I live on a north-south street in a suburb where most streets are on a squared-off grid.  In order to drive to my favorite restaurant on the big local county road, I drive south on my road and then take a right to get to the county road.  This county road runs on a diagonal, northwest-southeast. Most of the time this doesn’t cause a perspective problem for me, except when I approach it from an east-west road…as I always do when coming from home.  For some reason, my perspective overrides my rational understanding of directionality.  It overrides my knowledge that the sun rises in a generally easterly direction and sets in a generally westerly direction depending on the time of year.

This may be based on the fact that I grew up in the flatlands. The homesteads were laid out in even quarter sections and the roads were for the most part laid out based on the homestead boundaries.  The roads are almost all either north-south or east-west, unless they are diverted to accommodate a river.  I have always had this problem and diagonals have always messed with my sense of direction.  I need a map whenever I am in a strange city or neighborhood, because I need to have street names matched up with those in the map if I have been faced with driving in an area infested with curvy roads or diagonal streets.  I lose my north/south/east/west innate sense of direction, even when the sun is out and I should know my directions based on its position in the sky.

When I visualize through my intuitive sense of direction rather than one adjusted by rational direction or matching a map to my surroundings, in my suburb, I encounter streets that are 90° “off” from where they should be.  My kids’ mother’s street is a north-south street, but to me it feels east-west.  I can’t fully orient myself in this town, and I will have to move as soon as I can back to St. Paul or to Minneapolis just to get my bearings again.

Perception, in psychology, is the manner in which we interpret the sensations we receive through from our environment. The five senses are touch, taste, sight, sound and smell.  What we do with data we get through the senses is based on our perceptions of what is and even what “should be.”  The sensation of “cold” is actually a perception; in other words our nerves send to our brains the information that a certain amount of thermal energy has made contact with our nerve endings.  The brain compares this volume of thermal energy to a standard that we use to decide, based on the situation in which this information is being processed, whether or not that amount of thermal energy translates to “hot,” “cold” or “warm.” If I was determining whether or not a cup of water is hot enough to brew tea, the standard that my brain uses for that measure is different than if I am determining if the same temperature of water is safe for taking a shower.  In one situation, the water can be hot or cold to my touch even though the temperature is constant at 150° F. Very hot for a shower; very cold for tea.

Perspective is a function of perception.  My sense of direction is based on perception of data brought in through my sensations of sight and the kinetic sense, and there is no absolute direction or sensational cue of directions.  People only know the directions based on their prior learning and interpretation, and mine happens to be faulty at times and requires direct thought for correction.  My fault in perspective is something I’m aware of, and knowing this, I can the apply rational thought to reorient myself so that I don’t drive into a ditch or someone’s house and instead drive to the proper house and make the proper turn.  Not proper in the sense of seeing my ex-wife, but proper in the sense of being reunited with my children.

What I apply in order to regain my bearings is critical thinking.

The process of using critical thinking involves several steps. These steps work formally in experimental design and analysis, studying and mastering new concepts as we learn and in making decisions that people need to make in the various aspects of our lives.  They also work informally and people process these steps often when we are not aware of them, nor even that we are following them.  Stephanie listed the steps she used in the process of critical thinking in her article “Trust and Critical Thinking in Science Reporting:  A Case Study.”  Her steps were; use the controversy, check the tools, check the controls, check the claims, untangle the logic, and to finally identify the biases.

Between checking the controls and identifying the biases there is an overlap, because the controls should be designed to correct for the biases. If the author of a study, as in the case of the report that Stephanie had analyzed, doesn’t recognize that he was in fact trying to find a reason to justify his belief that there is a measurable IQ difference in races, then he will not set a proper control against that bias.  He will be disoriented, and while it seems perfectly reasonable to him to come to the conclusion that he did, the results will still be off by ninety degrees.  Metaphorically, of course, but in defending his work, he has gone in the ditch.

This is where a layperson, or a journalist, reporting on science can muck up the analysis when reading and reporting on the results of a recent scientific finding.  If the writer doesn’t seek to find their own perspective and how it might color the way that they write on or analyze the topic, then they will either accept the conclusions as the are delineated in the abstract of the paper or seek an outside and irrelevant source of clarification that will take them away from the truths either found or obscured.

For those of our Quiche Moraine readers that have been following the controversies brought out here, at Greg Laden’s Blog and at Almost Diamonds, there will be an invaluable resource on how the layperson can balance trust in science journalism with skepticism using tools of critical thinking.  Greg and Stephanie will be joining PZ Myers, Desiree Schell and Kirsten Sanford in a panel to discuss the issue, and resources will be made available for you during and following the discussion at ScienceOnline2010. Much to my regret, I will not be there in person, but I will be following the events as well as I can from here.

Why is this so important for the lay (nonscientist) person out here in Reader Land?  Steven Newton has an excellent, if brief article in the Huffington Post on the issue.  Firstly, we should hope that the editors of Huffington Post read the article and apply their own critical thinking to the stories that they decide to publish.  Secondly, Newton makes a very important point that there are dragons out there and they are ready to consume our intellects:

From evolution to global warming to vaccines, science is under assault from denialists–those who dismiss well-tested scientific knowledge as merely one of many competing ideologies. Science denial goes beyond skeptical questioning to attack the legitimacy of science itself.

Recent foment over stolen e-mails from a British research group inspired an American creationist organization to pronounce that “a cabal of leading scientists, politicians, and media” has sought to “professionally destroy scientists who express skepticism” about climate change. The Discovery Institute usually reserves this kind of over-the-top language to attack evolution, so it was remarkable to see it branch out to climate-change denial.

Despite such misleading hyperbole, science is meritocratic. Once you achieve a minimum level of education and competence, you can participate, ask a challenging question of even the most respected scientist, or submit papers to scientific journals, where research is judged by the data and methodology. Esteemed scientists face relentless criticism. This is how science works.

Even when a scientific consensus based on evidence emerges–as it has for evolution and climate change–there is opportunity for dissent. As the great physicist Richard Feynman noted, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

Feynman was not saying that the experts are idiots. He was saying that their work is open to analysis and must be checked before being accepted to make sure they have corrected for their biases before reaching their conclusions.  They may or may not be ignorant of them, but they certainly aren’t going to be able to be credible if they hide their biases rather than deal with them.  Many good science journalists have all but abandoned HuffPo because it publishes stories by denialists and woomeisters who cloak their biases in scientific sounding jargon.  I hate to see it, because HuffPo’s readership is large, and they need offsets to this trend so that people who read the site can learn how to dismiss the crap and, at least conditionally, trust the good stuff.

Ninety degrees screws everything up when I don’t understand the bias created by a diagonal. If I were to sit at the intersection on the county road and tell you that it’s oriented from northeast to southwest, I would certainly hope that you would be able to look at my analysis and tell me it is faulty.   I would hope that you as my passenger would recognize what I have missed, and be able to correct me.  At some point, I hope that science journalists and lay bloggers learn to use the same steps that you would use to prevent me from turning the wrong direction.

CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, but it is the most important one, and most of it is put there by humans.

The focus in the global warming discussion is on fossil “carbon” in the form of CO2 gas. There are other global warming related gases, but this is the main one. We often hear people complaining that water vapor is a more important greenhouse gas, or that there are other greenhouse gases, etc. The reason that none of that is important, and that this question is nothing other than a poorly executed canard, is this: Global warming is caused by the atmospheric release of carbon previously trapped in solid or liquid form during ancient times. With that carbon trapped, the earth is a bit cooler, with the carbon in the atmosphere, the earth is a bit warmer. That is the part that matters.

While large climate changes have happened in the past, they are always bad news for the organisms living on the planet.

Have you ever heard about the famous genetic bottlenecks the human species went through? A bottleneck is when almost all the individuals of a species die off. Our recent bottlenecks were caused by climate change.

The earth has been much much warmer (and colder) in the past. In fact, than it is now. It was so warm that dinosaurs lived within the arctic circle! So, given this, why do we care about global warming?

Well, the truth is, global warming probably isn’t that important. If we put all that carbon that was at one time in the atmosphere back, and make a warmer earth, we’ll just have a warmer earth. Life will go on.

Of course, the ecology of the planet will be entirely different, and most living species will have a hard time adapting to that change. There will be a mass extinction. But I wouldn’t worry about that mass extinction as much as other mass extinctions. A mass extinction caused by a cosmic impact could actually kill off ALL life instead of just a whole bunch of species, and could have a much longer recovery time if it happens to not kill everything. But a warming-related mass extinction may not be so bad.

Many humans will die miserable deaths, but in the larger scale, that is of no great consequence.

There is one small problem…if there is enough warming and the warming is fast enough, the cyanobacteria in the ocean could face a major die-off, which in turn would cause oxygen-breathing organisms to die off. But again, lots of other organisms would survive, so life would go on. But, well, whatever.

There is natural variation in climate, but it is easy to see the long-term anthropogenic warming as something added.

Short term natural variation such as El Nino cycles can be fairly intense, and it may be difficult for an individual to understand that over medium and long time scales AGW is occuring. There is also “natural” variation in the direction your car goes as you drive between two distant points…you don’t drive in a perfectly straight line, which might take you through people’s yards and across rivers where there is no bridge, and so on. You drive on roads and there is some back and forth that happens along the way. You don’t go, “OMG, we’re varying back and forth in our exact direction! We’ll never get to where we are going!!! We can’t possibly understand or measure our direction or know or plan where we will end up!!!! OMG!!!”

Well, some people do, but most people get that there are different signals of variation in time-series phenomena and, even so, it is possible to understand longer-term trends. And with respect to climate, we do understand and there is a warming going on now.

The effects of global warming have already started to occur.

People often say that we can’t be sure if the effects of global warming will be severe, but this is one of the most offensive things people say, because it overlooks the things that have already happened, including the moose dying off in Minnesota (for a local example) and the millions of people who have died with desertification in North Africa (to provide one of the more tragic examples). The effects of global warming are not confined to the future.

A related question is about the link between global warming and severe weather events. There is a link, though the link to each kind of weather event is not clearly proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by multiple scientific studies. And never will be, because it is hard to do that and probably not necessary. The link is so impossible to avoid that it is not necessary to work out the proximate mechanisms to the level that would be.

A lot of well-meaning people claim that you can’t connect a particular hurricane or other weather event with global warming “because it does not work that way.” But those well-meaning people are wrong, exactly because it DOES work that way. Weather events are linked to the process of movement of excess tropical heat energy towards the poles and towards the outer atmosphere. With a warmer earth there will be more severe and more extreme weather events. Some specific types of weather events may not increase in magnitude, while others do. But overall, more warming = more “weather,” which will be in the form of more rain in a given rainfall, more wind-related events, and yes, even more snow under certain conditions.

Think of it this way. You can’t blame a given convenience store robbery on poverty during a period of crime rising with worsening economic conditions, but when the business association meets and 14 store owners were robbed since the last meeting (rather than the old average of, say, 1 or 2) then you can blame that phenomenon on the crime rate/poverty connection (assuming there is a connection). We can blame increased severity of weather events on global warming because it makes perfectly good scientific sense to do so.

Can AGW denialists ever be convinced that AGW is real?

I had a global warming denialist on my blog a few months back. He kept pointing out that it was just as warm in Minnesota at one point in the past as it is now, so there is no global warming. I explained that he was cherry picking and misinterpreting the data. He fought back until I posted a couple of items that fully and indubitably proved that he was in fact being intellectually dishonest. He went away and has not been back.

I don’t expect these dyed-in-the-wool cranks to change their minds, but it is appropriate that those of us who do have bits and pieces of the internet in our charge keep the dialog honest and progressive. The denialists are putting up offensive, inaccurate, one-liner billboards. We are burning the billboards down with science. It is worthwhile work, important work, and it can even be fun on occasion.

There are times when it is helpful to understand why facts are not a function of one’s place on the political spectrum.  Helpful enough that I feel it counts as customer service.

There are two very dangerous forms of denialism that are gaining strength over the facts because of the absolute power of sound-bite propaganda to destroy the work of fact-based science communication.  I have been doing a bad thing in just trying to tell people where to go for information, I guess, when all they want to hear is affirmation that leaked e-mails and a severe cold spell disprove the facts of anthropogenic global warming.  I have been doing a bad thing by just trying to tell people where to go for real information on vaccinations.  They respond by telling me, as one woman did yesterday, “I guess we are just on the opposite sides of the political spectrum.”

I do need to be careful on how I approach the issue because when I am talking to a customer I am “Big Corporate” with an operator number and a first name.  All that the customer knows about me is that I have a friendly voice and that I can help them resolve a business-related issue. They don’t know my background in studying experimental design or how I know that there are ways to detect bullshit in bad science that nearly anyone can learn.  They don’t know I also understand that the economic cost of global warming denialism is as high as the environmental cost, and that the delays in trying to resolve it will further weaken our economy.

I deal with small business customers.  Our customer service protocol involves building “rapport” or making a connection with the customer so that they associate my employer with friendly customer service to build loyalty to a company whose fees are in some cases higher than those of our competitors.  (Don’t get me started on those sorts of complaints from people with high-end accounts yelling at me for a $3 photocopy fee.)  We need them to add on to their relationship with us by adding services, and one way to do that is to get them to feel comfortable that they are working with nice people.

We ask them how their business is doing, and I cringe to ask some people because I can see it is not doing well.  When I ask them, I do so in a sympathetic voice and prepare for an onslaught of sob story.  I truly sympathize with their plight, but I am dismayed at the level of “blaming” they toss at me.  The government is to blame for everything for some people.  Taxes and Regulations Are Destroying the Small Business Economy in America.  For far too many, there is conservative self-victimization going on, and I hear the name Obama used as a pejorative explanation for why business sucks.

It bugs me.  I had a chiropractor tell me business is really good, but he will probably go out of business if the socialists in Congress get their health bill passed.¹  I had an oil drill maintenance company owner tell me business is good, but if the government doesn’t start letting businesses drill he will be out of work.  I had a naturopath tell me business is good, but the FDA will ruin it for her if they start regulating her remedies.  I had a small church tell me business was dropping off because people are leaving for MegaChurches.  Oh, wait, they aren’t the government.

I have construction people telling me they can’t get work bidding on schools because they have to bid too low to get a job, and they can’t afford to take the work because of it.  I have real estate agents who are stuck because the market is making it hard to resell anything because their customers can’t afford to sell for the market price.  It’s the economy that the Democrats ruined, is what it is.

There’s a lot of blaming, and not much taking responsibility and adapting.  That’s what people need to do, rather than wait for Sarah Palin to come along and destroy the damage that Barack Obama is doing.  The world is changing, and livery stable owners need to start looking at making a go at the auto dealership business.

But no.  They don’t think they should need to adapt to a changing economy.  They want things the way they were when they were successful in the old days, when things were booming and the work and money fell at their door.

I try to make rapport with them and continue to provide a soothing voice and help them with their business-related problem, but occasionally I slip up and try to help them understand further what the consequences of denialism will be.  The problem is that they just don’t expect it from a customer service representative and are pretty sure they are just going to have a sympathetic ear for whatever they say.  When I try to gently correct them, they dismiss me or engage me with the propagandistic bullshit that is winning over explanation.

I talked to a woman yesterday, who told me how cold it is in Austin, Texas.  ”Good thing we got global warming!”  So I started to explain that the “global” in “global warming” means “not local” and reflects larger trends which seem small, but considered as a measure of additional energy in the atmosphere, cause very large effects. She cut me off and said that she believes that the Earth’s temperature always goes in cycles and that this is just another cycle.  I tried to explain to her that there are resources she can use if she wants to get more information, but again she cut me off and said, “Well, I guess we are just on opposite ends of the political spectrum.”

I dropped that particular subject and went on to the business matter at hand. I was frustrated to be dealing with yet another person who confuses science with political persuasion.  The science of global warming is settled, and the increasing level of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is a major contributing factor.  That’s a fact, but denial of that fact has become a tenet of conservative thought.  In my experience, small business owners tend to be politically conservative and where they once saw innovation opportunities, now continue to cling to their ways even while they see their business tanking.

What I want to tell them is to take this opportunity to get into the nascent renewable energy fields.  What I want to tell them is to shake their ideas that Al Gore invented global warming so that he cold be more powerful and better-liked by the country that gave him an electoral majority in 2000.  What I want to tell them is that if painting contractors are not getting bids that can support them, it is time to learn how to apply materials that capture sunlight.  What I want to tell them is that there is money to be made.  Chiropractors I want to tell to find an honest line of work, and churches I want to tell to start looking at the possibility of converting their buildings to museums.

I can’t tell my customers this, of course, because I like my job.  My frustration builds because we are in a social setting that prevents me from having a conversation about an important issue.  I avoid the Big Three topics (religion, sex and politics) at work as much as possible.  I understand the reason that this is necessary and avoid it for the purposes of keeping the level of customer service professional. There are times, however, when I just want to yell at these people for avoiding the future and contributing to the dissemination of invalid information.  I want to yell at the naturopath who tells me that vaccination is dangerous and that she is selling cures that help people avoid sickness.  I want to tell them to stop it, to wake up and prepare for a new economy rather than allow themselves to lose out by hanging on to an old economy.

Denialism and customer service are two difficult bedfellows, but this is where I lay.

1. These are representative but not necessarily actual scenarios I’ve dealt with–as an additional service to my customers.