Progressive Mugged By...

Progressive Mugged By...

via Clayton Cramer's Blog by Clayton on 2/17/12

It used to be said that a conservative was a liberal that has been mugged.  Sometimes, but often only in a metaphorical sense.  I think of myself as a libertarian who was mugged by reality (or whatever you call the state of the San Francisco Bay Area).  Front Page has a fascinating article by a progressive filmmaker named Eric Allen Bell who started to make a documentary about the narrow-minded people of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who were protesting the building of a 53,000 square foot mosque.  (How many Muslims are there in Murfreesboro, anyway?)

He started out full of progressive contempt for these rubes...but the more he looked at the effects of Islam on societies in which it is a majority, the more he begin to see that perhaps the rubes were not expressing themselves well, but they did have a point worth considering:

Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt.  I saw that cab driver's worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs.  I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law.  After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law.  The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden.  A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped.  Similar news stories emerged from Iran.  A man who typed "there is no god" as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.

 Several Muslim men in England were arrested for handing out leaflets to Londoners demanding that homosexuals be executed by hanging for violating Islamic Law with their lifestyle.

And it struck me.  Even though these angry townspeople in Mufreesboro, TN had not articulated their concerns very well, they were only half wrong.  

And when he went to the Hollyweird set who were prepared to fund his movie about the dangers and evils of Christianity dominance in America, he started to point out that for all their errors, they were only half wrong. There was a real issue that needed discussion--and suddenly, he became anethema to progressives, for pointing out that the left's alliance with and defense of Islam was contrary to progressive values.

It has clearly been a sobering experience for him.  He now realizes that much of what progressivism stands for concerning Islam is actually a reactionary, cliche-ridden defense of a system that will have no problem whatosever destroying everything that progressives support.

Concerned Scientists Reply on Global Warming - WSJ.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203646004577213244084429540.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

We agree with Mr. Trenberth et al. that expertise is important in medical care, as it is in any matter of importance to humans or our environment. Consider then that by eliminating fossil fuels, the recipient of medical care (all of us) is being asked to submit to what amounts to an economic heart transplant. According to most patient bills of rights, the patient has a strong say in the treatment decision. Natural questions from the patient are whether a heart transplant is really needed, and how successful the diagnostic team has been in the past.
In this respect, an important gauge of scientific expertise is the ability to make successful predictions. When predictions fail, we say the theory is "falsified" and we should look for the reasons for the failure. Shown in the nearby graph is the measured annual temperature of the earth since 1989, just before the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Also shown are the projections of the likely increase of temperature, as published in the Summaries of each of the four IPCC reports, the first in the year 1990 and the last in the year 2007.
These projections were based on IPCC computer models of how increased atmospheric CO2 should warm the earth. Some of the models predict higher or lower rates of warming, but the projections shown in the graph and their extensions into the distant future are the basis of most studies of environmental effects and mitigation policy options. Year-to-year fluctuations and discrepancies are unimportant; longer-term trends are significant.
From the graph it appears that the projections exaggerate, substantially, the response of the earth's temperature to CO2 which increased by about 11% from 1989 through 2011. Furthermore, when one examines the historical temperature record throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the data strongly suggest a much lower CO2 effect than almost all models calculate.
The Trenberth letter tells us that "computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean." The ARGO system of diving buoys is providing increasingly reliable data on the temperature of the upper layers of the ocean, where much of any heat from global warming must reside. But much like the surface temperature shown in the graph, the heat content of the upper layers of the world's oceans is not increasing nearly as fast as IPCC models predict, perhaps not increasing at all. Why should we now believe exaggerating IPCC models that tell us of "missing heat" hiding in the one place where it cannot yet be reliably measured—the deep ocean?
Given this dubious track record of prediction, it is entirely reasonable to ask for a second opinion. We have offered ours. With apologies for any immodesty, we all have enjoyed distinguished careers in climate science or in key science and engineering disciplines (such as physics, aeronautics, geology, biology, forecasting) on which climate science is based.

One reason to be on guard, as we explained in our original op-ed, is that motives other than objective science are at work in much of the scientific establishment. All of us are members of major academies and scientific societies, but we urge Journal readers not to depend on pompous academy pronouncements—on what we say—but to follow the motto of the Royal Society of Great Britain, one of the oldest learned societies in the world: nullius in verba—take nobody's word for it. As we said in our op-ed, everyone should look at certain stubborn facts that don't fit the theory espoused in the Trenberth letter, for example—the graph of surface temperature above, and similar data for the temperature of the lower atmosphere and the upper oceans.

Leaked Docs From Heartland Institute Cause a Stir—but Is One a Fake?

Leaked Docs From Heartland Institute Cause a Stir—but Is One a Fake?

via Megan McArdle : The Atlantic by Megan McArdle on 2/16/12

The climate blogs have been swept by quite a scoop in the past few days.  An anonymous leaker identified only as "Heartland Insider" has dumped a cache of documents on climate blogs purporting to reveal the inner workings of the Heartland Institute, a vigorous promoter of skepticism about anthropogenic global warming.

Over the course of a few days, details have emerged.  According to Heartland, someone contacted them pretending to be a board member, and requested that the organization "resend" their annual meeting board package to an alternative email address.  And apparently some gullible staffer actually complied. The result is here. There are loads of juicy details about who donates what, and who gets money from Heartland.

Predictably, climate blogs are having a field day.  Much of the attention has centered around an explosive document titled "2012 Heartland Climate Strategy", which contains stuff like their plans for "dissuading [K-12 teachers] from teaching science".

Heartland has confirmed the provenance of most of the documents, in a blustery press release which I think they're going to end up regretting heartily:

The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

But in that press release, they unequivocally deny that the "Climate Strategy" memo came from them, or anyone in their employ.  And after reading through the documents, I'm inclined to believe them.  

Full disclosure: One of the donors in the apparently authenticated documents is Charles Koch, and my husband did a year-long fellowship with the Koch Foundation. However, nothing I'm going to write either defends or indicts Mr. Koch, who's actually pretty incidental to both Heartland's funding, and this story. 

I should also probably note that I disagree pretty strenuously with Heartland's position on global warming.  I not only believe that anthropogenic global warming is happening, but also support stiff carbon or source fuels taxes in order to combat it.  While I've expressed some dismay at the behavior revealed in the leaked Climategate memos, they haven't changed my mind about the reality, or the danger, of global warming.  I'm not defending Heartland's stance on climate science; I'm mostly interested in this because I have a longstanding fascination with fake quotes and documents

Now, caveats out of the way, here's why I think that memo is probably fake:

1.  All of the documents are high-quality PDFs generated from original electronic files . . . except for the "Climate Strategy" memo. (Hereinafter, "the memo").  That appears to have been printed out and scanned, though it may also have been faxed.

Either way, why?  After they wrote up their Top Secret Here's All the Bad Stuff We're Gonna Do This Year memo, did the author hand it to his secretary and say "Now scan this in for the Board"? Or did he fax it across the hall to his buddy? 

This seems a strange and ponderous way to go about it--especially since the other documents illustrate that the Heartland Institute has fully mastered the Print to PDF command.

It is, however, exactly what I would do if I were trying to make sure that the document had no potentially incriminating metadata in the pdf.

2.  The date on the memo file is different from the other documents. And indeed, when you look at the information on the PDFs that Heartland acknowledges, almost all of them were created by printing to PDF on January 16th, the day before Heartland's board meeting.  There is a Board Directory that was created on the 25th of January, also by printing to PDF.  And then there is the memo, which was created via an Epson scanner at 3:41 PM on February 13th.  

That seems to be just about 24 hours before this broke on the climate blogs.  The timing seems odd, and somewhat suspicious. The fact that this document, and it alone, was scanned rather than printed to PDF or emailed as a word document, is even more so.

2.  Every single verifiable fact that's in the memo is found in another one of the documents, or available in a public source; in fact, many of the sentences are cut and paste jobs from the fundraising document, the binder insert, or the budget.  

Substantial overlap is to be expected.   But perfect overlap is surprising--there was nothing they wanted to elaborate on about their Climate Strategy that wasn't found in their fundraising or budget documents?  There's actually much less information about their climate efforts than can be found in the budget and fundraising packets. The only new material is a bit of editorializing, and suspiciously, it is editorializing that makes Heartland sound much worse than the authenticated documents do.

The editorializing tends to fall into one of two categories: they leave out the facts that make Heartland sound not quite so bad (like a huge drop in corporate donations) or they recast the activities of the Heartland Institute in a somewhat less favorable light than the presentation in the authenticated documents.  

It's hard to imagine why someone at Heartland would have written a memo that didn't contain any new information, or even useful new spin.  On the other hand, if I were trying to make sure that the memo couldn't be conclusively shown to be a fake, this is exactly the approach I'd take: borrow 100% of the facts, and most of the language, from real documents.

3.  The style is different.  Most institutions have a sort of house style for things like board packages.  That style drives writers nuts, because it's flabby and repetitive, but it's also generally consistent, and professional-sounding. The other documents are all written in the same basic style: formal-ish, overlong, and written at about a tenth grade reading level.  A lot of fairly brief paragraphs, a carefully titrated modicum of self-praise.  Except for the required legal notices, which are double spaced, they're all using approximately the same formatting.

Then there's the memo, which uses a different format and what seems to be a different font size or weight.  It's in run-on paragraphs that read as if they had been exhaled in one long breath.  The writing is sloppy in many places, including word choices ("dissuading them from teaching science") that should never have made it past a second set of eyes, and certainly not all the way to the board.

4.  It's too short.  Memos like this are usually padded with references to the bright future, the glorious past, the sterling efforts of the team members. The other documents are far longer than they need to be to make rather simple points, and larded with tables, charts, bullet points, and headers.   As I mentioned above, the memo is a clip job that contains less information than the other documents the board is already getting, and the person who wrote it could barely be bothered to bold their paragraph headers.  Why waste their time, or yours, with tedious and poorly-formatted repetition?

5.  The worldview is different.  In my experience, climate skeptics see themselves as a beleaguered minority fighting for truth and justice against the powerful, and nearly monolithic, forces of the establishment.  They are David, to the climate scientists' Goliaths. This is basically what the authenticated documents sound like.

The memo, by contrast, uses more negative language about the efforts it's describing, while trying to sound like they think it's positive.  It's like the opposition political manifestos found in novels written by stolid ideologues; they can never quite bear (or lack the imagination) to let the villains have a good argument. Switch the names, and the memo could have been a page ripped out of State of Fear or Atlas Shrugged.

Basically, it reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic.  By an intern.

6.  There's no name, date, or identifying information in the memo.  Memos are usually written by someone, to a specific audience.  In this case, the writer says "I propose that at this point it be kept confidential and only be distributed to a subset of Institute Board and senior staff".  Okay, so where's the distribution list?  Who is "I"?  People do not usually chattily speak in the first person without identifying themselves.

Of course, maybe this was sent in an email or a Word doc from the original author--but in that case, why was it scanned rather than printed to PDF?

Or maybe the memo was scrubbed . . . but why?  The other documents weren't, and this memo was never supposed to be seen by outside eyes.  

If I weren't too familiar with Heartland's internal personnel, this is the sort of information I'd probably leave off, to make sure that I didn't name someone who was, say, verifiably on vacation or at a funeral when the memo was allegedly written, or simply obviously not senior enough to have written it.

7.  Heartland says that this was erroneously emailed to someone impersonating a board member.  If this memo is so secret, how did the staffer get a hold of it to email?  Did a "senior staffer" really not recognize a member of the board's inner circle?

Related question:  Why is this memo super-secret, when there's nothing in it that isn't also in the materials distributed to the entire board?

Overall, like the fake documents and quotes of earlier posts, it just feels too convenient.  It's a super-handy roadmap to all the most incendiary portions of the other documents, and it contains absolutely nothing that does not serve that purpose--no formulaic self-puffery, no mentions of problems that you would think a legitimate memo would have covered, like the precipitous cuts in their global warming programs that they were forced to undertake when their anonymous donor delivered less cash than expected in 2011.  It reads like it was written for climate activists.  And I don't get the feeling that the folks at Heartland are much interested in helping out their friends at ClimateProgress and Grist.

Below the fold, my section-by-section analysis of what makes me uncomfortable.

This is the memo's opening.

January 2012
Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy
Given the increasingly important role the Heartland Institute is playing in leading the fight to prevent the implementation of dangerous policy actions to address the supposed risks of global warming, it is useful to set priorities for our efforts in 2012. This document offers such a set of priorities. I propose that at this point it be kept confidential and only be distributed to a subset of Institute Board and senior staff. More details can be found in our 2012 Proposed Budget document and 2012 Fundraising Strategy memo. In 2012 our efforts will focus in the following areas:

This seems like the sort of strained declaration I would have given a novel villain when I was in high school--where I take what I think is actually true, and add swinish sarcasm, and SEE! VILLAIN!!!

Sadly, this was not as artistic as I believed at the time. But I digress.

Another question quickly springs to mind: If the memo was written in January, as it claims, how come it was scanned into a computer on February 13th, instead of being made into a PDF along with the rest of the board package in mid-January?

And why aren't there any other strategy documents, on things like health care, net neutrality, and so forth?  

Did the anonymous leaker leave them out because they weren't relevant to the climate blogs?  (But why not email them to, say, open internet blogs?)  

And if so, why did they include less-than-exciting filler like the legally required notice of an impending board meeting?

The next section is their climate change fundraising strategy:

Our climate work is attractive to funders, especially our key Anonymous Donor (whose contribution dropped from $1,664,150 in 2010 to $979,000 in 2011 - about 20% of our total 2011 revenue). He has promised an increase in 2012 - see the 2011 Fourth Quarter Financial Report. We will also pursue additional support from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. They returned as a Heartland donor in 2011 with a contribution of $200,000. We expect to push up their level of support in 2012 and gain access to their network of philanthropists, if our focus continues to align with their interests. Other contributions will be pursued for this work, especially from corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies.

This is all accurate. In fact, it's almost too accurate. The Anonymous Donor data comes from this table:

Here's the first Koch reference in the same document:

The Charles G. Koch Foundation returned as a Heartland donor in 2011. We expect to ramp up their level of support in 2012 and gain access to the network of philanthropists they work with.

It's almost eerily similar to the language in the memo above -- as if someone were being very careful not to make any claims beyond what is backed up in the other documents.  

To be fair, people do cut and paste from their memos.  But this paragraph is as notable for what it does not say, as for what it does.  The document has a lot to say about the gyrations in support from "Anonymous".  Yet it doesn't mention two things which feature fairly prominently in the original fundraising document: 

1.  Corporate donations fell by nearly $1 million in 2011

Receipts from corporations were almost exactly $1 million below budget, whereas income from individuals was almost exactly (101%) of the budgeted amount. Corporate gifts were down partly due to economic changes - our corporate donor base is mostly older manufacturing businesses that were especially hurt by the economic downturn - but largely because of staff turnover. Rachel Rivest was new to corporate relations management in 2011 and did no traveling. We expect this will be an area of major recovery and improvement in 2012.

2.  The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation gave nothing in 2010, and only $25,000 in 2011.  

Note that the fundraising excerpt does not say that they expect global warming to be at the heart of their corporate strategy.  Moreover, this is not how they describe it anywhere else in the document, and clearly not the source of all their corporate donations--they get some donations from energy companies, but they also get large sums from technology firms, presumably for their work on net neutrality.  

Here's how Heartland describes their corporate and large-donor strategy in the fundraising document:  "While ideologically motivated individual donors are apt to contribute for general operating, corporations and (increasingly) foundations want project-specific proposals. We try as best we can to tailor our programs to meet both the requirements of our mission - to discover, develop,and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems - while also exciting new donors to make the contributions needed to fund our programs" 

Of the ten major programs they list, three involve global warming, and one involves a weakly related topic (fracking).  The rest are in health care, finance, public unions/debt, and education.  Obviously, global warming is very important, particularly to their anonymous donor.  But it's far from the only issue. And more to the point, they do not self-describe their efforts as marketing their services to corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies.  They describe themselves as "promoting free market solutions".   

Nor does this section mention the apparently huge impact that the decline in donations from the anonymous donor had on their climate programs in 2011; apparently, almost all of the lost money came out of those programs: "The anonymous donor reduced his giving from $1,664,150 in 2010 to $979,000 in 2011. We are extinguishing primarily global warming projects in pace with declines in his giving, and we were careful not to hire staff based on his past generosity."

It seems odd to be so specific about "Anonymous" and so vague about the others.  It also seems odd to be so specific about the general size of the donations from Anonymous, and so vague about the funds earmarked for global warming.  And it does seem to me that the omissions tend to run in the direction of making Heartland sound scarier, more powerful, and better funded--particularly by anti-AGW corporations--than they actually have been, at least for the past few years.

The next section has attracted a great deal of attention from climate bloggers:

Development of our "Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms" project.
Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain - two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged by the Anonymous Donor.

Again, this is basically a summary of what's found in the fundraising plan:

Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn't alarmist or overtly political. Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. Moreover, material for classroom use must be carefully written to meet curriculum guidelines, and the amount of time teachers have for supplemental material is steadily shrinking due to the spread of standardized tests in K-12 education.

Dr. David Wojick has presented Heartland a proposal to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools that appears to have great potential for success. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. He has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science and mathematical logic from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.S. in civil engineering from Carnegie Tech. He has been on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon and the staffs of the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Lab.

Dr. Wojick has conducted extensive research on environmental and science education for the Department of Energy. In the course of this research, he has identified what subjects and concepts teachers must teach, and in what order (year by year), in order to harmonize with national test requirements. He has contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting science curricula.

Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on "modules" for grades 10-12 on climate change ("whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy"), climate models ("models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial"), and air pollution ("whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions").

Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact ("environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather"), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.

We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $5,000 per module, about $25,000 a quarter, starting in the second quarter of 2012, for this work. The Anonymous Donor has pledged the first $100,000 for this project, and we will circulate a proposal to match and then expand upon that investment.

But as with the previous section, whoever wrote the memo has offered a gloss which is either incredibly clumsy, or purposely designed to make them sound as bad as is plausible in a memo that is supposed to come from Heartland itself.

The next section covers "funding for parallel organizations".  Here's what's in the strategy document:

Funding for parallel organizations. Heartland is part of a growing network of groups working the climate issues, some of which we support financially. We will seek additional partnerships in 2012. At present we sponsor the NIPCC to undermine the official United Nation's IPCC reports and paid a team of writers $388,000 in 2011 to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered. Expenses will be about the same in 2012. NIPCC is currently funded by two gifts a year from two foundations, both of them requesting anonymity. Another $88,000 is earmarked this year for Heartland staff, incremental expenses, and overhead for editing, expense reimbursement for the authors, andmarketing.

Now, here's the same activity described in the fundraising document:

Heartland sponsors the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an international network of scientists who write and speak out on climate change. Heartland pays a team of scientists approximately $300,000 a year to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered, the most comprehensive and authoritative rebuttal of the United Nations' IPCC reports. Another $88,000 is earmarked for Heartland staff, incremental expenses, and overhead for editing, expense reimbursement for the authors, and marketing.

NIPCC is currently funded by two gifts a year from two foundations, both of them requesting anonymity. In 2012 we plan to solicit gifts from other donors to add to what these two donors are giving in order to cover more of our fixed costs for promoting the first two Climate Change Reconsidered volumes and writing and editing the volume scheduled for release in 2013. We hope to raise $200,000 in 2012.

I can believe that someone at Heartland is going around clipping the content of other documents into some sort of a strategy memo.  I find it harder to believe that they are rewriting those activities to make themselves sound more evil.  Have you ever heard anyone describe themselves as "undermining" something?  It's a word that implies sneaking and underhanded behavior, which is why only bad movie villains usually apply it to their own activities.

Note also that whoever wrote the memo has hashed the math--they added in the $88,000 for internal resources twice. And they changed "scientists" to "writers", which is not consistent with how these same people are described in the authenticated documents.  It is, on the other hand, consistent with how climate activists view the kind of people who work for Heartland.  Which makes it feel as if the paragraph had been written by someone who couldn't quite bring themselves to deploy Heartland's self-approving language.

The next section involves external personnel:

Funding for selected individuals outside of Heartland. Our current budget includes funding for high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message. At the moment, this funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals, but we will consider expanding it, if funding can be found.

The salaries are taken from the annual budget. The description, interestingly, is not. This is how the budget describes these payments:

The two tables below summarize the multi-year budget for the project and personnel costs for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an international group of scientists that produces critiques of the reports of the United Nation's IPCC. Heartland hosts and funds the effort. A growing number of scientists have been recruited by Craig Idso to be contributing authors and editors of NIPCC's major reports, a series titled Climate Change Reconsidered. Two volumes have been published so far.

Table 2 presents the proposed budget as it appears in the fundraising proposal for the NIPCC project. Table 3 shows projected personnel expenses for 2012. We do not expect to produce an interim report of Climate Change Reconsidered in 2012, so the only incremental expense for this project other than personnel is $1,000/month in expense reimbursements for Fred Singer. That amount appears in the Communications Department budget.

It seems to me somewhat telling that the memo's single biggest divergence from the authenticated documents comes in a section dealing with outsiders with whom climate activists have been doing battle for some time.

The final section involves Heartland staff.  And it's just . . . weird.  

Expanded climate communications
Heartland plays an important role in climate communications, especially through our in-house experts (e.g., Taylor) through his Forbes blog and related high profile outlets, our conferences, and through coordination with external networks (such as WUWT and other groups capable of rapidly mobilizing responses to new scientific findings, news stories, or unfavorable blog posts). Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow highprofile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out. Efforts might also include cultivating more neutral voices with big audiences (such as Revkin at DotEarth/NYTimes, who has a well-known antipathy for some of the more extreme AGW communicators such as Rornm, Trenberth, and Hansen) or Curry (who has become popular with our supporters). AVe have also pledged to help raise around $90,000 in 2012 for Anthony Watts to help him create a new website to track temperature station data. Finally, we will consider expanding these efforts further, or developing new ones, if funding can be obtained.

To start with, why does the document feel a need to provide a bio for Wojick--who works closely enough with Heartland to have a bio on their website--but not for all the climate scientists and writers that it cites in this section?

Then there's the tone. I have never heard a warming skeptic refer to themselves as "anti-climate", or to their opponents as "communicators".  And believe me, I get chewed out by climate skeptics with great regularity.

And in a way I find it hard to put my finger on, the worldview just feels . . . off.  There are a bunch of little things--this is the only document in which the word "warmist" appears, for example.  But it's much more than that. It's too nice to opponents ("high profile", "communicator"). And it views climate skeptics as far more powerful than they (in my experience) actually feel, and opponents as combating their messages, rather than the other way around.  It seems to fundamentally misunderstand the paranoia of a movement that sees itself as under siege.  

The commenters who attack me on my global warming views do not see us as equals doing battle on the plains of Mordor.  They think of me as having been captured by a dubious consensus that is manufactured and maintained by social pressure, the general human tendency to alarmism about complex threats, and the self-interest of a few scientists--and in truth, they can point to some instances, like the longstanding belief that humans had 48 chromosomes, which were maintained against all evidence by a very powerful social dynamic.  Obviously, I disagree with their analysis, but I do understand their reasoning process--and that they have a reasoning process.  I don't feel like the writer of this memo understands either. It's more like they sat down at the computer and said, "What would I write IF I WERE AS CRAZY AS AGW SKEPTICS?"

And the stuff about Forbes is sheer lunacy, on multiple levels.  The idea that conservatives view Forbes as their beachhead for control of world opinion is . . . well, I spend a fair amount of time with conservatives and libertarians, including those who work for think tanks, and I have never once heard them express such an opinion.  If they did, I'd point out that neither their editorial, nor their readership, is that monolithic.  Of course think tanks puff up their influence for donors, but they don't usually make themselves sound like they're on the verge of a megalomaniacal break.

Which makes it especially crazy to talk about how Heartland can "keep opposing voices out" of the Forbes editorial page.  If they thought they had any shot at this, I'd expect to hear details about friendly editors, not mad ranting about the amazing power of Taylor's blog.  But everything I know about the Forbes digital strategy indicates that they're interested in driving traffic, not a conspiracy to deny global warming.

Need I point out that this seems almost expressly designed as a counterweight to the ClimateGate emails which talked about keeping opposition voices out of journals and the IPCC report?  Except ludicrous--even if it were true, can anyone imagine a climate skeptic saying to themselves, "Well, they've got the IPCC and the peer-reviewed jouranls, but thank God, we've got Forbes!"

The bottom line is that while the Times thought that "its tone and content closely matched that of other documents that the group did not dispute", to me, they aren't a close match at all. Rather, they read like, well, like someone without the imagination--or motivation--to pass an Ideological Turing Test wrote up a neat little executive summary for their ideological fellows.

The textual analysis alone would make me suspicious--but the fact that the document was created much later, using a different method, with different formatting--makes me fairly sure that while the other documents are real, this was written after the fact, by an author outside of Heartland.  If there were any way to get conclusive proof, I'd bet heavily against this document being real.

That said, I think it's impossible to prove -- at least with my forensic skill levels.  People do write crazy memos sometimes--there are lunatics in every movement, and most organizations.  While this just doesn't feel like the right kind of crazy to me, it's possible I'm wrong.  

And at some level, I'm not sure it really changes the story.  The memo doesn't add new facts, just new spin.  Naturally, because the spin is more lurid, it's what a lot of the climate blogs seized on -- I suspect, in the same way that Twitter and Facebook seized on the half-fake part of the Martin Luther King quote that went viral after Bin Laden was killed.  The appended material had more momentary punch than the original, because it had been written for the moment.

In the next few days, there will still be entirely legitimate discussions of Heartland's funding sources, and what it was doing with the money.  But we should probably be cautious about leaning too hard on this memo.  And if its provenance can't be ascertained, we should probably also be asking questions about who wrote it -- and why.

Myths about Free Markets

Myths about Free Markets

via John Goodman's Health Policy Blog by John Goodman on 2/15/12

1. They encourage discrimination against minorities.
2. They make the rich richer and the poor, poorer.
3. They degenerate into monopoly.
4. They promote war.
5. They promote stinginess.

All demolished by David Henderson in his talk at Hoover. Interesting video throughout.

Real Science and Health News: From a Truth Vigilante [Starts With A Bang]

Sent to you by Karl via Google Reader:

Real Science and Health News: From a Truth Vigilante [Starts With A Bang]

via ScienceBlogs Select by Ethan Siegel none@example.com on 2/7/12

"If people decide they're going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there's not much you can do with them. For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education." -Harrison Schmitt

Last year, I asked a simple question with no easy answer: Whom Do You Trust For Your Science, Health, and Education? Because unless you yourself are the expert in a given field, it's often very, very difficult to tell what's trustworthy from what's not.
(Images credit: Dr. Roy Spencer (top) and American Meteorological Society (bottom).)
This is especially true when you're presented with biased facts or premises as your starting point. In an ideal world, every source you went to for your news would agree on the same fundamental facts, and you'd have a wide variety of logical, reasonable interpretations of those facts. No one would be misleading; no one would present counterfactual information; no one would cherry-pick the data to support a preconceived or scientifically invalidated conclusion. Every news source you heard from would be qualified to give an opinion, and that opinion would be an informed one, biased only by their experience, and not by any political or economic agenda.
This is, no doubt, a dream world, as you are probably much more familiar with what actually goes on.
(Image credit: Philadelphia Inquirer / Universal Press Syndicate.)
You might hope that your favorite mainstream news sources wouldn't fall for this type of false equivalence. Surely they -- under the guise of presenting fair, balanced, objective news -- wouldn't fail to fact-check even the most basic of claims, to ensure they're printing the truth? The most reputable ones -- the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, the New York Times -- surely this is what they do; surely that's what journalism is, right?
Hopefully you caught it, last month, when the public editor of the New York Times asked whether news sources should serve as truth vigilantes and correct untrue facts in their reporting. The overwhelming response was, thankfully,

yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.

The fact that the Times was even asking this question should make you facepalm. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks hit it spot-on for me.
Throughout my time writing this blog, I've always done my best to present to you the best, most factually accurate information I can possibly find, and to present it through the lens of my experience as a theoretical astrophysicist to tell you -- to the best of my abilities -- what it most likely indicates. Sometimes this generates the good kind of controversy, such as when others disagree with my interpretation of the facts. When that happens, I welcome an interesting, if often inconclusive, dialogue. But when they make up their own facts to do so, that is not okay, and that opinion does not deserve equal voice, equal time, or any other sort of false balance. As Felix Frankfurther said (and I am fond of quoting),

It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.

And, particularly in science, one can distinguish whether an idea is valid, plausible-but-unproven, or unequivocally wrong. For instance, before natural selection came along, there were other ideas for the mechanism of evolution, such as Lamarckism, where organisms can pick up traits during their lifetime and pass them on to their offspring.
(Image credit: Lamarck's Giraffe, retrieved from University of Miami.)
Given a modern understanding of genetics and DNA, of course, this is not true, and Lamarckism is not an equal idea to natural selection. When you get your news about evolution, an invalid idea such as this should not pollute your news.
So with all of this in mind, where should you go to get your science and health news? Up until now, the options were either:

• Go to an aggregator (like google news), and trust yourself to decide what's trustworthy and what isn't,
• Go to a "trusted news source" like the Times, the Journal, etc., and trust their editors and reporters to report the truth, or
• Create your own bookmarks/RSS feed of sources that you trust, and go out and manually gather that information yourself.

None of which are very satisfying. The aggregator option is great for a diversity of sources and opinions, but is noisy, filled with unreliable sources, and very often contains information that is directly or subversively counterfactual. The "trusted news source" option is, sadly, not only untrustworthy, but very often only superficial in its coverage of the events and findings you're interested in. They may be fine for learning about some surface aspects of the news, but you'll never get the in-depth coverage you'd truly hope for. And that last one -- your own hand-collected assortment of blogs and feeds -- while likely to be the most accurate (assuming you've gathered sources that really are good), is likely very limited in terms of the scope of the news it can cover.
But all of that is about to change. I told you back in November that I had taken a new job, where my goal was to create this news source -- for quality science and health news -- that didn't yet exist. Where you or anybody could come to get a wide interpretation of perspectives, some of which are cursory, others which are more in-depth, but all of which are controlled for quality and veracity, on a huge variety of science and health issues of the day. Where political or ideological biases are minimized and sources of spam have been filtered out. Where demagoguery is not allowed. And where advertising dollars or artificially inflated SEO don't dictate what you see. Today, I am pleased to unveil to you what I've been working to create:
Say hello to Trap!t, an artificial-intelligence engine designed with the express purpose of discovering quality-checked content on any topic of interest you provide it with. In particular, I'm the head editor and curator of the Science and Health sections, doing my absolute best to bring diverse, high-quality content that doesn't compromise on medical or scientific facts.
What that's means is I've been training the software to learn what it means to be a topical article, quality site, and a reliable source for a whole variety of topics, from Autism to Climate Change, from Outer Space to Dinosaurs, from Fluoride to Vaccination. Each of these boxes, shown above, is a "trap" of relevant articles from around the web, with the most recent news items displayed first. Trap!t is a real-time, artificial-intelligence-powered news aggregator that continuously pulls content from all the reputable, original sources around the web it can find, filtering through them to bring you only the articles you've trained it to bring you. You can make your own user-created traps on any topic you like, training it by liking and disliking the first round of search results, or you can go into the featured traps sections, where I (and the rest of the curation team) have been working to optimize the content you'll see on a wide variety of relevant, newsworthy topics. (My work can be seen in every one of the featured traps for Science and Health, but any user can create and train their own user traps, which you're welcome to do if you like.)
And, of course, I'm committed to being a truth vigilante about each and every one of the Science and Health traps, and I've even written an in-depth piece on the trap!t blog explaining what that means. (Seriously, you should go read it.)
At this point, I've created and trained more than 30 traps each for science and health. The ones that are currently active and visible from the featured traps page are as follows:

Science			Health
Archaeology	Exoplanets	Plastic	Abortion	Eating Disorders	Nutrition
Bears	Fracking	Robots	Alcoholism	Fitness	Obesity
Bees	Green Cars	Saturn	Alzheimer's Disease	Fluoride	Organ Transplants
Biofuels	Hubble Space Telescope	Science Education	Assisted Suicide	Gluten Disorders	Peanut Allergy
Butterflies	Hurricanes	Sharks	Autism	H.I.V./A.I.D.S.	Plastic
Climate Change	International Space Station	Stars	Body Image	Health Care Reform	Prenatal Care
Deep Sea Life	Large Hadron Collider	Stem Cells	Breast Cancer	Hearing Loss	Skin Cancer
Dinosaurs	Lions & Tigers	Supernova	Concussions	Heart Disease	Tobacco
Dolphins	Mars	The Sun	Diabetes	Influenza	Vaccination
Earthquakes	Meteor Showers & Comets	Turtles	Domestic Violence	Medical Marijuana	Yoga
Eclipses	Neutrinos	Volcanoes	Dyslexia	Migraines
Elephants	Outer Space	Whales
Evolution	Penguins	Wolves

But I'm not satisfied with the content I've created so far, no matter how useful (and unique) it is at the moment. I'm committed to creating a high-quality science and health news outlet here, and I need your help to do it. Here's what you can do.
Go to the featured traps -- either Science, Health, or both -- and poke around inside. If you're an expert on one of these topics, that's particularly useful. Because here are the things I need to know:

• Are there articles you're seeing that aren't relevant to the topic at hand?
• Are there sources that you know are too disreputable or highly politicized when it comes to the issue at hand to be considered reliable?
• Are there glaring omissions, of stories, blogs, or online articles that should have been included in this trap, but somehow weren't?

At this stage, Trap!t is still in beta, but we need all the useful feedback we can get. Find a bug? Tell me. Are we desperately in need of a feature we don't have? Suggest it. Is there something that particularly either works or doesn't work for you? Let me hear it. And finally, are there topics, stories, or entire categories that absolutely need to be included that are presently omitted? Let me know. Feedback from informed, intelligent, quality readers like you will help make this the news service that the world so badly needs.
In fact, I want you to let me know what you think, what's working, what's misfiring, and what you'd like to see so bad, that either by commenting here or by emailing me at "trapit DOT science AT gmail DOT com", I'll be giving away free stuff for your feedback! Everyone who comments or emails gets entered in a raffle to get a free trap!t T-shirt (winners TBA), and the most useful/constructive comments will get a free trap!t sweatshirt, which will instantly* transform you into a bad ass.
(* -- transformation may not actually happen.)
So, this is what I'm working on. Science news, health news, and the truth. The world needs it, and -- along with the rest of the company here at trap!t -- I'm working to make it happen. Help me out, let me know what you think, both about the idea and the implementation, and let's make this great for ourselves and for the world!
Update: If you would like to report a bug either in general or a problem/suggestion with one of the featured traps, please tell me what the bug is, what trap this came from/happened in, and, if it's from a particular article within a trap, share the url with me like so:
That will give me the best information you can provide to help with addressing the issue and making it better. Thanks for all your feedback so far!

Read the comments on this post...

Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

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• Subscribe to ScienceBlogs Select using Google Reader
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The Trouble With Theistic Evolution : EvolutionBlog

Link: http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2012/02/the_trouble_with_theistic_evol.php

Articles: Alan Dershowitz Says Media Matters Could Cost Obama the Election

Link: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/02/alan_dershowitz_says_media_matters_could_cost_obama_the_election.html (via shareaholic.com)

When asked about Blumenthal's DP article, Dershowitz looked exasperated and listed all the ways in which that article got everything wrong.  For example, Dershowitz is opposed to torture.  Dershowitz has called for something called "torture warrants" to ensure that extreme measures be applied only in extraordinary circumstances and with the most extraordinary of safeguards.  Blumenthal's  distorted analysis?  Dershowitz supports torture. 
Much more newsworthy than the silly spitballs Blumenthal threw with his screaming article was Dershowitz's conviction that Blumenthal and his buddies at Media Matters (a media watchdog organization affiliated with the Democratic party and which has recently been widely accused of engaging in anti-Semitism) were going to cost this president the election.
Asked at the pre-event press conference whether he had seen Blumenthal's article, Dershowitz's immediate and angry response was: "I have, and let me tell you, Max Blumenthal and Media Matters will be singlehandedly responsible for [Obama] losing this election.  They [the Democrats] cannot win the election and keep this affiliation with them [Media Matters]."

Are Liberals Smarter and Nicer? Just Ask Academia

Are Liberals Smarter and Nicer? Just Ask Academia

via Big Journalism by Brad Schaeffer on 2/8/12

A recent Livescience.com article appearing in Yahoo! News highlighted a study by psychologist Gordon Hodson of Brock University in Ontario in which a nexus is supposedly found between being unintelligent and conservative and being racist. I presume then that, as conservatives and morons tend to be more racist, the dots between them are connected? The story not only provided an overview of the study but also links to other similar studies which appear to back up Hodson's conclusions. Well then, there it is. We always knew that liberals are smarter and more tolerant. We just needed a study to prove it.

Gordon Hodson

At best, psychology is an inexact science, as the human brain is the most complex system in the known universe, and to try to understand what makes it tick is daunting if not impossible. But layer on top of that the possibility that the researchers themselves may harbor a bias that leads them to subconsciously steer their studies towards reaching pre-determined conclusions, and you have the makings of a sham science project … with predictable results.
Hodson's complete study is not available for free online, so I readily admit I only know what has been made public. Apparently the researchers offered a list of questions which would measure participants' left or right leanings based upon the answers. For example, one measure in defining "conservative" is gauging one's level of agreement with the statement "schools should teach children to obey authority." Then they overlaid these results with responses to questions with overtly racial overtones such as "I wouldn't mind working with people of other races." I guess if you answer "yes" to authority and "no" to working with others not like you, you are a conservative racist. Conversely, if you replied "fight the power, maaan" and "I want my office to look like a rainbow, my brother," then you are a tolerant and cognitively well-adjusted liberal. Oh, if only the world were so simple.
But the world is not simple.  Even the questions I offer as examples have nuance. For instance, I was never taught by my Marine Corps dad (as conservative as they come) to unconditionally obey authority. In fact, he revered the Founding Fathers, for whom declaring our independence was an enormous thumb in the eye of the crown's authority. I was, however, taught to respect authority. There is a subtle difference. When it comes to blindly obeying, it depends on the situation. If it involves heeding police instructions at an intersection, then by all means I do it—unless I discover that the cops are beating a man to death with night sticks and demanding I join in.  As to working with other races, that depends on the individuals. Are they college-educated or street thugs? Are they going to speak a foreign language in my presence all day, making me uncomfortable? This applies to whites as well, though. Are they respectable or trailer trash? So it is not race per se that will make me choose the complexion of my co-workers but who they are. How does one distill these textured concepts into a questionnaire that may pigeonhole me as racist if I check box A instead of B?
Speaking of complexity and texture: to me, the salient feature of this article and only real admission that this study may not be fair, or even complete, is this parenthetical afterthought: "(These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson's work can't speak to this 'underground' racism.)"
Well, I can speak to it. "Underground racism" is an antiseptic term for  "how liberals behave as opposed to what they profess." One can insist until blue in the face that they are color-blind (and answer as such on Hodson's study earning them a gold star), but the moment they can afford to, they will move as fast as they can to an all-white neighborhood to raise their kids. They will insist  they do not see the world through multi-colored glasses, but when a presidential candidate calls Barack Obama the "food stamp president," immediately those whom I bet this study would label as the non-racists jump to the conclusion that such a statement is racially charged. It is not. It is a straightforward fact that more Americans of all shades have joined the food stamp rolls during Obama's watch than ever before. One can argue the economics underscoring this trend, but only those who either consciously or subconsciously associate food stamps with blacks would see racism in such a statement where none exists. So who are the true bigots again? I refer you to Bill Maher for an illustration of the concept.
"Underground racism" comes in many forms, some of which are quite insidious, such as  paternalism of the state. Also, there is that ever-so-subtle patronizing so common in liberal arts academia and mainstream journalism. For example, some can argue that those who oppose "Black History Month" could be racist. Yet, what does promoting such an idea say about those who envision and proffer it?  As black actor Morgan Freeman once said in a moment of racial clarity that has since abandoned him, only one who views the world through the prism of color would see 'black history' at all and not simply American history. Freeman asked the poster-child of elitist race-pandering Mike Wallace, who also happens to be Jewish, what month is "Jewish History Month"? There is none. Does Wallace want one? Emphatically, he replied no.Yet he defends Black History Month why, exactly? I wonder how Wallace and his peers would have scored on Hodson's study—a study in which the very definition of racism is, if not off-sides, then at least incomplete.
In a way, even well-intentioned academics could be falling victim to some odd cousin of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle with such studies. I find it somewhat unfeasible that a liberal (call it a hunch) who views conservative ideology with hostility could possibly create a study that does not have this bias seep into the methodology making truly impartial findings beyond reach. As anyone who has seen the liberal bias of  the mainstream media in action can attest (see Obama 2008 campaign), it is almost impossible to separate personal beliefs from such human nature studies far removed from the more precise physical sciences that attempt to link a political ideology to both intelligence and an ingrained, if unpleasant, human characteristic.
Another attempt to explain this human characteristic is provided by Ms. Pappas through a link to a piece about the various "isms" and their relation to societal rather than cognitive influences as studied by Georgia Tech psychologist Paul Verhaeghen. "There's one idea that people tend to associate black people with violence, women with weakness, or older people with forgetfulness because they are prejudiced. But there's another possibility that what's in your head is not you, it's the culture around you," Verhaeghen said in a statement.
To me there is a glaring problem with Verhaeghan's thinking at its core and reveals a pre-determined idea of what counts for an "ism" that surely influences his research. Whatever their origin, his examples  are not expressions of bias at all. They are associations based upon empirical fact, regardless of how uncomfortable or politically incorrect.
In the United States, blacks do commit an alarmingly disproportionate number of violent crimes relative to their population. It is therefore not 'prejudiced' to associate blacks, who though only 18% of the population commit half of all homicides, with violence more than whites, but rather a reflection of a sad reality. If I am prejudiced for saying this, then what of Jesse Jackson who admitted: "There is nothing more painful to me… than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."
And it is not a stereotype to label women as physically weaker than men on the whole. If you think otherwise then you have never watched a sporting event in your life. There is a reason why we have the WNBA, women's tennis, women's golf, etc. Again, that is just seeing life as it is, not as one would want it to be.
Yet again, one aspect of old age for many seniors is indeed memory loss (as I am starting to discover myself, unfortunately). Yet again, one aspect of old age is indeed mem—ach, you see?
So the question really comes to mind: how can one possibly make a study of what is "prejudiced" or not when its very definition I believe to be suspect or at least  in the eye of the one running the study. What one researcher describes as a "stereotype" I would argue is just recording what your own eyes see and what the data confirms. In some circles this is known as a reality check.
And based on his faulty notion of prejudice, in the end we see a supposedly impartial researcher's true left-wing agenda seep through in the conclusion he drws from his biased study. After deciding that what you see, hear, and read is making us bigots rather than observers, Verhaegan offers something that would make George Orwell cringe: "There's a reason for political correctness," he says. "At least, as studies suggest, it might be a good idea to not put stereotypes out there too clearly, because if you do, people will internalize them." Oh yes, we need even more stifled dialogue. Maybe that will get us to racial nirvana.
Do such studies ever leave liberals holding the short intelligence straw? Actually, in May 2010, the Journal of The American Institute for Economic Enlightenment did a study trying to find clues to economic literacy which included links to political ideology. It asked eight questions about economics such as "Agree/disagree: rent control leads to housing shortages" (Disagree=economically unenlightened). The results found that the least economically enlightened defined themselves as "progressive/very liberal." The most economically astute were "very conservative."
So what does this pro-conservative economics survey tell us? Are liberals, in fact, economic nit-wits? Well, I'm not sure, but I know I didn't read about it on and the ABC-affiliated Yahoo! News. And I highly doubt even if they did grudgingly report the findings, they would have led with something so damning as "As is to be expected, liberals are economically illiterate." One thing it could mean is that such surveys involving correlations between intelligence, racism, economics and politics could be as inexact as the science of psychology itself… and as prone to bias as the researchers clamoring for relevance—and perhaps, even, also seeking a bit of reassurance that their own left-wing political beliefs stem from a superior intelligence to match their attitudes.

On Same Sex Marriage and “Sex Discrimination”

On Same Sex Marriage and “Sex Discrimination”

via The Volokh Conspiracy by David Bernstein on 2/10/12

On the one hand, I agree with Ilya that bans on same-sex marriage could be described as sex discrimination.  On the other hand, from opponents' perspective, the point is that "marriage" has been defined for several thousand years in Judeo-Christian culture as between a man and a woman, and retaining that definition is not sex discrimination.
Imagine, for example, that having a bar mitzvah in Israel provided boys with various and important rights and obligations.  [Let me tighten the hypothetical a bit.] Imagine that in Israel, any thirteen year old Jewish boy could go to city hall and get a certificate of bar mitzvah, regardless of whether he had a religious bar mitzvah ceremony, and imagine further that this certificate provides the boys who get it with various important rights and privileges. Israel, recognizing that girls should be entitled to analogous rights, offers girls a [certificate of] bat mitzvah instead.  The bat mitzvah gives girls the same legal rights and obligations as boys, but because it's not called a bar mitzvah, it's less culturally significant and, according to critics bespeaks inequality (and in fact, while bar and bat mitzvahs don't confer legal rights and obligations in Israel, it's an important religious and cultural tradition. Girls don't always get a bat mitzvah, and when they do, it's rarely celebrated with the same vigor or considered as significant as a bar mitzvah in the same family).
A girl sues, demanding that she be entitled to a legally recognized "bar mitzvah."  On the one hand, Ilya could rightly claim that by definition, denying her access to the status of "bar mitzvah" is sex discrimination.  On the other hand, defenders of limiting legally recognized bar mitzvahs to boys would rejoin that bar mitzvahs by definition, backed by hundreds of years of tradition and culture, are solely for males.
It strikes me that both sides have a point, and most likely the best thing for courts to do under such circumstances, where they'd basically just have to take sides in a culture war pitting feminists against religious and cultural traditionalists, is to stay out of it–so long as analogous rights and obligations are available to the plaintiff through an analogous
ceremonycertificate, in this hypo the bat mitzvah.
Disclaimer: While I don't think that courts should recognize a right to same sex marriage by finding that the absence of such a right is sex discrimination, nor do I think courts should even take the position that is must be analyzed as sex discrimination, I support legislation providing for same-sex marriage. I'll also add the disclaimer that I'm not addressing any other constitutional arguments that states must expand their definition of marriage to include same-sex couples.
UPDATE: Let's add an interesting hypo to the mix: what if California, instead of having a domestic partnership law, instead created a new legal category called "same sex marriage" that had exactly the same rights and privileges as "marriage", but every relevant statute that applied to marriage now applies to "marriage and 'same-sex' marriage", or perhaps "'traditional marriage'" and "'same sex marriage'".  Still sex discrimination if same sex couples aren't eligible for "traditional marriage"? Again, I think that by definition the answer is yes, and by definition the answer is no.
FURTHER UPDATE: New hypo: A small European nation has a constitution that bans any form of sex discrimination.  The King  (who has only ceremonial duties) dies.  His daughter is next in line for the throne.  Even though she'd have the same legal rights, duties, and privileges either way, she demands to be crowned King, not Queen.  She points out that it's sex discrimination that only men can be called "King", argues that she will likely get less respect from her subjects if she is called Queen instead of King, and that the distinctions between "King" and "Queen" are rooted ancient patriarchy.  Valid sex discrimination claim?  Once again, my instincts are that (a) this, by definition is sex discrimination [or, more precisely, a classification based on sex and therefore subject to intermediate scrutiny under American law]; and (b) this, by definition, is also NOT sex discrimination, and if I were a judge I'd stay out of it.

Climate Scientists Violate Own Advice: Opine On Topics About Which They Have...

Jerry Pournelle's suggestion:

Create a computer model starting with the planet in the year 1900.
Feed in the known state of the planet as it stood on January 1, 1900.
Feed in the known changes in the composition of the atmosphere as they occurred over the past century.
Compare the temperatures calculated in the model with the temperatures that were actually observed in the real world.

When a computer model replicates the observed history of the planet (a process called "retrodiction"), then we can have some confidence in its ability to predict when extended into the future.

Has this been done? If not, is there a reason why not?

Climate Scientists Violate Own Advice: Opine On Topics About Which They Have No Expertise

via Hit & Run by Ronald Bailey on 2/8/12

Back on January 27, the Wall Street Journal ran an op/ed by some distinguished researchers arguing that climate change is no big deal. The op/ed, No Need to Panic About Climate Change, asserted:

...the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

If there is not all that much warming, then why is there so much brouhaha about it? The op/ed continued:

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.
Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

Not too surprisingly, those accused of being bought-and-paid for alarmists were annoyed. Earlier this week, the Journal published a response from 38 of the perturbed alarmists, Check with Climate Scientists for Views on Climate. Their letter asserted:

Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.
You published "No Need to Panic About Global Warming" on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

So, there! And what do "real" climate scientists believe?

Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record. Observations show unequivocally that our planet is getting hotter. And computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean. Such periods are a relatively common climate phenomenon, are consistent with our physical understanding of how the climate system works, and certainly do not invalidate our understanding of human-induced warming or the models used to simulate that warming.
Thus, climate experts also know what one of us, Kevin Trenberth, actually meant by the out-of-context, misrepresented quote used in the op-ed. Mr. Trenberth was lamenting the inadequacy of observing systems to fully monitor warming trends in the deep ocean and other aspects of the short-term variations that always occur, together with the long-term human-induced warming trend.

Question: How long before the short-term variation with minimal warming [PDF] suggests that there may be something wrong with the climate computer models? Just asking.
In any case, the climate experts then go on to become the equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology:

It would be an act of recklessness for any political leader to disregard the weight of evidence and ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses. In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth. Just what the doctor ordered.

Really? Scanning the list of signers of the letter one does not find that any seem to have any special expertise on economics and public policy. Perhaps the climate "dentists" are recommending open heart surgery to treat tooth decay. Interestingly, the op/ed to which they object does cite economic expertise in reaching its conclusions:

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

I will also mention that the public policy side of the Reason Foundation which publishes this website released a report back in December looking at the economics of climate change that reached similar conclusions:

"Using the IPCC's own highest emission scenario, we show that by 2100 the Gross Domestic Product per capita of today's 'developing' countries will be double that of the U.S. in 2006, even taking into account any losses resulting from climate change. Thus developing countries will have significantly more resources and better technology to cope with climate change than even the U.S. does today," Goklany says. "But these advances in adaptive capacity and what they'll mean for our ability to cope with any potential warming are virtually ignored by the IPCC when it assesses the possible impact of global warming."
The study outlines three approaches to tackling climate change: cutting emissions of greenhouse gases; focused adaptation; and economic growth. "The best strategy by far to combat climate change is economic growth," says Julian Morris, the study's project director and vice president at Reason Foundation. "Economic growth is the best way to eliminate poverty; meanwhile, the resulting wealth and technological advances  will enable people better to address all the problems they face, including any challenges that global warming may present."

For what it's worth, the climate experts asserting consensus about the reality of man-made global warming cannot, on the basis of their climate expertise, assert a consensus on the policies needed to address the problem.
 Go here to read the Reason Foundation study on the best policies to handle future climate change.