The same is true of the long-debunked example of cherry picking, “It hasn’t warmed since 1998″ (see my April 11 post). Another common false statement is “The planet warmed just as much during the Medieval Warm Period, but eventually it cooled down again.” They argue that if this warming preceded our modern injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then maybe our current global warming not caused by our burning of fossil fuels. Climate deniers repeat this old saw over and over again as if it’s somehow a devastating blow to the huge body of data about our recent climate changes. They often illustrate it with the anecdotes about how the Vikings could colonize Greenland for a while, then as climate cooled in the late Middle Ages, these colonies failed when Greenland became too cold again. The story about the fate of Viking colonies in Greenland is true—but the rest is not.

The Northern Hemisphere temperature curve of Moberg et al. (2005). Note that the Medieval Warm Period is nowhere near as warm as the modern episode of global warming.

As climate scientists have long understood, there were numerous small fluctuations of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years of the Holocene. Most are well understood to be consequences of the different orbital variations of the earth around the sun (the Croll-Milankovitch cycles), with some component of solar activity. But in the case of the Medieval Warm Period (about 950-1250 A.D.), the temperatures were only 1°C warmer in the Northern Hemisphere, much less than the temperature changes since the beginning of our current global warming (Fig. 1). The warmest years of the Medieval Warm Period are comparable to the mean annual temperatures recorded about 1960—and the earth has warmed dramatically in the past 50 years.

More importantly, the Medieval Warm Period was also only a local warming in the North Atlantic and northern Europe. If you look at the record of global temperatures over this interval, the mean temperature of the earth did not increase significantly, and actually cooled by more than 1°C. And in contrast to the current episode of global warming, which is caused by burning fossil fuels, the Medieval Warm Period was triggered by several well-known non-human causes: a long-term drop in volcanic activity (which can warm the earth by letting in more solar radiation) and an episode of unusually high solar activity. In addition, there may have been a strong long-term oceanographic effect, the North American Oscillation, that might explain why the warming was local to the North Atlantic and not global.

Likewise, the warmest period of the last 10,000 years prior to 1800 was the Holocene Climatic Optimum (5000-9000 B.C.) when warmer and wetter conditions in Eurasia caused the rise of the first great civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China. This too was largely a Eurasian phenomenon, with 2-3°C warming in the Arctic and northern Europe. By contrast, there was almost no warming in the tropics, and cooling or no change in the Southern Hemisphere.

To the Eurocentric world, these warming events seemed important, but on a global scale the effect is negligible. In addition, none of these historic and prehistoric warming episodes is related to increasing greenhouse gases. The Holocene Climatic Optimum, in fact, is predicted by the Milankovitch cycles, since at that time the axial tilt of the earth was over 24°, its steepest value, meaning the poles got more solar radiation than normal. By contrast, not only is the warming observed in the last 200 years much greater than during these previous episodes, but it is also global and bipolar, so it is not a purely local effect. The warming that ended the “Little Ice Age” (from the mid-1700s to the late 1800s) was due to increased solar radiation prior to 1940. Since 1940, however, the amount of solar radiation has been dropping, so the only candidate for the post-1940 warming has to be carbon dioxide.

But you would never get this straight story that paleoclimatologists have known for years if you examine any of the climate-denier sites. Instead, they are loaded full of misinformation written by people who do not have formal training in, nor do they actively participate in, climate science research. Instead, like the creationists they keep repeating and recycling debunked and outdated ideas, unwilling or unable to read anything that does not get through their strong filter of confirmation bias. And, like the smug fundamentalist that I mentioned in my March 7 post, they are self-righteous and utterly sure that their arguments are sound, yet they never even bother to read or consider anything that might go against their ideological biases (any more than creationists will read or understand anything that undermines their biblical literalism). Such a behavior may be well understood in the world of psychology and neuroscience, especially as an example of confirmation bias—but it is indefensible in the scientific community, where peer review weeds out the false and bad ideas and data (like creationism and climate denialism) and scientists must learn to accept ideas which have become overwhelmingly supported by the evidence, such as climate change and evolution. Such ideas may not tell us what we want to hear, but that’s all the more reason to believe that they are probably real and not the result of wishful thinking.

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When you hear creationists argue their cause, sooner or later they reach into their standard litany of debunked arguments. One of their favorites (since it sounds convincing to their largely math-illiterate followers) is to point to the complexity of a molecular system or the cell or any other part of nature and “how could such a complicated system arise BY CHANCE?” The bigger implication is that they cannot fathom humans and their religious worldview being produced by anything other than a supernatural creator, so chance (as they misunderstand the concept) cannot produce it. The same argument underlies much of what the “intelligent design” creationists claim as well.

There are many versions of this argument, all of which are equally fallacious. When I debated Duane Gish at Purdue University in 1983, he was using his favorite line of his whole spiel, stolen from the maverick astronomer Fred Hoyle (legendary for being wrong on nearly every thing he argued, including Big Bang cosmology and his attacks on Archaeopteryx and evolution). In Gish’s version, he argues that the probability of random evolution assembling the complex system of life was as likely as a tornado in a junkyard assembling a Boeing 707 (which shows how ancient this punchline was).

As in the case of all creationist arguments, this one is completely fallacious on several different levels:

1. Evolution is not “random chance” like a lottery or throwing the dice. The variation on which natural selection works (mutations, recombination, etc.)  is randomly produced, but natural selection is not random. Natural selection is a process that weeds out unfavorable variations, and greatly improves the likelihood of events.  Anti-evolutionists for years  have used various versions of this fallacious analogy: “what is the probability that a monkey (or chimpanzee) with a typewriter randomly pounding on the keys could produce the works of Shakespeare?” A better analogy is a monkey with a word processor, whose program (like your spell checker) automatically deletes or fixes mistakes, so that even by typing random keys, the monkey will eventually assemble a recognizable string of words. Richard Dawkins (in The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, and Climbing Mount Improbable, 1996) has provided many interesting examples and computer models that show just how easily this can be done. This is the fundamental misunderstanding: evolution is not just “random chance” but a strong non-random force capable of changing genomes and acting upon material provided by chance.

2. Many of the standard examples that creationists trot out seem staggeringly difficult to produce as they present it, but in fact there are numerous small intermediate steps that show it’s not so hard as they imagine. As I discuss in Chapter 6 of my evolution book, since the days of the Miller-Urey experiment in 1953, most of the chemical steps needed to assemble the simplest forms of life (RNA in a lipid bilayer membrane) have all been produced by biochemists in the laboratory using relatively simple chemical reactions. To produce long-chain biochemicals, there are a number of “templates” (clays, zeolites, pyrite, etc.) that assemble simple organic chemicals into long-chain polymers by lining them up all close together, and then their chemical linkages form. (I use the analogy of a mosh pit—everyone packed shoulder to shoulder tightly in the same direction, then their earrings and piercings get  hooked together). As Lynn Margulis and others have shown, the eukaryotic cell can be most easily produced by endosymbiosis, where symbiotic prokaryotes like cyanobacteria and purple non-sulfur bacteria have changed to organelles like chloroplasts and mitochondria. With all these intermediate steps that have been discovered in the past 60 years, the origin of life from simple chemicals is no longer as improbable as the creationists like to claim.

3. As anyone who really understands probability knows, you can’t make a probability argument after the fact. If you do so, then any complex sequence of events is extremely improbable, even though they actually occur. A good analogy is the one I used in the Gish debate. I asked the audience of several hundred to estimate the probability after the fact that all of the events that had happened in their lives would actually happen, and the probability that among all those unlikely events, they would all end up in this room at this particular moment. Naturally, the improbability of this event is enormous. I pointed out to the audience that by Gish’s probability arguments, they could not exist! For someone to make a probability argument of this sort, it has to be made ahead of time, because life is full of events that (looked at after the fact) are extremely improbable—yet happened nonetheless.

So the next time you get into an argument with a creationist, don’t let them baffle you with garbage about “random evolution” or “the probabilities say it is impossible”.

The most obvious difference is MONEY: the exhibit area for AAPG is HUGE, and filled with gigantic expensive booths from many of the major companies like Schlumberger and Halliburton. These booths have mini-lecture theaters with multiple big-screen displays where they give free seminars on their methods, thick plush carpets, potted plants, free food and drink, and fancy furniture—all for less than 3 days that the exhibits are open! Professional registration for this meeting is expensive (since most oil geologists make MUCH more than academic geologists, and the oil companies pay their employees to attend), and the dress code is also suits and ties for men (it’s much more casual at academic conferences). You can just smell the money at the meeting, and see lots of geologists hungry to learn techniques so they can jump to a more profitable position in their company, or go off and get rich as an independent (all of whom have smaller booths there as well).

The second difference is the emphasis of the meeting. At GSA, nearly 6000 attendees give more than 4000 talks or posters, 20 talks every 15 minutes for four straight days plus hundreds of posters. By contrast, for the same attendance there were only 5-6 20-minute talks at any given time at AAPG in less than 3 days, and the majority of the attendees didn’t present anything. Their job is to do whatever their company pays them to do, not churn out new research results to present at a meeting every year, like academic geologists must. Most AAPG talks tend to be very narrow and describe details of one particular oil field, not independent research into general principles of geology that academics are trying to decipher. Finally, the demographic differences are striking. Academic geologists are nearly 50% women now, and they are distributed across all age classes. Oil geologists, by contrast, are nearly all old white guys in their 60s or older, with a lot of young men (and a few women) just recently hired in the business. The entire generation that would now be in their 40s and 50s is missing because of the attrition during the oil busts of the late 80s-90s.

But the biggest take-home message is something oil geologists have known for years: oil is never going to be as cheap or easy to obtain again, and the global price of oil will get higher and higher as it becomes more and more scarce, especially with the huge increase in demand from developing countries like China and India. I heard this message  over and over again, from the gossip on the exhibit hall floor with friends, to the plenary addresses by the top people in the oil business. Coincidentally, it was the cover story of the April 9. 2012, issue of Timemagazine as well. This fact  has been known for some time, and was first predicted by the pioneering oil geologist M. King Hubbert in 1953. Using his knowledge of the history of non-renewable resources (which show a “bell curve” history of production, from their initial log growth phase to an equally rapid decline as the easily obtained resources vanish), plus his deep understanding of the amount and nature of oil reserves. he predicted that U.S. oil production would reach a peak in the early 1970s—and his prediction came true in 1971. Since then, U.S. oil production has steadily declined as fewer and fewer large fields were found, and older fields have been used up.

U.S. oil production peaked in 1971 (as predicted by Hubbert in 1953), despite increased efforts to find more domestic oil, and has declined ever since. The slight upturn at the end is due to production from expensive, dangerous "unconventional" sources: offshore drilling, fracking, tar sands—but it will never return the U.S. to levels of production like before 1971.

What about global production of oil? A few quotes from the top people in the oil business says what all the AAPG geologists I met this week have long known:

We’ve embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil. Embrace the future and recognize the growing demand for a wide range of fuels or ignore reality and slowly—but surely—be left behind.” 

—Mike Bowlin, chairman and CEO of ARCO, speech in Houston, 9 Feb 1999

Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century, and one thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over

—Chevron, http://www.willyoujoinus.com/vision/

While major new finds cannot be ruled out, recent statistics do provide worrisome signals… Discoveries only replaced some 45% of production since 1999. In addition, the number of discoveries is increasing but discoveries are getting smeller in size. The 25 biggest fields hold some 33% of discovered reserves and the top 100 fields 53%; al but two of the giant fields were discovered before 1970.”  

—USGS WPA 2000 part 1 – A look at expected oil discoveries

All the easy oil and gas in the world has pretty much been found. Now comes the harder work in finding and producing oil from more challenging environments and work areas.

—William J. Cummings, Exxon-Mobil company spokesman, December 2005

It is pretty clear that there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil. Any new or unconventional oil is going to be expensive.

—Lord Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, October 2008

As these quotes show, nearly all the geologists (including most oil company geologists) who deal with the realities of oil supply as part of their daily experience, are fully aware that oil is becoming scarcer, and that there are fewer and fewer new oil fields found, and we  are nowhere close to keeping up with demand on a worldwide basis. The figure below shows a very sobering “reality check”: a plot of the discovery dates of US oil fields. Notice that there was a “bell curve” with a peak in the 1930s.

Despite all the increase efforts of oil geologists, almost all the large fields in the U.S. were discovered before the 1930s, and there have been no similar large fields found in the decades since then, even as the price of oil climbs.

Despite the fact that U.S. oil companies have spent billions and developed huge technological advances since the 1930s and 1940s to find oil by better means, the rate of discovery has continued to drop. Even with all these advantages, large oil fields no longer can be found in the lower 48 states. Only the Bakken fields of North Dakota-Montana represent a large new discovery, but they are smaller than the giant Texas oil fields found in the 1930s, and they are the exception that proves the rule. Those in Alaska are near exhaustion, since they peaked in 1988 and are nearly dry now. All these slogans about “Drill, baby, drill” solving our problems are just fantasies. The U.S. oil companies have indeed been drilling as fast as they could everywhere in the U.S., and as the figure shows, getting very little no matter where they look. As the Time magazine article pointed out, now they’re spending most of their time and money on increasingly risky and expensive operations like fracking, pumping water in old fields to push out the last drops of oil, or mining oil sands with all their environmental costs. The biggest push is in offshore oil platforms—and the 2010 Gulf oil disaster (along with previous oil disasters on platforms around the world) shows just how risky it is to drill so far offshore.

One of the favorite arguments is to drill more in Alaska, especially in the ecologically sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) on the North Slope. The entire issue became a political hot button in the 2008 presidential election, as environmentalists pointed out how much habitat would be destroyed in the short-term search for oil. But the answer is clear, no matter what your politics: such exploration and possible production would be just a drop in the bucket. In 1998, a non-partisan federal agency, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there were at best only 16 billion barrels of oil in the ANWR and most of these reserves are prospective resources, not proven resources. Sixteen billion barrels sounds like a lot until you realize that it’s less than 1% of the total world oil consumption each year. The U.S. alone consumes over 20 million barrels of oil per day, so even if every drop of oil were actually extracted from the ANWR, it would at best provide two to three years’ worth of oil for the U.S.—and then it would be exhausted, and what would remain would be an ecological disaster.

So what about the world discovery rate? That answer has been known for a long time. World discovery rate peaked in 1965, and has been steeply declining ever since, even though more and more exploration is conducted in the farthest reaches of the globe in the past 47 years. The “peak oil” effect has probably already occurred, and we are likely on the slow downward decline in discoveries of cheap, easy-to-pump oil. Knowing that there are likely no more huge fields in our future, the next step is to calculate how much oil is left. Estimates of the ultimate recovery have fluctuated all over the place in the past few decades, but in recent years most of the estimates place the total volume of ultimately recoverable oil in the range of 1.8 to 2.6 trillion barrels, with most estimates around 2.0 trillion barrels. This was the number that Hubbert himself used when trying to determine the amount of oil left and when the peak would occur (he estimated a window between 1995-2000). Depending upon how the model is run, most scientists predicted that the peak of world oil production would occur around 2005-2010, with most estimates around 2006 to 2007. Although it’s still to early too tell if the peak has fully passed until we view it from a further distance, so far that prediction has proven accurate.  According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the peak of global oil production was in 2006, and declined by 6.7% in 2007. As this figure shows, the peak may have occurred between 2006 and  2009, and production has hit a plateau, despite increased pumping while the oil price climbs.

World oil production seems to have slowed down or even declined in the past decade, despite huge increases in demand and rapidly rising prices due to growth in Indian and China. If we have not hit the Hubbert peak for world oil yet, we are very close to it

In December 2009, however, the reports of a few large fields seem to have suggested that the peak might have occurred before 2010. In the same interview, the head of the Brazilian oil conglomerate Petrobras pointed out that the decline in supply was so severe that we would need one new discovery the size of the entire Saudi Arabian oil reserve every two years to keep up with increasing demand!

Meanwhile, demand continues to climb, driving up prices. The booming economies of China and India, along with some other developing nations, are greatly exceeding any increased production due to new discoveries. The numbers are truly staggering. From only 50,000 barrels/day in 1980, world consumption is now almost 100,000 barrels/day. As oil executive Peter Tertzakian pointed out in his book title, we’re nearing the once-unimaginable consumption rate of a thousand barrels a second!Even as the U.S. finds more oil in unconventional places, we cannot keep our domestic prices down because demand outside the U.S. is driving the world price upwards. All it takes is a few oil speculators and/or some political event in the Middle East, as happened this spring, and oil prices jump upward. But when they retreat again, they never return to “the gold ol’ days” but keep ratcheting upward to a new base level—this despite a global recession for the past 5 years.

Despite the best efforts of oil geologists to increase production, demand from India and China have boosted world oil prices so they exceed the oil price spikes of the past—and unlike those short-term shocks due to politics, there is no reason to expect that the current rise will slow down. Not even 5 years of global recession has stopped the rise.

Many oil companies see the handwriting on the wall. They are already spending some of their immense wealth in research and development of alternative energy sources, so their business doesn’t die out when the oil becomes too scarce. In 2000, British Petroleum (BP) decided to market themselves as the environmentally friendly oil company. They changed their logo to a green and yellow shape resembling a flower or starburst, and launched a high-profile $200 million ad campaign touting their alternative energy efforts, with the tagline that “BP” stood for “Beyond Petroleum.” That’s quite remarkable to hear an oil company announce its own transition to non-oil energy sources (even if it was mostly PR hype, since in actuality BP spent only a tiny portion of its research and development budget from its huge profits on non-oil research). Of course, with the BP Gulf oil disaster of summer 2010, the company has other bad publicity to deal with now. As soon as BP dropped its “Beyond Petroleum” campaign, Shell stepped up with their “Let’s Go” ad campaign, touting their research and investment in alternative energy sources, with the slogan, “Let’s make the most of what we’ve got.”

To summarize: the era of cheap, easily obtained, abundant oil is over, and oil will soon become scarce despite more and more costly efforts to squeeze out every last drop from more and more “unconventional” sources.  The fact that Hubbert’s model exactly predicted the U.S. oil peak, and seems to be predicting the global peak, should be strong enough evidence in and of itself. There is also the fact that the peak of discovery of major oil fields occurred 47 years ago, and there have been no giant oil fields found in a long time, and most of the world’s older oil fields are nearing their ends. There are no polls that show just how many qualified experts (geologists and geological engineers within and close to the oil industry) accept the concept of peak oil and the end of cheap abundant oil, but a lot of oil experts are on the record as supporting it, including a number of oil geologists and executives. My many friends in the oil business almost all tell me that “peak oil” is widely accepted among their colleagues, and they have long been forced to work with extraordinarily difficult exploration problems because there are no easy oil fields any more.

There are some who say, “If cheap oil ends, we will just go to alternatives”. They say “We’re finding lots of natural gas,” which is  true—so far as it goes. This sounds fine in theory, but when you look hard at the evidence, it doesn’t hold water (or oil). First of all, even if we stopped using oil for our cars tomorrow, there would still be huge demands in other areas. Most of our nation’s power plants are oil or gas burning, and they account for a huge percentage of our consumption. Natural gas is indeed more abundant, but it only solves part of the problem—it takes much more of it to get the same amount of energy, and it still produces greenhouse gases—nor is it practical for transportation fuel yet. If we got rid of oil- and gas-powered electricity, we’d have to go to nuclear power (which is still controversial here thanks to the Three Mile Island disaster, or the recent disaster in Japan), or coal. We do have abundant supplies of coal in the U.S., but as many people have shown, coal is one of the dirtiest and nastiest of energy alternatives.  Most coal must be extracted either by dangerous shaft mining (which is expensive and produces relatively low quantities of coal) or by strip mining, which literally rips a landscape apart. In addition, most coal is high in sulfur, so it has long been the major source of acid rain. Finally, coal produces far more greenhouse gases than does oil or natural gas, so coal does not solve our carbon footprint problems. And no one is even thinking of using coal to run cars any more (let alone going back to the coal-fired steam locomotives of the past).

People also forget (or do not realize) that we use oil in many other ways besides energy. Nearly every synthetic substance you use, from the huge array of plastics in every product we own, to all the fabrics (nylon, rayon, Dacron, polyester, and many others) are produced from cheap oil. Just look around you and you will probably see dozens of plastics and synthetic fabrics in your clothes, and nearly every object in a typical room has plastic in it. When oil becomes too expensive for these things, what will we do? We will no longer be able to import thousands of cheap plastic toys for our kids’ Happy Meals, or wear synthetic fabrics (even when we need our polyester or spandex), or use products made largely of plastic (like the computer parts I’m using right now), or throw away plastic water bottles by the millions. When cheap oil becomes expensive, plastics will have to be recycled and rationed, and become much too precious for most ways we use and waste it today. And you can’t make plastics cheaply from anything but oil—not coal or anything else.

Anyone who lives in the farm belt knows that there’s another huge consumer of oil: agriculture. When I lived in the farming country of central Illinois for three years, it was striking that all the advertisers for the dinnertime  news broadcasts (aimed at farmers when they were having dinner and watching the upcoming weather reports) were producers of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. All of these products are derived from oil. Nearly every strain of corn we use today is genetically modified by Monsanto to be immune to their powerful herbicide called Roundup, which kills all plants except this modified strain of corn. Thus, Monsanto can sell both the corn and the poison, ensuring a large crop each year. (To top that off, Monsanto genetically engineered the corn to be infertile, so the farmers are obligated to buy new seed from them each year as well). An acre of corn consumes 80 gallons of oil in the form of pesticides, fertilizers, and fuel for the tractors. We’ve replaced the human and animal labor of a century ago with machinery that requires lots of cheap oil. Our entire modern agricultural system of monoculture crops which have no resistance to pests, and which deplete the soil rapidly, can only be sustained by throwing oil at it in the form of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. Without it, our food supply would collapse, and the world would be looking at a global famine. The end of cheap oil will force everyone to re-examine agricultural practices, since you can’t make most pesticides or fertilizers out of coal.

Many of the “energy alternatives” once touted in political campaigns turn out to be illusions. Take the example of biofuels. They have been hyped way beyond their actual worth because they are popular in the farm belt, where politicians must curry favor (especially in Iowa, which has way too much influence because it holds the first presidential caucus). When there was a surplus of corn in the early 2000s, everyone was talking about turning it into ethanol and using it for fuel. But the end result was a classic example of unintended consequences. The increased consumption of corn for biofuels helped contribute to a worldwide food shortage, so that now most corn goes for fuel ethanol or animal feed, and very little goes directly for human consumption. Meanwhile, other countries saw the opportunities, and began to cut down pristine rainforests (with their valuable effect of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and of maintaining the highest diversity of land life) and replaced it with biofuel crops like sawgrass. As reported in Time magazine, 750,000 acres of Brazilian rainforests (equivalent to the size of Rhode Island) were cut down in just 6 months in 2007, all to raise biofuel crops. When you do the calculations, one person could be fed for an entire year on the corn required to produce one tank of gas from biofuels. One editorial cartoon lampooned this brilliantly. It shows a rich fat American in the nice suit pulling the ear of corn away from the starving African child and says, “Excuse me. I’m going to need this to run my car.”

Yet there are also signs of hope. Each time oil prices rise abruptly, or cross some psychological barrier (like $4 a gallon), people do conserve, cut down on unnecessary driving, get rid of their gas guzzlers and invest in higher-mileage cars. We may not be able to get Americans to act by preaching at them or by trying to get our political system to work in our best interests, but economic pressures do seem to work. And there are models for an even better alternative to the roller coaster of oil prices. Nearly all the European and Asian countries that import all their oil have already adopted measures that greatly reduce consumption. Through taxation, most of these countries price their gas at a realistic rate that reflects its true, externalized cost in infrastructure and environmental damage (usually $5 or more  a gallon), so people are strongly inclined to conserve gas and drive small cars only when their excellent systems of public transport are not sufficient. Those taxes on gas then go into the energy and transportation infrastructure, so the citizens get better mass transit, better roads, and they are invested heavily in energy alternatives, like nuclear, wind, and solar power.

Paul Roberts, in his excellent book The End of Oil, pointed out a model for other countries: Germany. Before 1990, German politics were controlled by big industry (especially coal companies) and coal miners’ unions. But the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Ukraine galvanized the environmental awareness of the entire world, and by the 1990s, wind farms and other energy alternatives were rapidly emerging in Germany, spurred on by a law passed in 1990 to invest in carbon-free energy production. In addition, the Green Party became a significant force (not just a token party, as it is in U.S. politics). In 1999, the Greens won enough seats that they formed a coalition government with Gerhard Schroeder’s moderate Social Democrats. Soon laws were passed, policies changed, and subsidies granted, and Germany was meeting a higher and higher percentage of its energy needs through wind and solar power, along with biomass facilities which burn crop waste to make energy. Now Germany leads European countries in its energy conservation efforts, reduced carbon footprint, and in the research and development of alternative energy sources. The German policies are closely emulated by the Scandinavian countries, France, and many other European countries. This was all achieved while Germany continued to thrive economically, and today they are less dependent on foreign oil than ever, and have an economy stronger than that of most other  countries. Americans who despair of our getting out of our current addiction to foreign oil need only look to Germany, Scandinavia, France, Japan, and other countries to see that if there’s enough economic pressure and political will, there’s a way.

One of the problems both scientists and reporters face is how to make the research sound interesting to a lay public that knows almost nothing about science—and much of what the public thinks they know is wrong. Much of chemistry and physics is incomprehensible and uninteresting to people that never took a single class in high school on physics or chemistry, and even something more immediate like biology is full of subjects that are obscure to the lay audience. Geologists usually have it slightly better, since topics like earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, climate change, etc., are easier to relate to.

We paleontologists usually have it even easier, because a few of us work on something immensely popular—dinosaurs—although I’m really a Cenozoic fossil mammal specialist and only rarely has my research ventured back to the Mesozoic. Just add dinosaurs and the research goes to the front page of most science news websites or The New York Times, or gets published in high-profile journals like Nature, Science, or PNAS. But when I make an important discovery on a group such as rhinos or peccaries or camels, I’m lucky to get it published in a third-tier journal, and I typically get no reporters calling at all. The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs generated huge interest when the asteroid impact theory first emerged in 1980, with thousands of papers published and dozens of books on the topic. But it’s only the third or fourth largest extinction in earth history. The great Permian extinction 250 m.y. ago, which wiped out 95% of species on earth, is lucky to get ANY press attention. Who cares about productid brachiopods, or fusulinids, or tabulate or rugose corals, among the many victims of this event?

So I guess it’s not surprising when scientists who don’t work with dinosaurs try to find any connection,no matter how ridiculous, with them. Consider, for example, this recent article, which speculates about whether advanced dinosaurs could rule other planets. My first reaction is astonishment—how could there possibly be a legitimate scientist claiming that we have evidence of dinosaurs on other planets? We don’t even have the simplest forms of life on any other planet yet! The breathless reporting by Science Daily buys into the whole argument without any challenges.

But if you read it a little closer, the absurdity becomes apparent. It’s an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society discussing the fact that all asymmetric biochemicals on earth have the same chirality or “handedness”; only “left-handed” amino acids  exist on earth (except for a few odd bacteria). Only “right-handed” sugars exist on our planet. Yet meteorites show that both left- and right-handed amino acids are found around the solar system. Scientists have long speculated on why this might be, but the simplest answer is that the amino acids that were found in the earliest life (whether generated on earth or carried from space) happened to be left-handed, and once they establish this template, all subsequent life must follow it.

So far, so good. But the author of this research, Ronald Breslow, goes on to speculate that if other planets had life, they could just as easily have right-handed amino acids or left-handed sugars. Sheer speculation, since no life has been found yet, but possible nonetheless. But then the paper goes off the deep end:

An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D-amino acids and L-sugars. Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them.

This guy may be a good at chemistry, but at biology and paleontology he is abysmally incompetent. At best, speculating about the existence of life with different handedness predicts only that the life forms on other planets might be simple things like bacteria. As Stephen Jay Gould and others have pointed out many times, life is full of chance, contingent, unpredictable events. There is absolutely no reason to expect that if we started the history of life on earth all over from the beginning, or “rerun the tape from the beginning”, we’d get anything like what actually happened over the past 3.5 billion years, much less such advanced and improbable creatures such as dinosaurs—or humans, for that matter. Life has so many unpredictable possibilities, and there too many chance events (like mass extinctions caused by changes in the environment) that gave us completely different outcomes to expect that we would repeat any of the events of the past beyond evolving bacteria and cyanobacteria—and even that is a  stretch. P.Z. Myers made the same point, and argued that the author should be embarrassed at this silly last paragraph thrown in to make the story sexier for reporters. Since the article was “just accepted” for the journal (which means it passed review of several other chemists—shame on them!), it was still possible for him to delete the nonsensical paragraph at the end, and P.Z. wishes that he would do so.

I’m not so optimistic. I think Breslow knows full well that putting anything about dinosaurs in an otherwise yawner of a paper (not even that original, since the chirality debate goes back decades) is a sure trick to get reporters’ attention. Shame on him for a cheesy gimmick like this—and once again, shame on the scientifically illiterate reporters who didn’t ask any paleontologists to see if this conclusion made any sense. Just like the two previous examples I blogged about and cited above, we have a scientist speaking out of his level of expertise and bringing up a ridiculous notion that would never survive full peer review—and a reporter looking for a flashy story and not bothering to track down other scientists with the relevant expertise to comment on it.

This is not to say that I don’t integrate “active learning” techniques in my lecture whenever I can. They can range from simple things like passing a specimen of a rock or fossil around and make sure they are all see or feel what I’m describing; or getting them to all stand up in their seats, and then having the men and women sit down in 2:1 ratios as if they were atoms paired up into crystals and settling out of a magma chamber.  I frequently pose questions to the class and wait patiently til someone comes up with the answer, giving them a few hints along the way if necessary. I’ve got amusing cartoons that make the point interspersed here and there through my slides; I try to make sly references to cultural phenomena or things the students can relate to, or poke fun at familiar movie plot devices that are geologically impossible. I try to pose realistic scenarios (especially on exam questions, which are all essay style) so that they can show they understand how their knowledge applies to the real world, and not just how well they can memorize and regurgitate a list of facts.

Many big universities are forced by the necessity of their big enrollments to schedule lecture sections with hundreds of students. They have all sorts of new gimmicks and toys to keep the students showing up and paying attention. The latest is the “clicker”, a small remote-control unit that electronically gives each student a chance to select answers to a question posed by the lecturer (while also taking roll at the same time). I’m aware of the difficulties in teaching huge sections where you can’t even see their faces, but fortunately I’ve been spared that most of my career. My largest lecture sections ever were about 80 students, but the room was small and shallow so I could see the back row easily. I made a point of watching the students’ faces as I lectured (I’ve taught for so long I no longer need notes) to spot whether my bellwether students are looking puzzled. If so, this is my cue to stop, back up, and make sure they understand. Even in my largest classes, I tried to know all their names in the first few weeks, and in small classes, I can immediately spot who’s absent. Most of my students really appreciate it that I know who they are and keep up with how they’re doing in class, and whether they show up. And I have 33 years of excellent student course evaluations to back me up.

The key, as I learned early in my teaching career, to making a lecture effective is making it interesting and—dare I say?—entertaining. We’ve all had experiences with boring, poorly presented lectures, where it is a struggle just to stay awake, let alone to follow what the lecturer is saying. But there’s a big difference between a decent lecturer and the truly gifted communicator as well. One year, I was visiting a friend in Salt Lake City, and she had me tag along and sit in on a lecture by her favorite professor, Dr. Laurence Lattman at the University of Utah. He started the lecture by asking the students to close their notebooks! He wanted their undivided attention to follow the amazing story he was about to tell, and he didn’t want them distracted by writing things down. Then he launched into a truly spellbinding lecture, weaving in themes of history and culture into a simple geology topic—and the class was mesmerized. I’d never seen a performance like it, despite all the years I’ve witnessed lecturers of every caliber, including some amazing speakers we bring to the Skeptic Society lecture series.

But there is more to it than that. Early in my career, before I had tenure, we untenured faculty all agonized about the student evaluations and how just a few disgruntled students had the power to destroy your career, even if you had done a great job. Then my colleagues and I ran into a series of famous papers about the “Dr. Fox effect” (Naftulin et al., 1973; Williams and Ware, 1975, 1976). These studies, done in the early 1970s, decided to see how much the entertainment value (“seductiveness”) of the lecture affected student evaluations and retention of material. They coached a good actor (in this case, veteran character actor Michael Fox—NOT the much younger Michael J. Fox, whose screen name added the fake “J.” because he couldn’t use the same name as the older actor) with no formal training in a subject to give a convincing, exciting lecture that was pure gibberish! They disguised him and named his character “Dr. Myron L. Fox”. They then ran several different experiments on different groups, both students and faculty. In some trials,  ”Dr. Fox” gave a relatively bland formal presentation, while others when he pulled out all the stops to be entertaining, engaging, and charming. The results were clear. First, no matter which delivery he used, no one spotted that the lecture made no sense! But when course evaluations were turned in, the audience made it clear that they felt they had learned a lot more from the engaging lecture rather than the more conventional one. In both cases, the audience did very well in answering questions afterwards about the content of the course—without noticing that it was gibberish! Not surprisingly, they had much better “retention” of the material in the engaging lecture than they did in a conventional one.

Of course, to a terrified junior faculty member struggling to get good student course evaluations, this is discouraging. All that seems to count is being a good actor—even if you don’t know the material! But it does raise a larger point: human learning is a complex process, but it’s clear that you have to engage and get their attention and even amuse them or they’ll tune you out—no matter how solid the technical side of your lecture is.

This makes the idea of “distance learning” and teaching all courses on-line so that the student and the professor never even have to be in the same room seem even more absurd to me. Lots of universities are adopting “distance learning” modes more and more, because they are cheap and allow them to serve a potentially infinite number of students with a pre-packaged, pre-recorded series of lectures. But as someone with decades of college education experience under my belt, I can see it’s just a scam to cut costs. Most of the subjects we teach require that you learn by discussion with your peers as well as the professor, nearly impossible when you’re not even in the room. Even in the lecture setting, the main job of education is interaction and communication, which are virtually impossible if you’re just flipping through Powerpoint slides on your laptop in your pajamas in your bedroom.

REFERENCES

Naftulin, D., J.E. Ware, Jr., and F.A. Donnelly, 1973. “The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction”, Journal of Medical Education 48: 630-635.

Williams, R., and J. Ware, 1975, “The Dr. Fox effect: a study of lecturer effectiveness and ratings of instruction,” Journal of Medical Education 50: 149-156.

Williams, R., and J. Ware, 1976, “Validity of student ratings of instruction under different incentive conditions: A further study of the Dr. Fox effect”, Journal of Educational Psychology 68: 48–56.

One of the most famous examples of the “cooling since 1998″ meme occurred when conservative pundit George Will wrote in a Feb. 15, 2009 Washington Post column, “Dark Green Doomsayers,” that “According to the World Meteorological Organization,there has been no record of global warming for more than a decade.” The same column also printed false claims about the retreat of the glaciers, and about scientists predicting global cooling back in the 1970s (all discussed and debunked in Jim Powell’s new book The Inquisition of Climate Science, pp. 75-79). Will was taken to task by climate scientists all around the world for his mistakes and misrepresentations, but he never retracted them. The Washington Post ombudsman tried to justify running Will’s column and rationalize their lax fact-checking procedure, writing that “opinion columnists are free to choose whatever facts bolster their arguments. But they are not free to distort them.” Eventually, the uproar was so great at Will’s egregious distortions that the Post printed two separate columns rebutting him. Apparently learning nothing from the experience, Will dug an even deeper hole by again claiming in an April 2, 2009, column that there hasn’t been a warmer year since 1998.

The problem with Will’s statement—and all those made by AGW deniers who repeat the meme—is that it is false! Picking 1998 as a starting point is a classic example of cherry-picking data to show what you want it to show, and a deliberate attempt to distort the actual record. As climatologists have known for years, 1998 was an exceptionally warm year due to  a record El Niño, which boosted average global temperature way above the overall trend from the past few decades. During El Niño years, the marine circulation patterns release a lot of tropical heat from the oceans and raise overall global temperature for a short time. Likewise, 2008 was a La Niña year, and it was cooler than normal. These are part of the year-to-year “noise” in the system of global temperatures that is well known to scientists. Scientists nevertake a single year’s temperature and then connect it to another data point and claim it’s a “trend.” Instead, the only rigorous and scientifically defensible method is to look at the long-term trends in climate over decades and “smooth” the curve using rolling averages, so that a more statistically meaningful curve fit can be performed.

The global mean temperature record, showing the year-to-year "noise" (blue dots and line) and the overall trend (5-year running average—red line)

Such a procedure is performed in the plot shown here, where the curve fit filters out the noise and shows the overall trend in the data—and by any objective measure, global temperatures are clearly increasing dramatically over the past century. This is the same answer that all the other climate indicators have been giving for years, and this is part of the reason why over 95-99% of climate scientists agree that AGW is real.

In response to Will’s column, Michael Jarraud, the secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (whose data Will misused) wrote:

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record—as was done in a recent Post column….and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects. The difference between climate variability and climate change is critical, not just for scientists or those engaging in policy debates about global warming. Just as one cold snap does not change the global warming trend, one heat wave does not reinforce it. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature has risen 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit. Evidence of global warming has been documented in widespread decreases in snow cover, sea ice and glaciers. The 11 warmest years on record  occurred in the past 13 years [this was written in 2009].

If this is the reality, what about Will’s claim that climate has cooled since 1998? You can squint at the last few data points on the curve and see the 1998 El Niño spike clearly—but it is also clear that it is just a one-year spike, and not representative of the trend over 5 years or 10 years or longer. The message of the curve is clear: global temperatures are warming dramatically, and the El Niño event of 1998 is just a wiggle in the overall trend. To report the story any other way is a clear distortion of the data.

Details of the past 20 years of earth's mean surface temperature.

Making  the point clearer, I’ve replotted the last 20 years of NASA-GISS data on a more expanded graph, so we can focus on the details, and I’ve also updated the data through 2010 (we should have the data for 2011 soon, but already the winter of 2011-2012 is the fourth warmest on record; the previous 3 hottest were all in the past 20 years). As you can see from the plot, the warming trend since 1989 shows up clearly, as does the anomalous spike in 1998. Yet the AGW denier cherry-pickers start with the anomalously warm 1998 data then try to make the case  that the next few years are cooler, hence, “no global warming”. However, this falls apart in 2002 and 2003, which were as warm as 1998 (without El Niño events), and 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2010 were as warm as 1998 or even warmer still. As the quote above pointed out, as of 2009, 11 of the warmest years on record had occurred in since 1986, and adding 2009 and 2010, that makes 13  of the warmest years on record in the past 15  years. All of the sixteen hottest years ever recorded on a global scale have occurred in the last 20 years. They are (in order of hottest first): 2010, 2009, 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2001, 1997, 2008, 1995, 1999, 1990, and 2000. In other words, every year since 2000 has been in the Top Ten hottest years list, and the rest of the list includes 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000. Only 1996 failed to make the list (because of the short-term cooling). So the claim that “it hasn’t warmed since 1998″ has been false since 2002. This statement is even more pernicious because it deliberately and dishonestly ignores these many record-breaking years since 2004.

Cherry-picking can be played both ways. If I pick any year prior to 1998-2000 and connect with any data point from 2001 onwards, I get a warming trend. In fact, the only way a AGW denier could get their “no warming since 1998″ misrepresentation is to deliberately and consciously look at the curve, pick 1998 to start, and only compare it to 1999-2001. Any other long-term combination of the data shows warming. Thus, this distortion of the data that Will keeps repeating is not just a simple misreading of the facts. Since the meme is quoted from 2009, this means that the deniers were consciously and fraudulently trying to distort the data to suit their purposes. The fact that this lie keeps being perpetuated despite the fact that scientists have offered numerous corrections shows the AGW deniers have the same casual disregard for the truth that creationists do. Such practices demonstrate the absymal level of their scientific integrity, and speaks to the fact that AGW deniers are not climate scientists, but people with political agendas who cherry-pick data, quote-mine out of context, and use whatever lies and half-truths they need to support their cause. The parallel with creationists and other science deniers could not be any clearer.

The long-discredited idea of sauropods snorkeling in deep water as illustrated in this old painting by Zdenek Burian. The biggest problem is that they couldn't breathe in water this deep with the pressure it puts on their lungs.

The story popped into my email box earlier this week and soon I had dozens of follow-up emails from the vertebrate paleontology listserver flooding my inbox. Once again, the media have shown their complete inability to get the science right and publicized another flashy story that was complete garbage. I already gave an example last fall (my Nov. 2 post) with Mark McMenamin’s ridiculous claim that a giant Triassic “kraken” rearranged the bones of ichthyosaurs to create art. (By the way, that claim has dropped out of sight, and I don’t ever expect to see it published). As soon as the furor of that media gaffe dies out, however, they commit an even bigger blunder.

This time it was an article in the British media, starting with a “journalist” Tom Feilden (previously caught plagiarizing dino stories) reporting for the Telegraph doing an interview that then got coverage on both BBC radio and TV and on their website. In the brief story, a “Professor” Brian J. Ford makes the claim that giant sauropod dinosaurs were aquatic, not land-dwelling creatures. Immediately, the first reaction that my paleontologist colleagues and I had was “Who the hell is ‘Prof. Brian J. Ford’?” and “Did he say this in 1900?” To us, the article was startling not because it has some new insight on sauropods—but because someone who clearly  had no idea about the last century of sauropod research had managed to get all this publicity, and there was no evidence he had any credentials to be taken seriously!

It didn’t take much digging for my paleontologist colleagues and I to quickly discover the truth. The press coverage promotes him as a “University of Cambridge researcher,” but just a visit to his (clearly self-written and self-promoting) Wikipedia entry, or his over-the-top personal website shows he attended Cardiff University for only two years (1959-1961), has no college degrees, and no formal training in paleontology or any other scientific subject, for that matter. He has only a tenuous affiliation (not a real professorship) with Cambridge University but works out of his own “laboratory” (apparently, just a room in his house). His biography is full of amateur efforts in microbiology, criminal forensics, and other topics which he has no training to publish in. He even has the temerity to brag about being in Mensa. If his past work can be described simply, it is “glorified amateur science buff and media celebrity”. My friends in the British science community tell me he’s a well-known crank with no advanced training or qualifications in any field. Apparently his entire shtick is to dabble in different scientific fields without knowing much about them, gain media exposure for something flashy, and then move on.

So what if  Ford  has no qualifications? Maybe the idea has merit, even though he’s an amateur without formal training in paleontology. But this is the crucial point: if he had any formal training in paleontology and any familiarity with research into sauropods, he’d know right away that his idea was bunk that has been discredited for more than a century. Back around 1900 it was widely thought that sauropods were too large to carry their bodies on dry land, and must have dragged around on the ground on their bellies like lizards, or floated in water to enable their buoyancy to support them. You still see the old images of a brachiosaur deep in a fjord (see above) with only its nostrils above water (a physical impossibility, since the pressure of the water at that depth would have made it impossible to breathe). The problem with all these ideas is that they were debunked by solid evidence over the past century. For one thing, the limb posture of sauropods cannot be slow, belly-dragging lizard-like creatures living in swamps, because their limb bones cannot be articulated that way. Sauropod limbs are built much like those of elephants, and require that they were upright beneath their bodies like all other dinosaurs (and like mammals). Details from the anatomy of their tail bones show no evidence that they dragged along, but instead were held out rigid behind  them for balance. Ford poses the phony argument that their great weight seems unsupportable on dry land, but the biomechanics of sauropods have been studied over and over, and there’s no problem with their immense legs supporting their weight. More to the point: most sauropod bones come from units like the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation in the Rocky Mountains which are categorically NOT swampy deposits, but shallow braided river and floodplain deposits with only rare seasonal ponds, so there was no water deep enough for them to float in. The same can be said for the sauropods from South America and from Africa, as well. Recently, an article by Noto and Grossman showed that most dinosaur-bearing rocks show signs of aridity, not of swampy wetness. Any paleontologist who knows anything about sauropods would know this, since it was first published over 30 years ago. Finally, the clinching line of evidence: footprints and trackways. We have many different trackway sites around the world now, and the sauropod trackway sites are nearly always found on ancient floodplains or river channel sandbars, with no evidence that they left tail-drag marks. There are just a couple of examples of dinosaur swim tracks, which show just how rare this activity must have been. As for his ridiculous point that the tracks weren’t deep enough? The trackway depth varies tremendously depending on the firmness of the substrate, and in the case of sauropod tracks, their huge area means they spread the weight over a larger contact area. In fact, there are both shallow and deep sauropod trackways. In short, he’s making it all up.

SO where was the data to back up his claim published? Did he do new studies in biomechanics to support his assertions? Did he review the large volume of scientific literature and discuss all the points listed above? Did he manage to convince even a few peer reviewers so his work could be published in a reputable journal? No, the study appears in a little journal called Laboratory News, which is not peer-reviewed, and mostly publishes pop-science articles for the credulous. Judging from the Laboratory News website and the accompanying video, his argument is based on hunches and intuition—dinosaurs just “seem” too large to him, therefore the terrestrial explanation is wrong. In his own words from the article, “Dinosaurs look more convincing in water.” But nowhere in the article does he do any calculations to show biomechanically why they could not have been terrestrial. And as for experimental data? Ford’s “research” consisted of putting toy model dinosaurs in graduated cylinders of water (which he calls by the fancy name “volumentric analysls”) to calculate their volume and mass. This is a technique that was abandoned over 40 years ago as being too full of problems to be taken seriously (which he would have known if he’d read any dinosaur literature). Something must be wrong with the method, because he estimated the weight of the tails of large dinosaurs at 10-20 tons—larger than the total body mass of the largest dinosaurs (let alone their tails), according to modern estimates of dinosaur weights.

Apparently, this “journal” loves to repeat outrageous ideas by this clown, because it generates lots of publicity on the internet and the media and helps sales. For example, in July 2011 they ran a cover story by Ford claiming humans could not have evolved without the help of dogs. Never mind the fact that for most of human evolution, dogs were competitors and enemies of humans, or that dog domestication was a very late event in human prehistory.

But the “journalist” Feilden compounds the problem by not only giving a crank undue coverage of a thoroughly debunked idea, but then comparing him to Galileo in his fight against the scientific establishment. To me, that’s a sure warning sign. Almost every crank wants to make themselves out to be a modern Galileo, persecuted  by the establishment. But there’s a big difference between cranks and Galileo: Galileo was the most brilliant scientist of his generation, he did actual experiments and observations, and most importantly, he was right.

So Ford’s idea is garbage, pure and simple. The press coverage relied entirely on Feilden’s article, and only sought out one expert opinion, from sauropod specialist Dr. Paul Barrett at the British Museum, who commented (with typical British understatement and restraint), “Things have moved on quite a lot. I don’t think we will be re-writing the text books just yet.” The tone of sauropod researchers on this side of The Pond is one of outrage and indignation (see here and here), and for good reason. Once again, we have a glorified amateur playing with his toy dinosaurs who manages to get a gullible “journalist” to print his story with a straight face and almost no criticism. Feilden didn’t bother to check this guy’s credentials, consulted with only one qualified expert and then only used one sentence of rebuttal, and gave the story the full promotion because it was a glamorous topic (dinosaurs) and challenged conventional wisdom.

It’s bad enough that the internet is full of garbage that anyone with an opinion can broadcast worldwide without peer review. And there is certainly some bad science that does get past peer review and should never have been published (although in subsequent years, most of this bad stuff is weeded out by further research). But it’s really sad that science journalism has descended to the point where any reporter can interview any self-proclaimed expert and run the story, with no editorial oversight or fact-checking, and only a minimal attempt to ask experts or seek out dissenting opinion. Now my colleagues and I will be having to explain all over again when we talk to lay audiences that no, serious dinosaur researchers do NOT believe dinosaurs were aquatic. No wonder our level of scientific literacy is so abysmal. It starts with scientifically illiterate science reporters!

And to add to the list of ironies: later in the same issue of Laboratory News, they printed an article about the problem of bad science journalism!

In his book Capistrano Nights, Father St. John O’Sullivan, Pastor of Mission San Juan Capistrano from 1910-33, tells how the swallows first came to call the Mission home. One day, while walking through town, Father O’Sullivan saw a shopkeeper, broomstick in hand. He was knocking down the cone-shaped mud swallow nests under the eaves of his shop. The birds were darting back and forth, shreiking over the destruction of their homes.”What in the world are you doing?” O’Sullivan asked.”Why, these dirty birds are a nuisance and I am getting rid of them!” the shopkeeper responded. ”But where can they go?”"I don’t know and I don’t care,” he replied, slashing away with his pole. “But they’ve no business here, destroying my property.”O’Sullivan then said, “Come on swallows, I’ll give you shelter. Come to the Mission. There’s room enough there for all.”The very next morning, Father O’Sullivan discovered the swallows busy building their nests outside Father Junipero Serra’s Church.

Amazingly, they fly 6000 miles from their winter nesting grounds near Goya in Corrientes, Argentina, which is one of the longest migrations known and even more remarkable when you realize the bird is smaller than the size of your fist. This purely local event wouldn’t have become such a big deal if it were not for the 1940 chart-topping song, “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano”, which was recorded by everyone from  Gene Autry to Glenn Miller to the Ink Spots to the King Sisters  to Guy Lombardo to Pat Boone. (I vividly remember how often my parents would sing or play records of this song, a family sentimental favorite).

The city and its boosters use the occasion to put on a huge week-long festival, which draws 35,000-40,000 visitors to this tiny town of a few thousand, according to the Los Angeles Times. On Saturday, March 24, 2012, there was a huge parade and street fair with about 3200 participants and over 500 horses, but traveling only a few blocks (1.5 miles). It is said to be the largest non-motorized parade in the U.S.  I once marched in that parade with my high school band (I play trombone). I remember the festival as a huge deal, with vendors set up everywhere and every shop in town crammed with tourists. Except for the businesses, however, most of the residents of the town who DON’T make a buck from the mobs hate the crowds and traffic and people parking illegally everywhere. Part of my family still lives in San Juan Capistrano, and they try to leave town during that weekend.

There’s one small problem with the whole thing: it’s a complete myth! The return of the swallows does not happen on March 19; the swallows don’t return to the Mission any more; and most don’t even return to the region!

The problem lies with the ecology of the swallows themselves. These tiny birds do fly enormous distances from Argentina, but in small groups. They must stop often to rest and feed and build up energy for each leg of the long perilous trip. Typically, the scout birds that have flown fastest or left earliest arrive first, but scattered over many days in March, so there may be some swallows there on March 19, but they’re not the first birds, nor even the main flocks of birds. Before the 1960s, San Juan Capistrano was a tiny town with just a few hundred houses surrounding the old Mission. In those days, the Mission was the largest structure in town, so the cliff swallows used the artificial “cliffs” of the Mission walls and eaves to build their little mud nests. Thus, the myth got launched, and persisted for many years aided by the song.

The real irony is that the very development and growth that the city’s boosters hope to foster with their over-the-top festivities is the primary reason there are no swallows there any more. As I learned when I studied Vertebrate Field Biology with Dr. Wilbur Mayhew at University of California, Riverside, in the 1970s, swallows catch insects on the wing, swooping through clouds of flies and mosquitoes with their beaks open. They normally feed in wetlands and above streams and ponds where these flying insects breed. But development wiped out nearly all the original wetlands and ponds in old San Juan Creek, so it’s now just a concrete-lined ditch with a few gravelly areas of natural stream bed. Cut off from their source of food, the cliff swallows have moved inland to less developed areas, such as the Chino Hills. They have no reason to return to San  Juan Capistrano any more.

Every time I’ve been down there during the Swallow Festival and visited the Mission, I’ve made a point of looking for swallows or their nests. Nothing. I’ve seen a few underneath the bridges over San Juan Creek (another place cliff swallows like to nest), but none on the Mission. Yet as I stand there, I listen to all these amateurs getting excited as a pigeon flies by, or pointing to a jay or a starling and calling it a swallow. (I spent a year learning birding in my college Vertebrate Field Biology class, so I got to be pretty good at identifying any bird in California). Apparently, there are no biologists or birders down there to set them straight.

Other towns use the same faked history to boost their commerce. When my folks lived in the city of San Clemente just south of San Juan Capistrano from the 1970s to 2001, that town made  big fuss about the “La Cristianitos” festival they held each year. Problem with that idea is that it’s a myth as well. San Clemente has no history like San Juan Capistrano. It was a real estate development begun in the 1920s to look like an old Spanish town. The alleged first baptism of Native Americans in California (the “Cristianitos” in the name) didn’t take place in town, but in the creek to the south near San Onofre.

Just like religions and other faith-based systems that don’t like the facts to get in the way of their comforting and cherished ideas, I doubt whether people (especially the boosters) would want to know the truth anyway. Occasionally a reporter has the temerity to mention it, but that doesn’t seem to matter to most people. It would sure get in the way of making a big profit off all those tourists each March.

The story began in the late 1960s when the U.S. and Europe were both engaged in a race to develop a supersonic transport (SST) for civilian passengers, which would whisk people around huge distances in much shorter times (primarily between Europe and America). I vividly remember this series of events, because my father worked for Lockheed Aircraft at the time, and spent years  of his life working very long hours to develop a huge multivolume “proposal” for how the Lockheed SST would be built. Huge numbers of man-hours and millions of dollars building two working prototype aircraft were wasted by Lockheed in the competition when the contract went to Boeing Aircraft instead. Ironically, the Boeing SST was eventually canceled, too. The only SST that was built was the Anglo-French Concorde, which traveled between New York and Paris from 1976 until it was retired in 2003 due to low demand after the 2000 Concorde crash, low air traffic after 9/11, and high costs since most of the electronics in the aircraft were over 30 years old and obsolete.

One of the concerns that caused the cancellation of the Boeing SST project (besides the technical problems, delays, huge cost overruns, and the concern that it would ever be profitable enough to justify its existence) was the possibility that as the SST flew through the ozone layer in the stratosphere, it might cause environmental damage.  Ozone (O₃) is a chemical made of three oxygen molecules bonded together; it has a distinctive smell most commonly noticed when a lightning strike or electrical discharge occurs. It is formed when O₂ in our stratosphere is bombarded by radiation and splits up, and some of those free oxygen radicals join other O₂ molecules to form O₃. At ground level, it is not good for us, but up in the stratosphere, it performs an important role in screening out excessive ultraviolet-B (UVB) radiation from the sun, which can cause skin cancers and blindness.

The issue of the possible damage of SST travel in the ozone layer was raised in the late 1960s as the Boeing and Concorde SST projects were well along (previously, there had been worries that SSTs might contribute to greenhouse gas warming).  A crucial 1970 paper by atmospheric chemist Harold Johnston raised the possibility that nitrous oxides from jet engines might break down the ozone layer, and the story soon reached national attention.  However, by the time the paper was fully published, the House of Representatives had already canceled funding for the Boeing SST program, so it was only applicable to the European Concorde. Nevertheless, Congress funded another program, Climate Impact Assessment Program (CIAP), which involved nearly 1000 scientists across many different agencies and universities over 3 years, to assess the possible impact of the SST. When the 7200-page report came out in 1975, it suggested that 500 Boeing-type SSTs could deplete the ozone layer by 20% especially over the heavily traveled North Atlantic corridor. Yet the executive summary, written by Department of Transportation bureaucrats who wanted the SST to go forward, claimed just the opposite, and suggested that a newly modified SST would not damage the ozone layer. The scientists who had worked so long and hard on the research were outraged, but their corrections only appeared in the scientific literature, while the mass media only reported the summary that falsely claimed that the SST was safe for the ozone layer.

Meanwhile, the focus on SSTs and nitrous oxide shifted to another culprit when scientists testing the engines for the upcoming space shuttle missions discovered that it emitted chlorine, which was much more reactive and capable of destroying ozone. Paul Crutzen, an important contributor to the “nuclear winter” debate, presented a paper on the chlorine problem at a 1974 NASA conference on the topic in Kyoto. Soon thereafter  Rowland and Molina published a historic paper in Nature showing that the most abundant source of stratospheric chlorine was chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were commonly used in refrigerators and air-conditioners as a coolant, and spray cans as a propellant. CFCs were particularly nasty and rapid destroyers of ozone. In the stratosphere, they break up due to solar radiation to release a free radical chlorine atom, which then bonds to ozone and breaks it apart. Once this reaction occurs, however, the chlorine atom is freed up to break up more and more ozone.

With the news that everyday products like hair spray were dangerous to the environment, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, and Congress soon convened panels and commissioned research to look into the problem. As Oreskes and Conway (2010, Chapter 4) describe in detail, the battle of scientists vs. the CFC industry soon became bitter and nasty. The main industry trade associations and their lobbyists, the Chemical Specialities Manufacturers Association and the Manufacturing Chemists’ Association, soon set up a PR campaign to try to discredit the research, while pouring over $5 million in research grants to scientists (in hopes they might find results which would dispute Molina and Rowland’s conclusions). They hired a British professor of theoretical mechanics, Richard Scorer, to plug their viewpoint. He argued that humans could not cause a problem that might affect the entire atmosphere (even as he gave speeches in Los Angeles, which was experiencing dangerous smog alerts). Once a Los Angeles Times reporter exposed his links to the CFC industry and called him a “hired gun,” his propaganda was discredited, but others soon took his place.

Then the industry made a big fuss about the idea that volcanic eruptions might be a bigger source of CFCs than humans, and therefore hair sprays were not to blame. They spent money on a “research” program monitoring an Alaskan volcano, which erupted as expected in January 1976. But when the research didn’t show what they wanted to show, they quickly toned down the PR machine and claimed the results were “inconclusive”. Yet the lie that volcanoes were a bigger source of ozone damage continued in their PR campaign. As Harold Schiff put it, the CFC industry “challenged the theory every step of the way. They said there was no proof that fluorocarbons even got into the stratosphere, no proof that they split apart to produce chlorine, no proof that, even if they did, the chlorine was destroying ozone”. Then scientists went out in 1975 and 1976 and disproved every one of the industry’s claims, and showed that CFCs were indeed a severe threat to the ozone layer and needed to be taken seriously.

When the National Academy of Sciences finally released its long-delayed report on Sept. 15, 1976, it was devastating in its clear-cut conclusions: CFCs were indeed a serious threat to the ozone layer. Despite the efforts of the aerosol industry, the federal regulatory machinery jumped into action, and the FDA and EPA both began to work on regulation of CFCs. Ironically, by the time the FDA announced regulations in 1977, the bad publicity surrounding hair sprays had already had an effect on consumer buying patterns.  People had discovered that there were lots of CFC-free products that sprayed their contents without dangerous chemicals,  such as roll-on deodorant and pump sprays for most kitchen cleaners. The sales of CFC propellants had dropped by 75%, and when the ban took effect in 1979, it was merely the final step in the process already underway.

Meanwhile, NASA began to devote more and more of its satellite time to look into the problem. By the 1980s, their satellites had documented an alarming “hole” in the ozone layer that arose over the Antarctic at the beginning of each austral spring in September-October, as the warming stirred up the stratospheric clouds and sped up the chemical reactions.  The hole was huge and persisted for months, and the ozone levels were alarmingly low. There were even hints of an Arctic ozone hole as well, although it was not as predictable and well established. Both of these discoveries were alarming, since it meant that people living at high latitudes (southern South America, New Zealand, Australia) as well as the wildlife of these areas and the Antarctic, were being exposed to dangerous levels of UV-B during the Austral Spring. Not only does high UV-B cause skin cancer, but at high enough levels it can cause eye damage as well. This was a threat to be taken seriously.

As this research emerged through the 1980s, international conferences were held to reach agreements for a worldwide ban on CFCs. The final result of years of negotiation was the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, which was ratified by all the signatory nations by 1988. Not only was the research supporting the agreement scientifically impeccable, but even the manufacturers had a member on the panel. They could see the market trends away from CFC use, and the risks they took by fighting regulation and scientific consensus. Finally, on March 18, 1988, DuPont (the largest maker of CFCs) announced that they would cease production of CFCs within a few years.

The battle should have been over. The scientific research had reached a consensus, governments around the world had agreed on a solution to the problem, and since CFCs were easily replaced, the industry had complied and actually done better financially without CFCs. Case closed.  But the right-wing organizations that challenge any science restricting business (even a business no longer fighting the science) were not ready to give up. The major conservative “think tanks” (the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Marshall Institute again) wanted to keep fighting regulation which violated their “free market” philosophy, even if the industry being regulated didn’t make the polluting product any more, and had agreed to the regulation (and improved their bottom line). Some of these people were prominent in the Reagan Administration, like Interior Secretary Donald Hodel. His “protection plan” for people under the ozone hole was to wear hats and long-sleeved shirts! The ridicule that he received soon led to his resignation, but there were many other conservatives both in and out of the Reagan White House who were working both publicly and quietly to deny the already settled problem of ozone depletion.

Among the most prominent of these critics was none other than Fred Singer of the Heritage Foundation, a “hired-gun” scientist famous for his previous battles defending the tobacco industry and the polluters who caused acid rain. In 1987, he wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal claiming that the “ozone scare” was not credible. He claimed that CFCs were not responsible, and that the ozone simply moved somewhere else. Of course, if he were not a long-retired physicist with no experience in satellites since the 1960s, he would have known that this claim was ridiculous. The newer generation of satellites have global coverage, so if the ozone had moved somewhere else, it would have been detected.

Singer’s writings are full of the same dodge, deny, and divert tactics pioneered by the tobacco industry. For example, he pulled the old distraction of “other causes”: there are other reasons for skin cancer, therefore we shouldn’t worry about the ozone hole! As we saw before, this is irrelevant: if the ozone hole causes skin cancers, we don’t want to add it to the list of other known carcinogens, but try to eliminate it.

His main stratagem was a familiar one: scientists have changed their minds in the past, therefore we shouldn’t take them seriously. He brought up the ancient 1960s debate over where the SST might deplete ozone, and laughed at scientists when this proved to be wrong. But he never mentioned that scientists themselves had corrected this error decades ago, and the current evidence of CFCs causing ozone was based on a huge amount research in the ensuing 20 years.

In 1988, Singer misinterpreted valid scientific research by V. Ramanathan about greenhouse gases to claim that the fluctuations of chlorine and stratospheric cooling were just “natural variations” and humans didn’t cause them. But in original paper, Ramanathan argued nothing of the kind, but just the opposite: that humans were warming the warming the troposphere that was causing cooling of the stratosphere.  Singer did the same to James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and an early prophet of the global warming problem. Singer pulled a graph out of context from one of Hansen’s publications to argue that the warming trend was part of a natural cycle. Of course, any objective look at those papers would show that this is a deliberate distortion to pervert their meaning to the opposite of what was said. Ramanathan and Hansen’s research was arguing in the clearest possible terms that the changes in the troposphere and stratosphere were not cyclic and were due to human-induced greenhouse gases.

Soon Singer’s view of the world—that CFC-ozone science was incomplete and uncertain, that scientists had made mistakes in the past, that it would be expensive to fix the problem, and that scientists were corrupt and money-grubbing)—was picked up by the right-wing media, including the ultra-conservative Washington Times (founded and owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church), and business publications like the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fortune. William F. Buckley published an article by Singer in his conservative journal National Review.  There, Singer blamed rejection of his writings by major scientific journals not on his own incompetence and bad science, but on a global conspiracy by scientists to shut out dissenting points of view. According to Singer, “It’s not difficult to understand some of the motivations behind the drive to regulate CFCs out of existence. For scientists: prestige, more grants for research, press conferences, and newspaper stories. Also the feeling that maybe they are saving a world for future generations”.

To working scientists, this entire statement sounds bizarre and absurd. Yes, scientists are motivated to publish research which will be noticed and have some importance. They’re all human, after all. And why is it a bad thing to save the planet? Unlike biased “think tanks” publishing their own opinions over and over, and pushing a political-economic agenda, scientists can’t get away with claiming just anything. The peer review process is very strict, and if their data or conclusions don’t pass muster, they will be quickly refuted by other scientists eager to shoot them down. Outsiders like Singer (long retired from doing any real science) or the creationists love to propagate this myth of “scientific conspiracy”, but as any working scientist knows, that’s a lie. The scientific community is sharpening their knives to critique each other through peer review and checking published results with later follow-up research to prove someone wrong, and they are about as far from a unified conspiracy as one could imagine.

And the charge that scientists do their research just to get rich is equally absurd. Most of them are in relatively low-paying teaching positions, where they rarely reach a six-figure salary even after 20 or more years of hard work. I’ve been teaching for 33 years now, and I still haven’t made it to a salary of six figures, despite publishing numerous books and over 250 scientific papers. To reach our goals of working in science, we had to make many hard sacrifices of long hours and living in near poverty in 5-7 years of grad school (for a total of 10-12 years in college) to earn a Ph.D. Then we go through the brutal process of teaching for 4-6 years or more on starvation wages as a lowly assistant professor, all the while under the threat of not getting tenure and losing our job forever.  All the scientists I know have made these sacrifices willingly, because they love what they do, and want to discover new and important things about the natural world.  As scientists, we were typically bright students near the top of our class, capable of going in lots of directions. If we wanted to make real money, we would have gone into business or law, where the grad program is only a few years, and then huge salaries are available at the other end.

For Singer or any of the other conservative anti-environmentalists to claim scientists are corrupt and trying to earn big money and better reputation is a clear case of projecting their own motivations on someone else, or the “pot calling the kettle black.” Singer and his cohort are certainly not hurting for monetary support. For example, Singer’s foundation Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) was originally affiliated with a Moonie organization, and now receives funding from Arco, Unocal, Shell, and ExxonMobil. SEPP netted $226,443 in 2007, and had accumulated assets of $1.69 million. We don’t know how much Singer gets paid for shilling for all these different conservative foundations, but it’s safe to say he earns a lot more (as do most of the rich businessmen who fund these foundations) than the paltry salaries of academics. And Singer, a former scientist with an agenda, gets a lot more publicity and coverage when his causes are trumpeted by right-wing media than do any scientist involved in the debate.

What motivates this bizarre perspective of Singer and his conservative cohorts? As Oreskes and Conway (2010, p 134) show, Singer sees the environmental science community as “technology-hating Luddites” with a goal to regulate and change our economic system. According to Singer, scientists have a “hidden political agenda” against “business, the free market, and the capitalistic system.” The “real agenda” of scientists is to overthrow capitalism and replace it with communism.

I’m not sure what scientists Singer hangs out with, but this sounds like the Red Scare paranoia of the 1950s, and it is about as far from reality as possible. I know hundreds of natural scientists (geologists, biologists, chemists, and physicists in many subspecialties), and if there’s one thing they almost all share, it’s a lack of interest in politics and economics, let alone a unified socialist-communist agenda. Many got into science specifically because they weren’t interested in economics and politics, and had a gift or love for doing science instead. What they are committed to is a sincere love of the truth, and a willingness to make sacrifices of their time, money, and even comfort and personal safety to find out what is really true about nature, no matter whose agenda it might support. Only rarely do most of us think about possible political or economic implications of our research. Typically scientists try to downplay those aspects because they don’t want to attract attention or controversy! If you doubt this, just look at all the negative comments that scientists heaped on Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould because they were willing to be public figures.

Nor are we all “commies”. I know of large numbers of both conservative and liberal scientists (but no outright communists or socialists), despite the claim that we’re all left-wingers. There are some scientists who do have strong political opinions, but as scientists we try our best to prevent our political biases from influencing our scientific results. We’re human, of course, so occasionally research with a political agenda does get published—but then the rest of the scientific community will jump in and criticize it, so we don’t get away with our biases for long.

But let’s get back to the ozone depletion issue and what this example tells us. Scientists originally looking for something else accidentally discovered the problem. Then it was found to be serious and generated a huge volume of conclusive scientific evidence. From this, governmental agencies finally took action, but long after consumers had almost stopped using CFCs. Soon the industry stopped making them because demand had dropped, and they weren’t necessary, and other materials and methods for refrigeration and propellants worked cheaper and better.  Since the Montreal Protocol, the ozone layer has been gradually recovering and CFCs have been gradually vanishing from the stratosphere, although they may not be gone until 2050 or later. Yet the anti-environmentalist movement kept beating a dead horse, filling the right-wing media with false or misleading stories, and claiming that even something like curbing CFCs (which was a good economic decision for both DuPont and the planet) was somehow leading us to communism.

All through this debate, one can see the strong parallels to the current global warming debate, from the tactics of industries who want to confuse and cloud the issue (the tobacco company “smokescreen” defense), to the attempts to smear scientists and paint a completely bizarre picture of them, to the efforts to fund phony “research” and then downplay the results when they don’t support your company’s interests. And the players in all these debates were the same, especially the conservative foundations with their funding from major energy corporations. But there are positive messages, too: once scientists produced overwhelming evidence for the dangers of CFCs, and governments and affected industries cooperated with each other, it was possible to find a solution for a global environmental problem, and now it is no longer on our radar. The same happened with the acid rain debate of the 1970s and 1980s, and now cap-and-trade has solved that pollution problem. We hear all the screaming over cap-and-trade on the AGW issue, but it works just fine in reducing acid rain and everyone in those industries has learned to work with that system.

Of course, weaning civilization off of fossil fuels is a bigger problem than these, but the history of the debates over the ozone hole and acid rain show that once science, industry, and governments get together, something CAN be done. The question is: will we be able to reach that consensus? Or will science deniers in the pay of the fossil fuel industries prevent us from acting when it has been long overdue?

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Anywhere you go in modern society, dinosaurs are ubiquitous. From the movies to TV to the internet to toy stores and museum gift shops, there are countless chances to spend money on dinosaur paraphernalia. The three Jurassic Park movies were among the top grossing movies of all time. For kids between the ages of 2 and 12, dinosaurs are often a major part of their imaginations. Many kids are hugely fascinated with them, and have learned to master their polysyllabic names to the amazement of  their parents. (I was one of those kids, hooked on dinosaurs at age 4. I wanted to become a paleontologist as soon as I knew what the word meant. Back in the late 1950s-early 1960s when I grew up, this was highly unusual; kids back then didn’t care much for dinosaurs compared to today’s kids). Most kids change their interests as puberty hits and they enter the “tweens” and teen years, but the fascination with dinosaurs never completely disappears.

We can’t imagine a world where this is not true, but in fact it is a relatively recent phenomenon, just a century old. More than any other person, the public fascination and interest in prehistoric creatures owes its existence to one man, Charles R. Knight. Prior to Knight’s  “reconstructive” illustrations of a wide range of extinct animals, there was almost no public awareness of them.

The earliest discoveries of dinosaurs in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s were just fragmentary bones, and by the 1860s they had been depicted as giant lizards by the British artist Waterhouse Hawkins. In the U.S., the early discoveries by Joseph Leidy, O. C. Marsh, and Edward Drinker Cope were also quite fragmentary, and illustrated only in technical monographs that the general public could not obtain. There were almost no museums displaying large mounted skeletons of dinosaurs until Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York did so in the early 1900s. Osborn’s museum crews obtained nearly complete skeletons of some of the most famous dinosaurs: sauropods like “Brontosaurus” (now Apatosaurus) and the first skeletons of Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops. Osborn realized the publicity value of spectacular dinosaur skeletons for his growing museum, and so these mounts were the forerunners of the many displays in museums worldwide. But mounted skeletons were not enough. Osborn realized that the”dry bones” did not speak to the public so clearly without a good reconstruction to help the layperson visualize them. And fortunately for paleontology and history, he discovered the gifted young Charles R. Knight hanging out with the taxidermists at his museum.

As this outstanding book by historian of science Richard Milner describes it, Knight was born in Brooklyn in 1874, three years after Darwin published The Descent of Man. This was a period of groundbreaking discoveries in biology and paleontology, and young Charles was fascinated with animals as a toddler. One day he told his father he was tired of stories about Jesus, and wanted to hear stories about elephants!  He began doing sketches of the animals in his books, even though he lived in urban Brooklyn with few exotic animals to study. Eventually, naturalists such as Osborn, Theodore Roosevelt, and the wealthy “sportsmen”  of the Boone and Crockett Club established the Bronx Zoo. Here, Knight got his first chance to practice his burgeoning art skills on drawing animals from all over the world. Unfortunately, when Charles was 6, he was struck by a pebble thrown by another boy, and it damaged his right eye. He had to use his myopic and astigmatic left eye for the rest of his life, and somehow managed to produce  his greatest work during his later years when he was legally blind!

Charles’s father was a secretary to J.P. Morgan, powerful baron of industry and treasurer of the American Museum, and it was through this connection that young Knight  gained access to the taxidermy and paleontology workshops. The  new head of the museum’s paleontology department, Henry Fairfield Osborn,  immediately recognized his talents, and by 1896 was commissioning him to do nearly all the painting and restorations of prehistoric beasts that their expeditions had discovered. Although heavily committed to work for the American Museum for  more than 40 years, he refused Osborn’s entreaties to join  its staff, and stubbornly kept his independence. Knight continued to do a wide variety of free-lance illustrations for magazines, and remarkable sculptures, paintings, and drawings of wild animals, many based on the creatures at the Bronx Zoo. Having refused a secure staff position at the American Museum, he was nearly always broke and in debt. His traditional, realistic style of painting wildlife was hard to sell in the midst of the wave of new artists from Europe (Picasso, Gauguin, Matisse, Duchamp, and others), so he rarely got commissions from wealthy patrons to keep him financially secure. He was always forgetful about money, walking away from store counters without his change, and did not know how to manage his finances. As his ties to the American Museum weakened over money issues, he eventually received commissions to do grand murals for the Field Museum in Chicago and a series of paintings for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. By the time these murals were commissioned, Knight was  legally blind, and had to employ assistants to render his small sketches into wall-sized paintings that Knight could see only as a blur. Late in life, he always carried a piece of paper with his address, so if he became lost due to his blindness, someone could help him get home. After he had completely lost his sight, Knight’s health began to deteriorate, and he died in 1953, at the age of 79.

But Milner’s book is more than just a biography of a pioneering paleoartist. It is gloriously illustrated with Knight’s art, rendered in full color on quality paper stock by Abrams, a noted publisher of art books, so the colors just pop out of the page. (Milner is credited as the art editor of the book as well as the author.) Many of the sketches were previously unpublished, and show the artist’s early ideas for works that later become iconic. Others are truly remarkable, such as the guest book pages from Henry Fairfield Osborn’s mansion, signed by J.P. Morgan and other powerful people—with prehistoric animal doodles by Knight. Milner’s book has chapters on the Bronx Zoo and Knight’s connection with its  early history, including his amazing sculptures for its elephant house; on how Knight’s art helped to save the bison from extinction; Knight’s sketches showing animals dissected down to their muscles, which helped make Knight’s creations more realistic and life-like; pages and pages of gorgeous paintings of the great cats and exotic birds; descriptions of how Knight prepared sketches and anatomical drawings before he painted, and how he fleshed out mounted skeletons of extinct beasts into amazing  miniature sculptures; his role in creating Sinclair Oil’s “Dinoland” for the 1964 New York World’s Fair; and his trip to Europe to study  early Paleolithic cave paintings and connect with the Ice Age  artists who made them. The book also includes an Introduction by Knight’s granddaughter, Rhoda Knight Kalt, with her charming childhood recollections of her grandfather.

Inevitably in a project as large and complex as this, a few small errors creep in—mostly the spelling of one or two scientific names in captions (such as Protoceras and Megaceros on p. 66). However, Milner was conscientious in making sure that the captions reflect the most current scientific names and interpretations of these extinct creatures. More importantly, the high-quality reproduction of the art and the many previously unpublished sketches and doodles give us an unprecedented insight into Knight’s artistic techniques and his love of his animal subjects. Milner shows how Knight’s conception of prehistoric animals changed over time as the scientific ideas changed, so he rendered the great sauropods as both sluggish tail-dragging lizard-like creatures in swamps (the view a century ago) and also as animals of the dry land with necks and tails held out straight (the modern view). He rendered a famous painting inspired by the insights of the ailing  Edward Drinker Cope that showed the modern conception of the predatory Allosaurus (then called Laelaps) jumping on another in a very active pose, a view which has come back into scientific favor a century later. At Osborn’s urging, Knight had spent weeks absorbing Cope’s expertise shortly before the pioneering paleontologist died in 1897.

In 1934, Osborn wrote, “Charles R. Knight is the greatest genius in the line of prehistoric restoration that the science of paleontology has ever known. His work in the American Museum will endure for all time.” Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that although Knight never published a single scholarly work in paleontology, he was more influential in shaping our ideas about the prehistoric world than any scientist. More to the point, Knight is the source of nearly all modern paleoart, revered by all modern dinosaur artists and Hollywood dinosaur animators as their founding father. Even though he was nearly blind, without his visualization of prehistoric creatures our modern obsession with dinosaurs might never have occurred, or followed the path that it did. The world of  extinct animals that  seems so familiar to us is largely Knight’s vision, and we can be thankful for his amazing skills, passion, and dedication in making the prehistoric past come alive.