Cosmos Tackled Climate Change in a Wonderfully Satisfying Way

So I worked out while watching this week’s episode of Cosmos. I’m several weeks “behind”, if it’s possible to be behind for a documentary series (though I’ve DVRed them all for future marathon sessions). But this was a wonderful episode to come back to. It was a really good primer on contemporary understanding of climate change, especially addressing rebuttals from skeptics that have become more common over the last 20 years or so. In particular, I liked these points

• Tyson pointed out that the greenhouse effect is “beneficial” in that Earth would be like 30 degrees cooler without it. But he also points out how little CO2 it takes to get that much of a shift, and how little CO2 we need to add to make temperature change too much.
• It’s not that climate is changing that’s bad, it’s that climate change that is too fast can destroy ecosystems. Tyson pointed out the speed of anthropogenic CO2 emissions isn’t close to anything previously seen in Earth’s history aside from the previous mass extinction believed to be caused by climate change.
• We can in fact figure out the difference between CO2 we’re emitting and CO2 from many natural sources, and that evidence points out most of the new CO2 is from our fossil fuels. How? The CO2 from fossil fuels is made up of carbon atoms that are different weights from what we would otherwise expect in the atmosphere.
• The Sun hasn’t really appreciably changed to cause the temperature increases we see.
• The ocean is warming up. Actually, I’m not sure the show mentioned the “greenhouse pause” people talk about, but what is important to note is that so-called “stop” in air temperatures doesn’t really tell the whole story. The Spaceship of the Imagination gave us an infrared view of the Earth to look at the planet’s heat emissions. We’re finding out that while the atmosphere may not have heated up over this last decade, the ocean definitely has. I’m also surprised the show didn’t mention the potential danger of ocean acidification.

I also loved the presentation of climate as better understood by large scale driving forces and not “just” the average of weather. I don’t know any climatologists, but I’m sure such a simplifying definition of their field has always bugged them. One major factor is energy conservation, and since I took a simple engineering class that tried to stress how much of understanding technical systems is based on just applying various conservation laws, I try to emphasize that more. Those space satellites let us measure how much heat Earth radiates away, and given that the sun’s input is relatively constant, if the atmosphere traps more heat in, then we must be heating up. (This is also the source of my very basic understanding as to why severe weather gets worse under climate change. We’re trapping in more energy, and so storm systems basically get stronger because it goes somewhere.) And I also loved that they tied in how our knowledge of other planets has helped inform our understanding of Earth. (And even gave a shout out to Carl Sagan’s research!) I do have one major peeve, though, and I want to point out that they did commit the cardinal sin of data presentation and not include any scale for the color representing temperature increases on their maps.

I had never heard of Frank Shuman before and now I want to look him up. It amazes me how similar his pointing out a small region of solar power generators could power civilization is to Rick Smalley’s idea, minus the nanotubes. If there’s anything I’ve learned the last two years in grad school while doing literature research for my own project, it’s how freakishly non-linear and coincidental energy research can be. To a more philosophically minded friend, I joked that learning about energy technologies has destroyed the last shreds of my old belief in logical positivism, the idea that human history is generally a linear progression towards more good. But I’ll be darned and say I’m still an optimist and had slight chills hearing JFK’s “We choose to go to the moon” speech with scenes of that (super utopian) city of sustainable energy and green spaces. 

Going over the Critique of Cosmos part 1 and a brief review of part 2

Like I said before, Hank Campbell’s had some interesting critiques of the first episode of Cosmos. I thought nearly all of them missed the mark, and to be honest, it seems like he’s being a bit of a science hipster here. I want to go more in depth, and I’ll do that here. Let’s go through his points

1. Venus was not caused by global warming

Let’s look at what Campbell says:  “We have to ask why he thinks Venus is the way it is due to the greenhouse effect — which is another way of saying global warming. Venus is almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit and the clouds are sulfuric acid. Even the most aggressive climate change models and their 20-foot ocean rises don’t predict that for Earth… If this sequel to Cosmos had been made in 1989 the screenwriters of Cosmos would have invoked acid rain on Venus instead of global warming. Regardless, CO2 did not cause the poisonous conditions on Venus; instead, CO2 is an effect of the poisonous conditions on Venus. Invoking the greenhouse effect when talking about Venus is like blaming ocean liners for inventing barnacles.

Okay, but global warming isn’t the same as the greenhouse effect.  If it weren’t for the CO2, SO2, and H2O, Earth’s surface temperature would be significantly lower. That is the definition of the greenhouse effect. More technically, the greenhouse effect is when a gas in an atmosphere can absorb heat radiated from a planet surface, which then redirects some of the heat escaping from the planet back towards the surface. This shift the temperature equilibrium to higher than it would without the greenhosue gas. In an exchange on a follow-up on his website, Science 2.0, Campbell says the real culprit is hydrogen escape. (Note: I’m the “Matt” participating in the comment section.) “On Venus gravity, hydrogen is already light so a lack of gravity causes the water problem to go nuts. No water, CO2 goes crazy – but CO2 did not cause the atmosphere of Venus, Tyson knows it, anyone who knows high school atmospheric science knows it…”

Campbell probably overestimates hydrogen escape by itself. Hydrogen escapes from Earth too (we’re predicted to lose our all water due to hydrogen escape within the next billion years). Also, Venus’ surface gravity is about 90% that of Earth’s, so hydrogen shouldn’t experience that much weaker of a pull to the planet that it does here.  The chain of cause and effect leading to atmospheric changes on Venus doesn’t mean the greenhouse effect doesn’t describe the current temperature, or ever played an effect in the evolution of Venus’ climate. Even planetary scientists describe Venus’ history as the result of a “runaway greenhouse effect”. Once most of Venus’ water was in the atmosphere, it stayed that way because water vapor is also a greenhouse gas and raised the temperature enough to prevent condensation into massive oceans that could have held on to the water longer. (It’s easier to strip hydrogen from molecules in the atmosphere.) This is also why I don’t buy the idea that this segment relates at all to climate change debates. CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, and this is typically mentioned in modern discussions about methane, and Tyson didn’t actually mention the concentration of CO2 in Venus’ atmosphere. Campbell takes his concern of framing too far here.

2. The Multiverse is Not Science

Campbell: “Any time a scientist begins a sentence with “Many of us suspect,” it is codespeak for “we sit around and discuss it at the bar.”

Why not just let that go as artistic license? When Carl Sagan was filming the originalCosmos program, physicists Alan Guth and Andrei Linde had not even come up with “inflation” for the Big Bang that Tyson mentions casually. Thus, it would not have made it into the original Cosmos as fact. Too much speculation makes the audience wonder if scientists are going to be trusted guides or another version of Dr. Oz and his Miracle Vegetable of the week. Science doesn’t need to toss in speculation to be interesting, because what we know and therefore don’t know is fascinating enough.”

“The multiverse is not science. It is more like an anthropic secular alternative to a divine origin. It’s not science because it can’t be proved or disproved — it’s just postmodernism with some math. And it’s invoked shortly after the introduction where Tyson tells us to test everything.”

I also kind of cringed when Tyson mentioned a multiverse and it even had a visualization with the spaceship of the imagination. But if you pay attention to the language of the episode, you’ll see that the writers were actually being pretty deliberate. Tyson used “suspect” here. But for the rest of the episode, Tyson never describes a scientific theory as anything less than a fact (which is how scientists treat theories). This means Cosmos is not elevating the idea of a multiverse to the level of accepted scientific theory. And it is true that many physicists and cosmologists “suspect” a multiverse.  Also, Campbell seems to only be thinking of a string theory multiverse in his critique. Tyson’s description didn’t specify the “kind” of multiverse, but the description and visualization seemed to suggest one resulting from “chaotic inflation”. That kind of multiverse actually may be testable if we see an “imprint”, and the new gravitational wave measurements suggest chaotic inflation is the inflation model that more closely matches our universe.

3. There is No Sound In Space

Like I said before, there actually isn’t a good defense of this. Tyson wouldn’t accept it in any other show, and I’m surprised he let that happen here.

4. Giordano Bruno Was Not More Important To Science Than Kepler And Galileo

Like I said before “The episode did not claim Bruno was more important than contemporary natural philosophers and empiricists and definitely pointed out that he wasn’t a scientist. Bruno’s ideas, though, do fit in well with the idea of understanding our place in the universe, which was the entire point of the first episode, as stated in like the first five minutes.”

5. The Universe Was Also Not Created in One Year

“On January 1st, we had the Big Bang and on December 31st, I am alive, less than a tiny fraction of a millisecond before midnight. That can’t be right — it took me a whole day just to write this article.

Oh, Cosmos is not being literal? Oddly, a number of religious critics, Tyson included, insist that too many religious people believe the Book of Genesis is taken literally by people who read the Bible. Unless we accept that figurative comparisons help make large ideas manageable, a year is no more accurate than six days — it is instead a completely arbitrary metric invented to show some context for how things evolved.”

Oh my God, seriously? Hank Campbell is trying so hard to not want to be in a culture war that he wound up back in it. First, Tyson is not nearly as involved in the science aspect of the “culture war” as, say, Richard Dawkins. Also, many Americans don’t take the Biblical account of Genesis figuratively. According to a 2012 Gallup poll, 46% of Americans think God created humans instantly in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

All these complaints just seem… odd. Like I said, “science hipster” is the best description I can think of. I was surprised to hear Campbell really liked the second episode. I actually liked that episode less. The description of the evolution of the eye seemed like a just-so story  in some steps, and probably would not win over the creationists who argue that “the eye is too complex to have evolved”. I thought the step showing the evolution of the lens seemed HUGE and it wasn’t associated with an organism like most of the other steps were. I feel like it would have been more straightforward to show the variety of eyes in the context of the tree of life, but maybe I say this because I’m not as familiar with evolutionary biology. The visualization of DNA seemed “too busy” at times, and they kept changing schematic representations without explaining it. I get that DNA doesn’t really look as pretty as it does in my old bio textbooks, but I was unsure of what was being represented at times. I thought the comparison of DNA sequences seemed a bit odd without a description of what base pairs are.

The Titan bit also seemed odd. I liked the description of Titan, but didn’t like the idea of the ship of the imagination visiting a hydrothermal vent (or its analogue) there. To me it seemed like the show was saying the hydrocarbon lakes on Titan are as deep as Earth’s oceans, and unless I’m really behind the times, I don’t think we know the depth that much. And we definitely don’t know if there are hydrothermal vents on Titan, and that visualization wasn’t accompanied by Tyson saying we “suspect” or some other phrase that would give it less of a weight than a theory/fact like the multiverse visualization was.

“Cosmos” is allowed to have a narrative

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s sequel/reboot to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, premiered last week on Fox and there’s a multitude of reactions to it. One of the most common negative reactions focuses on the episode’s relatively long segment on Giordano Bruno. If you really want to learn more about Bruno and the various other figures people relate him to and see one of the clearest criticisms and replies to defenses of the show, I suggest you look at the Renaissance Mathematicus’ post on the issue. (And if you want to learn REAL history of science, I highly suggest you check out the rest of his blog.)

A very religious friend posted concerns from Catholic commentators that Cosmos is attacking religion here. I argue that both just seem to be taking offense and ignore Tyson’s actual narration during and around this segment. At no point does Tyson criticize faith. If anything, it’s a critique of institutions which both blog posts seem to also acknowledge by saying that structures and actors in the Church may be bad, but that doesn’t mean Catholicism itself is bad. I’d argue the bigger takeaway is that Bruno thought others’ God was too small.

Several people have asked why mention Bruno at all in the show. Because the entire point of this first episode was to establish the scale of the Universe and our place in it. Bruno was one of the first Western thinkers to propose a Universe where humanity and Earth and the Sun are all small and not particularly unique with respect to the rest of the cosmos. though he was still off on how that actually worked out, as detailed in the Renaissance Mathematicus link above. To Bruno, that had immense philosophical implications and he was willing to die for them (and the host of other heterodox beliefs he held). Why should we just ignore that? Tyson (and Sagan!) are both big on the idea that science can inform metaphysics, and Western culture seems to have a fear that science will leave life without meaning. It seems perfectly reasonable for the show to mention a person whose cosmology inspired a lot of his own religious and spiritual thought. 

Hank Campbell, founder of Science 2.0 and one of the co-authors of Science Left Behind, has different criticisms than most about the first episode, saying “Science is cool. Should we care if it’s accurate?” I want to quickly respond to these points, and I’ll go in more depth later. 

1. The greenhouse effect is in fact different from the idea of global warming, but the greenhouse effect does play a part in the latter.
2. I kind of cringed too at the reference to a multiverse but considering the language the episode used, I’d say the phrase “many of us suspect [a multiverse]” was chosen precisely because it isn’t an accepted theory.
3. The first time I watched the episode, I didn’t notice the external sounds in space separate from the soundtrack. It struck me as kind of funny because Tyson would typically destroy any show that did it. He should be held accountable on his own.
4. The episode did not claim Bruno was more important than contemporary natural philosophers and empiricists and definitely pointed out that he wasn’t a scientist. Bruno’s ideas, though, do fit in well with the idea of understanding our place in the universe, which was the entire point of the first episode, as stated in like the first five minutes.
5. The age of the universe as 13.8 billion years old was given multiple times, and the introduction to every major historical landmark on the calendar involved Tyson giving both its date on the calendar and a conversion to how many millions or billions of years ago it actually was.