MoJo Author Feeds: Chris Mooney | Mother Jones

Are Conservatives More Likely Than Liberals to Avoid Cognitive Dissonance?

Chris Mooney — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:20:31 +0000

Ever since Stanford psychologist Leon Festinger's pioneering work on doomsday cults in the 1950s, the concept of cognitive dissonance has been well established in psychology and even, to some extent, embedded in public consciousness. Basically, when the mind is faced with an idea that is threatening to one's identity or sense of self—an idea that induces unpleasant dissonance—one tends to try to either avoid the thought or, perhaps, reinterpret it into something unthreatening or positive. Thus, in Festinger's landmark work, a doomsday cult interpreted the failure of the world to end on the precise day they had predicted as evidence that their beliefs were right in the first place!

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But do liberals and conservatives differ in their tendency to avoid cognitive dissonance? Suggestive evidence from past research suggests they might. For instance, a study of voters in the 2000 election by Stanford public opinion specialist Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues found that although Republicans and conservatives were more interested in learning information about George W. Bush than about Al Gore, Democratic and liberal voters had no such political preference.

In a recent study in PLOS One, an online academic journal, the psychologist Jay Van Bavel and his colleagues at New York University set out to explicitly test whether conservatives are more likely than liberals to avoid the unsettling sensation of cognitive dissonance. For the experiment, they asked George W. Bush and Barack Obama supporters to write an essay supporting the president whom they had already said they opposed. It was a test, as the study's instructions instructions put it, of "the ability to craft logical arguments arguing positions you may not personally endorse."

Importantly, the study sometimes presented writing the essay as a choice—which is more likely to arouse dissonance—and other times presented it as an assignment. As a control, the participants were put through the same routine by being asked to write essays on a nonpolitical issue: How they felt about Macs vs. PCs.

Sure enough, the results yielded a significant partisan difference in the willingness to write the essay—but only when the essay was political (not about Macs vs. PCs) and only when writing it was presented a choice, not an assignment. In that context, the results were rather stunning: Not a single Bush supporter was willing to write a pro-Obama essay. That's 0 out of 28 Bush supporters overall. Obama supporters didn't like writing pro Bush essays much either, but they were a lot more willing in general: 20 out of 71 did so, or 28 percent overall. (The study sample, obtained through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, contained more liberals than conservatives.)

In fact, some conservatives sounded rather miffed after taking the study, leaving comments like: "Not for all the tea in China would I write that." In contrast, note the study authors, some liberals seemed to revel in the assignment. "This was fun!" as one put it.

The same finding arose—but less sharply—in a second study, when the presidents involved were Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, rather than Bush and Obama. Here, 13 out of 58 Clinton supporters—or 22 percent—wrote essays supporting Reagan, whereas just 3 out of 30—or 10 percent—of Reagan fans bothered to extoll Clinton. (The authors hypothesized that the response might have been different in this case because both former presidents are now quite well regarded, their reputations much more insulated from the partisanship of the current political moment.)

Like responsible scientists, the study authors noted factors other than the obvious one that could have contributed to their results—e.g., maybe liberals just enjoy the opportunity to be devil's advocates more than conservatives do. Or maybe it's really true (as much other research suggests) that the left-right divide reflects a deeper divide in psychology.

Liberals and conservatives did look almost identical when they were required to write the dissonance-inducing essay, rather than having a choice about the matter. When people are required to think positively about their political foes, they will, says NYU's Van Bavel. It isn't impossible, then—just something that happens far too rarely.

Your Hormones Tell You How to Vote

Chris Mooney — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:05:05 +0000

Today we're witnessing an explosion of research on the biological factors that may underlie our political views. This new body of science is, slowly but surely, upending the old "I vote Democrat because Mom and Dad did" view of where our ideologies come from, and substituting an explanation based on genes, personalities, and emotions.

But to draw a seamless connection between a person's genes and his or her political orientation poses a formidable scientific challenge. What's more, there's a crucial biological step that, thus far, has been largely missing. Genes, after all, are simply the code or template that our cells use to make proteins. So what are those proteins doing in the body to create political leanings?

Today's political psychologists and biologists are honing in on a possible answer: Genetic differences may influence the body's production of hormones (such as testosterone) and neurotransmitters (such as dopamine). These chemical messengers flow through the bloodstream and in between nerve cells, shaping our patterns of attention, response, emotions, and much else. Such patterns, the thinking goes, then come together to create our values and personalities; and these, along with input from our surroundings, impel our political ideologies and behaviors.

"The variation between people in hormone levels is just tremendous, and I don't think we really appreciate that," explains John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who has been a pioneer in studying the biology of ideology.

This is a very new field, but already researchers have homed in on some hormones and neurotransmitters that may be involved in politics:

Cortisol: This stress hormone may also influence us politically, according to recent research by Hibbing and his collaborators. "You can see people's cortisol levels go up dramatically when you stress them out," Hibbing says—for instance, by requiring them to prepare to give a speech that is going to be videotaped. "We are finding there are relationships between cortisol and not voting. Those people who don't vote are the people who tend to have fairly high cortisol levels. Because politics is pretty stressful."

Testosterone. "There is genetic variance in how much testosterone someone has at birth, and there are certain things that can enhance or diminish that," explains Brown University political scientist Rose McDermott, a prominent researcher on the science of ideology who authored a recent book chapter on hormones and politics. "One of those things that enhance that is muscle mass—if you build muscle mass, you enhance" your testosterone levels.

What might this have to do with politics? While direct research linking testosterone to ideology is lacking, researchers have recently published data tying muscle mass to political preferences. One study shows that rich men with large biceps are more opposed to wealth redistribution than rich men with small biceps. Another study finds that weightlifting ability correlates with support for, er, a more muscular foreign policy. Plus, get this: Men with wider faces (an indicator of testosterone levels) have been found to be more willing to outwardly express prejudicial beliefs than their thin-faced counterparts.

Oxytocin: Often dubbed the "love hormone" because of its role in forging ties between lovers (and parents and children), oxytocin may also have a role in politics. Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist at Claremont Graduate University, describes research in which a nasal spray containing oxytocin made research subjects more generous in sharing money with one another. But before you jump to the conclusion that oxytocin simply fuels generosity, consider another study, in which the hormone seemed to promote cooperation with your in-group or tribe, but quite the opposite with an outside group or tribe that threatens you. Clearly there are strong political implications here—and not entirely cuddly ones.

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Dopamine: This neurotransmitter shapes our need for pleasure, rewards, and novel sensations. Indeed, "sensation seeking" has been associated with particular dopamine receptors in the brain whose numbers vary, for genetic reasons, from individual to individual. A particular variant of the gene that codes for these receptors has, in turn, been associated with political liberalism; one study found that people who had the key gene variant in question were more likely to be political liberals.

None of which is to say that researchers can definitively say how any of the four chemicals discussed here—cortisol, testosterone, oxytocin, and dopamine—may affect us politically. Nor are they the only candidate hormones or neurotransmitters that may do so. "I think it would be a mistake to kind of lead people to believe that in the near future this is going to be tied up with a ribbon," says Hibbing.

For Hibbing that's good news, because studying political hormones could help lay to rest the concern that the new biology-of-politics research is focused on simplistic genetic explanations for why we think as we do. "It moves us a little bit away from the nature-nurture debate, because clearly, the nature of your endocrine system and how it's released, it's influenced by genetics, but also by your experiences in your early life," he says. Our hormones pulse and cascade, in part, in response to what happens to us—and what has happened to us. And over time, a pattern of response can be laid down. Nobody disputes that—but what scientists are now saying is that the pattern itself may influence our political leanings.

TV Weathermen and Climate Scientists Kiss and Make Up

Chris Mooney — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:45:08 +0000

Weather forecasters and climate scientists aren't exactly known for being the best of buds. Several surveys have shown that among members of the American Meteorological Society—and especially among professional TV forecasters—there’s a substantial degree of global warming skepticism. Indeed, more than half of AMS members perceive conflict within the organization over the issue of climate change. Meanwhile, members of the climate science community are sometimes accused of speaking down to their weather geek brethren.

Given this tense history, what happened at the most recent Climate Desk Live event, featuring Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis and Stu Ostro, senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel, might be considered fairly remarkable.

"Jennifer's coming at it from a different direction than I am," said Ostro after he and Francis delivered complementary analyses of how global warming is upending our weather. "But what's interesting is that we have converged on a very similar spot—I as a day-to-day weather forecaster, and Jennifer, who has a background in meteorology but who's in more of a climate science research area."

Ostro believes that climate change is increasing the atmosphere's overall thickness and thereby forcing weather patterns to stay in place for longer—with sometimes devastating results. Francis, meanwhile, argues that the dramatic warming of the Arctic is, in turn, slowing down the hemisphere-sized loopings of the jet stream—with very similar consequences.

And there are other signs that relations between climate scientists and weather forecasters are improving—signs that go considerably beyond the scientific mutual admiration society that is Francis and Ostro. "I think for the mainstream broadcasters, who may have been sort of agnostic, it's getting harder and harder, the evidence is becoming a little bit stronger with each passing day, and certainly as the years go by," says Bob Ryan, a meteorologist for over 30 years with NBC and ABC affiliates in the DC area, and a former president of the American Meteorological Society.

Indeed, the past several years have seen a growing number of forecast meteorologists speaking out about climate change. There's the Weather Channel's Ostro, who attests that "something ain't right with the weather." There's Ryan, who produced a six-part series on global warming at WRC-TV in 2009.

There's Paul Douglas, the Minneapolis/St. Paul area forecaster—and a Republican—who last year drew massive attention after he proclaimed that "acknowledging climate science doesn't make you a liberal." There's Jim Gandy, chief meteorologist at South Carolina's CBS affiliate, WLTX-TV, who just won the American Meteorological Society's "Excellence in Science Reporting" award for segments on climate change.

But why is this rapprochement happening now? In significant part, it's because of increasingly wacky weather itself±from 2012's dramatically warm winter to, just this week, extreme floods in Europe that were recently called "unprecedented since the Middle Ages." "Meteorologists are trained to look at the atmosphere, and generally are pretty intelligent. And anybody with that sort of training, watching the atmosphere, is going to notice that there are new patterns emerging," explains Jeff Masters, cofounder of Weather Underground and a leading commenter on climate change and weather.

The history of meteorology is, in one sense, a history of divides between scientists who approached the very act of research in a different ways. "Meteorology has often been an apple of contention, as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere induced a sympathetic effect on the minds of those who attempted to study them," wrote the Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry in 1858. Henry was referring to the mid-19th century "American Storm Controversy," in which two pioneering meteorologists, William Redfield and James Espy, engaged in a vitriolic battle over the nature of storms. Redfield was an empiricist, a data gatherer, who collected large numbers of observations on storms. Espy, in contrast, had a theory rooted in fundamental physics and the behavior of moisture and gases in the atmosphere.

It's a striking parallel to the modern rift between forecast meteorologists, who focus on large numbers of daily weather observations and analyze them for very practical reasons (like keeping people safe), and climate scientists, who are often trying to understand, based on equations and first principles, how the system works.

"Climate scientists look at things differently than meteorologists do," explains South Carolina's Gandy. "The fundamental difference is that we don't really have to think too much about the physics of infrared radiation"—the heat radiation that is being trapped at the level of the Earth's atmosphere by carbon dioxide. Or as the pioneering Swedish meteorologist Tor Bergeron put it in 1959: "[This] seems to be a rule in our science: progress is impeded by want of meteorological knowledge on the part of the theoreticians and by a too poor mathematical training of weather-men."

Stu Ostro fits the empiricist mold to a T. His documentation of the wild weather that he's been seeing takes the form of a 1,072-slide (and growing) PowerPoint—the work of a data gatherer through and through. Jennifer Francis, in contrast, writes in a recent scientific paper of how Rossby wave theory helps to explain the hypothesized effect of greater Arctic warming on weather in the mid-latitudes. Her paper has plenty of data too—but much more in service of an overarching theoretical account of what the atmosphere is doing.

But methodological rifts can also heal, once theory and data line up and naturally push empiricists and theoreticians back together. "What's happening is that the theorists saw this coming ahead of time, but the data wasn't supporting it," explains Jeff Masters. "Now that we're seeing the impacts, the climate is changing before our eyes, the empiricists are recognizing this and saying, 'The theorists were right.'"

How's this for evidence: In two weeks in Nashville, the American Meteorological Society and Climate Central will be offering a short course on climate science for forecast meteorologists, taught by leading climate scientists. The room is oversold—there's already a waiting list.

Conspiracy Theorists Are More Likely to Doubt Climate Science

Chris Mooney — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 10:00:08 +0000

In recent years, a persuasive theory of how and why people deny science and reality has emerged. It's called "motivated reasoning"—and was described at length in Mother Jones (by me) back in 2011. Here's the gist: People's emotional investments in their ideas, identities, and worldviews bias their initial reading of evidence, and do so on a level prior to conscious thought. Then, the mind organizes arguments in favor of one's beliefs—or, against attacks on one's beliefs—based on the same emotional connections. And so you proceed to argue your case—but really you're rationalizing, not reasoning objectively.

At the same time, though, other phenomena are also often invoked to explain the rejection of science on issues like climate change, evolution, and vaccinations—phenomena that may (or may not) be fully separable from motivated reasoning. One of the most prominent of these: conspiracy theorizing.

Psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky, who studies conspiracy theorists

So what's the relationship between the two? In my recent Point of Inquiry podcast interview (excerpted below) with University of Bristol psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky, it became clear that motivated reasoning and conspiracy mongering are at least in part separable, and worth keeping apart in your mind. To show as much, let's use the issue global warming as an example.

In a recent study of climate blog readers, Lewandowksy and his colleagues found that the strongest predictor of being a climate change denier is having a libertarian, free-market world view. Or as Lewandowsky put it in our interview, "The overwhelming factor that determined whether or not people rejected climate science is their worldview or their ideology." This naturally lends support to the "motivated reasoning" theory—a conservative view about the efficiency of markets impels rejection of climate science because if climate science were true, markets would very clearly have failed in an very important instance.

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But separately, the same study also found a second factor that was a weaker, but still real, predictor of climate change denial—and also of the denial of other scientific findings such as the proven link between HIV and AIDS. And that factor was conspiracy theorizing. Thus, people who think, say, that the Moon landings were staged by Hollywood, or that Lee Harvey Oswald had help, are also more likely to be climate deniers and HIV-AIDS deniers.

"Clearly, for a number of people…conspiratorial thinking determines their rejection of science," explained Lewandowsky in our interview.

Indeed, there are distinct personality or dispositional factors that have been associated with a tendency towards conspiratorial thinking—including paranoia and a sense of disgruntlement, or being unhappy with how society is treating you. Furthermore, conspiratorial beliefs tend cluster together. "If a person believes in one conspiracy theory, they're likely to believe in others as well," explained Lewandowsky on the podcast. "There's a statistical association. So people who think that MI5 killed Princess Diana, they probably also think that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act by himself when he killed JFK."

This makes conspiracy theorizing a kind of "cognitive style," one clearly associated with science denial—but not as clearly moored to ideology.

For an excerpt of the relevant part of our interview, listen below (for the full show click here):

One Meteorologist's Come-to-Jesus Moment on Climate Change

Chris Mooney — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 10:27:01 +0000

Ever since he was a kid, Stu Ostro has been, in his own words, "obsessed with the weather." One day when he was around 11, he recalls, a lighting strike hit the house across the street in Somerville, New Jersey, while he and his brother watched from their porch—sending fire trucks scrambling, and the French fries that Ostro was eating "went flying." Back then, Ostro's weather fascination manifested as a "phobia" of thunder and lightning; nowadays, as a senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel and head of its team of tornado and hurricane specialists, his obsession takes a rather different form. Try perusing his 1,072-slide-long and ever-growing PowerPoint on extreme and unusual weather phenomena—and how they may relate to climate change—and you'll get some sense of it.

Ostro will speak at this Thursday's Climate Desk Live on "The Alarming Science Behind Climate Change's Increasingly Wild Weather" alongside Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis, whose work on how the warming of the Arctic is driving wacky weather complements his own theorizing. But Ostro didn't always fit this billing, because he didn't always buy into fears about global warming. As he puts it, he used to be a "vehement skeptic…not only about a human role in global warming, but also the idea that there was anything unusual about any weather we had been seeing."

Indeed, circa 1999 Ostro could be found in USA Weekend expressing uncertainty as to "whether humans are contributing to climate change or not." In this, Ostro channeled the views of many of his fellow TV weather forecasters, who have long nourished a skeptical streak, as a group, towards the notion of human-caused climate change.

"A lot of them are still where I was at," Ostro explains.

Weather Channel meteorologist Stu Ostro Image courtesy of Stu Ostro

So what changed? Ostro's conversion was gradual, but the clincher was the stupefying hurricane season of 2005. Remember when forecasters ran out of letters of alphabet to name storms—Katrina, Rita, Wilma—and ultimately had to resort instead to the Greek alphabet (Epsilon, Zeta)? By the end of the next year, Ostro had decided, as he put it in an email, that he could "no longer accept the mantra of 'individual weather events can't be connected to global warming.'" Rather, he now views climate and weather as intricately connected—you change the one, you inevitably change the other. Or as he puts it in his mega PowerPoint presentation: "Climate is a book, weather is chapters and pages."

As an overworked forecaster in 2005, Ostro was noticing much more than the dizzying number of storms. It was the overarching atmospheric patterns conducive to storm formation that really caught his attention—and that led him to conclude that "something ain't right with the weather."

More specifically, Ostro began noticing a pattern of what's called increasing atmospheric thickness. In other words, the vertical distance between the Earth's surface and various higher levels of the atmosphere (identified by their atmospheric pressure) was growing. To explain this, Ostro uses the helpful analogy of baking a loaf of bread. "You put dough in the oven, it rises," he says. "Same thing in the atmosphere." With increasing heat, the atmospheric ridges of high pressure (regions in which air is falling, rather than rising) were higher, taller, on average. "The frequency of these really strong ridges of high pressure aloft, these anomalous high pressures aloft are increasing," Ostro explains—with profound consequences.

Strong high pressure ridges are tough to alter. They're persistent, and so is the weather that accompanies them. It could be a long heat wave; or it could be rain or snow for days on end. "The crazy snow in China, the cold in parts of Europe and Asia this winter, and extreme flooding, and heat waves, it's driving all of that," Ostro says. The outcomes are variable—but the extremes are often powerful enough to have dramatic consequences in terms of human lives and also economic losses.

Ostro says he has voted for Democrats, Republicans, and libertarians. But his neutral stance on politics hasn't kept the trolls away. Recently one commenter wrote, "Stu, how does it feel to have your name permanently attached to the biggest media weather hoax in the history of mankind?" One conservative blogger, meanwhile, dubbed him "Mr. Ostroass" and described his "charming ability to repeat Leftist government talking points while miring in his own idiocy." There were even "a couple of comments which I intercepted before they made it to the site that were threatening," Ostro notes. That hasn't stopped him: His PowerPoint documenting eerie weather extremes, ranging from an unheard-of Brazilian hurricane to seasonally odd tornadoes, just gets longer and longer.

So why don't more of Ostro's fellow weathermen follow the evidence from the atmosphere, and from the weather maps that they look at every day—just as he has done? "As meteorologists," Ostro explains, "we are used to always seeing extremes in weather, and we know there have been extremes for as long as there's been weather. So it might be a little extra hard to convince us that anything out of the ordinary is going on."

As Ostro adds, it doesn't help that on occasion, some climate scientists can be a tad condescending towards meteorologists—who apply a sophisticated tradecraft in their work, but aren't usually known as great physicists or atmospheric theorists. Not all have advanced scientific degrees. Some were originally trained as journalists.

But the wilder weather gets, the harder it is to ignore—most of all for those who analyze it daily. So perhaps some inroads are slowly being made among television meteorologists—nearly two-thirds of which, according to a 2010 study, erroneously think global warming is mostly "natural," not human caused. Ostro himself still remains cautious—he isn't ready to connect the past few weeks' tornado disasters to global warming, and he also questions the early forecasts of a bad 2013 hurricane season. But nevertheless, he knows that, because of climate change, all weather is changing—because all weather now occurs in a different atmosphere.

"The word that I use over and over in every talk," Ostro says, "is 'context.'"

WATCH: What Does 400 ppm Mean? Talking with Climate Scientist Michael Mann

Chris Mooney — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:00:13 +0000

Last week in Washington, DC, leading climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania sat down with Climate Desk Live to talk about the significance of an planetary milestone—we've reached 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As Mann explained, humans are altering the content of the atmosphere at an alarming rate—one perhaps never seen before in the history of Earth itself.

The Most Controversial Chart in History, Explained

Chris Mooney — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:00:08 +0000

Back in 1998, a little-known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet's past temperatures going back half a millennium before the era of thermometers—thereby showing just how out of whack recent warming has been. The finding: Recent Northern Hemisphere temperatures had been "warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400." The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick: After a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the "shaft"), it showed a sharp mercury upswing during the last century or so ("the blade").

The report moved quickly through climate science circles. Mann and a colleague soon lengthened the shaft of the hockey stick back to the year 1000 AD—and then, in 2001, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prominently featured the hockey stick in its Third Assessment Report. Based on this evidence, the IPCC proclaimed that "the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years."

And then all hell broke loose.

IPCC Third Assessment Report / Wikipedia

Mann tells the full story of the hockey stick—and the myriad unsuccessful attacks on it—in his 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines; Mann will appear at a Climate Desk Live event on May 15 to discuss this saga. But to summarize a very complex history of scientific and political skirmishes in a few paragraphs:

The hockey stick was repeatedly attacked, and so was Mann himself. Congress got involved, with demands for Mann's data and other information, including a computer code used in his research. Then the National Academy of Sciences weighed in in 2006, vindicating the hockey stick as good science and noting:

The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world.

It didn't change the minds of the deniers, though—and soon Mann and his colleagues were drawn into the 2009 "Climategate" pseudo-scandal, which purported to reveal internal emails that (among other things) seemingly undermined the hockey stick. Only, they didn't.

In the meantime, those wacky scientists kept doing what they do best—finding out what's true. As Mann relates, over the years other researchers were able to test his work using "more extensive data sets, and more sophisticated methods. And the bottom line conclusion doesn't change." Thus the single hockey stick gradually became what Mann calls a "hockey team." "If you look at all the different groups, there are literally about two dozen" hockey sticks now, he says.

Mother Jones' Jaeah Lee traced the strange evolution of the hockey stick story in this video:

Indeed, two just-published studies support the hockey stick more powerfully than ever. One, just out in Nature Geoscience, featuring more than 80 authors, showed with extensive global data on past temperatures that the hockey stick's shaft seems to extend back reliably for at least 1,400 years. Recently in Science, meanwhile, Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University and his colleagues extended the original hockey stick shaft back 11,000 years. "There's now at least tentative evidence that the warming is unprecedented over the entire period of the Holocene, the entire period since the last ice age," says Mann.

So what does it all mean? Well, here's the millennial scale irony: Climate deniers threw everything they had at the hockey stick. They focused immense resources on what they thought was the Achilles' heel of global warming research—and even then, they couldn't hobble it. (Though they certainly sowed plenty of doubt in the mind of the public.)

What's more, even if they'd succeeded, in a scientific sense it wouldn't have even mattered.

"Climate deniers like to make it seem like the entire weight of evidence for climate change rests on the hockey stick," explains Mann. "And that's not the case. We could get rid of all these reconstructions, and we could still know that climate change is a threat, and that we're causing it." The basic case for global warming caused by humans rests on basic physics—and basic thermometer readings from around the globe. The hockey stick, in contrast, is the result of a field of research called paleoclimatology (the study of past climates) that, while fascinating, only provides one thread of evidence among many for what we're doing to the planet.

Center for American Progress

Meanwhile, the hockey stick's blade doesn't just stop rising of its own accord. It's just going to go up, and up, and up, as the image above, combining the Marcott hockey stick with projections of where temperatures are headed by 2100, plainly shows.

When he shows that graph to audiences, says Mann, "I often hear an audible gasp." In this sense, the hockey stick does indeed matter—for it dramatizes just how much human irresponsibility, in a relatively short period of time, can devastate the only home we have.

WATCH: A Conversation With Climate Scientist Michael Mann

Chris Mooney — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:03:52 +0000

climatenexus on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

One of the chief scientists behind the famous "hockey stick" graph, Michael Mann is among the most influential climate researchers in the United States.

He's also, perhaps, the most regularly attacked.

It started with swipes at the hockey stick—the graph seemed to show global warming so unequivocally that skeptics made it their number one target. The furor became even more intense when some of Mann's emails were exposed in the "ClimateGate" pseudo-scandal. Now, Mann receives regular threats and has found his personal emails pursued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

And all of this has only made Michael Mann more outspoken.

At the next Climate Desk Live event, Mann and host Chris Mooney will discuss new research that reaffirms the validity of the hockey stick. They'll also talk about public opinion on climate change—and why Mann believes it's changing.

Please join us:

Wednesday, May 15, 2013, 6:30 p.m. at the University of California Washington Center, 1608 Rhode Island Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036. To attend, please RSVP to cdl@climatedesk.org

In Boston, Was Lockdown the Wrong Approach?

Chris Mooney — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:00:07 +0000

The late Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that terrorists thrive off of the "oxygen of publicity." It's impossible to dispute that the Boston bombings produced just that, which raises a rather uncomfortable question. Are we sure that we responded to those horrific events in the best way?

For my Point of Inquiry podcast, I recently spoke with a top terrorism expert—Scott Atran of John Jay University and the University of Michigan—about the overall lessons that we can take away from the Boston bombings. Atran, who has personally interviewed a number of violent extremists, such as the plotters of the 2002 Bali bombing, stated bluntly that mass-media attention and mega-scale law enforcement mobilizations, of the sort that we just witnessed, "help terrorists terrorize." As he put it:

Public transportation was stopped, a no-fly zone was proclaimed, people told to stay indoors, schools and universities closed, hundreds of FBI agents pulled from really other pressing investigations…10,000 law enforcement officials, other state and city agents, heavy weapons, armored vehicles, helicopters, planes, all close to martial law—with the tools of the security state mobilized to track down a couple of young immigrants, with low tech explosives and small arms, who failed to reconcile their problems of identity and so became amateur terrorists.

Scott Atran Photo courtesy of the University of Michigan

On the one hand, we should probably be relieved that our would-be attackers are mostly amateurs; their attempts are ultimately less threatening than coordinated attacks. Those who opt to carry out terror attacks, Atran's research shows, tend to be "disaffected young men from diaspora immigrant communities." They're usually in "transitional stages" of their lives—late teens, early 20s—and often self-radicalize by forming small, insular groups with a small number of friends or family. "The best predictor of whether they'll actually join up is who their friends are," Atran notes.

But it remains the case that for the foreseeable future, there will continue to be a small number of people who want to attack the United States, and to gain mass-media attention for doing so. Thus the right approach, in Atran's view, is to resist the temptation to feed the beast through the media. In this, Atran is in agreement with the celebrated Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, author of the book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, who similarly argues that our fear reactions make terrorists more powerful than they otherwise would be.

So what should we do? Atran suggests that journalists practice restraint, just as Edward R. Murrow did when he first learned of Pearl Harbor but didn't rush to air the news. Here's an extended cut of our provocative conversation, where we discuss how our media and public reactions might fan the flames of terrorism—for the full-length interview, click here.

WATCH: The Alarming Science Behind Climate Change’s Increasingly Wild Weather

Chris Mooney — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:27:36 +0000

Watch live streaming video from climatenexus at livestream.com

Join us for a joint Climate Desk Live and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) event moderated by Chris Mooney discussing the alarming science behind climate change's increasingly wild weather featuring senior Weather Channel meteorologist Stu Ostro and top climate researcher Jennifer Francis.

Date and Time: Thursday, June 6, 2013, 4:30 p.m.
Location: WWF Building, 1250 24th St., NW, Washington, DC 20037.
To attend, please RSVP here.

Stu Ostro is a senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel, and was a longtime climate change skeptic—until the devastating 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, when he started documenting hundreds of cases of extreme and unusual weather and the patterns associated with them, and became convinced that something is very off about the atmosphere.

Jennifer Francis is a top climate researcher focused on the Arctic, whose work has drawn dramatic attention in the context of the very warm U.S. winter of 2012 (and attendant droughts and wildfires), the Russian heat wave and Pakistan floods of 2010, and other extreme weather events.

Both are now leading voices in diagnosing the wild weather that the world has seen of late—most recently, an intense winter in the UK that threatens to last throughout April.

For Ostro and Francis, the explanation for what we're seeing is simple. More heat in the Earth's system due to global warming is felt everywhere, and that includes the massive-scale patterns of atmospheric circulation that give us our weather.

Ostro's observations suggest that global warming is increasing the atmosphere's thickness, leading to stronger and more persistent ridges of high pressure, which in turn are a key to temperature, rainfall, and snowfall extremes and topsy-turvy weather patterns like we've had in recent years.

Francis's scientific story is complementary. She sees the rapid warming of the Arctic weakening the northern hemisphere jet stream, and thus, once again, slowing down the weather, leaving a given pattern stuck in place for longer (making any event potentially more disruptive and extreme).

We don't know—yet—what the next extreme manifestations of these large-scale changes in weather patterns will be. But as Ostro and Francis warn, we had better be getting ready for them—because this isn't your grandparent's Planet Earth any longer.

We hope you can join us for Climate Desk Live on June 6^th, 2013, as we discuss this important subject.