In his NYT column today, Paul Krugman remembers that when he started writing for the public prints he entertained the idea that serious people in public life were prepared to have their views changed by reasoned argument. The current US Congress has cured him of that illustion:

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

So it’s up to the Democrats — and more specifically, since the House has passed its bill, it’s up to “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. Are they willing to learn something from the disaster that has overtaken the U.S. economy, and get behind financial reform?

Which neatly brings us to Michael Tomasky’s sobering column about how dysfunctional Congress has become.

Watching American politics through British eyes, you must be utterly mystified as to why Barack Obama hasn’t gotten this healthcare bill passed yet. Many Americans are too. The instinctive reflex is to blame Obama. He must be doing something wrong. Maybe he is doing a thing or two wrong. But the main thing is that America’s political system is broken.

How did this happen? Two main factors made it so. The first is the super-majority requirement to end debate in the Senate. The second is the near-unanimous obstinacy of the Republican opposition. They have made important legislative work all but impossible.

The super-majority requirement – 60 votes, or three-fifths of the Senate, to end debate and move to a vote on final passage – has been around since the 19th century. But it’s only in the last 10 to 15 years that it has been invoked routinely. Back in Lyndon Johnson’s day – a meaningful comparison since American liberals are always wondering why Obama can’t be “tough” like Johnson – the requirement was reserved for only the most hot-button issues (usually having to do with race). Everything else needed only 51 votes to pass, a regular majority.

Both parties have contributed to this problem. But guess which has contributed more? In 2007, when they became the minority party for the first time in five years, the Republicans invoked the super-majority measure 60 times, an all-time record for a single year.

And Obama’s problems are not limited to Republicans, of course. Think of it this way: in a 100-seat body, getting 51 votes is hard but not impossible. But getting those 57th, 58th, 59th and 60th votes to end debate … Well, the situation gives those senators incredible bargaining power. They can basically dictate terms in exchange for their votes. Which is exactly what senators Ben Nelson (Democrat of Nebraska), Joe Lieberman (independent of Connecticut), Olympia Snowe (Republican of Maine) and others have been doing publicly for weeks. A sharp friend has mordantly taken to referring to them as “President Nelson”, “President Lieberman” and “President Snowe” in emails. My friend is not exaggerating. With regard to the final content of the Senate bill, each has more power than Obama.

And the result: a huge, rich, smart nation that can’t fix even its most pressing problems. Or, in Tomasky’s words, “a distended nightmarish version of what the founders wanted. We’ve got a Congress that can not only stand up to the executive branch but can (at least on domestic matters) dictate terms to it. And we have a minority that has the power to stop the majority from doing much of anything”.

And the depressing thing is that there’s nothing Obama can do about it.

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I don’t normally link to AP stories because of their somewhat aggressive stance towards bloggers, but they have performed a useful service by doing a detailed and — as as far as I can judge — pretty detached study of the UEA email trove. The overall conclusion:

E-mails stolen from the computer network server of the climate research unit at the university show climate scientists stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data, but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked.

I had thought of going through the trove myself but desisted because (a) they were stolen, (b) they were downloadable only as a zip file from a .ru server and (c) laziness, so it’s interesting to see what a detailed study reveals.

At first sight, the UEA people seem to be too jokily dismissive of climate change ‘sceptics’, and that’s obviously embarrassing. But there’s a context here: what the stolen emails don’t reveal is the level of intrusive, aggressive harassment that climate change researchers can face from sceptics and deniers. The tool of choice of these people (some of whom are clearly obsessives) is FOI requests and these are very blunt and time-consuming instruments. I imagine that the UEA researchers were constantly bombarded with these, and might understandably have developed a siege mentality — traces of which are clearly visible in the emails.

The other thing that’s interesting about the AP analysis is the light it throws on the real — as opposed to the idealised — practice of science. Students of these things will remember that the criterion that Karl Popper proposed for deciding whether an activity is scientific or not is whether its practitioners actively seek ways of falsifying their theories (as distinct from ways of verifying them). This seemed to me to fly in the face of everything we know about science in practice: in order to make real advances in a field one has to be an absolutely passionate advocate for a theory. The last thing one wants to do is pick holes in it; that’s the job of others (and of the peer-review process). Very few scientists are falsificationists in the Popperion sense — at least about their own theories. So it’s hardly surprising that the UEA researchers might express in private emails what might seem, in retrospect, to be a less than detached attitude towards their theoretical findings and beliefs. They’re perfectly normal scientists.

Thanks to Roger Highfield of New Scientist for the original link.

Later: My colleague Joe Smith has a thoughtful blog post about this, in which he says, en passant:

The IPCC has serious limitations, including a gaping hole when it comes to investigating the social, cultural and philosophical dimensions of climate change, but it remains the most ambitious peer review process modern science has undertaken. The truth about climate science is that it is inevitably messy and unfinishable – its a hugely complex system we’re trying to understand – but that hard intellectual work conducted by a very large number of people (who win little publicity and are modestly rewarded) is doggedly narrowing the boundaries of uncertainty. There is, almost all climate science researchers agree, plenty of justification for very urgent and bold action.

From the If-You’re-Really-Desperate Department: some advice.

If you’re giving a presentation, make sure your script is full of tweetable content. Think in terms of 140 characters or less. As you’re preparing, literally write out those tweetable points to ensure they’ll fit with room for retweets to spare (right around 100 characters is about right).

If your goal is to share your story not just to those in the room, but their followers as well, this will ensure you’re getting maximum pass-along for yourself and your message.