The Heartland Institute strikes back in the latest installment of the Climate Change Wars. Coming soon to a billboard near you.

While you consider the image, recall the backstory with Heartland. As a sworn enemy of Global Warming advocates, the Heartland Institute runs a professional persuasion shop aimed at persuasion and lobbying with the Other Guys who really count: members of Congress, for example. You are not surprised to learn that GW advocates take a dim view of Heartland, so much so that one masqueraded as a Heartland director to obtain unethically, and maybe even illegally, Heartland documents which he then doctored and put up on advocacy websites to discredit Heartland. The advocate confessed his theft and resigned from a post at a Global Warming advocacy institute.

Heartland runs an annual conference on Global Warming from their point of view and this billboard is running right now in Chicago, IL where the next meeting will occur later in May, 2012. Motorists there get the early treat of seeing this billboard . . . and then trying to figure out what it means.

Frankly my first take on it missed. I did not recognize the man in the image. That’s Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. I thought the image ripped off the play with those ubiquitous Internet ads with goofy looking people that sells insurance.

I then read the text about global warming and got confused. After thinking about it for a couple of seconds, I thought that it was a warning from a Global Warming advocate, just badly done. Then I saw the Heartland.org source on the bottom, remembered who Heartland is, then, finally, got the point. Ohhhh! This is an anti-Global Warming ad. And, ha-ha-ha, they are mocking the Consensus Authority play we’ve seen from Global Warming advocates before.

Put another way, this ad failed for me. You need to get it in about 2 seconds because you are driving on the Eisenhower expressway around Chicago with nine thousand of your closest friends all going 75 miles per hour. I get the point Heartland is trying to make, but the execution is awful.

You can tell these guys use persuasion as lobbyists and not as public persuasion mavens. Even sitting comfortably in my house with limited traffic around me, I didn’t get the ad on my first, second, or third attempt. Imagine how little impact it’s having on the Interstate.

I applaud Heartland’s attempt to mock that foolish Consensus Authority play. Heartland is apparently reading the Persuasion Blog because they criticize the bad peer review research that I’ve mocked here. While presented as science, it is not. A couple of different research teams did about a bad a job you can do trying to measure opinion and attitudes in a population and invented numbers that could reasonably qualify as Consensus if there was any kind of science behind the data collection. That bad research then gets passed around as some kind of truth when it is nothing but error. You’d flunk a grad student who wrote a paper doing what these guys did . . . unless you were an advocate.

So, it’s smart for Heartland to attack GW advocates on this case because their published work is so bad. Yet, the attack ad from Heartland is just awful.

This is free advice to Heartland. One quote from one guy, even a mad bomber, misses the Consensus Cue. You need to have pictures and quotes from several odious guys to visually depict Consensus. Why not mock up a petition with a Heading of “I Believe In Global Warming” then the actual signatures along with pictures of the odious ones? The collection of many bad guys communicates both the Consensus and the failure.

Better still . . . why not a billboard with something like: Consensus? Then pictures and signatures of people who’ve publicly disputed the Climate Change hypothesis.

Best . . . Follow the Herd to Global Warming.

P.S. Man, that was quick. While I composed this post, Heartland dropped the ad from the Chicago billboard with an apology.

“We know that our billboard angered and disappointed many of Heartland’s friends and supporters, but we hope they understand what we were trying to do with this experiment,” the institute said late Friday afternoon said in a statement. “We do not apologize for running the ad, and we will continue to experiment with ways to communicate the ‘realist’ message on the climate.”

No one, it seems, in the Climate Change wars knows anything about persuasion.

The science of genetics has produced hope and belief in personalized medicine. Consider the particular case with cancer.

A new world has been anticipated in which patients will undergo a needle biopsy of a tumor in the outpatient clinic, and a little while later, an active treatment will be devised for each patient on the basis of the distinctive genetic characteristics of the tumor. The path to that new world is already being cleared, with several companies now marketing genetic tests that measure the genetic signature of a tumor, with the expectation that this signature will direct the choice of treatment and predict treatment outcome.

New science testing that proposition produces bad news. Researchers ran state of the art genetics fingerprinting on single tumors and found . . .

In this issue of the Journal, Gerlinger and colleagues map out the remarkable heterogeneity within a single tumor . . . Thus, a single tumor biopsy, the standard of tumor diagnosis and the cornerstone of personalized-medicine decisions, cannot be considered representative of the landscape of genomic abnormalities in a tumor.

Stated another way, a tumor will mutate over the course of time and treatment making personalized medicine of this sort not the hoped for one-shot test, but rather a continuing chase by physicians after an ever changing cancer. This is not what some expected.

Yet, if you are a scientist even this bad news is good news. Science is more like a chase than people realize. You need to have the experience of looking at a pile of dead data analysis on a printout or computer screen to appreciate this. A lot of science is the pursuit of failure with a few successes along the way.

Consider how much resource our society has devoted to the particular area of cancer and genetics. Literally billions of dollars and while treatment is improving, only those with a book, a pill, or an herb would say that we have a cure for cancer. Most of that money has purchased bad news like this, yet this is how science operates.

Now, compare this kind of science to the kind of Scientific Science I criticize on the Persuasion Blog. Scientific Science seems to operate without failure, ambiguity, or uncertainty. Everything is proven beyond argument – with global warming as just the loudest current example. While cancer and climate change are very different phenomena both operate at a daunting level of complexity. So, cancer genetics eludes us, but climate change doesn’t? Sure. Global climate change is a lot simpler than cancer or genetics. Or is it?

While I’m pretty sure that this story is true in the details, I think that it is not true in the main point. The NYTimes profiles a sweet and loving academic who built a computer model of health insurance that drove Health Care legislation.

Mr. Gruber has spent decades modeling the intricacies of the health care ecosystem, which involves making predictions about how new laws will play out based on past experience and economic theory. It is his research that convinced the Obama administration that health care reform could not work without requiring everyone to buy insurance.

Jonathan Gruber’s equations proved beyond reason, doubt, and faith that reform would fail without the mandate that all individuals must participate. You see the trail in the enthymeme. The equations prove reform requires the mandate. The equations are irrefutable Science. Legislation then requires the mandate. We now wait to see whether the mandate is Constitutional, an element in reality apparently omitted from computer models.

Just as I assert that there are No Laws of Persuasion, I’d extend that to say there are No Laws of Computer Models. The Rule proves itself. If you could Lawfully create Computer Models of complex systems, you could control and manipulate those systems at your whim, impulse, or insight. Without much effort you can find fabulous failures of computer models for economic phenomena like the stock market, climate change, and just about any complexity in the world some bright thought he could fashion into wings and fly to the sun. Modeling is a fun tool for developing theory, but is a proven failure as even a metaphor for reality. Life does not operate like a model.

What, a math geek disdains math models? No. As a persuasion geek I disdain math models that exclude persuasion concepts. They’re great for Science, but terrible for Change. By definition the exercise had to assume that everything in the model was at least legal and would be properly written into law. If that assumption is wrong, the equations may still form a great model, but they have no meaning or worth in the real world. As a persuasion guy, I think that models alone usually do not capture all the relevant features in the Local, as in this case, considerations of Constitutionality.

The modeling failure here is not in Gruber’s work alone. The failure is in making the models too small and excluding how to write and pass the legislation so that it gets the science you want along with niceties like surviving court challenges. FauxItAlls often fail to see that turning science into practice requires science plus persuasion and not science alone. As a great and terrible illustration, theoretical physicists alone did not build the atomic bomb that ended World War II. Without engineering, the device was nothing more than a computer model of Bang! You’re Dead. Analogously, I metaphor that these computer models of health insurance are little more than expressions of Bang! You’re Cured.

Recall this fabulous persuasion play with health care workers and hand washing. Video cameras monitored workers and observers coded whether they washed their hand or not at baseline then provided real time, continuous feedback to all personnel. Hand washing rates skyrocketed after feedback. This graphic should refresh your memory.

Talk about an effective persuasion intervention. Just tell folks what they and everyone else are doing in real time and you get wildly better health performance. Everyone approves . . .

. . . unless you are a physician. They appear to fear the feedback. The good MDs at Journal Watch, a medical abstracting service, describe the study as . . .

Big Brother by the Sink.

Seriously. Physicians view this as the exemplification of George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, and Big Brother Is Watching. If they read more widely they might even see shades of Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler’s totalitarian classic. Observation and feedback on a scientifically validated health behavior among all health workers is viewed as an obtrusive, evaluative, and controlling force.

We can move easily from this beautiful fiction to beautiful persuasion theory: Reactance! Docs perceive a video feedback system as an unfair restriction on their freedom. Down with Big Brother! Up with Freedom!

If you are selling this feedback system realize that you’ll probably need to get through a committee of MDs to obtain support and approval. Clearly, they are threatened with observation and feedback, just like most people. You might want to begin with a strong affirmation play to bolster their self esteem, then roll into your feedback presentation.

Even with smart folks who call themselves scientists, science can elicit Reactance and no change in the Other Guys. You’ve got to expect that response and persuade in front of it.

I missed the planning for this event probably because I paid my student loans a couple of years after graduating and that was a while ago. Now, all the Other Guys going to college have accumulated an estimated one trillion dollars of debt, more than the debt for credit cards or automobiles. This issue got lost in the larger Occupy Wall Street movement, but was part of the concern. Folks with over a hundred thousand in debt and only a sociology degree to show for it! And they thought that put them in a 99%. Man. A hundred grand for a soc degree must surely be a 1%. But, that’s not the persuasion point today.

On April 25 folks organized a national protest day, 1Tday, the 1 Trillion Dollar day. Like I said, I hadn’t been contacted earlier and just learned about it in a bottom story somewhere. (The Google news aggregator notes about 60 sources.) You’d think with a total debt of one trillion dollars and all those people with at least some college experience and a Facebook page that this would have been the lead story of the day much like OWS in those early days. But, not so much.

Here’s their Facebook page.

Jeepers. Fewer than 400 people indicate they are attending a rally. Fewer than 60 maybes. Shootfire on any college campus on any day anywhere in America you can get more than 60 maybes for picking up litter. And look at their twitter page. The 1Tday twitter page has 166 followers as of April 25. It’s tweeted more (193) than it is followed.

You might have noticed that President Obama has been talking up the issue of student debt on college campuses. The President feels their pain. He notes that the Obama’s themselves were paying off their student debt up until eight years ago. (Is this a great country or what? You make your last payment on your student loan and eight years later you’re running for re-election as President of the US. Kinda undercuts the protest if you think about it, but I don’t think anyone wants you to think about it that way. Back to the opera.)

While I admire much of Obama’s election persuasion, I think he should rethink courting college voters on this issue. His similarity to them is engaging, but ultimately counterproductive. Worse still, even Other Guys with the debt won’t even sign up as Maybes for a protest on a spring day. Where do you think these Other Guys will be on a dreary November later this year?