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My thoughts are with the Haitian people

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From David Adam’s article about the CARMA International report, Western Media Coverage of Humanitarian Disasters, January 2006:

“The western media’s response to … humanitarian disasters is driven by “selfishness and egocentricity”…  Domestic politics, tourism and feel-good tales about western heroism and donations make a story… rather than human suffering.” The Guardian, 30 Jan. 2006

I had two thoughts yesterday morning, when I heard the CBC news reporting the devastating earthquake near Port-au-Prince. The first was about how limited the capacity of Haiti will be to respond to this disaster, given that it is one of poorest countries in the world. Haiti has one of the smallest per capita ecological footprints in the world, at just 0.5 ha per person. Compare this to a whopping 7.1 ha/person for the average Canadian. Yes, one average Canadian consumes the resources used by a total of 14 Haitians. I just shook my head in dismay at the ongoing suffering of the Haitian people, recalling their continuing political turmoil of the last decade, which included the US-backed removal of their elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. And arguably, this history clearly plays a role in the suffering created by the impact of the earthquake.

My second thought was that because Canada’s Governer-General, Her Excellency Michaëlle Jean, is originally from Haiti, that the kind of self-interested Western media response to humanitarian crises, described in the CARMA International report, may not, for a change, happen here. What do I mean? Well, the media plays a major role in defining a disaster and  CARMA (who are global media analysts) analyzed how various natural and man-made disasters that resulted in high loss of life were being covered in the Western press. The report’s main conclusion was that “Western self-interest is the pre-condition for significant coverage of a humanitarian crisis”. It’s great to read the report directly, but David Adam’s article gives a good summary (Western media ‘underplay disasters in developing world’ in the Guardian Weekly, Feb 10-16 2006 p.27, and Crisis of Communications, The Guardian, Monday Jan 30 2006).

The report examined 2,000 articles from 64 daily and weekly publications from among  9 countries (including UK, USA and Australia, with emphasis on the European press). The newspaper coverage of 6 disasters was compared:
1. Earthquake in Pakistani-Kashmir
2. Indian Ocean Tsunami
3. Earthquake in Bam, Iran (2003)
4. Darfur, Sudan - a humanitarian crisis exacerbated by environmental degradation
5. Hurricane Katrina, USA
6. Hurricane Stan, Central America, especially Guatemala

Each article started with a 50 point score and points were subtracted depending on:

Headline, Placement in the paper, Portrayal of the situation and Evidence of bias. The articles scored were those published from 2 days before to 10 weeks after the disaster. Here’s what the report found: that there was “no link between the scale of a disaster and resulting media coverage”. For example, Hurricane Katrina received the highest media coverage (referred to 3,105 times in UK papers), while Hurricane Stan received the lowest media coverage (referred to, only 34 times in UK papers). But, both hurricanes killed over 1,000 people.

"The hurricane Stanley emergency stands out as the worst indictment of the selfish western approach to humanitarian disasters. There is no obvious significant economic or political interest. Consequently, there is virtually no coverage of any kind beyond the first few days." (CARMA International, 2006).

And to think, that Haiti was on my mind only a week ago, as I headed back to Toronto from a one-week cruise in the western Caribbean. During my trip, I had a number of interesting encounters with several of the many Haitian immigrants to Florida, including an adventure with a taxi driver who got lost between the port and the Amtrak station. This story was going to be in one of my forthcoming travel blogs about whether it’s possible to holiday with a low carbon footprint – but hey, CARMA, I get it, and I hope that other people do, too – it’s not about me and my recent chats with Haitians - IT’S ABOUT DOING SOMETHING, BOTH SHORT AND LONG-TERM, TO RELIEVE THE IMMEDIATE SUFFERING OF THE HAITIAN PEOPLE AND TO SERIOUSLY ADDRESS THEIR “POVERTY-DRIVEN LOW-LEVEL OF EARTHQUAKE PREPAREDNESS”!
Is it to much to ask every Canadian with an ecological footprint that is greater than 2 ha to reduce their footprint by 1/14th and to demand that the Federal Government  direct those resources to the average Haitian? Simplistic, yes, but worth reflecting on.

Dawn R. Bazely

Please note that the Ecological Footprint figures are from WWF Living Planet Report 2008.

Pictures of York’s Exhibit with Ecoar at COP 15

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I think all of us are still in a bit of shock about how COP15 actually went down. We'll be reporting more in the new year, but for now would like to say that manning the booth and dealing with the lines at the Bella Center left little time to blog as we had hoped.

For now, here are some pictures of the booth, including the ribbons we handed out that are a Brazilian tradition. Please note the banner of signatures from York students under the exhibit booth. We've also got a shot of the mural that we brought from an FES popular education class!

miriam

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Ben Todd: The Role of the Arts in Driving Sustainable Lifestyles

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nonameOf interest to all members of the university community and beyond:

What? Wendy Michener Lecture in the Faculty of Fine Arts

When? Thursday January 14 2010 3pm-5pm

Where? Sandra Faire & Ivan Fecan Theatre, Accolade East Building, York University, Keele campus

Layout 1“While scientists tell us that we already have the technologies required to avert catastrophic climate change, policy-makers and businesses continue to seek new technological 'solutions'. Meanwhile, global consumption and emissions continue unsustainably, with minimal abatement. I believe that to change the lifestyles of entire populations, a cultural shift is required, and thus it is cultural agents which must take the lead. The past three years of work at Arcola Theatre provide examples and lessons.” - Ben Todd, Arcola Theatre

noname-1

Who needs a fair hearing? Have the Skeptics had enough of a hearing?

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I started writing this blog post in June 2009, which was long before I found out that Lomborg was back on the public stage. In retropect, it's interesting to see how my thinking was evolving. I was very cool with giving skeptics a fair hearing, and the tone is quite light. However, 6 months on, I am definitely feeling much less patient than I was back in the summer. How times change...

My blog about animal rights activists' tendency to be as biased in their use of the peer-reviewed literature as climate change deniers got me thinking that I'd better pay some attention to both groups' claims that the majority of scientists are actually biased against them.

In the case of animal rights activists, a recent court case about cormorants, upheld Parks Canada's culling of cormorants on Middle Island to reduce mortality of the trees, plants and other animals.  Birders have striven to make the case that cormorant numbers were always really high, and that they should not be managed.  But there's actually not a lot of evidence to support their position.

In the case of climate change deniers, the website Skeptical Science examines the science of global warming scepticism, and is well worth reading.  There's also a great, detailed BBC News article that investigated the claims of these skeptics that their work is being ignored (hint: there wasn't much evidence to support their allegations).

Of course, the most famous ecological skeptic is probably Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote the controversial, The Skeptical Environmentalist. He got into trouble with a whole lot of ecology and evolution biology professors.  Back in 2003, I actually ran a graduate course which examined his various claims in detail.  The students had lots of fun investigating and locating the bits of various chapters where Lomborg was quoting research completely out of context."

OK - so that blog was back in mid 2009. My current position on all of these skeptics, who keep on trying to challenge the basic science, is: "If you wanna debate this with me, you need to earn the right to do so and to take up my time - so, first you need to submit a 10 page, referenced essay (with peer-reviewed literature - not these rubbish blogs - and I include my blogs in the latter category) to me, explaining who Karl Popper is, who Thomas Kuhn is, and what the scientific method is. We can talk after that." Interestingly, the Globe Columnist, Leah McLaren wrote a great column on December 19 2009, called "Why are we calling on an ex-call girl for relationship tips?" that aims to explain why people cannot differentiate good (or informed) advice from bad (uninformed). Check it out.

Dawn R. Bazely

COP15: The entitled, the resentful and the powerless

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BY PROFESSOR STUART SCHOENFELD, CHAIR OF SOCIOLOGY, GLENDON COLLEGE, YORK UNIVERSITY ( schoenfe@yorku.ca)

From one perspective, the climate change conference in Copenhagen looks rational.  It’s about science – understanding the implications of the largest scientific project in history – and it’s about deliberation – well briefed representatives of 192 nations brought together to write an international treaty.  But the meeting is not so rational.  People come to the negotiating table not only with interests, but also with emotions.  The negotiators in Copenhagen represent some who feel entitled, others who feel resentful and yet others who feel powerless.  This play of emotions seems to be the story of the conference, a global summit of desires, fears, outrage and frustration.  Out of this mix of emotions, the challenge is to feel and act on the latent but powerful feeling of mutual responsibility.

The feelings of resentment and powerlessness come into focus when the feelings of entitlement are acknowledged.  No leader of any developed country can say to its citizens, “We are not entitled to our way of life.”  The point of view is implicit in the language: “we” are developed; those who do not share our prosperity are “developing” or “underdeveloped.”  Surely the road ahead, as the international development industry has taught for decades, is for others to model themselves on us, to work hard and succeed, just as we have.  “We” can help the underdeveloped.  Money is available for assistance in climate adaptation and mitigation.  There are intellectual and organizational resources as well to support the transformation of the global energy system.

All this good will does not challenge the feelings of entitlement in developed countries, or even admit that entitlement is an issue.  People have become accustomed to - and the economic system dependent on - transportation, food and building practices that are comfortable and satisfying, but unsustainable.  Even leisure activities that produce high greenhouse gas emissions – air travel, destination holidays, cruise ships – seem unlikely to change dramatically on a voluntary basis.  This sense of entitlement is understandable.  Prosperous countries have meaningful historical narratives of hardship, struggle and success.

It is precisely this sense of entitlement that is the focus of the resentments that have surfaced so strongly in Copenhagen.  China, India and the others in the G77 use the language of “historical responsibility” - greenhouse gases accumulated in the atmosphere when the West dominated industrial production.   The West has been responsible for the problem; the West has the responsibility to clean up the mess. Because the West’s prosperity is based on creating a global crisis, it also has the responsibility to assist others with the clean technologies that the global crisis requires.  To do otherwise is to ask the victims to pay for the damages.  The resentment gets even stronger.  Consider the history of the India textile industry.  When India was a colony, village weavers, using low GHG producing hand looms, were driven out of business by the importation of cheap cloth from British coal fired textile mills.  Now, India, with its impoverished multitudes, is being asked to restrain low per capita green house gas emissions in order for the West to continue its prosperity and higher per capita GHG emissions!  Perhaps the expressions of resentment are partly verbal posturing, intended to produce an agreement more favorable to the interests of the G77 plus China, but the outrage and anger are much more than tactics.

Some other countries, lacking the political leverage of China, India and a handful of others, are the beggars at the banquet.  The 39 members of the Alliance of Small Island States are, with the exception of Singapore, low income and vulnerable.  They can plead, but their ability to influence is slight.  The Alliance includes the most desperate, and the most frustrated.

The outcome at COP15 depends on more than the science, the negotiators’ clarity on national interests, and the skills at compromise.  The outcome, and even more the follow through, depend as well on the emotions that come out of the conference.  The perpetuation of entitlement, resentment and powerlessness jeopardize global success.  Rising to the challenge of climate change requires other emotions, of mutual care and concern, across the globe and across generations.  Success will ultimately come from shared personal commitments, and leadership that evokes them.

Stuart is a long-serving member of the IRIS Executive.

Dawn R. Bazely

Let’s hack into our own emails and smear ourselves with our own incriminating, out of context phrases!

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Well, I was wrong, wrong, wrong, when I told several colleagues, some weeks ago, that the CRU (Climate Research Unit) at UEA (University of East Anglia) e-mail hacking incident was silly, and to ignore it.

It has not gone away, because climate-change deniers are fully invested in launching what appears to me to be an across-the-board attack on peer reviewed science. This has happened before, to whit, the lobbying for and subsequent removal of Robert Watson as Chair of IPCC (the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change).

How on earth should the scientific community respond? Well, I challenge everyone to hack into your own emails using terms such as "rejection", "rejected", "plagiarism", "trick", "fix" and see what emails you come up with. Then you can find incriminating phrases that can be taken out of context and used to self-smear your own integrity as a scientist.

Here's what I found when I searched 4 years of my backed-up emails for "trick". In a 2007  email, I wrote that Doritos will provide an alternative solution to dealing with the consequences of climate change: "doritos should do the trick". Please note that Drs. Vicari and Koh, as former students of mine, are clearly fellow members of this conspiracy and we are, in fact, hoping that this snack company will fund our next field season.

Dawn R. Bazely

Tuvalu wins first ever “Ray of the Day”

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Today at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP15, in Copenhagen, Tuvalu, a small Polenisian island nation, won the first ever "Ray of the Day" award, which will be given for actions that substantially advance the negotiations. The Ray of the Day is a new award given by the Fossil of the Day Awards that conversely decorate the country with the worst performance for the talks. Canada has already won four Fossil award, when counting the two targeted at industrialized countries; how disappointing!

Anyway, Tuvalu won the Ray of the Day for proposing that the plenary session discuss transparently a legally binding amendment to the Kyoto Protocol: that the treaty require countries to keep temperature rises to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Tuvalu is one of the islands that will be affected first by rising sea levels due to climate change.

The significance of the debate that ensued following Tuvalu's proposal--with small island states (AOSIS) and some poor African countries vs. China, India and Saudi Arabia, among others--is that there is a wider split emerging within the developing countries, which traditionally voted as a block. Another indication of the growing divide is that the AOSIS countries have said their vulnerabilities have not been addressed in the draft of a potential treaty by the BASIC (Brazil, India, South Africa and China).

Why does anyone bother with Bjørn Lomborg?

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Here's another reason why history matters. Because anyone who has done their research into Bjørn Lomborg's history would be aware that most of what he has published in the peer-reviewed journal literature (and it's not much), has hardly ever been cited by other academic scholars in their peer-reviewed journal articles! (I checked Lomborg's citation record on Web of Science). He and his appallingly researched book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, (defended by Cambridge University Press as peer-reviewed), were investigated for academic dishonesty. While the book was found guilty (but not the author), the decision was later overturned by a Danish government review for "process" reasons.

Like Daniel Simberloff, when I read the chapters in the book on which I would consider myself an expert, I was shocked at the poor coverage of the pertinent literature. My own book with Judy Myers was also published by Cambridge University Press, and I was therefore interested in the overall implications for and interpretations of the quality of their in-house book review system. How had Lomborg's book gotten through the process, and was it really as bad as it seemed? So, in 2003, I taught a Biology graduate course in which students "deconstructed" the Lomborg book's chapters. They scrutinized Lomborg's sources, and detailed the many ways in which he skewed and misrepresented the data. Frankly, if Lomborg was a new Master's student in Biology, and he submitted any of these chapters to me as essays, he would receive a failing grade. The reason for this would have nothing to do with his polemical positions, because good scholarship is essentially about challenging the status quo, and everything to do with his poor scholarship. But Lomborg has simply never acknowledged his shortcomings. A few years ago I wrote to Scanorama, the SAS airlines magazine (the one you find in your seat pocket), after they profiled Lomborg, and made the following points:

"Dear Sir - I enjoyed your article about Dr. Lomborg in the October 2004 issue
of Scanorama, and feel compelled to share four thoughts I had after reading
it.
1. Dr. Lomborg is photogenic, and I doubt he would have received so much
attention if this was not the case.
2.  As a practicing field ecologist, I learned early on to avoid consulting
colleagues who are trained as pure statisticians for help in analyzing my
data, because they lack practical experience.  I invariably feel more confused
after a conversation with a statistician, than I do beforehand.  Dr. Lomborg's
book left me feeling both irritated and confused.
3.  It is particularly noteworthy that the people who lodged the formal
complaint against Dr. Lomborg were not environmental activists but first and
foremost, peer-reviewed scientists, with pretty comfortable careers in
academia.  Why did they exercise themselves when they did not need to?
4.  From the point of view of Cambridge University Press, the publisher of The
Skeptical Environmentalist, that there is no such thing as bad publicity when
it comes to book sales.
Sincerely, Dawn R. Bazely, Associate Professor, Biology Department, York
University, Toronto, Canada."

Apparently some form of my letter was published, although I never saw it. And then, I simply forgot about the book, except that I refer to it as an excellent example of how to misrepresent the biodiversity literature. BUT now, I find that this is the man sponsored by the Munk Lectures to debate Elizabeth May and George Monbiot? And, no one in the Canadian media and certainly not on the Munk Debate website is making any reference to Lomborg's history as an academic against whom formal charges of dishonesty were brought? The latter event is so rare and huge that it cannot and should not be ignored, regardless of the highly political outcome. Academics gripe and moan about each other, but are loathe to spend time insisting that formal charges of academic dishonesty be brought. I have been directly involved in only one such formal case at York University in the early 1990's, in which a PhD dissertation was found to contain manufactured data. The entire incident was quite emotionally exhausting for everyone who was involved both in uncovering the fraud and in investigating it.

Contrary to what one might expect in terms of a balanced assessment of Lomborg, the Munk Debates website states that Esquire Magazine described him as: "one of the world's 75 most influential people of the 21st century". What, influential like the Jonas Brothers and Simon Cowell of American and British Idol? I would certainly also approach all of Lomborg's subsequent writing with the working hypothesis that his selective  and biased approach is likely unchanged. Why would it change, when it has served him so well in the past?

This apparent lack of willingness by the Canadian media to research the full picture surrounding Lomborg can be interpreted in a number of different ways, but, if you want an analysis that is more of a political than scientific deconstruction, I would direct you to the Lomborg analysis on The Way Things Break blog, and the post called Lomborg and Playing the Long Game.

Dawn R. Bazely

Accepting personal responsibility

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The front page of today's Globe and Mail has a story about how  staff and Board members at the Toronto Humane Society are facing various criminal charges for cruelty to animals. The story broke this past summer and I was appalled to learn how animals were being treated and how they were not being euthanized, even if they were suffering. An article today, relates how  some Board members were unaware that they might be facing charges and were surprised. Having sat on two non-profit daycare boards, I learned early on about my very serious responsibilities as a board member, and what their implications were, vis-a-vis my liability. The buck has to stop somewhere. For me, this story is as much about cruelty to animals, apparently perpetrated by self-described  animal welfare supporters, as it is about yet another segment of society unwilling to take responsibility for its actions.

Last week, I heard an amazing lecture by Dr. Daniel Krewski, from the University of Ottawa about assessing public health risks. It was the Morris Katz Memorial Lecture at York University.

Dr. Krewski made many excellent points, but one that stuck in my mind had to do with perceptions of responsibility. He explained  that when the public is polled about who should take responsibility for such crises as BSE (Mad Cow) and other health threats, they invariably respond that, it's "all of us" who bear responsibility for action. I saw this in the IRIS survey on climate change. BUT, BUT, BUT - Dr. Krewski told us, that when the public is asked whether government, or the agency  charged with acting to protect the public interest is doing enough, a majority invariably responds, that not enough is being done! Ahah, so ready to blame someone else.

This observation does not surprise me because, these days, I am very accustomed to having students blame their poor academic performance directly on me, their professor. There has been a significant shift in the last 20 years, in terms of how much responsibility students are willing to accept for their own actions. A very high number of students (not all, by any means) really just want to blame someone else. I see this tendency in my own children, and it's clearly become an entrenched societal norm. So - what does this mean for taking personal action on the environment, climate change and sustainability? Well... what do you think?

PLEASE THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND WHOM IT IS AFFECTING! Without that reflection, how will people truly be motivated to downsize their carbon footprints? On the other hand, if you are reading this, then you already know what I am talking about!

Dawn R. Bazely

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