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South Africa's award winning journalist, Mzilikazi wa Afrika had been doggedly investigating government corruption, when he was arrested on August 4th by police outside the offices of his employer the Sunday Times. wa Africa¹ had recently written a story about a shady real estate deal arranged by National Police Commissioner General Bheki Cele, a deal Cele vehemently denied was shady. A few weeks later, because of its shadiness, the deal was put on hold.

The journalist had also been investigating a story about some murders of public officials that took place in the Mpumalanga province, that police were failing to investigate.

Kidnapping and Treason Accusations for South African Journalists

He was held for 48 hours, while police drove from place to place, including his house, which they ransacked, confiscating his computer (and his eight year old son's) and taking his journalist notebooks (some 10 years old). He hoped they didn't bring him to the province of Mpumalanga where all the murders had taken place, and where the murdered appear on a hit list that perhaps had his name on it. But they did. At one point the police dropped him at the Waterval Boven, Mpumalanga police station, where:

"one of the officers warned me that I was being left in this tiny town for my own safety. 'Don't eat or drink anything, we know they are going to try and poison you. These people want you dead' he said...."

Mzilikazi wa Africa tells his story of being shuttled about by police here.

"At 1:40am, I was taken back to Mapiyane's office, where the general introduced himself as the lead investigator in the case and read me my rights. He said I would be charged with fraud and defeating the ends of justice...He asked me to make a statement, 'to make things easier' for me. I told him I could not do that without my lawyer present. Mapiyane was irritated and a colleague of his told me I was giving them problems by writing stories about Mpumalanga [a province]."

"Five-and-a-half hours after I first got there, I was taken to the Nelspruit, Mpumalanga police station. It was 3:20am."

"At 8am my legal team finally had access to me...One of the questions the police asked was: "Have you either directly or indirectly been discrediting senior office bearers of the ANC in Mpumalanga?"

They asked him: "Are you destroying the image and integrity of the ANC in Mpumalanga?" The police grilled him on a story he had not published.

He was charged with fraud, forgery and uttering (passing forged documents - because he had been faxed a fake resignation of a Mpumalanga government official). People believe wa Africa's harassment is retribution for his investigative journalism, or a concerted police attempt to ferret out his sources, perhaps potential whistleblowers in the Mpumalanga province .

The police intimidation of the journalist has sent chills through South Africa and the world, especially in light of two initiatives sought by the African National Congress -- the Protection of Information Bill and the proposed Media Appeals Tribunals (MAT).

"The Sword is Mightier Than The Pen"

That's the "joke", as the South African government brims with ideas about how to curb the still vibrant press -- unruly by government standards. The detention of wa Africa, not too mention calls by a youth league of the ANC to convict the journalist of "high treason" hints at the draconian potential of these moves.

The government proposes media appeals tribunals (MAT) despite the admittedly excellent ombudsmen system already in place. As well, a bill being discussed in parliament called unconstitutional by the national lawyers bar would impose 15-25 years jail time for journalists who fail to support vague notions of "national interest".

As former journalist Sej Motau, from the opposition Democratic Alliance, wrote

"It's not about journalists; it's about every one of us in this country, and I'd like to appeal to the people of this country. If we fall asleep on this one, and we think, 'Oh no, it's only about the journalists', we're making a big, big mistake."

Indeed, if people can't ask why they don't have electricity, why the government isn't following through on promises, then all South Africans suffer. And if the ANC government can classify information willy-nilly, imprisoning journalists and newspapers who don't pen their line, businesses are in trouble too. As the Independent Online writes: "If passed, the bill would also restrict access to information from regulators and state-owned enterprises, which critics say could cut investors off from information affecting equity, treasury and foreign exchange markets."

Business Speaks Out

Foreign companies like ArcelorMittal (steel, Luxembourg), and Lonmin (mining, UK) are rightly concerned about a squashed media where cronyism thrives. Both have already been subjected to the corrupt business practices that benefited President Zuma and his associates. Domestic businesses are likewise worried, policies that favor ANC sycophants undermine their profitability too.

The business press gets it. Michael Skapinker, commenting for the Financial Times, and R.W. Johnson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, led the (rather anemic) international outcry earlier this week. Unfortunately, Johnson's column in the WSJ (it's worth noting) introduced some confusion about what South African bill was at issue.² Johnson wrote:

"the government plans a "Protection of Personal Information Bill," which would only allow reporting about people's personal lives with their consent. Heavy penalties would thus prevent any more reporting of Mr. Nizimande's wine-bibbing or of illegitimate children born to President Zuma's mistresses. This is accompanied by a new "Information Bill" proposal, which would impose penalties of up to 25 years in jail for reporting about anything the government declares to be a matter of national interest, itself defined broadly to include anything which may be for the advancement of the public good..."

WSJ has confused two bills. The "Protection of Personal Information Bill" can be found here at KPMG, Africa, and there's more information here at Deloitte. This bill deals with how organizations deal with private personal information, and the need for standards in the public and private sectors guiding how some information needs to be protected while other information needs to be accessible. KPMG writes: "Over the years, the principles contained in the Bill have become recognised as the leading practice baseline for effective data privacy around the world..."

The WSJ is the only place I've read Johnson's unique interpretation of the Protection of Personal Information. The bill has been heralded by some human rights advocates because it will protect victims. Could be abused by government? I'm sure anything could happen, but it would also be highly unusual for WSJ (and the FT) to oppose KPMG and Deloitte. Security of personal information is important to democracy, and security is also a growing business sector. Condyn, an IT security contractor, recently issued a press release seeking to clear up just this type of confusion between the two similarly named bills.

No, the bill that worries everyone is the "Protection of Information Bill", the ANC controlled government's wild grab to redefine how government officials classify and release information. It basically gives government officials free reign to classify any secrets as they wish into "classified", "secret", and "top-secret". The media appeals tribunal would impose the government's view.

Don't Go Hysterical About Tribunals Zuma Says -- Russia is Sharing Their Media Strategy With Us?

Of course President Zuma and members of government insist that the African National Congress,(ANC), is not trying to muzzle journalists, and will not impose "draconian apartheid laws to gag the freedom of the press".

Zuma says that, while complaining that media is a consolidated institution destroying the good of the nation on the other. He explains that: "South Africans rebelled against the media in June-July this year, united in their diversity" during FIFA. They defied the "media fraternity" and its "chorus of division and negativity", he said, peddling the notion that South Africa would be a Disneyland of green grass, ball playing, vuvuzelas, and international jubilance if not for the negative media.

The discussion document accompanying the paper gets to the meat of the ANC media crackdown and exudes an anti-liberal (in the economics sense), pro-socialist view:

"Our objectives therefore are to vigorously communicate the ANC's outlook and values (developmental state, collective rights, values of caring and sharing community, solidarity, ubuntu, non sexism, working together) versus the current mainstream media's ideological outlook (neo-liberalism, a weak and passive state, and overemphasis on individual rights, market fundamentalism, etc)."

For journalists who resist being state messengers? Apparently it'll be loud droning vuvuzelas, kicks to the ribs, and shots to the heads. Zuma explains the tribunals:

"The media has put itself on the pedestal of being the guardian. We therefore have the right to ask, who is guarding the guardian?....During our State visit to Russia a week ago, Russian television was running a promotional jingle saying: 'How dependent is the independent media? Who pays for the news'?

Newspapers are profit motivated says Zuma, the the news isn't "independent". Therefore, why shouldn't the news be the megaphone of the ANC party? And what better example to reassure your countrymen of your intentions for the press -- than Russia? Reporters Without Borders ranked Russia 153rd of 175 countries in the Press Freedom Index last year. As the International Press Institute reports, Russia remains one of the most dangerous places for reporters, a place where journalists are murdered with impunity. What a puzzling PR move. Is this a twisted way to get western investment? Or are public announcements about lessons from Russia on dealing with the media, just...governance as usual?

"Freedom" of the Press

With recent actions, the Zuma government has been compared to the oppressive states of Gambia and Zimbabwe. 37 of the country's editors signed a petition protesting the government's intentions to curtail freedom of the press. The international response, including that from top US media, is an unanimous call to drop the contentious bill and media appeals tribunals.

But the crackdown has been brewing for a while, and is not the first step the ANC has taken to sweep in some censorship. And the government has long derided newspapers and journalists who unveil information that doesn't paint the government in a favorable light. In 2007 we wrote about Africa's AIDS and public health crisis in hospitals, which the media persistently exposed. In response to the press attention, Mbeki pounded back in his own newspaper columns, including one Acronym Required dubbed "the mini-skirt memo". But Mbeki never did address the issues.

Mbeki's ANC consistently labeled anyone who criticized him as being unfaithful to the revolution, and Zuma hints at as much. This would be a blow for democracy, human rights, and business. But unfortunately, some countries have proven, like China and Russia and many others, that with the help of greed enabled complacency from US and Europe, freedom of information and freedom of press aren't necessarily requirements for state enrichment.

President Zuma urges people to "move away from hysteria dwelling on individual experiences". And he concludes: "We will use our right to express what we think. And we should not be silenced by claims of 'threats to press freedom'".

Acronym Required writes frequently about South Africa, especially issues involved the state's public health policies, HIV/AIDS progress, public media.

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¹a name he adopted meaning "of Africa"

² No one would accuse these authors of being dedicated to politically liberal causes. Concurrent with China, Skapinker this spring urged a ban on comment anonymity 'to promote civility', a trending meme that would slap a lid on many important forms of speech. While some people took exception to Skapinker's tedious idea, in one published letter to the FT editor, the writer agreed with Skapinker, and added that we should also identify motorists' identities via their license plates to promote highway civility, because as he noted, fooled by randomness, people who drove cars with vanity plates were more polite.

RW Johnson recently outraged writers, academics, and civilians with a racist piece he wrote for the London Book Review. 73 signatories complained in a letter to LBR that his work was "often stacked with the superficial and the racist".

The University of California, Berkeley always amazes. It has an ultra-liberal reputation, yet it defies its label by harboring some of the most controversial figures, and protects them under the auspices of academic freedom -- an excellent institution -- strreetttched at Berkeley to fit many circumstances. The law school dean used it to protect John Yoo, the law professor who crafted the Bush administration's torture policy, for instance. Now the school has invoked the useful catch-all to clear scientist Peter Duesberg of wrong-doing over a paper he wrote denying the HIV viral link to AIDS. The University said there was "insufficient evidence" to do anything else.

Berkeley Did Not Judge the "Accuracy or Validity of the Article"

Although UC Berkeley didn't judge the "accuracy or validity of the article", those issues lie at the heart the ongoing Duesberg controversy. This was only Dueberg's latest foray, that he initiated last year by publishing a paper in a non-peer review journal called "Medical Hypotheses". He claimed in his paper that the HIV virus didn't cause AIDS, something he's been promoting for years. The paper did not undergo peer-review. Scientists refuted his false theories in a collective uproar, the journal retracted the paper, the journal editor was fired, and Elsevier, the publisher, promised to rethink the journal format.

Then the University received two letters, one from Treatment Action Coalition (TAC) in South Africa, criticizing Duesberg's paper for conflict of interest and for "making false claims". The letters asked the University to investigate. The school did so, however yesterday's action clearing Duesberg of wrongdoing indicates that the UC Berkeley mission, policy and conduct documents don't contain anything that's applicable to Duesberg's situation.

Duesberg's Legacy In South Africa

The main problem is not necessarily the statements Duesberg published last year, but the fact that for years he's been publishing them and they've significantly influenced policy and beliefs about AIDS and science in general. It's his actions outside the University, like Yoo's, that cause the most distress. Duesberg sat on former South African President Mbeki's advisory panel on AIDS back in 1999-2000, and the South African government frequently cited his AIDS ideas to support their policies. Mbeki didn't treat AIDS in his country, letting hundreds of thousands of people die.

Whether Duesberg was a handy foil for Mbeki's pre-determined policy -- whether Mbeki's countrymen died because the president was more driven to toe conservative economic and social policy the procure available AIDS drugs -- is unclear. What is clear is that the country had the highest death rate from AIDS in history, while wielding the most mendacious policies, which Mbeki backed-up with "science" created by Duesberg.

Yet there's nothing in Berkeley policy that specifically calls this a crime.

Peer-Review? Whatever. Duesberg = UC Berkeley= AIDS Denial = Mbeki's AIDS Policy = Death

A Berkeley spokesman told Nature: "The university relies on the scholarly peer-review process, rather than disciplinary procedures, for evaluating the value of scientific work." There. Very official. However AIDS denialists don't rely on peer-review. They revel in non-peer-review.

And unlike the University and scientists who care about peer-review, for Duesberg's purposes, getting a paper retracted by some flaky non-peer-reviewed tabloid called "Medical Hypotheses" doesn't matter. He has his audience. For years he's had a self-promoting website up, and his ideas have gained an audience. Next they'll go after "my parking permits" he says. His audience laps this stuff up -- the underdog, taking on the big evil science establishment.

UC Berkeley has their policies and official responses. Academic freedom, the concept, is inarguably beneficial, the heart of academia. But the fact remains, one of the most renowned research universities in the world supports a scientist largely responsible for some of the most deadly anti-science claims in history. If you search "Duesberg" in Google, his site is featured at the top. Here's how the Google results page text reads today:

"Peter Duesberg on AIDS - Duesberg.com - HIV / AIDS research ... Infectious AIDS - Have We Been Misled? This is the official HIV/AIDS research from the University of California Berkeley, Department of Molecular and Cell ... www.duesberg.com/ - Cached - Similar"

"Official" HIV/AIDS "research" from the University of California, Berkeley. The Wikipedia entry for Duesberg appears third today on the same Google search page. Here's how it reads:

"Duesberg hypothesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Duesberg hypothesis is the claim, associated with University of California, Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg, that various non-infectious factors such ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duesberg_hypothesis - Cached - Similar"

UC Berkeley policy has nothing to say. Peer-review? Here's what the world sees: Duesberg = UC Berkeley= AIDS Denial = Mbeki's AIDS Policy = Death. Somewhere deep in the heart of hearts of university bureaucracy, under all the official, vague missions, purposes, and policies, doesn't this cause angst?

Exonerated?

Interestingly, it's Duesberg himself whose been spear-heading the reporting on the investigation. Apparently Duesberg has enough confidence in the support of anti-science, AIDS denialist community, to know the outcome would work for his purposes. And since now Duesberg is claiming that he was "exonerated", it's like free marketing for his theories. How tragic.

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¹PLoS One, the audience reviewed journal, is also tangentially affiliated with UC Berkeley via PLoS co-founder and esteemed scientist Michael Eisen.

Acronym Required has written frequently on South Africa and AIDS, occasionally about HIV/AIDS deniers, and once in a while about UC Berkeley.

The BP spill in the gulf remains an unrelenting environmental and economic disaster. Oil industry technology lets us pierce deep holes in the ocean floor and extract oil for energy and profit for companies. That know-how is obviously way ahead of the know-how to avert and fix oil rig failures that impact people and the economy more frequently than they should.

Flimsy Tech, Strong Marketing

John Gapper wrote over a month ago in the Financial Times that the BP disaster could have been worse, for instance if the larger Thunder Horse rig failed. He quoted BP's website: "Everything about Thunder Horse is at or beyond the limits of the offshore industry's experience", and noted: "What once sounded impressively high-tech now sounds positively scary."

Of course, lack of "industry experience" sounds less scary today, a month and a half later, because we understand the enormity of the Deepwater Horizon mishap. Our fear has been removed by experience. Can we fathom anything worse, now that the estimated volume of gushing oil has been adjusted upward; now that plugs, top-kills, and various domes and caps have failed to stop the damage?

We don't even have a word for it. "Spill"? As in a sippy-cup of milk? Perhaps we need a new word for ~60,000 gallons a day gushing into the Gulf? Gusher's not quite right. Sound's almost celebratory, like champagne. Trivialities aside, don't we need a new system to assure that technology to contain spills doesn't extend "beyond the limits of offshore industry's experience"?

Tech Failure as Entertainment Staple?

Technological failures happen every day, we don't have blind faith in technology, despite what some say. Buildings collapse, brakes fail, cars crash. We live with this, we wear seatbelts, mandate airbags, set values on body parts. And when worse comes to worse, we get cathartic pleasure from accidents. It's true. Why is the traffic stopped on the highway for five miles back? The accident is cleared, the bodies are gone, but people need to gawk at the damage on the cars. What can't be gotten in person we get on TV. Any botoxed, pancake make-up plastered announcer who manages to contort their face into an emotion while describing an airplane crash, a fire, or a kitten with two faces steals our attention.

A little hormone surge, then back to the routine until the next catastrophic high. We depend on those hormone surges like some probably depend on prayer, to get us through the mundane day. A little spilt milk souring someone else's life is great entertainment. The difference with this spill is that we're usually free, after a few minutes of rubbernecking, to drive away from the scene, catecholamine rush satisfied.

We crave that. And so the media finally goaded President Obama to say "kick-ass" on TV -- to pretend-put BP in it's place and give us a little surge. True, talking about ass-kicking will never prevent the next catastrophe, but the grinding negotiations of lawmaking never provides an adrenaline boost. We champion people talking about change, but that's it. Unfortunately, Obama's presidential version of "kick-ass" didn't satisfy. Fortunately Congress can always step up to some ass-kick rhetoric theatre for America.

Weak Oversight of Inevitable Failure?

The company face-off with congress suits business too. Companies seem used to enduring public lashings, as long as their business goes on as usual. CEO's probably have it written into their contracts: "You will appear before Congress for reprimanding should the business of risking lives for profits be revealed, and your job is to exhibit the full range of arrogance and chagrin:" (Salary: $27.2 million).

Dragging bank CEOs before Congress served this purpose earlier this year. And notice how quick we lost interest in the "regulatory loopholes", ensconced as we are in the current crisis.

The hearings also give oil company executives a chance to argue for less regulation right off the bat. The BP technology failure, as inevitable as it was, sent shudders through all the regulation-allergic oil companies. This week executives energetically backstroked away from the flaming BP rig oil gusher. Rex Tillerson (Exxon) described it as an "unprecedented" event, due to a "level of risk...beyond industry norms." that "should not occur". John Watson (Chevron) called it a "single incident" and a "preventable tragedy", due to "failure to operate with high standards".

The Exxon and Chevron CEOs offered lawmakers all sorts of reasons why the BP accident wouldn't happen in their companies, because of "documented standards", "best practices", "proprietary technology", "stop-work authority", and "time to do things right or not at all". Watson said "safe" or "safety" no less than 25 times in his brief.

Of Walruses...and Little People

And about those "documented standards"? We saw how companies share in their contingency plans the phone numbers of the same dead experts, and descriptions of how to clean walruses not seen in the Gulf since the Ice Age. Kudos to Congress for pointing all this out with great theatre. But shouldn't someone be reading these plans before the failure? That walrus thing would be pretty easy to spot. Demonstrating how little relevance these showdowns have, even that embarrassing fact didn't move Exxon's CEO, who said: "It's unfortunate that walruses were included". Because...if they hadn't been included nobody would have noticed that there was no plan at all? Accchhh...the insouciance.

Once impressive technology always looks fatally flimsy after failure, like the feebly blinking red 12:00. We're used to technology achievements -- they yield tremendous bragging rights. We're also used to technology failures. Cars crashes happen and when they do we know how to mop up. Spills occur, as in the Niger Delta and frequent gushers across the world. So shouldn't the standards and contingency plans be evaluated as part and parcel with the technology -- ahead of time? There's more to technology then a deep a hole we can dig for ourselves.

In our break from blogging we learned about an unexplored benefit of writing about news, as we do at Acronym Required (from time to time). When we spend "free" time writing or interpreting news we care about we interrupt any potential habit of seeking substantive news amongst the addictive trifle of mainstream media. Not to disparage all MSM, of course, some MSM is great. ProPublica publishes great pieces (though not quite mainstream). There's Huffington Post's Investigative Fund. But trash news is the bread and butter of MSM (and Huffpo proper), because readers are addicted to piffle.

Haggis

Case in point: At Reuters, often a fine reporting vehicle, readers devoured the piece "The Hills Are Alive With Haggis". Haggis, you ask? Indeed. Scots consume Haggis a dish made from the lung, liver and heart of a sheep, on Burns night - of course, with lots of whiskey.

An aside: The US banned haggis in 1989 because of the threat of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), but for some reason unexplored by Reuters, the US recently relaxed the ban. Richard Lochhead, the Scottish environmental secretary waxed ecstatic that Americans can now "sample our world-renowned national dish."

But Reuters did not cover the American ban of sheep innards because of BSE. Readers can only learn that "renowned" as it may be, many Scots don't know what haggis is and Brits are even more uninformed. As the report goes, one in five Brits thinks haggis is "an animal that roams the Highlands", another 18% think it's a Scottish instrument, and 4% think its a character from Harry Potter.

Circuses and More

Like the empty calories of cotton candy, apparently, the haggis story leaves readers hungry for more drivel. Because from "The Hills Are Alive With Haggis", they're unlikely to click on a story about the environmental crisis off the Louisiana coast or the implications of Greek financial crisis. No, says Reuters "after reading this article people will most likely read": "Police barred from penis enlargement", about Indonesian police candidate screening, that even I refuse to link to. Rather that exploring the BSE ban, they'll more likely read: "Circus comes to Turkmenistan again after long ban."

Just like any perilous addiction, it seems that reading banal news leads to reading even more rotten gibberish. Of course, as we've just inadvertently demonstrated, bloggers, once heralded as the saviors of news, are JUST AS PRONE to courting readers with the most scurrilous news they can drum up. But we do try to do better. (This post not included). We try to write about science.

Haiti!

Help, donate: Partners in Health, or Medecins Sans Frontiers, or the Clinton Foundation, or the International Red Cross or text-to-give.

• PLoS and Elsevier: On the Same Page?

  One of our favorite things, in the Obama era, is to see would be foes band together. So we look fondly upon the unlikely albeit fragile "alliance" that PLoS and Elsevier ended up in at a recent open access publishing roundtable. The occasion was a meeting around the report issued by the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. The U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) convened the meeting of a group of fourteen publishers, university leaders, librarians, and other experts at the round table, who drafted basic agreements about how public access to journal publications. They emphasized:

  "the need to preserve peer review, the necessity of adaptable publishing business models, the benefits of broader public access, the importance of archiving, and the interoperability of online content"

  However, the Elsevier and PLoS representatives refused to join the other 12 members in signing the consensus agreement, although both agreed that points of the agreement were "positive". PLoS and Elsevier apparently both have a lot a stake, since they each sent extra representatives to the panel. Elsevier sent their General Counsel/Senior Vice President, and PLoS sent their Managing Editor as well as their CEO.

  Predictably, YS Chi, speaking for Elsevier, stated that he couldn't sign the agreement because it "supports an overly expansive role of government and advocates approaches to the business of scholarly publishing that I believe are overly prescriptive." No question about where giant, monopolistic, Elsevier ever stands.

  PLoS representative Mark Patterson's statement was a little more difficult to unpack. He said that the agreement "stops far short of recognizing and endorsing the opportunities to unleash the full potential of online communication to transform access to and use of scholarly literature." What did he mean? He didn't include "the need to preserve peer review" as one of his "positive" points of agreement....But does PLoS want more Federal support for PLoS? Explicit endorsement of pay to publish? A more "expansive role for government"? Who knows.

  For more information on open access and this agreement in general, there's a great public access policy forum here at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the "ever-enthusiastic public access policy team" at OSTP has extended the comment period. So you can comment, and there's lots to read.

• H1N1

  The World Health Organization (WHO), has hit back at accusers who say that the organization, along with pharma companies, created a "fake epidemic" in H1N1. WHO reiterated its role to balance urgency and expediency with the uncertain nature of the epidemic. In an editorial generally praising the organization's response, Nature wrote this week:

  "The danger now is that last year's relatively mild pandemic will create a false sense of security and complacency. The reality is that next time we might not be so lucky -- especially given that this time most of the world's population, living as they do in developing countries, had no access to either vaccines or antiviral drugs."

  It's apparently easy for otherwise smart people to be cynical about the H1N1 pandemic. It is truly a challenge to explain risks and uncertainty of pandemics and the fact that the scientists and public health organizations are actually doing a great job.

Judge Overrules FDA on Electronic Cigarettes, Whatever They Are

Some people believe that a president's most lasting legacy is in the judges he appoints; George W. Bush appointed judge Richard Leon of the Federal District Court in Washington. Leon recently moved to stop the FDA from regulating e-cigarettes, on grounds that they aren't tobacco. In fact, e-cigarettes are battery-powered tubes that vaporize nicotine with tobacco flavoring, that simulate cigarette smoking for the user. I can't make that sound good. Seems like the next best thing to sex robots. But anyway, these devices deliver addictive nicotine to the body, but the judge says the FDA can't regulate e-cigarettes as devices anymore.

In other tobacco regulation news, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) discusses opposition to the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act on First Amendment grounds. Even the ACLU objects to the Act, which prohibits the use of certain words by cigarette advertisers, saying that

"regulating commercial speech for lawful products only because those products are widely disliked -- even for cause -- sets us on the path of regulating such speech for other products that may only be disfavored by a select few in a position to impose their personal preferences."

Instead advised the ACLU, "the antidote to harmful speech can be found in the wisdom of countervailing speech -- not in the outright ban of the speech perceived as harmful." But as the NEJM authors wrote:

"How did we come to believe that the exchange of commercial appeals in the marketplace of goods and services should be equated with free exchange in the marketplace of ideas? Are our freedoms really secured by a constitutional doctrine that would limit our capacity to inhibit the promotion of toxic goods? This is an opportune moment to reflect on these questions and their implications for the relationship between public health goals and the rules that should be foundational in a democracy."

• EPA's Updated Smog, Ozone Standard

  The EPA proposed new standards for smog last week, which would update the Bush Administration standards. The agency will set the "primary" standard, which protects public health, at a level between 0.060 and 0.070 parts per million (ppm), measured over eight hours, and will also propose a new secondary standard. These standards were recommended by scientists years ago to decrease deaths and smog levels dangerous to children, the elderly, and those with asthma and respiratory disease. As we wrote earlier, the Bush's EPA pushed the weaker standard of .075 ppm. We also wrote about the Obama EPA's stated intention to change the standard last fall.

• Airport Screening to Double as Healthcare?

  "We are headed toward the moment when screeners will watch watch-listers sashay through while we have to come to the airport in hospital gowns, flapping open in the back", wrote Maureen Dowd recently, commenting on holes in airport security processes. But I think she's seeing a cup half empty. We may well be headed for a moment when airport screening, reviled as a breach of privacy to some, is the closest thing to healthcare people can get.

  The public option has fallen "off the table" again, by now "fallen off the table" so many times that even when it intermittently appears back "on the table", it's obviously shopworn, if not smashed to bits.

  But the glass could still be half full. Think of the savings, if airport screening could double as healthcare screening : "You're cleared for flight sir, and don't worry about that lump..."

• What to Call It? Science Terminology

  For various reasons, political, scientific, logical (or not) or historical, people refer to the same thing using different terms. Here are two examples.

  Canada does not call the tar sands "tar sands", anymore, they're "oil sands". Of course "tar sands" is more descriptive of the energy-intensive process, of extracting oil, but "oil sands" sounds like something that you would naturally siphon some oil out of, it sounds better.

  In 2005, physicist Lisa Randall urged that "global climate change" was the appropriate phrase to use, because "global warming" would lead people to argue that their winter was actually very cold. Others argued that "climate change" sounded less dangerous, so therefore would be used to manipulate people who would be fearful enough about "global warming" to urge policy changes, whereas "climate change" seemed benign. But it gets even more complicated for some agencies. NASA differentiates between "global warming", which is surface climate change, and "climate change", and "global change", and "global climate change", which deems the most accurate term. I think everyone pretty much knows what everyone's talking about now, though I dare not make conclusions about that.

• Oh, and Happy Not-So-New Year

  Did you travel over your break? Have fun?

  In the US, marketing aimed at tourists is off the rails. Perhaps marketers have learned that people who travel in a heightened state of orange level stress will sooth themselves by buying absurd products. You may argue that it's a global trend, and indeed, the badminton set peddled to me by a man on the muddy backroad of a major city in Asia seemed ridiculous, until I flipped through Sky Mall Magazine and spied the "King Tut Life Sized Sarcophagus Cabinet" that can be "delivered curbside" (to impress your neighbors). Personally, I would rather pay to bat around a little white badminton birdie in a mud puddle, while talking baksheesh with kids who speak, at will, touristica French, German, English or Japanese. By comparison, traveler oriented products in the US seem conceived by desperate marketing departments who've lost their wits. Case in point -- the sarcophagus cabinet. Or:

  • If you were assigned to seating group 2 or above recently, on my least favorite airline I still fly on, you heard this announcement: "Board now. Enter via aisle closest to the wall, NOT THE RED CARPET." Because "the red carpet", actually a two foot doormat, is reserved for first class customers.

    Some people bemoan the lot of the economy passenger, the so-called "poverty parade", and the herd animal like treatment. But as a first class customer you pay an extra few thousand dollars to traipse across a red mat with bars on each side to keep you in bounds. Sure the legroom's nice, I won't argue, but you have to walk "the red carpet" to get there, and once there in that bigger, comfier seat, you're subjected to complimentary cheesefood snacks. Supposedly smart people actually buy this privilege.

  • At your hotel, you will be sold the usual-- rooms, room service, laundry services, shoe shines and upgrades, not to mention the mini-bar. But what if the five dollar peanuts in the mini-bar are too devilish a temptation for you and your New Year's resolutions? No worries, there's a market-based solution. Pay $50 to have the mini-bar hauled away at one hotel I was recently at.

  • Want to use the hotel refrigerator for your water? $50 fine at another hotel. And the same people who stay at these hotels complain that the EPA's bureaucracy confines their business style.

  • Maybe you actually love business travel and want to bring home a bit of the experience, like the "pulsating" showerhead that your can actually buy from one hotel's glossy catalogue. The catalogue carried other mundane household hardware and dog cushions stamped with the hotel's logo. Pretty special.

  Couldn't we just travel unsolicited sometimes? Definitely not in 2010. Happy New Year.

• Copenhagen: Despite walking past sculptures of skeletons and eerie melting ice polar bears and mermaids daily, the climate change delegates collectively refused to come up with anything substantial in Copenhagen. President Obama curtailed his much awaited visit, altogether minimizing his association with what was by most accounts a failure, but also known as an accord, in order to fly home early and beat a snowstorm. If we are one world we are also many countries with our own economic interests in mind.

  Is there a better way? The Economist suggested in an article last week that the talks may have gone better if different regions and pollutants were considered separately. While the idea is interesting, this sort of regime is also how fishing interests repeatedly fail to establish effective ecological safeguards and effective quotas.

  Although the talks weren't considered fruitful, an interesting sidenote is the inability of very tenacious climate change deniers to convince delegates or the thousands of protestors in Copenhagen that climate change is a hoax, that nothing's at stake.

• The Ice Floe Debate: Last month, in our Notes on Science Dust-Ups and Dirty Laundry, under "Curly-haired Science Populizers Spar" we wrote about what we'll call the IQ nurture:nature debate between two science popularizer giants, Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell. Pinker had criticized Gladwell for what he cuttingly labeled the "Igon Value Problem", defined as, "when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong."

  In return, Gladwell wrote that Pinker might be "unhappy" with him for not joining him on the "lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism", and criticized him for quoting bloggers. (Although if not for bloggers there might not be people in science of lower regard in the research hierarchy than some of Gladwell's mashable social scientists -- just saying.)

  After we left off, Pinker responded to Gladwell that IQ was related to "many important educational, economic and social outcomes" according to "52 signatories" and "a unanimous blue-ribbon panel". Gladwell then raked over Pinkers' sources, detailing how 15 of those 52 signatories belonged to a group founded by a eugenicist -- whose members are racists, eugenicists and sexists. After substantiating his response at length, he concludes:

  "The fact that ideas are sometimes supported by people with unsavory connections does not make them invalid. An ice floe is not necessarily a bad place to be. It's just that if you are plainly floating on one, it doesn't make much sense to insist that you are standing on solid ground."

  Although both science popularizers are getting more popular via the dispute, there are important issues at stake here. (Acronym Required previously wrote "Watson Uncut: Surprising? Boring? Racist?)

• Racism Persists: Psychology researchers at Yale University found that racism persists, despite US society's more tolerant overt attitudes. The psychologists studied nonverbal interactions between white and black characters on television shows, then surveyed study participants for their responses to the actors attitudes (complicated methodology). They concluded that nonverbal behavior towards minorities on television influence the attitudes of millions of viewers.(Dovidio et al Science(326) 1641 - 1642 DOI: 10.1126/science.1184231)

• Larry Summers Summons the Economy to Man-Up: Larry Summers is overly optimistic on jobs says a guest blogger on Naked Capitalism in the article titled: "Larry Summers Is Like a Guy Who Yells That the Sun Really DOES Revolve Around the Earth and that the Current Orbit is Just a Temporary Aberration . . . and That If We Just Wait a Little While, Everything Will Return to Normal". We last reviewed Summers's history of unfailing optimism in Mission Accomplished: Summers Ends Economy's Free Fall.

• Coaxing The GOP To Eat Arugula: Michael J. Petrilli questions the GOP vote getting strategy in Wall Street Journal. The Hoover Institute Fellow observes that "with the white working class shrinking and the educated 'creative class' growing", Republicans such as Sarah Palin, "whose entire brand is anti-intellectual", and GOPers who brand themselves for "working-class families", "Sam's Club Republicans", and "your co-worker not your boss", might be miscalculating. Petrilli's assessment of those who criticize "Eastern Elites"? "Playing the populism card looks like a strategy of subtraction rather than addition". Instead he suggests: "What is needed is a full-fledged effort to cultivate "Whole Foods Republicans" - independent minded voters who embrace a progressive lifestyle but not progressive politics."

• South Africa's Ex-Health Minister Dies: South Africa's Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang died of complications from a liver transplant she had two years ago. As Health Minister during the Thabo Mbeki administration, she was known as "Dr. Beetroot" for her suggestions that lemon, beetroot and garlic would protect AIDS patients against the deadly effects of the disease in lieu of antiretrovirals. Mbeki's administration oversaw the fraught handling of the AIDS crisis in South Africa, and the former president went to great lengths to protect his comrade Tshabalala-Msimang, who attracted international attention for her positions.

  Even the Minister's liver transplant was controversial. The Times wrote in Manto: A Drunk and a Thief, of a Health Minister who was an alcoholic with liver cirrohsis -- a kleptomaniac on bad behavior while in hospital. One hospital employee told the paper that Tshabalala-Msimang's "antics were common knowledge among staff.'Everyone here thinks its hilarious that she is today a health minister in South Africa'". The story questioned whether favoritism and power enabled her to receive a liver transplant ahead of others.

• Sickle Cell Anemia Not the Only Genetic Mutation to Protect Against Malaria: We learned in our biology courses that the genetic mutation that causes sickle cell anemia is an adaptation to the malaria causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Recently, scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have shown that a less common malaria causing strain, Plasmodium vivax, has also caused adaptive pressure on the genome. The scientists found a gene variant associated with an enzyme deficiency which seems to protect against infection by P. vivax in Southeast Asian populations. The variant causes a deficiency of the enzyme glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD), associated with neonatal jaundice and hemolytic anemia after exposure to certain infections, foods, or medications. (Sakuntabhai et al Science 326, 1546-1549 (2009)DOI: 10.1126/science.1178849)

• Cookstove Technology: Indoor pollution causes 1.6 million deaths per year. Cookstoves contribute significantly to indoor pollution, especially in developing countries where morbidity and mortality from cookstoves disproportionately affects women and children. The New Yorker recently published an article about an Oregon company (one of many) working on cookstove technology for developing countries. An efficient cookstove will vent smoke out of the dwelling and will also burn fuel effectively, saving both lives and forests. But as the article shows, it's about more than technology -- there's many ways a cookstove can not work in developing countries.

Trick

Scientists sometimes confuse people with inscrutable acronyms -- BPA, NIEHS, NTP, EPA (bisphenol A, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Toxicology Program, Environmental Protection Agency), words that are difficult to pronounce -- "phthalates", or words that are difficult to get to the end of -- "Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis". But lately, we've been stumping people with words everyone thought they knew, like "trick". People went wild over the idea that East Anglia scientists had used a "trick" to manipulate raw data.

"Trick", previously associated with annuals "treats" and six year olds in fairy costumes, was suddenly linked to nefarious acts. Yes, there is that "trick", but it's not often used¹. And did the media mayhem over "trick" top the media mayhem over the breast-baring wardrobe malfunction during Super Bowl half-time a couple of years ago? Hard to say -- but global warming is actually serious.

Scientists explained over and over that "trick" can be a good thing, like mathematics, logical thinking, transparency, pragmatism, maybe even dignity for life -- but their insistence only increased suspicion and talk. "Trick" dominated the news cycle longer than any five letter word should be allowed to and even wormed its way into events like the US legislature, where senators leveraged the word in committee meetings to veer away from very important topics like the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)².

Now we see the word all over the place. And like the original East Anglia "trick", it's often used to rationalize why climate change, the reality, isn't being translated into climate change policy. The Financial Times reported on the tension between China and the US in Copenhagen and quoted China's on its changing stance:

"'China will not be an obstacle [to a deal]. The obstacle now is from developed countries,' he said. 'I know people will say if there is no deal that China is to blame. This is a trick played by the developed countries. They have to look at their own position and can't use China as an excuse...'"

John Tierney recently used the word to propose a temperature based carbon-tax -- a joke perhaps, or to scoff at science?

"[U]se the temperature readings as the basis for a carbon tax instead of a cap-and-trade system...the carbon tax would be more effective at reducing emissions because it is simpler, more transparent, easier to enforce and less vulnerable to accounting tricks and political favoritism."

Up to his usual tricks, that Tierney.

Talking about the challenge the US Senate presents for Obama in Copenhagan, Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center described Obama's challenge as a "Goldilocks Problem":

''The trick is finding something just right in balancing the importance of demonstrating international leadership while not undermining the legislative dynamic here at home.''

Moving away from climate change, the word "trick" can morph from a bad thing or a challenge, to a good thing. An author recently mused in an essay in the New York Times about the "tricks" to maintaining a marriage.³

Hack

The confusion over "trick" is not entirely unjustified. Merriam Webster has seven possible uses of "trick". And another word that's ambiguous for some people, again, reasonably so, because it has nine uses in Merriam Webster, is "hack", as in, they hacked into the email server in East Anglia and stole a thousand emails.

During the December 2, 2009 hearing on the pressing imperative of revising the "Federal Toxic Substances Control Act" (TSCA), climate denier Senator Inhofe (R-OK) hijacked the meeting to windbag on about "tricks" in emails necessitating a halt to EPA emissions rulemaking.

Senator Boxer (D-CA) responded eloquently and forcefully, noting that although she was concerned about criminal acts of "hacking", she was more concerned about anthropogenic carbon emissions, about global warming, and about the repercussions for human health -- that's where her duty was, to the people effected by global warming. About the email break-in she said:

We're dealing with a criminal act of hacking into a computer...It seems to me they must have been hacking this for years. And just before Copenhagen they came out with it...That's what it seems to be...because, these emails, they go back...how many are there? Over a thousand emails? So I don't know how long a thousand emails...

This may be a silly example, but it shows how people with expertise in a particular area assume common understanding of simple words. Here it seems like "hacking" into a computer is visualized as George Washington trying to "hack" down a giant redwood tree in the Muir Woods National Park.

Hack can mean to chop at roughly. It can also mean to tolerate or bear something, for instance, I don't know how Senator Boxer can hack Senator Inofe's perennial global-warming-is-a-hoax B.S. so gracefully. Used as a noun, hack can also be a cough, a horse, a worker, or (derogatorily) someone who misconstrues or butchers something -- for example, Senator Inofe is a real hack when it comes to science and global warming.

But when someone hacks into a computer as they did in East Anglia, they exploit a vulnerability in order to access data owned by someone else. Different than hacking at a tree. It can take a computer hacker a while to find the vulnerability and locate the data, but then they most often swoop in, get it, in this case a bunch of emails, and go. Sometimes they lurk about, poised to commit further crimes, or leave an opening to come back, obviously there's no rules, but generally they're not hewing emails out of the server one at a time over many years 465 -- hack, hack hack, 466 -- chop, chop, 467 -- hack, hack -- that's a different use of the word.

The Trick for Scientists, If They Can Hack It

So "trick" can not so intuitively mean find a solution, as well as to deceive, and "hack" can mean deceptively break into a computer in order to plunder or pillage, as well as to chop at something. And confusingly, computer scientists, sometimes known as "hacks" but in a good way, will "hack" a solution to a very tricky programming problem, just as scientists use a "trick" to help analyze and make sense of data.

And that's the challenge for scientists -- a trivial one, but another one. In addition doing science, teaching, writing grants, motivating grad students, negotiating politics and budget cuts, actually physically looking out for hackers and those who would break into scientists offices and steal computers as part of a global effort to undermine climate science; in addition to assessing threats of bodily harm, scientists need to simplify concepts, avoid acronyms and watch their use of simple seeming words whose meaning they take for granted.

All that work because even people with the best intentions don't always have a grip on either science or its lexicon. And once scientists sort out "trick" and "hack" for everyone, they'll then face the greater challenge of explaining the risks of doing nothing about global warming, with the risks of doing something. After all, probability and risk are orders more challenging for people to grasp than "tricks" and "hacks".

--------------------------

¹ See, "Do Names Portend Profession?", in AR's Science Dust-Ups and Dirty Laundry

²

We wrote about TSCA here. Of 80,000 chemicals produced, there's little information about which ones are on the market, and only 5 are regulated by the EPA.

³ In the NYT on marriage: "Recently one of my wife's college students kept pressing us, with baffled curiosity, for our secret, as if there had to be some trick to it..."

In his most recent column, Thomas Friedman marshals ideas from Ron Suskind, Dick Cheney and Cass Sunstein in calling for action on climate change. By the end of his column, Friedman has reminded readers of decades of research showing that greenhouse gases make the planet warmer, with the "potential to unleash 'catastrophic' warming." Which risk should we take, he asks? Should we increase our efficiency and mitigation efforts, then in the unlikely event that climate change weren't critical, "as a country we would be stronger, more innovative and more energy independent"? Or should we risk not preparing, then if climate change were a catastrophe, "life on this planet" would become "living hell"?

Before we get to these arguments in "Going Cheney on Climate", though, you must grapple with Friedman's interpretation of Dick Cheney, Rons Suskind and Cass Sunstein. It's unclear why Friedman chose them, perhaps to convince the GOP, or any deniers, or those who are swayed by deniers, to support climate change action? Anyhow, using their ideas makes his argument confusing.

The One Percent Solution and Climate Change

Friedman refers to Ron Suskind's book "The One Percent Doctrine", titled after a comment Dick Cheney made in 2001:

"If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response..."

That part Friedman gets right. But Suskind was actually extremely critical of Cheney and the "Cheney Doctrine". Why? Here's the rest of Cheney's comment:

"...It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence...It's about our response""

As Suskind wrote, Cheney's new world order demanded action despite evidence:

"Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to "evidence", the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply." If there was even a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction- and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time -- the United States must now act as if it were a certainty. This was a mandate of extraordinary breadth...

Cheney's new US policy direction meant commitments from citizens and libraries as well as all levels of government -- the the CIA, the Army, the NSA, the Treasury. The costs were stupendous. As Suskind wrote:

"all parties took a vow of sorts on Sept. 12...vowed to work each day and every night...They'd stop at nothing...Global accords on everything from greenhouse gases to international courts...now were seen as constraints...Such agreements were for lesser countries. They were to be shaken off...

Suskind criticized the Cheney Doctrine precisely because its framers willfully disregarded evidence about the negligible risks of Al Queda gaining nuclear capability. They charged into war despite the evidence.

The situation with climate change is the opposite, the evidence for climate change is substantial. A cartoon in the Atlantic Constitution this week summarizes the folly of the deniers. A woman, speaking sometime in the future, says: "The North Pole melted. Polar bears are extinct. Asia's under water. Africa's a desert." The guy next to her responds: "Hey I never said the global warming hoax wasn't elaborate."

Adding to the confusion of Friedman's line of persuasion, the Cheney Doctrine leaves no doubt about that administrations sentiments on climate change, since according to Suskind the US took greenhouse gases off the negotiating table under the Cheney Doctrine.

Friends or Foes? Friedman's Folly

In addition to Suskind and Cheney, Friedman pulls in Cass Sunstein to wrap it all up, saying

"Sunstein wrote in his blog: 'According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events -- such as climate change. Indeed, another vice president -- Al Gore -- can be understood to be arguing for a precautionary principle for climate change (though he believes that the chance of disaster is well over 1 percent)."

Here, Sunstein was actually criticizing the Precautionary Principle, and by extension the Cheney Doctrine, and most likely Cheney and company would bristle at being compared to Gore. According to Sunstein the Precautionary Principle muddles and stalls appropriate action on climate change. ideas he spelled out in papers, articles and books like Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle", and "Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment", his 2002 book.

Sunstein uses social science research to show that individuals are susceptible to faulty conclusions based on irrational fear and errors in judgement like "availability heuristics". Sunstein argues that instead of the Precautionary Principle, the risks and benefits of action on suspected perils should be evaluated empirically. On global warming, he suggests cap-and-trade agreements and incentives to motivate players to make choices to limit emissions, rather than regulation. In a 2008 Boston Globe essay, Throwing Precaution to the Wind, Sunstein specifically uses the example of Bush's Iraq War as a precautionary tale for dealing with global warming:

"the Bush administration justified the war on explicitly precautionary grounds - that even the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iraq was so threatening that it demanded action. Indeed, the idea of "preemptive war" articulated by President Bush is a kind of precautionary principle. The nation went to war on the chance that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But this precaution is imposing a heavy price and creating serious risks for the future."

Sunstein warns against regulation, saying that regulation can invoke unforseen risks or even death -- banning DDT he says caused deaths from malaria -- a spurious argument, but one he uses along with others to warn people off the Precautionary Principle.

The "Cheney-Thing" on Climate - Something to Get Behind?

In the end, Friedman says:

"When I see a problem that has even a 1 percent probability of occurring and is "irreversible" and potentially "catastrophic," I buy insurance. That is what taking climate change seriously is all about.""

Cheney might use the one-percent argument to go to war, but he did so to invoke fear in the American public in order to gain their support. Suskind did not support the Cheney Doctrine, because it wasn't based in evidence and fact. Sunstein also criticized the Cheney Doctrine, comparing it unfavorably to the Precautionary Principle. Now Friedman incongruously corrals the whole mix to support: "doing the Cheney-thing on climate -- preparing for 1 percent." I'm not sure quite what to make of this kind of endorsement.

When "Effective EPA" is No Longer an Oxymoron?

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the agency's finding last April that greenhouse gases "(GHGs) endanger public health and welfare. Jackson reminded viewers that the Bush administration EPA had found that greenhouse gases endangered health and welfare, action compelled by the 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, but had "regrettably" stalled on moving forward with the agency's recommendation offering only "excuses" and "delay". Said Jackson: "this administration will not ignore science or the law any longer, nor will we avoid the responsibility we owe to our children and grandchildren."

Having finalized the Endangerment Finding, Jackson announced some first steps:

"Next month, large emitters in the U.S. will begin working with EPA to monitor their emissions. Beginning in 2011, large emitters will - for the first time - submit publicly available information that will allow us to meaningfully track greenhouse gas emissions over time....And starting next spring, large emitting facilities will be required to incorporate the best available methods for controlling greenhouse gas emissions when they plan to construct or expand."

The agency noted that it had no intention of putting burdens on small businesses.

The Indefensible Status Quo and Republicans Think They're Deep Throat(?)

Last weekend we wrote about a group of GOP Republicans who asked the EPA to withdraw the Endangerment Finding because of the CRU emails. We noted their tone of desperation, for instance that they tried to make their case by quoting an infamous, non-sensical UK climate denier. Jackson addressed the skeptics, and noted that the EPA's action was based on decades of research.

"We know that skeptics have and will continue to try to sow doubts about the science. It's no wonder that many people are confused. But raising doubts - even in the face of overwhelming evidence - is a tactic that has been used by defenders of the status quo for years. Those tactics have only served to delay and distract from the real work ahead, namely, growing our clean energy economy and freeing ourselves from foreign oil that endangers our security and our economy."

True to form, last week Representative James Sensenbrenner(R-WI) had said that CRU emails were "evidence of scientific facism". Today, having worn out facism, communism and nazism and Hitler references, EPA letter writer Representative Richard Issa (R-CA) summoned fellow Republican the deceased Richard Nixon for his incoherent campaign. Responding to Jonathan Pershing's (U.S. deputy special envoy for climate change) observation that the emails were inconsequential and the science on climate change was "incredibly robust", Issa declared: "Richard Nixon said that about what Deep Throat had outed about the break-in."

Green Jobs, Pragmatism and Details

Jackson noted that today's action would also assure the American people, scientists, and the world that the EPA is serious, after eight years of inaction, about acting on the challenge of climate change. She hoped that recent EPA action would restore the "credibility and the trust of the American people" by taking an "enduring" and "pragmatic"

"step[s] towards innovation, investment and implementation of technologies that reduce harmful emissions...green jobs, reduced dependence on foreign oil, and a better future for our children."

These are great steps for the EPA, although we recognize the devil is in the details. Just as the work wasn't over once Obama won the election, the work isn't over now that the waiver is finalized.

Of Course Denial Is Not The River In Africa:

The upheaval over the climate e-mails is business as usual for the climate science deniers or denialists - not "skeptics", and just a word on that first. Scientists are by nature "skeptics" and consider skepticism a valid approach to analysis. Merriam Webster says "skeptic" derives from the Greek skeptikos thoughtful, or skeptesthai to look. However, unfortunately for all of us, the climate data needs to be denied to be disbelieved. There's too much of it over too many years from too many different fields -- too much evidence to be skeptical about. Meanwhile, while some deniers happily call themselves deniers, others deniers take extreme offense, saying calling them deniers is dismissive or denigrating. But that's not the goal here. I'm not saying deniers don't have feelings, they have valid feelings, and they may also have issues facing reality or other problems.

For instance, just as people who don't recycle may sincerely have difficulty separating cans from cardboard, climate deniers may be incapable of swimming. We can empathize. Swimming may become an even more vital skill in the future. Deniers may fear being seen driving an electric car, fear heatstroke, fear malaria, fear fire, fear tornadoes, fear heatstroke, or fear moving from Florida, which could be affected most by impending climate change with rising sea waters, temperatures and incidence of malaria. Fear may incapacitate deniers reasoning faculties or propel them to convince themselves and others that no change is necessary. We empathize some more.

But if we chance-it, do nothing because of deniers' fears, so we can talk about emails in the UK some more, then we're making a choice that has the potential for far scarier outcomes than facing the mounds of evidence and choosing to do something. And we can do something, we can change, we can support industries that solve climate problems. Or we can do business as usual, and suffer the economic consequences of that. There are all sorts of innocent reasons why deniers are in denial. Only some of them nefarious like fear of losing the vote. But denial for any reason thwarts problem solving.

Rearranging The Deck Chairs on The Titanic. Well..?

We don't necessarily understand their reasons, but we recognize the deniers' rhetoric. If decades of ice core data, Antarctica data, arctic data, temperatures, sea levels, temperatures and, corral bleaching, tree ring data, and more, all show global warming over decades, they'll say "but today is cold out - global warming? Hahaha". If there's noise in a 30 year graph showing an up or down trend, they focus on a one year time period that shows the opposite trend, and throw that out as "proof" that the graph is false.

Here's one video, just one piece of evidence in mountains of available data, showing the decrease in perennial sea ice (seconds ~25-50):

Deniers will ignore all the evidence, focus on a bunch of emails and call it ClimateGate, and get everyone to run over to the starboard side of the ship, when there's an iceberg forward (although, actually, eventually that won't be a problem anymore.) Or they'll say the problem is that the scientists weren't communicating and weren't being transparent with the data. Of course last year the Wall Street Journal was complaining about "too much" global warming evidence. We're not saying that scientists shouldn't have thought twice about pouring vents and frustration into emails, but this is the sideshow which keeps us all spinning, keeps us doing nothing.

Meanwhile, if the sea level of the Mediterranean Sea rose 1 meter, the Nile River Basin, home to millions and cultivated to feed more millions, would lose 6.1 million people to displacement. Where would they all go? 4,500 square kilometers of Nile River Basin cropland would be lost, and the World Bank estimates a 6% loss in GDP to Egypt, and direct GDP losses for about 10 other countries. 6% GDP impact would raise to 16% with a 5 meter rise of sea level. That's one area of the world and one river basin, there's many others. Louisiana and Florida will be lost to rising seas. California and Australia will have more forest fires.

And while many results of climate change are known, other possible changes could be even more catastrophic if they happened. This is the case with The Great Ocean Conveyor Belt or thermohaline circulation. Scientists don't know what the outcome of the collapse of the thermohaline circulation would be. They don't know how that would further change climate, which areas would be warmer, how it would effect ocean salinity. Would the ocean become a pond? Scientists can't predict, but there's a chance that it could be catastrophic. There's never absolute surety in science, but the outcomes can be different both ways, better, or a lot worse.

Deniers like Inhofe would be brandishing threats about emails if he were in hip-waders up to his waist in sea water, rather than accept the evidence. That's the way its always been and that's the way it will always be. Fighting against mult-million dollar "pro-industry" campaigns by oil companies and the people they corral with their ideas, like Inhofe, has occupied scientists as much as the science. So when some people, (including scientists) now turn around and say that scientists need to be more transparent, if doesn't ring true. The data has been there and still is. These 'scientists aren't talking right' distractions only derail scientists from looking for solutions.