Team B, Red Teaming and Steve Koonin

The Trump administration has been pushing the idea of a "Red Team" to re-examine the EPAs endangerment finding.  As Eli has pointed out, this is not a Red Team effort but a Team B attempt.  Red teams bring in experts in the field who have not been involved in a specific report to critically evaluate it.  Team B was a group run by Richard Pipes to exaggerate Soviet capabilities in the mid-1970s in order to justify an arms build up by tearing down CIA analysis.  Team B brings in ideologues to write a report that conforms to the ideology of those who commission their work. 

Joshua Rovner, in his book, Facixing the Facts, National Security and the Politics of Intelligence"points out where the Pipes Team B exercise went

The actual intelligence picture was irrelevant.  Team B simply assumed that Moscow was actively seeking any technology that would allow it to gain a decisive strategic advantage

 And Team B's imagination was quite fertile 

The Team B exercise corrupted the estimative process in ways that were wholly predictable.  The theoretical benefits of competition were lost because the composition of Team B was lopsided, because the panel spent as much time criticizing the intelligence community as it did evaluating the Soviet threat, and because the outside group relied on open sources.  The administration was warned of these problems in advance but did not intervene to insulate the NIE process from political bias.  On the contrary, it allowed the exercise to proceed in order to satisfy domestic political imperatives.

 There is much more at the link detailing the disastrous errors in the Team B report but the worst outcome was Star Wars, as the following Reagan administration used it as justification for the Star Wars build out. 

So let the bunnies count the ways that this administration's EPA administrator will build out his Team B

• The membership of Team B Climate will be lopsided

• Team B will spend as much time criticizing the IPCC and National Academy reports as evaluating the threat from climate change

• Team B will rely on open sources, lord help us, like Watts Up With That, Curry's Climate Etc.

Any bunny thinking not, well Eli has a few carrots to wager on each proposition.

History Commons has a long discussion of Team B's fantasies including

Lack of Facts Merely Proof of Soviets' Success - One example that comes up during the debate is B’s assertion that the USSR has a top-secret nonacoustic antisubmarine system. While the CIA analysts struggle to point out that absolutely no evidence of this system exists, B members conclude that not only does the USSR have such a system, it has probably “deployed some operation nonacoustic systems and will deploy more in the next few years.” The absence of evidence merely proves how secretive the Soviets are, they argue. 

Climateball players have seen this before, and indeed, the run up to the Iraq War featured exactly the same playbook (see History Commons).

Brad Plumer points to Joseph Majkut at the Niskanen Center wondering what could be wrong with such an exercise.   Now Brad is a reasonable guy and the Niskanen Center is reasonable as real conservatives can be, but when Eli points out that the pawn is poison Majkut replies

Though I agree a simple back and forth (as suggested by Koonin) could be just an intellectual comb-over. https://t.co/yORJmGaaTu

— Joseph Majkut (@JosephMajkut) June 30, 2017

Koonin, of course, is the apparatchik who tried to hijack the APS's drafting of their statement on climate change which required, amongst other things, that wiser heads on the drafting committee step in and Koonin huffing off in full regalia.  Eli has written several brilliant posts on the entire farrago but there was one thing that he missed coming from early on in the process, February 2013, which shows what Koonin was up to

The type of statement APS should make – simple & declarative or one that incorporates many details – needs consideration. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is also due to report on climate change in 2013; using their review as a trigger for an in-depth look at the APS statement is appropriate.

Commentary: J. Trebes agreed that using the IPCC review as a trigger is appropriate. Using it as a scientific basis for our statement will mitigate scientific argument within the APS. S. Koonin cautioned that APS should create its own statement and make its own judgment, separate from the IPCC report.

And he tried, oh my how he tried.

Russia, China, and cyber acts of war

I've been dumbfounded by the willingness/denialism of Republicans and of parties in other democracies to be the manipulated tools of the hostile Russian government. Apparently, rabid nationalism can be turned on and off as circumstances warrant.

OTOH, until recently I've been moderately less-exercised about what the Russians had actually done. Hostile countries steal secrets, so that level of espionage is standard activity. They also selectively release stolen secrets, leavened with lies, to weaken their opponents, so there's nothing out of line in that Russian behavior. What's out of line is that it actually contributed to their preferred candidate's success in the US, with little political blowback during the election (or afterwards).

Maybe this specific kind of election interference should be considered worse than it is normally considered as espionage, but the limited reprisal Obama has appeared to authorize seemed appropriate.

One thing that is different is the more recent news that Russian tried to do more than steal information and spread lies, but appear to have made a serious effort to hack the election systems. What I've read is that was more of a recon than an actual attempt to change the results, but it is different from everything else they did.

Everything else is normal espionage that requires a normal level of retaliation. Hacking an election to stop the elected candidate from getting office is overthrowing the American government, and it's an act of war. I think it's equivalent to an assassination attempt. Maybe it's not overtly violent, but unless you're a pacifist, there are things that are equivalent or worse than violence, and overthrowing democracy is one of them.

An act of war doesn't require a declaration of war in response, it just requires a proportionate response. Hacking the medical records of senior Russian officials and changing their medical prescriptions strikes me as a proportionate response.

I don't know if that needs to be done now (and won't anyway given that the Russian candidate now runs our country) but should be the guide for the future, and communicated to Russians for purposes of deterrence.

The one other factor that I haven't seen discussed is how Russian and Chinese behavior seem so different. China is our real, long-term rival. Putin's incompetence has used up half of the time Russia has to transform itself before oil becomes useless, and there's zero likelihood he'll now start a transition. China, on the other hand, is not engaged in these kinds of political attacks on the US, and that's interesting from a foreign policy perspective.

Seems like China is treating us a potential future enemy - its massive hacking of our systems are designed to crash those systems if it needs to in the future. Russia is treating us as a current enemy. Different tactics, requiring different responses from us.

Advice From teh Communicators

An evergreen across science communication is that scientists don't know how to communicate science.  Eli has confronted this issue before at the cost of ticking (permanently) off a bunch of communicators

. . .  a whole lot of other people appear to think that scientists are lousy communicators, and indeed, a whole lot of scientists agree and there are workshops, meetings and even, shudder, blogs, devoted to self improvement, or not. This goes into the file under missing the point.

It's not that scientists are or are not lousy communicators (say that and Eli will lock you in a room with Richard Alley for example), but that journalists are lousy communicators. It's their fucking (emphasis added) job and they are screwing it up to a fare-thee-well. It ain't just climate either. What journalists produce often makes the average cut and paste student paper blush with modesty

Well that, of course points to the communicators, who are not just journalists, and indeed some journalists are doing a good job communicating science, others, of course, not so much.  The not so much camp is dominated by the opinion communicators like Bret Stephens, like Matt King Coal Ridley, like James Didn't Read the Literature Delingpole and others.  The perversity of this is the New York Times, which hired at the same time Bret Stephens and Brad Palmer Plumer and now Lisa Friedman in addition to the esteemed Justin Gillis.  Of course what happens is the trio of reporters best stories get stepped on by the Opinion (don't have anything to do with us boss) Section's know nothings, the public hears cacophony, rolls eyes, decides nothing is settled, climate change is just a side show and moves on.

Of course, there are not just reporters, there are communications experts, the various deficit modelers and the cultural cognition folk and more.  Most of these are simply trying to cut themselves a piece of the pie.  RPJr when he was in the business was a great one for pie slicing.

ATTP has a recent comment on this based on a talk Doug McNeil gave.  And sums it up as

The environment can be difficult and challenging; we should try to say interesting things but also be careful of what we say; it should be relevant but not too complex; we should know the audience, and we should repeat the message.

As fate would have the June 2017 copy of APSNews came across Eli's mailbox (the Heartland Institute never set the Bunny so much as a cross word) and on the back page was an essay by Bill Foster, a member of the US House of Representatives and a PhD physicist who sums up science communication with this gem of advice

On the campaign trail, I learned that there is a long list of neurons that you have to deaden to convert a scientist's brain in to a politician's.  When you speak with voters, you must lead with conclusions rather than complex analysis of underlying evidence -- something that is very unnatural to a scientist.  You also have to repeat your main campaign message over and over again, since you will be lucky if a typical voter will hear you speak for a few seconds -- and those few seconds have to include your campaign message.

0.04% Is a Lot of Molecules

An evergreen in the denial crowd is that CO2 is only a very small part of the atmosphere so how could it make a difference.

ADDED: In the comments Mark B points out that

The silliness is that it is precisely because CO2 is a very small part of atmosphere that humans are able to meaningfully change it's concentration. For example we are depleting O2 at the same rate as we are adding CO2, but the change is a negligible percentage of the normal content so only the most pedantic would dwell on it. That is, we've changed the CO2 concentration by about 45% and the O2 concentration by about 0.06%.

The short answer is that the atmosphere is very big.   Eli has a nice BOE (back of the envelope, not quite a Fermi problem but Eli would be quite pleased if others thought it in the neighborhood of same) answer

"... the estimation of rough but quantitative answers to unexpected questions about many aspects of the natural world. The method was the common and frequently amusing practice of Enrico Fermi, perhaps the most widely creative physicist of our times. Fermi delighted to think up and at once to discuss and to answer questions which drew upon deep understanding of the world, upon everyday experience, and upon the ability to make rough approximations, inspired guesses, and statistical estimates from very little data."

 It starts by estimating the number of molecules in a m³ of air.  Well a Bunny who knew Loschmidt's number 2.7 x 10¹⁹ cm^-3 or 2.7 x 10²⁵ m^-3  (which is the same thing since 1 m³ is 10⁶ cm³ ) could start there or you could rearrange the ideal gas law

pV = nRT to n/V = p/RT

Since 1 atm is 101, 325 N/m², the gas constant R is  8.314 J K^-1mol^-1 and 0 C is 273 K

n/V = 101 325 N/m² /(8.314 J K^-1mol^-1 x 273.15 K) = 44.64 mol m^-3 

which is a little surprising, since the average weight of a molecule of air is ~ 29 g or 0.029 kg so a cubic meter would weigh 1.3 kg but that is another direction.  In any case since there are 6.02 x 10²³ molecules per mole that gives us Loschmidt's number again, in case a bunny has forgotten it or 2.69 x 10²⁵ m^-3.

If 400 ppm or 0.04% of that is CO2 there are  1.07 x 10 ²¹ CO2 molecule in a cubic meter.  A useful estimate of the average distance between CO2 molecules is the inverse of the cube root. of the number density.  That is 4.5 x 10^-8 m.

So how does that compare to the wavelength of light at which CO2 absorbs light in the IR.  Hmm, that's about 14 microns.  A micron is a millionth of a meter, So how many CO2 molecules are there along one wavelength of IR light where it is capable of absorbing.

About 300.

That's enough