que é saudável em ciência, consonante com a dúvida sincera e a conduta crítica, da negação religiosa, baseada em fé e na necessidade cega de defender determinado ponto de vista, independente se o mesmo tem base real ou não e, principalmente, da canalhice pura e simples, que é o que é promovido por alguns dos negadores. O possível “sucesso” dessas idéias junto ao público, para mim, são terreno da psicologia social, mas a melhor analogia que tenho é a da popularidade de idéias religiosas, em geral mentiras reconfortantes que são preferidas em detrimento de verdades desagradáveis.

O verdadeiro ceticismo levou até onde os físicos de Berkeley foram (http://www.berkeleyearth.org/index.php). Inicialmente questionando os resultados obtidos por nossa comunidade, se municiaram de um enorme banco de dados de temperatura em escala mundial, mais amplo do que os que o Hadley Centre inglês e a NASA dispunham. Testaram outras metodologias, chegaram até a excluir as estações meteorológicas usadas por nossos centros de pesquisa. A postura inicial de Richard Muller, idealizador dessa iniciativa, era de tamanho questionamento em relação a nossos resultados que ele chegou a alavancar recursos da famigerada Fundação Koch, abertamente anti-Ciência do Clima. Mas o que Muller e seus parceiros encontraram? O mesmo resultado que já nos era conhecido. A Terra está aquecendo e este aquecimento se acelerou bastante nas últimas décadas do século XX. Este aquecimento se aproxima de um grau e portanto está muito acima de todas as flutuações naturais registradas desde que se tem registro instrumental. Aliás, confirmou o que também sabíamos: que os dados da Universidade de East Anglia (aqueles mesmos da farsa montada sob o nome altissonante de “climategate”, aqueles que foram perseguidos e cuja reputação foi ignominiosamente atacada, com repercussões em suas carreiras profissionais e vidas pessoais) contém um erro… para menos! O aquecimento sugerido pelos dados da CRU/UEA é um décimo de grau inferior aos das outras fontes de dados e, claro, entre nós, ninguém os acusa de desonestos por isso.

Outra impostura – e infelizmente, apesar da dureza do termo, acho que é neste caso em que ele se aplica – é a subestimação da inteligência de nossa comunidade, aliada ao desconhecimento dos materiais por ela produzidos. O 4o relatório do IPCC já contém um capítulo exclusivamente sobre Paleoclimatologia, isto é, sobre o clima do passado. Eu pessoalmente tenho dedicado grandes esforços na análise de testemunhos do clima passado e na modelagem das condições climáticas passadas. Existe uma preocupação permanente em discernir o sinal natural e separar, dele, o sinal antrópico, desde o primeiro relatório do IPCC. Para isso, avalia-se o papel das variações de atividade solar, as emissões dos vulcões, etc. Já avaliamos as possíveis influências naturais e as descartamos como possível causa para o aquecimento observado.

Nesse sentido, não há lugar para sofismas e tergiversações. Sobre os registros paleoclimáticos, que são capazes de recontar o histórico de temperatura e de concentração de gases de efeito estufa de 800 mil anos atrás até o presente, todos sabemos que, no passado, um pequeno aquecimento do planeta precedeu o aumento da concentração dos gases de efeito estufa. Isso se deu antes do encerramento de todas as eras glaciais. Mas é um raciocínio obtuso deduzir daí que o CO2 não exerce nenhum papel ou, nas palavras dos negadores “é consequência e não causa”. Existem diversos processos de retroalimentação no sistema climático e este é um dos melhores exemplos. As sutis variações da insolação e da distribuição desta sobre a superfície da Terra associadas aos ciclos orbitais são – e isto é do conhecimento de todos – muito pequenas para explicar as grandes diferenças de temperatura entre os períodos glaciais (“eras do gelo”) e os interglaciais (períodos quentes, mais breves, que as intercalaram). Mas um aquecimento sutil, após alguns séculos, mostrou-se suficiente para elevar a emissões naturais de CO2 e metano, que causam efeito estufa e amplificam o processo. Essa retroalimentação só era refreada, em condições livres da ação do homem, quando as condições orbitais mudavam novamente, levando a um resfriamento sutil, que induzia a captura de CO2 no sistema terrestre, que por sua vez amplificava o resfriamento e assim por diante.

Mas não é porque pessoas morrem de câncer e infarto que não se possa atribuir responsabilidades a um assassino! Porque pessoas morrem naturalmente de derrame, alguém acha possível dizer que “é impossível que um tiro mate alguém”? Ou que não se deva julgar mais ninguém por assassinato? Antes, era preciso um pequeno aquecimento para deflagrar emissões naturais e aumento de concentração de CO2, para daí o aquecimento se acelerar. Hoje, há uma fonte independente de CO2, estranha aos ciclos naturais e esta é a queima de combustíveis fósseis! Devo, aliás, frisar que até a análise isotópica (a composição é diferente entre combustíveis fósseis e outras fontes) é clara: a origem do CO2 excedente na atmosfera terrestre é sim, em sua maioria, petróleo, carvão, gás natural! Um mínimo de verdadeiro aprofundamento científico deixa claro que, hoje, o aumento das concentrações de CO2 na atmosfera é eminentemente antrópico e que é isso que vem acarretando as mudanças climáticas observadas. Não é possível mais tapar o sol, ou melhor, tapar os gases de efeito estufa com uma peneira! Os registros paleoclimáticos mostram que o aquecimento atual é inédito nos últimos 2500 anos. Mostram que a concentração atual de CO2 está 110 ppm acima do observado antes da era industrial e quase 100 ppm acima do que se viu nos últimos 800 mil anos. Mostram que esse número é maior do que a diferença entre a concentração de CO2 existente nos interglaciais e nas “eras do gelo” e que isso faz, sim, grande diferença sobre o clima.

QUAIS OS VERDADEIROS ERROS

Algumas pessoas se dizem céticas, críticas e desconfiadas em relação à maioria de nossa comunidade de cientistas do clima, mas não percebem o erro fundamental que cometem: a absoluta falta de ceticismo, criticidade e desconfiança em relação aos que nos detratam. A postura dos que combatem a Ciência do Clima sob financiamento da indústria petroquímica, ou em associação com setores partidários e da mídia mais reacionários é auto-explicativa. Interessa o acobertamento da realidade. Mas não só. Há desde essas pessoas que recebem diretamente recursos da indústria do petróleo a falastrões que há muito não têm atuação científica de verdade na área e, sem serem capazes de permanecer em evidência trabalhando seriamente para contribuir com o avançar de nossa ciência, debruçando-se sobre as verdadeiras incertezas, contribuindo para coletar dados, melhorar métodos e modelos, etc., apenas para manterem holofotes sobre si, têm atacado o restante da comunidade. Estranho e espalhafatoso como as penas de pavão. Prosaico como os mecanismos evolutivos que levaram tais penas a surgirem. Daí é preciso também combater o ponto de vista daqueles que dão a esse ataque um falso verniz “de esquerda”, pois lançam mão de teorias de conspiração, uma deturpação patológica do raciocínio crítico. Lutar com o alvo errado, com a arma errada, é pior do que desarmar para a luta.
O IPCC é perfeito? Não, é claro. Cometeu erros. Mas querem saber, de fato, quais são? Uma coisa precisa ficar claro a todos. As avaliações do IPCC tendem a ser conservadoras. As projeções de temperatura realizadas para após o ano 2000 estão essencialmente acertadas, mas sabe o que acontece com as projeções de elevação do nível dos oceanos e de degelo no Ártico? Estão subestimadas. Isso mesmo. O cenário verdadeiro é mais grave do que o 4o relatório do IPCC aponta. Mas de novo não é por uma questão política, mas pela limitação, na época, dos modelos de criosfera, incapazes de levar em conta processos importantes que levam ao degelo. Provavelmente, baseando-se em artigos que vêm sendo publicados nesse meio tempo, o 5o relatório será capaz de corrigir essas limitações e mostrar um quadro mais próximo da real gravidade do problema em 2013-2014 quando de sua publicação.

QUAL A VERDADEIRA QUESTÃO IDEOLÓGICA?

Não faz sentido “acreditar” ou não na gravidade, na evolução ou no efeito estufa. Não se trata de uma “opção ideológica” (apesar de haver, nos EUA, uma forte correlação entre ideologia e ciência junto ao eleitorado republicano mais reacionário, que dá ouvidos aos detratores da ciência do clima e que também querem ver Darwin fora das escolas).

A verdadeira questão ideológica, é que as mudanças climáticas são um processo de extrema desigualdade, da raiz, aos seus impactos. Quem mais se beneficiou das emissões dos gases de efeito estufa foram e continuam sendo as classes dominantes dos países capitalistas centrais. Juntamente com os mega-aglomerados do capital financeiro, a indústria petroquímica, o setor de mineração (que inclui mineração de carvão), o setor energético, etc. concentraram riquezas usando a atmosfera como sua grande lata de lixo. Mais do que a “pegada” de carbono atual (que é ainda extremamente desigual se compararmos americanos, europeus e australianos, de um lado, com africanos do outro), é mais díspar ainda a “pegada histórica” (isto é, o já emitido, o acumulado a partir das emissões de cada país), que faz da Europa e, em seguida, dos EUA, grandes emissores históricos.

Cruelmente, em contrapartida, os impactos das mudanças no clima recairão sobre os países mais pobres, sobre as pequenas nações, principalmente sobre os pobres dos países pobres, sobre os mais vulneráveis. Perda de territórios em países insulares, questões de segurança hídrica e alimentar em regiões semi-áridas (tão vastas no berço de nossa espécie, que é o continente africano), efeitos de eventos severos (que, com base física muito clara, devem se tornar mais frequentes num planeta aquecido), comprometimento de ecossistemas marinhos costeiros e florestas, atingindo pesca e atividades de coleta; inviabilização de culturas agrícolas tradicionais… tudo isso recai onde? Sobre o andar de baixo! O de cima fala em “adaptação” e tem muito mais instrumentos para se adaptar às mudanças. A nós, neste caso, interessa sermos conservadores quanto ao clima e frear esse “experimento” desastrado, desordenado, de alteração da composição química da atmosfera terrestre e do balanço energético planetário! Para a maioria dos 7 bilhões de habitantes dessa esfera, a estabilidade climática é importante!

Alguns dos mais ricos, na verdade, veem o aquecimento global como “oportunidade”… Claro, “oportunidade” de expandir o agronegócio para as futuras terras agricultáveis do norte do Canadá e da Sibéria e para explorar petróleo no oceano que se abrirá com o crescente degelo do Ártico.

Assim, é preciso perceber que há uma verdadeira impostura vagando por aí e a Ciência precisa ser defendida. Uma rocha é uma rocha; uma árvore é uma árvore; uma molécula de CO2 é uma molécula de CO2, independente de ideologia. Mas os de baixo só serão/seremos capazes de se/nos armarem/armarmos para transformar a sociedade se estiverem/estivermos bem informados e aí, é preciso combater os absurdos proferidos pelos detratores da Ciência do Clima.

Alexandre Costa é bacharel em Física e mestre em Física pela Universidade Federal do Ceará, Ph.D. em Ciências Atmosféricas pela Colorado State University, com pós-doutorado pela Universidade de Yale, com publicações em diversos periódicos científicos, incluindo Science, Journal of the Amospheric Sciences e Atmospheric Research. É bolsista de produtividade do CNPq e membro do Painel Brasileiro de Mudanças Climáticas.

Television Has Less Effect On Education About Climate Change Than Other Forms Of Media (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Oct. 16, 2009) — Worried about climate change and want to learn more? You probably aren’t watching television then. A new study by George Mason University Communication Professor Xiaoquan Zhao suggests that watching television has no significant impact on viewers’ knowledge about the issue of climate change. Reading newspapers and using the web, however, seem to contribute to people’s knowledge about this issue.

The study, “Media Use and Global Warming Perceptions: A Snapshot of the Reinforcing Spirals,” looked at the relationship between media use and people’s perceptions of global warming. The study asked participants how often they watch TV, surf the Web, and read newspapers. They were also asked about their concern and knowledge of global warming and specifically its impact on the polar regions.

“Unlike many other social issues with which the public may have first-hand experience, global warming is an issue that many come to learn about through the media,” says Zhao. “The primary source of mediated information about global warming is the news.”

The results showed that people who read newspapers and use the Internet more often are more likely to be concerned about global warming and believe they are better educated about the subject. Watching more television, however, did not seem to help.

He also found that individuals concerned about global warming are more likely to seek out information on this issue from a variety of media and nonmedia sources. Other forms of media, such as the Oscar-winning documentary “The Inconvenient Truth” and the blockbuster thriller “The Day After Tomorrow,” have played important roles in advancing the public’s interest in this domain.

Politics also seemed to have an influence on people’s perceptions about the science of global warming. Republicans are more likely to believe that scientists are still debating the existence and human causes of global warming, whereas Democrats are more likely to believe that a scientific consensus has already been achieved on these matters.

“Some media forms have clear influence on people’s perceived knowledge of global warming, and most of it seems positive,” says Zhao. “Future research should focus on how to harness this powerful educational function.”

Support for Climate Policy Linked to People’s Perceptions About Scientific Agreement Regarding Global Warming (Science Daily)

ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2011) — People who believe there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about global warming tend to be less certain that global warming is happening and less supportive of climate policy, researchers at George Mason, San Diego State, and Yale Universities report in a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

A recent survey of climate scientists conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois found near unanimous agreement among climate scientists that human-caused global warming is happening.

This new George Mason University study, however, using results from a national survey of the American public, finds that many Americans believe that most climate scientists actually disagree about the subject.

In the national survey conducted in June 2010, two-thirds of respondents said they either believed there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening (45 percent), that most scientists think it is not happening (5 percent), or that they did not know enough to say (16 percent.) These respondents were less likely to support climate change policies and to view climate change as a lower priority.

By contrast, survey respondents who correctly understood that there is widespread agreement about global warming among scientists were themselves more certain that it is happening, and were more supportive of climate policies.

“Misunderstanding the extent of scientific agreement about climate change is important because it undermines people’s certainty that climate change is happening, which in turn reduces their conviction that America should find ways to deal with the problem,” says Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.

Maibach argues that a campaign should be mounted to correct this misperception. “It is no accident that so many Americans misunderstand the widespread scientific agreement about human-caused climate change. A well-financed disinformation campaign deliberately created a myth about there being lack of agreement. The climate science community should take all reasonable measures to put this myth to rest.”

Large Gaps Found in Public Understanding of Climate Change (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Oct. 14, 2010) — Sixty-three percent of Americans believe that global warming is happening, but many do not understand why, according to a national study conducted by researchers at Yale University.

The report titled “Americans’ Knowledge of Climate Change” found that only 57 percent know what the greenhouse effect is, only 45 percent of Americans understand that carbon dioxide traps heat from the Earth’s surface, and just 50 percent understand that global warming is caused mostly by human activities. Large majorities incorrectly think that the hole in the ozone layer and aerosol spray cans cause global warming. Meanwhile, 75 percent of Americans have never heard of the related problems of ocean acidification or coral bleaching.

However, many Americans do understand that emissions from cars and trucks and the burning of fossil fuels contribute to global warming and that a transition to renewable energy sources is an important solution.

Americans also recognize their own limited understanding. Only 1 in 10 say that they are “very well-informed” about climate change, and 75 percent say they would like to know more about the issue. Likewise, 75 percent say that schools should teach children about climate change and 68 percent would welcome a national program to teach Americans more about the issue.

“This study demonstrates that Americans need to learn more about the causes, impacts and potential solutions to global warming,” said study director Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale University. “But it also shows that Americans want to learn more about climate change in order to make up their minds and take action.”

The executive summary and full report are available online:http://environment.yale.edu/climate/publications/knowledge-of-climate-change

The online survey was conducted by Knowledge Networks from June 24 to July 22, 2010, with 2,030 American adults 18 and older. The margin of sampling error is plus- or minus-2 percent, with 95 percent confidence.

Increased Knowledge About Global Warming Leads To Apathy, Study Shows (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2008) — The more you know the less you care — at least that seems to be the case with global warming. A telephone survey of 1,093 Americans by two Texas A&M University political scientists and a former colleague indicates that trend, as explained in their recent article in the peer-reviewed journal Risk Analysis.

“More informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming,” states the article, titled “Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the USA.”

The study showed high levels of confidence in scientists among Americans led to a decreased sense of responsibility for global warming.

The diminished concern and sense of responsibility flies in the face of awareness campaigns about climate change, such as in the movies An Inconvenient Truth and Ice Age: The Meltdown and in the mainstream media’s escalating emphasis on the trend.

The research was conducted by Paul M. Kellstedt, a political science associate professor at Texas A&M; Arnold Vedlitz, Bob Bullock Chair in Government and Public Policy at Texas A&M’s George Bush School of Government and Public Service; and Sammy Zahran, formerly of Texas A&M and now an assistant professor of sociology at Colorado State University.

Kellstedt says the findings were a bit unexpected. The focus of the study, he says, was not to measure how informed or how uninformed Americans are about global warming, but to understand why some individuals who are more or less informed about it showed more or less concern.

“In that sense, we didn’t really have expectations about how aware or unaware people were of global warming,” he says.

But, he adds, “The findings that the more informed respondents were less concerned about global warming, and that they felt less personally responsible for it, did surprise us. We expected just the opposite.

“The findings, while rather modest in magnitude — there are other variables we measured which had much larger effects on concern for global warming — were statistically quite robust, which is to say that they continued to appear regardless of how we modeled the data.”

Measuring knowledge about global warming is a tricky business, Kellstedt adds.

“That’s true of many other things we would like to measure in surveys, of course, especially things that might embarrass people (like ignorance) or that they might feel social pressure to avoid revealing (like prejudice),” he says.

“There are no industry standards, so to speak, for measuring knowledge about global warming. We opted for this straightforward measure and realize that other measures might produce different results.”

Now, for better or worse, scientists have to deal with the public’s abundant confidence in them. “But it cannot be comforting to the researchers in the scientific community that the more trust people have in them as scientists, the less concerned they are about their findings,” the researchers conclude in their study.

Despite Awareness Of Global Warming Americans Concerned More About Local Environment (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2008) — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently declared climate change a top international threat, and Al Gore urged politicians to get involved to fight global warming. Results from a recent survey conducted by a University of Missouri professor reveal that the U.S. public, while aware of the deteriorating global environment, is concerned predominantly with local and national environmental issues.

Potomac River near Washington DC. The top three issues that the US public wants the government to address are protecting community drinking water, reducing pollution of U.S. rivers and lakes, and improving urban air pollution issues like smog. (Credit: Michele Hogan)

“The survey’s core result is that people care about their communities and express the desire to see government action taken toward local and national issues,” said David Konisky, a policy research scholar with the Institute of Public Policy. “People are hesitant to support efforts concerning global issues even though they believe that environmental quality is poorer at the global level than at the local and national level. This is surprising given the media attention that global warming has recently received and reflects the division of opinion about the severity of climate change.”

Konisky, an assistant professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at MU, recently surveyed 1,000 adults concerning their attitudes about the environment. The survey polled respondents about their levels of concern for the environment and preferences for government action to address a wide set of environmental issues.

A strong majority of the public expressed general concern about the environment. According to the survey, the top three issues that the public wants the government to address are protecting community drinking water, reducing pollution of U.S. rivers and lakes, and improving urban air pollution issues like smog. In the survey, global warming ranks eighth in importance.

“Americans are clearly most concerned about pollution issues that might affect their personal health, or the health of their families,” Konisky said.

Additionally, Konisky and his colleagues found that the best predictor of individuals’ environmental preferences is their political attributes. They examined the relationship between party identification and political ideology and support for action to address environmental problems.

“The survey reinforced the stark differences in people’s environmental attitudes, depending on their political leanings,” Konisky said. “Democrats and political liberals clearly express more desire for governmental action to address environmental problems. Republicans and ideological conservatives are much less enthusiastic about further government intervention.”

Results from the survey were recently presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association in San Diego.

Support for Climate Change Action Drops, Poll Finds (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (May 8, 2012) — Americans’ support for government action on global warming remains high but has dropped during the past two years, according to a new survey by Stanford researchers in collaboration with Ipsos Public Affairs. Political rhetoric and cooler-than-average weather appear to have influenced the shift, but economics doesn’t appear to have played a role.

The survey directed by Jon Krosnick, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, shows that support for a range of policies intended to reduce future climate change dropped by an average of 5 percentage points per year between 2010 and 2012.

In a 2010 Stanford survey, more than three-quarters of respondents expressed support for mandating more efficient and less polluting cars, appliances, homes, offices and power plants. Nearly 90 percent of respondents favored federal tax breaks to spur companies to produce more electricity from water, wind and solar energy. On average, 72 percent of respondents supported government action on climate change in 2010. By 2012, that support had dropped to 62 percent.

The drop was concentrated among Americans who distrust climate scientists, even more so among such people who identify themselves as Republicans. Americans who do not trust climate science were especially aware of and influenced by recent shifts in world temperature, and 2011 was tied for the coolest of the last 11 years.

Krosnick pointed out that during the recent campaign, all but one Republican presidential candidate expressed doubt about global warming, and some urged no government action to address the issue. Rick Santorum described belief in climate change as a “pseudo-religion,” while Ron Paul called it a “hoax.” Mitt Romney, the apparent Republican nominee, has said, “I can tell you the right course for America with regard to energy policy is to focus on job creation and not global warming.”

The Stanford-Ipsos study found no evidence that the decline in public support for government action was concentrated among respondents who lived in states struggling the most economically.

The study found that, overall, the majority of Americans continue to support many specific government actions to mitigate global warming’s effect. However, most Americans remain opposed to consumer taxes intended to decrease public use of electricity and gasoline.

Bruno Latour: Love Your Monsters (Breakthrough)

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Breakthrough Journal, No. 2, Fall 2011

Latour - crying baby - AP.jpg

In the summer of 1816, a young British woman by the name of Mary Godwin and her boyfriend Percy Shelley went to visit Lord Byron in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. They had planned to spend much of the summer outdoors, but the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year had changed the climate of Europe. The weather was so bad that they spent most of their time indoors, discussing the latest popular writings on science and the supernatural.

After reading a book of German ghost stories, somebody suggested they each write their own. Byron’s physician, John Polidori, came up with the idea for The Vampyre, published in 1819,¹ which was the first of the “vampire-as-seducer” novels. Godwin’s story came to her in a dream, during which she saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.”² Soon after that fateful summer, Godwin and Shelley married, and in 1818, Mary Shelley’s horror story was published under the title, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus.³

Frankenstein lives on in the popular imagination as a cautionary tale against technology. We use the monster as an all-purpose modifier to denote technological crimes against nature. When we fear genetically modified foods we call them “frankenfoods” and “frankenfish.” It is telling that even as we warn against such hybrids, we confuse the monster with its creator. We now mostly refer to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster as Frankenstein. And just as we have forgotten that Frankenstein was the man, not the monster, we have also forgotten Frankenstein’s real sin.

Dr. Frankenstein’s crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that heabandoned the creature to itself. When Dr. Frankenstein meets his creation on a glacier in the Alps, the monster claims that it was notborn a monster, but that it became a criminal only after being left alone by his horrified creator, who fled the laboratory once the horrible thing twitched to life. “Remember, I am thy creature,” the monster protests, “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed… I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

Written at the dawn of the great technological revolutions that would define the 19th and 20th centuries, Frankenstein foresees that the gigantic sins that were to be committed would hide a much greater sin. It is not the case that we have failed to care for Creation, but that we have failed to care for our technological creations. We confuse the monster for its creator and blame our sins against Nature upon our creations. But our sin is not that we created technologies but that we failed to love and care for them. It is as if we decided that we were unable to follow through with the education of our children.⁴

Let Dr. Frankenstein’s sin serve as a parable for political ecology. At a time when science, technology, and demography make clear that we can never separate ourselves from the nonhuman world — that we, our technologies, and nature can no more be disentangled than we can remember the distinction between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster — this is the moment chosen by millions of well-meaning souls to flagellate themselves for their earlier aspiration to dominion, to repent for their past hubris, to look for ways of diminishing the numbers of their fellow humans, and to swear to make their footprints invisible?

The goal of political ecology must not be to stop innovating, inventing, creating, and intervening. The real goal must be to have the same type of patience and commitment to our creations as God the Creator, Himself. And the comparison is not blasphemous: we have taken the whole of Creation on our shoulders and have become coextensive with the Earth.

What, then, should be the work of political ecology? It is, I believe, tomodernize modernization, to borrow an expression proposed by Ulrich Beck.⁵  This challenge demands more of us than simply embracing technology and innovation. It requires exchanging the modernist notion of modernity for what I have called a “compositionist” one that sees the process of human development as neither liberation from Nature nor as a fall from it, but rather as a process of becoming ever-more attached to, and intimate with, a panoply of nonhuman natures.

1.
At the time of the plough we could only scratch the surface of the soil. Three centuries back, we could only dream, like Cyrano de Bergerac, of traveling to the moon. In the past, my Gallic ancestors were afraid of nothing except that the “sky will fall on their heads.”

Today we can fold ourselves into the molecular machinery of soil bacteria through our sciences and technologies. We run robots on Mars. We photograph and dream of further galaxies. And yet we fear that the climate could destroy us.

Everyday in our newspapers we read about more entanglements of all those things that were once imagined to be separable — science, morality, religion, law, technology, finance, and politics. But these things are tangled up together everywhere: in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in the space shuttle, and in the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

If you envision a future in which there will be less and less of these entanglements thanks to Science, capital S, you are a modernist. But if you brace yourself for a future in which there will always be more of these imbroglios, mixing many more heterogeneous actors, at a greater and greater scale and at an ever-tinier level of intimacy requiring even more detailed care, then you are… what? A compositionist!

The dominant, peculiar story of modernity is of humankind’semancipation from Nature. Modernity is the thrusting-forward arrow of time — Progress — characterized by its juvenile enthusiasm, risk taking, frontier spirit, optimism, and indifference to the past. The spirit can be summarized in a single sentence: “Tomorrow, we will be able to separate more accurately what the world is really like from the subjective illusions we used to entertain about it.”

The very forward movement of the arrow of time and the frontier spirit associated with it (the modernizing front) is due to a certain conception of knowledge: “Tomorrow, we will be able to differentiate clearly what in the past was still mixed up, namely facts and values, thanks to Science.”

Science is the shibboleth that defines the right direction of the arrow of time because it, and only it, is able to cut into two well-separated parts what had, in the past, remained hopelessly confused: a morass of ideology, emotions, and values on the one hand, and, on the other, stark and naked matters of fact.

The notion of the past as an archaic and dangerous confusion arises directly from giving Science this role. A modernist, in this great narrative, is the one who expects from Science the revelation that Nature will finally be visible through the veils of subjectivity — and subjection — that hid it from our ancestors.

And here has been the great failure of political ecology. Just when all of the human and nonhuman associations are finally coming to the center of our consciousness, when science and nature and technology and politics become so confused and mixed up as to be impossible to untangle, just as these associations are beginning to be shaped in our political arenas and are triggering our most personal and deepest emotions, this is when a new apartheid is declared: leave Nature alone and let the humans retreat — as the English did on the beaches of Dunkirk in the 1940s.

Just at the moment when this fabulous dissonance inherent in the modernist project between what modernists say (emancipation from all attachments!) and what they do (create ever-more attachments!) is becoming apparent to all, along come those alleging to speak for Nature to say the problem lies in the violations and imbroglios — the attachments!

Instead of deciding that the great narrative of modernism (Emancipation) has always resulted in another history altogether (Attachments), the spirit of the age has interpreted the dissonance in quasi-apocalyptic terms: “We were wrong all along, let’s turn our back to progress, limit ourselves, and return to our narrow human confines, leaving the nonhumans alone in as pristine a Nature as possible, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa…”

Nature, this great shortcut of due political process, is now used to forbid humans to encroach. Instead of realizing at last that the emancipation narrative is bunk, and that modernism was always about attachments, modernist greens have suddenly shifted gears and have begun to oppose the promises of modernization.

Why do we feel so frightened at the moment that our dreams of modernization finally come true? Why do we suddenly turn pale and wish to fall back on the other side of Hercules’s columns, thinking we are being punished for having transgressed the sign: “Thou shall not transgress?” Was not our slogan until now, as Nordhaus and Shellenberger note in Break Through, “We shall overcome!”?⁶

In the name of indisputable facts portraying a bleak future for the human race, green politics has succeeded in leaving citizens nothing but a gloomy asceticism, a terror of trespassing Nature, and a diffidence toward industry, innovation, technology, and science. No wonder that, while political ecology claims to embody the political power of the future, it is reduced everywhere to a tiny portion of electoral strap-hangers. Even in countries where political ecology is a little more powerful, it contributes only a supporting force.

Political ecology has remained marginal because it has not grasped either its own politics or its own ecology. It thinks it is speaking of Nature, System, a hierarchical totality, a world without man, an assured Science, but it is precisely these overly ordered pronouncements that marginalize it.

Set in contrast to the modernist narrative, this idea of political ecology could not possibly succeed. There is beauty and strength in the modernist story of emancipation. Its picture of the future is so attractive, especially when put against such a repellent past, that it makes one wish to run forward to break all the shackles of ancient existence.

To succeed, an ecological politics must manage to be at least as powerful as the modernizing story of emancipation without imagining that we are emancipating ourselves from Nature. What the emancipation narrative points to as proof of increasing human mastery over and freedom from Nature — agriculture, fossil energy, technology — can be redescribed as the increasing attachmentsbetween things and people at an ever-expanding scale. If the older narratives imagined humans either fell from Nature or freed themselves from it, the compositionist narrative describes our ever-increasing degree of intimacy with the new natures we are constantly creating. Only “out of Nature” may ecological politics start again and anew.

2.
The paradox of “the environment” is that it emerged in public parlance just when it was starting to disappear. During the heyday of modernism, no one seemed to care about “the environment” because there existed a huge unknown reserve on which to discharge all bad consequences of collective modernizing actions. The environment is what appeared when unwanted consequences came back to haunt the originators of such actions.

But if the originators are true modernists, they will see the return of “the environment” as incomprehensible since they believed they were finally free of it. The return of consequences, like global warming, is taken as a contradiction, or even as a monstrosity, which it is, of course, but only according to the modernist’s narrative of emancipation. In the compositionist’s narrative of attachments, unintended consequences are quite normal — indeed, the most expected things on earth!

Environmentalists, in the American sense of the word, never managed to extract themselves from the contradiction that the environment is precisely not “what lies beyond and should be left alone” — this was the contrary, the view of their worst enemies! The environment is exactly what should be even more managed, taken up, cared for, stewarded, in brief, integrated and internalized in the very fabric of the polity.

France, for its part, has never believed in the notion of a pristine Nature that has so confused the “defense of the environment” in other countries. What we call a “national park” is a rural ecosystem complete with post offices, well-tended roads, highly subsidized cows, and handsome villages.

Those who wish to protect natural ecosystems learn, to their stupefaction, that they have to work harder and harder — that is, to intervene even more, at always greater levels of detail, with ever more subtle care — to keep them “natural enough” for Nature-intoxicated tourists to remain happy.

Like France’s parks, all of Nature needs our constant care, our undivided attention, our costly instruments, our hundreds of thousands of scientists, our huge institutions, our careful funding. But though we have Nature, and we have nurture, we don’t know what it would mean for Nature itself to be nurtured.⁷

The word “environmentalism” thus designates this turning point in history when the unwanted consequences are suddenly considered to be such a monstrosity that the only logical step appears to be to abstain and repent: “We should not have committed so many crimes; now we should be good and limit ourselves.” Or at least this is what people felt and thought before the breakthrough, at the time when there was still an “environment.”

But what is the breakthrough itself then? If I am right, the breakthrough involves no longer seeing a contradiction between the spirit of emancipation and its catastrophic outcomes, but accepting it as the normal duty of continuing to care for unwanted consequences, even if this means going further and further down into the imbroglios. Environmentalists say: “From now on we should limit ourselves.” Postenvironmentalists exclaim: “From now on, we should stop flagellating ourselves and take up explicitly and seriously what we have been doing all along at an ever-increasing scale, namely, intervening, acting, wanting, caring.” For environmentalists, the return of unexpected consequences appears as a scandal (which it is for the modernist myth of mastery). For postenvironmentalists, the other, unintended consequences are part and parcel of any action.

3.
One way to seize upon the breakthrough from environmentalism to postenvironmentalism is to reshape the very definition of the “precautionary principle.” This strange moral, legal, epistemological monster has appeared in European and especially French politics after many scandals due to the misplaced belief by state authority in the certainties provided by Science.⁸

When action is supposed to be nothing but the logical consequence of reason and facts (which the French, of all people, still believe), it is quite normal to wait for the certainty of science before administrators and politicians spring to action. The problem begins when experts fail to agree on the reasons and facts that have been taken as the necessary premises of any action. Then the machinery of decision is stuck until experts come to an agreement. It was in such a situation that the great tainted blood catastrophe of the 1980s ensued: before agreement was produced, hundreds of patients were transfused with blood contaminated by the AIDS virus.⁹

The precautionary principle was introduced to break this odd connection between scientific certainty and political action, stating that even in the absence of certainty, decisions could be made. But of course, as soon as it was introduced, fierce debates began on its meaning. Is it an environmentalist notion that precludes action or a postenvironmentalist notion that finally follows action through to its consequences?

Not surprisingly, the enemies of the precautionary principle — which President Chirac enshrined in the French Constitution as if the French, having indulged so much in rationalism, had to be protected against it by the highest legal pronouncements — took it as proof that no action was possible any more. As good modernists, they claimed that if you had to take so many precautions in advance, to anticipate so many risks, to include the unexpected consequences even before they arrived, and worse, to be responsible for them, then it was a plea for impotence, despondency, and despair. The only way to innovate, they claimed, is to bounce forward, blissfully ignorant of the consequences or at least unconcerned by what lies outside your range of action. Their opponents largely agreed. Modernist environmentalists argued that the principle of precaution dictated no action, no new technology, no intervention unless it could be proven with certainty that no harm would result. Modernists we were, modernists we shall be!

But for its postenvironmental supporters (of which I am one) the principle of precaution, properly understood, is exactly the change ofzeitgeist needed: not a principle of abstention — as many have come to see it — but a change in the way any action is considered, a deep tidal change in the linkage modernism established between science and politics. From now on, thanks to this principle, unexpected consequences are attached to their initiators and have to be followed through all the way.

4.
The link between technology and theology hinges on the notion of mastery. Descartes exclaimed that we should be “maîtres et possesseurs de la nature.”¹⁰
But what does it mean to be a master? In the modernist narrative, mastery was supposed to require such total dominance by the master that he was emancipated entirely from any care and worry. This is the myth about mastery that was used to describe the technical, scientific, and economic dominion of Man over Nature.

But if you think about it according to the compositionist narrative, this myth is quite odd: where have we ever seen a master freed from any dependence on his dependents? The Christian God, at least, is not a master who is freed from dependents, but who, on the contrary, gets folded into, involved with, implicated with, and incarnated into His Creation. God is so attached and dependent upon His Creation that he is continually forced (convinced? willing?) to save it. Once again, the sin is not to wish to have dominion over Nature, but to believe that this dominion means emancipation and not attachment.

If God has not abandoned His Creation and has sent His Son to redeem it, why do you, a human, a creature, believe that you can invent, innovate, and proliferate — and then flee away in horror from what you have committed? Oh, you the hypocrite who confesses of one sin to hide a much graver, mortal one! Has God fled in horror after what humans made of His Creation? Then have at least the same forbearance that He has.

The dream of emancipation has not turned into a nightmare. It was simply too limited: it excluded nonhumans. It did not care about unexpected consequences; it was unable to follow through with its responsibilities; it entertained a wholly unrealistic notion of what science and technology had to offer; it relied on a rather impious definition of God, and a totally absurd notion of what creation, innovation, and mastery could provide.

Which God and which Creation should we be for, knowing that, contrary to Dr. Frankenstein, we cannot suddenly stop being involved and “go home?” Incarnated we are, incarnated we will be. In spite of a centuries-old misdirected metaphor, we should, without any blasphemy, reverse the Scripture and exclaim: “What good is it for a man to gain his soul yet forfeit the whole world?” /

1. Polidori, John, et al. 1819. The Vampyre: A Tale. Printed for Sherwood, Neely, and Jones.

2. Shelley, Mary W., 1823. Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. Printed for G. and W.B. Whittaker.

3. Ibid.

4. This is also the theme of: Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis or the Love of Technology. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

5. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.

6. Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. 2007. Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

7. Descola, Philippe. 2005. Par dela nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.

8. Sadeleer, Nicolas de, 2006. Implementing the Precautionary Principle: Approaches from Nordic Countries and the EU. Earthscan Publ. Ltd.

9. Hermitte, Marie-Angele. 1996. Le Sang Et Le Droit. Essai Sur La Transfusion Sanguine. Paris: Le Seuil.

10. Descartes, Rene. 1637. Discourse on Method in Discourse on Method and Related Writings. Translated by Desmond M. Clark. 1999. Part 6, 44. New York: Penguin.

Charting Hybridised Realities (Tactical Media Files)

16/04/2012UncategorizedCidadania, Interatividade, Mídia, Mediação tecnológica, Opinião pública, participatividade, Redes sociais, sociedade civilrenzotaddei

Posted on April 15, 2012 by admin

This text was originally written for the Re-Public on-line journal, which focuses on innovative developments in contemporary political theory and practice, and is published from Greece. As the journal has ground to a (hopefully just temporary) halt under severe austerity pressures we decided to post the current first draft of the text on the Tactical Media Files blog. This posting is one of two, the second of which will follow shortly. Both texts build on my recent Network Notebook on the ‘Legacies of Tactical Media‘.

The second text is a collection of preliminary notes that expand on recent discussions following Marco Deseriis and Jodi Dean’s essay “A Movement Without Demands”. It is conceivable that both texts will merge into a more substantive essay in the future, but I haven’t made up my mind about that as yet.

Hope this will be of interest,
Eric

Charting Hybridised Realities

Tactical Cartographies for a densified present

In the midst of an enquiry into the legacies of Tactical Media – the fusion of art, politics, and media which had been recognised in the middle 1990s as a particularly productive mix for cultural, social and political activism [1], the year 2011 unfolded. The enquiry had started as an extension of the work on the Tactical Media Files, an on-line documentation resource for tactical media practices worldwide [2], which grew out of the physical archives of the infamous Next 5 Minutes festival series on tactical media (1993 – 2003) housed at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. After making much of tactical media’s history accessible again on-line, our question, as editors of the resource, had been what the current significance of the term and the thinking and practices around it might be?

Prior to 2011 this was something emphatically under question. The Next 5 Minutes festival series had been ended with the 2003 edition, following a year that had started on September 11, 2002, convening local activists gatherings named as Tactical Media Labs across six continents. [3] Two questions were at the heart of the fourth and last edition of the Next 5 Minutes: How has the field of media activism diversified since it was first named ‘tactical media’ in the middle 1990s? And what could be significance and efficacy of tactical media’s symbolic interventions in the midst of the semiotic corruption of the media landscape after the 9/11 terrorist attacks?

This ‘crash of symbols’ for obvious reasons took centre stage during this fourth and last edition of the festival. Naomi Klein had famously claimed in her speedy response to the horrific events of 9/11 that the activist lever of symbolic intervention had been contaminated and rendered useless in the face of the overpowering symbolic power of the terrorist attacks and their real-time mediation on a global scale. [4] The attacks left behind an “utterly transformed semiotic landscape” (Klein) in which the accustomed tactics of culture jammers had been ‘blown away’ by the symbolic power of the terrorist atrocities. Instead ‘we’ (Klein appealing to an imaginary community of social activists) should move from symbols to substance. What Klein overlooked in this response in ‘shock and awe’, however, was that while the semiotic landscape had indeed been dramatically transformed (and corrupted) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it still remained a semiotic landscape – symbols were still the only lever and entry point into the wider real-time mediated public domain.

Therefore, as unlikely as it may have seemed at the time, the question about the diversification of the terrain and the practices of media activism(s) was ultimately of far greater importance. What the 9/11 crash of symbols and the semiotic corruption debate contributed here was ‘merely’ an added layer of complexity. In a society permeated by media flows, social activism necessarily had to become media activism, and thus had to operate in a significantly more complex and contested environment. The diversification of the media and information landscape, however, also implied that a radical diversification of activist strategies was needed to address these increasingly hybridised conditions.

To name but a few of the emerging concerns: Witnessing of human rights abuses around the world, and creating public visibility and debate around them remained a pivotal concern for many tactical media practitioners, as it had been right from the early days of camcorder activism. But now new concerns over privacy in networked media environments, coupled with security and secrecy regimes of information control entered the scene. Critical media arts spread in different directions, claiming new terrains as diverse as life sciences and bio-engineering, as well as ‘contestational robotics’, interventions into the space of computer games, and even on-line role playing environments. Meanwhile the free software movement made its strides into developing more autonomous toolsets and infrastructures for a variety of social and cultural needs – adding a more strategic dimension to what had hitherto been mostly an interventionist practice. In a parallel movement on-line discussion groups, mailing lists, and activity on various social media platforms started to coalesce slowly into what media theorist Geert Lovink has described as ‘organised networks’. [5] Or finally the rapid development of wireless transmission technologies, smart phones and other wireless network clients, which introduced a paradoxical superimposition of mediated and embodied spatial logics, best be captured in the multilayered concept of Hybrid Space. [6]

Our question was therefore entirely justified, to ask how the term ‘tactical media’ could possibly bring together such a diversified, heterogeneous, and hybridised set of practices in a meaningful way? It had become clear that more sophisticated cartographies would be necessary to begin charting this intensely hybridised landscape.

A digital conversion of public space

If the events in 2011 have made one thing clear it is that the ominous claim of Critical Art Ensemble that “the streets are dead capital” [7] has been declared null and void by an astounding resurgence of street protest, whatever their longer term political significance and fallout might be. These protests staged in the streets and squares, ranging from anti-austerity protests in Southern Europe to the various uprisings in Arab countries in North Africa and the Middle East, to the Occupy protests in the US and Northern Europe, have by no means been staged in physical spaces out of a rejection of the semiotic corruption of the media space. Much rather the streets and squares have acted as a platform for the digital and networked multiplication of protest across a plethora of distribution channels, cutting right across the spectrum of alternative and mainstream, broadcast and networked media outlets.

What remained true to the origin of the term ‘tactical media’ was to build on Michel de Certeau’s insight that the ‘tactics of the weak’ operate on the terrain of strategic power through highly agile displacements and temporary interventions [8], creating a continuous nomadic movement, giving voice to the voiceless by means of ‘any media necessary’ (Critical Art Ensemble). However, the radical dispersal of wireless and mobile media technologies meant that mediated and embodied public spaces increasingly started to coincide, creating a new hybridised logic for social contestation. As witnessed in the remarkable series of public square occupations in 2011, through the digital conversion of public space the streets have become networks and the squares the medium for collective expression in a transnationally interconnected but still highly discontinuous media network.

Horizontal networks / lateral connections

One of the remarkable characteristics of the various protests is not simply the adoption of similar tactics (most notably occupations of public city squares), but the conscious interlinking of events as they unfold. Italian activists of the Unicommons movement physically linked up with revolting students in Tunisia, Egyptian bloggers and occupiers of Tahrir Square linked up with the ‘take the square’ activists in Spain, who in turn expressed solidarity and even co-initiated transnational actions with #occupy activists in the United States and elsewhere. It is the first time that the new organisational logic of transnational horizontal networks that has been theorised for instance in the seminal work “Territory, Authority, Rights” by sociologist Saskia Sassen, has become so evidently visible in activists practices across a set of radically dispersed geographic assemblages.

Horizontal networks by-pass traditional vertically integrated hierarchies of the local / national / international to create specific spatio-temporal transnational linkages around common interests, but also around affective ties. By and large these ties and linkages are still extra-institutional, largely informal, and because of their radically dispersed make up and their ‘affective’ constitution highly unstable. Political institutions have not even begun assembling an adequate response to these new emergent political constellations (other than traditional repressive instruments of strategic power, i.e. evictions, arrests, prohibitions). Given the structural inequalities that fuel the different strands of protest the longer term effectiveness of these measures remains highly uncertain. The institutional linkages at the moment seem mostly limited to anti-institutional contestation on the part of protestors and repressive gestures of strategic authority. The truly challenging proposition these new transnational linkages suggest, however, is their movement to bypass the nested hierarchies of vertically integrated power structures in a horizontal configuration of social organisation. They link up a bewildering array of local groups, sites, networks, geographies, and cultural contexts and sensitivities, taking seriously for the first time the networked space as a new ‘frontier zone’ (Sassen) where the new constellations of lateral transnational politics are going to be constructed.

Charting the layered densities of hybrid space

Hybrid Space is discontinuous. It’s density is always variable, from place to place, from moment to moment. Presence of carrier signals can be interrupted or restored at any moment. Coverage is never guaranteed. The economics of the wireless network space is a matter of continuous contestation, and transmitters are always accompanied by their own forms of electromagnetic pollution (electrosmog). Charting and navigating this discontinuous and unstable space, certainly for social and political activists, is therefore always a challenge. Some prominent elements in this cartography are emerging more clearly, however:

– connectivity: presence or absence of the signal carrier wave is becoming an increasingly important factor in staging and mediating protest. Exclusive reliance on state and corporate controlled infrastructures thus becomes increasingly perilous.

– censorship: censorship these days comes in many guises. Besides the continued forms of overt repression (arrests, confiscations, closures) of media outlets, new forms are the excessive application of intellectual property rights regimes to weed out unwarranted voices from the media landscape, but also highly effective forms of dis-information and information overflow, something that has called the political efficacy of a project like WikiLeaks emphatically into question.

– circumvention: Great Information Fire Walls and information blockages are obvious forms of censorship, widely used during the Arab protests and common practice in China, now also spreading throughout the EU (under the guise of anti-piracy laws). These necessitate an ever more sophisticated understanding and deployment of internet censorship circumvention techniques, an understanding that should become common practice for contemporary activists. [9]

– attention economies: attention is a sought after commodity in the informational society. It is also fleeting. (Media-) Activists need to become masters at seizing and displacing public attention. Agility and mobility are indispensable here.

– public imagination management: Strategic operators try to manage public opinion. Activists cannot rely on this strategy. They do not have the means to keep and maintain public opinion in favour of their temporary goals. Instead activists should focus on ‘public imagination management’ – the continuous remembrance that another world is possible.

Beyond semiotic corruption: A perverse subjectivity

The immersion in extended networks of affect that now permeate both embodied and mediated spaces introduces a new and inescapable corruption of subjectivity. Critical theory already taught us that we cannot trust subjectivity. However, the excessive self-mediation of protestors on the public square has shown that a deep desire for subjective articulation drives the manifestation in public. The dynamic is underscored further by upload statistics of video platforms such as youtube that continue to outpace the possibility for the global population to actually see and witness these materials.

Rather than dismissing subjectivity it should be embraced. This requires a new attitude ‘beyond good and evil’, beyond critique and submission. A new perverse subjectivity is able to straddle the seemingly impossible divide between willing submission to various forms of corporate, state and social coercion, and vital social and political critique and contestation. It’s maxim here: Relish your own commodification, embrace your perverse subjectivity, in order to escape the perversion of subjectivity.

Eric Kluitenberg
Amsterdam, April 15, 2012.

References:

1 – See: David Garcia & Geert Lovink, The ABC of Tactical Media, May 1997, a.o.:
www.tacticalmediafiles.net/article.jsp?objectnumber=37996

2 – www.tacticalmediafiles.net

3 – Documentation of the Tactical Media Labs events can be found at:
www.n5m4.org

4 – Naomi Klein – Signs of the Times, in The Nation, October 5, 2001.
Archived at: www.tacticalmediafiles.net/article.jsp?objectnumber=46632

5 – Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, Dawn of the Organised Networks, in; Fibreculture Journal, Issue 5, 2005.
http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-029-dawn-of-the-organised-networks/

6 – See my article The Network of Waves, and the theme issue Hybrid Space of Open – Journal for Art and the Public Domain, Amsterdam, 2006;
www.tacticalmediafiles.net/article.jsp?objectnumber=48405
(the complete issue is linked as pdf file to the article).

7 – Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance, Autonomedia, New York, 2001.
www.critical-art.net/books/digital/

8 – Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984.

9 – A useful manual can be found here: www.flossmanuals.net/bypassing-censorship/

Conservatives’ Trust in Science at All-Time Low (Slate/L.A.Times)

29/03/2012Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

A new study suggests a growing partisan divide as science plays an increasing role in policy debates.By Ankita Rao | Posted Thursday, March 29, 2012, at 1:29 PM ET

A new report suggests the number of conservatives who trust science is at an all-time low. Photo by Aude Guerrucci-Pool/Getty Images.

This may explain some of the rhetoric we’ve been hearing in GOP stump speeches of late: The number of conservatives who say they have a “great deal” of trust in science has fallen to 35 percent, down 28 points from the mid-1970s, according to a new academic paper.

The study, which was published Thursday in the American Sociological Review, found that liberal and moderate attitudes toward the topic have remained mostly unchanged since national pollsters first began posing the question in 1974, back when roughly half of all liberals and conservatives expressed significant trust in science.

The peer-reviewed research paper explains: “These results are quite profound because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives.”

The man behind the study, UNC Chapel Hill’s Gordon Gauchat, says the change comes as conservatives have rebelled against the so-called “elite.”

“It kind of began with the loss of Barry Goldwater and the construction of Fox News and all these [conservative] think tanks. The perception among conservatives is that they’re at a disadvantage, a minority,” Gauchat explained in an interview with U.S. News. “It’s not surprising that the conservative subculture would challenge what’s viewed as the dominant knowledge production groups in society—science and the media.”

The sociologist suggested that the shift is also likely tied to science’s changing role in the national dialogue. In the middle of the 20th century, science was tied closely with NASA and the Department of Defense, but now it more frequently comes up when the conversation shifts to the environment and government regulations.

“Science has become autonomous from the government—it develops knowledge that helps regulate policy, and in the case of the EPA, it develops policy,” he said. “Science is charged with what religion used to be charged with—answering questions about who we are and what we came from, what the world is about. We’re using it in American society to weigh in on political debates, and people are coming down on a specific side.”

You can read a more of the interview at U.S. News, a more detailed recap of the the study over the Los Angeles Times, or check out the full paper here.

Conservatives’ trust in science has declined sharply

Since 1974, when conservatives had the highest trust in science, their confidence has dropped precipitously, an American Sociological Review study concludes.

By John Hoeffel – Los Angeles TimesMarch 29, 2012

As the Republican presidential race has shown, the conservatives who dominate the primaries are deeply skeptical of science — making Newt Gingrich, for one, regret he ever settled onto a couch with Nancy Pelosi to chat about global warming.A study released Thursday in the American Sociological Review concludes that trust in science among conservatives and frequent churchgoers has declined precipitously since 1974, when a national survey first asked people how much confidence they had in the scientific community. At that time, conservatives had the highest level of trust in scientists.

Confidence in scientists has declined the most among the most educated conservatives, the peer-reviewed research paper found, concluding: “These results are quite profound because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives.”

“That’s a surprising finding,” said the report’s author, Gordon Gauchat, in an interview. He has a doctorate in sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

To highlight the dramatic impact conservative views of science have had on public opinion, Gauchat pointed to results from Gallup, which found in 2012 that just 30% of conservatives believed the Earth was warming as a result of greenhouse gases versus 50% two years earlier. In contrast, the poll showed almost no change in the opinion of liberals, with 74% believing in global warming in 2010 versus 72% in 2008.

Gauchat suggested that the most educated conservatives are most acquainted with views that question the credibility of scientists and their conclusions. “I think those people are most fluent with the conservative ideology,” he said. “They have stronger ideological dispositions than people who are less educated.”

Chris Mooney, who wrote “The Republican War on Science,” which Gauchat cites, agreed. “If you think of the reasons behind this as nature versus nurture, all this would be nurture, that it was the product of the conservative movement,” he said. “I think being educated is a proxy for people paying attention to politics, and when they do, they tune in to Fox News and blogs.”

Gauchat also noted the conservative movement had expanded substantially in power and influence, particularly during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, creating an extensive apparatus of think tanks and media outlets. “There’s a whole enterprise,” he said.

Science has also increasingly come under fire, Gauchat said, because its cultural authority and its impact on government have grown. For years, he said, the role science played was mostly behind the scenes, creating better military equipment and sending rockets into space.

But with the emergence of the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, scientists began to play a crucial and visible role in developing regulations.

Jim DiPeso, policy director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, has been trying to move his party to the center on issues such as climate change, but he said many Republicans were wary of science because they believed it was “serving the agenda of the regulatory state.”

“There has been more and more resistance to accepting scientific conclusions,” he said. “There is concern about what those conclusions could lead to in terms of bigger government and more onerous regulation.”

The study also found that Americans with moderate political views have long been the most distrustful of scientists, but that conservatives now are likely to outstrip them.

Moderates are typically less educated than either liberals or conservatives, Gauchat said. “These folks are just generally alienated from science,” he said, describing them as the “least engaged and least knowledgeable about basic scientific facts.”

The study was based on results from the General Social Survey, administered between 1974 and 2010 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Gauchat, who has been studying public attitudes toward science for about eight years, has applied for a National Science Foundation grant to investigate why trust in science has waned. He plans to ask a battery of questions, including some focused on scientific controversies, such as those overvaccines and genetically modified foods, to try to understand what makes conservatives and moderates so distrustful.

“It’s not one simple thing,” he said.

john.hoeffel@latimes.com

Neela Banerjee in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

Americans Listening to Politicians, Not Climate Scientists (Ars Technica/Wired)

28/03/2012Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

By Scott K. Johnson, Ars Technica

February 27, 2012

US public opinion about climate change has been riding a roller coaster over the past decade. After signs of growing acceptance and emphasis around 2006 and 2007, a precipitous decline brought us back to where we started, with fully a quarter of the public not even thinking that the planet has warmed up. It’s not shocking that concerns about climate change would take a back seat to the economic recession, but that doesn’t explain why some are skeptical that global warming is even real.

Since economic turmoil does not extend to past temperature measurements, it seems clear that public acceptance of the data depends at least partly on something other than the data itself. So the natural question is — what’s driving public opinion? Why the big shifts? The answer to that question may hold the key to the US’ response to the changing climate.A recent study published in Climatic Change evaluates the impact of several potential opinion drivers: extreme weather events, public access to scientific information, media coverage, advocacy efforts, and the influence of political leaders. These are compared to a compilation of 74 surveys performed by six different organizations. The polls took place between 2002 and 2010, and provide a total of 84,000 responses. The researchers used all the questions that asked respondents to rate their concern about climate change to calculate a “climate change threat index” that could be tracked through time.

For extreme weather events, the researchers used NOAA’s Climate Extremes Index, which includes things like unusually high temperatures and precipitation events, as well as severe droughts. To evaluate public access to scientific information, they tracked the number of climate change papers published in Science, major assessments like the 2007 IPCC report, and climate change articles published in popular science magazines.

Similarly, media coverage was tracked with a simple count of stories appearing on broadcast evening news shows and in several leading periodicals. Advocacy was measured using a number of “major environmental” and “conservative magazines.” In addition, they captured the influence of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (a favorite target of climate contrarians) using the number of times it was mentioned in the New York Times.

Finally, they counted up congressional press releases, hearings, and votes on bills related to climate change. For comparison, they also looked at the influence of unemployment, GDP, oil prices, and the number of deaths associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The researchers compared each time series to their climate change threat index. They found no statistically significant correlation with extreme weather events, papers in Science(hardly shocking—when was the last time you found Science in the waiting room at the dentist’s?), or oil prices. There was a minor correlation with major scientific assessments.

While articles in popular science magazines and advocacy efforts (especially An Inconvenient Truth) appeared to have an effect, the impact of news media coverage came about because it is transmitting statements from political leaders, what the researchers refer to as “elite cues.” That’s where the meat of this story lies. Those elite cues were the most significant driver of public opinion, followed by economic factors.

The researchers note that around the time when public acceptance of climate change reached its peak, political bipartisanship on the subject also hit a high point. Republican Senator and (then) presidential candidate John McCain was pushing for climate legislation, and current presidential candidate Newt Gingrich filmed a commercial together with an unlikely partner — Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi — urging action.

And then things changed. The economy went pear-shaped and Republican rhetoric shifted into attack mode on climate science. Gingrich’s commercial with Pelosi offers one example — opposing candidates in the presidential race have used its mere existence as a weapon against him, and Gingrich has tried to distance himself, calling it “the dumbest thing I’ve done in the last four years.”

Flipping this around, it suggests that serious action on climate change depends on a healthy economy and bipartisan agreement among politicians. If that leaves you pondering a future connection between global warming legislation and icy conditions in hell, the cooperation in 2007 indicates it isn’t totally unthinkable.

In addition, recent polling has shown that acceptance of climate change is, once again, climbing among those who identify as moderate Republicans. It’s unclear how to interpret that in terms of this study’s conclusions. Is economic optimism having an impact, have Republican presidential candidates alienated moderates in the party, or is something totally different responsible?

While it’s certainly not surprising, it’s discouraging to see how little effect scientific outreach efforts and reports have had on public opinion. Even on simple questions like “Is there solid evidence that the Earth has warmed?” — it’s politicians that are driving public opinion, not scientists or the data they produce.

Image: Hurricane Ike in 2008. (NOAA)

The Inside Story on Climate Scientists Under Siege (Wired/The Guardian)

28/03/2012Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, jornalismo, Mídia, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsão, Religião, Sensacionalismo, Visualidaderenzotaddei

By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian
February 17, 2012 |

It is almost possible to dismiss Michael Mann’s account of a vast conspiracy by the fossil fuel industry to harass scientists and befuddle the public. His story of that campaign, and his own journey from naive computer geek to battle-hardened climate ninja, seems overwrought, maybe even paranoid.

But now comes the unauthorized release of documents showing how a libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, which has in the past been supported by Exxon, spent millions on lavish conferences attacking scientists and concocting projects to counter science teaching for kindergarteners.

Mann’s story of what he calls the climate wars, the fight by powerful entrenched interests to undermine and twist the science meant to guide government policy, starts to seem pretty much on the money. He’s telling it in a book out on March 6, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines.

“They see scientists like me who are trying to communicate the potential dangers of continued fossil fuel burning to the public as a threat. That means we are subject to attacks, some of them quite personal, some of them dishonest.” Mann said in an interview conducted in and around State College, home of Pennsylvania State University, where he is a professor.

It’s a brilliantly sunny day, and the light snowfall of the evening before is rapidly melting.

Mann, who seems fairly relaxed, has just spoken to a full-capacity, and uniformly respectful and supportive crowd at the university.

It’s hard to square the surroundings with the description in the book of how an entire academic discipline has been made to feel under siege, but Mann insists that it is a given.

“It is now part of the job description if you are going to be a scientist working in a socially relevant area like human-caused climate change,” he said.

He should know. For most of his professional life has been at the center of those wars, thanks to a paper he published with colleagues in the late 1990s showing a sharp upward movement in global temperatures in the last half of the 20th century. The graph became known as the “hockey stick”.

If the graph was the stick, then its publication made Mann the puck. Though other prominent scientists, such as Nasa’s James Hansen and more recently Texas Tech University’s Katharine Hayhoe, have also been targeted by contrarian bloggers and thinktanks demanding their institutions turn over their email record, it’s Mann who’s been the favorite target.

He has been regularly vilified on Fox news and contrarian blogs, and by Republican members of Congress. The attorney general of Virginia, who has been fighting in the courts to get access to Mann’s email from his earlier work at the University of Virginia. And then there is the high volume of hate mail, the threats to him and his family.

“A day doesn’t go by when I don’t have to fend off some attack, some specious criticism or personal attack,” he said. “Literally a day doesn’t go by where I don’t have to deal with some of the nastiness that comes out of a campaign that tries to discredit me, and thereby in the view of our detractors to discredit the entire science of climate change.”

By now he and other climate scientists have been in the trenches longer than the U.S. army has been in Afghanistan.

And Mann has proved a willing combatant. He has not gone so far as Hansen, who has been arrested at the White House protesting against tar sands oil and in West Virginia protesting against coal mining. But he spends a significant part of his working life now blogging and tweeting in his efforts to engage with the public – and fending off attacks.

On the eve of his talk at Penn State, a coal industry lobby group calling itself the Common Sense Movement/Secure Energy for America put up a Facebook page demanding the university disinvite their own professor from speaking, and denouncing Mann as a “disgraced academic” pursuing a radical environmental agenda. The university refused. Common Sense appeared to have dismantled the Facebook page.

But Mann’s attackers were merely regrouping. A hostile blogger published a link to Mann’s Amazon page, and his opponents swung into action, denouncing the book as a “fairy tale” and climate change as “the greatest scam in human history.”

It was not the life Mann envisaged when he began work on his post-graduate degree at Yale. All Mann knew then was that he wanted to work on big problems, that resonated outside academia. At heart, he said, he was like one of the amiable nerds on the television show Big Bang Theory.

“At that time I wanted nothing more than just to bury my head in my computer and study data and write papers and write programs,” he said. “That is the way I was raised. That is the culture I came from.”

What happened instead was that the “hockey stick” graph, because it so clearly represented what had happened to the climate over the course of hundreds of years, itself became a proxy in the climate wars. (Mann’s reconstruction of temperatures over the last millennium itself used proxy records from tree rings and coral).

“I think because the hockey stick became an icon, it’s been subject to the fiercest of attacks really in the whole science of climate change,” he said.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced a poster-sized graph for the launch of its climate change report in 2001.

Those opposed to climate change began accusing Mann of overlooking important data or even manipulating the records. None of the allegations were ever found to have substance. The hockey stick would eventually be confirmed by more than 10 other studies.

Mann, like other scientists, was just not equipped to deal with the media barrage. “It took the scientific community some time I think to realize that the scientific community is in a street fight with climate change deniers and they are not playing by the rules of engagement of science. The scientific community needed some time to wake up to that.”

By 2005, when Hurricane Katrina drew Americans’ attention to the connection between climate change and coastal flooding, scientists were getting better at making their case to the public. George Bush, whose White House in 2003 deleted Mann’s hockey stick graph from an environmental report, began talking about the need for biofuels. Then Barack Obama was elected on a promise to save a planet in peril.

But as Mann lays out in the book, the campaign to discredit climate change continued to operate, largely below the radar until November 2009 when a huge cache of email from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was released online without authorization.

Right-wing media and bloggers used the emails to discredit an entire body of climate science. They got an extra boost when an embarrassing error about melting of Himalayan glaciers appeared in the U.N.’s IPCC report.

Mann now admits the climate community took far too long to realize the extent of the public relations debacle. Aside from the glacier error, the science remained sound. But Mann said now: “There may have been an overdue amount of complacency among many in the scientific community.”

Mann, who had been at the center of so many debates in America, was at the heart of the East Anglia emails battle too.

Though he has been cleared of any wrongdoing, Mann does not always come off well in those highly selective exchanges of email released by the hackers. In some of the correspondence with fellow scientists, he is abrupt, dismissive of some critics. In our time at State College, he mentions more than once how climate scientists are a “cantankerous” bunch. He has zero patience, for example, for the polite label “climate skeptic” for the network of bloggers and talking heads who try to discredit climate change.

“When it comes to climate change, true skepticism is two-sided. One-sided skepticism is no skepticism at all,” he said. “I will call people who deny the science deniers … I guess I won’t be deterred by the fact that they don’t like the use of that term and no doubt that just endears me to them further.”

“It’s frustrating of course because a lot of us would like to get past this nonsensical debate and on to the real debate to be had about what to do,” he said.

But he said there are compensations in the support he gets from the public. He moves over to his computer to show off a web page: I ❤ climate scientists. He’s one of three featured scientists. “It only takes one thoughtful email of support to offset a thousand thoughtless attacks,” Mann said.

And although there are bad days, he still seems to believe he is on the winning side.

Across America, this is the third successive year of weird weather. The U.S. department of agriculture has just revised its plant hardiness map, reflecting warming trends. That is going to reinforce scientists’ efforts to cut through the disinformation campaign, Mann said.

“I think increasingly the campaign to deny the reality of climate change is going to come up against that brick wall of the evidence being so plain to people whether they are hunters, fishermen, gardeners,” he said.

And if that doesn’t work then Mann is going to fight to convince them.

“Whether I like it or not I am out there on the battlefield,” he said. But he believes the experiences of the last decade have made him, and other scientists, far better fighters.

“Those of us who have had to go through this are battle-hardened and hopefully the better for it,” he said. “I think you are now going to see the scientific community almost uniformly fighting back against this assault on science. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but I do know that my fellow scientists and I are very ready to engage in this battle.”

Video: James West, The Climate Desk

Original story at The Guardian.

O planeta doente (culturaebarbarie.org)

28/03/2012Uncategorizedciência, Clima, discurso ambiental, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mídia, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Políticas públicas, Previsão, Sensacionalismo, Visualidaderenzotaddei

por Guy Debord

A “poluição” está hoje na moda, exatamente da mesma maneira que a revolução: ela se apodera de toda a vida da sociedade e é representada ilusoriamente no espetáculo. Ela é tagarelice tediosa numa pletora de escritos e de discursos errôneos e mistificadores, e, nos fatos, ela pega todo mundo pelo pescoço. Ela se expõe em todo lugar enquanto ideologia e ganha terreno enquanto processo real. Esses dois movimentos antagônicos, o estágio supremo da produção mercantil e o projeto de sua negação total, igualmente ricos de contradições em simesmos, crescem em conjunto. São os dois lados pelos quais se manifesta um mesmo momento histórico há muito tempo esperado e freqüentemente previsto sob figuras parciais inadequadas: a impossibilidade da continuação do funcionamento do capitalismo.

A época que tem todos os meios técnicos de alterar as condições de vida na Terra é igualmente a época que, pelo mesmo desenvolvimento técnico e científico separado, dispõe de todos os meios de controle e de previsão matematicamente indubitável para medir com exatidão antecipada para onde conduz — e em que data — o crescimento automático das forças produtivas alienadas da sociedade de classes: isto é, para medir a degradação rápida das condições de sobrevida, no sentido o mais geral e o mais trivial do termo.

Enquanto imbecis passadistas ainda dissertam sobre, e contra, uma crítica estética de tudo isso, e crêem mostrar-se lúcidos e modernos por se mostrarem esposados com seu século, proclamando que a auto-estrada ou Sarcelles têm sua beleza que se deveria preferir ao desconforto dos “pitorescos” bairros antigos ou ainda fazendo observar gravemente que o conjunto da população come melhor, a despeito das nostalgias da boa cozinha, já o problema da degradação da totalidade do ambiente natural e humano deixou completamente de se colocar no plano da pretensa qualidade antiga, estética ou outra, para se tornar radicalmente o próprio problema da possibilidade material de existência do mundo que persegue um tal movimento. A impossibilidade está de fato já perfeitamente demonstrada por todo o conhecimento científico separado, que discute somente sua data de vencimento; e os paliativos que, se fossem aplicados firmemente, a poderiam regular superficialmente. Uma tal ciência apenas pode acompanhar em direção à destruição o mundo que a produziu e que a mantém; mas ela é obrigada a fazê-lo com os olhos abertos. Ela mostra assim, num nível caricatural, a inutilidade do conhecimento sem uso.

Mede-se e se extrapola com uma precisão excelente o aumento rápido da poluição química da atmosfera respirável, da água dos rios, dos lagos e até mesmo dos oceanos; e o aumento irreversível da radioatividade acumulada pelo desenvolvimento pacífico da energia nuclear, dos efeitos do barulho, da invasão do espaço por produtos de materiais plásticos que podem exigir uma eternidade de depósito universal, da natalidade louca, da falsificação insensata dos alimentos, da lepra urbanística que se estende sempre mais no lugar do que antes foram a cidade e o campo; assim como as doenças mentais — aí compreendidas as fobias neuróticas e as alucinações que não poderiam deixar de se multiplicar bem cedo sobre o tema da própria poluição, da qual se mostra em todo lugar a imagem alarmante — e do suicídio, cujas taxas de expansão se entrecruzam já exatamente com as de edificação de um tal ambiente (para não falar dos efeitos da guerra atômica ou bacteriológica, cujos meios estão posicionados como a espada de Dâmocles, mas permanecem evidentemente evitáveis).

Logo, se a amplitude e a própria realidade dos “terrores do Ano Mil” são ainda um assunto controverso entre os historiadores, o terror do Ano Dois Mil é tão patente quanto bem fundado; ele é desde o presente uma certeza científica. Contudo, o que se passa não é em si mesmo nada novo: é somente o fim necessário do antigo processo. Uma sociedade cada vez mais doente, mas cada vez mais poderosa, recriou em todo lugar concretamente o mundo como ambiente e décorde sua doença, enquanto planeta doente. Uma sociedade que não se tornou ainda homogênea e que não é mais determinada por si mesma, mas cada vez maispor uma parte dela mesma que lhe é superior, desenvolveu um movimento de dominação da natureza que contudo não se dominou a si mesmo. O capitalismo finalmente trouxe a prova, por seu próprio movimento, de que ele não pode mais desenvolver as forças produtivas; e isso não quantitativamente, como muitos acreditaram compreender, mas qualitativamente.

Contudo, para o pensamento burguês, metodologicamente, somente o quantitativo é o sério, o mensurável, o efetivo; e o qualitativo é somente a incerta decoração subjetiva ou artística do verdadeiro real estimado em seu verdadeiro peso. Ao contrário, para o pensamento dialético, portanto, para a história e para o proletariado, o qualitativo é a dimensão a mais decisiva do desenvolvimento real. Eis aí o que o capitalismo e nós terminamos por demonstrar.

Os senhores da sociedade são obrigados agora a falar da poluição, tanto para combatê-la (pois eles vivem, apesar de tudo, no mesmo planeta que nós; é este o único sentido ao qual se pode admitir que o desenvolvimento do capitalismo realizou efetivamente uma certa fusão das classes) e para a dissimular, pois a simples verdade dos danos e dos riscos presentes basta para constituir um imenso fator de revolta, uma exigência materialista dos explorados, tão inteiramente vital quanto o foi a luta dos proletários do século XIX pela possibilidade de comer. Após o fracasso fundamental de todos os reformismos do passado — que aspiram todos eles à solução definitiva do problema das classes —, um novo reformismo se desenha, que obedece às mesmas necessidades que os precedentes: lubrificar a máquina e abrir novas oportunidades de lucros às empresas de ponta. O setor mais moderno da indústria se lança nos diferentes paliativos da poluição, como em um novo nicho de mercado, tanto mais rentável quanto mais uma boa parte do capital monopolizado pelo Estado nele está a empregar e a manobrar. Mas se este novo reformismo tem de antemão a garantia de seu fracasso, exatamente pelas mesmas razões que os reformismos passados, ele guarda em face deles a radical diferença de que não tem mais tempo diante de si.

O desenvolvimento da produção se verificou inteiramente até aqui enquanto realização daeconomia política: desenvolvimento da miséria, que invadiu e estragou o próprio meio da vida. A sociedade em que os produtores se matam no trabalho, e cujo resultado devem somente contemplar, lhes deixa claramente ver, e respirar, o resultado geral do trabalho alienado enquanto resultado de morte. Na sociedade da economia superdesenvolvida, tudo entrou na esfera dos bens econômicos, mesmo a água das fontes e o ar das cidades, quer dizer que tudo se tornou o mal econômico, “negação acabada do homem” que atinge agora sua perfeita conclusão material. O conflito entre as forças produtivas modernas e as relações de produção, burguesas ou burocráticas, da sociedade capitalista entrou em sua fase última. A produção da não-vida prosseguiu cada vez mais seu processo linear e cumulativo; vindo a atravessar um último limiar em seu progresso, ela produz agora diretamente a morte.

A função última, confessada, essencial, da economia desenvolvida hoje, no mundo inteiro em que reina o trabalho-mercadoria, que assegura todo o poder a seus patrões, é a produção dos empregos. Está-se bem longe das idéias “progressistas” do século anterior [século XIX] sobre a diminuição possível do trabalho humano pela multiplicação científica e técnica da produtividade, que se supunha assegurar sempre mais facilmente a satisfação das necessidades anteriormente reconhecidas por todos reais e sem alteração fundamental da qualidade mesma dos bens que se encontrariam disponíveis. É presentemente para produzir empregos, até nos campos esvaziados de camponeses, ou seja, para utilizar o trabalho humano enquanto trabalho alienado, enquanto assalariado, que se faz todo o resto; e, portanto, que se ameaça estupidamente as bases, atualmente mais frágeis ainda que o pensamento de um Kennedy ou de um Brejnev, da vida da espécie.

O velho oceano é em si mesmo indiferente à poluição; mas a história não o é. Ela somente pode ser salva pela abolição do trabalho-mercadoria. E nunca a consciência histórica teve tanta necessidade de dominar com tanta urgência seu mundo, pois o inimigo que está à sua porta não é mais a ilusão, mas sua morte.

Quando os pobres senhores da sociedade da qual vemos a deplorável conclusão, bem pior do que todas as condenações que puderam fulminar outrora os mais radicais dos utopistas, devem presentemente reconhecer que nosso ambiente se tornou social, que a gestão detudo se tornou um negócio diretamente político, até as ervas dos campos e a possibilidade de beber, até a possibilidade de dormir sem muitos soníferos ou de tomar um banho sem sofrer de alergias, num tal momento se deve ver também que a velha política especializada deve reconhecer que ela está completamente finda.

Ela está finda na forma suprema de seu voluntarismo: o poder burocrático totalitário dos regimes ditos socialistas, porque os burocratas no poder não se mostraram capazes nem mesmo de gerir o estágio anterior da economia capitalista. Se eles poluem muito menos — apenas os Estados Unidos produzem sozinhos 50% da poluição mundial — é porque são muito mais pobres. Eles somente podem, como por exemplo a China, reunindo em bloco uma parte desproporcionada de sua contabilidade de miséria, comprar a parte de poluição de prestígio das potências pobres, algumas descobertas e aperfeiçoamentos nas técnicas da guerra termonuclear, ou mais exatamente, do espetáculo ameaçador. Tanta pobreza, material e mental, sustentada por tanto terrorismo, condena as burocracias no poder. E o que condena o poder burguês mais modernizado é o resultado insuportável de tanta riquezaefetivamente empestada. A gestão dita democrática do capitalismo, em qualquer país que seja, somente oferece suas eleições-demissões que, sempre se viu, nunca mudava nada no conjunto, e mesmo muito pouco no detalhe, numa sociedade de classes que se imaginava poder durar indefinidamente. Elas aí não mudam nada de mais no momento em que a própria gestão enlouquece e finge desejar, para cortar certos problemas secundários embora urgentes, algumas vagas diretrizes do eleitorado alienado e cretinizado (U.S.A., Itália, Inglaterra, França). Todos os observadores especializados sempre salientaram — sem se preocuparem em explicar — o fato de que o eleitor não muda nunca de “opinião”: é justamente porque é eleitor, o que assume, por um breve instante, o papel abstrato que é precisamente destinado a impedir de ser por si mesmo, e de mudar (o mecanismo foi demonstrado centenas de vezes, tanto pela análise política desmistificada quanto pelas explicações da psicanálise revolucionária). O eleitor não muda mais quando o mundo muda sempre mais precipitadamente em torno dele e, enquanto eleitor, ele não mudaria mesmo às vésperas do fim do mundo. Todo sistema representativo é essencialmente conservador, mesmo se as condições de existência da sociedade capitalista não puderam nunca ser conservadas: elas se modificam sem interrupção, e sempre mais rápido, mas a decisão — que afinal é sempre a decisão de liberar o próprio processo da produção capitalista — é deixada inteiramente aos especialistas da publicidade, quer sejam eles únicos na competição ou em concorrência com aqueles que vão fazer a mesma coisa, e aliás o anunciam abertamente. Contudo, o homem que vota “livremente” nos gaullistas ou no P.C.F., tanto quanto o homem que vota, constrangido e forçado, num Gomulka, é capaz de mostrar o que ele verdadeiramente é, na semana seguinte, participando de uma greve selvagem ou de uma insurreição.

A autoproclamada “luta contra a poluição”, por seu aspecto estatal e legalista, vai de início criar novas especializações, serviços ministeriais, cargos, promoção burocrática. E sua eficácia estará completamente na medida de tais meios. Mas ela somente pode se tornar uma vontade real ao transformar o sistema produtivo atual em suas próprias raízes. E somente pode ser aplicada firmemente no instante em que todas suas decisões, tomadas democraticamente em conhecimento pleno de causa, pelos produtores, estiverem a todo instante controladas e executadas pelos próprios produtores (por exemplo, os navios derramarão infalivelmente seu petróleo no mar enquanto não estiverem sob a autoridade de reais soviets de marinheiros). Para decidir e executar tudo isso, é preciso que os produtores se tornem adultos: é preciso que se apoderem todos do poder.

O otimismo científico do século XIX se desmoronou em três pontos essenciais. Primeiro, a pretensão de garantir a revolução como resolução feliz dos conflitos existentes (esta era a ilusão hegelo-esquerdista e marxista; a menos notada naintelligentsia burguesa, mas a mais rica e, afinal, a menos ilusória). Segundo, a visão coerente do universo, e mesmo simplesmente, da matéria. Terceiro, o sentimento eufórico e linear do desenvolvimento das forças produtivas. Se nós dominarmos o primeiro ponto, teremos resolvido o terceiro; e saberemos fazer bem mais tarde do segundo nossa ocupação e nosso jogo. Não é preciso tratar dos sintomas, mas da própria doença. Hoje o medo está em todo lugar, somente sairemos dele confiando-nos em nossas próprias forças, em nossa capacidade de destruir toda alienação existente e toda imagem do poder que nos escapou. Remetendo tudo, com exceção de nós próprios, ao único poder dos Conselhos de Trabalhadores possuindo e reconstruindo a todo instante a totalidade do mundo, ou seja, à racionalidade verdadeira, a uma legitimidade nova.

Em matéria de ambiente “natural” e construído, de natalidade, de biologia, de produção, de “loucura” etc., não haverá que escolher entre a festa e a infelicidade, mas, conscientemente e em cada encruzilhada, entre, de um lado, mil possibilidades felizes ou desastrosas, relativamente corrigíveis, e, de outra parte, o nada. As escolhas terríveis do futuro próximo deixam esta única alternativa: democracia total ou burocracia total. Aqueles que duvidam da democracia total devem esforçar-se para fazer por si mesmos a prova dela, dando-lhe a oportunidade de se provar em marcha; ou somente lhes resta comprar seu túmulo a prestações, pois “a autoridade, se a viu em obra, e suas obras a condenam” (Jacques Déjacque).

“A revolução ou a morte”: esse slogan não é mais a expressão lírica da consciência revoltada, é a última palavra do pensamento científico de nosso século [XX]. Isso se aplica aos perigos da espécie como à impossibilidade de adesão pelos indivíduos. Nesta sociedade em que o suicídio progride como se sabe, os especialistas tiveram que reconhecer, com um certo despeito, que ele caíra a quase nada em maio de 1968. Essa primavera obteve assim, sem precisamente subi-lo em assalto, um bom céu, porque alguns carros queimaram e porque a todos os outros faltou combustível para poluir. Quando chove, quando há nuvens sobre Paris, não esqueçam nunca que isso é responsabilidade do governo. A produção industrial alienada faz chover. A revolução faz o bom tempo.

Escrito em 1971, por Guy Debord, para aparecer no nº 13 da revista Internacional Situacionista, este artigo permaneceu inédito até recentemente, quando foi publicado, junto com dois outros textos do mesmo autor, em La Planète malade (Paris, Gallimard, 2004, pp. 77-94). A tradução de “O planeta doente” aqui publicada apareceu pela primeira vez em http://juralibertaire.over-blog.com/article-13908597.html. Tradução de Emiliano Aquino (http://emilianoaquino.blogspot.com/).

Fonte: http://culturaebarbarie.org/sopro/arquivo/planetadoente.html

19 Climate Games that Could Change the Future (Climate Interactive Blog)

23/03/2012UncategorizedClima, Cultura, Incerteza, Interatividade, Mídia, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, participatividade, Previsão, Psicologia, Redes sociais, Visualidaderenzotaddei

By Ellie Johnston

March 9, 2012 – 10:13 a.m.

The prevalence of games in our culture provides an opportunity to increase the understanding of our global challenges. In 2008 the Pew Research Centerestimated that over half of American adults played video games and 80% of young Americans play video games. The vast majority of these games serve purely to entertain. There are a growing number of games that aim to make a difference, however. These games range from those that show players the complexity of creating adequate aid packages and delivering them to places in need to games thatrequire people to get out and work to improve their communities to do well in the game.

Looking at the climate change challenge there are a number of games and interactive tools to broaden our understanding of the dynamics involved.Climate Interactive, for one, has led the development of the role-playing game World Climate, which simulates the UN climate change negotiations and is being adopted from middle school all the way up to executive management-level classrooms. Many are recognizing the power of games and everyone from government agencies to NGOs to a group of teenagers is trying to launch a game to help address climate change. Below are some of the climate and sustainability-related games we’ve found. Let us know if you’ve found others.

Computer Games:

Climate Challenge

1. Climate Challenge: The player acts as a European leader who must make decisions for their nation to reduce CO2 emissions, but must also keep in mind public and international approval, energy, food, and financial needs.

2. Fate of the World: A PC game that challenges players to solve the crises facing the Earth from natural disasters and climate change to political uprisings and international relations.

3. CEO2: A game that puts players at the head of a company in one of four industries. The player must then make decisions to reduce the CO2 and maintain (and increase) the company’s value.

4. VGas: Users build a house and select the best furnishing and lifestyle choices to have the lowest carbon footprint.

5. CO2FX: A multi-player educational game, designed for students in high school, which explores the relationship of climate change to economic, political, and science policy decisions.

6. “Operation: Climate Control” Game: A multi-player computer game where the player’s role is to decide on local environmental policy for Europe through the 21st century.

My2050

7. My2050: An interactive game to determine a scenario for the UK to lower its CO2 emissions 20% below 1990 levels by 2050. The user can select from adjustments in sectors from energy to transit.

8. Plan it Green: Gamers act as the planners of a city to revitalize it to become a greener town through energy retrofits, clean energy jobs, and green building.

9. Logicity: A game that challenges players to reduce their carbon footprints by making decisions in a virtual city.

10. Electrocity: A game designed for school children in New Zealand to plan a city that balances the needs of energy, development, and the environment.

11. Climate Culture: A virtual social networking game based on players’ actual carbon footprints and lifestyle choices. Players compete to earn badges and awards for their decisions.

12. World Without Oil: An alternate reality game that was played out on blogs and other social media platforms for 32 weeks in 2007 by thousands of players to simulate what might happen if there was an oil crisis and oil became inaccessible. Participants wrote blogs and made videos about their experience as if it was real.

13. SimCity 5 (coming 2013): With over 20 years of experience and millions of players the SimCity series has captured imaginations by putting players in control of developing cities. Recently announced, SimCity 5 will add among other things the need to face sustainability challenges like climate change, limited natural resources, and urban walkability.

Role-playing Games:

14. World Climate Exercise: A role-playing game for groups that simulates the UN climate change negotiations by dividing the group into regional and national negotiating teams to negotiate a treaty to 2 degrees or less.

15. “Stabilization Wedge” Game: A game to show participants the different ways to cut carbon emissions, through the concept of wedges.

Board Games:

16. Climate Catan: Building on the widely popular board game Settlers of Catan, this version adds oil as resource that spurs development but if too much is used it also instigates a climate related disaster which can ruin development.

17. Climate-Poker: A card game with the aim to have the largest climate conference in order to address climate change.

18. Keep Cool- Gambling with the Climate: Players take on the roles of national political leaders trying to address climate change and must make decisions about the type of growth and balance the desires of lobby groups and challenges of natural disasters.

19. Polar Eclipse Game: A game where players navigate different decisions in order to chart a path to future that avoids the worst temperature rise.

Lessons from Gaming for Climate Wonks and Leaders — Video

By Ellie Johnston

Games can help us ensure that climate and energy analysis gets used to make a difference. Last week at the Climate Prediction Applications Science Workshopin Miami, Climate Interactive co-director Drew Jones, gave a keynote presentation to an audience of climate analysts, many who are working to communicate the massive amount of climate data to the public.

In Drew’s speech below, he draws out the key things that we are learning from games, like Angry Birds, Farmville, World of Warcraft, and the existing efforts to integrate climate change into games. Also included in this presentation, but left out of the video, was a condensed version of the World Climate Exercise, a game that Climate Interactive has developed to help people explore the complex dynamics encountered at the international climate change negotiations.

New report reveals how corporations undermine science with fake bloggers and bribes (io9)

12/03/2012Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsão, Sensacionalismorenzotaddei

BY ANNALEE NEWITZ

MAR 9, 2012 2:22 PM

You’ve probably heard about how the tobacco industry tried to suppress scientific evidence that smoking causes cancer by publishing shady research, bribing politicians, and pressuring researchers. But you may not have realized that tabacco’s dirty tricks are just the tip of the iceberg. In a disturbing new report published by the Union of Concerned Scientists about corporate corruption of the sciences, you’ll learn about how Monsanto hired a public relations team to invent fake people who harassed a scientific journal online, how Coca Cola offers bribes to suppress evidence that soft drinks harm kids’ teeth, and more. Here are some of the most egregious recent examples of corruption from this must-read report.

The report is a meaty assessment of corporate corruption in science that stretches back to incidents with Big Tobacco in the 1960s, up through contemporary examples. Here are just a few of those.

One way that corporations prevent negative information about their products from getting out is by harassing scientists and the journals that publish them. Here’s how Monsanto did it:

Dr. Ingacio Chapela of the University of California–Berkeley and graduate student David Quist published an article in Nature showing that DNA from genetically modified corn was contaminating native Mexican corn. The research spurred immediate backlash.Nature received a number of letters to the editor, including several comments on the Internet from “Mary Murphy” and “Andura Smetacek” accusing the scientists of bias. The backlash prompted Nature to publish an editorial agreeing that the report should not have been published. However, investigators eventually discovered that the comments from Murphy and Smetacek originated with The Bivings Group, a public relations firm that specializes in online communications and had worked for Monstanto. Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek were found to be fictional names.

Corporations also form front organizations to hide their efforts to undermine science. That’s what happened when producers of unhealthy food got together to cast doubt on the FDA’s recommended health guidelines:

The Center for Consumer Freedom is a nonprofit that targets dietary guidelines recommended by the FDA, other government agencies, medical associations, and consumer advocacy organizations. The center has run ads and owns a website that accuses government agencies of overregulation, and has published articles claiming to refute evidence that high salt intake and other dietary guidelines are based on inadequate science. The center was founded with a $600,000 grant from Philip Morris, but has also received funding from Cargill, National Steak and Poultry, Monsanto, Coca-Cola, and Sutter Home Winery.

Sometimes corporations just go for it and buy off legit organizations, as Coca Cola did when they appear to have paid dentists to stop saying kids shouldn’t drink Coke:

In 2003, the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry accepted a $1 million donation from Coca-Cola. That year, the group claimed that “scientific evidence is certainly not clear on the exact role that soft drinks play in terms of children’s oral disease.” The statement directly contradicted the group’s previous stance that “consumption of sugars in any beverage can be a significant factor…that contributes to the initiation and progression of dental caries.”

Corporations can also unduly influence federal agencies, as ReGen did when they wanted their device approved for trials by the FDA, despite serious medical problems:

ReGen Biologics attempted to gain FDA approval for clinical trials of Menaflex, a device it developed to replace knee cartilage. After an FDA panel rejected the device, the company enlisted four members of Congress from its home state of New Jersey to influence the evaluation process. In December 2007, Senator Frank Lautenberg, Senator Robert Menendez, and Representative Steve Rothman wrote to FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach asking him to personally look into Menaflex. Soon thereafter, the commissioner met with ReGen executives and heeded the company’s advice to have Dr. Daniel Shultz, head of the FDA’s medical devices division, oversee a new review. The FDA fast-tracked and approved the product despite serious concerns from the scientific community.

If bribery doesn’t work, you can always censor negative results, the way pharmaceutical company Boots did:

Boots commissioned Dr. Betty Dong, a scientist at the University of California–San Francisco, to test the effects of Synthroid, a replacement for thyroid hormone. Boots hoped to reveal that despite its high price, Synthroid was more effective than similar drugs. The company closely monitored the research, and when Dong found that the drug was no more effective than its competitors, instructed her not to publish the results. When she refused to comply, Boots threatened to sue. The company relented only after several years, during which consumers continued to pay for the costly product.

You can also try “refuting” scientific results with bad evidence, the way the formaldehyde industry did:

To counter a study that found that formaldehyde caused cancer in rats, a formaldehyde company commissioned its own study. That study-which found no association between the chemical and cancer-exposed only one-third the number of rats to formaldehyde for half as long as the original study. A formaldehyde association quickly publicized the results and argued before the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) that they indicated “no chronic health effects from exposure to the level of formaldehyde normally encountered in the home”

And then, if you’re Pfizer, you can just generate as much favorable research as you like to bolster sales of a drug, despite your discovery that the drug increases risk of suicide:

From 1998 to 2007, Pfizer discreetly facilitated the publication of 15 case studies, six case reports, and nine letters to the editor to boost off-label use of Neurontin, a drug prescribed to treat seizures in people who have epilepsy and nerve pain. The number of patients taking the drug rose from 430,000 to 6 million, making it one of Pfizer’s most profitable products. An investigation found that Pfizer had failed to publish negative results, selectively reported outcomes, and excluded specific patients from analysis. [Most importantly] Pfizer failed to note that the drug increased the risk of suicide.

Read the full report here, which includes sources for these stories, as well as an extensive section devoted to reforming scientific practices. There are ways we can avoid this kind of corruption, and they involve everything from federal reforms to corporate transparency.

[via Union of Concerned Scientists]

Nature journal criticizes Canadian ‘muzzling’ (CBC News)

09/03/2012UncategorizedCensura, ciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Economia, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

Time for Canadian government to set its scientists free, magazine says

The Canadian Press

Posted: Mar 2, 2012 7:08 AM ET

Last Updated: Mar 2, 2012 12:54 PM ET

One of the world's leading scientific journals is criticizing the Harper government for 'muzzling' federal scientists

One of the world’s leading scientific journals is accusing the Harper government of limiting its scientists from speaking publicly about their research.

The journal, Nature, says in an editorial in this week’s issue that it’s time for the Canadian government to set its scientists free.

Nature says Canada is headed in the wrong direction in not letting its scientists speak out freely. (Nature)It notes that Canada and the United States have undergone role reversals in the past six years.

It says the U.S. has adopted more open practices since the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, while Canada has gone in the opposite direction.

Nature says policy directives on government communications released through access to information requests reveal the Harper government has little understanding of the importance of the free flow of scientific knowledge.

Two weeks ago, the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, the World Federation of Science Journalists and several other groups sent an open letter to Harper, calling on him to unmuzzle federal scientists.

The letter cited a couple of high-profile examples, including one last fall when Environment Canada barred Dr. David Tarasick from speaking to journalists about his ozone layer research when it was published in Nature.

O que você não quer ser quando crescer (Revista Fapesp)

09/03/2012Uncategorizedciência, Educação, Opinião pública, Sensacionalismo, Visualidaderenzotaddei

HUMANIDADES | PERCEPÇÃO DA CIÊNCIA

Pesquisa mostra que menos de 3% dos adolescentes latino-americanos desejam seguir uma carreira científica

Carlos Haag

Edição Impressa 192 – Fevereiro de 2012

Mesmo vivendo num mundo imerso em tecnologia, o jovem, ao se deparar com a célebre pergunta “o que você quer ser quando crescer?”, dificilmente responderá “cientista”. Segundo a pesquisa Los estudiantes y la ciência, projeto do Observatório Ibero-americano de Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade (Ryct/Cyted), organizado pelo argentino Carmelo Polino, apenas 2,7% dos estudantes secundaristas (de 15 a 19 anos) da América Latina e Espanha pensam em seguir uma carreira nas áreas de ciências exatas ou naturais, como biologia, química, física, e matemática (as ciências agrícolas mal aparecem). Realizada entre 2008 e 2010, foram consultadas cerca de 9 mil escolas, privadas e particulares, em sete capitais: Assunção, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Lima, Montevidéu, Bogotá e Madri. Curiosamente, 56% dos entrevistados se disseram interessados em se profissionalizar em ciências sociais e um quinto deles optou pelas engenharias. A equipe brasileira participante do projeto veio do Laboratório de Jornalismo da Unicamp (Labjor), coordenado pelo linguista Carlos Vogt, responsável pelo capítulo “Hábitos informativos sobre ciência e tecnologia” do livro, lançado em espanhol e disponível apenas para download pelo link www.oei.es/salactsi/libro-estudiantes.pdf.

“São dados preocupantes para sociedades em cujas economias há uma intensa necessidade de cientistas e engenheiros, mas há um baixo interesse dos jovens por essas profissões. E as razões alegadas igualmente são desanimadoras: 78% dos estudantes explicam sua opção por achar que as ciências exatas e as naturais são ‘muito difíceis’, quase metade dos alunos as considera ‘chatas’, enquanto um quarto deles afirma que esses campos oferecem oportunidades limitadas de emprego”, afirma Polino. “O número de alunos de ciências já está num patamar insuficiente para as necessidades da economia e indústria e, acima de tudo, para lidar com os problemas a serem enfrentados pelas sociedades no futuro.” Ainda segundo os entrevistados, o desânimo em face do desafio das ciências está ligado, em boa parte, à forma como elas são ensinadas, e reclamam que os recursos utilizados em sala de aula são limitados. Metade dos adolescentes tampouco acredita que as matérias científicas tenham aumentado sua apreciação pela natureza, nem que sejam fontes de solução para problemas de vida cotidiana.

“Há barreiras culturais, porque os jovens de hoje acham que para ter êxito na vida, ter dinheiro, não é preciso estudar muito. É possível escolher uma carreira de resultados econômicos mais rápidos. A cultura do esforço, que é a cultura da ciência, vem perdendo espaço. Temos a necessidade urgente de uma política pública de educação e comunicação da ciência”, avisa Polino. Em alguns pontos a nova pesquisa reforça algumas tendências observadas no estudo anterior do grupo, Percepção pública da ciência (ver “Imagens da ciência” na edição 95 de Pesquisa FAPESP; “Leitores esquivos”, na 188; e “Avanços e desafios”, na 185), de 2004, mas a pesquisa recente, com o foco nos jovens, traz novos e preocupantes dados. “Num país como o nosso, cujo futuro depende dos avanços de ciência e tecnologia, e onde há uma grande carência de profissionais técnicos e engenheiros, esses números demandam atenção das autoridades e da sociedade em geral para despertar nesses jovens o interesse pelas carreiras científicas. Acima de tudo, é um paradoxo, porque vivemos num mundo estruturado pela presença da tecnologia em todos os espaços da vida das pessoas”, analisa Vogt. “Apreciamos as benesses do esforço científico, mas não nos interessamos em continuar esse trabalho. As facilidades são ofertadas, mas são ilusórias, porque se quisermos tomar posse dessas conquistas é preciso capacitação científica, capacidade de abstração, mesmo com todas essas dificuldades que advêm do estudo das ciências exatas e naturais.”

“Já existem obstáculos grandes para os jovens adentrarem o mundo das ciências, visto como hermético, uma coisa de iniciados com linguagem própria que pouco tem a ver com o mundo sensível em que vivemos, exigindo um alto grau de abstração, e nem sempre se pode encontrar com facilidade analogias na vida pessoal dos estudantes”, observa Vogt. “Imagine tudo isso num país como o nosso em que apenas 2% dos formados desejam seguir uma carreira no magistério. A situação de ensino é lamentável e, na maioria dos casos, quem dá aulas de ciências vem de campos alternativos, como engenheiros ou médicos, pouco interessados em facilitar ou renovar a maneira de ensinar.”

São, portanto, sutis as razões que levam um estudante a optar pela carreira científica. Segundo a pesquisa, 4 em cada 10 estudantes seguiriam a profissão por dois motivos: viajar muito e trabalhar com novas tecnologias. Para um terço dos interessados, o salário, que consideram atrativo, é também uma variável a ser levada em conta para essa escolha. Bem atrás, com menos de 18%, estão motivos como: descobrir coisas novas, solucionar problemas da humanidade e avançar o conhecimento. Bem abaixo, com menos de 5%, estão razões como exercer uma profissão socialmente prestigiada ou trabalhar com pessoas qualificadas. No campo dos fatores que desanimam os jovens, o grande “vilão” é a didática das ciências nas aulas, que afasta da cabeça dos estudantes o desejo de uma carreira científica ou um futuro laboratorial. Em seguida, para 6 em cada 10 alunos, a dificuldade em entender as matérias é um filtro negativo. O “tédio” assola metade dos jovens. Daí, outro fator que os desanima é a ideia de que escolher a área científica é seguir estudando “indefinidamente” algo que consideram “chato”. Em quarto lugar, com 24%, está o receio de que existam poucas oportunidades de conseguir um emprego na área.

Isso não impede os jovens de ver aqueles que escolheram a ciência para profissão como figuras socialmente prestigiadas, cujo trabalho está associado a fins altruístas e ao progresso, e a imagem dos cientistas que predomina é a de apaixonados pelo seu trabalho, com mentes abertas e um pensamento lógico, não vigorando mais o estereótipo do cientista “solitário” e “distante da realidade”. Há, porém, um ponto controverso: os jovens estão convencidos, em sua maioria, de que os cientistas são donos de uma inteligência superior, que embora possa ser vista como uma característica positiva e atrativa afugenta os jovens, que não se consideram capazes de alcançar os patamares dessas “figuras excepcionais”, afetando negativamente a escolha pela carreira científica. “É preciso analisar esses dados a partir do seu potencial, pois é possível mudar esse paradigma atual que reverta a situação, trazendo não apenas mais jovens para as carreiras científicas, como também melhorando a experiência de aprendizagem da educação secundária”, observa Polino.

Diante da afirmação “que a ciência traz mais benefícios do que riscos à vida das pessoas”, 7 em cada 10 entrevistados concordaram com a premissa. Mas diante da assertiva “a ciência e a tecnologia estão produzindo um estilo de vida artificial e desumanizado”, as posições são menos definidas e a resposta mais recorrente (21,5%) foi “não concordo, nem discordo”. O contexto social revelou aspectos interessantes: os jovens de escolas públicas são menos entusiastas das comodidades oferecidas pela tecnologia. “Não é de estranhar que os que têm menos acesso a ela percebam menos a sua importância em facilitar a vida das pessoas”, nota Polino. Diante das afirmações “contraditórias” de que a ciência está “tirando postos de trabalho” e que “a ciência trará mais chances de trabalho para as gerações futuras” os resultados revelam que mais jovens (37%) têm medo de perder seu emprego por causa da ciência do que são otimistas com o futuro (32%). Segundo os pesquisadores, as respostas seguem o padrão da juventude latino-americana, para quem a “meritocracia” no trabalho é mais mito do que realidade. Quando o meio ambiente entra em cena, tudo piora.

Em face das assertivas “ciência e tecnologia eliminarão a pobreza e a fome do mundo” e “a ciência e a tecnologia são responsáveis pela maior parte dos problemas ambientais”, 3 em cada 10 estudantes não acreditam no poder de “cura” científico e a cifra se repete na certeza de que a ciência está afetando o meio ambiente negativamente. Aqui também as mulheres mostram sua visão: elas são as mais céticas, com 5 em cada 10 rejeitando a capacidade da tecnologia em pôr fim às mazelas globais. No cômputo total, porém, há certo otimismo juvenil: 52% dos adolescentes estão abertos e favoráveis ao que a ciência e a tecnologia possam realizar em nossas sociedades, mostrando que não vigora mais a fé cega e absoluta diante de seus resultados, sendo bem mais moderados e conscientes dos riscos do que os adultos, o que, dizem os pesquisadores, se bem aproveitado pode servir de base a uma cidadania mais crítica e responsável. “Instalar uma usina em Angra sem consultar a sociedade é, hoje, algo impensável. Os jovens pressupõem que exista um sistema que enfatiza a democratização nos processos científicos, o que não implica votar em quem vai ou não para um laboratório”, observa Vogt. “Eles aceitam uma cultura científica que realize uma ligação entre razão e humanidade, entre ciência e sociedade.”

Isso talvez explique um dado curioso descoberto na pesquisa realizada pelo Labjor. Se o caminho do conhecimento científico principal continua a ser a televisão, seguida pela internet, a ficção científica, em livros, filmes, HQs ou games, ganhou um honroso terceiro lugar como fonte de informação sobre ciências para os jovens. “Ao lado da internet, esses meios diferenciados oferecem um grande potencial de atrair jovens para a ciência de forma lúdica e interessante, uma forma estratégica de atingir essa camada da população para a divulgação de assuntos científicos”, nota Vogt. Até porque em vários lugares pesquisados as instituições oficiais são pouco conhecidas ou mesmo ignoradas, assim como os locais onde se pode informar sobre ciência, como museus ou zoológicos. Assim, curiosamente, uma cidade como São Paulo, onde há uma concentração de centros de pesquisa, universidades, e onde o acesso à informação científica é favorecido pela presença de museus e uma oferta midiática rica, mostrou índices de consumo informativo da população abaixo da média.

Veja infográficos:
Evolução dos universitários formados por área do conhecimento; Frequência com que os jovens se informam sobre ciência; O que afasta os jovens da ciência

The Importance Of Mistakes (NPR)

29/02/2012Uncategorizedciência, Física, Incerteza, Mídia, Mediação tecnológica, Opinião públicarenzotaddei

February 28, 2012
by ADAM FRANK

Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images. It takes a lot of cabling to make the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus (OPERA) run at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS) in Italy.

How do people handle the discovery of their own mistake? Some folks might shrug it off. Some folks might minimize its effect. Some folks might even step in with a lie. Most people, we hope, would admit the mistake. But how often do we expect them to announce it to the world from a hilltop. How often do we expect them to tell us — in the clearest language possible — that they screwed up, providing every detail possible about the nature of the mistake?

That’s exactly what’s required in science. As embarrassing as it might seem to most people, admitting a mistake is really the essence of scientific heroism.

Which brings us, first, to faster-than-light neutrinos and then to climate science.

Last week rumors began to circulate that the (potential) discovery of neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light may get swept into the dustbin of scientific history. The news (rumors really) first circulated via Science Insider.

“According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos’ flight and an electronic card in a computer.”

Oops.

The story goes on to say that once the cable was tightened the Einstein-busting result disappeared. While “sources familiar with the experiment” might not seem enough to start singing funeral dirges, (who was the source, Deep Neutrino?), CERN released its own statement that points in a similar direction. No one can say for sure yet, but it appears that the faster-than-light hoopla is likely to go away.

So what are we to make of this? A loose cable seems pretty lame on the face of it. “Dude, Everybody with a cable box and a 32-inch flat screen knows you got to check the cable!”

There is no doubt that, as mistakes go, researchers running the neutrino experiments would rather have something a bit more sexy to offer if their result was disproven. (How about tiny corrections due to seismic effects?) Still, I’m betting the OPERA experiment had a heck of a lot more cables than your TV so, perhaps, we should be more understanding.

More importantly, no matter how it happens making mistakes is exactly what scientists are supposed to do. “Our whole problem is to make mistakes as fast possible,” John Wheeler once said.

What make science so powerful is not just the admission of mistakes but also the detailing of mistakes. While the OPERA group might now wish they had waited a bit longer to make their announcement, there is no shame in the mistake in-and-of itself. If they step into the spotlight and tell the world what happened, then they deserve to be counted as heroes just as much as if they’d broken Einstein’s theory.

And that is where we can see the connection to climate, evolution and all the other fronts in the ever-expanding war on science. Last week at the AAAS meeting in Vancouver, Nina Fedoroff, a distinguished agricultural scientist and president of that body, made a bold and frightening statement (especially for someone in such a position of authority). Fedoroff told her audience, as The Guardian reported:

“‘We are sliding back into a dark era,’ she said. ‘And there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.'”

See video: http://bcove.me/ajmi39pd

The spectacle of watching politicians fall over each other to distance themselves from research validated by armies of scientists is more than depressing. Our current understanding of climate, for example, represents the work of thousands of human beings all working to make mistakes as fast possible, all working to root out error as fast as possible. There is no difference between what happens in climate science or evolutionary biology and any other branch of science.

Honest people asking the best of themselves push forward in their own fields. They watch their work and those of their colleagues closely, always looking for mistakes, cracks in reasoning, subtle flaws in logic. When they are found, the process is set in motion: critique, defend, critique, root out. When science deniers trot out the same tired talking points, talking points with no scientific validity, they ignore (or fail to understand) their argument’s lack of credibility.

Eventually, science always finds its mistakes. Eventually we find some kind of truth, unless, of course, mistakes are forced on us from outside of science. That, however, is an error of another kind entirely.

Stadium ban for EU hooligans undermines civil rights (The Limping Messenger blog)

29/02/2012UncategorizedDiscriminação, Futebol, hooligans, Opinião pública, Políticas públicas, Violênciarenzotaddei

February 3, 2012 by Tjebbe van Tijen

EUROPEAN FOOTBALL STADIUM BAN FOR HOOLIGANS… Ahmed Aboutaleb major of the City of Rotterdam rejoices today the European Parliament initiative for an European level implementation of banning locally convicted football hooligans from all EU stadiums. (1) This law initiative has been long in the making. An earlier document by the Council of the European Union “Resolution of the Council on preventing and restraining football hooliganism through the exchange of experience, exclusion from stadiums and media policy” dates back to the year 1997:

The responsible Ministers invite their national sports associations to examine, in accordance with national law, how stadium exclusions imposed under civil law could also apply to football matches in a European context.

However much I dislike football hooligans this is a juridical precedent which will have far reaching negative consequences for civil rights in general. Not only does it create yet another centrally managed person database that can be accessed by all EU police forces (like data on persons DNA, illegal migrants and so on) it is a further step in constructing a ‘central EU police force’ with all its inherent dangers. Such an EU-wide anti-hooligan law also means multiplied condemnation – for a big part of the European continent – on the basis of a local conviction.

Together with actual proposals (in the Netherlands) for ‘whole sale mass arrests’, not only hooligan “leaders”, but also of their “followers” (‘meeloophooligens’ is the Dutch term), we can be certain that such an extra-national banning and black-listing power, will be abused in ways beyond our imagination. Once such a law and its enforcement has been put into effect, other ‘social distinct groups’ whose behaviour is classified as unruly can get the same routine treatment in the future. The Council of Europe document of 1997 cited above speaks of “preventing and containing of disorder”, so one need not to be surprised when other forms of ”disorder” will be handled in the long run in the same way. For instance, when we take in account the frequent attempts by politicians – defending employers interest – to criminalise strike actions, trade union activists could be databased and blacklisted with the same ‘anti-hooligan routine’.

—-
(1) It is interesting to note that the ‘hooligan-ban’ proposals in the European Parliament plenary session of February 2. 2012, was part of a bundle of all kind of measures related to sport listed in this order: – Promote sport for girls; – Blacklist hooligans; – Make doping a criminal offence; – Regulate sport agents; -Combine learning and training. The resolution – thus packaged – has been passed with 550 votes in favour, 73 against and 7 abstentions. In the section of hooligans is also this sentence: “MEPs also call on Member States and sports governing bodies to commit to tackling homophobia and racism against athletes.” Something problematic in the sense of ‘civil rights’ has been hidden inside a package of mostly emancipatory proposals.

Politics hindering scientists on climate change (The Seattle Times)

30/12/2011UncategorizedClima, Incerteza, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

Sunday, December 25, 2011 – Page updated at 08:00 p.m.

By JUSTIN GILLIS
The New York Times

At the end of one of the most bizarre weather years in U.S. history, climate research stands at a crossroads.

Scientists say they could, in theory, do a much better job of answering the question “Did global warming have anything to do with it?” after extreme weather events like the drought in Texas and the floods in New England.

But for many reasons, efforts to put out prompt reports on the causes of extreme weather are essentially languishing. Chief among the difficulties that scientists face: The political environment for new climate-science initiatives has turned hostile, and with the federal budget crisis, money is tight.

And so, as the weather becomes more erratic by the year, the public is left to wonder what is going on.

When 2010 ended, it had seemed as if people had lived through a startling year of weather extremes. But in the United States, if not elsewhere, 2011 has surpassed that.

A typical year in this country features three or four weather disasters whose costs exceed $1 billion each. But this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tallied a dozen such events, including wildfires in the Southwest, floods in multiple regions of the country and a deadly spring tornado season. And the agency has not finished counting. The final costs are certain to exceed $50 billion.

“I’ve been a meteorologist 30 years and never seen a year that comes close to matching 2011 for the number of astounding, extreme weather events,” Jeffrey Masters, a co-founder of the popular website Weather Underground, said last month. “Looking back in the historical record, which goes back to the late 1800s, I can’t find anything that compares, either.”

Many of the individual events in 2011 do have precedents in the historical record. And the nation’s climate has featured other concentrated periods of extreme weather, including severe cold snaps in the early 20th century and devastating droughts and heat waves in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.

But it is unusual, if not unprecedented, for so many extremes to occur in such a short span. The calamities in 2011 included wildfires that scorched millions of acres, extreme flooding in the Upper Midwest and the Mississippi River valley and heat waves that shattered records in many parts of the country. Abroad, huge floods inundated Australia, the Philippines and large parts of Southeast Asia.

A major question nowadays is whether the frequency of particular weather extremes is being affected by human-induced climate change.

Climate science already offers some insight. Researchers have proved the temperature of the Earth’s surface is rising, and they are virtually certain the human release of greenhouse gases, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, is the major reason. For decades, they have predicted this would lead to changes in the frequency of extreme weather events, and statistics show that has begun to happen.

For instance, scientists have long expected a warming atmosphere would result in fewer extremes of low temperature and more extremes of high temperature. In fact, research shows that about two record highs are being set in the U.S. for every record low, and similar trends can be detected in other parts of the world.

Likewise, a well-understood physical law suggests a warming atmosphere should hold more moisture. Scientists have directly measured the moisture in the air and confirmed it is rising, supplying the fuel for heavier rains, snowfalls and other types of storms.

“We are changing the large-scale properties of the atmosphere — we know that beyond a shadow of a doubt,” said Benjamin D. Santer, a leading climate scientist who works at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “You can’t engage in this vast planetary experiment — warming the surface, warming the atmosphere, moistening the atmosphere — and have no impact on the frequency and duration of extreme events.”

But if the human contribution to heat and precipitation is clear, scientists are on shakier ground analyzing many other events.

Some questions can be answered with focused studies of a specific weather event, but these are often finished years afterward. Lately, scientists have been discussing whether they can do a better job of analyzing events within days or weeks, not years.

“It’s clear we do have the scientific tools and the statistical wherewithal to begin answering these types of questions,” Santer said.

But doing this on a regular basis would probably require new personnel spread across several research teams, along with a strong push by the federal government, which tends to be the major source of financing and direction for climate and weather research. Yet Washington, D.C., is essentially frozen on the subject of climate change.

This year, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tried to push through a reorganization that would have provided better climate forecasts to businesses, citizens and local governments, Republicans in the House of Representatives blocked it.

The idea had originated in the Bush administration, was strongly endorsed by an outside review panel and would have cost no extra money. But the House Republicans, many of whom reject the overwhelming scientific consensus about the causes of global warming, labeled the plan an attempt by the Obama administration to start a “propaganda” arm on climate.

In an interview, Jane Lubchenco, the director of NOAA, rejected that claim and said her agency had been deluged with information requests regarding future climate risks. “It’s truly unfortunate that we are not allowed to become more effective and efficient in delivering that information,” she said.

NOAA does finance research to understand the causes of weather extremes, as do the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. But with the strains on the federal budget, Lubchenco said, “it’s going to be more and more challenging to devote resources to many of our research programs.”

World on track for nearly 11-degree temperature rise, energy expert says (Washington Post)

06/12/2011UncategorizedClima, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Políticas públicas, Previsãorenzotaddei

By Juliet Eilperin, Published: November 28

The chief economist for the International Energy Agency said Monday that current global energy consumption levels put the Earth on a trajectory to warm by 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by 2100, an outcome he called “a catastrophe for all of us.”

Fatih Birol spoke as as delegates from nearly 200 countries convened the opening day of annual U.N. climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

This year has been an unprecedented one for natural disasters. By the end of June, economic losses totaled $265 billion, according to German reinsurer Munich Re. That easily exceeds the total figure for 2005, which was previously the costliest year.

International climate negotiators have pledged to keep the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels. The Earth has already warmed 0.8 degrees Celsius, or 1.4 Fahrenheit, so far, according to climate scientists.According to the IEA’s most recent analysis, heat-trapping emissions from the world’s energy infrastructure will lead to a 2-degree Celsius increase in the Earth’s temperature that, as more capacity is added to the system, will climb to 6 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.Unless there is a shift away from some of the fossil fuel energy now used for electricity generation and transportation, Birol said, “the world is perfectly on track for a six-degree Celsius increase in temperature.“Everybody, even the schoolchildren, knows this is a catastrophe for all of us,” he said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Birol spoke in unusually blunt terms about the climate implications of the global energy mix, implications that are disputed by many conservatives in the United States who don’t believe in the connection between human activity and climate change.

David Burwell, who directs the energy and climate program at the Carnegie Endowment, said Birol’s comments have “big implications for capital investment in energy,” though he noted that it will be oil executives and others in the private sector who will drive many of the key decisions.

“We can try to regulate, we can try to incentivize, but ultimately, they’ve got to make the decisions, they’ve got to make the investments,” he said, adding that government officials should engage with the energy industry on this topic. “Now’s the time to have the conversation about investments.”

Burwell added that while the IEA has analyzed energy use and production for years, this is the first year its officials have spoken this publicly about the need to shift gears.

“They’re definitely raising the red flag, because the numbers speak for themselves,” he said. “This is the first year they’ve started stamping their foot and saying, ‘Lookit, listen to us.’ ”

In an interview after his talk, Birol said he believes his agency’s analysis is having an impact in places such as China, which he said would outpace the European Union in per capita carbon emissions by 2015. He added that by 2035, China would outrank the industrialized world as the single biggest overall emitter of greenhouse gases in history.

“They are one of the few countries putting an emphasis on climate change,” Birol said, noting they will experiment next year with putting a price on carbon in some regions.

The U.N. talks, meanwhile, suffered a setback as Canada announced Monday that it would not agree to sign up to a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 climate pact that set emissions targets for all major industrialized nations. Canada had pledged to cut its overall greenhouse gas emissions 6 percent by 2012 compared with 1990 levels; as of 2009, its carbon output was 29.8 percent above 1990 levels.

Climate summit opens amid big emitters’ stalling tactics (BBC)

06/12/2011UncategorizedClima, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Políticas públicas, Previsãorenzotaddei

28 November 2011 Last updated at10:40 GMT

By Richard BlackEnvironment correspondent, BBC News

South African minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane

South Africa’s Maite Nkoana-Mashabane called for delegates to find a “common solution” for the future

As this year’s UN climate summit opens, some of the developing world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters are bidding to delay talks on a new global agreement.

To the anger of small islands states, India and Brazil have joined rich nations in wanting to start talks on a legal deal no earlier than 2015.

The EU and climate-vulnerable blocs want to start as soon as possible, and have the deal finalised by 2015.

The UN summit, in Durban, South Africa, may make progress in a few areas.

“We are in Durban with one purpose: to find a common solution that will secure a future to generations to come,” said Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africa’s minister of international relations, who is chairing the summit.

But the process of finding that common solution, in the form of an agreement that can constrain greeenhouse gas emissions enough to keep the global average temperature rise below 2C, will entail some complex and difficult politics.

Developing countries will certainly target rich governments such as Japan, Canada and Russia over their refusal to commit to new emission cuts under the Kyoto Protocol, whose current targets expire at the end of next year.

They see this as a breach of previous commitments and of trust.

But some observers say small island states may begin “naming and shaming” developing countries that are also delaying progress.

They say the impasse should not delay talks on a new deal, arguing that to do so would be, in one delegate’s wording, “the politics of mutually-assured destruction”.

“They’re on the edge of a mess,” another delegate told BBC News, “and they may not be able to resolve this mess”.

“The global response to climate change simply does not have time for advancing self-serving national interests” Mark Roberts, EIA

Seismic shift

The politics of the UN climate process are undergoing something of a fundamental transformation.

Increasingly, countries are dividing into one group that wants a new global treaty as soon as possible – the EU plus lots of developing countries – and another that prefers a delay and perhaps something less rigorous than a full treaty.

The divide was evident earlier this month at the Major Economies Forum (MEF) meeting in Arlington, US – the body that includes 17 of the world’s highest-polluting nations.

There, the UK and others argued that the Durban summit should agree to begin work on a new global agreement immediately, to have it in place by 2015, and operating by 2020 at the very latest.

The US, Russia and Japan were already arguing for a longer timeframe.

But BBC News has learned that at the MEF meeting, Brazil and India took the same position.

DURBAN CLIMATE CONFERENCE

Summit will attempt to agree the roadmap for a future global deal on reducing carbon emissions

Developing countries are insisting rich nations pledge further emission cuts under the Kyoto Protocol

Delegates also aim to finalise some deals struck at last year’s summit

These include speeding up the roll-out of clean technology to developing nations…

… and a system for managing the Green Climate Fund, scheduled to gather and distribute billions of dollars per year to developing countries

Progress may also be made on funding forest protection

Brazil wants the period 2012-15 to be a “reflection phase”, while India suggested it should be a “technical/scientific period”.

China, now the world’s biggest emitter, is said by sources to be more flexible, though its top priority for Durban is the Kyoto Protocol.

“The planet has no other sustainable alternative other than to ensure the continuity of the Kyoto Protocol, through a second commitment period starting in 2013,” said Jorge Arguello, leader of the Argentinian delegation, which this year chairs the powerful G77/China bloc of 131 nations.

“The adoption of a second commitment period for the reduction of greenhouse gases emissions under the Kyoto Protocol is not only a political imperative and a historical responsibility, but a legal obligation that must be faced as such.”

Although the EU does not oppose a second commitment period, other developed nations do.

And as the US left the protocol years ago, nations still signed on account only for about 15% of global emissions – which is why there is so much emphasis on a new instrument, with some legal force, covering all countries.

Cooling wish

The US, Russia, Japan and Canada have all argued for delaying negotiations on this for various domestic political reasons.

EU climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard

Connie Hedegaard’s EU is increasingly isolated among the industrialised world bloc

But the news that big developing countries are also lobbying for a delay is likely to lead to fireworks in Durban.

Many of the countries most at risk from climate impacts want to cut emissions fast enough to hold the global average temperature rise from pre-industrial times under 1.5C.

Scientific assessments say that for this to happen, global emissions should peak and begin to fall before 2020, adding urgency to these nations’ quest for a new and effective global agreement.

President Nasheed of the Maldives is virtually the only leader who has spoken openly of the need for major developing countries to begin cutting emissions soon.

Equating the need to develop with the right to emit greenhouse gases is, he has said, “rather silly”.

But sources in Durban indicate that delegates from other small developing countries may join him before the fortnight elapses, and demand more of the big developing nations.

China, Brazil and India are also being blamed for blocking moves to phase out the climate-warming industrial HFC gases, which small island states tabled at the Montreal Protocol meeting in Bali last week.

“The global response to climate change simply does not have time for advancing self-serving national interests,” said Mark Roberts, international policy advisor for the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

Funding gap

Sources say, however, that there is real prospect of agreement in Durban on rules and mechanisms for a Green Climate Fund.

This would raise and disburse sums, rising to $100bn per year by 2020, to developing nations.

The industrialised countries (and countries in transition to a market economy) which took on obligations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Their combined emissions, averaged out during the 2008-2012 period, should be 5.2% below 1990 levels.

There is no agreement on where the money should come from.

Developing countries say the public coffers of industrialised nations should be the main source, whereas western governments say the bulk must come from private sector sources.

That is unlikely to be resolved until the end of next year.

But finalising the fund’s rules in Durban would be a concrete step forward.

Tim Gore, Oxfam’s chief policy adviser, said UK Climate Minister Chris Huhne must push for “getting the money flowing through the Green Climate Fund that poor people need to fight climate change now.

“A deal to raise resources from international transport could be on the table, and Huhne must convince other ministers to strike it,” he said.

However, there is widespread scepticism about the much smaller funds – $10bn per year – that developed nations are already supposed to be contributing under the Fast Start Finance agreement made in 2009.

Developing countries say only a small fraction of what has been pledged is genuinely “new and additional”, as it is meant to be; and that little has actually materialised.

The summit may also see a row over the EU’s imminent integration of aviation into the Emission Trading Schemen, which India and some other developing nations oppose.

Science panel: Get ready for extreme weather (AP)

06/12/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mídia, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Previsão, Psicologia, Sensacionalismo, Visualidaderenzotaddei

November 18, 2011|Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer

Maarten van Aalst, leading climate specialist for the Red Cross and Red Crescent, speaks about how climate change will affect people and assets during the presentation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report at a press conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, in this April 11, 2007 file photo. Top international climate scientists and disaster experts meeting in Africa had a sharp message Friday Nov. 18, 2011 for the worlds political leaders: Get ready for more dangerous and unprecedented extreme weather caused by global warming. (AP Photo/Keystone, Salvatore Di Nolfi, File)

Think of the Texas drought, floods in Thailand and Russia’s devastating heat waves as coming attractions in a warming world. That’s the warning from top international climate scientists and disaster experts after meeting in Africa.

The panel said the world needs to get ready for more dangerous and “unprecedented extreme weather’’ caused by global warming. These experts fear that without preparedness, crazy weather extremes may overwhelm some locations, making some places unlivable.

The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report on global warming and extreme weather Friday after meeting in Kampala, Uganda. This is the first time the group of scientists has focused on the dangers of extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods, droughts and storms. Those are more dangerous than gradual increases in the world’s average temperature.

For example, the report predicts that heat waves that are now once-in-a-generation events will become hotter and happen once every five years by mid-century and every other year by the end of the century. And in some places, such as most of Latin America, Africa and a good chunk of Asia, they will likely become yearly bakings.

And the very heavy rainstorms that usually happen once every 20 years will happen far more frequently, the report said. In most areas of the U.S. and Canada, they are likely to occur three times as often by the turn of the century, if fossil fuel use continues at current levels. In Southeast Asia, where flooding has been dramatic, it is likely to happen about four times as often as now, the report predicts.

One scientist points to this year’s drought and string of 100 degree days in Texas and Oklahoma, which set an all-time record for hottest month for any U.S. state this summer.

“I think of it as a wake-up call,’’ said one of the study’s authors, David Easterling, head of global climate applications for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The likelihood of that occurring in the future is going to be much greater.’’

The report said world leaders have to prepare better for weather extremes.

“We need to be worried,’’ said one of the study’s lead authors, Maarten van Aalst, director of the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre in the Netherlands. “And our response needs to anticipate disasters and reduce risk before they happen rather than wait until after they happen and clean up afterward. … Risk has already increased dramatically.’’

New climate emails leaked ahead of talks (CBS)

06/12/2011Uncategorizedciência, Clima, comunicação científica, Economia, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Internet, Marketing, Mídia, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Políticas públicas, Previsãorenzotaddei

November 22, 2011 2:15 PM

The Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. (AP)

LONDON – The British university whose leaked emails caused a global climate science controversy in 2009 says it has discovered a potentially much larger data breach.

University of East Anglia spokesman Simon Dunford said that while academics didn’t have the chance yet to examine the roughly 5,000 emails apparently dumped into the public domain Tuesday, a small sample examined by the university “appears to be genuine.”

The university said in a statement that the emails did not appear to be the result of a new hack or leak. Instead, the statement said that the emails appeared to have been stolen two years ago and held back until now “to cause maximum disruption” to the imminent U.N. climate talks next week in Durban, South Africa.

If that is confirmed, the timing and nature of the leak would follow the pattern set by the so-called “Climategate” emails, which caught prominent scientists stonewalling critics and discussing ways to keep opponents’ research out of peer-reviewed journals.

Those hostile to mainstream climate science claimed the exchanges proved that the threat of global warming was being hyped, and their publication helped destabilize the failed U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, which followed several weeks later.

Although several reviews have since vindicated the researchers’ science, some of their practices – in particular efforts to hide data from critics – have come under strong criticism.

The content of the new batch of emails couldn’t be immediately verified – The Associated Press has not yet been able to secure a copy – but climate skeptic websites carried what they said were excerpts.

Although their context couldn’t be determined, the excerpts appeared to show climate scientists talking in conspiratorial tones about ways to promote their agenda and freeze out those they disagree with. There are several mentions of “the cause” and discussions of ways to shield emails from freedom of information requests.

Penn State University Prof. Michael Mann – a prominent player in the earlier controversy whose name also appears in the latest leak – described the latest leak as “a truly pathetic episode,” blaming agents of the fossil fuel industry for “smear, innuendo, criminal hacking of websites, and leaking out-of-context snippets of personal emails.”

He said the real story in the emails was “an attempt to dig out 2-year-old turkey from Thanksgiving ’09. That’s how desperate climate change deniers have become.”

Bob Ward, with the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said in an email that he wasn’t surprised by the leak.

“The selective presentation of old email messages is clearly designed to mislead the public and politicians about the strength of the evidence for man-made climate change,” he said. “But the fact remains that there is very strong evidence that most the indisputable warming of the Earth over the past half century is due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities.”

The source of the latest leaked emails was unclear. The perpetrator of the original hack has yet to be unmasked, although British police have said their investigation is still active.

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