Paper in a recent issue of Climatic Change: Understanding public complacency about climate change: Adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter
And we’re not talking about out-of-touch middle Americans, either. We’re talking 212 MIT grad students. When asked to anticipate CO2 levels under two emissions scenarios, more than 3/4 gave answers that would require carbon dioxide to disappear from the universe.
The authors, John Sterman and Linda Booth Sweeney, are from MIT, too – so they likely weren’t intending to take a cheap shot at MIT’s reputation. Rather, they were pointing out how tricky it is to imagine complex systems at work – and how our brains gravitate toward easy (but error prone) ways of thinking.
At the heart of the problem is our obsession with CO2 emissions and removal rates. As the MIT students demonstrate, it’s all too easy to think that if we can level off our emissions (itself an almost unimaginably remote goal at the moment), CO2 levels and temperatures will start to drop. Problem is, that misses the (dare I say it?) inconvenient truth that emissions already outpace removal by more than 2 billion tons per year. So just leveling off emissions still means a steady, uncompromising rise in atmospheric CO2.
The authors do a nice job of drawing comparisons: We typically deal with the world on some sort of a “wait-and-see” basis. Is the kettle boiling? Wait for the whistle. Is the bathtub full? Turn off the tap. That’s how most of us operate. When even slightly more complicated relationships are left to the public to decide, it’s always a struggle: look at the battles we’re still fighting to get people to wear seat belts and vaccinate their kids.
If reasonably smart people are prone to making foolish errors when it comes to climate change, it’s even easier to lead them into those errors with some sophistry. That’s what Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has made a career doing: popping off fallacies and ad hominem attacks with the unerring regularity of Wallace’s automatic porridge-flinger.
He probably doesn’t realize it, but he got his comeuppance this month, in a Vanity Fair interview. He scoffed his way through his questions, insulting climatologists’ pedigrees rather than addressing their research (NASA’s Jim Hansen “isn’t even a climate scientist!” Right, he’s, uh, an atmospheric physicist. Your point?). Fortunately, interviewer Michael Shnayerson cut away regularly to get counterpoints from actual climate scientists.
Ebell’s ability to lap up disapproval, badmouth the opposition and crow about his own brilliance is infuriating, especially for someone whose own climate credentials add up to an undergrad degree in philosophy. But it reminds me why critical thinking is still the most important subject in school.
Documentary director Martin Durkin takes unsavoriness one step farther. In “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” Durkin falsified data on temperature graphs and claimed they came from NASA when in fact they came from an obscure journal populated by other climate skeptics. And all this in the name of revealing some sort of carefully concealed truth to the public.
Tellingly, e-mails from the U.K.’s Times asking Durkin for explanation received unprintable replies. When you don’t have anyplace left to argue from, you start yelling. Squeaky wheels are the same the world over.
I’d write something unprintable myself, but I’m holding fast to the belief that people can still tell a shaky argument by the way it’s delivered. Shrill, blustery, self-congratulating, or circular? Not interested. Reasonable premise, reliable evidence, intact logic? Let’s talk.
surf.bird.scribble. 
You bring up a good point – that critical thinking is the most important subject in school. The problem is, many of the classes I had in undergrad didn’t quite get that point. I belabor this point often, but many of the beginning (and some advanced) science courses I took started with a memorization approach and threw in independent thought as, well, an after thought. I didn’t take too many non-science courses, so maybe all the fuzzy people out there can tell an exxon mouth-piece from an independent scientist, but I’d be willing to bet that a lot of humanities majors also had regurgitation as their foundation. Anyone coming from that side of the aisle?
Good comment, Mr. Anonymous. I remember being taught critical thinking sometime in eighth or ninth grade. Even then (and that was fairly far back in the mists of time), it was thought of as a skill that people didn’t practice enough. Now, I worry that our era of “No Child Left Behind,” with its maniacal focus on standardized test scores, has distracted us even more from teaching critical thinking.
An interesting post over at RealClimate points out some undergrads having difficulty thinking about water vapor. I’ll hang my head along with them and admit to being wrong-headed on the first count, which involved the densities of humid air versus dry air. Other misconceptions revealed in the post are even more alarming. (While you’re there, if you need cheering up, scroll down to RealClimate’s April Fool’s joke – all about the Sheep Albedo Effect. Priceless.) http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/ozone-hole-leaks-and-other-tales/
Then, to return to seriousness, check out North Pole research being reported live by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Oops – they’re not at the Pole yet, because the ice at the North Pole cracked in two and the runway is too short to get the scheduled plane in. Looks like the climate is doing what it wants, regardless of how clearly we’re thinking.
http://polardiscovery.whoi.edu/expedition1/journal-day5.html#slideshow
My undergraduate math students DETEST critical thinking, even the best of them. They regard it as some new kind of trick, designed to deprive them of the decent grade they deserve by virtue of having memorized what’s in the text book. It is like pulling eyeteeth to get them to extract a conclusion out of a set of data. What they would rather do (and what they have been taught to do by the Education Mafia) is to describe their feelings while looking at a sheet of data. To actually digest some facts, add other facts out of their reading and experience, and marshall them into some kind of argument leading to a conclusion is a process as esoteric to them as Tibetan Bhuddism. All of their papers (yes, I assign papers in freshman algebra) are fact-free zones.
VN
i have nothing either critical or particularly thoughtful to add but i would like to throw in a feeling (with a nervous glance towards the veteran naturalist).
it is that i find myself curiously uplifted to be able to read thoughtful comments from the scribbler AND listen to bill moyers making a lot of sense, all in the space of less than 24 hours.
maybe there’s hope after all.
The Mummbler
I do not recall every being taught critical thinking skills at school or university. (And I went to what were thought of as reasonably good ones) Of course, you were sometimes expected to draw conclusions from evidence, but nobody went through how to do so, and the philosophy of science was never mentioned in my Chemistry degree.
It is only now, after several years of arguing with Creationists and climate change denialists, as well as some reading of certain books, as well as several years working in real jobs that require critical thinking and problem solving skills, that I can appreciate what was missed out of my education.
Thanks for reading, guthrie. Something about your post makes me think you went to school in England – am I imagining that? It would be interesting to know if the U.S. and other countries are fumbling this sort of teaching in similar ways, or if we’ve all concocted separate ways of ignoring it. Especially since I tend to think of other countries as having better primary schools than the U.S.
(If it turns out you’re American after all, and just write in an English-y way, then forget what I just said.)
And thanks to the VN* and the Mummbler* for their comments, too.
*Also known as the dad and mum.
I love the pic of Wallace that illustrates this post. Hilarious, you are, to equate naysayer swill with flavorless porridge! Thanks for the GBG (great big grin).
The Veteran Naturalist has it right: “(…what they have been taught to do by the Education Mafia) is to describe their feelings while looking at a sheet of data.”
I see this behavior with my daughter. Everything, to her, is an emotional crisis (and I do mean everything. Especially socks.)
But even people who’ve outgrown this childish auto- response can retreat to it when faced with something unpleasant. It is easier to have an emotional response to something (like GW) than to examine the issue, *think critically*, and come to a logical, intelligent conclusion — whether it’s for whom you’ll vote or how many sunspots one might expect at the next solar maximum. I’ve spoken with a lot of people about climate change, and one of the most common excuses people make for continuing their carbon-spewing lifestyles is that “it’s too much work to figure out the whole climate thing”. And, as long as they haven’t figured it out, they don’t have to make any changes, right?
(Sigh. Press [home]. See Wallace covered in porridge. GBG!)
Great blog, dude. Keep it up! I’ll now return to tamino’s blog to have a go at his post on Coriolis Force…
In my haste to offer kudos for the Wallace homage, I forgot to say that I too am sick of Pluto. Gimme more ocean! (even if most of the reports these days are depressing)
Off topic, but…I wish all fisheries were as sane as the Alaska crab harvest seems to be. The only seafood I really like is crab; I could eat it without (much) guilt, but I’m allergic to it. Talk about irony. Grrr! So I have to have my crab vicariously by watching The Deadliest Catch…
Thanks for reading, Arvella, and glad you liked seeing Wallace at the top of the post. Stay tuned for more ocean news – HP
[…] I don’t know if you’re sick of the subject by now, but iron fertilization of the oceans is back in the news – this time on CNNmoney.com. This is a good sign, if only because it signals that people with money are beginning to hear that we need to put some major resources into reducing the amount of carbon that’s in the atmosphere (not just reducing the amount that is still going in). […]
thank you! I really liked this post!