Ethos or Logos?

Last week, Bjorn Lomborg wrote an opinion piece in the WSJ preemptively attacking the climate policies that he speculates Obama will endorse. I don't usually read this kind of thing, but journalists at Climate Science Watch asked what I thought about it since they didn't believe it.  Reading the article, I was surprised the WSJ had published it -- not because the citations were not 100% correct, but because the overall logic of the essay was flawed in obvious ways (regardless of your political stance). This is the kind of thing a copy-editor should have picked up on.  My reply to the CSW mainly focused on this central logical flaw.

Interestingly, when CSW posted its reply to BL (here), which drew on many scientific experts, it was focused entirely on discrediting individual statements that BL had made

Displaying his trademark doublethink, Bjorn Lomborg’s latest op-ed in the Wall Street Journal switches between recognizing the risks of climate change and rejecting the need for meaningful action in the near term. Lomborg incorporates misleading and discredited scientific information to justify dangerous delays in climate action. 

rather than pointing out that the giant "if-then" statement at the core of the article's architecture would obviously return an error if it were fed into any computer capable of boolean logic.

This struck me because the dialogue (in both directions) was focused on discrediting one's opponent, by demonstrating they don't understand science (BL does this to Obama, and CSW does this to BL), rather than finding a logical solution to the problem (or simply having a logical discussion about it).  This seemed unfortunate, since in this particular case, the physical science is pretty irrelevant to the actual policy discussion. The entire discussion should be focused on the economics. I blame BL for inappropriately bringing the science into the discussion, but I wish CSW had pointed out that that was the error, since I think doing so (here and elsewhere) would get us back on track to meaningful discussion rather than escalating the scientific mudslinging.

My fully reply to the CSW is below the fold (I had been in referee-mode at the time, which is probably evident).

Declining public interest in the drought

David Lobell mentioned that there seemed to be less news coverage of the drought, so I checked Google Trends and David was right. Looking just the USA, interest in the drought peaked about a week ago:

(news report volume looks similar, but Google doesn't give me the raw data). Is interest/news falling because the nation's corn crop has recovered? Probably not.  But a week ago, something else took over the airwaves and peoples' attention:

Is this spurious? It's possible, but this general pattern is well documented. In a 2007 article, David Strömberg linked the quantity of US disaster relief (a proxy for public interest) to "whether the disaster occurs at the same time as other newsworthy events, such as the Olympic Games, which are obviously unrelated to need."  He concludes "that the only plausible explanation of this is that relief decisions are driven by news coverage of disasters and that the other newsworthy material crowds out this news coverage." So it isn't crazy to think that the London Games might soak up some of the public interest that would otherwise go towards our own drought.

In a closely related 2011 paper, Matthew Kahn and Matthew Kotchen showed that "an increase in a state's unemployment rate decreases Google searches for "global warming" and increases searches for "unemployment."" 

Yet, while it seems unlucky for folks in the midwest to get hit by this drought during the Olympics, they are "lucky enough" to get hit just before the presidential race. In their 2007 paper, Thomas Garrett and Russell Sobel "find that presidential and congressional influences affect the rate of disaster declaration and the allocation of FEMA disaster expenditures across states. States politically important to the president have a higher rate of disaster declaration by the president... Election year impacts are also found. Our models predict that nearly half of all disaster relief is motivated politically rather than by need. The findings reject a purely altruistic model of FEMA assistance and question the relative effectiveness of government versus private disaster relief."

(cross posted on G-FEED)