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“Climate Change is NOT a hoax” (B. Obama) blog #5: Introducing York’s UNFCCC delegates

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It's that time of year again: the annual Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This year, UNFCCC COP 18, is being held at Doha, Qatar, and meetings began yesterday, Monday, November 26th. This year, York's delegation is made up of professors from quite different disciplines: Professor Muhammad Yousaf (Chemistry - at left) and Professor Idil Boran (Philosophy - below right). Sadly, Professor Ian Garrett from the Department of Theatre, who received accreditation as part of the delegation, was unable to attend the COP in person, but plans to blog about it from afar.

Professor Boran is carrying out SSHRC-funded research which re-examines climate change policy, with a special focus on the challenges for decision-making, both at the individual and the societal level. She is interested in understanding the extent to which recent research in the social sciences that pertains to the effect of social and cognitive factors on our decision-making processes can help to develop new approaches to climate change policy. Professor Boran seeks to articulate the implications of this research for international debates and negotiations toward a global agreement.

Her participation at COP18, will, she hopes, allow her to assess whether the strategies and arguments used in international debates are compatible or incompatible with the latest social scientific developments, and whether they can mutually learn from one another. In light of these observations, she will be able to draw implications both for theory and policy practice. She will set targets, for her own research, on how to analyze the new scholarly advances on decision-making on climate change policy, in light of insights from actual decision-making and negotiation processes. This in turn can potentially contribute to a more refined theoretical analysis and help bridge the gap between theory and practice in scholarly research.

Although Professor Yousaf is newly arrived at York's Chemistry Department (in 2011), which he chairs, from the Chemistry Department at the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill, he is no stranger to the campus. He is a York alumnus, having graduated with a Chemistry and Biology B.Sc. degree in 1994!

Professor Yousaf has wide-ranging research interests that span from chemistry to biology, and he also has an interest in understanding how science informs policy. He will be bringing his science-perspective to the COP, as he seeks to understand exactly how the science of climate change is regarded by the policy makers, and politicians.

Ian-GarrettWe wish Professors Boran and Yousaf all the best in Doha. They will be sending updates and mini-blogs as time permits. Professor Ian Garrett (at left), who attended COP 15, is a veteran blogger and co-founder of the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. He is the recently arrived Professor of Sustainability and Design in the Faculty of Fine Arts, and he will be casting his critical artist's eye on the Doha meetings, from Toronto.

This is the fourth delegation that York University is sending to the annual meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change, since 2009, when we applied for, and received Civil Society Observer Status for York University in time for COP 15 in Copenhagen. Past York delegations have included staff, students and faculty from areas as diverse as Political Science, Nursing, and the Faculty of Environmental Studies. Outcomes from delegates have included experiences that informed a book, Climate Change - Who's Carrying the Burden, edited by Professor Anders Sandberg and his son, Tor, and blogs by Jacquie Medalye, as well as extensive national and international networking.

Dawn R. Bazely

“Climate Change is NOT a hoax” (B. Obama) blog #3: Evidence-based policy and the need for scientists to talk to the public

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In their 2000 book, The Cultural Creatives, Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, two professors in the USA, examined common values that are held by people regardless of their political affiliation - democrat or republican. They generated a long list of shared characteristics that cut across partisan political boundaries, such as an interest in ecological sustainability, and respect for womens' rights.

One value that I hope most people would share across a broad-political spectrum, is that of using the best-available research to inform policy. I would also wager, that given the difference between the trends in Canadian and USA citizens' beliefs about whether climate change has a human cause, most Canadians would think that we'd be much more likely to find ideology-driven policy (this is basically policy that's driven by belief and values, even in the face of contradictory evidence, that suggests that the value-based policy may not serve society's broader interests), south of the 49th parallel.

51OBQ4EnYnL._SL500_AA300_Ummm, so, the actual evidence appears to runs contrary this assumption. In an in-depth article for  The Walrus in September 2012,  and a more light-hearted Toronto Star article from August 2012 (if that's possible, given the seriousness of the topic), by self-described seniors, criminal defence lawyer Edward L. Greenspan, and criminologist, Professor Emeritus Anthony N. Doob challenge federal criminal justice policy that runs in direct opposition to research results. They wrote in the Toronto Star, that: "The minister of justice said he is not interested in evidence-based policy: “We’re not governing on the basis of the latest statistics,” he said. “We’re governing on the basis of what’s right to better protect victims and law-abiding Canadians.”"

If crime has been declining since 1992 (so the stats say), then building more prisons to incarcerate more people, which the Harper government is pushing, just doesn't make good policy sense. But, aha, perhaps there's a profit-motive in here somewhere. So, if you are interested in learning more about what a profit-motive associated with higher levels of imprisonment could look like, then, in the spirit of NOT getting our information from verifiable, peer-reviewed sources that feed into the evidence-base of the policy pyramid, I can thoroughly recommend the Jailhouse Job episode, from the TV series, Leverage, starring Timothy Hutton.

Since the present Canadian justice minister is not interested in evidence-based policy, it seems pretty evident to me, that this value must, logically, hold across all branches of the federal government. You can't have one ministry rejecting the concept of "evidence-based" and another accepting it, can you? OK - maybe you can....  in a blog from 2011, Tobi Cohen explains exactly how this government achieves this multiple-personality approach.

So, what's a researcher, engaged in knowledge production to do, when confronted by all this rejection of tedious data? One option, is to go to a meeting where politicians are discussing the importance of research in policy development, and try to feel some love. This is exactly what I did last week at the Thornhill Federal Liberal Riding Association fundraiser event in Vaughn, Ontario, just north of Toronto.

A retired colleague, Prof Emeritus Ken Davey FRSC, Order of Canada, of York University's Biology Department, organized a panel consisting of provincial and federal members of parliament, including Dr. Ted Hsu, the Liberal MP for Kingston and the Islands. Dr. Hsu is a physicist, who went into business, and then into politics. He is the Liberal critic for science and technology, and has been one of the most active Canadian politicians in calling out the Harper government on their humungous cuts to science, including the closure of the Experimental Lakes Area. Incidentally, York University's Professor Norman Yan is speaking, today, on a panel at the University of Toronto, about the Experimental Lakes closure: Unmuzzled -  The Urgent Need for the Vocal Aquatic Scientist in Today's Political Climate in Canada.

In his speech, Dr. Hsu explained the implications of cancelling the long-form census, the gutting of Environment Canada and Parks Canada, the muzzling of federal scientists, and of many other Harper government idealogically-motivated cuts to those parts of our federal government that deal in producing high quality data or the provision of expert review. Dr. Hsu also talked about his excitement at the Death of Evidence rally in Ottawa in July 2012, at which he was the only MP to address the crowd. He was delighted to see a group (namely, scientists), who don't normally engage in political actions, becoming active.

Well, yeh, I was aware of the demonstration, since a number of my colleagues organized it and many  attended it - and, way to go, guys! Unfortunately, as a veteran demonstrator myself (taking my toddler to Queen's Park in the mid-1990s, to demonstrate against cuts to daycare, etc.), it's hard for me to see how this lab-coat protest is going to contribute towards bringing about a change in attitude on the part of the Harper government. The real work lies elsewhere. This rally was baby-step number zero.

In my opinion, one of the main reasons why Canadian science has been suffering so much at the hands of the current federal government, is that Canada has been a laggard when it comes to supporting and promoting the Public Understanding of Science. You only have to look to the United Kingdom, at science personalities like, now retired, Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford University, and Jim Al-Khalili, the Professor of Public Engagement in Science at Surrey University, to see the boosted profile that basic science research has in society.

Both in the UK and the USA, there is much more organized advocacy for research. For example, while  on sabbatical at Harvard, there was a call at the Forest, for a training opportunity to teach researchers how to speak to their congressman or congresswoman.

Are there strategic solutions to this Canadian gap in science engagement? Yesterday, the Science Media Centre of Canada, a non-profit charity, and the office of York's Vice-President for Research and Innovation, held a "journalism bootcamp" or Journalism 101 afternoon session for scientists to learn how to improve their interactions with the media. Members of a panel, Karen McCairley, an Executive Producer at Discovery Channel, Jim Handman, Senior Producer of CBC's Quirks and Quarks, Hannah Hoag, freelance science journalist and Penny Park, Executive Director of the Science Media Centre spelled out, in hilarious, and very plain language, how to be a more accessible scientist to the public and media.

I got to give a presentation, as a scientist, about why we (I'm looking at you in your lab coats and uncombed hair!) SHOULD communicate with the public about science, both directly and indirectly, instead of hiding in our labs., or in my case a ditch, or a forest. Here are my 5 main reasons:

1. The public are taxpayers, they fund you, and they deserve to hear directly from you (OK, so the Harper government doesn't want that, but other governments support this notion and have developed some great guidelines).

2. Outreach and engagement is increasingly written into funding requirements.

3. If the scientist doesn't communicate in plain language, someone else will do it for him/her.

4. Learning how to communicate in plain language can have the payoff, of enabling better interdisciplinary communication within academia, and increased research opportunities where large, interdisciplinary collaborations are required for funding.

5. To help Canada catch up with the UK and USA, which are ahead in encouraging the area of the public understanding of science.

At the bootcamp, Peter Calamai, a veteran Canadian science journalist and a founding member of the Canadian Science Writers' Association, reported some alarming statistics from the USA that underscored the importance of scientists communicating with our various publics. Most Americans cannot name a living scientist  - 15% managed Stephen Hawking (the slide above is used with permission). This was reported in the March 2011 Research Amer!ca: Your Congress, Your Health, National Public Opinion Poll. Peter also recommended the book, Escape from the Ivory Tower by Nancy Baron, as a must-read for scientists.

In their book, Unscientific America - How scientific illiteracy threatens America, authors Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirschenbaum report that only 18% of Americans have actually met a scientist. Which prompted one blogger, at New Voices for Research to encourage scientists to head out into the street, shake  a stranger's hand and introduce ourselves!

So, there are the marching orders for scientists living in Conservative-held Federal ridings across Canada - go forth and shake a lot of hands. That's what it is going to take to build voter-support for natural and physical sciences, social sciences academic research, and evidence-based policy, one hand-shake at a time.

Dawn Bazely

And PS - I talk to politicians of all stripes and people from all walks of life - this is a fundamental approach of sustainability - to be inclusive, and cut-across partisan politics. I believe that I just might be a Cultural Creative! Do the test for yourself, and find out whether you are one.

 

IRIS researchers praised for helping make sense of the “assisted migration” debate

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For academics, there are few things more satisfying than having a research paper you slaved over for months published in a top peer-reviewed scholarly journal. When a leading scientist then blogs enthusiastically about the article, telling the world how great it is, the feeling is even better. That's what happened this week for a group of IRIS researchers after they published an article in the prestigious journal Biological Conservation about whether to use "assisted migration" to help species adapt to a rapidly changing climate.

Assisted migration is the intentional translocation of species outside their historic ranges to mitigate biodiversity losses caused by climate change. While this idea has been around for decades, it has recently become the subject of fierce controversy in the academic literature.

The article was written by IRIS Senior Fellow and York geography instructor Dr. Nina Hewitt and an interdisciplinary team of IRIS-affiliated researchers from biology, environmental science, business, law and social science. It takes stock of the burgeoning academic literature on this topic and identifies possible avenues toward consensus on how to address what might otherwise become an intractable ethical and policy problem.

Joern Fischer of Leuphana Universität Lüneburg in Germany, a leading scientist in the field, wrote about the article yesterday in his "Ideas for Sustainability" blog. He congratulated the article for its thorough analysis of a very complex and polarized debate. It is polarized because many scientists see assisted migration as pitting two conservation goals against each other: the preservation of a single species from extinction, versus the protection of entire ecological communities against the risks posed by introduced species, which can have impacts similar to invasive alien species.

Fischer lauded the article for focusing on the nuances and complexities of the debate rather than accepting a polarized, black-and-white view. He especially liked a figure in the article that presents the arguments for and against assisted migration and their key inter-relationships in a one-page schematic.

Professor Fischer praised the article's effort to provide a conceptual framework within which scientists and policy makers can find common ground:

"The authors state that the debate is complex, and rather than proposing a simple solution, they try to provide a framework which can help to reach case-specific solutions. Hooray …! I wish more scientists did this. ... Hewitt et al. have done a great job of giving an authoritative overview of many relevant arguments. I highly recommend their paper!"

This endorsement from one of the protagonists in the assisted migration debate is a great vindication for the hard work that went into the study, and it suggests that the article will have a constructive impact both on the scientific debate and on conservation policies and practices on the ground. Achievements like this article really help to advance IRIS's mission as a national and international leader in practical, collaborative and interdisciplinary research that influences policy and decision makers on a variety of sustainability issues.

There is one irony in this story. The research was funded by the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, one of the victims of the Canadian federal government's recent massive cuts to scientific and environmental programs. These cuts are one of many sad indications of this government's unfortunate head-in-the-sand attitude toward climate change and other ecological challenges.  CFCAS pleaded with the government, to no avail, to reconsider the cuts and devote adequate funding to weather and climate research.

Winkling out those climate change skeptics – yes, they are everywhere

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Hmmm - I arrived home after a hard week of BIOL 2010 (PLANTS) lectures and more missed deadlines, to pick up the Globe and Mail Friday edition for a nice, relaxing read, when I suddenly sat up straight at Neil Reynolds' Business section column - The mythical assertion of fossil fuel scarcity. It's all about a recent article by Professor Emeritus Peter Odell, in the European Energy Review (I haven't downloaded and read it yet, but I will).

"Wow!" I thought, "it kind of goes against everything that I have been reading about Peak Oil, for much of the last decade", so it must be important. And then, I ask myself, who is this Odell? Quickly checking him on Google Scholar, I found that my academic work is cited more than his, and he's 30 years older than I am. Then, I check him out further, and find some interesting comments in response to an article, in the same vein, that he wrote in The Guardian in 2008. Some of the quite long, coherent, as opposed to the short, incoherent,  responses say things like "Mr. Odell, I request that you get up to speed on what's happening with the world oil situation. Your misinformation is doing everyone a great disservice" and "Unfortunately, Mr. Odell is woefully unaware of the current oil situation" and "Anybody who knows anything about oil is aware that the R/P ratio is a pointless statistic. If Peter Odell is using it, he either ignorant or disingenuous" and, my favourite, "I seriously don't see how you could be a professor emeritus of international energy studies and believe the stuff you have written".

But, it gets better - Prof. Emeritus Odell is on Republican Senator J. Inhofe's notorious and hilariously debunked list of supposed expert climate change skeptics. For the debunking by Prof. A. Dessler, just go to: http://www.grist.org/article/the-inhofe-400-skeptic-of-the-day1/ and keep changing the number at the end of  the url to 3. And, while you're at it, check out the very detailed debunking of Dr. Seitz as a climate denier, which is one of Peter Sinclair's "crock of the week" videos.

A few blogs ago, I outlined what I perceived to be a failure of the Canadian media to carry out proper investigative reporting vis-a-vis Bjorn Lomborg, and, well, it just carries on, unfortunately with a columnist in my favourite Canadian newspaper. This is not the first time that Neil Reynolds has published anti-climate change columns that sort of have an an aura of balanced reporting. In the same way that academics carrying out medical research must reveal all of their sources of research funding when publishing articles, it would be helpful for members of the Canadian Press to reveal their political affiliations. Then it'd be obvious to those readers who are not prepared to dig a little deeper as to exactly where they are coming from.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Michael Enright give an after-dinner speech, and was surprised to hear him decry the appalling state of investigative journalism in Canada. (He named the New York Times as the best newspaper in the world. I started paying a lot more attention to it, and have been forced to come to the conclusion that he probably was right. For TV journalism, I would have to say, that Al-Jazeera English, is also right up there in terms of quality of in-depth reporting, with respect to covering generally ignored issues). I have now come to the sad conclusion that his assessment of the general state of Canadian journalism was also pretty much bang on.

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

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

Can blogging be sustainable?

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It's about a year since I last blogged.  When we got the new IRIS website up and running, it was great fun to learn about blogging, but it actually took a lot of time to write and fact-check serious blogs (as opposed to simply churning out drivel).  It's been a challenge to get people associated with IRIS to commit to blogging and to sustain it.  This challenge has given me insight into why social networking sites such Facebook, and the sms-driven Twitter, are so appealing.  Having said that, while you CAN post to these sites really quickly, I also think that far too many people (including members of my family and a lot of students and older people that I know) spend far too much time on these sites; there is a very addictive quality about them.

My issue with finding time for blogging, is that, not only do I have lots of "Administrative Duties" (around here, the Director is as likely to be taking out the trash as to be schmoozing with VIPs), but I also lead active field-based research projects, supervise graduate students, write papers and book, carry out peer-review for journals and governments, and serve on many external bodies - plus I have children (teenagers need as much time and attention as toddlers) and a husband who is on the road a lot.  So, my blogging about sustainability had to be sidelined.  But, no more - I have decided that I will be doing less intensive and more twitter-like blogging, that is much more frequent.  Why?  Because a large part of my job is about being a Connector in a Gladwellian, Tipping Point, sense. The more that I participate in sustainability-related conversations, the more I have come to realize that many concerned people remain hugely unaware of many important issues that relate directly to their concern about sustainability. Additionally, because IRIS is about sustainability in an academic setting, IRIS members - including myself - are also Mavens or information specialists (again, see The Tipping Point).  For example, my research on why many forests in southern Ontario are falling down and are NOT sustained forest ecosystems, is producing new information and knowledge (see photos of Rondeau Provincial Park, and the low density of trees, due to deer browsing on the twigs of saplings, resulting in long-term mortality of high woody species i.e. trees).

So - as a professor, who cannot resist giving homework - today's assigned reading is Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point - but if you don't have time, the Wikipedia page on this one is just fine.

Dawn Bazely

 

Advice for Doing Field Work

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After two days of doing various field work activities with Dr. Brian Hickey, from the St. Lawrence River Institute of Environmental Sciences, with Dr. Dawn Bazely, and with York University graduate students Sheila Colla and Jason Gibbs, a group of students wrote the following advice about field work:

 
 Collecting water samples                   Examining water samples
 When doing field work, you need to be prepared for outdoors. Everything you do is hands on, so get ready to get dirty! Remember to always be organized, on time, and ready to go. You will be collecting data and interacting with the environment. For example, you may be observing insects, determining water quality, examining plants and the stars. You may also be taking your field work into the lab to study it more. You could find yourself setting up traps, for example, to capture bats. Another thing you could be doing is learning orienteering, getting prepared and learning your directions and surroundings so that you can find your way around. Field work connects you with the environment and its creatures.
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

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