Henceforth, people will be looking at the universe with the eyes of oxen. —Katib Chelebi, 17th-century geographer

“Barack Obama won’t show us his birth certificate,” says Steve, a Connecticut resident and small-business owner, while he’s shoveling his walk. “He’s a Muslim terrorist. And you know what really bothers me? He is doing exactly what Hitler did.”

Steve has plenty of other opinions relating to the American president, culture, and society. He can rattle off the prized talking points of this country’s culture of belief without missing a beat: The moon landing was a hoax; the world is ending in 2012; 9/11 was an inside job; creationism is valid science.

A hardworking fellow and family man in a postindustrial factory town of a blue state, Steve does not come across as fanatical. Yet his adherence to raw belief—a position unassailable by factual counter-data—is more than an inherently dangerous American mind-set. It is a deadly challenge to the aim of humanism.

The “belief” mind-set is pretty common in the news these days. Much of the believers’ ire seems directed at the current presidential administration, and it’s now getting legal attention: The U.S. Army is set to court-martial a soldier who refused deployment to Afghanistan because the soldier—Lieutenant Colonel Terry Lakin—shares with Steve the belief that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Neither Lakin nor Steve nor thousands of other “birthers” can put forth any evidence, documentation, or data that withstands the test of scrutiny. They just, well, believe it.

Their blind allegiance is precisely like the more extreme elements of their political rivals. While birthers are largely a Republican phenomenon, the “9/11 truth movement” stems chiefly from the liberal wing of American politics. Truthers are as fervent in their belief that the United States’ own government used controlled demolition to destroy the Twin Towers as the birthers are that Obama has perpetrated a global hoax to keep his birth certificate under wraps.

Clearly, the appeal of blind faith has been part of human history since the earliest days of Babylonia. In the United States, however, we have taken this tendency to disturbing new heights. Emboldened by the sharp rise of rabid partisanship and the ubiquitous presence of mass media, Americans have come to be belief’s poster children: reactionary, emotional, and almost blissfully willing to ignore facts if they contradict a cemented position.

The belief culture thrives on the false principle that all opinions are equal, even those without a shred of factual data, documentation, or reasoned methodology. It is a culture in which one in 20 Americans believe NASA faked the Apollo moon landings, and half the population believes the world was made in six days.

When the scholar Katib Chelebi spoke the words that open this piece, it was in response to a tidal shift in the culture of 17th-century Turkey. Chelebi was a cartographer, historian, traveler, philosopher, and writer. He had been exposed to the works of the ancient Greeks and appreciated their methodical approach to investigation. Yet the rationalist mind-set of Turkish schools was descending into dogmatism. It appealed to emotions and impulsiveness. It catered to the basement of the human mind, which today’s neurologists would call the r-complex. Chelebi keenly perceived this devolution and saw the road ahead, which diverged in the proverbial woods. He was aghast at the path his people were choosing.

There is a certain irony in the case of the United States, a nation founded on Enlightenment principles of rationality and now so eagerly becoming a culture of raw, unquestioning belief. When we hear about an alleged culture war, we tend to think of it in political terms like gay marriage or abortion. The truth goes deeper. As in Chelebi’s era, our real battle is for critical thinking. It is about our fundamental approach to the universe and is nothing less than a line in the sand between the logical and the delusional.

It would be comforting if we could trace this phenomenon only to the Internet, which by virtue of its anonymity provides an easy venue for irrational “trolling,” as it’s called. Mark Twain’s warning that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on is readily proven in the echo chamber of cyberspace: Saddam Hussein had connections to the 9/11 hijackers, Nostradamus predicted the fall of America in the 21st century, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is a liberal plot, swine flu is God’s punishment against whomever, to name a few.

In the year 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under a sea of hot ash. Predictably, many people who were alive at that time blamed the calamity on Zeus. Since geological science hadn’t been born, assigning divine character to natural catastrophe was the best explanation going.

Today we live in an age of rational methodology. Our laws are ideally derived from cogent debate—which is why we say “without passion or prejudice” in our legal proceedings—and we use the scientific method in dealing with worldly phenomena. A culture of belief rejects this in favor of a Neolithic worldview. The rational mechanisms behind hurricanes, plane crashes, and flu epidemics are eschewed by this crowd in favor of evil spirits, alien conspiracies, and prophecy.

That evolution and creationism are still butting heads 150 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species is probably the best testament to this slide from rational culture. In 2009 half the U.S. population accepted creationism; ours is one of the only developed nations where the subject is even a debate anymore. 

It isn’t that rationality must preclude emotion. What’s needed is not a society of cold intellectuals, but a culture that emphasizes reasoned debate. Perhaps the best illustration comes from Plato. Imagine, he suggested, that you have horses tethered to a chariot, and a charioteer holding the reins. Both the man and the beasts are necessary to get anywhere; it is the guiding hand of a clear-thinking charioteer that needs to be in charge.

The pages of history are filled with irrational decisions. Often these decisions have world-altering results. When the Great Library of Alexandria was destroyed by fundamentalists, the classical age of scientific and artistic inquiry was obliterated. One thousand years of a dark age followed, during which, Mark Twain wrote, a “nation of men” was turned into “a nation of worms.”

Today, the situation is far more dire. Belief-stricken populations and their leaders can cause unthinkable devastation to modern society. In ancient Alexandria, an irrational policy abetted the fall of civilization. But while those book burnings required at least 451 degrees, tomorrow’s censorship will be done with a search-and-replace command. A global power, Chelebi reminds us, can become a global “sick man” in the blink of a historical eye.

Excerpted from The Humanist (July-Aug. 2010), “a magazine of critical inquiry and social concern” that inspires without preaching. It’s published bimonthly by the American Humanist Association. www.thehumanist.org 

Read more: http://www.utne.com/print-article.aspx?id=2147488859#ixzz1ACGUXgqO

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal.  It was a mixed and judicious appraisal.  “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.”  And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet.  Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning “a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome” on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin.  If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.

Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet.  At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress towards any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.

Climate-Change Denial as an O.J. Moment

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it.  The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning.  So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.

If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)?  That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.

Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated — a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting. 

Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climate-gate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.  

Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made — that’s what Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) did, insisting the emails proved “scientific fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents “Hitler youth.” Such language filters down.  I’m now used to a daily diet of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: “Nazi Moron Scumbag.” 

If you’re smart, you can also take advantage of lucky breaks that cross your path. Say a record set of snowstorms hit Washington D.C.  It won’t even matter that such a record is just the kind of thing scientists have been predicting, given the extra water vapor global warming is adding to the atmosphere. It’s enough that it’s super-snowy in what everyone swore was a warming world. 

For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website, the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred posts poking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believe in, you know, physics. Morano, who really is good, posted a link to a live webcam so readers could watch snow coming down; his former boss, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had his grandchildren build an igloo on the Capitol grounds, with a sign that read: “Al Gore’s New Home.” These are the things that stick in people’s heads. If the winter glove won’t fit, you must acquit.

Why We Don’t Want to Believe in Climate Change

The climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks to Exxon Mobil and others with a vested interest in debunking climate-change research, their “think tanks” have plenty of money, none of which gets wasted doing actual research to disprove climate change. It’s also useful for a movement to have its own TV network, Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a few rightwing British tabloids which validate each new “scandal” and put it into media play.

That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February when even the New York Times ran a front page story, “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel,” which recycled most of the accusations of the past few months. What made it such a glorious testament to their success was the chief source cited by the Times: one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be called since he is some kind of British viscount.  He is also identified as a “former advisor to Margaret Thatcher,” and he did write a piece for the American Spectator during her term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for “the only way to stop AIDS”:

“…screen the entire population regularly and… quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month… all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.”

He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic — and now from above the fold in the paper of record.

Access to money and the media is not the only, or even the main reason, for the success of the climate deniers, though.  They’re not actually spending all that much cash and they’ve got legions of eager volunteers doing much of the internet lobbying entirely for free. Their success can be credited significantly to the way they tap into the main currents of our politics of the moment with far more savvy and power than most environmentalists can muster. They’ve understood the popular rage at elites.  They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control.

Some of that is, of course, purely partisan. The columnist David Brooks, for instance, recently said: “On the one hand, I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and it is manmade.  On the other hand, I feel a frisson of pleasure when I come across evidence that contradicts the models… [in part] because I relish any fact that might make Al Gore look silly.” But the passion with which people attack Gore more often seems focused on the charge that he’s making large sums of money from green investments, and that the whole idea is little more than a scam designed to enrich everyone involved. This may be wrong — Gore has testified under oath that he donates his green profits to the cause — and scientists are not getting rich researching climate change (constant blog comments to the contrary), but it resonates with lots of people. I get many emails a day on the same theme: “The game is up. We’re on to you.”

When I say it resonates with lots of people, I mean lots of people. O.J.’s lawyers had to convince a jury made up mostly of black women from central city L.A., five of whom reported that they or their families had had “negative experiences” with the police. For them, it was a reasonably easy sell. When it comes to global warming, we’re pretty much all easy sells because we live the life that produces the carbon dioxide that’s at the heart of the crisis, and because we like that life.

Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, and given half a chance to think they don’t need to, they’ll take it. Especially when it sounds expensive, and especially when the economy stinks. Here’s David Harsanyi, a columnist for the Denver Post: “If they’re going to ask a nation — a world — to fundamentally alter its economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers’ credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.”

“Unassailable” sets the bar impossibly high when there is a dedicated corps of assailants out there hard at work. It is true that those of us who want to see some national and international effort to fight global warming need to keep making the case that the science is strong. That’s starting to happen.  There are new websites and iPhone apps to provide clear and powerful answers to the skeptic trash-talking, and strangely enough, the denier effort may, in some ways, be making the case itself: if you go over the multi-volume IPCC report with a fine tooth comb and come up with three or four lousy citations, that’s pretty strong testimony to its essential accuracy.

Clearly, however, the antiseptic attempt to hide behind the magisterium of Science in an effort to avoid the rough-and-tumble of Politics is a mistake. It’s a mistake because science can be — and, in fact, should be — infinitely argued about. Science is, in fact, nothing but an ongoing argument, which is one reason why it sounds so disingenuous to most people when someone insists that the science is “settled.” That’s especially true of people who have been told at various times in their lives that some food is good for you, only to be told later that it might increase your likelihood of dying.

Why Data Isn’t Enough

I work at Middlebury College, a topflight liberal arts school, so I’m surrounded by people who argue constantly. It’s fun.  One of the better skeptical takes on global warming that I know about is a weekly radio broadcast on our campus radio station run by a pair of undergraduates. They’re skeptics, but not cynics. Anyone who works seriously on the science soon realizes that we know more than enough to start taking action, but less than we someday will. There will always be controversy over exactly what we can now say with any certainty.  That’s life on the cutting edge. I certainly don’t turn my back on the research—we’ve spent the last two years at 350.org building what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally” around a previously obscure data point, the amount of atmospheric carbon that scientists say is safe, measured in parts per million.

But it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.

So let’s figure out how to talk about it. Let’s look at Exxon Mobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn’t pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world. 

Right now, there’s a bill in the Congress — cap-and-dividend, it’s called — that would charge Exxon for that right, and send a check to everyone in the country every month. Yes, the company would pass on the charge at the pump, but 80% of Americans (all except the top-income energy hogs) would still make money off the deal. That represents good science, because it starts to send a signal that we should park that SUV, but it’s also good politics.

By the way, if you think there’s a scam underway, you’re right — and to figure it out just track the money going in campaign contributions to the politicians doing the bidding of the energy companies. Inhofe, the igloo guy? Over a million dollars from energy and utility companies and executives in the last two election cycles. You think Al Gore is going to make money from green energy? Check out what you get for running an oil company.

Worried that someone is going to wreck your future? You’re right about that, too. Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They’re making the investments that mean future windmills and solar panels, even ones installed in this country, will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not Chicago.

Coal companies have already eliminated most good mining jobs, simply by automating them in the search for ever higher profits. Now, they’re using their political power to make sure that miner’s kids won’t get to build wind turbines instead. Everyone should be mighty pissed — just not at climate-change scientists.

But keep in mind as well that fear and rage aren’t the only feelings around. They’re powerful feelings, to be sure, but they’re not all we feel. And they are not us at our best.

There’s also love, a force that has often helped motivate large-scale change, and one that cynics in particular have little power to rouse. Love for poor people around the world, for instance. If you think it’s not real, you haven’t been to church recently, especially evangelical churches across the country.  People who take the Gospel seriously also take seriously indeed the injunction to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. 

It’s becoming patently obvious that nothing challenges that goal quite like the rising seas and spreading deserts of climate change. That’s why religious environmentalism is one of the most effective emerging parts of the global warming movement; that’s why we were able to get thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times last October to signify what scientists say is the safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere; that’s why Bartholomew, patriarch of the Orthodox church and leader of 400 million eastern Christians, said, “Global warming is a sin and 350 is an act of redemption.”

There’s also the deep love for creation, for the natural world. We were born to be in contact with the world around us and, though much of modernity is designed to insulate us from nature, it doesn’t really work. Any time the natural world breaks through — a sunset, an hour in the garden — we’re suddenly vulnerable to the realization that we care about things beyond ourselves. That’s why, for instance, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are so important: get someone out in the woods at an impressionable age and you’ve accomplished something powerful. That’s why art and music need to be part of the story, right alongside bar graphs and pie charts. When we campaign about climate change at 350.org, we make sure to do it in the most beautiful places we know, the iconic spots that conjure up people’s connection to their history, their identity, their hope.

The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re not completely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove every possible doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocent man in a jail cell is a scandal, but outside of it we should act more conservatively.

In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they’ll be a footnote to history. (Hey, even O.J. is finally in jail.) But they’ll lose because we’ll all lose, because by delaying action, they will have helped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while there’s still time. If we’re going to make real change while it matters, it’s important to remember that their skepticism isn’t the root of the problem. It simply plays on our deep-seated resistance to change. That’s what gives the climate cynics ground to operate. That’s what we need to overcome, and at bottom that’s a battle as much about courage and hope as about data.

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books, including the forthcoming Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Times Books, April 2010). He’s a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.  Catch the latest TomCast, TomDispatch.com’s audio interview with Bill McKibben on what to make of the climate-science scandals.

When you are sick or injured, you want to know what’s wrong and what can be done. You want a diagnosis. A correct diagnosis reveals what is wrong, what is the preferred treatment and what is the likely outcome. For example, a diagnosis of pneumonia indicates a serious lung infection that can usually be cured with antibiotics.

While medical diagnoses are based on science, psychiatric “diagnoses” are not at all scientific. They do not reveal what is wrong, what is the preferred treatment, and what is the likely outcome. Nor are they reliable. Different psychiatrists who examine the same patient typically offer different “diagnoses.” Moreover, psychiatric “diagnoses” move in and out of favor, depending on a variety of social factors.

Psychiatric “diagnosis” is actually a labeling process, where the patient’s symptoms are matched with a grouping of symptoms listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM). As we shall see, this psychiatric “bible” was developed and is maintained by financial and political interests.¹

Sigmund Freud

Who decides what is normal or healthy and what is deviant or sick?

Before the 20^th century, life stresses were generally seen as spiritual problems or physical illnesses, and people turned to religious advisors and physicians for help. Medical doctors treated “hysteria” and “nerves” as physical problems. Psychiatry was restricted to the treatment of severely disturbed people in asylums.² The first classification of psychiatric disorders in the United States appeared in 1918 and contained 22 categories. All but one referred to various forms of insanity.

In 1901, Sigmund Freud revolutionized psychiatry by breaking down the barrier between mental illness and normal behavior. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,³ Freud argued that commonplace behaviors – slips of the tongue, what people find humorous, what they forget and the mistakes they make – indicate repressed sexual feelings that lurk beneath the surface of normal behavior.

By linking everyday behavior with mental illness, Freud and his followers released psychiatry from the asylum. Between 1917 and 1970, as psychiatrists cultivated clients with a broad range of problems, the number of psychiatrists practicing outside institutions swelled from eight percent to 66 percent.⁴

The social movements of the 1960′s opposed psychiatry’s focus on inner conflict and emphasized the social sources of sickness instead. Dr. Alvin Poussaint recalls the 1969 convention of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

“After multiple racist killings during the civil rights movement, a group of black psychiatrists sought to have murderous bigotry based on race classified as a mental disorder. The APA’s officials rejected that recommendation, arguing that since so many Americans are racist, racism in this country is normative.”⁵

Growing the industry

In 1980, the APA overhauled the DSM. The Task Force established to create the new manual declared that any disorder could be included,

“If there is general agreement among clinicians, who would be expected to encounter the condition, that there are significant number of patients who have it and that its identification is important in the clinical work it is included in the classification.”⁶

In other words, the new DSM was not based on science, but on the need to maintain existing patients and include new ones who might seek help for any number of problems. A profitable and self-perpetuating industry was born. The more people could be encouraged to seek treatment, the more conditions could be entered into the DSM, and the more people could be encouraged to seek treatment for these new conditions.

By 1994, the DSM listed 400 distinct mental disorders covering a wide variety of behaviors in adults and children. Significantly, racism, homophobia (fear of homosexuality) and misogyny (hatred of women) have never been listed as mental disorders. In 1999, the chairperson of the APA’s Council on Psychiatry and the Law confirmed that racism “is not something that is designated as an illness that can be treated by mental health professionals.”⁷ Homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder until activists campaigned to have it removed.⁸

The women’s liberation movement condemned labeling symptoms of oppression as mental illnesses. In They Say You’re Crazy: How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal, Paula Caplan explains,

“In a culture that scorns and demeans lesbians and gay men, it is hard to be completely comfortable with one’s homosexuality, and so the DSM-III authors were treating as a mental disorder what was often simply a perfectly comprehensible reaction to being mocked and oppressed.”⁹

Caplan describes efforts to prevent “Masochistic Personality Disorder” from being included in the DSM. This disorder assumes that women stay with abusive spouses because like to suffer, not because they lack the resources to leave. Despite protest, “Masochistic Personality Disorder” was added to the 1987 edition of the DSM, although it was later dropped.

The inclusion of “Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder” (PMDD) in the DSM also raised a protest. According to Caplan,

“The problem with PMDD is not the women who report premenstrual mood problems but the diagnosis of PMDD itself. Excellent research shows that these women are significantly more likely than other women to be in upsetting life situations, such as being battered or being mistreated at work. To label them mentally disordered – to send the message that their problems are individual, psychological ones – hides the real, external sources of their trouble.”¹⁰

As soon as PMDD was listed in the DSM, Eli Lilly repackaged its best-selling drug, Prozac, in a pink-pill format, renamed it Serafem, and promoted it as a treatment for PMDD. By creating Serafem, Lilly was able to extend its patent on the Prozac formula for another seven years.

A marketing gold mine

The DSM is a marketing gold mine for the drug industry. The FDA will approve a drug to treat a mental disorder only if that disorder is listed in the DSM. Therefore, each new listing is worth millions in potential drug sales. Most of the experts who construct the DSM have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, and every new edition of the DSM contains more conditions than the previous one.

Once the DSM lists a new mental disorder, drugs for that disorder are heavily marketed for everyone who might fit the symptom checklist. (Doctors are also encouraged to prescribe these drugs for “off-label use,” which means to anyone they think might benefit.) Not surprisingly, the   numbers of people “diagnosed” with a mental condition rise rapidly after a drug is approved to treat that condition.

In 2005, a major study announced that “About half of Americans will meet the criteria for a DSM-IV disorder sometime in their life…¹¹ How is this possible? Has it become normal to be mentally ill, or has the definition of mental illness expanded beyond reason? Both could be true.

Capitalism damages people in many ways. It’s also true that the more people can be labeled as sick, the more profits can be made from selling them treatments. In Creating Mental Illness, Alan Horowitz warns,

“…a large proportion of behaviors that are currently regarded as mental illnesses are normal consequences of stressful social arrangements or forms of social deviance. Contrary to its general definition of mental disorder, the DSM and much research that follows from it considers all symptoms, whether internal or not, expected or not, deviant or not, as signs of disorder.”¹²

Most people know the difference between normal behavior (such as grief over the death of a loved one) and abnormal behavior that could indicate an internal disorder (such as prolonged grief for no apparent reason). However, the DSM does not consider what happens in people’s lives. With one exception (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), the DSM lists and categorizes symptoms outside of any social context. As a result, DSM-based surveys artificially increase the numbers of people suffering from mental disorders and, therefore, the market for drug treatments.

DSM-inflated rates of mental illness are typically accompanied by the warning that not enough people are getting treatment,¹³ which serves to further expand the market for drugs. The question of whether all these people are actually sick is never raised, nor is the question of whether their symptoms might be linked to physical illnesses. 

Many physical diseases generate psychological symptoms. Researchers estimate that from 41 to 83 percent of people being treated for psychiatric disorders are actually suffering from misdiagnosed physical diseases like hyo- or hyper-thyroidism, heart disease, immune-system diseases, nervous system diseases (including multiple sclerosis) and cancer.¹⁴ Undiagnosed and untreated, these physical diseases can progress to cripple or kill. Furthermore, psychiatric drugs can worsen physical diseases, sometimes fatally. None of these “costs” are borne by the pharmaceutical industry – the most profitable industry in America.

Social control

Psychiatry has a long history of medicating the oppressed, including children, for social control.¹⁵

Schools force youngsters to sit still in closed rooms for long periods of time and force-feed them information that has no connection to their lives. Those who rebel are diagnosed with mental disorders (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, etc.) and forced to take mind-altering drugs. To preserve a crazy-making system, the healthy child must be made “crazy.”

Using DSM criteria, at least six million American children have been diagnosed with serious mental disorders, triple the number in the early 1990′s. The rate of boys aged 7 to 12 diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder more than doubled between 1995 and 2000 and continues to rise.

A 2007 survey of 8- to 15-year-olds discovered that nine percent met the DSM criteria for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The survey found that fewer than half of these children had been diagnosed or treated, “suggesting that some children with clinically significant inattention and hyperactivity may not be receiving optimal attention.” Noting that poor children were least likely to receive medication, the authors of the study recommend “further investigation and possible intervention.”¹⁶

Instead of addressing the oppressive social conditions that agitate children, psychiatry imposes conformity through medication. To force compliance with this oppressive system, access to insurance benefits, medical care and social services depends on “having a diagnosis.”

Most of the symptoms listed in the DSM describe human responses to deprivation and oppression (anxiety, agitation, aggression, depression) and the many ways that people try to manage unbearable pain (obsessions, compulsions, rage, addictions). Depression is strongly linked with poverty,¹⁷ and alleviating poverty can lift depression.¹⁸

The suffering of war veterans is labeled as a mental disorder (PTSD) instead of the inevitable consequence of war. These soldiers are sick because they have been violated. Their symptoms express their anguish and outrage at the barbarism they witnessed and perpetrated on others.  What’s sick is sending good people into the hell of war.  

Schizophrenia is designated as a mental illness that is assumed to be genetic. However, studies from several countries show that living in a city gives a person a higher probability of developing schizophrenia than having a family member with the disease. Moving from rural to urban centers increases the risk of developing schizophrenia, while moving in the other direction reduces the risk.¹⁹ City living is associated with increased stress and trauma, exposure to lead,²⁰ infection,²¹ malnutrition,²² and racial discrimination²³- all of which are linked with higher rates of schizophrenia.

Under capitalism, addressing the social causes of illness is politically risky and unprofitable. So psychiatry extracts the individual from society, splits the brain from the body, severs the mind from the brain and drugs the brain.²⁴

A sick society

Capitalism is a system that requires the majority to have no control over their lives and to believe that this condition is normal. Therefore, all reactions to inequality and deprivation must be viewed as signs of personal inadequacy, biological defect, mental illness – anything other than reasonable responses to unreasonable conditions.

During slavery days, experts argued that Black people were psychologically suited for a life of slavery, so there must be something wrong with those who rebelled.² In 1851, the diagnosis of “drapetomania”(runaway fever) was developed to explain why slaves try to escape.²⁶ Not much has changed. Today, exploitation and oppression are considered normal, and those who rebel in any way are considered to be sick or deviant and in need of medication or incarceration.

What’s the diagnosis for a sick society? We know what’s wrong. Most people are kept in sick social conditions so that a few can maintain their wealth and power. What is the treatment?  Putting human needs first would eliminate most human misery. Who will deliver the medicine? The majority must organize to take collective control of society.

I don’t expect this diagnosis to appear in the DSM anytime soon.

1  Kirk, S.S. & Kutchins, H. (1992). The selling of DSM: The rhetoric of science in psychiatry. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.

2. Horowitz, A.V. (2002). Creating mental illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

3. Freud, S. (1901/1991). The psychopathology of everyday life. New York: Penguin

4. Shorter, E. (1997). A history of psychiatry: From the era of the asylum to the age of Prozac. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

5. Poussaint, A.F. & Alexander, A. (2000). Lay my burden down: Suicide and the mental health crisis among African-Americans. Boston: Beacon Press, p.125.

6. Spitzer, R.L., Sheeney, M. & Endicott, J. (1977).  DSM III: Guiding principles. In Psychiatric diagnosis, (Eds). Rakoff, V., Stancer, H. & Kedward, H. New York: Brunner Mazel.

7. Egan, T. (1999). Racist shootings test limits of health system and laws. New York Times, August 14, p.1.

8. “DSM and homosexuality: A cautionary tale.” in Kirk, S.A. & Kutchins, H. (1992). The selling of DSM: The rhetoric of science in psychiatry. New York: Aldine De Gruyter  p 81-90

9. Caplan, P. (1995). They say you’re crazy: How the world’s most powerful psychiatrists decide who’s normal. New York: Addison-Wesley, pp.180-181.

10. Caplan, P.J. (2002). Expert decries diagnosis for pathologizing women. Journal of Addiction and Mental Health. September/October 2001, p.16.

11 Kessler, R.C. et. al. (2005). Lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Arch Gen Psychiatry. Vol.62, No.6, pp.593-602.

12. Horowitz, A.V. (2002). Creating Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.37.

13. Talen, J. (2005). Survey says nearly half of all Americans will be affected by a mental illness, some before adulthood. Newsday, June 7. www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hsment0607,0,6745489.story 

14. Klonoff, E.A. & Landrine, H., 1997, Preventing misdiagnosis of women: A guide to physical disorders that have psychiatric symptoms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 

15. Breggin, P.R. & Breggin, G. R. (1994). The war against children: How the drugs, programs, and theories of the psychiatric establishment are threatening America’s children with a medical ‘cure’ for violence. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

16. Froehlich T.E., et. al. (2007). Prevalence, recognition, and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in a national sample of US children. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. Vol.161, pp.857-864. 

17. Duenwald, M. (2003). More Americans Seeking Help for Depression. New York Times, June 18. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/18/health/18DEPR.html

18. Costello, E.J., Compton, S.N., Keeler, G. & Angold, A.(2003). Relationships between poverty and psychopathology: a natural experiment. JAMA. Oct 15, Vol.290, No.15, pp.2023-9.

19.. Pedersen, C.B. & Mortensen, P.B. (2001). Evidence of a dose-response relationship between urbanicity during upbringing and schizophrenia risk. Arch Gen Psychiatry. Vol. 58, No. 11, pp.1039-46.

20. Calamai, P. (2004). Lead exposure in womb linked to schizophrenia. Risk also found if mother had flu: 1960′s U.S. data help unravel mystery. The Toronto Star, Feb. 15.

21. Opler, M.G.A. et al. (2004). Prenatal lead exposure, -aminolevulinic acid, and schizophrenia. Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol.112, pp.548-552.

22. St Clair, D., Xu, M., Wang, P. Yu, Y., Fang, Y., Zhang, F. Zheng, X., Gu, N., Feng,G., Sham, P. & He, L. (2005). Rates of adult schizophrenia following prenatal exposure to the Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. JAMA. Vol.294, No. 5, pp.557-562.

23. Joan Arehart-Treichel, J. (2003). Is schizophrenia a downside of urban life?  Psychiatric News (American Psychiatric Association) May 16, Vol.38,  No.10, p.37.

24. Ross, C.A., & Pam, A., (1995).  Pseudoscience in biological psychiatry: Blaming the body.  New York: Wiley.

25. Poussaint, A.F. & Alexander, A. (2000). Lay my burden down: Suicide and the mental health crisis among African Americans. Boston: Beacon Press.

26. Cartwright, S. (1851). Report on the diseases and physical peculiarities of the Negro race. New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal. May, p. 707.

Susan Rosenthal is a practicing physician and the author of POWER and Powerlessness (2006) and Class, Health and Health Care (2008). She is a founding member of International Health Workers for People Over Profit. She can be reached through her web site: http://www.powerandpowerlessness.com/ or by email: powerandpowerlessness@rogers.com

This article was origanily published on Dissident Voice.

UCLA psychologist Golnaz Tabibnia, and colleagues Ajay Satpute and Matthew Lieberman, used a psychological test called the “ultimatum game” to explore fairness and self-interest in the laboratory. In this particular version of the test, Person A has a pot of money, say $23, which they can divide in any way they want with Person B. All Person B can do is look at the offer and accept or reject it; there is no negotiation. If Person B rejects the offer, neither of them gets any money.

Whatever Person A offers to Person B is an unearned windfall, even if it’s a miserly $5 out of $23, so a strict utilitarian would take the money and run. But that’s not exactly what happens in the laboratory. The UCLA scientists ran the experiment so sometimes $5 was stingy and other times fair, say $5 out of a total stake of $10. The idea was to make sure the subjects were responding to the fairness of the offer, not to the amount of the windfall. When they did this, and asked the subjects to rate themselves on scales of happiness and contempt, they had some interesting findings: Even when they stood to gain exactly the same dollar amount of free money, the subjects were much happier with the fair offers and much more disdainful of deals that were lopsided and self-centered.

The psychologists wanted to know if there is something inherently rewarding about being treated decently. So, they scanned several parts of the participants’ brains while they were in the act of weighing both fair and miserly offers. Consistent with previous results, the researchers found that a region previously associated with negative emotions such as moral disgust (the anterior insula) was activated during unfair treatment.   However, interestingly, they also found that regions associated with reward (including the ventral striatum) were activated during fair treatment even though there was no additional money to be gained.

As reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the brain finds self-serving behavior emotionally unpleasant, but a different bundle of neurons also finds genuine fairness uplifting. What’s more, these emotional firings occur in brain structures that are fast and automatic, so it appears that the emotional brain is overruling the more deliberate, rational mind. Faced with a conflict, the brain’s default position is to demand a fair deal.

Furthermore, when the scientists scanned the brains of those who were “swallowing their pride” for the sake of cash, the brain showed a distinctive pattern of neuronal activity. It appears that the unconscious mind can temporarily damp down the brain’s contempt response, in effect allowing the rational, utilitarian brain to rule, at least momentarily.

Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Reprinted from the Association for Psychological Science.

Click here to view the embedded video.

WASHINGTON/LONDON/NAIROBI/DELHI – 15^th April 2008. The way the world grows its food will have to change radically to better serve the poor and hungry if the world is to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social breakdown and environmental collapse. That is the message from the report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, a major new report by over 400 scientists which is launched today.

The assessment was considered by 64 governments at an intergovernmental plenary in Johannesburg last week.

The authors’ brief was to examine hunger, poverty, the environment and equity together. Professor Robert Watson Director of IAASTD said those on the margins are ill-served by the present system: “The incentives for science to address the issues that matter to the poor are weak… the poorest developing countries are net losers under most trade liberalization scenarios.”

Modern agriculture has brought significant increases in food production. But the benefits have been spread unevenly and have come at an increasingly intolerable price, paid by small-scale farmers, workers, rural communities and the environment.

It says the willingness of many people to tackle the basics of combining production, social and environmental goals is marred by “contentious political and economic stances”. One of the IAASTD co-chairs, Dr Hans Herren, explains: “Specifically, this refers to the many OECD member countries who are deeply opposed to any changes in trade regimes or subsidy systems. Without reforms here many poorer countries will have a very hard time… ”

The report has assessed that the way to meet the challenges lies in putting in place institutional, economic and legal frameworks that combine productivity with the protection and conservation of natural resources like soils, water, forests, and biodiversity while meeting production needs.

In many countries, it says, food is taken for granted, and farmers and farm workers are in many cases poorly rewarded for acting as stewards of almost a third of the Earth’s land. Investment directed toward securing the public interest in agricultural science, education and training and extension to farmers has decreased at a time when it is most needed.

The authors have assessed evidence across a wide range of knowledge that is rarely brought together. They conclude we have little time to lose if we are to change course. Continuing with current trends would exhaust our resources and put our children’s future in jeopardy.

Professor Bob Watson, Director of IAASTD said: “To argue, as we do, that continuing to focus on production alone will undermine our agricultural capital and leave us with an increasingly degraded and divided planet is to reiterate an old message. But it is a message that has not always had resonance in some parts of the world. If those with power are now willing to hear it, then we may hope for more equitable policies that do take the interests of the poor into account.”

Professor Judi Wakhungu, said “We must cooperate now, because no single institution, no single nation, no single region, can tackle this issue alone. The time is now.”

For more information visit GreenFacts.

[This is an edited transcript of a talk given to the Senior Fellows Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin, March 27, 2008.]

Environmentalism and climate science

A lot of people come to the climate change issue as environmentalists. Environmentalism is diverse, but I would say that a common denominator for environmentalists is that they are concerned with the negative impact of human activity on the ecosystems that sustain life on the planet and want to make changes that reduce that negative impact – or have no impact or positive impact. But having agreed on this, there are many different views within environmentalism. Some environmentalists want to protect nature from humans, some want to protect nature for humans. Some think technology is to blame, others think technology could be the solution.

Environmentalists sometimes talk about a “triple bottom line”. That’s ‘social, economic, and environmental’. The ‘social’ part is ‘social justice’, it’s a concern for people. People concerned about social justice usually believe that equality is a value society should strive for, especially in the economy. They are critical, skeptical, of the claims of those in power or authority.

I am also concerned about climate change as a scientist. The scientists who have developed our understanding of climate change are mostly atmospheric physicists. I studied atmospheric physics as an undergraduate, but now I work in forestry, and like most scientists, I work in a fairly specialized area. My work is not about how climate change occurs in the atmosphere, but on the impact of that change on forests, specifically on forest fires in the Canadian province of Ontario. I will elaborate on climate science below, but I want to say that working in this field, I have had the experience of most scientists. We use the established models from our field of application (in my case, models about how fast fires spread in different forest types and under different weather conditions). We feed these models some possible, and likely scenarios for what the weather will be like if things continue along present trends. We look at the results and are shocked by how much worse things are than we could have predicted. That’s the experience of modelers like me. The scientists who gather the data, who are watching the polar ice or the temperature trends, are similarly shocked every time they look at the new data.

I think that having all three of these lenses: an environmentalist one, a ‘social’ one, and a scientific one, is very useful in looking at the climate problem and possible solutions. It takes a bit of work to bring these views together, but in the end you get a good picture of the situation and what has to be done about it.

Science and environmentalism

Let me start by talking a little more about the science. I thought Al Gore’s film was a good and straightforward presentation of the science. Some of the best books on solutions to the problem – George Monbiot’s Heat, for example – don’t get into the science very much. They assume it, or they accept the authority of the scientific consensus. Should we? There are legitimate questions about this. Leftists raise legitimate questions about this. Even though not all questions about the science of climate change are legitimate or well-meaning or raised by people with decent values, it is worth spending some time taking them on.

A lot of the controversies about climate science are artificial. They are manufactured by petroleum-industry funded lobbyists who have gotten visibility and equal time in the media despite not having scientific credibility. Monbiot, who is a journalist and an expert at the kind of investigation that exposes these links, exposes these ‘denialists’ in his book, Heat. Here is a problem though, for someone who is concerned about social justice and critical of the media. We might believe there is an establishment that uses mechanisms like editorial review, self-censorship, and social sanction, to exercise a subtle control over what information gets out and what information gets emphasized in the public conversation. Is the scientific establishment any different, a socially critical person could ask? And is the current media interest in climate change not a sign that climate change isn’t really a problem, since we know the system tells lies? This is the argument made by a pair of (frequently very perceptive) social critics from my part of the world, in Canada, and by Alexander Cockburn here in the US. To answer this argument requires some quick discussion on what science is.

To repeat the problem: we are all told that we face a very serious threat to human civilization in the form of global warming caused by our emission of CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels. We have to act against this threat, and we have to act quickly. We are told this by ‘science’. But why should we believe ‘science’? Who is behind it? Is it a network of university-trained elite professionals, funded by government and private sector grants, a gentlemen’s club that protects its interests and promotes ideas that will further those interests?

Of course it is. Some of the better known philosophy of science, like Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, shows how most scientists in most times work within a set of assumptions – what he calls a paradigm – and that science advances when one or more of these assumptions is shown not to hold. Those scientists who work within a paradigm are doing what Kuhn calls “normal science”, and there is certainly lots of “normal science” going on in climate research. It’s humble stuff. Kuhn shows how “normal science” defends itself by excluding new ideas and that new ideas only advance when old generations die off. But it gets worse even than that. Physicist Jeff Schmidt wrote a book, Disciplined Minds, that gives just such an analysis. In that book he shows how graduate and professional school, even in the most “disinterested” of sciences like physics, train people to think creatively, but inside a box. And still worse, consider how much of research activity is ultimately intended for military ends. Or how much pharmaceutical research and medical research has been corrupted by the interests of drug companies. And this doesn’t even get into the social sciences, like economics, which produce arguments in favor of inequality and barbarism and present them with scientific authority. So yes, science is an establishment.

But it is also something else. In Einstein’s words, science is the refinement of everyday thinking. To me, science is applying certain human capacities – combining consistent logic and reasoning, creative leaps and then systematic testing, attention to evidence – to the world. It is something everyone can do and it is cumulative, maybe the most cumulative of our activities because it is intrinsically based on building on what others have done. The promise of science is that we can, if we pay attention, discipline ourselves to think clearly, and work and think with others, and give ourselves time and make the effort, come to some understanding about the world. It will be tentative, it will be subject to change, but we will be able to have some mental understanding, some mental model, that corresponds to reality. What I like about science, in other words, is that it doesn’t depend on authority. It is about not accepting things on authority. It’s actually when we don’t use our scientific capacities that we are left with nothing but some external authority to tell us how to understand the world.

Of course, ‘science’ itself is presented as just such an authority. Psychologists, doctors, government- and university-employed scientists constantly make public claims invoking the authority of science. What they do not do enough is actually open the process up: talk about the evidence behind the claims, the methods they use, the assumptions they make. They don’t present science as the refinement of everyday thinking and help people refine their thinking because that would actually reduce their authority. If you reject their claims, you can be accused of being ‘unscientific’. Who wants to be ‘unscientific’? Outrageous claims made by people with an air of authority can be used to make something seem ‘controversial’. If the process were more open, people could be invited to look at the methods, the evidence, the assumptions, and decide how credible a claim is. Because some things, some fields, are better understood than others.

Atmospheric science involves mostly physics and chemistry. Fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and spectroscopy are well-developed, well-understood fields with experimental backing and very credible theory. The atmosphere is complex, but it is a much more narrow field of inquiry than the ecosystems it interacts with, because adding life to the mix introduces something qualitatively different. Add human society and economy into this and you get another qualitative change. And in general, the more narrow the field of inquiry, the deeper the understanding. Social sciences like economics are intrinsically incredibly broad, and the results are therefore shallow if they’re valid. Economists try to narrow their inquiries by making assumptions, but this often abstracts out very important elements of the real world and makes their results useless for the real world.

I am arguing that atmospheric science, the science that tells us the climate is changing, is a field where more precise and accurate claims can be made than in economics. But the public discussion is presented as if the opposite were true. As if our society had to weigh the ‘certain’ costs of dealing with climate change against the ‘uncertain’ threats from it.

It’s true that climate science is uncertain. But all science is uncertain, and climate science claims are less uncertain than economics claims. It has a much better record of prediction. And uncertainty cuts both ways: the ‘uncertainty’ about the impacts of climate change mean that things could be much worse than we think. A Danish statistician named Bjorn Lomborg wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist. He sometimes shows some interesting ‘skepticism’ about environmentalist claims, but he doesn’t show skepticism about claims about economic activity, or cost, or growth, or markets. These assumptions are accepted so completely that we don’t even know they are assumptions. But this is the opposite of a skeptical attitude or a scientific attitude. Science advances when people discover assumptions they didn’t know they held.

Science is work, it takes time, and because it is cumulative, there are many pieces that build on others. What the denialists do is take one piece out of context and present some (usually dubious) counter-evidence or simple argument. They are usually wrong about the pieces they take on, but they also try to use some small piece to discredit the entire building. In a short time, it’s impossible to present all of climate science. If I had a full hour I could not do better than Al Gore did in his film. But let me just present some elements of the science as it was taught to me. You can, and should, look into it further if you are interested. If you do, I think you will be able to convince yourself of its validity.

The climate story

The basic argument is this. The energy to warm the earth comes from the sun’s radiation. Some of that is reflected straight back into space by clouds or ice (the reflectivity of the earth is called its albedo). Some of it reaches the earth’s surface, raises the earth’s temperature, and radiates out as heat. Some of that heat is, in turn, trapped by the atmosphere and returned again to the earth’s surface. How much heat is trapped by the atmosphere depends on the composition of the atmosphere – different chemicals have different characteristic frequencies that they emit at. CO2 emits heat. So does CH4 (methane) and some other important gases. The atmosphere has increasing amounts of these gases because we keep burning fossil fuels. The gases eventually cycle out of the atmosphere and back to the surface of the earth, when plants grow for example, but we are emitting into the atmosphere much more and much faster than the carbon is returned to the earth’s surface. The result is more heat in the atmosphere and higher temperatures, which, because the atmosphere and the climate are complex systems, have effects on everything else.

There is a carbon cycle. Carbon travels in a kind of equilibrium between the ocean and the earth’s surface, plants and animals on that surface, into the atmosphere, and back. The processes that drive the carbon cycle have a lot to do with life. Plants take carbon from the atmosphere as they use energy from the sun to grow. Animals release carbon into the atmosphere when they breathe. When organisms die, a lot of the carbon in their bodies is released. But it can also be stored. Coal is ancient plant matter that has been stored. Oil is ancient plankton, from the ocean. These fossil fuels can be thought of as dead, trapped, concentrated solar energy.

Flannery quotes a scientist named Jeffrey Dukes at the University of Utah who concluded that 100 tonnes of ancient plant life is required to create four litres of petrol (about 1 gallon). Growing that much plant life takes a lot of years of sunlight. The equivalent of about 1 year’s fossil fuel use (1997) globally is 422 years of sunlight.

It takes a remarkable process to make oil, a really remarkable sequence of events over thousands of years. It is such a chance event that I want to describe it in detail. This is Flannery (pg. 76):

The geological process for making oil is as precise as a recipe for making soufflé. First the sediments containing the phytoplankton must be buried and compressed by other rocks. Then, the absolute right conditions are needed to squeeze the organic matter out of the source rocks and to transfer it, through cracks and crevices, into a suitable storage stratum. This stratum must be porous, but above it must lie a layer of fine-grained, impervious rock, strong enough to withstand the pressures that [would shoot] the oil and gas into the air… and thick enough to forbid escape. In addition, the waxes and fats that are the source of oil need to be ‘cooked’ at between 100-135 degrees Celsius [water boils at 100 C] for millions of years. If the temperature ever exceeds these limits, all that will result is gas, or else the hydrocarbons will be lost entirely. As there is no cook tending the great subterranean ovens wherein oil is forged, the creation of oil reserves is the result of pure chance – the right rocks being cooked in the right way for the correct time, usually in a dome-shaped structure where a ‘crust’ overlies a porous oil-rich level that prevents the oil’s escape.

It can’t be replicated, which means our economy, based on it, is inherently unsustainable. But even if it could, our economy is also based on taking carbon that has been out of circulation, stored in the ground, for millions of years, and putting it into the atmosphere.

This changes the carbon cycle. To have an ecological world-view is to understand that everything is connected to everything else. So changing the carbon cycle changes the atmospheric temperature. It changes the hydrological cycle. It changes habitats for wildlife. It changes agricultural potentials and the amount and type of life different ecosystems can support. It combines with all the other kinds of toxins we release into the atmosphere, water, and land in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways. These changes are making parts of the earth, which are habitat for diverse life forms, unlivable. They are making parts of the world where millions of people live, unlivable. Let me not make the case for how serious the problem is, here. I refer you to Gore, or Flannery, or just the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s very conservative estimates. This presentation assumes you think the problem is very serious and must be solved quickly. The solution has an easy and a hard part.

The easy part of the solution

Two scientists from Princeton, Pacala and Socolow, published a paper in Science 2004 called “stabilization wedges”. The abstract of the paper is worth reading in full.

Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century. A portfolio of technologies now exists to meet the world’s energy needs over the next 50 years and limit atmospheric CO2 to a trajectory that avoids a doubling of the preindustrial concentration. Every element in this portfolio has passed beyond the laboratory bench and demonstration project; many are already implemented somewhere at full industrial scale. Although no element is a credible candidate for doing the entire job (or even half the job) by itself, the portfolio as a whole is large enough that not every element has to be used.

The elements that Pacala and Socolow present include what I call non-solutions like ethanol fuel and nuclear power as well as things that have to happen like reducing reliance on cars and stopping deforestation. Ethanol is already contributing to rising food prices and hunger in Latin America. By taking agricultural land out of circulation to produce corn for ethanol that then goes in a car, we’re still emitting CO2. But we’re also feeding cars instead of people. And the energetics of ethanol are scandalous. Filling an SUV’s tank takes enough corn to feed a person for a year. The food system and farming is dysfunctional as it is, distorted because of energy inputs and ecological destructiveness, actually. But we are hoping to stabilize the climate in time to prevent millions from dying and being displaced because of floods and drought. We don’t want to do it in a way that threatens millions with mass starvation. Nuclear power has other problems. If there is no safe way of disposing of it, if there are small risks of unthinkably catastrophic events, it is irrational to keep incrementing these risks with new plants.

Another non-solution is carbon offsets. The idea here is that if you are going to emit CO2, you can purchase “offsets” somewhere else so that you can end up with a net carbon balance of zero – your money is taking up as much carbon as it is putting out. Most of these “offsets” have to do with planting trees. But trees need to be planted anyway, and there are a whole number of reasons why a tree should or shouldn’t be planted in a certain place. Is that agricultural land? Is it well-watered enough for growing trees? Is the tree useful habitat for wildlife, or would some other land use in that area make better habitat? Even more than this, forests have an equilibrium role in the carbon cycle. When they grow, they take carbon out of the atmosphere. When they die, they release it. Burning fossil fuels is not an equilibrium activity – we are taking carbon that’s been buried for millions of years, out of circulation for millions of years, and putting it into the atmosphere. Forests cannot be used as a substitute for reducing emissions.

George Monbiot’s book, Heat, goes much deeper than Pacala and Socolow do in their paper, and he also rejects biofuels. He starts by saying, if it is technologically impossible to have an advanced, comfortable civilization and a stable climate, then we are probably doomed, because it will be impossible to generate the kind of social movement necessary to stabilize the climate if people have to mobilize to ruin their own lives. But then he does a very careful evaluation of the technologies and some evaluation of political feasibility, and shows that it is technologically possible to have pretty much all of the comforts and conveniences we are used to and still have a stable climate – all the conveniences except mass commercial flight. Which, obviously, since I’m convinced by Monbiot, makes me feel somewhat silly for flying here from Toronto to do this talk. Perhaps next time I’ll visit by videoconference?

I should say that, think that, Pacala and Socolow are basically right: the scientific, technological, and industrial knowledge exists to solve this problem. But every solution that is proposed needs to be evaluated for its ecological, social, and ethical implications. The test for any technology, any institution, any idea, any action, ought to be – what will this do to people, what will it do to nature, does it protect or destroy life?

One technology that I think does pass this test is a type of idea environmentalists are always raising. I’m presenting it as a technology following George Monbiot. The simple “technology” is called leaving the fossil fuels in the ground. It sounds crazy, but it would be very good for the atmosphere. It would also be good for society – if we could learn that not everything has to be viewed as a resource and not every resource has to be harvested, that would be positive. Since most people are not getting the benefits anyway, and since most people are being harmed, this technology isn’t one that harms the poor more than the rich. So, instead of society mobilizing its people, its brains, its institutions, to take resources and burn them, we could redirect our efforts to figuring out how not to do this. And how to do what we really want without doing this.

The hard part of the solution

It would seem, then, that the path is reasonably clear. We live in a democracy, after all. So we convince enough people that the climate problem is serious. We demonstrate that the technology is available to solve it without sacrificing most comforts and conveniences. Then we convince our leaders to make the necessary technological and policy changes, and if they don’t, then we elect leaders who do. Some who make decisions for the economy, through businesses they own or manage aren’t elected, it’s true. But they, too, can be convinced by rational arguments. Business leaders meet with environmentalists regularly. British Petroleum is getting ‘beyond petroleum’, they just call themselves BP now so you can wonder whether they’re British or Beyond and whether Petroleum really has anything to do with it any more. If parts of the planet become uninhabitable and there are a series of catastrophes for nature and people, that would be bad for business, right? So they will come along with the right arguments and proposals?

I wish it was true, but I don’t think that’s how things work. The basic nature of the system we live in isn’t democratic. We are ruled by a system that takes the elements of life – nature, land, water, energy, cultures and peoples – and destroys them to turn them into money and power. The system has its own logic. If you are a player in it, you have to follow that logic. You have to take what you can grab – for most people it’s their own lives – and turn it into money. If you’re excluded from it, you’re excluded from the very means of survival. If you’re excluded and you try to get the means of survival for yourself or your loved ones outside of the system, you will be met with violence. If you’re in this system you cannot think about whether it is killing the planet, whether the whole system is basically leading us to suicide. Even if you know that’s true, so long as it would make you more money to ignore it, you will never be able to compete with someone who does ignore it unless you do. And so much of our world is based on competition: between individuals, between businesses, and between countries. Economic competition, political competition, military competition.

You have probably figured out that I am talking about capitalism. It is a system based on profits, accumulation, competition, private property, class hierarchy, the destruction of nature, backed up by force. It coexists with a culture that has what environmentalist writer Derrick Jensen calls a ‘death urge’ – a culture that hates life, that hates women, that hates indigenous peoples and encourages hatred of anyone below on the rungs of a hierarchical society.

It is leading us to a disastrous future. Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine is about what she calls ‘disaster capitalism’. Those in power can use disasters to reconfigure the institutions of a country to make it easier to make profits. When they don’t have a disaster to hand, they can create one. One of her chapters is about Iraq. Another is about New Orleans. The book could be a picture of a nightmare future, except that it is the present. But a future along these lines can only get uglier.

Neither the climate problem nor running out of fossil fuels can be ignored. They will be dealt with. But they will be dealt with according to the principles of disaster capitalism. Yes, parts of the world will become uninhabitable. Other parts of the world will be habitable. These will be reserved for elites. Those who live there now will be displaced, by force. Yes, there will be a scarcity of energy, food, water, land. There will be some of these resources, and they will be reserved for elites. They will be used by elites to keep themselves secure from the rest. Before petroleum runs out, it will probably be reserved for exclusive use by the military. This will happen until the resources are run down and the basis for life is destroyed. Warning elites of this collapse won’t help – they know they are the only ones who have a chance of surviving it.

We know this will happen. It has happened. It is happening. And despite the ultimately suicidal nature of the system, it will defend itself against attempts to change it. That is why, as destructive as competition is, I don’t think we can completely discard it. For a stabilized atmosphere, we are going to have to defeat some people and some institutions. Success in that competition will require all the tools of social change: organization, communication, demonstration, and actions of all kinds, at least some of which will be new and correspond to the time and place. Everybody has to join that, and we have to win it.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and activist. He teaches at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies. Read other articles by Justin, or visit Justin’s website.

Reprinted from http://www.dissidentvoice.org/

Although science is rarely the only factor driving public policy, scientific input should always be weighed from an impartial perspective. Unfortunately, numerous independent investigations have documented the suppression, manipulation, and distortion of federal science before it enters the policy process. Political interference in science has indeed become pervasive.

Furthermore, recent changes in the structure of the federal government impair the ability of federal scientists to fulfill their responsibility to serve their agencies and the public interest.

Federal scientists find themselves under growing surveillance and control.  Administration officials have curtailed public access to scientific information, and subtle systemic changes have sidelined scientists and advisory committees that previously helped inform the policy-making process. In too many cases, these officials use tainted science to justify misguided policies.

The consequences of these practices are profound. Policy makers cannot make informed decisions without access to the best available scientific information. Even worse, the misuse of science threatens our nation’s ability to respond to increasingly complex public health, environmental, and security challenges. Such interference significantly decreases the effectiveness of federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency. It risks demoralizing the federal scientific workforce and raises the possibility of lasting harm to the federal scientific enterprise. And it makes our government less accountable to the citizens it is supposed to serve.

To restore scientific integrity to federal policy making, we need to open up the decisionmaking process to scrutiny. We need to protect the ability of federal scientists to fulfill their responsibilities without interference. To do so, Congress and the president must institutionalize the independence of the federal scientific community and its advice.

Chapter 1 of this report briefly explores the ways that the administration has directly misused science. Chapter 2 delves into the systemic changes that have made it more difficult for federal scientists to serve the public interest. Chapter 3 prescribes specific steps needed to bring scientific integrity and accountability back to federal decision making.

This report is intended to be illustrative, not exhaustive. Improving the way that science informs the decision-making process will require the persistent and energetic engagement of Congress, the executive branch, the scientific community, and the public.

For more information, download the executive summary or full report.

Reprinted from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The study’s indicators predict that China will soon pass the United States in the critical ability to develop basic science and technology, turn those developments into products and services — and then market them to the world. Though China is often seen as just a low-cost producer of manufactured goods, the new “High Tech Indicators” study done by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology clearly shows that the Asian powerhouse has much bigger aspirations.

“For the first time in nearly a century, we see leadership in basic research and the economic ability to pursue the benefits of that research — to create and market products based on research — in more than one place on the planet,” said Nils Newman, co-author of the National Science Foundation-supported study. “Since World War II, the United States has been the main driver of the global economy. Now we have a situation in which technology products are going to be appearing in the marketplace that were not developed or commercialized here. We won’t have had any involvement with them and may not even know they are coming.”

To read entire article go here.

In contrast, Chinese, who live in a society that encourages a collectivist attitude among its members, are much more adept at determining another person’s perspective, according to a new study.

One of the consequences of  Americans’ and other Westerners’ problems of seeing things from another person’s point of view is faltering communication, said Boaz Keysar, Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago. 

“Many actions and words have multiple meanings. In order to sort out what a person really means, we need to gain some perspective on what he or she might be thinking and, Americans for example, who don’t have that skill very well developed, probably tend to make more errors in understanding what another person means,” Keysar said.

Keysar is co-author with University graduate student Shali Wu of “The Effect of Culture on Perspective Taking,” which discusses their research and is published in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Although studies of children have shown that the ability a person to appreciate another person’s perspective is universal, not all societies encourage their members to develop the skill as they grow up.  “Members of these two cultures seem to have a fundamentally different focus in social situations,” the authors wrote of Chinese and Americans.

“Members of collectivist cultures tend to be interdependent and to have self-concepts defined in terms of relationships and social obligations,” they said. “In contrast, members of individualist cultures tend to strive for independence and have self-concepts defined in terms of their own aspirations and achievements.”

In order to study this cultural difference in interpersonal communications, the team devised a game that tested how quickly and naturally people from the two groups were able to access another person’s perspective.

They chose two groups of University of Chicago students: one consisting of 20 people from China who grew up speaking Mandarin, and another group including 20 non-Asian Americans who were all native English speakers.

The researchers tested a hypothesis that suggested interdependence would make people focus on others and away from themselves. They did that by having people from the same cultural group pair up and work together to move objects around in a grid of squares placed between them. 

In the game, one person, the “director,” would tell the other person, the “subject,” where the objects should be moved. Over some of the squares, a piece of cardboard blocked the view of the director, so the subject could clearly tell what objects the director could not see. In some cases there were two similar objects, one blocked from the director’s view and one visible to both people playing the game.

The Chinese subjects almost immediately focused on the objects the director could see and moved the correct objects. When Americans were asked to move an object and there were two similar objects on the grid, they paused and often had to work to figure out which object the director could not see before moving the correct object. Taking into account the other person’s perspective was more work for the Americans, who spent on average about twice as much time completing the moves than did the Chinese. 

Even more startling for the researchers was the frequency with which many of the Americans ignored the fact that the director could not see all the objects.

“Despite the obvious simplicity of the task, the majority of American subjects (65 percent) failed to consider the director’s pespective at least once during the experiment,” by asking the director which object he or she meant or by moving an object the director could not see, Keysar said.  In contrast, only one Chinese subject seemed confused by the directions.

“Apparently, the interdependence that pervades Chinese culture has its effect on members of the culture over time, taking advantage of the human ability to distinguish between the mind of the self and that of the other, and developing this ability to allow Chinese to unreflectively interpret the actions of another person from his or her perspective,” the authors wrote.

Americans do not lose this ability, but years of culturalization based values of independence do not promote the development of mental tools needed to take into account another person’s point of view, they said.

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