We all use credentials (and more generally, reputation) as what I call a "first stage filter", a quick way of doing triage on the cacophony of different voices competing for our collective attention.
Credentialism is at best a very quick-and-dirty method of evaluating a speaker, and elsewhere I've argued that things like this are useful and absolutely necessary, and yet they should also "leak", we should be on the lookout for cases where exceptions deserve to be made.
Let's see how Credentialism works in various cases, beginning with the anti-nuclear power activist Amory Lovins and moving on from there.
Amory Lovins, physicist?
In a recent issue of the AAAS publication Science, I noted with some mild surprise that there was an article by Amory Lovins. Isn't he more of an activist/ideologue than a scientist?
But I gather there's precedent of letting Lovins debate issues in the pages of Science, dating back to the 70s.
A glance at his credentials shows he's a "physicist" (which I hadn't heard) and he's got a stack of honorary degrees and such, so you can see why the AAAS would let him in the door. But-- he doesn't actually have any earned degrees? And who gave him all of those honorary degrees?
I've never had a very good impression of Amory Lovins (I'm more on the side of his former cohorts Stewart Brand and Peter Schwartz, both of whom converted over to the pro-nuclear side). Lovins is one of those guys who gets an uncritical acceptance in many quarters that I find pretty annoying. For example, the interview at "Democracy Now" where they invite Lovins to take shots at people like Stewart Brand, but have never given Brand an opportunity to respond.
In that interview, Lovins says some pretty outrageous sounding things, such as the headline quote "Expanding Nuclear Power Makes Climate Change Worse". Just looking at that headline, you'd think he's claiming that nuclear power is a big CO2 emitter (and oddly enough, there are people who believe things like that... I wrote about that over here). The claim he's actually making though is that he figures it's more cost-effective to go after other approaches to global warming.
His central premise is "nuclear power is expensive", and if you buy that, a big expansion in nuclear could soak up funding you'd rather use for something else. Needless to say, even granting his central premise (which I don't), there are less misleading ways you could make that claim: there's a huge difference between "there are better ways" and "that's a bad way".
Though, all things considered, I don't think nuclear power is really all that expensive, and I suspect it'll start looking like a good deal if we ever get some reasonable environmental policies like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme (ala Obama's Clean Power Plan). Wind and solar have fundamental flaws that limit how far we can push them without some breakthrough in energy storage technology... or without coupling them with load-following fossil fuels-- considering that that's what we've actually been doing, you could say "renewable energy makes climate change worse" and be closer to the mark than Amory Lovins.
In the recent article in Science (which is a book review of "Harness the Sun" by Philip Warburg), Lovins indulges in what looks like conspiranoia, calling the book "... a valuable service to a society rife with solar myths, many deliberately manufactured."
He later adds that he regards the intermittency problem I just mentioned as one of the "greatest myths"-- though it's not clear if it's supposed to be a "deliberately manufactured" one, or if it is, who it is who has manufactured it:
Warburg fails to discuss flexible loads, distributed thermal storage, and other cheap substitutes for bulk electrical storage, whose supposed necessity is variable renewable's greatest myth.
That's a little hard for me to decipher, but "thermal storage" sounds like a difficult and expensive technology to use with photovoltaics or wind, and I have a suspicion that "flexible loads" is going to turn out to be a code for "don't make a move if the wind and sun are down".
Past attempts by Lovins at arguing this point have not held up very well.
counting honoraries
Anyway, back on the subject of Lovins' credentials. It turns out that there's this guy Rod Adams (of the atomicinsights blog-- he also goes by the handle "#atomicrod"), and he's looked into this quite a bit: back on May 12, 2006 his not-very-sympathetic conclusion was
It seems to me that Mr. Lovins, who is famous as a convincing author and energy visionary, probably does not have an academic degree that is the result of following a prescribed course of study in an accredited institution of higher learning. I am not aware of any particular restriction on calling oneself a "physicist", but I would imagine that most people who use that designation have at least one and probably more formal academic degrees. Honorary degrees do not normally count for much.
Myself I'd have trouble going quite that far...
First of all, getting a stack of honorary degrees does not strike me as an easy trick (it's not like I've got any). Myself, I wouldn't say that they don't "count for much", though it might be a little ambiguous what they do count for (particularly if you seem to be allergic to telling people which institutions awarded you these honorary doctorates...).
Secondly, I'm not sure that we should really treat doctorates like union cards that are necessary to work in a field.
Freeman Dyson
Consider the case of Freeman Dyson.
If you survey his career, you can see he's a very important physicist who did quite a lot of impressive work without first earning a PhD, though since then, he's certainly been awarded honorary degrees (e.g. here's a mention of one from the University of Michigan).
I remember Dyson commenting in some of his popular writing that he didn't think anyone could do what he did today: the system of credentials has become too rigid for someone like himself to slip through it. It is not abundantly clear to me that this is a Good Thing.
But then Rod Adams certainly has a point that when you represent yourself as a physicist, to most people it probably does suggest that you've earned a PhD from an accredited institution.
And even to me, calling yourself a physicist implies that you've done some actual work in the field, that you've tried to advance the state-of-the-art. Freeman Dyson back in 1949 did some very significant work on the foundations of Quantum Electrodynamics. And even if you're not up at Freeman Dyson's level, I'd expect that if you call yourself a physicists you'd be someone publishing in reputable physics journals, which is not something that Lovins seems to do very often.
K. Eric Drexler
Back on the subject of honorary doctorates, let me consider another case: K. Eric Drexler.
Starting in the early 80s, Drexler was doing some really creative work on the potential of manufacturing with atomic-scale precision (aka "nanotechnology"), but this odd mix of theory and engineering from a strange outsider didn't sit well with the old guard in established fields like Chemistry.
He got a lot push back from people playing the "but you don't even have a PhD!" card. He was then awarded what I've always assumed was essentially an honorary PhD-- from the "MIT Media Lab"? What did his nanotech thesis have to do with them? His PhD looked like it was given to him as a maneuver to make it harder for people to avoid taking him seriously.
(The way I put it: Drexler had made it through the filters of folks at the MIT Media Lab, and they were trying to get him through the first stage filters of the traditional hard sciences.)
But then, it's not like Drexler has never received an earned degree, he had a Bachelor's and Master's from MIT before getting this (possibly) "honorary" PhD.
Stewart Brand
Really, in this day and age, I think it's fairly peculiar for a technically inclined person to not have a single earned degree in a technical field...
Even in the case of what I would call one of the ultimate outsider polymaths Stewart Brand -- founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Long Now Foundation, etc-- he has a degree in biology from Stanford that he earned early in his career (studying ecology under Paul Ehrlich, no less).
Jane Jacobs
But let's go even further into the outside, consider the case of Jane Jacobs.
Jane Jacobs masterwork was "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", a book published in 1969 which presented some critical insights in urban design. Briefly, cities work best when regions are shared by a diverse range of people, using them for different purposes at different times: so high densities and short blocks without single-purpose zoning are all key.
Jane Jacobs was one of the first to point out that there were severe problems with both the trends toward suburbia and the "urban renewal" game-- which involved calling functional neighborhoods "slums" and replacing them with phenomenally non-functional "housing projects": or destroying hundreds of small businesses to replace them with with gigantic institutions that take up entire city blocks.
As I've said before: "Jacobs was not a Professor of Urbanity, or an employee of the Department of Demarcation, or some such thing. Jane Jacobs was just herself: An unaffiliated, uncompromised intellect."
This is a case where an intelligent, untrained outsider did a better job than the insiders, almost certainly because she was an outsider. Sometimes the outsider perspective is just what's needed.
Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson's wikipedia page says that he has a Doctorate from Keio University, where he held a position as a visiting professor-- it doesn't make it clear, but I believe that's essentially an honorary degree. His earned degrees include a BA from Swarthmore and a Masters from Harvard in Sociology-- but none of these actually have a lot of direct relevance to his actual life's work. Among other things, he worked out a lot of the theory of hypertext systems (much of which has unfortunately been largely ignored in actual hypertext systems); notably, Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the WWW has referred to him as a "professional visionary". Ted Nelson was essentially the first software designer-- or very close to it. His detractors (on some variation of the "if you're so smart why aren't you rich" principle) regard him as a failure because his hypertext software project "Xanadu" never quite shipped (or in the forms it did ship, it never quite caught on). However, publishing several very influential books that changed the course of software development (albeit, not as much as he would've liked), does not strike me as being a failure.
The Last Intellectuals
There's a book by Russell Jacoby called "The Last Intellectuals" (1987) that has many flaws but was nevertheless very popular-- at least among intellectuals. "The Last Intellectuals" argues that the unaffiliated, generalist intellectual that once acted as a "transmission belt of culture" has become an endangered species, as intellectuals moved en mass into academia and lost the will and/or ability to write for the general public.
The academic world seems to have taken this book as a challenge for academics to do more publicly accessible work, even if it's just blogging (this seems to be the general attitude at the crookedtimber site, for example), though strictly speaking Jacoby was championing a completely unaffiliated and independent intellectuals ala the aforementioned Jane Jacobs, or for example, (to mention a crookedtimber favorite) George Scialabba.
Lovins the outsider
Interestingly, there are some places where Amory Lovins plays up his lack of conventional background and adopts an outsider stance.
If you look at the first of the multiple "Downloadable" Amory Lovins bios up at the Rocky Mountain Institute site (he has a half-dozen or so bios out there of different shapes and flavors), he states that he's "A Harvard and Oxford dropout", and adds that "He has held visiting posts at ten universities ranging from Peking to Stanford, teaching only subjects he’s never formally studied."
Lovins, the well-paid outsider
Rod Adams has recently made the point that Lovins is quite well paid by his "non-profit", the Rocky Mountain Institute, getting something like 300k annually:
Amory Lovins continues Sowing Confusion About Renewable and Nuclear Energy.
So, if Amory Lovins seems somewhat mentally inflexible on his opinions on nuclear power, we might imagine that it's because of this financial interest-- but on the other hand, people in general tend to be inflexible about changing long-held opinions.
"Jeroen", commenting here remarks: "Stewart Brand has specifically defended Lovins against my accusation that Lovins' 35 years as an oil industry consultant has something to do with his continued defense of fossil fuel consumption in the form of 'micro-power'. He claimed that there is no evidence that Lovins is anything but sincere ... "
It is interesting to consider that the "are they paid for this?" attack can be used to "discredit" almost anyone. It's nearly inevitable that a person with impressive credentials in a field is someone who makes money doing what they do. And if an "activist" figure who has been working at it for long enough to be famous for it, it's likely they've figured out how to bring in some money doing it, or else they'd have had to quit to work a straight job.
Lovins vs the Four: Brand, Schwartz, Lovelock and More
Amory Lovins had an interview on Democracy Now, back in 2008, where he said:
AMY GOODMAN: Environmentalists like Stewart Brand and James Lovelock are pushing nuclear power.
AMORY LOVINS: There are actually four individuals involved in the world who are prominent environmentalists who had that view, and you’ve named two of them.
AMY GOODMAN: Who are the other two?
AMORY LOVINS: Patrick Moore was active in founding Greenpeace back in the ’70s, now works for industry; and Peter Schwartz, who used to be on my board, who used to run group planning for Royal Dutch/Shell, is of the same view. But I can’t think of any others. There are no actual environmental groups who favor nuclear power.
AMY GOODMAN: What is your answer to them, and why have they arrived — these are your old colleagues?
AMORY LOVINS: Well, yeah, a couple of them are old friends. Well, I think they haven’t done their homework. And I keep asking for their analysis and not getting it, because I don’t think they have one. But they somehow form the view that because nuclear doesn’t emit carbon, it must be a good thing. Well, that’s not good enough.
You need a source that doesn’t emit carbon — nuclear emits a little bit in the fuel cycle and in building plants, and so on. But you need one that doesn’t emit carbon and is faster and cheaper than other ways to do the same thing. You see, renewables don’t emit carbon. Efficiency doesn’t emit carbon. Cogeneration based on recovered waste heat you were throwing away anyhow doesn’t emit carbon, because you already paid for the carbon in making the useful part of the heat in industry. And these sources are a great deal cheaper and faster than nuclear. So if climate’s a problem, we need to invest judiciously, not indiscriminately, to get the most solution per dollar, the most solution per year. Otherwise, we’re making things worse.
There are a few things of interest here, I think.
The posturing about how people like Brand and Schwartz don't have any "analysis" is outrageously obnoxious... The general argument is that, yes, nuclear power is a good thing because it doesn't emit carbon, but also because it doesn't require any breakthroughs in energy storage to get it to scale. Pretending that the intermittent nature of wind and solar isn't a problem does not count as being judicious. Myself, what I would call judicious is a "do everything" strategy that relies on a diverse range of low-carbon energy sources, and doesn't involve betting the planet on something new and untried...
On the subject of credentials, the position I take with a case like Amory Lovins is that his somewhat unconventional background might raise a flag of suspicion, but it does not automatically discredit everything he says. Similarly, the idea that Lovins has been well-paid for his activism might raise a flag, but that doesn't automatically discredit him either. In other words-- just looking at his background-- I would cut Lovins a little more slack than someone like Rod Adams does.
But here, in this Democracy Now interview, we see Lovins playing a game where he tries to discredit his opponents, implying that they've all been corrupted by their business connections. So it could be there's some poetic justice in Rod Adams attacks on Lovins.
James Hansen
In contrast to Amory Lovins, James Hansen's background could not be more impressive in the conventional way: he's got earned degrees in physics and astronomy (albeit all from a state school, the University of Iowa), and after that he followed a path of internships and postdocs to NASA Goddard, where he ended up serving as the head of the Institute for Space Studies for several decades.
An issue that comes up fairly frequently among the "green" left: is Hansen a hero for calling out global warming in 1988, or is he a villain for calling for nuclear power in 2008? The usual justification cited for rejecting his nuclear power stance is that he's qualified to speak in one area but not the other.
Here's an example from a recent post by Rod Adams: Appealing to the hearts and minds of the people at APIEL
On Sunday Mary Olson, a NIRS activist, spoke about the health effects of radiation, noting that regulators around the world agreed that there was no safe dose of radiation. I asked her if she was familiar with James Hansen’s peer reviewed paper calculating that nuclear energy had saved 1.8 million lives already and could save far more in the future. She responded by stating that she has a great deal of respect for his work as a climate scientist, but they said that he was completely unqualified in the area of energy policy.
The Hansen paper that Rod Adams referred to is here. Keith Pickering talked about it at the dailykos:
Climatologist James E. Hansen, who just this week retired as head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science, has just co-authored a paper that has been accepted by the journal Environmental Science & Technology, in which he calculates that nuclear power has prevented 1.84 million deaths worldwide that would have occurred if nuclear power plants had been built as fossil-fueled power plants instead. That's actually a conservative figure, because it doesn't count a number of things, like the effects of CO2 on climate change.
Although this number isn't terribly surprising to those who study energy issues, it does point up a hugely under-reported aspect of energy policy: nuclear power is the safest way ever devised to generate electricity. Safer than wind. Safer than solar. And far, far safer than fossil fuels.
(I thought I might as well quote that here, because I I'm going to refer to it in the section "Freeman Dyson nods".)
In that Rod Adams piece he continues:
She [Mary Olson] referred me to a piece published on the NIRS web site that refuted Hansen’s work. This commentary from Sovacool, Parenteau, Ramana, Valentine, Jacobson, Delucchi, Diesendorf appears to be the document she was referencing.
Benjamin K. Sovacool
Sovacool is frequently cited by anti-nuclear Greens, despite the evident lack of quality of much of his work.
Looking at the wikipedia article for Sovacool, you'll see a bunch of mind-numbingly Very Serious phrases that don't actually work out to being impressive scientific credentials:
Benjamin Sovacool is Director of the Center for Energy Technology at AU Herning and Professor of Business and Social Sciences at Aarhus University in Denmark. ... Sovacool is also Visiting Associate Professor at Vermont Law School and founding Director of the Energy Security & Justice Program.
His educational background includes a PhD in "Science and Technology Studies", with undergraduate work in "Philosophy and Communication Studies" and a masters in Rhetoric.
The idea that this man is qualified to understand energy policy and James Hansen is not seems very peculiar, to say the least.
social science and energy policy
Sovacool himself has stood up for the right of social scientists (such as himself) to get into the Climate Change field, Diversity: Energy studies need social science:
To secure a safe, reliable and low-carbon energy future, we must alter both technologies and human behavior ... . The US Department of Energy notes ... that supply and demand is “affected as much by individual choice, preference, and behavior, as by technical performance”.
Myself, I think it's pretty clear that there is a need for Social Scientists to work on energy policy, but it's equally clear we don't need them to try to do the kind of work that Sovacool was trying to do, where he was clearly in over his head.
To state the obvious: economics analysis is often crucial in this field. We've got some people telling us it'd cost umpty-trillion dollars to fix our energy infrastructure, and other people telling us it'll save millions of lives even if you don't consider global warming. How do we decide who's right?
There's another issue that I'm concerned about having to with designing institutions so that something like a nuclear plant can be constructed and managed safely-- There are issues of corporate set-up and plant management and also keeping regulatory agencies from falling pray to regulatory capture. Some of my pro-nuclear cohorts seem to feel that these are solved problems, but if so what isn't a solved problem is doing it all in a way that makes it obvious to the citizenry that it's being done right.
Issues involving urban planning have a tremendous impact on our energy needs, and figuring out what can be done with anti-sprawl initiatives is definitely in the realm of "social sciences".
Richard Posner
Richard Posner-- conservative legal beagle and chicago-style econ advocate-- has evidently been trying to walk back some of his Bush League idiocy in recent years, but the crap he was coming up with back when it mattered is way too nasty-stupid to want to give him much credit for anything now.
This is a man who tried to defend the Supreme Court's interference in the 2000 presidential election.
He wrote a justification-for-torture book "Not a suicide pact: the constitution in a time of national emergency" (2006). There's nothing quite like having a judge on the bench writing a "oh, just fuck the constitution" book.
But the reason I bring up Posner here is that he wrote an entire book on how intellectuals (excepting himself, of course) should stick to their fields of expertise: "Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline" (2001).
One of his arguments is that you can't trust anyone with tenure, because they're insulated from "market forces" which normally act to ensure intellectual quality (just like with Fox News). But then, you might also take this as an argument against judicial independence (why exactly is it that the legal scholars who advocated torture have not all been disbarred?).
Anyway, if you're inclined to be a hard-liner about fields of expertise, remember: Richard Posner is on your side. Are you sure you want to go there?
(This is the kind of thing that maybe shouldn't be an argument that matters, but I suspect that it does: Step carefully when you're in such company.)
IPCC
The IPCC is of course the gold-standard for climate change information, at least for us nominally reality-based folks (strangely enough, our conservative friends struggle with going along with the infamous 97% consensus among climate experts...).
To quote the ipcc working group 3 homepage/:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assesses scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. It is open to all Members of the United Nations and of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Cribbing from wikipedia one more time, to get an idea of how it all works:
The IPCC does not carry out its own original research, nor does it do the work of monitoring climate or related phenomena itself. The IPCC bases its assessment on the published literature, which includes peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed sources. ... Thousands of scientists and other experts contribute (on a voluntary basis, without payment from the IPCC) ... to writing and reviewing reports, which are then reviewed by governments.
Chairs and co-chairs are evidently chosen by election.
There's some information here about the IPCC Structure:
Historically, the IPCC has been organized into three working groups, a variety of task forces or special committees, and a small secretariat in Geneva.
It goes on to discuss in some detail how the IPCC uses peer review:
The IPCC’s technical reports derive their credibility principally from an extensive, transparent, and iterative peer review process that ... is considered far more exhaustive than that associated with scientific journals. This is due to the number of reviewers, the breadth of their disciplinary backgrounds and scientific perspectives, and the inclusion of independent “review editors” who certify that all comments have been fairly considered and appropriately resolved by the authors.
I think it's interesting that the IPCC operates without any sort of "poster boy": there's no leading scientist associated with what they do, and in fact I think most of use would be hard-pressed to think of a single scientist that contributes to the effort. The IPCC doesn't need the prestige of any one name associated with it (though conversely, there is some cachet with being associated with the IPCC... Benjamin Sovacool's bio mentions that he's a contributing author, for example).
Another bit from that Rod Adams post: Appealing to the hearts and minds of the people at APIEL:
One presenter quoted Benjamin Sovacool’s numbers for nuclear energy’s life cycle CO2 emissions, saying that his study reported that nuclear produced six times as much CO2 per unit of output energy as wind. I asked him why he accepted the IPCC as a credible source of information when it came to their warnings about climate change but not their recommendations for solutions and not their representative numbers [p.979] for emissions from various sources.
Rod Adams is referring to section A.II.5.2 "Review of lifecycle assessments of electricity generation technologies", which is a fairly dense and difficult read, but if I understand Table A.II.1 correctly ("Comparison of global total primary energy supply in 2008 using different primary energy accounting methods"), you'd have to say that Nuclear conclusively beats Fossil fuels and Renewables (including hydro) on minimizing green house gas emissions.
This section of the IPCC report describes the underlying methodology for Fig. 9.8, which can be found here. There's a lot going on in that graph, but if you look at the median values, it confirms my impression that any power source except fossil fuels are excellent ways of reducing GHG emissions. An odd feature of that graph though is it shows some estimates for what can supposedly be done with fossil fuels plus carbon sequestration, and the projected reduction in emissions for fossil fuels look really remarkable. Biopower+Sequestration is the big story there, I'd say: hypothetically this could become a big carbon sink.
Anyway, back at the "main subject", which is the evaluation of a position based on credentials... the case that Rod Adams describes does indeed seem like an excellent example of a case where the greens trumpet statements by the IPCC when they agree, but quietly slink away when they don't.
This makes me wonder how they're dealing with this development, as reported in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, by Suzanne Waldman, earlier this year: Timeline: The IPCC’s shifting position on nuclear energy:
The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report tamps down enthusiasm about renewable energy. The report candidly discusses the difficulties of spurring a renewable energy transition and integrating renewable energy. Nuclear is once again grouped with renewable energy as the key elements of a low-carbon energy system, along with carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS). “No single mitigation option in the energy supply sector will be sufficient,” the report warns. “Achieving deep cuts [in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions] will require more intensive use of low-GHG technologies such as renewable energy, nuclear energy, and CCS.”
Back in 2011, the IPCC was leaning more in the direction of pushing Renewables, and a few web searches will turn up many a gleeful comment about this from the usual suspects. Now that the bloom is off the renewable rose, where's the acknowledgment that nuclear power is a necessity?
Suzanne Waldman
And the bio of the author of that Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists piece:
Suzanne Waldman is a doctoral student at Carleton University who researches public dialogues on energy and risk, with a particular focus on how citizens can become informed enough to seek good policy decisions in the era of energy dynamism and climate urgency.
Her blog http://www.suzannewaldman.net/ has a number of interesting pieces up. Most recently she takes on Mark Jacobson and friends: The dubious environmental justice of 100% renewable energy
She's the author of this book: The Demon and the Damozel (2008) about "Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti" which is intended to be "Developing a perspective on Victorian culture as the breeding ground for early theories of the unconscious and the divided psyche ... ".
And unless my web searches have gone astray, she's also been doing some copy editing for an independent line of comic books.
So in general, she strikes me as a very bright, interesting young woman. She's been studying Communications, and has come to the conclusion if there's anyone with a "problem to communicate" it's the nuclear industry, so she's offering her assistance.
Getting that piece published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was actually an excellent move, it's the kind of place that's likely to be treated with some respect by our Green friends (unlike, for example, the FAQs available from nuclear organizations that are never read by the people who need to see them).
But: let us consider as a thought experiment, what if someone with an identical background to Suzanne Waldman was writing anti-nuclear pieces? I would probably be sneering at her lack of any technical background, and might very well be tempted to toss in a few cheapshots about Communication majors in general.
Though of course, in this case it's the prestige of the IPCC I'm most interested in, and I'm just trusting her to have summarized their reporting accurately.
Helen Caldicott
There was a time when Helen Caldicott seemed like the biggest name among anti-nuclear activists, bigger than someone like Amory Lovins. Somewhat famously, she was a pediatrician (essentially playing up the "outsider" bit... and you know, she was concerned for the children). Wikipedia has her background as:
Caldicott went on to study medicine and received her medical degree in 1961 from the University of Adelaide Medical School. In the 1970s, Caldicott rose to prominence as a public figure ... speaking on the health hazards of radiation from her professional perspective as a pediatrician.
I sometimes wonder why we seem to have stopped hearing from Helen Caldicott.
For me Caldicott is a primary symptom of everything that was wrong with the 70s-era nuclear power debate: She's always had a very earnest, alarmed speaking style, delivering factoids at a furious rate with a tone of absolute certainly... and not always (often?) getting them right.
I was once listening to KPFA (maybe a little over ten years ago), when Helen Caldicott was on the air, and a researcher from Stanford called in to talk to her about the conference they had both just attended. He got as far as "But that's not what he was saying, Helen!" at which point Caldicott cut him off with a flurry of sanctimonious ranting, and by the time she was done, the KPFA board-op had helpfully hung-up on the guy and moved on to another caller.
Then there was this book by Caldicott that was the first place I ever saw the odd notion that Nuclear power is actually a heavy CO2 emitter:
Nuclear Power is Not the Answer (2006):
Nuclear power is not "clean and green," as the industry claims, because large amounts of traditional fossil fuels are required to mine and refine the uranium needed to run nuclear power reactors, to construct the massive concrete reactor buildings, and to transport and store the toxic radioactive waste created by the nuclear process.
And skimming through the text to find out how she supported this (rather outrageous) claim, I found it relied on a single study:
Very few studies are yet available that analyze the total life cycle of nuclear power and its final energy input versus output. One of the best is a study by Jan Willem Storm can Leeuwen and Philip Smithe titled "Nuclear Power-- the Energy Balance."
I laughed put the book down, and then years later found people on the net quoting this thesis as gospel-- long after that one study was discredited.
(Perhaps unsurprisingly, Caldicott also quotes Amory Lovins-- in this case claiming that renewables are growing so rapidly they're eclipsing nuclear).
But it's been many years since I've seen an anti-nuclear person cite Caldicott by name. To my eye, she's suddenly disappeared from the scene. Did relying on her suddenly seem too similar to relying on a Fred Seitz or a Fred Singer?
Monbiot vs. Caldicott
The turning point might have been a dispute between Caldicott and George Monbiot on Democracy Now, which resulted in him publishing this follow-up piece patiently tracking down some of her references and finding no connection between them and what she was saying.
At first I asked for general sources for her claims. She sent me nine documents: press releases, newspapers articles and an advertisement. Only one of them was linked to a scientific publication, the BEIR VII report published by the National Academy of Sciences. She urged me to read it. I did so and discovered that, far from supporting her claims, it starkly contradicts them.
He concludes:
What if, for example, the continuing dangers of radioactive pollution for the people in the nations around Chernobyl have been so greatly exaggerated that they have been exposed to 25 years of unnecessary terror and distress? What if this has caused serious and widespread psychological problems, as the UN Scientific Committee suggests(Page 513)? What if we have exploited vulnerable people – those born with deformities and genetic diseases – by parading their conditions as examples of the damage radiation has done, when the evidence suggests that they are not? What if the same burdens are inflicted on the people of Japan? If that has happened, is it not a terrible thing to bear? Don’t we have a duty to interrogate ourselves as scrupulously as we can to ensure that we have not and will not do such a thing? All of us who are concerned about such issues – Helen and I included – want to prevent unnecessary suffering. If we spread misinformation, we could inadvertently achieve the opposite.
My current theory is that this exchange with Monbiot-- who is no less than the man generally credited with inspiring the Limbaughism "moonbat"-- was the turning point in Caldicott reputation.
The discussion at this blog seems very instructive: the author tries to use Monbiot's Caldicot-takedown as proof that "the left" distorts the facts when discussing nuclear energy. In the comments, rather than attempt to defend Caldicot the main response is to deny that she's representative of the left.
This is a phenomena I think I've seen before... once it's clear someone has become a political liability, that person is retroactively marginalized. After which, The Movement may quietly adopt a different position... or it may just look for someone else to use to support the same old position. Either way, this kind of retcon may be the best we can hope for... explicit retractions and apologies essentially don't happen.
George Monbiot
I'm giving George Monbiot credit for taking down Helen Caldicott, but what about his own credentials?
He has an MA in Zoology from Oxford, but overall I think you'd have to call him a general interest, broad spectrum "intellectual" of the type that Russell Jacoby was celebrating.
On the subject at hand:
Monbiot once expressed deep antipathy to the nuclear industry. ... He finally rejected his later neutral position regarding nuclear power in March 2011. Although he "still loathe[s] the liars who run the nuclear industry", ... Monbiot now advocates its use, having been convinced of its relative safety by what he considers the limited effects of the 2011 Japan tsunami on nuclear reactors in the region. ...
Monbiot's own remarks about his background are interesting: he describes a stint in environmental reporting for the BBC, which was cut short by Thatcher's election and subsequent evisceration of BBC's investigative reporting.
Paul Krugman
And, just to cover a stunningly obvious case (a man who needs no introduction...):
Krugman represents himself as an Economist, and needless to say it would be phenomenally weird to try to say he's not a real economist (MIT, Princeton, Nobel Prize...), but our conservative friends do try to go there...
For example, they like to claim that the Nobel prize in Economics isn't a real Nobel prize... but you know, that's not something anyone ever said about Milton Friedman's nobel.
Another line that conservatives sometimes trot out is: "Krugman was okay back when he was doing economics, but now that he's turned political he's nothing but an ideologue." If you actually follow Krugman, that seems like a very strange angle of attack... his political opinions, such as they are are typically rooted in economic arguments, typically backed up by some very clear facts and figures with accompanying charts and graphs...
Krugman hasn't done a lot of original economic research of late so by some measures you can argue that his "academic rank" is slipping compared to some of his opponents. But you know, as Krugman repeatedly points out, the old, well-established work in economics is getting ignored whenever it seems politically convenient... is it any wonder he's prioritizing popularization vs doing new work?
Krugman himself, on the subject of credentials:
What a lot of people — academics, I’m sorry to say, in particular — don’t seem to understand are the limits to what credentials get you, in principle and in practice.
Basically, having a fancy named chair and maybe some prizes entitles you to a hearing — no more. It’s a great buzzing hive of commentary out there, so nobody can read everything that someone says; but if a famous intellectual makes a pronouncement, he both should and does get a listen much more easily than someone without the preexisting reputation.
But academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there’s no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot — and no special qualifications required to make that pronouncement other than doing your own homework.
Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background.
One of the great things about the blogosphere is that it has made it possible for a number of people meeting that second condition to gain an audience. I don’t care whether they’re PhDs, professors, or just some guy with a blog — it’s the work that matters.
PhDs
The people that I know who've earned PhD's nearly all report a feeling like "Hm, I don't feel any smarter now."
They generally describe PhD's as "union cards": getting one is necessary for working in certain fields.
But on the other hand, nearly every one of them uses degree-status when judging other people. E.g. if you were editing a journal, you'd think twice before even reading a submission from someone with out the usual academic background.
Still, they all seem to use the rule-of-thumb that anyone who sticks a "PhD" after their name on a business card is an idiot.
Freeman Dyson nods
I've been a fan of the aforementioned Freeman Dyson for some time, but a few years back he made some moves that look to me a bit dubious, and I wouldn't be surprised if they strike a lot of you out there as even worse. After publishing a book on the need for "Scientific Heretics" (where one of his prime examples was Thomas Gold, by the way), Dyson then came out of the closet as a "global warming denialist", though of the "third type": His take is essentially that yeah, anthropogenic global warming is happening, but rushing to fix it now would be really expensive, and we're probably better off waiting for some technical breakthroughs in coming decades, and going after it then.
Dyson's ideas about possible breakthroughs struck me as pretty interesting (though I'm afraid your average environmentalist just thought they were whacked, and started doing the usual rants, like "Who's paying this guy? He must've been bought!").
Myself, I'd call this a case where Dyson was led astray by some inflated cost-estimates of going after GHG-emissions. As pointed out in the Hansen study mentioned above, the emissions of coal power are phenomenally nasty, even before you take the greenhouse effect into account. If you take climate change seriously, then coal power is public enemy number one, if we went after coal power and by some miracle discovered we were all mistaken about climate change... well then all we'd get out of it is saving millions of lives.
It's possibly a problem endemic with physicists-- they have a very high opinion of themselves, for good reason-- but consequently they have a way of thinking they can pick-up anything quickly and take on the pros in their own field...
James Hansen nods
And actually, much as I respect Hansen for being someone who on climate change understands both the problems and the solutions, there's no one who's infallible, and Hansen himself has gotten some things wrong. He has what looks like a very weird aversion to cap-and-trade schemes (despite the fact that they've been proven many times over), instead insisting that his own version of carbon tax plus citizen's rebate is the one and only way we should be trying to factor the costs of CO2 emissions into energy prices.
Paul Krugman nods
On cap-and-trade, I have to go with Krugman the economist over Hansen the scientist... but there are areas in energy policy where I think it's clear Krugman is in error-- he's been convinced that we can solve the climate change problem primarily through ramping up use of wind and solar. He's in denial about their limitations, and the need for a "do everything, including nuclear power) strategy.
I'd like to sit him down and make him watch some of Saul Griffith presentations at the Long Now seminars... maybe he'd get it then.
On the other hand, maybe all it will take is the IPCC recommendations that Suzanne Waldman wrote about...
Rod Adams
I've been referring to Rod Adams enough throughout this piece, it's about time I consider his own bio. On every one of his blog pages, there's a capsule summary:
Atomic energy expert with small nuclear plant operating and design experience. Financial, strategic, and political analyst. Former submarine Engineer Officer. Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.
He also links to his resume, which has his educational background: Bachelors in English, Masters in Systems Technology, and a "Naval War College diploma in National Policy and Strategy", all from Naval schools.
me
I've got a couple of engineering degrees, but I don't go around insisting that you should trust me on engineering issues (rather than, say, Amory Lovins). I'm not representing myself here as anything more than Some Guy On The Internet-- and actually I think you should really watch out for people claiming credentials that you can't (easily) check. There's a lot of Munchhausen Syndrome (and any other syndrome you can think of) going around on the net.
and in conclusion (sort of)
And thus ends another in my forays in what I think of as the "too long form", and the time has come to ask was there any point to this? what have we learned , class?
First of all, at the outset I thought I would have something more favorable to say about the practice of checking credentials as a rough evaluation of competence. Instead, it seems like I've got some very good examples where that fails as an initial screen. There are some examples where it works, but even there it doesn't seem to be necessary or perhaps even advisable... e.g. my objections to Amory Lovins are his long track record of error and dubious statements, it's not fundamentally an objection to him misrepresenting himself as a physicist--
Let's return to Rod Adams one more time; he does a good job of making the case I thought I'd be making:
All of us need to make energy decisions, and many of you do not have time to study the enormous volume of material yourself. Most people generally assume that the people that are summarizing these complex topics for general consumption have both done their homework and can be trusted to tell as complete a truth as possible by not slanting their findings based on hidden agendas or because the truth makes them uncomfortable.
I don't know that that's really what "most people" assume... Really, I think people are doing a lot of affinity checks and rolling with confirmation bias whenever they can...
an appendix on method
A couple of words about what you might call "my methodology" here, though that probably dignifies it a bit more than it deserves.
I'm working in something like an "inductive" fashion here, considering different examples of thinkers, taking a look at their credentials (with a lot of emphasis on their academic background), checking what they get right and wrong, and using that to try to come up with rules of thumb for how credentials should inform our opinions of people.
Part of this "method" is that I'm presuming that I can judge when someone is getting something right or wrong. Using my own opinion about things as an infallible guide is no doubt irritating to the reader, who might not agree, but it's not as though I'm assuming I'm infallible, it's just that this is all long and rambling enough already without also engaging in presenting evidence that I've called something right. That has to be handled elsewhere, on a "when I get to it" basis.
onward
There's other stuff I could say about this stuff-- I never run out, as you may have noticed.
Mostly I'm talking about the reputation of individuals here, though I included one section on an organization, the IPCC. Our judgment about organizations is also of critical importance, and in fact you could argue it's more fundamental than judging an individual, at least as far as things like educational background goes. A degree-- honorary or not-- in physics means more to us if it's from an MIT or a Princeton than if it's from Some State U... though arguably, this difference means too much to us, because I've done both and I can tell you that a Big Name school will typically have some advantages over a State School, but we exaggerated those advantages quite a bit, and we also ignore the fact that those State Schools have some advantages, too (like, for example, a faculty that's not too full of themselves to take teaching students seriously).
I don't doubt that James Hansen learned a few things at U of Iowa. None of us are going "damn, too bad Hansen didn't get to go to Harvard, then he really might've amounted to something".
For that matter, when we talk about earned degrees we typically only care about "accredited institutions": so there's another social process of accreditation that's in play, and myself, I'd like to learn more about how that works if only to think about stealing some of those ideas in other contexts.
Some older notes of mine:
- JANE_JACOBS
- HYPER
- POSNER_DECLINES
- IS_POT_BLACKNESS_HEREDITARY
- AND_THE_LOSER_IS
- LAST_INTELLECTUALS
- ACADEMIC_LIGHTS
- DYSON
- THE_HERETIC
- THERE_IS_A_WAR