Funding denialism, documented

From the Dec 2013 issue of the journal Climatic Change:

Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations

Robert J. Brulle

Abstract

This paper conducts an analysis of the financial resource mobilization of the organizations that make up the climate change counter-movement (CCCM) in the United States. Utilizing IRS data, total annual income is compiled for a sample of CCCM organizations (including advocacy organizations, think tanks, and trade associations). These data are coupled with IRS data on philanthropic foundation funding of these CCCM organizations contained in the Foundation Center’s data base. This results in a data sample that contains financial information for the time period 2003 to 2010 on the annual income of 91 CCCM organizations funded by 140 different foundations. An examination of these data shows that these 91 CCCM organizations have an annual income of just over 900million,withanannualaverageof64 million in identifiable foundation support. The overwhelming majority of the philanthropic support comes from conservative foundations. Additionally, there is evidence of a trend toward concealing the sources of CCCM funding through the use of donor directed philanthropies.

The journal is peer-reviewed, I believe.

The full paper, sadly, costs a lot of money to see, but there is a bunch of supplementary online material (PDF) available for free.

The Guardian has a good article about the paper. Here's how it begins.

Conservative groups may have spent up to $1bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate change, according to the first extensive study into the anatomy of the anti-climate effort.

The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change. Such financial support has hardened conservative opposition to climate policy, ultimately dooming any chances of action from Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, the study found.

News of the unsurprising, and mighty discouraging news at that, but a shoutout to Prof. Brulle for making the effort to document the atrocities, and a vote of sympathy to him for the character assassination he will doubtless be suffering in the next few weeks.

(h/t: Wired UK, via Ars Technica)

The only parargaph I don't like in Carl Zimmer's ...

... latest column in the NYT is this:

In our smaller-brained ancestors, the researchers argue, neurons were tightly tethered in a relatively simple pattern of connections. When our ancestors’ brains expanded, those tethers ripped apart, enabling our neurons to form new circuits.

Call me a paranoiac, a fringe member of the reality-based community, or whatever: I worry that this sounds too much like it's happening in individual brains, over the course of individual lifetimes, as opposed to what is actually meant: this is what you'd see if you made a film of snapshots of the the typical brain, over many generations, in an evolving species.

Trying to keep the voice active is commendable, especially when the topic is ... ooooo, Science. BOring. [Or so you worry your editors might think] ... but when writing about evolution, it's also worth keeping in mind how the denialists will seek to parse every frickin phrase; as in the familiar [snickerchortle] "Was your grandfather a monkey on your father or mother's side?" [/snickerchortle], &c.

All of the rest of the article is fascinating. This being Zimmer, that comes as no surprise.

So, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, and an atheist walk into a bar ...

Ah, sorry. There's no punchline.

But it was a great way to spend Christmas Eve. Thanks y'all.

And praise god for diversity.

I might even say.

Because vernacular, of course.

Grammar question. How say you?

There is a myriad of reasons why ...

Or should it be, there are a myriad of reasons why ...

Consider also:

There are a score of reasons why ...
There is a score of reasons why ...

There is a dozen reasons why ...
There are a dozen reasons why ...

There are a handful of reasons why ...
There is a handful of reasons why ...

Is the verb after There supposed to agree with the quantity-noun (myriad, score, dozen, handful) or the word (noun) reasons? And does the of, where it appears, make any difference?

My own ear leans toward(s) is when there is an of and the other way, when not. Which seems inconsistent after the most fleeting of thought(s).

tia

Image credit, long overdue

Once upon a time, MK mailed me a cartoon, on paper. I used it as a bookmark (the paper kind, in a paper book), as I often do with such things, because they're fun to come across when I re-read the book years later. I liked this particular cartoon so much that when blogging came along, I decided to use it as my About Me image. Since then, I've been using it, or pieces of it, for my online avatar pretty much everywhere, including as the favicon for this site.

Thanks to Sean Taggart, I now know the artist: the late and apparently great John Callahan.

More here. This profile, from 1992, is especially recommended.

I wonder if Vint Cerf ever says this, about the Internet

His lawyers argued that the anticensorship diatribes in Screw made the magazine sufficiently political, though Mr. Goldstein himself ridiculed this defense, insisting that a reader’s erection “is its own redeeming value.”

I never heard of Al Goldstein until now, never read any of his publications, and he sure doesn't sound like he was any fun to be around, but for whatever reason, he seems like he deserves a salute.

Deep thought

I'm not much of a spiritual guy anymore, but there are some times when I feel guilty about not giving a reverential enough look at the just past full moon, with Jupiter right next door.

Lucky for them the War stayed Cold, then, huh?

From a story about misfortunes surrounding this year's running of the Olympic Torch:

Russia’s torches were manufactured in Siberia at a reported cost of $6.4 million by KrasMash, which usually makes submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

Or, maybe there's more power in the word flamer than we ever knew?

Hurrah. Finally.

As you probably know, I've been yammering about this for what feels like forever.

After years of mounting concerns that the antibacterial chemicals that go into everyday items like soap and toothpaste are doing more harm than good, the Food and Drug Administration said on Monday that it was requiring soap manufacturers to demonstrate that the substances were safe or to take them out of the products altogether.

The proposal was applauded by public health experts, who for years have urged the agency to regulate antimicrobial chemicals, warning that they risk scrambling hormones in children and promoting drug-resistant infections, among other things.

Actually, I did not know about the hormone thing. My beef has always been about the latter worry.

[Added] My message, now with authoritah!

The agency also said there was no evidence that the substances were any more effective in preventing infection than plain soap and water.

Rhetorical question: how much luck have you had trying to buy plain soap lately?

WTF, Michigan?

Thanks be to TBogg, who somehow finds the energy to keep up with the atrocities.

[Added] Also.

Yep. This deserves promotion, all right.

[ + ]

Hello, my fellow Americans!

On the left, your National Reconnaissance Office's new logo for their latest spy satellite. Don't you feel safer already?

On the right, something intended to make you fearful.

From a different time. And a different country.

---

(Image credit: PsionEdge, on Ars. From that source, you can also get to a long Ryan Lizza piece, subtitled "Why won’t the President rein in the intelligence community?", if you like. I haven't yet found it within me to get to page 2.)

Not so much

I came across that phrase in a NYT article and it surprised me a bit. It strikes me as a colloquialism that the style guide masters would have, if ever, only very recently allowed.

But look at this graph from Google Ngrams.

Maybe it's just that I'm wiped out from work, but I can't think of a way it would be used other than in this sense from the article:

The natural question is how long this situation can last. Fifty years ago a “woman doctor” was a gender-bending phenomenon. Now not so much.

And that sounds distinctly recent to me. The top Google hits support this sense.

There is, however, this, from a 1914 book.

Other examples?

Another measure of the GOP's increasing distance from reality

Compare and contrast this, from the NYT's Business section, ...

More than two dozen of the nation’s biggest corporations, including the five major oil companies, are planning their future growth on the expectation that the government will force them to pay a price for carbon pollution as a way to control global warming.

The development is a striking departure from conservative orthodoxy and a reflection of growing divisions between the Republican Party and its business supporters.

A new report by the environmental data company CDP has found that at least 29 companies, some with close ties to Republicans, including ExxonMobil, Walmart and American Electric Power, are incorporating a price on carbon into their long-term financial plans.

... with this ...

During the 2012 election, every Republican presidential candidate but one, Jon Huntsman, questioned or denied the science of climate change and rejected policies to deal with global warming.

Better sit down for this part:

But unlike the five big oil companies — ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP and Shell, all major contributors to the Republican party — Koch Industries, a conglomerate that has played a major role in pushing Republicans away from action on climate change, is ramping up an already-aggressive campaign against climate policy — specifically against any tax or price on carbon. Owned by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, the company includes oil refiners and the paper-goods company Georgia-Pacific.

---

[Added] Oops. Earlier noted by Ocean.

Time for a new calender

Having recently (re)gifted an Advent calendar, it occurs to me that the next can't-miss item for retailers (assuming this gets a nod of approval from Dr. Oz) would be a Lenten Calendar.

It would work like this: every day, for forty days, a maw would open, and you, or your child, would be required to deposit therein a piece of candy.

Variations abound. For example, you could get all of it back (less tithe) on Easter.

Headline of the Day

Today, we are all tackle-box-faces:

Researchers Control Computers Through Body Piercings

Why does Paul Krugman have to be right about everything?

Dunno. But he is.

Another problem, it seems to me, is that there just aren't that many ways (besides ground) to buy turkey, year-round, in the typical grocery store at least.

In a better world, just saying "context matters" would suffice

Of course we do not live anywhere near that world. On the upside, we have Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has the patience to elaborate and the chops in so doing to make me say, for only about the 4,037th time, that's what I think, and that's what I would have said, if only ...

Minor point of disagreement, with one of TNC's examples: I'm fine with Matt Barnes's use of "niggas" in the context of his tweet. I don't expect that I'll ever use the term, being white, and I have no problem with that (as all too many seem to). In fact, I think TNC's call of "inappropriate" on this one contradicted the thrust of his argument. But no biggie: he's entitled to judge differently, and I can imagine why he might. And, in fairness, he was contrasting "inappropriate" with some far more heinous events.

On a thoroughly unrelated note, I happened to have been watching the game that led to the tweet, and I thought Barnes deserved to be the only player booted. The third man into a transient exchange of shoves between a pair of NBA players never, to at least three decimal points, has any business being there. Save that "enforcer" nonsense for the NHL and pro wrestling, if you'll pardon the redundancy.

Oh, this is such a good read

Frank Chimero has written up and posted a version of a talk he recently gave, called "What Screens Want."

His talk was (ostensibly?) aimed at web developers, but there's no way you need to fit into that slot to follow it, or to love it.

Just for example, how's this for empathy, for every plain ol' computer user out there?

Computers, after all, are just shaky towers of nested abstractions: from the code that tells them what to do, to the interfaces that suggest to the user what’s possible to do with them. Each level of abstraction becomes an opportunity to make work more efficient, communicate more clearly, and assist understanding. Of course, abstractions also become chances to complicate what was clear, slow down what was fast, and fuck up what was perfectly fine.

And this?

So what is the answer? I found this quote by Ted Nelson, the man who invented hypertext. He’s one of the original rebel technologists, so he has a lot of things to say about our current situation. Nelson:

The world is not yet finished, but everyone is behaving as if everything was known. This is not true. In fact, the computer world as we know it is based upon one tradition that has been waddling along for the last fifty years, growing in size and ungainliness, and is essentially defining the way we do everything. My view is that today’s computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life. And the imposition of inappropriate structures throughout the computer is the imposition of inappropriate structures on the things we want to do in the human world.

Emphasis mine. [...]

Also, to illustrate some of what he's saying, Frank has clips from James Burke's Connections, Eadweard Muybridge's work with horses, and The West Wing. Featuring CJ. I mean, the shared nerd porn interests alone ought to do it, don't you think?

Go, and enjoy.

(h/t: Jenna Wortham, via a Scuttlebot post which was presented as a sidebar on the NYT's Bits blog, which I saw while reading a note about Twitter and Perfect Forward Security, and omg, when the h/t is getting to be longer than the post, it is waaay past time to click the Publish button)

__________

[Added] Of course the first blockquote above reminded me of one of the classics from the mesozoic (when we had just evolved from hamsters running along wires strung between tin cans, and thence onto typewriter keyboards, and were suddenly able to sign up for Automatically Delivered Email Newsletters), Joel Spolsky's post "article," The Law of Leaky Abstractions. Joel does eventually get into specific programming examples, but don't let those throw you, if you're not a programmer. The opening, the general ideas, and most importantly, the view of what today's programmers face when trying to relate to non-programmers are well worth your time, especially if you liked Frank Chimero's piece. Even if the words are more than *gasp* ten years old.

Stool seeks pigeon

$29.95 for that piece of crap?

(Seen on Wonkette, I'm sorry to say)

Testy!

From a short interview of Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of the C++ programming language (emph. added):

C++ was and is meant to be a tool for professionals and for people who takes programming seriously. It can and is used by novices, but the too often heard complaint that “C++ isn’t for everybody and not every project is easily done using C++” is based on a seriously miscomprehension. There can be no programming language that is perfect for everybody and for everything. C++ doesn’t try to be everything for everybody, but it is rather good at the tasks for which it was designed – mostly systems programming, software infrastructure, and resource-constrained applications. C++ dominates the fields where its strengths are needed. The fact that you can write a simple web app easier using JavaScript or Ruby does not bother me. Basically, C++ was not primarily designed for tasks of medium complexity, medium performance, and medium reliability, written by programmers of medium skills and experience.

So he says now.

There are many ahems one might link to. Since he is a hero of mine, I'll be kind and leave it at this "How long" question.

(h/t: StatusCode issue 45)

From the Department of Better You Than Me

Or, First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All The Lawyers, Chapter 4927.

But whatever the case, all hail condolences to Dan Amira of New York mag's Daily Intelligencer blog:

For religious conservatives, howling over the so-called "war on Christmas" has become an annual holiday tradition almost as enjoyable as Christmas itself. On Tuesday, Sarah Palin seeks to capitalize on the phenomenon with the release of her newest book, Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas. Daily Intelligencer purchased the Palin-narrated audiobook from a local bookstore, where it was on sale early, and listened to all four-and-a-half hours, which is technically not a violation of the Geneva Convention if you're getting paid to do it, New York's legal team insists.

At the link is a Christmas tree, whose ornaments are themselves links to "some of the book's more memorable lines."

I myself have clicked none of them. Self-loathing only goes so far.

Tempting!

[ + ]

You gotta think about a million people will be registering names of their opponents. It'll be the next dot-com dot-fail boom!

So. Not actually ALL bad.

Kids, try to live your life so that you never have to ... breathe a sigh of relief? ... when seeing your name in the paper, in a sentence like this.

Mr. Abramoff, who was convicted of defrauding lenders in the deal but was not thought by prosecutors to have had a hand in the Boulis murder, ...

Yeah, that Jack.

Meanwhile, the Times is apparently amazed that New York-based mobsters have interests in Florida.

All together now!    No one could have predicted ...

And you thought that label for those posts of mine was just libtard mewling

From a short article in the NYT:

In a new book, “Reflections on Judging,” Judge [Richard A.] Posner, a prolific author who also teaches at the University of Chicago Law School, said, “I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion” in the case. He noted that the Indiana law in the Crawford case is “a type of law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.”

Judge Posner, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, extended his remarks in a video interview with The Huffington Post on Friday.

[...]

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Judge Posner noted that the primary opinion in the 2008 Supreme Court decision upholding the law had been written by Justice John Paul Stevens, “who is, of course, very liberal.” The outcome of the case goes to show, he said, that oftentimes, “judges aren’t given the facts that they need to make a sound decision.”

Wingnuts screeching about RINOs selling out to the liberal media establishment so they can get invited to Georgetown cocktail parties in 5, 4, 3, ...

POTS-down Confluence

Factoid of the day:

The traditional landline is not expected to last the decade in a country where nearly 40 percent of households use only wireless phones. Even now, less than 10 percent of households have only a landline phone, according to government data that counts cable-based phone service in that category.

Lots more interesting things to contemplate here.

You might want to sit down before reading, so as not to hurt yourself when you keel over from the SHOCK of learning how the phone companies think that while we're getting rid of landlines, we should also do away with anything resembling consumer protection, because Progress and Innovation, &c.

So, the good thing about the government shutdown is ...

... at least this kind of crap won't happen anymore.

On Aug. 8, Mr. Levison closed Lavabit rather than, in his view, betray his promise of secure e-mail to his customers. The move, which he explained in a letter on his Web site, drew fervent support from civil libertarians but was seen by prosecutors as an act of defiance that fell just short of a crime.

The full story of what happened to Mr. Levison since May has not previously been told, in part because he was subject to a court’s gag order. But on Wednesday, a federal judge unsealed documents in the case, allowing the tech entrepreneur to speak candidly for the first time about his experiences. He had been summoned to testify to a grand jury in Virginia; forbidden to discuss his case; held in contempt of court and fined $10,000 for handing over his private encryption keys on paper and not in digital form; and, finally, threatened with arrest for saying too much when he shuttered his business.

</sarcasm>

Science: It's cool, bitchez

How can you not adore a headline like this?

A Wealth of Data in Whale Breath

(tile: cf.)

Or, you might be two steps behind, and headed in the wrong direction

But a nice sentiment, nonetheless.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you are two steps ahead.
    -- Fannie Flagg

Some new research on crack and meth addiction. Or "addiction."

Pretty fascinating article about work done by a Columbia professor named Carl Hart, and a book he has recently published.

It'd be great to hear him interviewed by Mark Kleiman.

The mind reels. (But, really, how else to stay on track with Ms. Noonan?)

Not even a shorter. An actual quote:

Oh, Peggy’s reaching for her martini shaker again.

Maybe it grates on him [Vladimir Putin] that in his time some of the stupider Americans have crowed about American exceptionalism a bit too much ...

Unpossible!

__________

Bonus fun fact: Firefox's spell-checker simply does not recognize exceptionalism.

Communists.