On Earth Day, which was a week ago Monday, I spoke to a seminar class in the natural sciences at our local college, Lyndon State. It was fun talking to the students, and I was reassured to see how committed they are to doing something about global warming, which was the main subject of my talk. I learned the most, however, from a professor who sat in on the class. He changed my mind about wind power.

I had met physicist Ben Luce by chance at a lecture in St. Johnsbury over the winter. We enjoyed speaking to each other and decided to get together again sometime. I was surprised during that first conversation when this obviously intelligent person, an alternative energy and even wind activist who has all the numbers and regulations at his fingertips, came out strongly against wind power, not only in our home state but pretty much anywhere on land anywhere in the Northeast. (He believes it makes sense in the Midwest, where the resource is “two dimensional,” that is, it can be spread out over a plain, rather than along a one-dimensional mountain ridge. Ben’s advocacy of wind in New Mexico helped lead to the installation of several hundred megawatts of wind generation there.)  He told me that industrial wind development of a magnitude that could make any significant contribution to the Northeast’s energy needs would set us back years if not decades by giving alternative energy a bad name both politically and economically.

That short conversation had me intrigued but not convinced. I’ve been reading the papers and so on, so I’ve been aware of the resistance to the ridge line wind projects in northern Vermont, Lowell and Sheffield in particular, but I assumed it was motivated by NIMBY-ism or knee-jerk environmentalism in people who aren’t aware how important it is to cut  greenhouse emissions.  Last week when Ben sat me down and walked me through the numbers, he convinced me that economic and scientific logic comes down strongly on the side of resistance as well.

In a nutshell, wind power is not only highly destructive to Vermont’s lovely and iconic mountain ridge lines, it also loses hands down to solar, technically and economically, while solar is nowhere near as destructive to the landscape. This is a no-brainer. It would take wind development on half the state’s ridge lines to supply our state’s relatively modest electrical needs, while it would only take 1 percent of our already existing farmland to do the job with solar. Furthermore, Ben writes in an e-mail, “Focusing on just Vermont’s energy demand is irrelevant to the climate issue (its a red herring so to speak): VT’s consumption is only a few percent of the overall region’s demand. … What really matters is how the overall region is going to significantly reduce emissions, and this is where wind falls down badly.” If ALL of Vermont’s ridge lines were dedicated to wind, they would supply only about 1 percent of the Northeast’s energy demand. This is down at the noise level.

“Blasting and bulldozing ridge lines for wind power in Vermont is therefore analogous to cutting down a forest for a garden when there is already a large field prepared adjacent,” Ben writes elsewhere. “It just doesn’t make sense on scientific grounds, even from the standpoint of combating climate change.”

Wind advocates tend to emphasize the potential for Vermont alone, while neglecting to point out that solar could do the job much less destructively and also be capable of supplying a large fraction of the Northeast’s needs and therefore having a real impact on the region’s greenhouse emissions. Wind advocates “hide the fact that we are not supplying wind energy to Vermont for the most part anyways,” writes Ben, “because we are selling most of the credits to utilities in other states (while we double-count the same power towards our own ‘renewable energy targets’). This latter part is basically just fraud. … The real reason there is a wind rush on is simply that people haven’t studied it much, it became somewhat cheaper more quickly than solar, and because utilities despise distributed generation.”

This brings up another of wind’s drawbacks: transmission lines. Owing both to the small capacity of the local electrical grid and the fact that it’s not a “smart grid,” the Sheffield wind project (I’m tempted to call them “wind factories,” as the performers at Bread and Puppets did last summer) actually has to discard power when its output exceeds local demand. A wind project is a centralized power station–in this respect it’s like a fossil fuel-burning power plant–so significant wind development leads to the need for more transmission lines. Conservative goals for wind power in the Northeast over the next fifteen years would “carry transmission costs of between $7 billion and $12 billion” and require four thousand miles of new lines! These costs aren’t often mentioned by advocates. Even ignoring them, while the cost of wind dropped until about 2000, it has been increasing ever since, mostly due to the commodity costs associated with the enormous metal infrastructure involved. And in Vermont there is the added cost of massive road building in inhospitable terrain. Meanwhile, solar is by its nature distributed and less capital intensive, and its cost continues to drop. It’s already competitive with wind on its face, while the future costs of wind from transmission corridors and so on remain hidden.

“If you add in all the impact and cost issues, then wind looks really crazy,” Ben concludes.

Makes sense to me, and it’s also refreshing to see such clear thinking and explanation. There’s no easy answer to the daunting challenge of global warming. We’ll need all the clarity and level-headedness we can get .

Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 8:45 am/12:30 pm
Short talk introducing Lonnie Thompson, and Book Signing
American Polar Society 75th Anniversary Meeting and Symposium:
The Polar Regions in the 21st Century: Globalization, Climate Change and Geopolitics
Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts

Wednesday, June 3, 2009, 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Panel discussion on Censorship of Science
at the
Global Forum on Freedom of Expression
Oslo, Norway

Monday, March 2, 2009, 4-5 PM
Interview on Stand UP! with Pete Dominick
P.O.T.U.S. SIRIUS 110 / XM 130

Saturday, October 4, 2008, 8:00 PM
Censoring Science on Book TV (C-SPAN2)
This show streams on the Web, here.
It was edited from talks given by Mark Bowen and Jim Hansen
in Lexington, Massachusetts on June 1, 2008 in an event sponsored by the Lexington Global Warming Action Coalition

Friday, July 18, 2008
Panel discussion on Restructuring U.S. Science Policy
at the annual meeting of the progressive blogging community:
Netroots Nation (formerly YearlyKos), Austin, Texas

June 1, 2008
Talks by and discussion with Jim Hansen and Mark Bowen
Sponsored by the Lexington Global Warming Action Coalition
Cary Hall, Lexington, Massachusetts
(Daily Kos features a wonderful diary about this event by a “Kossack” who attended. It was also covered by New England Cable News, LGWAC has produced a video of the event, and it has been broadcast on C-SPAN’s Book TV.)

May 22, 2008
Interview on Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview (podcast)

April 29, 2008
“Climate Change from the Mountains to the Sea”
Talk in connection with Earth Day
Edinboro University, Edinboro, Pennsylvania

March 22, 2008
Talk: “Climate Change from the Mountains to the Sea”
American Alpine Club, New England Section, Annual Dinner, Weston, MA

March 21, 2008
Interview with Jim Hansen and Mark Bowen
Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez

March 11, 2008
Book reading: Censoring Science
Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, MA

February 17, 2008
Censoring Science, talk and book signing
Annual meeting of the American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science, Boston, MA

February 15, 2008
Interviewed along with Jim Hansen on Nature magazine’s Climate Podcast

February 2, 2008
Interviewed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Ring of Fire (audio or video)

 January 27, 2008
Interview on The John Batchelor Show, KFI-AM, Los Angeles

 January 26, 2008
Interview on Left Jab, XM Satellite Radio, Channel 167 (Air America)

January 14, 2008
Interview on the Michelangelo Signorile Show
Sirius Satellite Radio, Channel 109 (OutQ)

January 13, 2008
Interview on The John Batchelor Show
WABC Radio, New York City

January 10, 2008
Talk: “Responsible Climate Science Reporting”
19th Annual Weather Summit: Understanding & Communicating Climate Change More Effectively
Steamboat Springs, CO

January 8, 2008
Interviewed along with Jim Hansen
Fresh Air with Terry Gross, National Public Radio

October 27, 2007
Talk: “Thin Ice – Dramatic Climate Change on the €˜Roof of the World’ ”
Buddhist Himalaya Festival
Rheged, Penrith, Cumbria, United Kingdom

October 10, 2007
Talk: “Climate Change from the Mountains to the Sea”
Freeport Public Library, Freeport, ME

Sepember 8, 2007
Dinner Talk: “Climate Change from the Mountains to the Sea”
Mount Washington Symposium for Air and Climate
75th Anniversary of the Mount Washington Observatory
Bretton Woods, NH

March 31, 2007
Talk: Thin Ice
Climate Change Symposium
American Alpine Club Annual Meeting
Bend, OR

March 15, 2007
Talk: Climate Change from the Mountains to the Sea
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, NY

September 28, 2006
Talk: Thin Ice
Concord Academy
Concord, MA

September 20, 2006
Book reading: Thin Ice
Meet the Author Series, Brandeis University
Waltham, MA

May 27 – June 4, 2006
Two talks related to “Thin Ice”
Skeptics and Secular Humanist Cruise to Alaska,
sponsored by The Center for Inquiry

May 16, 2006
Talk: “Thin Ice”
The Explorers Club, New England Chapter
Cambridge, MA

May 10, 2006
Talk: Thin Ice
Annual Physics Banquet, University of Massachusetts – Lowell
Lowell, MA

March 30, 2006
Talk in support of Clean Power Now and Cape Wind
Cathedral Church of St. Paul
Boston, MA

February 3, 2006
Book reading: Thin Ice
Porter Square Books
Cambridge, MA

January 31, 2006
Talk: “Thin Ice”
Physics Colloquium, Brandeis University
Waltham, MA

January 22, 2006
Talk: “Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World’s Highest Mountains”
Lexington Global Warming Action Coalition
Lexington, MA

December 1, 2005
Book reading: Thin Ice
Trident Booksellers
Boston, MA

November 17, 2005
Book reading: Thin Ice
Northshire Bookstore
Manchester, VT

November 10, 2005
Talk about the writing of Thin Ice
Wellesley College Authors on Stage, Wellesley College Club
Wellesley, MA

Bill not only reports magnificently on the subject, he is also eloquent on the subtleties and responsibilities of reporting on such a complex, ideology-laden issue. Most other journalists could benefit from reading and watching his work.

Here’s an excellent recent piece by Bill on the ABC News Web site.

I first noticed a sea-change in the climate science reporting at the Times about two years ago in Justin’s first in-depth piece on climate, a story about the connection between the chaotic weather we’ve been experiencing for the past few years and global warming. The story was wonderfully clear, and reflected current scientific knowledge and uncertainty quite accurately, in my opinion. Justin took a rational approach. He went to the best scientists, used his own intelligence to understand the data and the crux of the matter, and reported his findings simply and straightforwardly. The previous reporter on this beat at the Times (I’m afraid that would be Andy Revkin) had approached the subject as if it were a political issue and he was an investigative reporter. He wasn’t particularly interested in getting to the bottom of scientific issues himself. Instead, he would go out of his way to get the “other side” of the story, which meant that he treated people with little scientific expertise, a history of intellectual dishonesty, or some very obvious bias–propagandists basically–as if they were experts on a par with the world’s leading scientists. As a result, as insightful as his articles could sometimes be, they were generally garbled and delivered mixed and misleading messages. I saw this as a sort of intellectual laziness and shirking of responsibility. Not so with Justin. I know how hard he worked on the Lonnie profile, for example, because he talked with me about it, off and on, for about six months.

I recommend all of Justin’s pieces, and especially his profile of Charles David Keeling. You can find most of them here and here.

And, Justin, please keep up the good work. We need it. It’s helpful.

From the Editor’s Choice section of the 8 June issue of Science:

MICROBIOLOGY

Hygiene Can Hurt

As human societies urbanize, chronic inflammatory disorders become more apparent. The hygiene hypothesis suggests that individuals exposed to infection in childhood are less likely to develop inflammatory disease because exposure to microorganisms is important for stimulating responses that maintain epithelial cell integrity. Hence, in urban environments, reduced contact with the full diversity of the microbial world may be leading to the increased incidence of inflammatory disorders. Hanski et al. took a random sample of 118 adolescents from towns, villages, and isolated dwellings in eastern Finland, tested their immune function and allergic responses, surveyed their skin microflora, and investigated the biodiversity within their homes. They found several significant correlations, not least that low biodiversity was surprisingly strongly associated with atopy, and concluded that humans need to interact with natural environments for their physical health, not just for their peace of mind.

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, 10.1073/pnas.1205624109 (2012).

Last week’s issue of Science magazine included a letter I had written to them a couple of months ago.  The letter is pretty much self-explanatory; I’ve appended it below. It’s about an attempt to revise history that I found in the magazine’s obituary of John Marburger, the former science adviser to Mr. Bush.

Although I thought the record ought to be corrected (and am gratified that Science has agreed), I saw no need to bring up the widespread criticism that Marburger faced during his tenure, as some obituary writers have (links here and here). On the other hand, it probably is worth pointing out that Nature, which is published in Britain and which did allude to the criticism in its obituary, also did a much better job of covering the censorship while it was taking place than Science did. Science is based in Washington and is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One wonders whether the editors felt constrained by the fact that, historically, Republican administrations have reacted to bad news from the scientific community, be it in their findings or in their policy or political statements, by cutting science funding.

It is true that John Marburger staunchly defended the indefensible acts of the Bush Administration when it twisted, suppressed, and censored scientific findings, on his watch. However, most of the insiders I interviewed for the book told me that he was probably one of the good guys, one of the many “governors of occupied territories” in that administration who tried their best to do the right thing under very difficult circumstances. Another was Dr. James Mahoney,  Assistant Secretary for Oceans and Atmosphere in the Commerce Department. Commerce oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where the suppression of climate science was institutionalized. Mahoney was additionally placed at the head of the US Climate Change Science Program, an organization that Bush (or, most likely, Dick Cheney) set up, ostensibly to coordinate climate science across the many agencies that conduct it, but in fact to control, spin, and suppress it. I was told that Mahoney, like Marburger, chose to work from the inside to limit the damage, rather than to turn in his badge. I don’t know what I would have done had I stood in either of these men’s shoes; but, as I say in the letter, it is not my place to second guess them. They may very well have been doing the bravest and most ethical thing.

When the editor from Science got in touch with me a few weeks ago, mainly to ask for references, I came across another case of history being rewritten–or, in this case, erased altogether. The first reference in my letter is to a report on political interference with climate science that was prepared by the House Oversight Committee–which was controlled, admittedly, by Democrats at the time. It is a solid report, nevertheless, based on extensive documentary evidence and fact-finding. The Oversight Committee is now controlled by Republicans. When I searched its Web site for the report, I found that it had been expunged, along with the transcripts of testimony that had been given at the congressional hearings that provided much of the basis for it. My guess would be that this is illegal.

Furthermore, it was quite depressing to skim over the titles of the most recent reports by the Republican majority, since this brought me face to face with the toxicity and childishness of the present discourse in Washington. They read like headlines from the editorial page of a right-wing tabloid, or press bulletins from a Tea Party public relations firm. Here are the four most recent:

Report: “Uncovering the True Impact of the Obamacare Tax Credits: Increases the Deficit, Expands Welfare through the Tax Code, and Implements a New Marriage Tax Penalty” – October 27, 2011

Report: How Obama’s Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs – September 22, 2011

Report: Broken Government: How the Administrative State has Broken President Obama’s Promise of Regulatory Reform – September 14, 2011

Report: Doubling Down on Failure: Before Asking for a New Stimulus Package, Will the Obama Administration Admit that the First One Failed? – September 8, 2011

This puts me in mind of a remark I came across in a column in our local newspaper up here in Vermont, written by one of our local treasures, outdoor writer Gary Moore. (This is the first time I’ve ever seen him stray into politics.)

I have been frustrated, embarrassed and angered by what has been happening in Washington as our Senators and Congressmen pontificate and obfuscate and do little of worth.

I am reminded of what Henry Ward Beecher wrote in the late 19th century.

“The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will and the other from a strong won’t.”

I’d prefer not to contemplate the level of scientific censorship we will see if any of the current choices on the Republican side are elected president. We may look back on the Bush/Cheney years as the good old days.

Anyway, here’s the letter. The links to Science and Nature may be problematic since they’re behind paywalls. If you wish, you can find additional details on the “resources” page of the Censoring Science Web site–Paul Thacker’s Freedom of Information Act documents are especially interesting–or in the book itself.

The one thing I wish I had added to the letter was that, before James Connaughton became Bush’s most trusted advisor on climate and other environmental matters, he worked as a lobbyist in Washington for major industrial polluters. His firm helped General Electric and ARCO, for example, skirt responsibility for their Superfund waste sites.

Science Adviser Faced Tough Political Climate

Raymond Orbach’s retrospective on the life of John Marburger contains an astounding statement that deserves a rebuttal. After observing that, in his role as science adviser to George W. Bush, Marburger dealt with “formidable scientific issues…including stem cell research and climate change,” Orbach asserts that “those who differed with Administration policy during his tenure often injected politics into the scientific debate.  They would resort to intimidating attack, mixing their ideology with scientific argument.”

This is at best arguable and at worst a gross distortion of fact and history. A vast amount of documentary evidence and congressional testimony (1–5) demonstrates that Orbach has it exactly wrong. From its inception, the Bush Administration injected politics into scientific issues, evoking outrage in scientists, both in the United States and abroad (6–8).

From what I could tell as I interviewed numerous government scientists and other public servants in the course of  writing a book about the censorship of climate science under the Bush Administration (9), John Marburger was a fine man who fought the good fight under very difficult circumstances. He made his own decisions on how to deal with the widespread distortion, censorship, and suppression of science that took place on his watch, and it is not our place to second-guess him. He was, as Orbach writes, “the longest-serving presidential science adviser in U.S. history,” but we should also remember that President Bush did not seek much advice about science. He waited an unprecedented 10 months before even appointing a science adviser, and he stripped away the title “assistant to the president” as he did so (10, 11). Thus, Marburger never had direct access to the president. Bush’s top adviser on climate was James Connaughton, the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, who was a lawyer (12).

Mark Bowen

1.     U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Political interference with climate change science under the Bush Administration (2007).

2.     Union of Concerned Scientists and Government Accountability Project, Atmosphere of pressure: Political interference in federal climate science (2007).

3.     T. Maassarani , Redacting the science of climate change: An investigative and synthesis report (Government
Accountability Project, Washington, DC, 2007).

4.     A.C. Revkin, NASA’s Goals Delete Mention of Home Planet, The New York Times, 22 July 2006.

5.     Union of  Concerned Scientists, ExxonMobil report: Smoke, mirrors, and hot air (2007).

6.     C. Macilwain, G.  Brumfiel, US scientists fight political meddling, Nature 439, 896 (2006).

7.     A. C. Revkin, Bush vs. the Laureates: How Science Became a Partisan Issue, The New  York Times, 19 October 2004.

8.     Union of  Concerned Scientists, “2004 scientist statement on restoring scientific
integrity to federal policy making” (2004).

9.     M. S. Bowen, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack
on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming (Dutton, New York, 2007).

10.  Breakthrough of the Year, “Bush mystery science theater,” Science 294, 2446 (2001).

11.  G. Brumfiel, “Mission Impossible?” Nature 428, 250 (2004).

12.  The White House,  Ask the White House, James L. Connaughton.

Ed Douglas is a fine writer and an avid climber, whom I once met over dinner at a friend’s house in England. We had a memorable conversation, to which he refers in an opinion piece that was published yesterday in the Guardian (UK). I fully agree with Ed’s call for climbers to bear witness to the catastrophic effects of global warming in our beloved mountains. We must also work to debunk the myth being propogated by global warming deniers that anecdotal evidence–i.e., facts that are so obvious that they slap you in the face, such as the present wasting away of the world’s mountain glaciers–is somehow unscientfic and therefore easily ignored.

There is nothing magical about science; it is simply observation of the physical world, coupled with deduction and insight. What is magical thinking is the way some people–both of the leading contenders for the Republican nomination for U.S. President, for example–continue to deny the unassailable evidence for human-induced climate change (links here and here).

Climbers are perfectly placed to make accurate observations of the mountain world. Who better to ask about changes in that world than those whose very lives depend on their ability to observe it?

You will find blog posts related to Ed’s opinion piece here, and here. (The latter is a complete draft of the 2001 article that I wrote for Climbing, which was the subject of an absurd controversy that was manufactured by the denial lobby at the beginning of last year.)

I recommend Ed’s biography of Tenzing Norgay, as well as his most well-known book, Chomolungma Sings The Blues.

Even “real Vermonters” are getting sick of winter at this point; they have been for a few weeks now. We’ve had persistent cold, quite a few mornings below zero — one just this past Thursday when it went down to -15 — and lots of snow. But last Tuesday, March 1st, was Town Meeting Day, always a harbinger of spring, and things really began looking up on Saturday, which was Losar, the Tibetan New Year, and the end of the inauspicious dön season. Yes, it rained, but it was warm, and so was Sunday morning, which brought more rain. The mountain of snow at the back end of our door yard shrunk noticeably and a pile of wood that I never thought we were going to need, but now I’m pretty sure we will, began peaking out from under its white cover in the wood yard.

Chatting with our neighbor, Marilyn, as she was picking up her mail last week, I learned that Town Meeting Day was when they always tapped their trees when she was a kid. Her father would go to town meeting and the rest of the family would go out and tap. She also reminded me that many folks start their seedlings about now, since it is traditional to plant on Memorial Day, although she often delays both the seedlings and the planting for a week or two, as frosts remain a possibility into the second week of June.

And so, on Sunday afternoon, the day we first noticed the red of new buds on the trees around our fields, Wendy and I tapped two sugar maples — in early spring sunlight with that special silvery hue that is unique to New England. What an amazing experience for two city slickers. The sap began dripping before we could hammer the tap in, and those two trees began gushing faster than we could keep up, about ten gallons of clear sugar water between them every day …

That night a storm hit, one of the five snowiest ever to hit the state, according to the newspapers. It raged all day Monday. When I went out to plow with my medium-sized tractor, a 30-hp John Deere 870, at about 11 am, it was coming down so fast I couldn’t keep up. About 18″ fell altogether.

But the trees kept producing. And then, of course, mud season began on Thursday. You have to roll with the punches around here …