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Politics and 'An Inconvenient Truth'
Frogbeater writes "The producer of 'An Inconvenient Truth' is accusing the National Science Teachers Association of being in the pocket of Big Oil because she can't get preferential treatment for her film. The entire situation is turning into a 'if you're not with us, you're against us' yelling match. Regardless of the viewpoint, is it even possible that science can remain apolitical? Has it ever been?" The Washington Post makes things out to be less than above board: "In the past year alone, according to its Web site, Exxon Mobil's foundation gave $42 million to key organizations that influence the way children learn about science, from kindergarten until they graduate from high school ... NSTA's list of corporate donors also includes Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which funds NSTA's Web site on the science of energy. There, students can find a section called 'Running on Oil' and read a page that touts the industry's environmental track record -- citing improvements mostly attributable to laws that the companies fought tooth and nail, by the way -- but makes only vague references to spills or pollution. NSTA has distributed a video produced by API called 'You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel,' a shameless pitch for oil dependence."
Where there's money involved, so too will there be politics.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
...to the known universe. In other words, *everything* has a political dimension to it. Politics is unavoidable.
What needs to be avoided is not politics but the temptation to distort scientific findings and inquiries to match preconceived ideas that support entrenched political interests.
We're pretty terrible at that. But it might not take a genius amount of forethought to understand that putting Al Gore's name on the movie doesn't help to de-politicize the issue.
I mean, duh.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
This is always the counter argument..."As long as we hold true to our principles it doesn't matter where the money comes from."
This is fine as long as everyone does hold to their principles, as long as there is someone there to point out that, in fact, X, Y, or Z piece of propaganda is propaganda.
History is rife with examples of corporate special interests skewing research about their products through carefully chosen grants and commissioned studies. Lead, Tobacco, DDT, Oil; hell, you even get a lot of it in government sponsored hydro power, because if the people who make dams run out of places to put dams their jobs go away.
It's real easy to say, "We can keep our principles and take their money" but history shows that that's just not true. You take their money, you drink their kool-aid, you sacrifice your principles, and you produce biased research.
It's like a politician saying, "Just because this lobbyist gave me a million dollars, doesn't mean I'm going to vote the way he wants me to." Come on. You're only fooling yourself.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm not saying they're not right about the NSTA being in Big Oil's pocket, but An Inconvenient Truth didn't have much in the way of science in it as far as hard numbers go. And without numbers, all of Al's pretty graphs don't mean anything. If my body temperature increases .000000001 of a degree, steadily year after year, I don't think it would amount to much. I'm not saying the science in An Inconvient Truth is wrong, it's just that the movie doesn't give any hard numbers to relate it to. I'm sure they're out there, but if I'm a science teacher and I'm going to spend valuable teaching time showing a movie, I want everything to be put together for me.
I disagree with the assumption that the oil companies truly believe that global warming is a nonexistent threat. Remember big tobacco? They persisted in denying that cigarettes causes cancer, etc. all the while knowing full well that this was false.
A quote which is attributed to Friedman goes: "The only social responsibility of a company should be to deliver a profit to its shareholders." Taken to the limit, this means that a company will take any action neccessary to secure and guard profits.
I'm one of the people who believes that this is exactly what most big corporations do. Call me cynical, but I think a lot of empirical data supports this theory.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
We do what we've always done; use indirect measures and accumulated evidence to reduce our uncertainty, then make extrapolations based upon the reproducible data. Go to your nearest university library and look up Tom Ray's work on the Tierra simulator, or read a few physics journals to find out what goes into those climate models that you're implicitly rejecting. (hint: lots of physics, parameters derived from measurements as appropriate, and endless validation runs) Other people are free to use the same equations, write their own simulation, and if they aren't deliberately feeding the models misinformation, will converge to a result within some confidence interval similar to yours, presuming you did your job correctly as well.
I make my living as a computational chemist, and while I know that we're neglecting many terms in our solutions, reproducible results come back, that agree to varying degrees of confidence to experimental results. Furthermore, we understand how to improve those results, and make rational time/accuracy/resource trade-offs to get the answers we need to the precision required.
In short, while I've never directly observed an oxygen molecule, accumulated indirect evidence has caused me to believe in them. It has also led to the conclusion that removing them from my immediate environment is bad. Same for your examples. Come up with a reasoned set of arguments that explain why a couple thousand physicists or biologists are all wrong, send out some papers and get yourself slotted into a presentation at a conference, and have at. You're free to try, and that's what the process is all about.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
A week ago slashdot had a story about the inconvenient truth DVD was out, and to go buy it, and about how noble Gore is. I realized, the movie was in theaters first, then the DVD came out, and it hasn't been on tv yet. Isn't that how you maximize profits from a movie? If I was all noble and I made a movie I genuinely felt people needed to see to save the earth, wouldn't I just give it to PBS on day 1?
It's not right that all science teaching is geared to the environemntal message. Yes, the Big Oil companies have done some questionable things, but the nature of our society is that we debate these points. The environmental lobby is hardly a tiny group of zealots these days, and it's not like they're totally without blame for spreading misleading propaganda. We should not allow all our science information to come from any single source. And there's some truth to what the oil conmpanies say. For good or bad, oil is essential to our society. Cars need it to run. Most machines will stop working without oil based lubricants. Oil is used for all sorts of purposes.
There can even be some largely apolitical justification for oil companies to be sponsoring science education. They are the largest employers of geologists, and oil probably account for a substantial portion of professional chemists. It's simply in their direct commercial interests to fund science. And if they do this, it's a good thing for everyone.
Likewise, with the lobbying against environmentla regulations - The adversarial system is not limited to the courts any more. Should politicians enact any and all possible environmental legislation no matter how small the effect without any concern at all for the costs to the oil industry?
Allow me for one to say that I am sick of the "Christians are anti-science" bullshit that the left loves to harp on while giving the environmental movement a free pass. You will notice, if you are honest, that the areas where even the most fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible conflict with modern scientific work are in areas that Christians have an **ethical** objection to the way that life is manipulated or ended or in how things came to be on some level. The environmental movement on the other hand is generally wildly antagonistic to everything from GM foods to many promising alternative energy sources to nanotechnology.
If there is any group that can be called anti-human, anti-science, it is the "true believer" segment of the environmental movement. No other politically active group is so thoroughly terrified of every promising area of research and development, so violent in opposing science (animal rights groups bombing research labs, for example) and so quick to limit the quality of life of the majority of the human race.
As opposed to the god fearing midwestern farmer. That's a man of the land! He knows all about the environment, read about it in the good book! Practices non-sustainable farming, just like all them folks in the bible! He don't believe in no damn "no till" farming! Only a bunch of hippies'd come up with crap like that.
Fertilizer, pesticides, and drainin down the aquifers, that's how god meant man to live! Top soil blowin away? Hell, boy, you think we're gonna run outta dirt? Go back to yer city!
Face facts, jackass. There is no place in this country where people are really living "with the land". Cities are actually nice and efficient, because they cram all those people and services into a tiny area. Sure they produce pollution, sure they use a lot of energy, definitely a hell of a lot more than in the 20's, but don't pretend that everyone in this country doesn't use more power than people in the 20's, and cities don't produce more pollution than the same number of people living outside a city would produce...Quite the contrary.
And it's a widely proven fact that the worst thing for nature is too much contact with man. Wildlife in the area around Chernobyl has rebounded since the disaster, and is more healthy now than it was before the meltdown. The demilitarized zone between the Korea's has healthy game populations, despite being paved with fricking landmines.
So all those people crowded together in that city are far far better for the environment than the same number of people spread out equally around the country. It's not that they're isolated fron the environment...city folks just love to go out and spend time with nature! It's that the environment is isolated from them...And that's a good thing.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm not sure who you're calling "environmentalists", but I know that I self-identify as one. I also have 3 science degrees, and am working on a fourth. I don't think you could sanely call me anti-science. Also, when it comes to anthropogenic global warming, every single last climatologist who does not receive money from fossil fuel companies is in agreement that it is real, and that it will be a major problem for humanity if something is not done about it.
Of course, I'm not 100% against GM foods (although I appreciate caution), I'm in favor of informed uses of nano-technology, and I think that nuclear power (i.e., fission) is the best option we currently have for dealing with greenhouse gases. So maybe I'm not an "environmentalist" by your definition - but I still recognize that global warming is a real, anthropogenic, threat.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
A lot of people are missing the point. This isn't about choice, or scientific debate, or agreeing to disagree.
The NTSA have themselves stated that they turned this down because they were concerned about their funding, instead showing a movie that is at least if not more bent in the opposite direction.
They said they're afraid of losing money. They never said they thought Inconvenient Truth is a crock of shit or that Gore is a snake oil salesman. They simply said if they do this, they may lose money.
This isn't about principles, this isn't about debate, and it isn't about educating kids. They've been bought and they admit it plain as day.
Polls pretty much consistently show that about 30% of Americans are "conservatives" who always vote Republican and about 30% are hard-core Democrats who may or may not be "conservative". The rest of us are more up-in-the-air. I think that the reason Slashdot seems to be so lefty is that academia tends to be lefty. We, being nerds, tend to be fairly educated. In other words, we are a very small cross-section of the world and do not represent the broader political reality at all. Further, we tend to be smart and are used to often being the smartest one around, so we tend to be jackasses when other people express an opinion that does not agree with our own. This is accentuated by our relative lack of social grace. :)
Note that these are all gross generalizations, and nearly everyone reading this will take exception to some specific thing that I said... one guy will claim that he never finished high school and another will claim that he's not socially awkward, as if that really matters when discussing generalizations.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That's not from the edit summary, that's from Frogbeater's story submission. Now, the editors may have picked that particular summary in order to piss off Slashdotters because we'd all point out how baldly inaccurate ("preferential treatment"?!) it was, so they'd get scads of comments. It wouldn't be the first time, but it's not quite the same as the editors themselves saying anything quite so stupid.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The difference is that climate scientists at the very top of their field - in terms of number of peer-reviewed articles published and positions held - vouch that An Inconvenient Truth is 99%+ accurate in portraying the current state of climate research.
Aren't these the same climate scientist that said we were going to have a record hurricane season this year. What was the number I read? "One in Six Americans Could be Directly Impacted by 2006 Hurricane Season " But we are supposed to believe them when they say that the film is 99% correct on long term forecasts when they can't tell me if it is going to rain today or not.
Yeah, these guys may be the top of their field, but being on top of a bunch of people who don't know crap doesn't say much.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It seems he could reach more people by making the movie free on TV. If, as you suggest, he's interested in targeting a theater-going, dvd-buying, and money-paying demographic, he could STILL reach more people by making the movie free on TV as well as all the other stuff. Is there ANY downside to making the movie free on TV, other than cutting into profits?
Science isn't researched in a vacuum. Nothing is apolitical.
www.joshferguson.org
Do you think that industry-created "think tank" fronts are in any way comparable to scientists working on grants? Have you considered that a scientist who fakes evidence and fudges numbers to garner reputation is taking a tremendous risk of being utterly discredited and never trusted again, while these "think tanks" can do so with impunity, secure in the knowledge that the funds will keep rolling in?
Your attempts at drawing a moral equivalence are feeble, and were I a working scientist, I'd probably be offended.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Since when is a movie designed to promote the political career of a politician proper viewing material in schools? What next, force kids to watch campaign commercials? Why not require them to "volunteer" to support Al Gore's next political campaign (or whoever he endorces) in order to get full credit?
Sorry, even if your propoganda is being pushed out of schools by the oil companies, just because the oil companies are doing it for their own selfish reasons doesn't mean that keeping propoganda out of schools is a bad thing.