Last week, The Daily Caller published, Global Warming Is Increasing Biodiversity Around the World. That caught my eye because apart from the obvious practical problems of global warming in the case of humans simply surviving, biodiversity is probably the most important issue. And here’s the thing: a warmer world could really bring about more biodiversity. Of course, it would mostly be more kinds of insects and algae. There are already thousands of species of termites and over ten thousand species of ants. There are perhaps a million species of algae. So this is really not the kind of biodiversity that we’re looking for.

I smelled a rat anyway. After all, there have been all kinds of papers that have indicated that species are dying off. If one paper found that biodiversity was increased by global warming, that does not means that “global warming is increasing biodiversity around the world.” But what do you expect from a libertarian website? Some kind of reasonable discussion of the facts? But I was interested to find out what this paper had to say. Did extreme weather manage to give us another kind of termite while killing off a dozen bird species? Did we have a million and one species of algae in exchange for more damage for our coral reefs? What could be this great news that The Daily Caller was trumpeting?

Well, Media Matters was interested in the same question, so Denise Robbins contacted the lead author of the study, Maria Dornelas. The scientist was kind of angry that her research was so obviously distorted for political ends. But it was hardly necessary to talk to her about it. The paper is titled, Assemblage Time Series Reveal Biodiversity Change but Not Systematic Loss. But before I explain what the paper reported, I have to explain a bit about the science.

There is what we call α-diversity. This is how much diversity there is in a single environment. Think of it like your house: if you have people from different background, the α-diversity is high. For example: if I lived with Bill Gates, we’d have a very high α-diversity. There is also what we call β-diversity. This is how much diversity there is between environments. So if the people in the house across the street were Warren Buffett and some other poor guy, then the β-diversity would be very low. Got it?

What Dornelas and her colleagues found was that α-diversity was pretty much unchanged. So in any particular forest (for example), there was just as much diversity as there was before. They don’t know what’s happening to the more important β-diversity. But they have a hunch. Dornelas provided the following thought experiment for how to think about this:

Got that? The α-diversity is exactly the same, but the β-diversity has gone way down. The fact that the α-diversity is the same on each island is meaningless.

I don’t really mind people disagreeing with me and being totally ignorant of the science they are talking about. But that’s not what The Daily Caller is doing. They are just lying. And what for? They are lying so that oil companies and others who are already really rich can continue to get even richer. It is times like these that I wish I believed in God and could take comfort in their eternal torture in a deep level of Dante’s Inferno.

Instead, at best, 20 years from now we’ll get a meek, “Oops!”

Last week on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, our intrepid host did a piece about global warming. It’s funny and all, so I’ve embedded it below. But it acts as a very insightful bit of media criticism that I don’t recall seeing before or, even worse, thinking about before. Well, I did have my problems with Bill Nye debating Ken Ham, because it legitimizes the idea of young earth creationism. But the truth is, as Oliver points out in the video, that even having two people discuss global warming gives a ridiculously skewed impression of what is going on.

And now, more and more, what you see on Fox News and the like is Bill Nye debating a conservative who claims not to be a global warming denier. We are now far enough along in this nonsense that the denier community is going with the old Intelligent Design tactic of “teach the controversy.” So the denier will say, “Sure, global warming is happening, but we can’t say it is humans causing it!” It’s all part of my Three Stages of Global Warming Denial:

1. There is no global warming!
2. There is global warming, but humans aren’t the cause!
3. Humans are causing global warming, but there is nothing we can do about it!

Increasingly, we are at stage three, because the first two stages just sound crazy. But when you have someone like Bill Nye (who really isn’t the best person to make the case) arguing the science, he sounds rigid. But the denier side sounds open-minded, “I agree with you Bill, but we’ve got to look at all the options!” In other words: let’s continue to do nothing because Exxon is making a pile of money right now.

But even if you had two people who really believed what they were saying, the viewer would get a totally skewed view of the facts. No reputable news agency would bring on a NASA astronomer to talk to a member of the Flat Earth Society. It would provide a ridiculous equivalence: the mainstream view of the shape of the world and the belief of a couple of thousand loons who believe the earth is flat because the Bible talks about the “four corners” of the earth. Yet these same pseudo-journalists are more than willing to imply an actual disagreement—50-50 split—on global warming.

So John Oliver does what someone should have done long ago. Since 97% of climate science papers with an opinion believe that global warming is happening, he brought on 3 deniers and 97 scientists who accept global warming. It’s brilliant:

Going back briefly to the Jonathan Chait article I mentioned earlier, there is one thing that Charles Krauthammer said that really bugged me. It’s been quoted various places but no one seems to have noticed the contradiction, so I figured that I should point it out.

The thing is that Krauthammer wants it both ways. Pure science that has no political implications is just fine, but applied science that indicates something that conservatives don’t want to do must be held to an impossibly high standard. He wrote:

He is arguing that since Einstein changed physics, we can’t know that global warming is true. The problem with this is that there was this thing called the ultraviolet catastrophe. The entire physics community was worried about it. There was also the Michelson–Morley experiment. The entire physics community was worried about it. In the decades leading up to Einstein, physics was in crisis. It wasn’t the case that that physicists were sitting around thinking that they had it all figured out. It was quite the opposite.

On the other hand, now there is a consensus on relativity and quantum mechanics. But why should Kruthammer accept that consensus? After all, he just disregarded the consensus that he made up about late 19th century physics. Why is the new consensus any more believable than the old consensus? Scientists can’t be trusted!

His argument is very simple if we assume that his historical examples are correct (which they aren’t). There was a wrong scientific consensus about relativity before Einstein. Then the scientific community learned the truth and developed a new consensus, which is the truth. Thus, the consensus on global warming is wrong because the consensus in the past was wrong (even though it wasn’t).

What Kruthammer’s argument comes down to is that he doesn’t want to accept global warming as a fact because it will hurt the oil companies and others who he works for. Thus, he will say anything at all to avoid admitting the truth. And in 20 years, if he’s still alive, no one will treat him as the evil lobbyist who helped to stop the world from addressing its most pressing problem.

This info graphic is from Media Matters, The Junk Science of Fox News’ Favorite “Global Cooling” Myth. It is a very useful push back against global warming deniers who say that we can’t believe the scientific consensus about global warming today just as we couldn’t believe the consensus about global cooling then. As you can see, there was no consensus about global cooling. In fact, then as now, there was a consensus on global warming.

The mechanism for global cooling was not wrong, however. Part of the pollution humans create is particulate—primarily SO2. By putting this in the air, we block out solar insolation. And the surface of the earth cools. There are two reasons why this isn’t a big deal. First, we pollute less—especially here in the United States, which is the biggest problem. Second, the effect is dwarfed by the heating effects of greenhouse gases.

What’s more, particulate-based solar forcing is included in the climate models. So the work on global cooling is included in today’s work on global warming. So the idea that scientists are just running around yelling about this or that issue is just untrue. The work is all part of the same process. The cooling and warming people are all one now: the warming people. That’s how science works.

If broadly applied, the argument we get from Fox News and other climate change deniers would stop us from ever accepting science. After all, how can we know that the earth orbits the sun? Only 500 years ago, scientists all said the sun went around the earth. That may seem fanciful, but I really don’t see any difference. The nature of science is that it is self-correcting, not that it is always right. And that self-correcting aspect of science has led us to today where we know that the earth is warming because of human activities. The climate change deniers are not involved in science, they simply want to believe that nothing is wrong, and nothing will convince them otherwise.

What is especially annoying about the global cooling claim is that it was always a short term phenomenon. Particulate matter doesn’t stay in the atmosphere very long. So if humans had wanted to, they could have reversed global cooling within months if not weeks. Global warming, on the other hand, cannot be reversed for decades at least.

I get asked a fair amount why I don’t write more about global warming, given my background. I suppose there are two reasons. First, it isn’t that interesting. The science is clear, and it is basically the same as the simple radiative-convective models predicted decades ago. Second, it’s frustrating. We aren’t having a debate. The deniers are just people who refuse to accept the science. It’s like so much else in the modern world where we know what to do to relieve suffering, but we do nothing because some small group has a vested interest in not doing it.

At one time, many conservatives accepted global warming and at least talked about doing something. But the oil companies started pushing their interests over those of the entire world. And the conservatives jumped on board their bandwagon, and now we can’t do anything. And I fear it will continue on like this until it gets very bad. At that point, the oil companies will have diversified. And all the deniers will say, “Oops.” There will be widespread suffering. But those who profited from the delay will not suffer the least consequences.

So what is the global cooling meme all about? It’s just one of many tactics that the denial community uses to avoid talking about the science—to avoid doing anything. There will be hell to pay. But not by those who are most responsible.

As you probably know, I’m a fan of Joe Biden. But this isn’t because of his policy ideas. He’s quite all right in that area, but there are a number of things I don’t like. For example, he has always been a “tough on crime” guy, and that has led to our extreme prison problems and the racial inequality that has gone along with them. But Biden is probably the best retail politician in America. No one seems as genuine as he does.

It’s always strange to me that conservatives paint him as a joke—like the Democratic version of Dan Quayle. But in Biden’s “gaffes,” I see authenticity. It may be part of his political brilliance, but all these unscripted moments just highlight that he is basically a decent guy. We don’t get comments about how God wanted a woman to be raped. Just the same, if you actually look at Bidens “gaffes,” there isn’t much there. Just as with Quayle, the media are always circling, looking for something they can grab to further their ultimately thin narrative.

Biden does demonstrate a certain friendly ethnocentrism. In the 2008 campaign, he said of Obama, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” That definitely boarders on racism and it is the worst thing I’ve ever heard him say. But generally, what are called gaffes are just kind of odd and often charming. That’s certainly the case with most of those on Time‘s Top 10 Joe Biden Gaffes. For example:

All this is to say that when it comes to politicians, Joe Biden is one of the better ones. So it was with much delight that I learned that scientists are calling the detached trans-Neptunian object 2012 VP113 “Biden.” Clearly, they have nicknamed the object because of the “VP.” But it rather fits because the object is unusual. It orbits at a huge distance from the sun: never closer than 80 AUs (distance from the earth to the sun). That’s the largest of any object known. For contrast, Pluto gets within 30 AUs from the sun. It is assumed to be an ice planetoid with a diameter of roughly 300 miles—about a quarter the size of Pluto. And given that it is probably spherical, it would be considered a dwarf planet.

The paths of 2012 VP113 (red) and Sedna (orange), with the Kuiper Belt (blue) and the planets (purple)

I think it would be totally awesome if the name Biden sticks. It just makes sense. We have a planetoid zipping around the solar system, doing its own thing without much of a care what other people think. I’m fond of saying we should build statues to great people like Richard Stallman and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Well, Biden needs his own dwarf planet!

Nate Silver wrote a bizarre article at FiveThirtyEight last night, For Columnist, a Change of Tone. It is a parody of an article in The New York Times and it attacks Paul Krugman, implying that Krugman has been attacking the new website because it left The Times. Since it is done as satire, it is hard to know what to make of it.

As you probably know, Silver became something of a media star when he predicted the last few elections quite accurately. And liberals especially liked him in 2012 because his model told liberals what they wanted to hear: Obama was winning the election. At no time during the general election did his model have Romney even close to Obama. That included the period after Obama’s less than impressive first debate. Silver was the main counterweight to all the pundits who talked about ridiculous notions of “political momentum” and the distribution of yard signs.

If we take Silver’s article as fundamentally serious, it shows that Silver really doesn’t understand the nature of the many complaints about his new venture. All it shows is that there is a correlation: since leaving The New York Times, Krugman has been critical of Silver. But that’s not the only thing that happened when Silver left. He also greatly expanded his work and has put out articles about global warming and economics. These are fields that are distinctly different from poll aggregation. So the correlation could just as reasonably cause one to conclude, “Krugman doesn’t like Silver since he branched out into fields he clearly knows nothing about.” Or there could be other reasons. The “leaving The Times” narrative seems highly unlikely.

But is Silver serious? He ended his article with a paragraph that I might have used to lampoon him:

I get the impression that Silver isn’t really sure what he wants to say. On the one hand, he seems to be bothered by all the attacks on his new site. On the other, he seems wryly aware that his statistical work has been thin.

The best take on the article is that Silver is saying that everyone is jumping on the site based upon little data. But the article makes it appear that Krugman was right in his initial assessment of FiveThirtyEight, “What would be really bad is if this turns into a Freakonomics-type exercise, all contrarianism without any appreciation for the importance of actual expertise.” I’m afraid so.

The biggest problem, is not the current criticism of Nate Silver. It is rather how much praise was heaped upon him before. I really liked his work during the 2012 election. But he was not the only one doing that kind of work and not even the best. To his credit, Silver always said that there was nothing special about what he was doing. And as is now becoming clear, there is nothing very deep about Silver’s thinking. For that reason, it is probably best that he stick to sports and other kind of “horse racing” analysis.

Recent research proves it: scientific opinions on global warming really do differ. The executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, James Lawrence Powell, looked at every peer reviewed journal article he could find on the subject of global warming in 2013. He found 10,855. Of those two did not accept that the earth was experiencing human caused global warming. Two percent, you ask? No. Two articles. That’s 0.018 percent, or just 0.00018 if you like simple fractions.

Let’s give this some perspective. Four percent of Americans think that “shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies.” That’s over 200 times more credible than global warming denial. A full six percent of Democrats think that Obama is the Antichrist. That’s 300 times more credible. Twenty-seven percent of Americans think that Jesus is “definitely” coming back in the next 40 years. That’s 1,500 more credible!

Now, it’s true: Powell’s work is not on scientists; it’s on scientific papers. And there are reasons why climate change deniers might not publish. One thing could be that they just can’t get papers published because of institutional inertia. But that isn’t as credible a reason as you might think. Journals like Nature and Science are desperate to publish shocking and disruptive papers. So what generally stops these supposedly shocking papers from being published is that they are bad science. I’ve read a number of Heartland Institute papers and they are all the same: they cherry pick data. Any data that conflict with their thesis is simply ignored, not even argued against.

But the fact that there are basically no papers most likely indicates that global warming denial is not a scientific enterprise. It is something done by people with ideological axes to grind. They don’t have to do science; they just know. So they aren’t scientists and it is wrong to say that the science is divided on the point.

It rather reminds me of the Ken Ham and Bill Nye debate. Repeatedly, Ham said something along the lines of, “You have your scientists and we have ours.” Well, sure. In the debate, it was clear that by “scientists,” he meant “two scientists,” because he brought the same two guys up again and again. And that’s about what we have in the global warming debate.

I don’t think that Powell’s work is definitive. I’m sure there were more than two real scientific papers published last year that had skeptical authors. But they are skeptical about little things. They aren’t out there thinking that if they could just get their big break they’d blow the lid off this vast scientific and political conspiracy. But that’s what the ideologues think. It just ain’t so.

The next time you hear about the scientific debate that is raging over human caused global warming, remember the kind of scale they are talking about. On one side: 10,853 articles. On the other: 2 articles. Going with the 2 article side is like not wearing a motorcycle helmet because in an accident, it might fall off and land on your toe.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release a report this week that, Predicts Dire Threats for People, Including Food, Water Shortages. Who would have thought? I mean, other than pretty much everyone in the field.

Since I was a climate scientist from roughly 1990 to 1998, one thing is especially clear to me. The predicted changes to the earth’s climate at that time have turned out to be conservative. The climate is getting much worse much faster than we had thought. We are so used to economic forecasts that tend to be much more drastic than what the truth turns out to be. A good example: Social Security projections. But with climate change, it has been the opposite. And the terrible thing is that while economic problems can be quickly fixed, global environmental problems cannot.

I keep coming back to the issue of uncertainty and danger. When it comes to the dangers of inflation, conservatives are all over it. And again: inflation can be fixed. And fast. But even if there were a small chance that humans are changing the climate, we would normally be concerned about it. It would be the same as a large asteroid hitting the earth: unlikely but catastrophic. So why don’t conservatives want to do anything, even if they think it probably isn’t happening?

Of course the truth is that it doesn’t work that way. We know the earth is heating. Conservatives have no real opinion on the science. But what they do have an opinion on is that the solutions for addressing global warming are things that they are committed to be against. What’s more, American conservatives have what can only be termed a mystical belief that any problem can be fixed with some technological innovation.

The sad thing is that they are half right. Technology is critical in solving the problem. But it should be solving the problem now. (Actually, it should have been solving it forty years ago, but I’ll leave that.) We all know that fossil fuels have great externalities that are not factored into the price of a gallon of gas. If the costs associated with a warmer world were factored into the price of gas, other (cleaner) fuel sources would be competitive. This is the idea of “cap and trade.” If gas cost a dollar more per gallon, there would probably be an order of magnitude more money going to investments in clean technologies.

So we are left with a world that is heating rapidly. We have a conservative movement that is determined to not see what’s going on. And in the end, when whole islands disappear beneath the ocean, when drought plagues this country’s farm regions, when extreme economic problems occur because of global warming, the conservative movement will give us a great big Rick Perry response, “Oops!” But it won’t matter in the future. Conservatives will go on ignoring any facts that conflict with their ideology. And roughly half the people will continue to vote for them. That’s the story of America: an ever repeating, “Oops!”