In short, if you’re an expert, you already know how much to divide your attentions between peer review and other sources in your field or fields of expertise.

If you’re not an expert, and you’re investigating a field where there is an academic discipline, you would do well to limit yourself to peer reviewed sources .

(I would add: or widely recognized textbooks; often this is the place to start. I would also add that it is best to look for “review” articles to get up to speed.)

Just because something is in the peer reviewed literature does not make it true. Just because something is not in the peer reviewed literature does not make it false. But if you lack a rich intellectual and social context in a field, and you do not have access to someone who does, you would greatly improve your odds by limiting your attentions to what has passed peer review.

(I would add: take the true skeptic’s path. The first thing to do is neither to doubt the publication nor to accept it. The first thing to do is doubt your own understanding of it. You will find that this greatly reduces the number of papers you can read. It is okay to read many more abstracts than papers. That is what they are for. But even with the abstract, question whether your understanding of the claim is actually what the authors are claiming.)

Klein observed that “it is not opposition to the scientific facts of climate change that drives denialists but rather opposition to the real-world implications of those facts.” She quotes Dellingpole: “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.”

Naomi Klein offers her own “inconvenient truth”. She says that on this point, Dellingpole is right.

She begins with a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel report on a meeting of the Heartless Heartland Institute:

[a] question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

But after a bit of barrel-fishing, Klein makes a deeper argument.

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. …

Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.

But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products and creating clever markets in pollution.
…
After years of recycling, carbon offsetting and light bulb changing, it is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response to the climate crisis. Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale. That means subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.
…
In addition to reversing the thirty-year privatization trend, a serious response to the climate threat involves recovering an art that has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market fundamentalism: planning. Lots and lots of planning. And not just at the national and international levels. Every community in the world needs a plan for how it is going to transition away from fossil fuels, what the Transition Town movement calls an “energy descent action plan.” In the cities and towns that have taken this responsibility seriously, the process has opened rare spaces for participatory democracy, with neighbors packing consultation meetings at city halls to share ideas about how to reorganize their communities to lower emissions and build in resilience for tough times ahead.
…
A key piece of the planning we must undertake involves the rapid re-regulation of the corporate sector. Much can be done with incentives: subsidies for renewable energy and responsible land stewardship, for instance. But we are also going to have to get back into the habit of barring outright dangerous and destructive behavior. That means getting in the way of corporations on multiple fronts, from imposing strict caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning new coal-fired power plants, to cracking down on industrial feedlots, to shutting down dirty-energy extraction projects like the Alberta tar sands (starting with pipelines like Keystone XL that lock in expansion plans).

Now is this really closet Stalinism? A return to totalitarianism in the guise of environmentalism?

Klein doesn’t think so.

Only a very small sector of the population sees any restriction on corporate or consumer choice as leading down Hayek’s road to serfdom — and, not coincidentally, it is precisely this sector of the population that is at the forefront of climate change denial.

Still, while it would be nice to leave left vs right (a.k.a. “politics”) out of it, this is a question we really need to grapple with. Exactly how much of a threat is dealing with climate to the status quo. How much do we need to challenge the structures of the modern corporate world to solve our immediate problems? What can we afford to leave to later generations, or abandon altogether, or even gleefully discard? We have a lot to achieve; we’d best have some idea of what the least we can stand would look like.

Can we just implement Hansen’s climate tax and have Business-As-Otherwise-Usual? Is there a simple, market driven solution?

Is there a way to finesse the COP process and just get where we need to go, possibly with a bilateral agreement between the US and China? Is such an agreement possible?

Can we put off dealing with the perpetual-growth question for a while, until the climate matter is resolved? (I argue that we could, except for the economists using it to construct castles in the air, so insofar as we consult economists in planning the policies, we unfortunately cannot.)

What is the least threatening change that will suffice to keep us reasonably safe from collapse?

Yes, you’ve heard it all before, but if you know someone who hasn’t yet, this would be a good place for them to start.

Business guru Malcolm Gladwell argues that practice is more important than talent.

Via InterPress Service:

This response is interesting.

In March 2007, at the request of the Group of Eight largest economies along with several developing countries, UNEP started an initiative called ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ (TEEB), aiming at studying the economic benefits of biodiversity and incorporating them into policy-making.

How does economics evaluate an extinction, or an ecosystem collapse? As economics is currently structured, will such tragedies not be systematically undervalued?

Taylor Wilson, is known as the boy who played with fusion, because at the age of 14 became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction.

The South American nation of Ecuador is famous for its biodiversity, with Pacific coastal plains, Andean mountain range, and the eastern sector taking in a small corner of the vast Amazon jungle. Despite its small size, Ecuador is home to over 1600 species of birds – about one-seventh of the world’s species: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_of_Ecuador

The sector east of the Andes is known as El Oriente – ‘the East’ – and is a largely roadless area still mostly covered in primary rainforest. Five of Ecuador’s 24 provinces make up El Oriente:  Sucumbios, Napo, Orellano, Pastaza and Morona Santiago.

Last month the Ecuadorean government announced its decision to open up a large area of the Oriente region to oil exploration by Chinese operators. This news seems disturbing given the area’s recent history of environmental and human impact from previous drilling operations in the same terrain. In this post I try to convey just how incongruous and imprudent this decision seems in light of this history.

Access to the roadless sector is almost exclusively via the rivers that flow east or southeast from the Andean foothills. Travel is via long dugout canoes, many now bearing outboard motors. (A few remote towns also have small airstrips, used chiefly for medical evacuations).  Although roadless, the area is far from uninhabited: a number of indigenous peoples make their homes in El Oriente. Under the broad category of the Kichwa peoples are more specific local populations known as the Waorani and Cofan in the north, Sarayaku in the south, among others. These peoples have inhabited the region for millennia, and have retained a pre-industrial subsistence lifestyle, migrating through their jungle territory and drawing their sustenance from hunting, fishing and gathering fruit and tree nuts. Many had little to no contact with the outside world until the mid-20^th century, and a few continue to avoid outsiders.

http://amazonwatch.org/work/kichwa

I learned about the Waorani or Huaorani people when we visited Sacha Lodge on the Rio Napo, just across from Yasuni National Park, 2.5 hours by motorized dugout down river from the end of the road river port of Puerto Francisco del Orellano (the town people know as just ‘Coca’– and not for the cola!) The lodge is staffed by local Kichwa people, including the brilliant bird guide Oscar. One early morning trip to the observation platform led by Oscar yielded 71 bird species – all 71 of which Oscar was able to rhyme off from memory perfectly back at the lodge later that day.

My wife has a knack for finding these eye-opening adventure trips, and also for selecting travel reading that brings each area to life. Her apt pick for our Panama trip was McCullough’s tour-de-force Path Between the Seas on the building of the canal. For Ecuador she found Joe Kane’s Savages (1995, ISBN 0679411917), a remarkable account of an American writer who settled among the Waorani people for the better part of a year.

Inspired by this great read, on returning to Toronto I delved into UofT’s library collection for more on the Waorani and related Kitchwa groups, which yielded several good accounts from differing points of view:

Crisis Under the Canopy: tourism and other problems facing the present day Huaorani by Randy Smith (ISBN 9978990909)
Waorani : the contexts of violence and war / Clayton Robarchek and Carole Robarchek.  ISBN 0155037978
Trekking through history : the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador / Laura M. Rival. ISBN 0231118449
Amazon Stranger: A Rainforest Chief Battles Big Oil by Mike Tidwell (1996, ISBN 1558214062)

New since I read up on this area:

A future for Amazonia : Randy Borman and Cofán environmental politics / by Michael Cepek. 2012 ISBN 9780292739505.

See also: Amazon Crude by Prof. Judith Kimerling

Along with these I also read about Chico Mendez organizing the indigenous rubber tappers in Brazil, another situation where indigenous rainforest residents found the outside world wanted things of them that they could neither understand nor properly assess or negotiate.

The upshot of all I read on the Waorani and Cofan peoples is that contrary to outward impressions of ‘poverty’ or ‘primitive’ lives, their world makes sense to them, and their way of life has been working without outside support or intervention since time immemorial. One researcher reported that their hunter-gatherer efforts take up just two hours of work per day on average to meet their nutritional needs, leaving them copious amounts of free time which they fill with weaving, dancing, singing, and storytelling. Their active life makes them physically fit – Kane is a distance runner yet he found it taxing keeping up with their pace when they claimed just to be ‘walking’ to neighboring villages, let alone running down wild boar.

These peoples control and live off land that was barely touched by European explorers and conquistadors. While these lands were ‘claimed’ for Spain during their colonization of South America, there was no substantial migration of Spanish people settling these areas. Nominally absorbed into the nation of Ecuador and its legal system, the Kichwa peoples retained their own cultural identity, and their world continued to function at a local level largely independent of both Spanish and highland Quechua outsiders. They have historically lacked both literacy and written documentation like legal land title and individual government ID. Ecuador’s westernized legal system has made some strides in recognizing their rights as citizens and occupants of the land despite this gap, but respect for their landholder rights can falter when outside forces like multinational oil companies take an interest in drilling their traditional lands.

This first happened starting over 50 years ago as Texaco and state-owned Petroecuador joined forces to explore for oil in El Oriente’s northern sector. Local residents were not really treated as landowners with rights to negotiate over drilling access. Randy Borman’s story recounts how the Cofan people responded to this incursion. While they resisted bravely and mainly non-violently, and their community held together under the disturbance, drilling did go ahead, with some severe environmental impacts.

Past decades saw catastrophic intrusions by Petro Ecuador in conjunction with Texaco. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroecuador. This partnership developed many conventional oil wells in the jungle and built pipelines to carry the resulting crude oil over the Andes to market. Sadly, their standards of work fell far short of the standards to which their first-world operations were held; operating far from the view of western business interests or government, Texaco and Petroecuador allowed a lax, negligent approach in drilling operations in the jungles of El Oriente. Pipelines frequently leaked crude, and water injection wells output toxic mixtures of oil, water and drilling fluids which were held in open, unlined ponds, with no attempt to return the surface to a safe condition.

Local indigenous residents began to notice oily contamination of streams and waterways on which they relied for both drinking and fishing. Complaints to drilling operators sometimes yielded tragi-comic attempts at remediation, such as offering empty plastic barrels for the victims to use to collect rainwater for use in lieu of formerly potable river water. (No mention was made of how to replace the lost food supply from fishing.)

After decades of frustration, the Kichwa peoples found their voice in national politics, and with legal help of environmental NGOs finally pressed a lawsuit against Chevron Corp (which had subsequently taken over Texaco.) www.chevrontoxico.org

In 2012 an Ecuadorean court found in favor of the Ecuadorian plaintiffs and against Chevron for a staggering $18 Billion. Naturally the defendant is not rushing to pay the settlement, claims it was fraudulent, and will pursue all available appeals and legal tactics. http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2013/01_-_January/Former_Ecuador_judge_on_Chevron_case_says_plaintiffs_bribed_court/

Currently, with the record-breaking Chevron judgment still working its way through the appeals process, Ecuador’s government has somehow decided to open up new tracts of El Oriente to oil exploration by China’s Overseas Oil Company. This also seems destined to vitiate any putative good that might have come out of President Correa’s 2007 proposal to close the Yasuni region to oil extraction in return for financial compensation from other nations (an intriguing idea which has attracted hard cash and pledges of more; it raises a lot of questions about how the world could ever reach the point of leaving much of the existing fossil reserves untapped. There’s a raft of issues for a whole separate post.)

Aside from the question of whether Ecuador could become a trailblazer for leaving most of the remaining carbon in the ground, the more immediate threat from the new oil leases is local. Despite the sorry legacy of PetroEcuador’s and Texaco’s  leaking pipelines, unlined pits filled with lost oil, water pollution, lost fisheries,  human cancers and numerous other health impacts on local residents, Ecuador is willing to resume drilling the Amazon basin. Perhaps they are hoping that this time, China will do better at respecting indigenous people’s rights, health, and the integrity of the jungle environment than Texaco was able to do?

Andrew Weaver, Newly elected Green Party MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head

The British Columbia Green Party just made history, voters in the riding of Oak Bay-Gordon Head elected Andrew Weaver, Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria, and a lead author for a chapter of the IPCC AR4, to the Legislative Assembly.

Andrew Weaver is the first Green party member ever to be elected to the legislative Assembly; his election continues the trend started by Elizabeth May, who was the first ever federal Green party member to be elected to the Canadian Parliament in the 2011 election.

Aside from the historic aspect of having a green party member elected to government, an aspect I find more important is having a practising scientist working in the Legislative Assembly. Scientists, often look at the world through a different lens; a lens that gives them a unique perspective and the ability to find innovative solutions to difficult problems. But this is a lens that is underrepresented in most governments and though it is still underrepresented here in British Columbia, Andrew Weaver’s victory ensures that the scientific lens will be a little more represented going forward. A trend I hope catches on elsewhere.

In the end, despite polls showing that the left-of-centre NDP had a sizeable lead, the right-of-centre BC Liberals retained their majority in the legislative assembly. The NDP retained their status as official opposition.

What is perhaps of more interest to readers of Planet3.0 is what the BC election will mean for climate policy.

In 2008 the BC Liberals (which are not affiliated with the federal Liberals) introduced North America’s first revenue neutral Carbon tax. This was a dramatic turnaround for the Liberals; before introducing the tax they were not seen as a government that cared for the environment, quite the opposite actually. In the 2009 election the NDP, who generally had the support of environmental organizations, ran an ‘axe the tax’ campaign to repeal the carbon tax, this caused a dramatic reversal which saw the BC NDP with the lose that environmental support and subsequently lose the election.

After the defeat the NDP learned to accept the tax. So this time around there was little chance that the carbon tax would be repealed. In fact the only party who wanted to repeal the carbon tax was the BC Conservatives (which are not affiliated with the federal Conservatives), but their support in the election was minimal and they failed to win any seats.

That being said none of the parties were talking about increasing the carbon tax which currently sits at $30/tonne.

The other major climate related issue affecting BC are the pipeline proposals to transport diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to the BC coast.

The BC Liberals have said that since BC is taking on most of the risk of spills, BC should receive a decent chunk of the revenue generated by the pipelines. That proposal has been flatly rejected by Alberta, so there is little chance the BC government will accept the pipelines. But the truth is that the Government of British Columbia, strangely, doesn’t have much of a say in either approving or disapproving the pipeline proposals.

In Canada pipelines fall under federal jurisdiction, and the Canadian Government has essentially rewritten the entire canon of Canadian environmental law in order to ensure that the pipelines are approved. Currently the biggest hurdle to the pipelines are the various First Nations groups that are opposed to having the pipeline traverse their territories. Their opposition could easily tie up the pipeline proposals in court for years.

Ultimately this election, aside from Andrew Weaver’s win, wasn’t really about climate change. British Columbia is already ahead of the curve in regards to climate policy and it seems as if there is little appetite from our politicians to move even further ahead of everyone else.

Many people have written eloquent criticisms of this move by the Canadian government. Phil Plait (at the above link) does a good job of explaining the why the move away from pure science funding is a bad idea from a scientific perspective (we don’t know ahead of time what research will yield economic benefits), but I find that Andrew Coyne (a right leaning commentator writing in a right leaning newspaper) does an excellent job of demonstrating why this is a bad idea from an economic perspective:

The redirection of public funds from basic to applied research may be bad science, but it is even worse economics. Whatever the distortion of the NRC’s raison d’etre is implied, it is nothing compared to the distortion of the economy. Far from a pragmatic matching of public research dollars to the real-word needs of industry, it reveals a basic confusion about the appropriate public and private roles in funding research.

Let’s start from the beginning. To understand what governments should or should not do in the economy, you have first to understand what markets can and cannot do. Governments, that is, should do what markets cannot. They should not try to do what markets can. This is a matter of scarce resources, if nothing else: the more government spends in areas where it is not needed, the less it will have left to spend in areas where it is essential. As a maxim, government should only do what only government can do.

Basic science, the kind of blue-sky research with no immediate commercial application, is an example of something the market cannot do, or not at a level that is optimal for society. Not only is there little obvious incentive for a private firm to spend money on research that does not pay off in new products or better processes, but so far as such research can be adapted to commercial uses it could as well benefit its competitors as itself: so the sharing of research that is a critical part of scientific progress is discouraged.

Hence it is well-established economic principle that basic research is the sort of thing governments should fund. By the same token, however, government should not be in the business of funding applied research, that is research directed to commercial uses. Not only is this unnecessary — business can perfectly well fund this sort of thing on its own — but it inevitably tilts the pitch in favour of certain activities over others: some technologies, innovations, products, firms and industries will be funded, at the expense of the rest.

Or in other words, “picking winners,” with all of the misallocation of resources that term implies. (If a product, firm or industry is really a “winner,” it shouldn’t need a subsidy. If it isn’t, all the more reason it shouldn’t get it.) What the government’s supporters might think is hard-headed realism is in fact simply central planning by another name — an illustration, once gain, of the difference between being “pro-business” and “pro-market.”

Youris.com reports that ban on the insecticide-soaked seed coating enforced by the Italian government last year seems to have worked wonders, judging from the freshest data collected on the ground by researchers, beekeepers and regional authorities alike.

Francesco Panella, President of the Italian Association of Beekepers, says:

On behalf of beegrowers working in a countryside dominated by maize crops, I wrote to the Minister of Agriculture to confirm the great news, for once: thanks to the suspension of the bee-killing seed coating, the hives in the Po Valley are flourishing again. We cannot underestimate that there are over one million hectares of maize crops, predominantly in Northern Italy, which means one crop out of every seven which are grown every year in our country. This year’s magnificent and unusual spring growth of bee colonies means a very good production of acacia honey in Northern Italy. We are now anxious to ensure that the temporary ban of neonicotinoid seed coating becomes definitive

Marco Lodesani, director of the honey bee and silkworm unit at the Agricultural Research Council (CRA-API) in Bologna, elaborates:

What did we learn in the past few years about the causes of CCD and the link with neonicotinoids?

Until recently, studies focused on the immediate, lethal effects of pesticides on bees. In other words, they looked at the dose that is needed to kill bees if they are exposed to a certain insecticide.

However, it is now clear that sub-lethal doses have a chronic effect that may be even more critical. When bees fly over the dust from coated seeds, they accumulate small doses of neonicotinoids that do not kill them. But it affects both each individual and the colonies in more subtle, long-term ways. For example, contaminated bees have a weaker immune response. This makes them more susceptible to viruses, which are a major cause of death.

Other effects are neurological and include learning problems, impaired orientation, or the inability to remember colours and odours. All of these aspects are crucial for the social organisation of colonies.

Are these chronic effect taken into account by the industry when testing for the safety of new compounds?

Not really. Testing is largely based on assays that look at the acute toxicity of compounds. But with CCD you do not necessarily expect to see bees decimated right in places where they use pesticides. You need to look at sub-lethal effects that are more insidious and difficult to study, but still involve entire colonies.

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UPDATE: The work appears in three white papers released last January. There does not appear to be a peer reviewed version as yet. The white papers are one each on clothiandin, imidacloprid, and thiomethoxam.

h/t to users LooseCannon and super_cookies at Reddit for demanding more information. (That’s all I got.)