Shawn Lawrence Otto: An Open Letter to Arianna Huffington [concerning the HuffPo antiscience article "NASA Global Warming Stance Blasted By 49 Astronauts, Scientists Who Once Worked At Agency"]

An Open Letter to Arianna Huffington

How the Huffington Post is still blowing it on science but has a chance to make a real difference

by Shawn Lawrence Otto, neorenaissance, April 17, 2012

Dear Arianna,

Congratulations on the Huffington Posts's Pulitzer prize. That is an important feather in the paper's cap.

I want you to know how much I value your publication, and how I think the dust up over the antiscience article "NASA Global Warming Stance Blasted By 49 Astronauts, Scientists Who Once Worked At Agency" is an opportunity for a broader discussion, which you could lead. The story has garnered wide condemnation in both science and journalism circles.  Why is an important discussion.

It is a discussion that I think is critical to our democracy.

I too wrote about the NASA 49's propaganda stunt in HuffPost, but unlike the staff piece, I used facts and context.  Ironically, I was speaking at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as the story broke, or I would have sent the piece in sooner. 

My story linked the words "gullible antiscience press" to the staff story, which was surprisingly under the byline of science section editor David Freeman.  Freeman has a brilliant history as one of the best, and it was an impolite thing for me to do, but it made an important point, which I'll discuss in a moment. 

Some hours after my story went up, I got an email from one of your editors, saying the Freeman story "has since been updated to clarify the way it was initially perceived.  Would you be amenable to simply removing the hyperlink on these words, since the purpose of that update was to clear the air of these types of characterizations and set the record straight as to our editorial position?" 

I said "Ok."  But I wasn't happy about it.

I want to let you know why I made the link and why I and many others still don’t think HuffPost’s response was proper or adequate.  I know Mike Mann spoke with Lucia Graves in a followup story, which was quite good, but the problems with the Freeman story are far deeper than the removed reader engagement query your editors portrayed as the problem.  It's troubling that neither you nor your staff seem to realize that there is more to the issue.

The problem is that the article is an outstanding example of false balance journalism.  False balance arises when an equivalence is made between objective knowledge and a contrary opinion that is not supported by the same level of evidence.  This creates the impression that knowledge is partisan and there is a legitimate controversy, when in fact "both sides" do not have equal claim to the truth.  One is based on knowledge, and the other is merely an opinion. 

This is something climate change deniers are particularly adept at using to manipulate the press.  There are no two ways about it: false balance is a false article, and this was a false article.  In other words, your paper disseminated propaganda, not news.

This problem arises from an error in the way many of today's reporters have been trained, and you can do great good by challenging and changing this.  Most reporters, and many reporter guidelines, have adopted the postmodernist view that there is no such thing as objectivity.  This is false.  Science has proven that there is an objective reality.  Using it we have doubled our lifespans in the past 140 years, and multiplied the productivity of our farms by 35 times.  We have altered the face of the Earth.  Failing to acknowledge the fact of objectivity is failing to report on reality.

I would strongly encourage you and David to reject this erroneous view.  My book Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, goes into much greater detail about this confusion in recent American journalism.  The problem is especially important in the realm of science reporting, where it comes to a head, such as in the article in question.  Like Jay Rosen, I have been writing about its various aspects for some time.

In this case, the headline started the problem.  NASA has not taken any “Global Warming Stance.”  This is a false headline.  They are in fact by law forbidden from taking any “stances” on policy issues.  They simply sponsor and report on science.

That’s not a stance, of equal merit in a political debate with someone’s opinion.  It’s based on peer-reviewed knowledge attained from measurements of nature.  

Placing the science denialist meme in the headline itself gave the false impression that this was in fact a matter of opinion and not knowledge, something one could take "stances" on.  I understand the need to drive readership, but it should never come at the cost of journalistic standards of truth.  I'm absolutely certain that wasn't David's intent, but am at a loss to explain what happened.

After the false headline, the piece went on to lead with the opinions in the letter as if they were knowledge and left them unchallenged.  This is at its core the root of the problem and the reason the article was and remains antiscience, and why it continues to upset so many people.  An embarrassment to a science section, and, obviously, it became and embarrassment to your entire publication.

The opening sentence, for starters, suggested that NASA might be “playing fast and loose with the truth.” Unless the Huffington Post has some knowledge to support that opening, it’s antagonistically deceptive and propagandistic — especially for a science section — even more so when written by the editor of said science section.  There are plenty of other angles that don’t involve denial of science in a science section.  

To suggest that NASA might be playing fast and loose with the truth, while providing no evidence, in the lead of the article, is an insult to NASA scientists and belies a tremendous ignorance of the data-gathering and measurement, the intense pressures and harsh scrutiny of peer review, and the lives and reputations that are placed on the line with scientific publication, and the years-long drive to get every detail right.  I am at a loss to understand how an experienced science editor like David Freeman could not know this. I'm sure he does.  And yet, it seems, he entirely forgot it.

Instead, Huffington Post chose to lead with a letter organized by a retired energy industry executive, and led by two climate-change denying Heartland Institute guys, that contains no science whatsoever, and to give it, not the mainstream, peer-reviewed science of NASA, the benefit of the doubt.  To top it off, in your mea culpa, you say you consider such a propaganda stunt “newsworthy.”

Newsworthy! 

Arianna, I very much appreciate your comment in a recent interview about this event.  It tells me you really value getting it right, but I think it also belies some confusion on the subject: “To be able to see clearly where truth lies on one side or the other, as it happened in this particular instance, is not to abandon objectivity — it’s to, in fact, embrace a higher standard of journalism,” you said.  

I don’t know why you would even hint that there could possibly be a question that it is abandoning objectivity or entertain that anyone could even utter that as a rational criticism worthy of mention.  

In fact, it is doing the opposite — it is embracing objectivity, instead of the scourge of postmodernism that has muddied the thinking of a generation of journalism students, whose last science class was often in high school, and which has made them susceptible to manipulation by reality-denying authoritarians.  

Take, for example, these well-intentioned new reporter guidelines, pulled from the otherwise often very good quality Voice of San Diego:

Voice of San Diego: New Reporter Guidelines.

We only do something if we can do it better than anyone or if no one else is doing it.* We must add value. We must be unique.
Three things to remember for each story:* Context
* Authority
* Not just what is happening, but what it means
There is no such thing as objectivity.* There is such thing as fairness.
* But everyone sees everything through their own filter. Acknowledge that, let it liberate you. Let it regulate you.
* We are not guided by political identification, by ideology or dogma. But every decision we make, from what to cover to how to cover it, is made through our own subjective judgments.
* We are guided by an ability to be transparent and independent, to clearly assess what’s going on in our community and have the courage to plainly state the truth.

If you believe that there is no such thing as objectivity, as these guidelines instruct, then you can easily become trapped by propagandists.  Such a reporter will never dig to get at the objective story of the nation and without that, false balance becomes prevalent and democracy ceases to function. 

The founding fathers conceived of democracy within the age of reason.  The premise of democracy is the well-informed voter who can discern reality for him or herself and so rejects the authoritarian edicts of a king or pope.  That presumes an objectivity that that voter can be informed about.  Without acknowledging the reality of objectivity and striving to capture it from the mists of confusion, we are left simply with the dominance of the most loudly voiced and well-financed opinion, which ultimately leads back to the authoritarianism the founders sought to repudiate.

And this is in fact what we are seeing now, as reporters regard their job as simply reporting on the varying views of a matter, without exercising judgment, as if that were admirable, and neocons adopt the postmodernist doctrine that the winners write the history books, so nothing else matters.  That's a foil to keep the press at bay. 

The consequences of this mistake are frightening. Consider the story of David Gregory and the war in Iraq: Gregory was the NBC News Chief White House Correspondent during the run-up to the war.  After it became clear that there were no WMD and that the reasons for invading Iraq were unsupported, he was asked why the press corps didn’t push President Bush about the inconsistencies in his rationale for invasion: “I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you’re a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn’t do our job,” said Gregory. “I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role.”

But if it's not the press's role, whose role is it?  And without that accountability and reflection on it by the voter, what cost in life and treasure — and to the people's retention of power?  Objectivity is the life blood of democracy, and without it, a democracy risks slipping into authoritarianism and plutocracy.

The fact that much of the mainstream press doesn’t view it as their role to record the objective story of the nation puts science in the especially precarious position of being just one of many warring opinions, and it erodes our ability to make sound judgments as a country. 

Climate change is the most pronounced example.  But we see it often today in our politics.  Irrational, counterfactual statements that once would have ended a candidacy for president now go almost unchallenged in the media.  And papers like yours, who say they "recognize that climate change is real and agree with the agencies and experts who are concerned about the role of carbon dioxide" nevertheless print propaganda uncritically, making themselves into tools, and argue that it's "newsworthy."

Huffington Post is particularly known among science reporters for often creating a false balance between knowledge and mere opinion, as happened in this case. This has happened with the writings of those who claim that cell phones cause brain cancer, or that vaccines cause autism, for example, and such pieces are equally unhelpful to the ability of your readers to discern reality and make good decisions.

One of the news outlets that has recognized this problem and is taking important steps to end this type of practice is National Public Radio.  As you know, in February they issued new reporter guidelines that say, in part, "Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth."

Arianna, I know you are personally committed to reality-based reporting, and to public service.  I know you value science and understand the politicization of climate change.  So I urge you to take this unfortunate incident as an opportunity to lead.  To remake Huffington Post into a gold standard. 

Please loudly publish revised and clear reporter guidelines for your staff pieces.  It will help your credibility as a paper and not just an advocacy outlet.  And please read my book, which deals with this issue in far more detail than can be contained in this letter.  I’d be happy to ask my publisher to send you a copy — please let me know.

Arianna, with the new prominence of Huffington Post you have a special opportunity to help wrest America back from the brink.  Seize it.

Thank you for your consideration,

Shawn Lawrence Otto

http://www.shawnotto.com/neorenaissance/blog20120417.html

Shawn Lawrence Otto: From a boy who loved NASA: How 49 former NASA astronauts and scientists soiled their good names over climate politics

From a boy who loved NASA: How 49 former NASA astronauts and scientists soiled their good names over climate politics

Sadly, these aren't the can-do right stuff guys they used to be

by Shawn Lawrence Otto, neorenaissance, April 12, 2012

Timing is Everything

When I was a boy, I loved NASA.  So imagine how pleased I was to be invited to speak at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center this week -- where the kindly, soft-spoken and brilliant Willy Wonka of the place, astrophysicist John Mather, and his team are building the James Webb Space Telescope -- perhaps humanity's most ambitious engineering project -- and where scientists use satellites to study climate change in incredible detail. 

My talk, on Wednesday, was about the subject of my new book, Fool Me Twice: fighting the assault on science in America, and ways NASA scientists, particularly NASA climate scientists, can communicate complex science in the face of antiscience attacks, such as those by global warming deniers.

At that very moment a living example was was unfolding around me.  I started getting texts, tweets and emails about 49 former NASA employees who were taking the agency to task for publishing information on climate change -- something they didn't politically agree with.

The sweet and fetid stench of propaganda

One of the most common tactics deniers use is something I call The Impressive Letter Technique, or this being NASA, let it be known by the acronym TILT -- which is exactly what it tries to do to your thinking.  A TILT is a letter signed by a lot of impressive sounding people who make a public statement or demand, and expect the gullible antiscience press (whose last science class was probably in high school), and the public, to lap it up because of their collective authority. 

99.9% of Petition Project signers (pink) are not climate scientists (green).

The classic example of a denialist TILT is the OISM Petition Project, which claims to have the signatures of 31,487 scientists who question the scientific consensus on climate change.  Pretty impressive, huh?  That many scientists questioning something must mean there's a real scientific controversy about it.  Until you break it down and then the petition project begins to evaporate into the fetid smoke and mirrors of propaganda.  It turns out that the petition is open to anyone with a bachelor's of science degree, which is roughly 20.5 million Americans.  Those are their "scientists."  So it's perhaps not surprising that of the signers, 99.9% of them don't have any training in climate science.   And out of a pool of 20.5 million, only 31.5 thousand, or 00.15%, have signed the petition.  In other words, outliers.

49 former NASA employees fall from grace

Ironically, at the same time I was speaking to some of NASA's climate scientists about how to counter these kinds of propaganda attacks, the denialsphere was abuzz with a new TILT -- this one signed by 49 former NASA employees.  Like other letters of its kind this one, addressed to NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, is signed by some prominent and semi-prominent names, thus is has the sheen of collective authority, but none of them are climate scientists or have any training in it.  In fact when you break the letter down, it too evaporates into propaganda -- in a way that sullies the names and credentials of these formerly respected individuals. 

A word about "unproven remarks"

For example, the letter demands that NASA

"refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites.  We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data." 

Sounds impressive.  Troubling even.  Until you realize that science never proves anything.  Ever.  That would be math. 

What science does is measure, compare those measurements to known quantities, make testable predictions, do experiments, and produce results that either confirm or refute the predictions.  In this way it builds knowledge of the physical world that is separate from us as individuals and our opinions and beliefs about the way we wish things would be.  After a while that knowledge begins to pile up and paint a pretty compelling picture. Then we can either accept it or begin to deny reality.

Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study (BEST) was partly funded by the Koch brothers, but it, too, verified the measurements of NASA.

That's the sort of hard-headedness that I used to love about NASA -- the idea that humans, if they just kept plugging away, could figure stuff out.  Not this hand-wringing by deniers that argue we can't figure anything out, we can't afford to do anything, it's all a vast hoax, and we shouldn't try.  A far cry from the can-do of NASA.  How could guys that once put their very lives in the hands of science be so dumb about it as they get old?

In the case of climate change, those measurements after measurements by thousands of scientists for over fifty years are adding up to an extremely compelling and robust argument because they all pretty much agree with each other. 

Take for example, NASA GISS director James Hanson's 1981 prediction (pdf), which the climate scientists who blog at RealClimate have overlayed with a chart of what the temperature actually turned out to be:

That is an excellent example of good science: based on measurements of carbon dioxide and temperature, and on our understanding from basic physics of the interactions between carbon dioxide and light, Hanson made a bold prediction that could be tested and verified experimentally over time. He put it out there for anyone to tear apart.  His career hung in the balance.

In the more than 30 years since, he's been proven correct -- sort of.  It turns out Hanson was too conservative.  He underestimated the temperature rise by about 30%.

Or consider Peter Sinclair's brief video comparing the statements of climate scientist Mike MacCracken in 1982 to what actually happened:

49 more authoritarians abandoning science in favor of politics

Next this TILT makes the classic appeal of antiscientists -- not to facts, not to data, but to authority -- the sort of appeal that would have made any colonial Tory proud to support the authority of the King instead of the upstart self-determining colonists:

"With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled."

Uh, wait a minute.  Haven't we seen that?  Tens of thousands of scientists?  Really boys?  I thought you guys all had the "right stuff."  Would you really let just anyone with a BS run mission control when your butts were up in orbit? 

If yes, you're not so bright after all, and if no, well, don't try to fool us with your OISM "tens of thousands" of scientists.  If that makes the science unsettled when compared to the billions of data points accumulated by thousands of real climate scientists working over fifty years, then nothing will ever be settled enough for you.  The hypocrisy of this is astounding and saddening.

If you ain't got the data, you can always use smear

Considering this, I guess it shouldn't have surprised me these gentlemen -- 49 out of tens of thousands for former NASA employees (more than 18,000 people currently work for NASA, so this is about 0.27% of current employees) would next move into the emotional language.  It shouldn't have surprised me, but it disappointed me just the same.

NASA's polar fleet of satellites observe the Earth and measure climate change.

Often deniers portray themselves as reasoned, cautious, and conservative scientists, while the real scientists working in the field are described with emotionally charged adjectives like "alarmists," "warmers," and the like to weaken the public's respect for their work and to fool journalists about whose who.  If you can degrade, mock or destroy the individual, then it's easier for the public to dismiss everything that individual said. 

"The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements."

So, here we see fifty years of science manipulatively described instead as "unbridled advocacy."  As in wild, emotional, and not objective, but rather subject to the passions of an unbroken horse -- just the opposite of the careful collection, calibration, and verification of billions of data points, which last I checked, don't have feelings, unbridled or otherwise.

Some of those data points can be seen in this incredible video prepared at Goddard that layers sea surface temperature data on top of ocean current data to create a powerful representation.  For instance, it's easy to see why England, which is much further North than most of the US, is still fairly temperate. This is the 

kind of thing these guys should be standing up and applauding.

Heartland Institute propaganda outfit ties

Former Apollo astronauts Walter Cunningham and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt are listed as the main contacts for the letter, and both of them have a public history of advocacy against climate change science.  This casts doubt on the scientific validity of any of their statements.

In 2009, Schmitt appeared on the talk show of 9/11 conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and said that he believed that the environmental movement was a front for Communism.

“I think the whole trend really began with the fall of the Soviet Union. Because the great champion of the opponents of liberty, namely communism, had to find some other place to go and they basically went into the environmental movement.”

Walter Cunningham wrote against climate science in a pamphlet (pdf) published by the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank fighting climate science.

Schmitt, a former Republican senator from New Mexico, is a current board member of the Heartland Institute, and was a speaker at a conference arranged by the Heartland Institute to deny climate change.

“The Heartland Institute provides the most coherent and consistent articulation of and source of information on basic American approaches to the resolution of major issues of our times,"said Schmitt.

ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers, who stand to gain hundreds of billions of dollars in profits from the denial of climate science, have been major funders of the Heartland Institute in the past.

Recently leaked documents show Heartland is drafting a national science curriculum created by a non-climate scientist database technician designed to undermine traditional science education and promote climate change denial by teaching school children that there is a scientific controversy when in fact there is not -- the controversy is political.

Hail to the chief (scientist)

Waleed Abdalati, NASA Chief Scientist. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati handled this propaganda attack with the grace and aplomb of a leader who's come up through the trenches and seen this sort of shameful ploy before.

"NASA sponsors research into many areas of cutting-edge scientific inquiry, including the relationship between carbon dioxide and climate. As an agency, NASA does not draw conclusions and issue 'claims' about research findings. We support open scientific inquiry and discussion... If the authors of this letter disagree with specific scientific conclusions made public by NASA scientists, we encourage them to join the debate in the scientific literature or public forums rather than restrict any discourse."

That is the key point.  Abdalati has graciously skewered these denialist propagandists by reminding everyone that they haven't produced any scientific evidence to back up their claims -- no data, no peer-reviewed research.  Just smears and emotional ploys in a TILT letter. 

If you disagree, he's telling them, let's see what you got.  Step up to the table like real men or women and subject your work to the withering scrutiny of peer review.  Can't do it?  Thought so.  Because it's not based in reality.

Two questions: why, and why?

In the end, these 49 signers sought to ... what?  Embarrass NASA into abandoning real science?  Pressure director Bolden into firing James Hansen?  Probably just to give Republican climate deniers some more ammo in the propaganda war to go after NASA's budget in the upcoming review on Capitol hill.  Watch for it and see which Members trot this out.  Odds are on Inhofe, Shimkus and the like.

But what they really did is tarnish their own names.  And that's a sad thing for a boy who loved NASA.

http://www.shawnotto.com/neorenaissance/blog20120413.html

Shawn Lawrence Otto's talk on modern science denialism, especially denial of climate change

Shawn Lawrence Otto has just launched his book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, a richly documented and well-reasoned analysis of modern science denialism, especially addressing climate change. Shawn notes that scientists are inherently apolitical in their work, but that science itself is always political, and ties this important observation into recent patterns of partisan maneuvering, questionable journalistic ethics even among the upper echelon of the fourth estate, and religious distortion of scientific findings and science-based policy making.

Click to download in MP3 format (29.6MB)

Join us on air for what is guaranteed to be a lively and enlightening conversation, and then join us at Q. Cumbers for brunch. If you bring a copy of Shawn Otto's book and a pen, you can get it signed!

We would also like to note that this Sunday's Q. Cumbers brunch will be also be a meet-up of a different kind. There will be at least three FTB.com (Freethought Blogs) bloggers at the brunch, Stephanie, Greg, and coming down from Canada with his wife Jodi, Jason.

Shawn Lawrence Otto's website is here.

http://mnatheists.org/news-and-media/podcast/675-shawn-otto