Attack on researchers ... and on climate change research

If you read the newspapers, (and after my last post),  you won't be surprised that there are others attacking climate change as a hoax. We know that there are political action committees and wealthy individuals who are making this part of the national debate. What is also relevant to us as colleagues, is the attack on  research on climate change and the personal attacks on those researchers. There is ample evidence of that. But here's the newest attack - beaten back by the Virginia Supreme Court...in a state not known these days for its liberal leanings.

Research on climate change conducted by an Assistant Professor at the University has been challenged. The Attorney General of the state subpoenaed his records as well as his personal correspondence. While lawyers and doctors have some protection from subpoena by the courts, researchers do not in the current political and legal climate... So think about the research you want to do as professionals and remember that there may be challenges to the confidentiality you offer your participants. Journalists ave gone to jail to protect their informants. What would you be willing to do?

Here's the article from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

March 2, 2012

Virginia Supreme Court Rejects Attorney General's Demand for Climate Documents

Mandel Ngan, AFP, Getty Images

Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli of Virginia said he had demanded climate-change documents from the U. of Virginia "to determine whether or not fraud had been committed."

 

By Paul Basken

Virginia's highest court on Friday threw out an attempt by the state's attorney general to make the University of Virginia surrender thousands of pages' worth of e-mail messages and other documents related to the work of one of the nation's most prominent climate scientists.

With its ruling, the state Supreme Court handed a definitive defeat to the attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, and a victory to the university and the researcher, Michael E. Mann, a former University of Virginia faculty member who is now a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University.

Mr. Mann is the creator of an iconic graph that has helped demonstrate the progress of man-made climate change by showing estimates of global temperature records over the past 1,000 years. Mr. Cuccinelli is a high-profile Republican who is now running for governor and who said he wanted the documents to search for evidence of research fraud in Mr. Mann's work.

"I'm pleased that this particular episode is over," Mr. Mann said in a written statement. "It's sad, though, that so much money and resources had to be wasted on Cuccinelli's witch hunt against me and the University of Virginia when it could have been invested, for example, in measures to protect Virginia's coastline from the damaging effects of sea-level rise it is already seeing."

The university spent more than $570,000, all from private sources, defending the case over the past two years, a spokeswoman said. Its victory, however, was complete. The court made clear the state institution enjoys full exemption from the state's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, which Mr. Cuccinelli had cited as his basis for demanding records of Mr. Mann's work.

"The University of Virginia, as an agency of the commonwealth, does not constitute a 'person' under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act and therefore cannot be the proper subject" of a records demand, the court wrote in its opinion.

Dismissal 'With Prejudice'

It is an "important decision that will be welcomed here and in the broader higher-education community," said Teresa A. Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia, where Mr. Mann served as an assistant professor of environmental sciences from 1999 to 2005.

The decision also carries great weight for researchers, said Michael H. Halpern, head of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. Mr. Cuccinelli "didn't have a legal leg to stand on in his pursuit of Mann's and other scientists' private correspondence," and the university deserves praise for firmly defending that principle, Mr. Halpern said.

The seven-member court, in a majority opinion written by Justice LeRoy F. Millette Jr., said it was dismissing Mr. Cuccinelli's case "with prejudice," meaning he cannot bring any further action on the same claim. The majority, in explaining its deference to state institutions, cited "ancient" legal interpretations dating to a time when it was recognized that "the king shall not be bound unless the statute is made by express words or necessary implication to extend to him."

One justice, Elizabeth A. McClanahan, dissented from the majority's dismissal of the lawsuit with prejudice. She agreed that the University of Virginia should be exempt from the fraud statute but said that Mr. Cuccinelli should be given other opportunities to seek records that might show fraud by Mr. Mann.
Mr. Cuccinelli, in pursuing a fraud allegation, suggested that Mr. Mann might have intentionally misrepresented scientific findings in order to obtain research grants. In a statement, he said he would now move to dismiss a follow-up request for documents that is still pending in Albemarle County Circuit Court.
"From the beginning," Mr. Cuccinelli said, "we have said that we were simply trying to review documents that are unquestionably state property to determine whether or not fraud had been committed. Today, the court effectively held that state agencies do not have to provide state-owned property to state investigators looking into potential fraud involving government funds."

It's not the end of investigations aimed at Mr. Mann, who has become a lightning rod for activists seeking to challenge scientific findings about the rise in average global temperatures.

The American Tradition Institute, a think tank with roots in the oil and gas industry, has filed its own lawsuit against the university, complaining that it has failed to respond adequately to an open-records request that seeks many of the same e-mails and other documents demanded by Mr. Cuccinelli.

The university so far has granted the American Tradition Institute access to about 2,000 of some 14,000 e-mails that it is seeking, said David W. Schnare, a lawyer who heads the institute's Environmental Law Center. That case is pending in Prince William County Circuit Court, with a decision expected within a few months, Mr. Schnare said.

Mr. Mann recently finished writing a book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, that depicts the efforts by Mr. Cuccinelli and the American Tradition Institute as part of a coordinated industry-financed campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming.

Mr. Mann said in his statement on Friday that he had faced attacks from "powerful vested interests who simply want to stick their heads in the sand and deny the problem of human-caused climate change, rather than engage in the good-faith debate about what to do about it."

"Environment"! "Consensus"! "Social Justice"! Here come the Socialists!

I am copying and pasting a powerful editorial by a writer I particularly like. His name is Jon Carroll and he writes for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Carroll suggests that the Right wing is working to challenge the recommendations of a UN white paper  devoted to sustainable growth and hence social justice--and to identify policy and planning with sustainability as its goal as anti-American and as undermining our value for individual rights.  I encourage you to imagine how the work you do as professionals can and must take on efforts such as these, to derail momentum toward a more sustainable world.Remember our conversation last semester about the disabling of a program that brought together HUD, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy to do collaborative planning?  Here's another expression of the efforts to constrain sustainable planning.

This is new to me, but I think that it is worth disseminating this in toto...Here it is:

Inside the nefarious Agenda 21

Jon Carroll

Friday, February 17, 2012

jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.
Have y'all heard about Agenda 21, the latest threat to our freedoms? It's a real thing and a growing movement, particularly in the West. Not in coastal California so much - we're west of the West - but in Colorado, Nevada, Utah, states like that. In some places, it's a big deal.

Agenda 21 is a 20-year-old white paper issued by the United Nations designed to encourage sustainable growth. Now it has become, in the eyes of some right-wing ideologues, a blueprint for taking American liberties away. Tom DeWeese, one of the guiding spirits behind End Agenda 21, or "Agenders," once wrote:
"Government will control how hot your shower may be, how much air conditioning or heat you may use. ... The policy of Agenda 21 comes in many names, such as Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, historic preservation ... and comprehensive planning."

And all the time I thought those were good things. Turns out they were a plot to make me take cold showers. Those bastards.

I learned about the phenomenon of Agenda 21 from a very good article by Jonathan Thompson in the current issue of the invaluable High Country News, from which much of this column is taken. Thompson traces the popularity of End Agenda 21 to a 17-minute Glenn Beck diatribe last year. Later that same year, Newt Gingrich vowed to cut funding for "any kind of activity for United Nations Agenda 21."

There had been glimmerings before. A Tea Party-backed gubernatorial candidate in 2010 in Colorado announced that Denver's bike-sharing program was part of the U.N. plot. That's the kind of looniness we're dealing with. I had thought at least that the United Nations had shaken off the world-domination thing long ago, based partly on its inability to dominate anything.

HCN even provided a handy list of words that act as dog whistles for the Agenders out there. They include: "Environment, Consensus, Affordable Housing, Protect, Social Justice, Watershed, Traffic Calming, Endangered Species, Invasive Species, Regional, Vision and Historic Preservation." All of these are indicators that secret U.N. agents are ready to make your town an international hellhole.

It's easy to make fun of these people now, but the consequences of their belief systems and their activism make them more dangerous than they seem. Thompson recounts the story of a long-range plan for La Plata County in Colorado (it's where Durango is located) and the county planning commission that shepherded it through.

It was two years in the making, took $750,000 to produce, and engendered a whopping 137 public meetings. And in the end, there was no report. Agenders have made it their mission to sabotage planning meetings, all to stop the United Nations breaking this country on the wheel of endangered species.

Or something.

This idea is that society acting for the common good is a threat to individual liberties. Even if a majority of people support the ideas. Even if the ideas are objectively good, like lowered air pollution. This is cussedness raised to a political art form and provided with its own bogeyman to strike fear into the hearts of the naive.

The United Nations is going to make you keep fringe-toed lizards in your back bedroom, dammit. Unless we stop them now, we'll be riding in hybrids and living in planned communities - because the United Nations wants it that way. As one La Plata activist said, "Someone who owns hundreds of acres in this county doesn't want someone living in the city who rides a solar-powered bicycle to tell them what to do."

We have met the enemy, and he is riding a bicycle...


 

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/17/DDHO1N828V.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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A new "normal"

It is another snow-free morning in Vermont. Nearly the end of February and there isn't a patch of white even in the shadiest portions of the back yard. I went outside without a coat to walk the cats this morning and "our" chipmunk was out and about. Ed (the cat) nearly came nose to nose with her. Simon, the great hunter, never knew there was anything worth pursuing.

I don't know whether chipmunks hibernate, but this has not been a hibernating year. It is easy to see this as yet another symbol of global climate change.   I wonder whether the ground has frozen or whether I could actually get in to dig up some of the weed roots I didn't get to in the Fall. I avoided walking in the woods yesterday, fearful that the tick population would still be active. There are rumors that the deer and the moose are dying of tick infestations. One local hunter found hundreds if not thousands of them on a moose he killed this past season, and others are rumored to be finding the animals dead, with no signs of trauma other than thousands of ticks.

I got a solicitation from an activist group this morning, asking me to write to the FDA to ban the use of a pesticide that has been used on corn crops. They say there has not been adequate testing other than a study by the company that is marketing the stuff. And it is blamed for Colony Collapse Disorder among bees. A poorly worded petition to stop the pesticide use, says that it isn't "only" about the death of a species, but about the impact on our agriculture that depends on bees for pollination of our crops.

I wonder how it became all about us. I look at the reports of climate change and it is always couched in terms of what humans need to survive. We appear to be a selfish species. We also want to see ourselves as benefactors--"making the world a better place"-- with our intelligence and industry, but somehow that is at the sacrifice of everything non-human around us. There is nothing new or particularly wise about this observation, but as I sit at my drafting table in the tiny room upstairs in a small house on the main road of a tiny town, I wonder how we became so selfish. I wonder whether there isn't another way to appeal to people. We stress the future of our children and grandchildren. That too is about our own legacy. We stress the geo-politics and economic hazards of a world in which people are forced to move from their homelands by sea level rise or driven to famine by drought cycles. And we feel "compassion fatigue" at yet another "cause" when there are so many others that compete for our attention. (Note that I didn't write: "action.") We focus on legislative changes needed to force compliance on those who still believe that climate change is a hoax, or on those who are so invested in their bottom line that they won't consider mitigation. But these are still selfish acts.

I wonder whether there isn't some other way. There are people I know and respect who simply won't act to change their own behavior patterns. I admit that I am a long way from perfect myself.  But what I do not see in any of the rhetoric about global climate change, is an analysis of the personal motivators that make us act for short-term self interest instead of the long-term self interest, or yes, in the interest of other species and other people and the planet.

There is a research study that I read once, about people on welfare in Ireland. With a fixed income, they knew that they had enough money to pay the heating bills that would keep the thermostat at a certain steady state temperature. But that temperature was not cozy. Instead of doling out the heat, they turned the heat up to a level that would allow them to feel cozy for a few days each month, until they ran out of money. They were cold then, when there was no more money to pay for heat until the next month's check. Asked why they cranked up the heat, they said something like - "we wanted to be 'normal'."  They didn't always want to feel poor. So for a few days, they pushed poverty aside and felt "normal."

It is a powerful metaphor for our need to structure a new "normal."

Once we turned to religion for a moral guide to actions in the interest of others. Once we turned to the sense of community norms, and believed that we were responsible for each other. And that spilled over to a sense of responsibility for those who cold not act in their own self-interest. Once we understood the chain of being, that linked our acts with the well-being of others, and yes, our well-being with the acts of others. No more.

There are days when I wake up feeling both isolated and crowded by the buzz of media images that fill me with the things I need to do. Compassion fatigue is strong these days for me as well. And there are days when I wake up wanting to feel "normal".

But when I sit at my little desk and look out at a brown landscape, see a chipmunk depending on the seed she so liberally stored away last summer and Fall, I wonder whether there isn't some other way to make change.

Depressing but true!

Here is a link to a Wall Street Journal article saying that not only are cover letters passe as application tools, but so are resumes. Now we are seeing companies rely on electronic media like Twitter, Linked In and (ta da!) your blogs for the jobs you are applying for... It suggests that building your skills in doing this might actually be more than an educational tool!

Here's the link: WSJ Online

Thoughts for a new beginning

I am sitting at my desk on a sunny (!!) afternoon, contemplating the start of a new semester and reconnecting with the gang at FIT. There is a desire to start a new semester with something startling, not just the same old, same old, and I have a lot to choose from that is inspiring though not startling...I am still working on that. But a colleague and friend sent this Ted.com video to me, and I would encourage you to watch it. Liz Coleman is confronting some of the major issues in education now, something that should matter to those of us who are faculty, but also to our students.

She is reflecting on the shape of the college curriculum in an age of change and danger. She is reflecting on the role of the liberal arts in "fixing" the environmental and social problems that are at the base of our conversation about sustainability. In too many cases, the liberal arts are relegated to a backwater of what is known as "Gen Ed"  referring to the core courses that all students must take to make them socially "literate." Increasingly we are seeing that these courses are both critical and that they are failing to make a literate, critical thinking, socially just and socially responsible public. In fact, she is talking about the power of the liberal arts to make us citizens, in the old fashioned sense, responsible for equity and environment and social justice.

There are many take-aways from this video; in fact so many that I need to read the transcript, but here's a few for starters:

"In truth liberal arts education.. no longer exists in this country. We have professionalized liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. Over the past century, the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment...The progression of today's college student is to jettison every interest except one. And within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less; this despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things."

"Questions such as, 'What kind of a world are we making? What kind of a world should we be making? What kind of a world can we be making? are treated with more and more skepticism, and move off the table."

"This brew--oversimplification of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical mastery, neutrality as a condition of academic integrity-is toxic when it comes to pursuing the vital connections between education and the public good, between intellectual integrity and human freedom..."

"Our public education, once a model for the world, has become most noteworthy for its failures. Mastery of basic skills and a bare minimum of cultural literacy eludes vast numbers of our students."

"..[The fact is that] no one was drawing any connections between what was happening to the body politic, and  what is happening in our leading educational institutions...Jefferson knew what he was talking about when he said, 'If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of covilization, it expects what never was and never will be.'

This betrayal of our principles, our decency, our hope, made it impossible for me to avoid the question, 'What will I say, years from now,   when people ask, 'Where were you?'"


"Being overwhelmed is the first step toward dealing with difficult issues at a scale which makes a difference. When you're overwhelmed, you have two things: your mind, and other people. Use them both, and change the world."

Cool Tool!

If you want to find out what the potential is for adding solar to the roof of your building, check out this way cool tool that will tell you what is possible and what the costs and payback period is...And you might find it interesting to see what is possible at FIT!

Another voice on building sustainability

This is an article written by Bill McKibben and posted on the Orion Magazine website. As I have said before, they are a good group, the articles are terrific and the photography is a moment's respite from our lives.  You may also want to check out the piece on drought and irrigation on this month's site.

Small Change

The Era of Small and Many

Reversing the trend of generations

by Bill McKibben

Published in the November/December 2011 issue of Orion magazine

Painting: Suzanne Stryk

Earlier this year, my state’s governor asked if I’d give an after-lunch speech to some of his cabinet and other top officials who were in the middle of a retreat. It’s a useful discipline for writers and theorists to have to summarize books in half an hour, and to compete with excellent local ice cream. No use telling these guys how the world should be at some distant future moment when they’ll no longer be in office—instead, can you isolate themes broad enough to be of use to people working on subjects from food to energy to health care to banking to culture, and yet specific enough to help them choose among the options that politics daily throws up? Can you figure out a principle that might undergird a hundred different policies?

Or another way to say it: can you figure out which way history wants to head (since no politician can really fight the current) and suggest how we might surf that wave?

Here’s my answer: we’re moving, if we’re lucky, from the world of few and big to the world of small and many. We’ll either head there purposefully or we’ll be dragged kicking, but we’ve reached one of those moments when tides reverse.

Take agriculture. For 150 years the number of farms in America has inexorably declined. In my state—the most rural in the nation—the number of dairies fell from 11,000 at the end of World War II to 998 this summer. And of course the farms that remained grew ever larger—factory farms, we called them, growing commodity food. Here in Vermont most of the remaining dairies are big, but not big enough to compete with the behemoths in California or Arizona; they operate so close to the margin that they can’t afford to hire local workers and instead import illegal migrants from Mexico.

But last year the USDA reported that the number of farms in America had actually increased for the first time in a century and a half. The most defining American demographic trend—the shift that had taken us from a nation of 50 percent farmers to less than 1 percent—had bottomed out and reversed. Farms are on the increase—small farms, mostly growing food for their neighbors. They’re not yet a threat to the profits of the Cargills and the ADMs, but you can see the emerging structure of a new agriculture composed of CSAs and farmers’ markets, with fewer middlemen. Which is all for the good. Such farming uses less energy and produces better food; it’s easier on the land; it offers rural communities a way out of terminal decline. You could even imagine a farmscape that stands some chance of dealing with the flood, drought, and heat that will be our destiny in the globally warmed century to come. Instead of the too-big-to-fail agribusiness model, this will be a nimbler, more diversified, sturdier agriculture.

And what works on the farm works elsewhere too. Think about our energy future—the phrase that engineers like to use now is “distributed generation.” Since our old fuels were dense in BTUs and concentrated in a few locations, it made sense to site a few giant generating stations where coal or uranium could easily be brought and burned. But the logic of sun and wind is exactly the opposite: millions of rooftops and ridgelines producing power. You can do it in cities as easily as in the country—new satellite and airplane mapping of New York City’s five boroughs showed that the city’s rooftops could provide half its electricity. If you can do that in New York, imagine Shaker Heights, not to mention Phoenix. And once you’ve done it, you’ve got something practical and local: an interconnected grid where everyone brings something and takes something away. A farmers’ market in electrons.

Many of us get a preview of life in the age of small and many when we sit down at our computers each day. Fifteen years ago we still depended on a handful of TV networks and newspaper conglomerates to define our world for us; now we have a farmers’ market in ideas. We all add to the flow with each Facebook post, and we can find almost infinite sources of information. It’s reshaping the way we see the world—not, of course, without some trauma (from the hours wasted answering e-mail to the death of too much good, old-school journalism). All these transitions will be traumatic to one extent or another, since they are so very big. We’re reversing the trend of generations.

But the general direction seems to me increasingly clear. Health care? In place of a few huge, high-tech hospitals dispensing the most expensive care possible, all the data suggest we’d be healthier with lots of primary and preventive care from physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners in our neighborhoods. Banking? Instead of putting more than half our assets in half a dozen money-center banks that devote themselves to baroque financial instruments, we need capital closer to home, where loan officers have some sense for gauging risk and need.

Your average state or city leader could help push change in those directions: small investments in, say, slaughterhouses and canneries will help local farmers diversify. New zoning regulations can make rooftop solar quicker and easier to install. Higher reserve requirements will move money from Wall Street’s casinos back to Main Street’s banks. None of them will produce utopia—we will still have endless problems, but they’ll be more limited. A careless local farmer can still sicken his customers, but he can’t sicken millions of them at once. A corrupt banker can wreak havoc in his community, but not so much havoc that it topples the financial system. Problems will stay problems, instead of ramifying into disasters. If a hailstorm wrecks my solar panels, I’ve got an issue, but it’s not blacking out the East Coast. 

All economic life is a bet—many small wagers at decent odds won’t make anyone a billionaire, but they should keep most of us out of the poorhouse. And that’s both the virtue and the trouble with this transition. The virtue is obvious; the problem is that there are always a few people determined to hit the jackpot. In our world, most of those people are not actually persons—we call them corporations. But their power over our democracy is very real, and on the farm and on the trading floor and in the hospital ward they’re doing their very best to block the transitions we need. Their money, earned under the old bigger-is-better paradigm, gives them great power to block change: just look at how skillfully the fossil fuel industry has used the Tea Party to stifle legislation that would speed the transition to renewable energy. Watch Big Ag write the next Farm Bill—it won’t be pretty. Big Pharma would happily keep our current medical system, never mind that it’s bankrupting us all even as we fall further behind other nations on everything from life expectancy to infant mortality.

It’s possible they can delay the transition too long—the physics and chemistry of climate change, for instance, demand quicker change than many of our systems can easily manage. But all the money in the world can’t, in the end, hold back history. It’s heading toward something different and new and interesting.

Or many many somethings, each of them small and beautiful.