Finding Fault With Anti-Fracking Science Claims

A widely carried Associated Press article (here, as run by the Wall Street Journal) reports that some of the convincingly scientific-sounding claims of opponents of fracking don't seem to hold up to scrutiny. That's not to say that all is peaches: the article notes, for instance, that much of the naturally radioactive deep water called flowback forced up along with fracking-extracted gas "was once being discharged into municipal sewage treatment plants and then rivers in Pennsylvania," leading to concern about pollution of public water supplies. Public scrutiny and regulation mean that's no longer true. But specific claims about cancer rates, and broader ones about air pollution or other ills, are not as objective as they might appear to be, according to Duke professor Avner Vengosh and others. An excerpt: "One expert said there's an actual psychological process at work that sometimes blinds people to science, on the fracking debate and many others. 'You can literally put facts in front of people, and they will just ignore them,' said Mark Lubell, the director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior at the University of California, Davis. Lubell said the situation, which happens on both sides of a debate, is called 'motivated reasoning.' Rational people insist on believing things that aren't true, in part because of feedback from other people who share their views, he said."

Comments

"Finding Fault"

[broginator]

I see what you did there...

Motiviated reasoning?

[Tanktalus]

I've always just called it "confirmation bias." I see it just as much in the left wing as the right, and nearly every other area of human interaction. Why should sciences be exempt?

Re:Motiviated reasoning?

[JoshuaZ]

Confirmation bias certainly exists throughout the political spectrum. However, it does seem that political partisanship has made it worst in the right end of the political spectrum than the left end. In particular, the more educated self-identified conservatives are, the more they doubt climate change is real. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503&http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503, but the reverse occurs for nuclear power and liberals, or vaccines and liberals, the more educated they are, the more likely they are to agree with the scientific consensus despite the views associated with their end of the political spectrum that run against it. This breaks down pretty badly outside the US though http://www.esds.ac.uk/doc/5357/mrdoc/pdf/5357userguide.pdf. Similarly, there's some evidence that conservatives respond more poorly than liberals to data that undermines their ideological claims (there was a Slashdot article that linked to this but I can't unfortunately find it right now). The upshot is that while there's definite political tribalism and confirmation bias throughout the political spectrum, at present there seem to be cultural issues that are making the problem more extreme among self-identified conservatives, although why is not at all clear.

Re:Motiviated reasoning?

[Belial6]

Confirmation bias certainly exists throughout the political spectrum. However, it does seem that political partisanship has made it worst in the right end of the political spectrum than the left end.

I see what you did there....

Re:Motiviated reasoning?

[bky1701]

Actually, that suggests the right had a qualitative failure, and the left had a quantitative failure. Wrong magnitude of prediction is a lesser error than complete failure to predict the occurrence of some event. Had you asked without allowing specification of magnitude (which is unrealistic to expect most people to remember anyway), the right would be completely wrong and the left completely correct.

Re:Motiviated reasoning?

[dr2chase]

Yeah, but if you do it that way, then you don't get to claim that both sides are equivalent. They're not. One is fuddled and useless, the other is batshit-crazy and dangerous.

Re:Motiviated reasoning?

[metallurge]

The greatest fracking risk is a substantive earthquake in a major fracking field creative a deep vertical fault through large numbers of artificial gas and toxic water filled horizontal faults all under pressure and releasing it all to the environment in a huge explosive and poisonous rush. So basically all fracking fields in earthquake zones are ticking poisonous fuel air time bombs, buried under the feet of millions of Americans now at risk, not a matter of if just when they will go off.

That's true if the energy put into the ground were to accumulate. I suppose in the very short term, that may be true, but in the medium term (like a couple of months to a couple of years max), these producing wells are not only returning essentially all of the pressurized frac water, plus pressurized salt water from the production zone, plus pressurized natural gas, plus maybe pressurized hydrocarbon liquids. Dead-simple economics would make it clear that if you are spending more energy to insert the pressurized frac water than the energy you can recover, the well will not make the investors any money. The reason why this sector of the energy market has really taken off over the last 30 years isn't because it is a net loss, I can assure you. Therefore, the net energy "buried under the feet of millions of Americans", as you so vividly put it, isn't really increasing as you seem to think it is, at least not directly from the frac-ing that goes on in order to produce oil and (natural) gas. The net energy underground is diminishing as we depressurize reservoirs, not building up as you imagine. Also, to highlight a very important point, frac-ing a well is done for the purpose of liberating oil and natural gas from rock that would not naturally release them in commercial quantities. Oil and natural gas are being produced from less-and-less readily available reservoirs. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, as it were, so we have to work harder and harder to produce from less-and-less easy reservoirs. Frac-ing is one of the technologies which makes this possible.

People are just flat-out hysterical and wrongheaded about so much of this. What people *should* be scrutinizing is the injection wells. These are wells which are either drilled for the purpose of water (produced formation saltwater and recovered frac water) disposal, or which are repurposed (old) production wells which are no longer commercially viable. These wells *are* potentially subject to the buildup you describe, and therefore are at least theoretically/potentially long-term dangerous. Now, in old oil-producing country, these disposal wells and the geology underlying them tend to have been pretty well-understood for a long time now. The reasonably-safe disposal of produced salt water has been going on for a loooong time now. Particularly with repurposed old production wells, you are injecting water back where you have already greatly reduced the reservoir pressure, so in a way, you are restoring things closer to the way they used to be prior to human intervention.

Standing between a doomsday I-can-imagine-it-so-it's-a-real-danger scenario and life as we know it are some things people may not know. First, hydraulic fracturing is designed to break down (create cracks in) rock that contains hydrocarbons, so those hydrocarbons can be released. This is done at a few thousand pounds of pressure with a few thousand horsepower of pump. Since the fracturing pressure falls away pretty quickly in the 3-d rock formation (stands to reason it's a distance-cubed pressure decline), increasing the size/pressure of a frac job one order of magnitude is going to take three orders of magnitude increase in pressure pumping capacity. So where we are now, technically, is probably essentially where we will be for the forseeable future, in terms of energy we're pumping downhole. Capability-wise, just so we're all clear, current technology can fracture out up to several hundred feet from the drilled (and cased and cemented) hole.

Second,

Re:Motiviated reasoning?

[TapeCutter]

Rational human beings are a mythological creature, much like unicorns.

That's just a rationialization that allows you to stop thinking and do what ever "feels good". A Sagan quote seems in order here...“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the Unites States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

It's like a drug to 'em (us)

[GrahamCox]

Whether fracking is scientifically sound or not, we have just got to stop this desperate scrabbling to dig up any scrap of fossil fuel we can find.

The world is acting like an addict that will do anything to get their next fix, no matter how damaging it could be, or what the consequences could be that we just don't care to think about. I'm no treehugger but even I think this is like raiding grandma's handbag to give to "my man" and it's embarrassing, undignified and immoral.

The first step to recovery is to admit the problem. We're still in denial.

Re:It's like a drug to 'em (us)

[Sarius64]

No rational person is in denial. In general, they marvel at the fact that our energy policy is still controlled by actors' feelings.

Thorium: It is about three times more abundant than uranium and about as common as lead.

http://www.hobart.k12.in.us/ksms/PeriodicTable/thorium.htm

http://thoriumforum.com/explanation-lftr-liquid-fluoride-thorium-reactor

The number one complaint I see about thorium is that we'll have to teach engineers new techniques and safety systems. Really?

Re:It's like a drug to 'em (us)

[The Mighty Buzzard]

Whether fracking is scientifically sound or not, we have just got to stop this desperate scrabbling to dig up any scrap of fossil fuel we can find..

Why, exactly? You have a specific reason in mind as to why we should avoid continued gathering of an existing resource when we've got no currently viable alternative?

Re:It's like a drug to 'em (us)

[GrahamCox]

Because on a geological timescale, what we're doing is releasing all the CO2 that has ever been sequestered on earth ALL AT ONCE. If you can't see there could be a problem with that you are in denial.

There are plenty of viable alternatives, they just need to be funded to the same extent as the fossil fuel industries.

Re:It's like a drug to 'em (us)

[khallow]

I don't have to justify it - I've presented my position and the reasons for it.

And you could present a completely different position and it'd be just as valid.

The thing that breaks the drug analogy or whatever is that recreational drugs simply aren't needed. Energy is needed. Even if we were to do away with everything else, we still need to eat in order to live, meaning we still need energy no matter how much we pare away.

So given that our society collectively needs energy just to exist and how it's currently structured, it needs a lot of it per person, what makes that an addiction rather than a normal need?

As I see it, the addiction metaphor assumes that this is a behavior which both we can choose to break and which is good to break, but which we won't break because of addiction-based behavior. But it doesn't have the addiction behavior. There's no positive reinforcement for using oil-based products, electric cars of the same capability would provide the same basic experience as gasoline cars.

What does change is there are technical, cost, and infrastructure advantages to oil-based infrastructure that its rivals don't have. None of these have any analogue to drug use or addiction. One doesn't use heroin because it is cheaper and more convenient than not using heroin. Not using recreational drugs at all is more convenient and cheaper than any of the drug choices. But one can't chose just to not use energy. That leads to starvation and death which generally isn't considered cheaper and more convenient.

I don't see any so far, just a denial that there is a problem. Which was my original point.

Well, I guess you still haven't see anything beyond that. It doesn't mean that you have received a worse answer than what you want or expect however.

Re:Common sense

[jmorris42]

I call bullsh*it. If you really believed that you would boycot the evil energy companies. Which would of course mean you wouldn't be posting on the Internet.

You want energy. I want energy. They want to sell us energy. Where is the evil in any of that?

God Damn, man! They are selling gasoline cheaper than milk right now (US). All you have to do to get milk is feed cows and wait, gas needs a LOT of work to obtain, complex chemistry to refine and a complex worldwide distribution network for both crude and the end products. If you weren't a fool you would give thanks for the hard work being done daily by millions to supply the energy you take for granted. And those 'evil' profits flow into pensions, dividends and lots of other productive uses. And never forget that those evil profits are the thin sliver left over after expenses and a shocking amount of taxes flowing into the welfare state that I'd bet good yellow gold YOU depend on.

Re:Common sense

[WaywardGeek]

Unfortunately, this is true in the most recent victory for fracking: drilling where I live in North Carolina, specifically Durham, and Chatham counties. The oil industry wrote this bill, and the Republicans, with one unwitting Democrat, passed it over our governor's veto.

Now, I'm not against fracking, done responsibly, and if we get something for it. A law I would support would have a public commission with over 50% of it's members voted into the position from counties where fracking occurs. It would have public meetings, and make public exactly what is being pumped into our ground. It would have tough penalties for frackers who pollute our ground water, and the city, county, and state would be free to levy taxes on natural gas profits.

That's not what we got. Thanks to NC redneck Republicans, we're simply a slutty high school girl begging for any boy with a penis to have a good time. They are keeping all records secret for two years in an ongoing way that insures no public information will ever be timely enough to do anything about any crap that happens. The board will meet in secret as often as they like, and are appointed by the Charmain of the House and Governor, who will most likely be Republican when the time comes. The law explicitly forbids the government from informing the public about what chemicals are being pumped into the ground. If you don't want fracking on your land, your neighbor is allowed to force you to, with nothing more that a board rubber stamp. All local laws are automatically revoked if they interfere with fracking. Only a stupid $30K one-time tax can be levied per well by a county, and the law has no state taxes at all for the oil guys.

If that's not enough to give every fracker out there a boner, we also sweetened the deal with a big fat pay-back to T-Bone Pickens, who will get millions for installing natural gas infrastructure in NC. I wouldn't have a problem with this, except T-Bone is a big Republican backer, who just bought himself another fat state contract.

Re:One Sided science

[drooling-dog]

When some of us question the shaky science of AGW we are called anti-science, 'deniers' and worse

Then perhaps you'd be well advised to start making formal scientific arguments in the peer-reviewed literature, rather than going through public relations firms hired to appeal directly to the public. If the data is on your side, then work it up to the same standards as everyone else and present it. Unless you do that, it's not science.

Or, like the GOP, you could just claim that more research is needed before actionable conclusions are made, all the while trying to cut funding for the very research you say we have too little of.

Viable alternatives

[Gavrielkay]

I wonder how much more viable clean and renewable alternatives would be if the fossil fuel industry was not subsidized and was responsible for the clean up of its mess. I've seen smog and soot and smelled what thousands of gas burning cars do to the air. That has a cost that is hard to measure.

Alternatives would become more financially competitive if more work were put into them. I'd love to see the money oil companies spent on defending their dirty businesses go to research and development of cleaner technologies.

Re:Viable alternatives

[garett_spencley]

"I'd love to see the money oil companies spent on defending their dirty businesses go to research and development of cleaner technologies."

I'd love to see their money go to paying my mortgage and buying me a corvette, but it's their money.

You did mention subsidies and I agree with you completely. In the case of subsidies it's not their money. But instead of giving that money to some other business venture I'd rather give it back to the tax payers and let them decide who deserves to get it. Government and business need to be kept separate for the exact same reason that government and church do. When state and church lay in bed they tell us what to do with our minds, when state and business lay in bed they tell us what to do with our bodies. It amazes me that so many who are opposed to religion making its way into politics don't see the problem with government and business mingling; or maybe they do, they just don't see the similarities between regulating thoughts and regulating trade.

I don't really care too much about "viable alternatives." I'm more worried about legal alternatives. As with all scarce resources, prices will rise as supply diminishes. When people are hungry for energy there will be a lot of money to be made in providing it. I'm not so worried about running out of fossil fuel as I am about legal barriers in place preventing new startups with mere millions from competing with the big boys who have the courts and police and politicians in their pockets.

i'm conflicted on this

[circletimessquare]

the marcellus shale has so much natural gas, we could all start driving cars powered by natural gas and all of the geopolitical headaches of oil would just go away. plus, with no incentive to safeguard foreign petroleum, we could just not care about security in the middle east

however, that's all fine and dandy until you consider the possibility that you are trading energy security for poisoned underground aquifers. i like my water supply clean, thanks

but the fracking goes on on a level far below the water table

still, it's like puncture holes that can induce mixing between layers. the poisons are not necessarily just from the fracking chemicals, there are all sorts of completely natural nasty minerals you don't want mixed up and introduced into your water supply with some artificial mayhem underground

the need then becomes that states and local governments REQUIRE drilling companies to go through a process whereby

1. they absolutely guarantee they follow procedures to carefully puncture the water table,
2. then seal their operations off from the water table, during operations,
3. and finally, when operations cease, to make sure they have a seal that is inspected and certified as the best we can technologically do

the problem is people acting too quickly and shoddy efforts and abandoned responsibilities, the usual lax standards when there is no fierce regulatory body around: you get the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico

this is a case where strict government regulation is an absolute must. government regulation something that is apparently evil according republicans. i guess republicans don't have to turn the faucet on in their home!

finally, there is the issue of the chemicals they are using your fracking. a lot of these mictures are trade secrets. well, that trade secret veil needs to be pierced: if it goes into the ground near my water table, i don't give a flying f*ck about your trade secrets, i want to know what you are pumping down there, and my right to know that my water is safe supersedes your capitalist imperative

however, i was recently amused to find out one major componet of the fracking brew:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/world/asia/fracking-in-us-lifts-guar-farmers-in-india.html

Guar gum!

Yes, the same thing you see listed as a thickener on your ice cream!

Which makes sense, you want to shove something down there thick and rigid and with a high viscosity to shove the natural gas back up: water laced with sand and thickeners. Makes sense.

So this relieves my worry somewhat. But I still want to know every chemical going into the ground. I don't care about your trade secrets, it's my water!

Re:i'm conflicted on this

[Teun]

Well written.
I work in the business and all this fracking panic in the US is justified for one simple reason, the US oil companies are not regulated.

So at the same time I say fracking can technically be done in a controlled and responsible way but not with the present US legislation that has grown companies devoid of any moral.

Re:Common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotcha Republicans are greedy, Democrats are too stupid to dress themselves.

Reasoning, motivated or not

[Okian Warrior]

There's no such thing as "motivated reasoning", there's only "reasoning", and it's not a good way to make policy.

Science is based on observation, and as a result we get "evidence-based" decisions. Knowing the likely result because you've done it before makes for good decisions.

When you have a lot of observations, you can sometimes discover underlying laws, rules, and insight into the mechanisms of outcome. This results in "analysis-based" decisions.

"Analysis-based" decisions are only valid when the rules and insight are properly applied. In any situation, you have to correctly identify that the rules you use is valid, and you *also* have to know that no other rules apply. No one does this perfectly and at all times, and so "analysis-based" decisions are less likely to be correct.

For an example, consider predicting the behaviour of an electrical circuit. The rules and insight for electronics are straightforward, but consider how often a real-life circuit fails to work as predicted. The same is true for software: setting aside bugs and misunderstanding of requirements, how often does a piece of software exhibit unpredicted behaviour?

And finally, there's "story-based" reasoning. That's where you make predictions based on gut feel and experience using insights from other disciplines, and then make decisions based on that. Economics is reasoning based on stories, as is Intelligent design.

For this example, in economics it's well known that a little inflation is good, a lot of inflation is bad, and negative inflation is very bad. What is the optimal value? Is the value exact, or can it be a little off (ie - is the plot of good/bad sharply peaked, or relatively flat)? How does one even *calculate* inflation?

Economics is all opinions and "schools of thought" with no predictive power. It explains why something happened, but it never seems to tell us what will happen next.

We need to get away from "story-based" decisions and rely more on evidence. Civilization is at a point where we now have unprecedented levels of information and data which could be mined for evidence and used to make decisions, so long as we ask the right questions.

For questions for which we have no readily available evidence, we should be gathering it. In cases where the risk/reward equation yields a high risk, such as permanently damaging the water supply over a wide swath of the country, it might be prudent to hold off until proper evidence has been gathered.

Re:Reasoning, motivated or not

[Stirling Newberry]

They've also predicted hyper inflation in the US for decades. Still hasn't happened.

And they were far from the only school to predict the burst of the dot.com bubble. They were also exactly wrong on the effects of monetary policy under Greenspan. There are plenty of etc. The best use for Austrian economics is to predict how gold bugs will invest, because a large percentage of gold bugs believe in it. Same for "Technical analysis" predicting chartists.

Flaming tap water

[Anonymous Coward]

Course, I'm waiting for the frakking community to tell us that the flammable tap water is normal:
"What you mean your tap water isn't flammable? You got yourself some defective water. After all, it's made of hydrogen and oxygen: one was responsible for the Hindenberg, and the other is used as rocket fuel."

Re:Flaming tap water

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what your point is here.
I remember hearing on tv / radio (NPR) reports of flammable tap water 30 years ago.
Normal? No, I don't think anybody is making this claim.
Naturally-occuring in some places? Yes.

Re:Flaming tap water

[tomhath]

Natural gas in well water is quite common in coal regions (e.g. much of Pennsylvania). It's also common for hydrogen to build up in water heaters. So yea, I wouldn't say "normal", but the flaming tap water is unlikely to have anything to do with gas drilling a few miles away.

Re:Common sense

[Attila Dimedici]

The regulation of most fracking is not coming from the EPA. It is coming from the same place it would come from if the EPA was disbanded, state level departments of environmental resources (or equivalent).
The rational for the creation of the Department of Energy was to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy supplies. The thing is, since the establishment of the Department of Energy, the U.S. has become significantly more dependent on foreign energy supplies. That means that the Department of Energy has been a complete failure at the mission for which it was created (or at least the mission which was claimed to be the reason it was created).

Re:One Sided science

[drooling-dog]

Well, I guess you just stumbled into the Great Liberal Conspiracy that all scientists are required to join before they are granted their PhDs. Why anybody puts any credence in them when ExxonMobil's PR firms are saying something completely different is beyond me.

Seriously, though... Taking a potshot at this data point or that, or citing professional rivalries between climatologists (re: "climategate") isn't going to be enough. It's like pointing to a "gap" in the fossil record and calling it a flaw in the theory of evolution. If you have the requisite training and can produce a bona fide model that takes the body of existing data and produces a different result, then maybe you have something. A Nobel prize even, if one was awarded in climatology. If you've done this, then I'd like to see the citation. Surely there is at least one reputable peer-reviewed journal that isn't part of the great conspiracy and would publish a solid paper that makes a convincing argument.

Re:One Sided science

[docmordin]

And I await, with breathless anticipation, the day that many of the AGW deniers can actually form a cogent argument and start to refute the underlying mathematical models, e.g.,

J. M. Murphy, et al., "Quantification of modelling uncertainties in a large ensemble of climate change simulations", Nature 430: 768-772, 2004
J. M. Murphy, et al., "A methodology for probabilistic predictions of regional climate change from perturbed physics ensembles", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 1993-2028, 2007
D. A. Stainforth, et al., "Confidence, uncertainty and decision-support relevance in climate predictions", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2145-2161, 2007
P. A. Stott and C. E. Forest, "Ensemble climate predictions using climate models and observational constraints", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2029-2052, 2007
C. Tebaldi and R. Knutti, "The use of the multi-model ensemble in probabilistic climate projections", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2053-2075, 2007
J. D. Annan and J. C. Hargreaves, "Efficient estimation and ensemble generation in climate modelling", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2077-2088, 2007
M. New, et al., "Challenges in using probabilistic climate change information for impact assessments: An example from the water sector", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2117-2131, 2007
H. Huebener, et al. "Ensemble climate simulations using a fully coupled ocean–troposphere–stratosphere general circulation model", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365: 2089-2101, 2007
S. H. Schneider and M. D. Mastrandrea, "Probabilistic assessment of 'dangerous' climate change and emissions pathways", Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 102: 15728-15735, 2005
F. Giorgi and R. Francisco, "Evaluating uncertainties in the prediction of regional climate change", Geophys. Res. Lett 27: 1295-1298, 2000
M. R. Allen and W. J. Ingram, "Constraints on future changes in climate and the hydrological cycle", Nature 419, 224-232, 2002
M. R. Allen, et al., Quantifying the uncertainty in forecasts of anthropogenic climate change", Nature 417: 617-620, 2000
F. Giorgi and L. O. Mearns, "Probability of regional climate change based on the Reliability Ensemble Averaging (REA) method", Geophys. Res. Lett. 30: 1629, 2003
N. G. Andronova and M. E. Schlesinger, "Objective estimation of the probability density function for climate sensitivity", J. Geophys. Res. 106: 22605-22612, 2001
C. E. Forest, et al., "Quantifying uncertainties in climate system properties with the use of recent climate observations", Science 295: 113-117, 2002
R. Knutti, et al., "Constraints on radiative forcing and future climate change from observations and climate model ensembles", Nature 416: 719-723, 2002
J. Gregory, et al., "An observationally based estimate of the climate sensitivity", J. Clim. 15: 3117-3121, 2002
R. J. Stouffer and S. Manabe, "Response of a coupled ocean-atmosphere model to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide: sensitivity to the rate of increase", J. Clim. 12: 2224-2237, 1999
D. A. Stainforth, et al., "Uncertainty in predictions of the climate response to rising levels of greenhouse gases", Nature 433: 403-406, 2005
J. Reilly, et al., "Uncertainty in climate change assessments", Science 293: 430-433, 2001
V. D. Pope, et al., "The impact of new physical parameterisations in the Hadley Centre climate model - HadAM3", Clim. Dyn. 16: 123–146, 2000
K. D. Williams, et al., "Transient climate change in the Hadley centre models: The role of physical processes" J. Clim. 14: 2659–2674 2001
G. C. Hegerl, et al., "Climate sensitivity constrained by temperature reconstructions over the past seven centuries", Nature 440: 1029-1032, 2006
C. Piani, et al., "Constraints on climate change from a multi-thousand member ensemble of simulations", Geophys. Res. Lett. 32: L32825, 2005
D. N. Barnett, et al., "Quantifying uncertainty in changes in extreme event frequency in response to doubled CO2 using a large ensemble of GCM simulations", Clim. Dyn. 26: 489-511, 2006
C. Tebaldi and B. Sanso, "Joint project

Why peer review is increasingly broken

[Paul Fernhout]

From the mid 1990s by the Vice-provost of Caltech: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."

More like that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

Also:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/26/peer-review-as-censorship/

All reasoning is also based on emotion, which relate to perceptions, assumptions, priorities and preferences which are, to some extent, outside of pure rationality (which why "technocracy" has many issues).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error

But the biggest issue is that our socio-economic-political system is not well-adapted to handle "externalities" including systemic risks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Any reasonable projection over the next twenty years shows we will almost certainly have dirt-cheap PV given exponential growth of that industry and rapidly dropping costs. We may even have hot or cold fusion in that time (and other things). With alternatives on the way, there is not a very good case to be made for risking destroy our groundwater for just a bit more fossil fuels:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power-the-world-in-16-years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity#Solar_power
http://pesn.com/2012/07/19/9602138_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_July19/
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/414559/a-new-approach-to-fusion/
And so on...

Accounting for externalities (including US defense spending for long oil supply lines), renewables (and energy efficiency) have been *cheaper* than fossil fuels since the 1970s... Two resources on that from around 1980:

Re:Common sense

[Black Parrot]

Gotcha Republicans are greedy, Democrats are too stupid to dress themselves.

That actually describes US politics pretty well.

Re:Grant Money

[Black Parrot]

When grant money is on the line science will reflect whatever is required to ensure continued financial support.

Right. Scientists are just trying to protect their paychecks, but the energy companies and their political shills are in it for the good of mankind.

Re:Answering your own question

[tomhath]

Where was the fault with the anti-fracking science that led to these regulations?

RTFA. Despite extensive testing there was never any detectable radioactivity in public water sources. The regulations were put in place because of emotion, not science.

Re:One Sided science

[docmordin]

I'd be willing to settle for the comment (or, potentially, original research) papers sent to the journal(s) editors.

Also, as someone who has written comment papers for Science, Nature, and PNAS, I can say that the reviewers are accepting, considering that science is an ongoing pursuit, provided you can present reasonable claims. For example, aside from the recent bout of arsenic-based life papers, i.e., M. L. Reaves, et al., "Absence of detectable arsenate in DNA from arsenate-grown GFAJ-1 cells", Science, 2012 (accepted, in press) and T. J. Erb, et al., "GFAJ-1 is an arsenate-resistant, phosphate-dependent organism", Science 2012 (accepted, in press), a semi-controversial topic, at least in geoscience, is the existence of the Younger Dryas impact event:

R. B. Firestone, et al., "Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling", PNAS 104: 16016-16021, 2007
D. J. Kennett, et al., "Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas boundary sediment layer", Science 323: 94, 2009
T. E. Bunch, et al., "Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago", PNAS 109: E1903-E1912, 2012

i.e., a large impact or airburst some 12.9 Ka wiped out the Clovis people, a large number of species, etc.

Although, initially, the hypothesis had merit, several researchers have since shown that many of the original conclusions are unsupported:

F. S. Paquay, et al., "Absence of geochemical evidence for an impact event at the Bølling-Allerød/Younger Dryas transition", PNAS 106: 21505-21510, 2009
T. L. Daulton, et al., "No evidence of nanodiamonds in Younger-Dryas sediments to support an impact event", PNAS 107: 16043-16047, 2010
T. Surovell, et al., "An independent evaluation of the Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact hypothesis", PNAS 106: 18155-18158, 2010
H. Tian, et al., "Nanodiamonds do not provide unique evidence for a Younger Dryas impact", PNAS 108: 40-44, 2011
J. S. Pigati, et al., "Accumulation of impact markers in desert wetlands and implications for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis", PNAS 109: 7208-7212, 2012
A. van Hoesel, et al., "Nanodiamonds and wildfire evidence in the Usselo horizon postdate the Allerød-Younger Dryas boundary", PNAS 109: 7648-7653, 2012

(see also: J. R. Marlon, et al., "Wildfire responses to abrupt climate change in North America", PNAS 106: 2519-2524, 2009
A. L. Westerling, et al., "Warming and earlier spring increase western US forest wildfire activity", Science 313: 940-943, 2006
T. W. Swetnam, "Fire history and climate change in giant sequoia groves", Science 262: 885-889, 1993
A. Hubbe, et al., "Early Holocene survival of megafauna in South America". J. Biogeography 34: 1642-1646, 2007
A. J. Stuart, et al., "Pleistocene to Holocene extinction dynamics in giant deer and woolly mammoth". Nature 431: 684-689, 2004
J. L. Gill, et al., "Pleistocene megafaunal collapse, novel plant communities, and enhanced fire regimes in North America". Science 326: 1100-1103, 2009)

In all of these cases, the authors were able to provide counter-proposals to some of the evidence that satisfied the journal reviewers, e.g., H. Tian, et al. showed that the existence of nanodiamonds alone does not provide sufficient evidence for a Younger Dryas impact, as nanodiamonds can be deposited by stellar dust (Z. R. Dai, et al., "Possible in situ formation of meteoritic nanodiamonds in the early solar system", Nature 418: 157-159, 2002; N. A. Marks, et al., "Nonequilibrium route to nanodiamond with astrophysical implications", Phys. Rev. Lett. 108: 075503, 2012), formed in charred wood (F. Banhart and P. M. Ajayan, "Carbon onions as nanoscopic pressure cells for diamond formation", Nature 382: 433-435, 1996), etc., while, van Hoesel showed that nanodiamonds in sediment layers from multiple areas postdate the Younger Dryas boundary.

Re:One Sided science

[drooling-dog]

Ummm... You assert that editors of peer-reviewed journals are refusing to publish quality papers, but you support this assertion by referring to "leftist friends" who post on Facebook, ignoring studies claiming that "fracking is not bad". That doesn't even make sense.

Was there ever a time when the mean global temperature was warmer than it is today, and even warmer than most models project it will be by the end of this century? Of course there was, and for millions of years. What's your point?

No study will ever show that "fracking is always bad" or "fracking is always good" because good and bad are not scientifically defined concepts. Fracking may have repercussions (like seismicity or groundwater contamination) in some instances and not others, depending on the specific geological formations and other factors. The research you'll see will mostly be aimed at characterizing those effects and identifying the situations (if any) in which they are likely to occur. I'm not a geologist or hydrologist, so I have no horse in this race intellectually. But if there is real chance of adverse effects, I'd like to see that investigated before they start fracking underneath my town. At the very minimum, the companies involved should be able to secure sufficient insurance to settle any claims if something goes awry, and insurance companies will need to know how to price those risks.

Re:Common sense

[mosb1000]

In all fairness to the DOE, they did develop a breeder reactor system that could meet all of our energy needs for hundreds of years to come, and was passively cooled so that it could avoid the fukishima like meltdown problems the current generation of reactors suffer from. It was just politics that stopped it from being built on a larger scale.

Duke - University built from Tobacco fortunes

[leftie]

Duke - Historical center of the attack against medical evidence proving smoking and second-hand smoke was hazardous to one's health

I'll call bull on this one

[Grayhand]

Sorry but the fact the gas companies got exemptions from the clean air and clean water acts makes me highly suspicious they knew from day one this was risky and they wanted to limit their exposure to lawsuits and fines. Shattering bedrock releases the gas just like it's supposed to do. The fact it migrates upward isn't shocking. Why exactly would you assume gas would stay put once you shatter what was containing it.

No need, it's already been done

[A nonymous Coward]

Take, for instance, the recentish revelations that climate models weren't taking clouds into consideration very well, if at all.

Or look at the spread of predictions, with the extreme ones predicting 20-30 foot sea level rise by 2100.

Or the 1970 (?) climate models which predicted global cooling.

It's all just science, nothing remarkable in its variability, but the left wing fanatics take the extreme predictions as gospel and refuse to even admit there's any uncertainty, while the right win uses the uncertainty as excuse to doubt everything.

I figure that all those who take definitive positions are the true fanatics, whether left or right, refusing to recognize the reality that the future is not as predictable as they would wish.

Re:One Sided science

[drooling-dog]

Well, you're just wrong about that. "Science" is not some oracle out of the Wizard of Oz that pronounces on the truth and falsehood of things. I don't know a single scientist who thinks that way, and I've known quite a few.

But you're right about not expecting science - or reason - to be a universal value that dictates (or even informs) policy. Politics is about balancing interests, and the weight of an interest is measured in dollars, not papers. I've heard people say that Republicans are scientifically illiterate, but I don't think that's true at all, at least not at the top. The GOP rejects science and reason not because they're ignorant, but because once you commit to a rational basis for government, your power is immediately diminished. Real power is power you can exercise arbitrarily, according to the side your toast is buttered on at the moment. You don't want a bunch of eggheads with their studies forcing your hand in one direction when the big money wants something else. We've been through this with the tobacco industry, we're going through it now with the fossil energy industry, and we'll go through it again with other moneyed interests.

The petroleum industry can afford to hire all of the scientists they want and more, but they know that won't get them the results they need. So why not just knock science off of its pedestal completely, in the eyes of the public?

Re:Common sense

[Unknown Lamer]

Probably not, actually. 'Tho my personal view is that both "parties" may as well be one and are roughly equally evil ("how would you like to be screwed over today, sir?") ... I listened to the vote as it happened, and it was pretty clearly a "oh no... I hit the wrong button" moment. Then the majority used some parlimentary trickery to prevent a reconsideration vote (which I believe they could have done, since a supposedly anti-fracking person voted for it and everyone can vote to reconsider...), and then, despite a clearly ambiguous voice vote, they closed the session and re-opened a new one at 12:05 a.m. instead of waiting until morning... just to affirm the previous day's actions into law and half-heartedly debate one bill before giving up 20 minutes later.

Also, there was another Democrat who definitely traded her vote... something about tax breaks for the film industry in eastern Carolina made her change her tune from anti-fracking to pro-fracking that night. A terrible combination of unfortunate circumstances I say.

The worst part is that NC has so little natural gas that it seems really pointless. That, and they're going to be doing it under a freaking Nuclear power plant (slated to be expanded to 3 units soon, but with Duke at the helm now ... save us all). I look forward to the day when a mild seismic event occurs and triggers a week long "oops we just lost 3GW of baseload to an automatic SCRAM" event.

Re:And then you circle back around

[dr2chase]

Except that right now, the extreme right end is elected to Congress, and the extreme left end (in this country) is mostly in history books. Can you name a single Democratic Congressman who with politics similar to Hugo Chavez? Not "as reported by Fox News" or in the fevered imagination of that pill-popping-sex-tourist-draft-dodger with the radio show, but actually making speeches, or proposing legislation? There's nothing close. "Hard left" in this country is to propose a 70% marginal rate on very high incomes (not unheard of in our history, and not bad for the economy) and single-payer health care (like those radical leftists Canadians). "Close the carried-interest loophole", whoa, strong stuff.

Note that, since high marginal tax rates are part of our own history, and single-payer health care is just across our northern border, that promoting these things is in no way "to the exclusion of reality". They've been tried, and they work fine. Whereas, the right wing in this country proposes things that, if/when they are measured, are demonstrated not to work well (everything from abstinence-only sex education, to charter schools, to cutting government spending to "stimulate the economy"). The two "ends" in this country are in no way equivalent.

Re:One Sided science

[docmordin]

I hope you realize that these (perturbed-physics ensemble) models are doing far more than "simple" interpolation and extrapolation of temperature values.

To elaborate, uncertainties or errors in numerical models limit the utility of projections from any individual model. As a result, ensemble approaches have been proposed in an attempt to estimate the uncertainty in short-term predictions (F. Molteni, et al., "The ECMWF ensemble predictions system: Methodology and validation", Quart. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 122: 73-119, 2006), which work by first measuring the prediction uncertainties and then tracing them back to model biases and errors.

Of course, a component of any projection system should be a suite of models that sample natural variability, forcing uncertainty and uncertainties in the underlying physical processes which drive regional and global climate change. Two approaches that have been adopted in recent years are the ensemble-of-opportunity (G. A. Meehl, et al., "The WCRP CMIP3 multimodel dataset: A new era in climate change research", Bull. Amer. Meteorol. Soc. 88: 1383-1394, 2007) and the perturbed-physics ensemble (J. M. Murphy, et al., "Quantification of modelling uncertainties in a large ensemble of climate change simulations", Nature 430: 768-772, 2004), with the latter being preferred.

One of the key strengths of the perturbed physics approach is the ability to produce a large number of ensemble members in a relatively easy way, as it is possible to control the experimentation and systematically explore uncertainties in processes and feedbacks. For example, it is possible to produce a set of experiments where the input forcing data is the same in each experiment, but the parameters which control, say, the climate sensitivity of the model are varied, which allows for different sources of uncertainty to be isolated. As well, it is possible to explore a wide range of feedback processes in the model by de-tuning it, potentially revealing the impact of previous compensating errors; such de-tuning can ameliorate the potential for double-counting when constraining the models with observations, i.e., the assigning of a relative likelihood to different model versions based on observed data that has been used in their development.

To give some specifics, the model employed by Murphy, et al. uses a total of 31 parameters, e.g., mid-top thin cloud percent, low-top thin cloud percent, zonal mean relative humidity cloud percent, sea-ice extent, outgoing SW radiation at TOA, diurnal temperature range, latent heat flux, mean sea level pressure, and climate prediction index, with perturbations done to a single parameter at a time, either to the minimum or maximum of the range specified in consultation with modeling experts/the literature or on/off. This resulted in 53 different model versions, including the standard parameter setting as defined by Gordon et al. ("The simulation of SST, sea ice extents and ocean heat transport in a version of the Hadley Centre coupled model without flux adjustments", Clim. Dyn. 16: 147-168, 2000) and Pope et al. ("The impact of new physical parameterizations in the Hadley Centre climate model-HadAM3", Clim. Dyn. 16: 123-146, 2000). Further, in this design, if a perturbation in one physical scheme has an impact on a process or model variable that is also related to another there can be no compensation achieved by perturbing a related parameter, as might be done in the model development process. As a result, this single-perturbation approach can be thought of as the simplest form of model de-tuning (T. F. Stocker, "Climate change: Models change their tune", Nature 430: 737-738, 2004), in that there is no attempt to a priori maximize the model performance when compared to observations (it should be stressed that no systematic tuning of model performance was done to produce the standard parameter settings).

Later on, however, others moved to simultaneous perturbation (M. J. Webb, et al., "On the contribution of local feedback mechanisms to

"Facts"

[MacGyver2210]

You can literally put facts in front of people, and they will just ignore them

Including such facts as "This benzene-toluene mixture we combine with diesel fuel and water, then pump at high pressure into the bedrock where your drinking water comes from is totally harmless. Trust us. No, of course we won't let you test the chemicals we use, that's proprietary."

Re:One Sided science

[sumdumass]

Actually, he is right to a degree. The raw data to a lot of the base studies which is primarily used for all global warming research was deleted which created a firestorm because it was the subject of numerous FOI requests. The raw data is manipulated on purpose to normalize the output into something useful. This manipulation process is missing too.

What the op is referring to is this and how it is impossible to recreate the raw numbers and check the normalization processes. No other data set can prove or disprove the original or even the studies created from it and studies that were built on it because they simply won't match. The concealment of this and denial to release it lasted so long that the majority of the IPCC work done is based around studies that reference the results of that data and process.

I disagree with the op's position though as eventually, even with faulty starting or reference data, the theory can be supported or proven wrong. It will take a large amount of time to collect enough contrasting data to get something useful though.

Re:One Sided science

[sFurbo]

The point of fracking is to make small fractures in the oil and gas carrying rock to allow them to flow to the bore-hole. These cracks are made by injecting high-pressure fluid, mostly water. However, in order to get the oil/gas out, you need to remove the pressure. That will make the cracks close. To avoid this, sand is mixed with the water to keep the cracks open. However, for this to work, the sand must get in to the cracks, which means that the water must get in to the cracks. Water has a high surface tension, so if no surfactants are added, the water will not get very far into the cracks, so the sand will not get very far into the cracks, so the cracks will mostly close when the pressure is removed, so the fracking will not be very effective.

The additives also do other things, such as controlling the viscosity.

Another point is that it wouldn't thelp very much to use pure water. When the pressure is removed, a lot of the water which was put down into the bore hole will come up again. Most of this will have been in contact with oil-containing rocks, and will be polluted with oil. So even if you put pure water down, you will not get pure water up.

Re:And then you circle back around

[ghostdoc]

oh here we go again... another slashdot discussion ends up in yank partisan bickering.

Please, for the love of all things shiny, stop. Just stop. Both your political parties are exactly the same, and no-one in the rest of the world gives a toss.

Re:One Sided science

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, since everyone seems to have abandoned themselves to the emotional discussion there are the simple facts on Fracking
(1) It represents pumping underground between 10 and 20 Acre feet of solution and sand into an area usually in the order of about 20 to 40 acres in area. This jacks up the land by about 0.5 feet. This definitely "fractures" hense the term "fracking" the rocks breaking the "impermiable barriers" involved. This is done with massive pressures in the order of 45,000psi.
(2) Fracking is massively more efficient for recovery of natural gas and oil.
(3) Fracking does cause earthquakes during the process typically in the order of 4.0 but has been higher. Sites in Arkansas have been shut down from too many earthquakes. Having nearly 10,000 in one year.
(4) Fracking isn't necessarily bad or good and highly varies in effect from location to location. That is some locations have no problems many other locations have problems.
(5) By the industry's own reports they estimate that Fracking will destroy 50% of the ground water resources of North America in the next 5 years polluting them beyond use without use of heavy purification technologies. This is why the oilmen have invested heavily in water purification technologies so that they can profit from the cities and towns and individuals who need drinking water to replace the pollution destroyed sources they have.
(6) The Fracking advocates plan to extract and export most of US production. This means the USA will get a trivial amount of resources in return for massive cost.
(7) The Fracking process is very likely doing very serious damage to the actual geological structures rendering much of the hydrocarbon lost by this damage. It is probably true that fracking is causing the loss of much of the USA resources on a perminant basis.

Now people seem to be reading this issue on the basis of some political bias. None of what I just said has anything to do with any bias. It is just from the investment and technical papers of the industry. It isn't even written by critics of the industry. It is in fact what the industry is saying internally.

Re:And then you circle back around

[mcgrew]

There's no confirmation bias in his comment, it is accurate. Tobacco is in fact an addictive poison that kills almost all its users with no beneficial effects at all, while marijuana is benign if eaten (if smoked can contribute to emphesyma), can be helpful for some medical problems, is not addictive, is not carcinogenic, and in fact has no bad side effects at all (although the main effect is unpleasant for some people).

No, he's accurate. The confirmation bias is your own, not his.