AROUND NEW HAMPSHIRE
1. The Revised Northern Pass Plan
Will plan to bury 60 miles of Northern Pass sway opposition?
by Allie Morris, concordmonitor.com, September 1, 2015
Dolly McPhaul of Sugar Hill has become one of the most vocal opponents of Northern Pass.
The energy project proposes to bring Canadian hydropower into New England through a 192-mile electric transmission line from Pittsburg to Deerfield, passing right through McPhaul’s hometown.
Even though Northern Pass officials announced plans to bury an additional 52 miles of the line through the White Mountain National Forest and several neighboring towns, including Sugar Hill, McPhaul has no intention of backing down.
“There is no plan to let up one iota because it’s not just about us,” said McPhaul, who would like to see the transmission line buried for its entire length through New Hampshire, if it’s built at all. “It’s such an affront to our beautiful state.”
And now people have a chance to weigh in on the project and revised plan, starting with a public information session in Concord on Wednesday night.
In an effort to appease concerns that overhead lines will mar natural landscapes and hurt property values, Northern Pass officials announced recently that they will bury 60 miles of the project in total, create a $200 million fund to invest in communities that host the line and dedicate a portion of the hydropower to New Hampshire customers to stabilize energy rates. It’s a compromise package Northern Pass is calling the Forward New Hampshire Plan.
“We’ve listened, and I think we have come up with a balanced approach,” Bill Quinlan, president of Eversource Energy New Hampshire Electric Operations, told the Monitor. It’s “one that basically allows the project to do what it was intended to do, which is to deliver a large amount of clean energy to New England, do it with a technology that’s proven and in a way that’s affordable.”
But so far, the revised route and accompanying announcements haven’t seemed to sway many of the project’s opponents.
Supporters, including some lawmakers and several organized labor groups, continue to back Northern Pass. Some who had been silent on the project are now voicing approval.
And while many critics say burying more of the transmission line is a step in the right direction, they maintain the plan doesn’t go far enough. Several key opposition groups still intend to fight the Northern Pass project as it moves into the state permitting phase.
“We continue to advocate that if Northern Pass can be built, it ought to be buried in its entirety,” said Jack Savage of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. The environmental group has already raised $325,000 from more than 2,000 donors for its “Trees Not Towers Defense Fund” – money it plans to use to mount a legal challenge against Northern Pass, Savage said.
“Why not bury all 200 miles?” Savage said.
The company has said it comes down to cost. In order to bury an additional 52 miles of the line and avoid soaring costs, Quinlan said, officials had to reduce the size of the project from 1,200 megawatts to 1,000 megawatts, about enough to power 1 million homes.
The revised project is still expected to be in the $1.4 billion price range, primarily by using different cable technology and reducing the capacity, Quinlan said. The company will release a new cost estimate this fall. “It’s irrefutable that underground construction is more costly than overhead construction,” Quinlan said.
In the wake of the announcement, some critics have questioned why Northern Pass doesn’t use the proposed $200 million community betterment fund to bury more of the transmission line.
“They are proposing $200 million to make up for destruction they are going to cause,” said state Sen. Jeanie Forrester, a Meredith Republican. “Why don’t you take that $200 million and bury more line?”
It costs about $5 million to $10 million more to bury 1 mile of transmission line, which means the fund’s balance could pay to bury an additional 20 to 40 miles, Quinlan said.
“Assume you’re going to do that, the question then becomes where,” he said. “We specifically selected these 52 miles because almost universally we received feedback those are the most treasured areas we should avoid.”
The new underground section sends the line beneath the shoulder of several state roads to avoid putting an overhead line through the White Mountain National Forest and several surrounding communities, as called for in the previous proposal.
“We think it’s the right balance, we think we’ve addressed the areas that are most important from a view perspective. We have gone a long way to delivering specific New Hampshire benefits,” Quinlan said.
It’s not yet clear how the $200 million fund would be divvied up. Northern Pass officials have said the money will be awarded to communities along the project route to invest in tourism, economic development and clean energy. An advisory board made up of local business leaders, environmentalists and labor groups, among others, will guide the decision making, Quinlan said. “The idea is, ‘Let’s find out where we could be helpful,’ ” he said. Specific members have yet to be named.
Senate President Chuck Morse, who said he was initially skeptical of the project, now supports the revised route. The project offers jobs and energy cost benefits, said the Salem Republican. “The fact they are burying 60 miles of it is very important.”
Ultimately, the projects’ fate rests with federal and state permitting authorities. But the public gets a chance to weigh in.
Northern Pass will soon file its state application with the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee, a body in charge of permitting large-scale energy projects. As part of that process, Northern Pass will hold public information sessions in all five counties the project is set to cross. The first will be in Concord on Wednesday at the Grappone Center from 5 to 10:30 p.m.
2. The State R&D Credit Hits the Cap
$2 million NH R&D tax credit cap exceeded agin
184 businesses receive less than 30% of the amount they sought
by Bob Sanders, nhbr.com, September 1, 2015
Some 184 New Hampshire businesses were awarded $2 million in research and development tax credits in the 2015 fiscal year, Gov. Maggie Hassan announced Monday. But what they received is less than 30 percent of the amount they had sought because demand again exceeded the program’s cap.
That means that qualifying businesses will be getting a maximum credit of $14,870 instead of the $50,000 they would have received had there not been a $2 million cap on the total amount of credits issued.
This was the smallest percentage given out since the cap was doubled to $2 million in 2013, when the total request value was $5.7 million. Businesses at the time received about 35 percent of what they asked for. In 2014, businesses would have been entitled to get $6.2 million with no cap. They got 31.6 percent. And in fiscal 2015, the total requests were slightly more than $6.725 million, and businesses received slightly about 29.75 percent of what they sought.
Most states with an R&D tax credit don’t have a cap, and business groups have been strong advocates of lifting or eliminating it in New Hampshire. Indeed, for the Business and Industry Association of NH and the NH High Tech Council, lifting the cap was a bigger priority in the last legislative session than the slight reduction in business tax rates. Those rate reductions were among the key sticking points that contributed to Hassan’s veto of the budget, which indeed lifted the R&D credit cap from $2 million to $7 million, although not until 2017.
In their joint press release, both Hassan and Department of Revenue Administration Commissioner John Beardmore focused on the break that businesses would actually receive.
Hassan noted that she supported doubling the R&D Tax credit in 2013.
“Our R&D tax credit program is an important tool to support job-creating businesses across the state, helping them invest in the development of new, innovative technologies that spur economic growth and job creation,” Hassan said. She promised to work with the Legislature ”to keep state government responsive to the needs of the business community, build on our bipartisan efforts to support innovative businesses and keep New Hampshire’s economy moving in the right direction.”
“New Hampshire’s R&D tax credit program provides a boost to businesses of all sizes and from every corner of the state,” Beardmore added. “And for the third year in a row, 75 of the companies receiving the tax credit reported less than $500,000 of qualified wages, demonstrating that the program continues to support smaller businesses in their efforts to grow and create jobs.”
3. Do NH Residents Believe Science? A Poll Result
Conservative and Liberal Views of Science
by Lawrence Hamilton, carsey.unh.edu, September 1, 2015
SUMMARY:
Conservative distrust of scientists regarding climate change and evolution has been widely expressed in public pronouncements and surveys, contributing to impressions that conservatives are less likely to trust scientists in general. But what about other topics, where some liberals have expressed misgivings too? Nuclear power safety, vaccinations, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are three often-mentioned examples. For this report, five similarly worded survey questions were designed to test the hypothesis that, depending on the issue, liberals are just as likely to reject science as conservatives. The five questions were included along with many unrelated items in telephone surveys of over 1,000 New Hampshire residents.
As expected, liberals were most likely and conservatives least likely to say that they trust scientists for information about climate change or evolution. Contrary to the topic-bias hypothesis, however, liberals also were most likely and conservatives least likely to trust scientists for information about vaccines, nuclear power safety, and GMOs. Liberal–conservative gaps on these questions ranged from 55 points (climate change) to 24 points (nuclear power), but always in the same direction. These results pose a challenge for some common explanations of political polarization in views about science.
Key Findings:
Seventy-one percent of New Hampshire residents surveyed say they trust scientists as a source of information about vaccines.
Trust in scientists is also high regarding climate change (62 percent), nuclear power safety (69 percent), and evolution (63 percent).
Expressed trust is lower regarding genetically modified organisms GMOs (47 percent), partly because fewer people feel familiar enough to give an opinion on this topic.
Trust in scientists as a source of information on all five topics increases with education.
Trust in scientists as a source of information on all five topics is significantly higher among liberals than conservatives, contradicting the hypothesis that bias goes in opposite directions depending on the topic.
[To read the full brief, including all charts and graphs, click on the following link:
4. Keep Those Canadians out of The Great North Woods
by William Tucker, miscellanyblue.com, August 31, 2015
[Sunday] on Meet the Press, Gov. Scott Walker – once considered a serious presidential candidate – declared building a wall along the nearly 4000-mile border between the United States and Canada is “a legitimate issue for us to look at" because “some people” at a New Hampshire town hall meeting suggested it.
“Do you want to build a wall north of the border, too?” NBC’s Chuck Todd asked. “Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire,” Walker answered. “They raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our town hall meetings about a week and a half ago. So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at.”
Twitter erupted. “Scott Walker: On Day One of my presidency, Canadian bacon shall be renamed ‘freedom bacon,’ “ one tweet declared. “BREAKING: NORAD apparently monitoring convey of zambonis assembling on Canadian border after Scott Walker’s comments this a.m.!” read another.
Esquire’s Charlie Pierce challenged civic-minded Granite Staters to press Walker on the immigration issue:
I will pay anyone a shiny buffalo nickel if they will show up at a future town hall meeting in New Hampshire and ask Scott Walker if we should fire sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads into synchronous low earth orbit to prevent undocumented immigrants from Zontar from entering the country. It probably would be declared a ‘legitimate issue for us to look at.’
AND NATIONALLY
5. A Political Niche Marketeer
Donald Trump Is Going to Lose Because He Is Crazy
by Jonathan Chait, nymag.com, August 26, 2015
Republicans, and observers of the Republican Party, have concluded that Donald Trump’s gonzo commandeering of their presidential primary has defied their attempts to suppress it because he is crazy. This is broadly true, but not quite in the way Trump’s befuddled critics mean it. What they say is that Trump is winning because he attracts voters with nonsensical ideas. Lindsey Graham calls Trump “a huckster billionaire whose political ideas are gibberish.” Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson tellsEvan Osnos, in Osnos’s paraphrasing, “anyone who runs for office discovers that some portion of the electorate is available to be enraged and manipulated, if a candidate is willing to do it.”
Trump has certainly crafted an appeal to voters who like impractical ideas. But his true threat lies in the fact that Trump himself is crazy — not just ideologically, though he is certainly that as well, but in the sense that he lacks any rational connection between his actions and his goals, to the extent that his goals are discernible at all. That is also his downfall.
For a long time, the political profession believed that Trump would never run for president. A profile by McKay Coppins last year framed Trump’s long history of teasing reporters with campaigns that he would not undertake as an unbreakable pattern of publicity-hounding. “Over the course of 25 years, he’s repeatedly toyed with the idea of running for president and now, maybe, governor of New York,” explained the story’s summary. “With all but his closest apostles finally tired of the charade, even the Donald himself has to ask, what’s the point?”
Trump defied the skeptics by actually announcing a run for office. He then defied the skeptics by surging into the polling lead, and again by maintaining his lead in the face of a withering assault by the Republican Establishment, led by Fox News.
By design or (more likely) by accident, Trump has inhabited a ripe ideological niche. Both parties contain ranges of opinions within them. And both are run by elites who have more socially liberal and economically conservative views than their own voters. (There are plenty of anti-abortion, anti-immigration, anti-same-sex-marriage Democrats not represented by their leaders.) But the tension between base and elite runs deeper in the Republican Party. Conservative leaders tend to care very little about conservative social policy, or even disagree with it altogether. Conservatives care a great deal about cutting the top tax rate, deregulating the financial industry, and, ideally, reducing spending on social insurance — proposals that have virtually no authentic following among the rank and file.
This chart by Lee Drutman, tracking public opinion on immigration and Social Security, displays the disconnect:
The sparsely filled bottom right corner represents the libertarian-ish leanings of the Republican elite, which would like to liberalize immigration law and decrease Social Security benefits. The upper left corner, thick with dots, represents the populist, opposite combination: higher Social Security spending and less immigration. The Republican field — all of which, other than Trump, has endorsed raising the Social Security retirement age — is fighting over the tiny right side, leaving the huge upper left all to Trump. Anew poll shows Trump leading New Hampshire with 35 percent, and the next-highest candidate, John Kasich, pulling in 11 percent. A South Carolina poll has Trump pulling in 30 percent of the vote.
Trump has homed in on a bona fide weakness in the Republican Party structure, one that has fascinated liberal critics in particular. The Republican Party has harnessed one set of passions, and then channeled them into unrelated policy outcomes favored by the party elite. Historically, the passions they have harnessed have revolved around foreign policy — like anti-communism, or the surge in nationalism following 9/11. Some of those passions have revolved around culture — a love of guns, the Pledge of Allegiance, a disdain for politicians who look kind of French, and so on.
But the classic formula seems to be yielding diminishing returns. Since 2012, the Republican Party has been attempting to work out a social profile that is better suited to an electorate in which blue-collar whites account for a declining share of the vote. Party strategists believe that the GOP’s long-term interests, and probably its short-term interests as well, require it to heal its disastrous standing among Latinos, Asian-Americans, and white voters with a college degree. They have no consensus over just how to handle it. The three major contenders differ in their approaches. Jeb Bush is trying to maintain his mainstream credibility throughout the primary, keeping the door open for endorsing comprehensive immigration reform. Scott Walker is running as a traditional, down-the-line conservative. Marco Rubio is carving a space between those two.
Trump offers no plausible solution to this conundrum. Everything about his persona seems designed to worsen it. His populist style appeals to some blue-collar whites, but is poison among the college-educated voters who have defected from the Republican coalition since the 1990s. His grotesque misogyny would deepen the hostility of women. And Trump has made himself the symbol of anti-Latino racism. His standing among Hispanic voters is off-the-charts bad:
There is little reason to conclude that the reaction to Trump’s characterization of immigrants from Mexico as rapists and murderers has humbled him. He has embraced the most nativist elements of the restrictionist movement. Last night, when Jorge Ramos — often called the Walter Cronkite of Hispanic America — tried to ask a question, Trump berated him and barked, “Go back to Univision.”
So the prospect of a Trump nomination justifiably terrifies Republicans. But unlike the prospect of nominating a Scott Walker — or a more extreme version, like Ted Cruz — the risk does not carry any proportionate reward. Bush, Walker, and Rubio all agree on the same basic domestic goals. If elected, they will try to enact the party’s agenda on taxes, regulation, and social spending.
Trump dissents from the field not just in his political strategy but in his overall orientation. While he shares the Republicans’ disdain for President Obama, he has not committed himself to a Republican program. Jeb Bush has frantically tried to question his commitment to the party by pointing out Trump’s prior support for single-payer health care and a large tax on the wealthy. These positions horrify the Republican Establishment. (A recent Wall Street Journal editorial cites Trump’s ability to defy the opinions of the donor class as a major reason to oppose him.) But few Republican voters find them actually disqualifying. The danger he poses is the prospect of harnessing the social passions of the conservative base and channeling them into (from the party’s point of view) the wrong agenda.
Trump poses a dire threat to the party: If elected, he could not be trusted to work for the Republican agenda. The party elite will oppose Trump with everything it has.
Trump has responded to attacks from fellow Republicans the way he has always conducted his feuds with journalists, celebrities, reality-show victims, or business rivals. The crude put-down (with misogynist overtones if his target is female) is Trump’s signature métier. And so he has insulted influential party actors like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Megyn Kelly, Karl Rove, Michelle Malkin, Dick Cheney, the last three Republican presidential nominees, and so on. He negotiated a peace with Fox News, the party’s quasi-official propaganda organ, and then blew it up for no reason.
In the short run, this can work. Trump is a polarizer. His grotesque, bombastic arrogance has worked very well as a business strategy. Everybody has an opinion about Trump, positive or negative. From a commercial standpoint, it doesn’t matter much which is which. Trump-haters will tune in to his show just as Trump-lovers will. Even if three-quarters of the public wants nothing to do with him, the quarter that admires Trump forms a massive customer base. That is how he has built a lucrative brand for golf courses, hotels, restaurants, beauty pageants, and so on.
But politics does not work like business. You can get rich being loved by a quarter of the country and hated by the rest, but you can’t get elected president that way. Trump has a brilliant strategy for winning the loyalty of a quarter of the primary electorate, or perhaps a third. He has no strategy for winning a majority, which is what you need to get the nomination. Indeed, the things Trump has done to elevate his profile have pushed that majority further from his reach. If the campaign gets to the point where there is one candidate left standing against Trump, that candidate will enjoy the unified support of the party's financial, media, and organizational strength. Trump has the power to destroy, but not to conquer.
Which brings us back to the question of what it is Trump is after. His presidential campaign seems to have come at enormous financial cost. His undisguised (or less-disguised) racism has made him an economic pariah. He has lost sponsorship agreements from a long list of corporations that want to sell things to people who aren’t white. He’s traded his lucrative brand for Pat Buchanan’s brand.
This immunity from consequence gives Trump the power to wreak apparently limitless havoc upon what is currently his party. The consequences Republicans impose for Trump's offenses have no effect on him. You cannot threaten a man if you don’t even know what he cares about. Is Trump running to spite the reporters who mocked him as a bluffer? As an expensive lark, like the time he got piano lessons from Elton John? To use his political fame to trade up for his next wife? Does Trump actually believe he can become president of the United States?
6. Republicans: Bringing Women Back to the 19th Century?
Hillary Clinton really did call Republicans terrorists. But here’s the real issue.
by Jonathan Allen, vox.com, August 29, 2015
One of the hot headlines of the week went something like this: Hillary Clinton called Republicans "terrorists." But the more important controversy is the actual policy fight behind the name-calling.
The gotcha version is mostly true: "Now, extreme views about women, we expect that from some of the terrorist groups," Clinton said on the stump Thursday. "But it’s a little hard to take coming from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States."
Understandably, Republicans have been eager to point out the use of the "T" word. The Republican National Committee called her language "a new low," and Ben Carson, a surging candidate in GOP polls, had this to say: "They tell you that there’s a war on women. There is no war on women. There may be a war on what’s inside of women, but there is no war on women in this country."
Provocative as Clinton's remarks were, though, they weren't really about terrorism. They were about a broader case that Republicans are trying to turn back the clock on a full set of women's health issues, from abortion to cancer screenings and the availability of contraception. So, the highly charged rhetorical war between Clinton and Republicans offers a window into a real, substantive difference between the parties on the government's role in abortion and other issues under the umbrella of women's health.
The question, posed by both Clinton and her Republican rivals, is whether it's more extreme for the government to subsidize abortion and Planned Parenthood, which uses its private funding for abortion services, or for the government to ban abortion and deny funding to groups like Planned Parenthood that are otherwise eligible for grants because they are engaged in providing abortion services.
This battle has tremendous implications for the 2016 presidential election, the outcome of which will make a big difference in how the US deals with abortion and funding for women's health clinics.
To understand the larger fight, you have to know all of what Clinton said
This isn't the first time a high-profile Democrat has drawn a parallel between Republicans and terrorists. Before and after t
In those cases, the underlying point was that Tea Party Republicans were holding funding for the government and the nation's credit rating hostage to win concessions on a host of issues, including major spending cuts. In this case, Clinton was arguing that, in their zeal to foreclose avenues to abortion, Republicans would hold hostage for other important health care service for women.
"I would like these Republican candidates to look a mom in the eye who caught her breast cancer early because she was able to get a screening for cancer or the teenager who didn’t get pregnant because she had access to contraception or anyone who’s ever been protected by an HIV test," she said.
The fundamental claim is that Republicans aren't respectful of women's access to health care — that they are treating women like second-class citizens. That, Clinton argued, is reminiscent of terrorist groups that repress and abuse women in their own societies. A Clinton campaign official denied that she had compared Republicans to terrorists, but the remarks were widely interpreted that way. And, as she was reading from notes while she spoke, it's hard to make a credible case that Clinton didn't deliberately draw some kind of parallel between Republican presidential candidates and terrorists.
You can judge that for yourself from the video here
and my transcription of her remarks immediately after it.
"Marco Rubio brags about wanting to deny victims of rape and incest access to health care, to an abortion. Jeb Bush says Planned Parenthood shouldn’t get a penny. Your governor right here in Ohio banned state funding for some rape crisis centers because they sometimes refer women to other health facilities that do provide abortions. I would like these Republican candidates to look a mom in the eye who caught her breast cancer early because she was able to get a screening for cancer or the teenager who didn’t get pregnant because she had access to contraception or anyone who’s ever been protected by an HIV test. Now, extreme views about women, we expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world. But it’s a little hard to take coming from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States, yet they espouse out-of-date and out-of-touch policies. They are dead wrong for 21st century America. We’re going forward, we’re not going back."
How the debate about abortion became entangled with cancer screenings, STD treatments and contraception
Though restrictions on federal funding for abortion have long carried exemptions for victims of rape and incest, as well as expectant mothers whose lives are endangered by their pregnancies, the Republican Party platform in each of the last three presidential cycles has called for a Constitutional amendment banning abortion without exception.
That's part of a marked GOP shift over several decades. Now, candidates who hope to win the Republican nomination must be hard-line opponents of abortion. And even the definition of what constitutes a anti-abortion stance has become a moving target.
Since the Supreme Court concluded in 1973 that the Constitution protects a woman's right to have an abortion, anti-abortion activists have sought countless avenues to restrict abortion at the federal and state levels in ways that are consistent with the court's ruling.
The latest front in that war is an effort to cut off funding for women's health clinics that perform abortions with private money or that refer patients to abortion providers. For example, Oho Gov. John Kasich signed legislation denying money to rape crisis centers that refer patients to abortion providers, and fellow Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush denied Florida state funds to Planned Parenthood when he was governor. Bush is campaigning on his promise to cut off federal subsidies for Planned Parenthood, a group that is one of the nation's most prominent and popular providers of health care services for poor women.
The ground on abortion-ban exemptions is shifting, too
During the Aug. 6 GOP debate, Rubio had a sharp exchange with Fox moderator Megyn Kelly over his position on whether legislation designed to curtail abortion, or federal funding for abortion, should carry exceptions in cases of rape or incest. Rubio has supported legislation with those exemptions — part of a long-codified triumverate along with cases in which the expectant mother's life is in danger — but said he would also back legislation without them.
That was a surprise for many Rubio observers. He has supported the exceptions, including in legislation he has sponsored, because he wants to reduce the number of abortions. Given the current political alignment on abortion, bills that don't carry the exceptions have no chance of becoming law.
Democrats took immediate note of his position because they believe it can be used to portray him as insensitive to the wishes of women who have become pregnant through acts of sexual violence. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has gone farther, saying he doesn't believe in making exceptions in cases in which the life of the mother is endangered. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has said that abortion could be banned altogether under the Constitution if Congress passes a law giving "personhood" status to unborn babies.
Clinton and her allies think, as she said Thursday, that these are extreme positions that disregard women's rights to make choices about their own health — particularly when it comes to rape victims who need federal assistance to have abortions.
Cutting through the rhetoric, this is a consequential fight not only for abortion but for other women's health services
Republicans say Clinton went over the top by putting GOP candidates and terrorists in the same couple of sentences. Democrats say Republicans are waging a "war on women." And partisans on both sides of that divide will feel confident that their champions are right.
What's clear from the sometimes-confusing rhetorical volleys, though, is that there is a very consequential debate being had over whether abortion is treated as a women's health issue and whether organizations that provide health care for poor women, including abortion, will have access to federal funding for non-abortion services.
The reason this has an economic element is that middle- and upper-class women have greater access to health care through private insurers, while women who depend on public subsidies often go to clinics, such as those operated around the country by Planned Parenthood, for a range of health care services.
If federal funding for Planned Parenthood is cut off, it will certainly be harder for poor women to obtain both abortions and other health care services. After all, Planned Parenthood is one of the nation's most prominent and most popular health care organizations.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll this month found that 54 percent supported federal funding for Planned Parenthood, while 26 percent opposed it. That despite the fact that, by a 44 percent to 34 percent spread, respondents who have seen the videos reported having more negative views of the group afterward.
And if Clinton and her allies win, poor women are sure to have equal or greater access both to abortion and to that set of health care services that Democrats say make the debate about a much larger philosophical divide between the parties over women's rights.
7. Deniers' Flawed Studies
Let’s See What Happens When This Group Of Scientists Retests Studies That Contradict Climate Science
by Natasha Geiling, thinkprogress.org, August 26, 2015
The scientific consensus behind man-made global warming is overwhelming: multiple studies have noted a 97 percent consensus among climate scientists that the Earth is warming and human activities are primarily responsible. Scientists are as sure that global warming is real — and driven by human activity — as they are that smoking cigarettes leads to lung cancer.
But what if all of those scientists are wrong? What if the tiny sliver of scientists that don’t believe global warming is happening, or that human activities are causing it — that two to three percent of climate contrarians — are right?
That’s the hypothetical question that a new study, authored by Rasmus Benestad, Dana Nuccitelli, Stephan Lewandowsky, Katharine Hayhoe, Hans Olav Hygen, Rob van Dorland, and John Cook, sought to answer. Published last week in the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, the study examined 38 recent examples of contrarian climate research — published research that takes a position on anthropogenic climate change but doesn’t attribute it to human activity — and tried to replicate the results of those studies. The studies weren’t selected randomly — according to lead author Rasmus Benestad, the studies selected were highly visible contrarian studies that had all arrived at a different conclusion than consensus climate studies. The question the researchers wanted to know was — why?
“Our selection suited this purpose as it would be harder to spot flaws in papers following the mainstream ideas. The chance of finding errors among the outliers is higher than from more mainstream papers,” Benestad wrote at RealClimate. “Our hypothesis was that the chosen contrarian paper was valid, and our approach was to try to falsify this hypothesis by repeating the work with a critical eye.”
It didn’t go well for the contrarian studies.
The most common mistake shared by the contrarian studies was cherry picking, in which studies ignored data or contextual information that did not support the study’s ultimate conclusions. In a piece for the Guardian, study co-author Dana Nuccitelli cited one particular contrarian study that supported the idea that moon and solar cycles affect the Earth’s climate. When the group tried to replicate that study’s findings for the paper, they found that the study’s model only worked for the particular 4,000-year cycle that the study looked at.
“However, for the 6,000 years’ worth of earlier data they threw out, their model couldn’t reproduce the temperature changes,” Nuccitelli wrote. “The authors argued that their model could be used to forecast future climate changes, but there’s no reason to trust a model forecast if it can’t accurately reproduce the past.”
The researchers also found that a number of the contrarian studies simply ignored the laws of physics. For example, in 2007 and 2010 papers, Ferenc Miskolczi argued that the greenhouse effect had become saturated, a theory that had been disproved in the early 1900s.
“As we note in the supplementary material to our paper, Miskolczi left out some important known physics in order to revive this century-old myth,” Nuccitelli wrote.
In other cases, the authors found, researchers would include extra parameters not based in the laws of physics to make a model fit their conclusion.
“Good modeling will constrain the possible values of the parameters being used so that they reflect known physics, but bad ‘curve fitting’ doesn’t limit itself to physical realities,” Nuccitelli said.
The authors note that these errors aren’t necessarily only found in contrarian papers, and they aren’t necessarily malicious. In their discussion, they offer a suite of possible explanations for the mistakes. Many authors of the contrarian studies were relatively new to climate science, and therefore may have been unaware of important context or data. Many of the papers were also published in journals with audiences that don’t necessarily seek out climate science, and therefore peer review might have been lacking. And some of the researchers had published similar studies, all omitting important information.
These same errors and oversights, the authors allow, could be present in consensus climate studies. But those errors don’t contribute to a gap between public understanding and scientific consensus on the issue, the researchers argued. The mistakes also seemed to be particularly present in contrarian studies, Nuccitelli wrote.
In the end, the researchers stressed the overall importance of reproducibility in science, both for consensus views and contrarian ones.
“Science is never settled, and both the scientific consensus and alternative hypotheses should be subject to ongoing questioning, especially in the presence of new evidence and insights,” the study concluded. “True and universal answers should, in principle, be replicated independently, especially if they have been published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature
FINALLY
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