Politicizing 'An Inconvenient Truth'

"St Roch Asking the Virgin Mary to Heal Victims of the Plague" by Jacques-Louis David 1780, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille

Cross posted @ NewsBusters

Are we too blasée? Do Republicans not care for the environment? Are we placing partisan ideology before the healthy future of our children?

These and a flurry of related questions that have been bugging me over the last few days since Vice President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" hit the silver screen, giving his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming a decisive push.

Let me be upfront and tell you outright, that I have not been able to reach any halfway satisfactory let alone conclusive answers to these fundamental questions. How could I.

Calling us "a renegade band of rightwing extremists", didn't help shoring up sympathies for his cause. But neither did Bill Gray's sensationalist and holy unrelated comparison, "Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews", add any credibility to his claim that Global warming is a hoax.

So what is a blogger to do? Take up the study of climatology and question the research and data hurled back and forth between scientists of both camps, with the media pitching for a position of their own? I don't think so...

Acknowledging that most of us have to make a choice which camp to believe is an important start; and I stress, the emphasis is on 'believe' not on choice! Most of us can't claim certain knowledge, although judging from what is published by the MSM, you could have fooled me.

Frankly, I don't worry too much about Gore's end-of-world statements. Politically, these scare-tactics are almost immediately discounted and rarely influence the polls; most big picture messages don't (that's why 'Bush lied, People died' has been so effective; it's up close and personal).

But I do worry about blind faith, especially when I read comments like these: "He [Gore] insults God and all of us by thinking we can change climate. Look to the heavens, Mr. Gore, and you'll see the One who will determine when this world comes to an end.  I'm comfortable with that."

I'm not. Think of Gore and his message what you will, the issue is far bigger than that. The global environment is being affected. 2.5 Billion Chinese and Indians are going to make first time purchases of cars in the next 50+ years. Reducing current and future economic and social changes like these and their inevitable impact on the global environment as mere political scare tactics is neither prudent nor convincing. Nor is it helpful to be associated with arguments which take the meaning of spin to a new level:

"Climate change is actually good. Growing seasons will be longer. Plants like carbon dioxide. Trees devour it. This demonized molecule, CO2, isn't some kind of toxin or contaminant or pollutant -- it's fertilizer." [...]

It won't do to sidetrack legitimate concerns about sharply rising pollution of our air, soil and water especially in developing countries as merely a healthy sign of economic growth which will self regulate itself when things get a bit too sticky. That's not the political message the President intended when he said:

"Addressing global climate change will require a sustained effort, over many generations. My approach recognizes that sustained economic growth is the solution, not the problem – because a nation that grows its economy is a nation that can afford investments in efficiency, new technologies, and a cleaner environment."

Instead the President is telling us, that he is addressing the charge and that political action to address the problem is severely delayed by concerns about the supposed costs by highlighting the most powerful incentive of all: Profitability. Government won't stop climate change and pollution through regulation. Profitability will; as soon as money can be saved by operating an environmentally friendly economy (Hybrid cars are no longer a fantasy but in an age of crude oil priced around the US$ 100.00 mark have become a necessity).

Meanwhile we are left to fight the messy and unrewarding 'war in the trenches':

Let us be honest about the intellectual culture of America in general: It has become almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion about anything. [...]

In a media-saturated world, it's hard to get anyone's attention without cranking the volume. Time magazine recently declared that Earth looks like a planet that is sick (cover headline: "Be Worried. Be Very Worried". [...]

The skeptics feed on alarmism. They love any sign that global warming is a case of mass hysteria. [...] Everyone, on both sides, is arguing like a lawyer these days, he [Myron Ebell, an analyst at CEI] says. "What is going on right now is a desperate last-ditch Battle of the Bulge type effort by the forces of darkness, which is relying heavily on the lockstep/groupthink scientific community." [...]

The president's science adviser, John Marburger, thinks the politicized debate has made it almost impossible to talk sensibly about the issue. "There seems to be the general feeling that somehow the administration doesn't feel that climate change is happening," he says. "That's completely wrong." The administration just doesn't think the problem can be solved with the "magic wand" of regulation.

My choice in what to believe? What the best course of action for our children's future should be? I like Amory B. Lovins' approach and I am impressed by his track record. The difference between Lovins and Gore is that Lovins calmly provides the answers at the grass roots level. Gore is busy standing on a soap box preaching to the masses and politicizing, which will do more harm than good, as it consequently polarizes the issue and brings a harsh spotlight on his motives and choice of timing, rather than the important facts underpinning this sensitive subject.

More @ Big Lizards, The American Thinker, No Pasarán! Wall Street Journal Blog, Scott Rosenberg's Salon The Astute Blogger Clayton Cramer's

Comments

[RJBJ]

Darrell,

From RealClimate.org

NOAA has issued its annual forecast for the hurricane season, along with its now-standard explanation that there is a natural cycle of multidecadal (40-60 year) length in the North Atlantic circulation (often referred to as the "Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation"--see Figure), that is varying the frequency of Atlantic tropical cyclones, and that the present high level of activity is due to a concurrent positive peak in this oscillation.

There was not one mention of the possibility of global warming being a partial factor for these changes (see also this NY Times report on two recent studies).

Read the whole post at RealClimate.org

Despite various parts of the agency, indeed most of the agency, convinced that global warming has something to do with the current frequency and intensity of hurricanes, the heads of NOAA refuse to make any mention of it.
This is why protesters called for various heads at NOAA to resign. NOT because they "don't believe in global warming."

[RJBJ]

Sorry, explanation of above - Areas that depend on snowmelt for freshwater will be adversely affected because less snow and more rain will fall. Snowmelt portions out freshwater at the best times - it gradually, over spring and some of summer, fills up reservoirs, during periods of the year when water is in highest demand.

link to a study in "Nature."

[RJBJ]

tucsondon,

You're "good news" isn't all that good, old boy. When you wrote that there'd be winners and losers in the "water lottery," you were right, and you undercut you're own point. Something like 20% of the people on Earth depend on snowmelt for fresh water. A "more active hydrological cycle" means smaller snowpacks and therefore less water for those areas that depend on them... not to mention more intense and frequent storms throughout the world.

When most people bring up the supposed "good news" about global warming, what they're really trying to say is that there is no need for action. This is truly idiotic, since adverse effects obviously outweigh any positive ones you could dig up and postulate. What I'm saying is that, in the reality-based world, the "good news" about global warming just doesn't get you very far.

Instead of playing the "water lottery" (many places already do, without even having experienced yet the larger effects of global warming) why don't we try and keep the odds we have in the game we've played for thousands of years?

[RJBJ]

heeehee. But Kenny, you didn't tell me why that comment is asinine. I hear people say all the time, "don't worry about _____, market forces will take care of it." You wrote:

if there's one thing the free market is really, really good at, it's solving problems; and nobody in the human race is better at looking into the future and seeing what will be needed and getting there soon enough but not too early (and it absolutely IS possible to attack a problem too soon, you know), than are entrepreneurs.

That's deferring a problem to entrepreneurs and the free market, isn't it? Whether it's a philosophy or just an attitude, I believe societies should have wide discussions with as wide a participation as possible... rather than trusting in entreprenuers and free market mechanisms to produce solutions for us. When "regular" citizens recognize a problem, why the hell would they blow it off with a belief in free market economics? They can act on their own.

[tucsondon]

Alexandra-

I'm dissappointed to see that you have come to believe that stating the positive effects of global warming are "spin to a new level".

In this "debate", that can't seem to get off the ground, the good and bad results of warming need to be disseminated. Problem is that the good results are rarely mentioned. Your response leads me to believe that you and most other info consumers have been so immersed in the bad and grossly exaggerated bad news that even presenting the positive results are met with contempt. We are in bad shape and the truth will never be known to most people if that's true.

Guess I can't mention any good news for fear of being derided. What a world! But I'm gonna mention one anyway!

Global warming will place more fresh water on the continents because of a more active hydrologic conveyor belt. No, that does not necessarily mean there will be more bad floods. Records to date suggest no correlation of greater average annual precip with more extreme flooding. There will be winners and losers in this water lottery for sure. But, and records thus far in the warming confirm this, there will generally be more water in rivers and aquifers and more water for riparian vegetation to thrive. The alarmist don't like to hear this, but tough it's well founded.

Please don't disregard non-bad news even if it is not stated in the most acceptable and understated terms. People are going to spout off with poorly phrased good or bad news when they feel disgusted because no one is listening.

[Kenny Pierce]

RJBJ,

A very calm and reasonable and to-the-point response. You've been around long enough to know that, family responsibilities being what they are, I tend to grab a couple of hours every week or so, post a whirlwind, and then disappear for a while; so please don't feel that I'm deliberately ignoring you if it takes me a while to get back to you.

Would you agree that our difference of opinion is not really a difference of opinion about the particular issue of global warming, but is instead a fundamental difference of political philosophy, and that if we agreed on the political philosophy we would probably pretty much agree on the global warming question? For example, take this statement: "I don't really like the idea of a society deferring social decisions to the free market. Many people are a little more active than that - and as members of society would like to have a little more participation." Now, that statement, especially the latter half, seems to me (forgive me) thoroughly asinine, but not because of anything to do with global warming per se. If you can say something like that with a straight face -- which obviously you can -- then we are going to disagree about pretty much any political question imaginable, and it seems largely pointless to bicker over global warming in that case. No disrespect intended, I assure you; I'm sure that if you were familiar with my political views you'd think they were as asinine as your neighbor's mule's grandpa.

[RJBJ]

Kenny,

I give corporations thanks for my daily bread, hahaha. While profusely thanking General Mills I also am forced to recognize that corporations don't always have the public good at heart, and at the same time have an enormous amount of resources to make it their way. The "hatred" of corporations stems from these two things, I think.

You don't need to boil the situation down between choosing my Cheerios and stopping global warming. It reminds me of the right-wing NSA scandal arguments - you can have warrantless wiretapping OR smoldering ruins and dead civillians. When it comes to intelligence, there are things we obviously NEED to do. Like wiretap suspected terrorists. There are things we don't need to do, like give the president to spy on anyone without any kind of oversight or accountablility.

When it comes to global warming, there are things we need to do, like reduce fossil fuel dependency. And there are things we don't need to do like become a non-democratic state.

I don't really like the idea of a society deferring social decisions to the free market. Many people are a little more active than that - and as members of society would like to have a little more participation.

In the face of abundant energy, why would corporations change? The consumer would have to change. Who knows, maybe the market system will end up being the main mechanism for change. I don't think so, however. The problem is the enormity of our dependence on fossil fuels. Also, market mechanisms alone aren't fast enough. Global warming is like the frog that sits in a pot on the stove until the water boils. Again, using this metaphor I'm not saying we will all be boiled alive, but that global warming is a problem of increments, all of which take a while to register as feedback.

Peak oil and its possible scarcity is something to consider. Again, we could defer this to the mechanisms of the market. But again, the enormity of our oil dependence is formidable. In a peak oil scenario will we be able to continue our way of life with technology that is supported by an energy source as abundant and cheap as oil once was? Who knows. But when someone says "we'll have to move away from fossil fuel dependence anyways," I assume they refer to the possible scarcity of oil in the future.

In what ways would a move away from oil through government intervention cause hardship? You use the word "force," but would improving public transportation and giving incentives for using it be considered "force," or cause hardship? Would doing something like phasing out the enormous fleet of cross-country trucks and replacing it with a new rail system cause that much hardship? Hahaha, would raising the driving age to 21 years old and making our teenagers ride bicycles instead cause that much hardship? Shit, we'd be saving thousands of their lives, probably. There are numerous ways to ease ourselves from oil dependency without causing hardship or sending in the national guard.

Cost-benefit analyses? But I'm just a pundit, like Sean Hannity but not nearly as smart. It would be interesting, these analyses. What were the results of the cost-benefit analysis for the invasion and occupation of Iraq? And what are the cost-benefit analyses for our continued occupation over the next year? According to a month-old poll by Quinnipiac University, 56% now say it was not worth going to war in Iraq. In an ABC poll of the same date, when asked if the war was worth fighting when the benefits to the US were compared to the cost, 62% said the war was not worth fighting. This is kind of a public cost-benefit analysis, in hindsight, on the war in Iraq. Don't worry, I'll tie this all in.

People have changed their minds about the war. The costs out-weigh the benefits. And this is a war we're talking about, where in 3 years tens of thousands have lost their lives. Billions have been spent and some estimates put the future cost at around a trillion dollars. Public opinion is beginning to influence policy, and unless things in Iraq change, politicians are going to have to do something about it.

It could be the same way with global warming. If it's shown to be a mistake, the public backs out on whatver the government has done to counter it, and the policies are changed. Tens of thousands of lives not lost. Money, however, spent, but not entirely lost... we'll have cleaner air and less dependence on oil. If global warming is shown to not be a mistake, money well spent, and many lives saved from hurricanes, disruptions in food supplies, etc.

[RJBJ]

And that's why Al Gore and RJBJ are. RJBJ can't even tell you the truth about the protests at NOAA.

Darrell, I can't tell you the truth about these incredibly important NOAA protests. You know why? Because I'm partners with Gore in the whole conspiracy to reduce the US to a socialist dictatorship - a plan based on clean air, reducing fossil fuel dependency, improving transport efficiency and enticing developing countries to do the same. Damn, what a short road to ruin, huh?

I already admitted I was wrong about your protests, 'member?

It's hard for me to believe that you're claiming that there has been no warming anywhere on the planet, if that is indeed what you're claiming. In an earlier post you said:
0.6 C degrees of warming since 1880!!!!! Ooooh, I'm scared! RUN FOR THE HILLS!

That's the spirit. To the high temperatures, I say, BRING 'EM ON!

What you are missing is the rapidity of the warming - and that rate of warming is predicted to increase.

A trend is what is expected, and a trend is what we have. Skeptics tend to put too much emphasis on local temps. Global Warming, since it's global warming, is based on a global average temperature. Of course your local temperature is going to fluctuate - that's why we use averages when talking about local climates. In fact, your local average temperature could be decreasing - but that doesn't come anywhere near disproving global warming, as long as global temperatures continue to increase.

So far, the only camp proven to have blatantly infused global warming with purely political agendas is some on the right. I admit, it's necessary for them to do this, since science is not helping them out. Philip Cooney, chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality resigned "to spend more time with his family" after he admitted deleting references to climate change in government reports. Major oil and energy companies, like EXXON, helped form our national energy policy, while at the same time fund "think-tanks" like the Competitive Enterprise Institute to the tune of a half-million dollars a year.

[Alex J]

Oops, please excuse the extra "l" in one of the links above (http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/warming-due-to-urban-heat-island.html).

[Alex J]

Darrell, what's of primary importance is average temperature anomaly, indicating an overall heat gain, not local record highs (the incidence of which can still be expected to rise overall). There's a clear trend in all temperature records to go with other observations of warming (including worldwide glacial retreat that can't be attributed to precipitation changes, and accelerated disintegration & melting in Greenland and West Antarctica, despite some inland snowpack increase). On Kilmanjaro, research only supports precipitation change as a primary cause of glacial retreat up to the early 20th century, and the ice there survived a 300-year drought in the past. On urban heat, it has little bearing on the global average (consider the small percentage of Earth's surface covered with asphalt, and the standards for the ground-based temperature record), and we still have the radiosonde record, oceanic readings (surface-down warming), and the satellite record (corrected for stratospheric bias). Along with what the IPCC reported, there's also this on UHI claims here

Yes, it has some realclimate links (and more), but realclimate has plenty of open science-oriented discussion and is hardly willy-nilly in it's conclusions (when it actually makes them). It's interesting that deniers often resort to dismissing them out of hand rather than directly countering what they're saying with actual science. Meanwhile, they quite readily swallow (without any salt at all) the stuff coming out of non-scientific, fossil-funded political organizations.

Even most "skeptics" don't argue that there's no warming trend anymore - they simply argue against human influence (contrary to what the actual science strongly indicates). As their claims are discredited, they predictably fall into other patterns of argument, like the risk of damage is low, nothing can be done about it anyway, or the costs will be too high.

[Alex J]

Kenny, the primary "special interest" we're talking about is obviously Big Fossil, and while there is some acknowledgement of the problem by companies like BP, others (one in particular) are actively misleading the public, just as Big Tobacco did in defense of their profits. I'm not against people making money, but the public should at least have straight information with which to decide if there's a high risk of harm, and whether they want alternatives.

On the mortgage analogy, most people concerned about this issue aren't arguing for the equivalent of calling the loan. It might be a bit simplistic, but let's say the "mortgage" is an adjustable rate, likely to double in ten years. We can't refinance, so paying it down as fast as possible seems to make sense. If top climatologists like Hansen are correct in their assessment, we have perhaps a decade to reduce emissions before major effects will be unavoidable. This is considering the delay of thermal inertia, as well as feedbacks. Entrepreneurs and the markets are primarily driven by need or want. By the time the need is physically clear to most people, it will be too late for an ounce of prevention. We need to get the efficiency and alternative energy pots simmering before then, and be ready to sell soup to the world.

As for economic damage, efficiency technologies and carbon-neutral fuels don't seem likely to be a death knell to the economy as a whole, particularly if we don't wait until the last minute. On the other hand, we have the potential costs from such things as severe weather, drought, adjusting cities and farms as regional climates change, trade and political implications from shifting agricultural productivity, higher sea level/storm surge, fishery damage, biodiversity loss, more favorable conditions for disease-carrying insects, greater wildfire incidence...

Quantifying such costs, and the value of things like human health, ecosystem integrity, and political stability, would appear more difficult than quantifying economic effects from a move away from fossil fuels (although basic cost assessments like the Swiss Re study have been made), but a rapid change in global average temperature won't be without consequence. Still, climatolgists are the ones being asked to provide all the details and erase uncertainty, while those making predictions of economic doom aren't held to the same standard. To them, odds and statistics are all fine & good in economics, but not in climate science.

I'm inclined to think that the economy is far more likely to successfully adapt to efficiency and fuel changes over a decade or so than it is to a multitude of effects from protracted climate disruption. A large part of the solution can be convincing individuals and businesses to make a move toward higher efficiency and alternative energy. This is likely to cause an economic shift (like those of other tech changes), not a wipe-out. Don't know if you caught this, but there's some discussion on the "economic suicide" predictions over here. And on the models here.

[Jonathan Abbey]

And your statement about no significant warming in the last 150 years seems wrong on its face, unless you're arbitrarily defining 'significant' as meaning 'warming greater than we've seen in the last 150 years'.

See The 2001 IPCC report on this matter. It also addresses the heat island effect that you cite.

[Jonathan Abbey]

And a little note...Real Climate has a political agenda. Take what you see there with a giant helping of salt. Real science mixed with overly broad conclusions...

What political agenda is that? I see good discussion there from leading climatologists. They don't agree with your reasoning on some of the points you've made, certainly, but I'm tempted to ascribe that to them being professionals in the field and you not, unless you can demonstrate otherwise.

[Darrell]

Will making the US pay "carbon penalties" reduce atmospheric CO2?
It may hold down future growth(but that's problematic because energy efficiencies are higher in the US than in the countries where industry will be relocated.) You know it's a fake problem because the solutions proposed are so lame and nonresponsive. Why don't we see anything being proposed that will make an immediate difference if this is such an urgent concern? Heck, even Iowahawk proposes solutions.http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2006/05/ten_things_you_.html

There is no place on Earth where the temperatures have changed significantly from those observed over the last 150 years. Where you live keep an eye on your newspaper for daily record highs. Were they all set in the last decade? Do you see a trend? Are day time highs really increasing? Or are nightime lows moderating? Snow melt is more a function of the amount of precipitation than of temperature. That's why no person with a functioning brain is worried about Mt. Kilamanjaro. And that's why Al Gore and RJBJ are. RJBJ can't even tell you the truth about the protests at NOAA. They were organized by the Left as a tie in to Al Gore's Chicken-Little movie. Their press releases promised "thosanads of protestors" and only hundreds showed up around the country. Yes, NOAA prefers science over agenda and they do object to scientists in their employ overstating the significance of their work--implying that it represents a consensus at NOAA, when it does not. Same at NASA. That's why adults have to be at the switch. And that's why it's so important NOT to let the Lefties get their hands on the controls again.

Modern cities warm with each passing year because they are built with billions of tons of concrete and asphalt that serve as thermal-energy storage materials--they absorb heat during the day and release it slowly during the night. That effect was first noted in the mid-1800's.

And a little note...Real Climate has a political agenda. Take what you see there with a giant helping of salt. Real science mixed with overly broad conclusions...

[Kenny Pierce]

Something to remember from No Pasaran!...

[Kenny Pierce]

Guys,

On the corporation "special-interest" thing, here's you a challenge:

Live the next week without making any use of any good or service provided to you with the help of one of those mean ol' nasty selfish corporations.

There, was that fun? Didn't interfere with your activities too much, did it? Didn't cause any noticeable hardship? I thought not. [I'm teasing you good-naturedly; you should imagine me smiling, not sneering, and you should imagine my voice with a chuckle in it, not dripping with sarcasm.]

Alex, you want to know why we would "risk" global warming. I'll answer that question if you'll answer this question: why would you want to risk screwing up the economic environment that has given you, among other things, the internet by which we are having this very discussion, and supermarkets like HEB, and medical technologies like MRI machines and the upcoming wave of medical nanotechnology, and safety technologies like side-impact air bags, and dental implants like the ones that replaced the teeth my wife lost through hereditary peridontal disease, and all the other things that mean that while my grandfather was a toothless old man in his early sixties I can reasonably hope to be spry and active (though not, alas, attractive, given the baseline from which I start) into my eighties and nineties? Why would you want to risk all that to head off a theoretical and very poorly quantified problem projected to arise decades hence?

Furthermore, let's say that you guys are right and global warming will eventually start causing us problems. Well, if there's one thing the free market is really, really good at, it's solving problems; and nobody in the human race is better at looking into the future and seeing what will be needed and getting there soon enough but not too early (and it absolutely IS possible to attack a problem too soon, you know), than are entrepreneurs. If global warming really is going to be a problem eventually, what in the world makes you think politicians will do a better job of figuring out when it's genuinely cost-effective to attack the problem (given all the competing priorites of all the other problems that affect human activities and satisfaction), and of actually making sure that their "solutions" do more good than harm, than will entrepreneurs? Have you not yet understood that entrepreneurs and businessmen succeed more by the intelligent management of risk than by any other skill, and that tons of money stand ready to reward the person who finds a solution to people's problems once they agree they really have a problem?

And, I don't want to be insulting, but that line about "something we'll have to do anyway" betrays some very serious economic naivete indeed. If I were to come to you and say, "You have to pay off all the remaining balance on your mortgage by next Friday," and you were to complain about the hardship my demand would impose on you, and I were to answer, "What's the big deal, you'll have to pay it all off eventually anyway?" would you say, "Oh, of course, when you put it that way, I see that I ought not mind"? I don't think so. Timing does matter, and economic cost now is much more expensive than the same economic cost later -- which is the whole reason you have to pay interest if you want to borrow money. If we have to move away from fossil fuels fifty years from now, that gives us fifty years to have found something else better so that the move will be pretty much painless; and if you tell me that in 1955 people could have imagined the technologies we now have then I'll believe that you can predict what the creativity of the marketplace will have come up with by 2055...

Look, if we impose a move away from fossil fuels now by government force, the result will be up-front hardship and interference in human activities. Isn't that what you guys are trying to avoid in the whole global-warming scare in the first place? You talk like people who haven't the foggiest idea of how to do cost-benefit analyses.

But perhaps that's just a function of the constraints of the blog-comment format, and you really have done these sorts of cost-benefit dilemmas, and just haven't addressed them here at ATB because it has seemed off-topic or because you haven't yet had time. If that's the case then we're likely to get some highly useful comments out of you guys over the next day or two, which will be very cool indeed. Really and truly, I'd be very interested in such comments and very open to well-constructed economic arguments to which the science was a responsibly-wielded adjunct.

[Kenny Pierce]

RJ,

Even the claim about "decreased quality of life" is a matter of faith in scientific authority -- but not qua science, as I'll explain in a minute. It is precisely the question of quality of life that was Julian Simon's lifelong passion, and his conviction that actual quality of life was overwhelmingly likely to get better for most people over time, was consistently verified by the facts -- in sharp contradistinction to the noisy claims that technology and capitalism and the Modern Way was going to lead to famine and various other forms of "decreased quality of life."

This seems to be an area of special interest for you guys, RJ and Jonathan and Alex, and it is self-confessedly NOT an area to which I have paid much attention (to invest time and energy into researching it instead of in providing for my family or raising money for the orphans, would be a decision that itself would be justified only if I had confidence in the judgment of the people telling me it was important enough to push aside those other priorities). So you may know off the top of your head answers to certain cynical questions of mine, e.g.:

1. Don't give me crap about how many degrees of warming there might be. Tell me exactly what you expect that to mean in terms of direct quality of life for the human race as a whole -- life expectancy, for example, or standard of living.

2. Also, for whatever studies you cite, I'd be interested to know whether the people who did those studies have made any predictions in the past (ideally from, say, ten or fifteen years back) and if so how their past predictions have held up.

3. If you have specific policy recommendations to make, then I would like to know (a) precisely how much of a positive difference on direct aspects of quality of life you would expect those recommendations to have, and (b) precisely how much of a negative impact you would expect the economic side effects to have on direct aspects of quality of life, the wealth created by capitalism and free markets being far and away the greatest contributor to quality of human life in the history of mankind. And I'd be interested to know how you generated the economic models involved.

4. Can you be more specific about "special interests" than simply "corporations"? If what you mean is that entrepreneurs and all the other people who are in business to make money, don't want to have their decisions interfered with by people who have other agendas and claim to be acting "for the good of mankind," then I would say that what you call "special interests" is in fact the closest thing we have to the general interest -- since EVERY material advantage and comfort that modern man possesses is available to him only because of the accumulated capital of generations of entrepreneurs and businessmen. The productive activity of humankind, and the astonishingly lengthened life expectancy of twentieth- and twenty-first-century man, is overwhelmingly a result of the actions of the rich (that is, by people who wound up rich), taken by them for the purpose of making themselves richer.

Look, I'm half asleep and probably making very little sense. But RJ, you said at one point that the threat of global warming was "that it will disrupt human activities and cause hardship." And then you ask, "...why this kind of reaction on the right to the scientific consensus of global warming?" Okay, look, will it help for me to say that the reaction is not to the scientific consensus that we can expect some degree of global warming and that human activity contributes to this effect to some degree? If that's all that "scientists" were saying, then good for them, that's fine, glad they've had fun figuring that stuff out. But that's not all that "scientists" are saying. The reaction is primarily to the "scientific consensus" about the policies (such as Kyoto) that the people making global-warming-alarmist noise want to impose by government force in the name of stopping global warming. And the reaction is so intensely negative precisely because something like Kyoto will either have no effect at all (because everybody will cheat on it) -- in which case it's a farce -- or else it will instantly, immediately and devastatingly "disrupt human activities and cause hardship." In order to stop a theoretical threat to human quality of life that might take place, to some small degree, many years in the future, the global-warming alarmists want to put into place public policies that will be immediately and instantly devastating now.

In other words, it's not the science that sucks so much (though the past history of "scientific consensus that says that governments should jump in and start overriding the free markets" makes it highly likely that the science put forth in defense of the global-warming agenda is at the very least distorted and exaggerated). It's the (bad) economics that are trying to be snuck in under cover of "science." The moment you go from saying, "The earth is going to get warmer over the next half-century," to, "And here's what we should do about it now," you stop being a scientist and start being an economist. And why should we think scientists know a damn thing about economics -- especially since the politicians who are on the side of the "scientific consensus" come predominantly from places (like Europe) that have royally screwed up their own economies and in which people don't live anywhere nearly as comfortably as we do in America? If the French -- or Jimmy Carter -- say that Kyoto is a good idea, that in itself is reason to suspect it's probably a recipe for economic disaster.

The question of whether we will be better off -- the question of which tradeoffs will pay off with higher human satisfaction in the long run -- is a fundamentally economic question. Quite frankly, I trust businessmen to evaluate such tradeoffs vastly more than I trust scientists to do so, for that is very much more of an economic question than it is a scientific one; and successful businessmen have shown themselves to be competent at this kind of decision-making while scientists have not. The most striking thing about the global warming debate is the degree to which confusion of categories dominates the popular thinking: science can theoretically contribute insight into the technical side of things (what kind of global warming might we expect, how much of an ocean level rise would come from a given amount of polar melting, etc.), but the technical insight is only one aspect of the decision, which is not a fundamentally scientific decision. Any person who talks about the scientific threat without giving equal weight to the economic consequences of trying to forestall the scientific threat, is either not thinking clearly or else not speaking responsibly.

By the way, on that line about "corporations and the government they buy" -- unless you consider that the Democratic Party is bought and paid for by corporations, the record of American government in the twentieth century is overwhelmingly the record of a government opposed (in rhetoric at least) to corporations. I'll put what corporations have done to increase the health, wealth and comfort of the average person up against what bureaucrats have done for them any day. Put it this way: who does a better job of providing for fundamental needs of our children -- the government-run schools, or the corporation-run supermarkets? I'll tell you this, I know what sorts of healthy food options are provided (at absurdly low prices) at H.E.B., and I know what kind of education (at absurdly high prices) my kids are getting in the public schools. I think the record that corporations have of increasing the quality of human life, of facilitating the average guy's ability to engage in the "activities" he prefers and of ameliorating the "hardship" that until our miraculous modern economy was taken for granted as the common lot of mankind, outlaps all competitors other than the U.S. military by an astonishingly wide margin -- and the U.S. military's contribution is simply to provide a safe arena in which corporations and small businesses can work their magic without having to worry about extortion and expropriation.

I don't care in the slightest whether the earth gets hotter or colder, except insofar as that makes people's lives better or worse -- and coercive government interference with peoples' lives has a far more direct and immediate and disruptive effect than global warming seems likely to have. So really, for me to maintain any further interest in the conversation, you'll have to show solid cause to think that global warming will make people more unhappy twenty years from now than "solutions" to global warming will make people unhappy right now. For global warming is a complete irrelevance except insofar as it impacts people to a degree sufficient to outweigh all the other factors impacting people (including the advances in technology and organization that accumulate vastly more rapidly in a free market than in a state-directed one).

[Alex J]

Enough evidence has accumulated to make it worthy of attention. Of course there's still some uncertainty about the details, but all CGCM studies (even the more conservative ones) indicate significant future warming. We're messing with a system that can be pushed into unfriendly modes of operation, and CO2 (even at low atmospheric concentration) has a strong influence on climate and life. That impact can be negative when you're talking about rapid accumulation during an interglacial period.

Speaking of which, someone mentioned ice ages. Obviously natural change occurs over time, but Earth's ecology and human civilization have grown and largely flourished during one of the longer interglacials. This relatively mild period likely has thousands of years remaining according to the latest research, yet we risk altering it for centuries to millennia (depending on the size of the CO2 anomaly & feedbacks we end up with). And why? Because special interests want to drag their feet on transitioning away from fossil fuels (something we'll have to do anyway)?

globalwarmingtruth.org does a fairly good job of describing the basics on this issue.

[Jonathan Abbey]

And, a better link on the question of water vapor's role as a feedback or a forcing. I'm pretty sure I described it incorrectly, before.

[Jonathan Abbey]

While we're on the topic of the global cooling scare, see this discussion about the difference between the content of scientific papers at that time and the popular press, including Newsweek, and why the current situation of
scientific concern about CO2 induced climate change is not comparable.

It's been a pleasure to read considered opinion in the continuing posts, here.

[RJBJ]

Yes, well Ehrlich (with an "h"), is a classic example of scientists getting it wrong. Global cooling, also. Thirty years later, these theories have been shown to be false, obviously. By observation (heehee!), and by improved understanding of climate. Global Warming, if it is partly or entirely wrong, will be proven either way beyond doubt by time and more observation.

I don't see any problem doubting the scientific community as a whole, if that's your wish. What I do have a problem with is using junk science, obviously influenced by an agenda, to make the claim that global warming is a socialist plot. It has been documented time and time again that the vast majority of researchers agree that global warming is real, and has at least partly a human cause. To pick up and cherish the little contrary scientific opinion available based on the notion that "the left must be stopped" is truly sad. The plainest idiocy is those that call it a hoax or an intentional trick.

If motive is the last thing you look at, and record is the first, Corporations and the government they fund obviously have a seriously worse record than the scientific community. That leaves you with what? If you choose not to believe scientific consensus... what is the next best authority to appeal to? Corporate PR? Your clergyman? To me it looks like your best bet is to wait, to hope you live 30 or so years to see your belief validated.

The big question, however, is why this kind of reaction on the right to the scientific consensus of global warming? If global warming turns out to be a colossal scientific mistake, and the developed world actually has embarked on a campaign to slow or stop it, what will the ramifications be? Think about it. Such things as cleaner air, more efficient transport, and a lessened need for oil. Among others. And, what may be your wish, a giant blow to the value of scientific contribution, heehee. There is no evidence that our economy will stagnate, that it will not be able to go in a more sustainable and less polluting direction.

I like this quote:
"Big Business And Capitalism Will Destroy Us All" is something these people are as desperate to believe as the Left Behind folks are desperate to believe that Jesus Will Come And Rapture Us All Away And Then Boy Won't It Suck To Be The Sinful Jerks Left Behind. Well, at least I'm all-inclusive when it comes to salvation, heehee. I'm obviously not going to their heaven. The big problem with this particular "narrative" is that I haven't read anyone who believes that global warming, or Corporate greed, will end humankind. The difference between these sentiments, I think, is that one envisions a better way of life for humanity, here, on this planet. The other looks towards the after-life, at the expense, I believe of the here and now. I have several friends who have told me that certain things they find sticky don't really matter because the Savior is coming sooner than later. While I respect their belief in the Savior, I have absolutely no respect for their disregard for "earthly" conditions.

In response to:But if global warming Will Kill Us All, why then the fact that I'm putting seven Kazakh kids through college and have adopted four others while you haven't gotten out of Ithaca and seen a real live poor person in ten years, doesn't matter, because you're saving four billion people so you're way more Caring and Important than I am.

Hahaha! While such caring truly is to be praised, are you showing off your compassionate "muscles?" I'll blame it on your narrative, but if you really want to compare each other's list of compassionate acts and see whose is bigger, e-mail me.

If global warming is a real phenomena, it won't spell the end of the human race. Who says these things? Dig the quotes all up, I won't agree with them, and I haven't read anybody who does. Instead of extinction, I'm sure we'll just be very, very uncomfortable. The threat behind global warming is a decreased quality of life in the future, not extinction. I mean, global warming IS doom and gloom, but it's not the apocalypse.

[Kenny Pierce]

[grinning] There you go, Alexandra, that was especially for you because I know you get a much bigger kick out of my periodically assumed Ranting Insane Persona than you do out of my ordinary generous and careful and four-times-revised-for-charity posts. And I didn't get you a birthday present; so that last post should help make up for my omission.

Plus, if I may say so, the comments section has been just the teeniest bit (uncharacteristically) boring the last week or so, and we can't be having that, now, can we?

RJ, I'm practically begging to be flamed back; so have no qualms. The serious point behind that last post was just that you don't have to know what somebody's motive is; if you know that they have committed fraud under similar circumstances in the past, then you know that unless something has changed they still have a motive (whatever bizarre motive it might be) for fraud in the present. That's why record is more valuable than speculation about motives -- and the "scientific consensus" has a record that only a fool would trust.

[Kenny Pierce]

RJBJ,

Merely speculative (motive being a tricky thing to judge in oneself, let alone others), but:

1. The Baby Boomer generation, along a great many other pathologies (no generation in history was ever given so much of value and passed on so little), has a great many people who from their youth have held with religious passion the belief that environmentalism is a Good Thing and that Big Business is Evil and The System Will Destroy Us All. A sizable number of the 'Sixties Stupids left college, got into the real world, and eventually had to grow up; but academia is famously a refuge from the inconvenient intrasigence of reality. "Big Business And Capitalism Will Destroy Us All" is something these people are as desperate to believe as the Left Behind folks are desperate to believe that Jesus Will Come And Rapture Us All Away And Then Boy Won't It Suck To Be The Sinful Jerks Left Behind.

2. Both scientists and economists are, as a group, sure that they are smarter than most people and honked off that most of us pay them relatively little attention. Why should politicians run the world instead of (clearly superior) scientists and economists? We all knew in high school the kid who was always creating unnecessary drama in order to be the center of attention. Paul Erlich will NEVER win a Nobel Prize 'cause he's not much of a scientist, any more than Carl Sagan was that much of an astronomer. But Erlich got fame and lots of money by publishing one grossly absurd apocalyptic book after another; as an entymologist (his actual scientific discipline) he's famous for his (hilariously wrong) population gloom-and-dooming, just as Carl Sagan the astronomer is famous for his television productions. Saying that the end of the world will descend upon us unless Congress puts public policy into the hands of scientists will garner you lots of attention (though your claims have to be more apocalyptic than the other folks's if you're going to get the press time and the grant money, which creates the equivalent of an academic arms race to the most breathless speculation). Providing a nuanced and conservative estimate that says mostly, "We don't really know what's going to happen and even what we're pretty sure will happen we don't know how much of it will be caused by us so we can't really tell you what your public policy will be," may be good science, but it gets you neither headlines nor academic notoriety. Do you really think anybody in America other than the twenty other people in Erlich's field would ever have given a rat's ass about Paul Erlich if he had restricted himself to only writing books about something he actually knew about (entymology) instead of writing The Population Bomb? Dr. Murray Mitchell and George Kukla and Reid Bryson and Dr. James D. McQuigg -- hey, they got their names into Newsweek magazine with their global-cooling bullshit; do you think any real work they could ever have done would have gotten them into any publication more than a few hundred people would ever actually read? Do you really think scientists don't, like everybody else, want to be Important People, the sort of people whom CNN asks to provide Expert Opinion (which isn't likely to happen unless your "expert opinion" fits into CNN's preconceptions and preferred narrative)?

There have always been people running around predicting the end of the world. As long as European culture prized preachers and priests and mystics, there were preachers and priests and mystics who couldn't resist the attention and notoriety that was there for any religious leader who could say he knew that Armageddon was at hand. Now that American and European culture doesn't value the opinions of clerics and does value the opinion of "scientists," there are scientists who can't resist the attention and notoriety that comes to anybody with pretentions to scientist status who will join in the apocalyptic narrative.

3. Besides, liberalism is fundamentally, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the politics of self-congratulation: liberals are better than the rest of us because they care. (Not that their solutions do anything but make problems worse, but it's not results that matter, it's the caring that establishes their moral superiority.) But if there's no crisis, then how can you be superior by caring? Kyoto is an absolutely perfect example: even by its proponents own numbers it would have had a negligible practical effect; but its symbolism...ah, that was what mattered, because it showed that we were Willing To Act. If there is doom looming over humanity and I Care About It and you don't, then you can congratulate yourself on your moral superiority to me. If there is not in fact any doom looming over humanity, then the fact that I don't care about global warming means precisely nothing, and you can't give yourself morality props on the grounds that you Care About Global Warming whereas I'm busy caring about saving the lives of orphans in Kazakhstan. But if global warming Will Kill Us All, why then the fact that I'm putting seven Kazakh kids through college and have adopted four others while you haven't gotten out of Ithaca and seen a real live poor person in ten years, doesn't matter, because you're saving four billion people so you're way more Caring and Important than I am.

Now, full stop, because you know what? I don't know if any of that's actually true (the part about liberals in particular is grossly and deliberately inflammatory, and I trust long-time liberal readers of ATB and my own blog to know I don't really ascribe such motives to each and every liberal in the world). I'm just generating possible narratives. My point is simply that motive is the last thing you look at, both because it's the hardest thing to pin down, and also because people do the stupidest things for the most trivial reasons. What is absolutely clear and beyond question is that the part of the scientific community that is in bed with the hysterical doom-mongering disaster-sells-magazines press has a well-established record of bastardizing "science" in order to support the apocalyptic, anti-capitalist Gaia-Earth-Mother greenie narrative. We can speculate about what their motives might be; but that they had some motive to that fraud is unquestionable -- because they unquestionably committed that fraud. Do you, who want us to pay attention to their latest round of apocalyptic fulminations, have any evidence whatsoever that their motives have changed, especially when simple perusal of the old global-cooling literature reveals that the language and breathlessness of tone are precisely parallel, with only the crise du jour's name having changed?

[RJBJ]

Thanks for the links Jonathan Abbey. I agree, a modicum of research is necessary before you set your little heart against the existence of global warming.

[RJBJ]

Hahaha, Darrell. You were right. Hundreds of protestors called for their resignation. However, they were calling for their resignation not because Lautenberg and Mayfield may disagree with the connection between global warming and hurricane intensity, but because they believe that research within NOAA strengthening the link is actively being covered up and suppressed. You may remember a similar thing happened at NASA not too long ago - George Deutsch, a political appointee, suppressed NASA sceintists and limited their contact with the press.
Here's an ABC News link

As far as agenda-driven science goes... what exactly is the agenda of a scientist whose research supports the existence of global warming? I mean, are all these scientists funded by shadowy socialist networks and the all-powerful Sierra Club?

It's easy to see the agenda of the few scientists and groups who deny the existence of global warming. Following the money works pretty well in that case.

[Jonathan Abbey]

I know we're all busy slamming the commies, here, but a lot of the arguments that have been brought up by Darrel et al concerning solar variability, etc., have actually been modeled and compared against the observed data. Heat increases due to solar variability would cause characteristic temperature increases at certain atmospheric levels, while heat increases due to increases CO2 trapping would show another pattern.

Guess which pattern we're actually seeing?

On the question of water vapor vs. co2, water vapor has the effect of transporting heat from the surface of the planet into the lower atmosphere, which tends to act as a negative feedback on water evaporation due to partial pressure of water. CO2 affects the top of the atmosphere radiation budget directly.. they are different gases which have different effects at different parts of the system, and it is the increase in co2 which is increasing systemic heat retention, again in correspondence with modeling.

As I say, I know it's very important to fight the left on this, since they want
us all to starve in the dark and all that other rot, but it might not go amiss to actually do some research on this stuff rather than taking it on faith that your arguments are more insightful and penetrating than the professionals who are sounding the alarm on this.

[Darrell]

Oh, and RJBJ,

'GLOBAL WARMING' PROTESTERS CALL FOR RESIGNATION OF HURRICANE CENTER DIRECTOR
Wed May 31 2006 12:04:34 ET

SILVER SPRING, MD ? Hundreds of concerned citizens and leaders from across the nation will join Hurricane Katrina survivors Wednesday to call for the resignation of the heads of the National Hurricane Center (NHC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the NOAA Headquarters just outside of Washington, D.C. During an 11 a.m. demonstration, advocates will demand that NOAA stop covering up the growing scientific link between severe hurricanes and global warming while insisting on real solutions to the problem of global warming.

The protest comes at the start of the 2006 Hurricane season, which officials at the NHC predict will be ?a hectic, above-normal tropical storm season.? Speeches begin at 11 a.m. EDT and protestors will carry dramatic props and photographs of Hurricane Katrina. A 37-hour demonstration will follow, lasting until midnight on June 1st, with picketing during the day and a candlelight vigil by night.

After a record four major hurricanes hit Florida in 2004, the 2005 hurricane season was even more devastating. Of the six most powerful hurricanes ever to hit America in the past 150 years, three occurred within 52 days in 2005. Yet, despite a flurry of peer-reviewed scientific studies linking planetary warming to storms like Katrina, leaders at NOAA and the NHC continue to claim that the recent hurricane devastation is part of a "natural cycle."

Since I said "The Left tries to get the head of NOAA fired for not pushing their nonsense about GW and hurricanes..." I GUESS I WAS RIGHT. Thanks for pointing out, though, that Democrats are part of the Left. I should have said "Leftist idiots." Then you would still be corerect to bring up Democrats. But not satellites or cost overruns.

[Darrell]

RJBJ quotes.."The strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth's climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. ....the hurricanes that do occur near the end of the 21st century are expected to be stronger and have significantly more intense rainfall than under present day climate conditions. This expectation (Figure 1) is based on an anticipated enhancement of energy available to the storms due to higher tropical sea surface temperatures."

Oh, that report by Thomas R. Knutson and Robert E. Tuleya at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. How surprising! Scientists at a single organization have different opinions! Too bad they aren't the leading experts in the field. And too bad they are practicing agenda-driven science. Good thing the Bush Administration allows for different points of view. There were loads of firings during Clinton's time of anyone that didn't follow the party line, and Federal funding was banned for any project that proposed disputing global warming. And too bad the simplistic linear model Knutson and Tuleya used to make those alarmist claims DOESN"T account for the lack of intense hurricanes in the past---during the period that atmospheric CO2 levels were increasing. Check out US land falling hurricanes by decade (http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml)and you can see the period 1961-2000 was unusually quiet, while the 1940s was a pretty tough period for the Atlantic coast. Even the period 1851-1900 was a more active Atlantic storm period than the century-later 1951-2000 and yet there was trivial human perturbation of the atmosphere to that time. Can their model reproduce that without the AMO too? Before anyone asks, land falling hurricane data is shown because it's the most comprehensive record -- there were no satellites recording mid-Atlantic storms until relatively recently.

And maybe Knutson and Tuleya can explain why the late Ordovician Period (505-438 MILLION YEARS AGO) suffered an ICE AGE (with associated mass extinction) while atmospheric CO2 levels were more than 4,000ppm higher than those of today (yes, that's a full order of magnitude higher), levels at which current 'guesstimations' of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 suggest every last molecule of ice should have been melted off the planet, I confess to significant scepticism over simplistic claims of a small increment in atmospheric CO2 equating to a toasted planet. Granted, continental configuration now is nothing like it was then, Sol's irradiance differs, as do orbits, obliquity, etc., etc. but there is no obvious correlation between atmospheric CO2 and planetary temperature over the last 600 million years, so why would such relatively tiny amounts suddenly become a critical factor now?

The bottom line is that there are OBSERVED cycles of hurricane activity. And NOT ONE SHRED OF EVIDENCE shows we have deviated from these OBSERVED CYCLES or that their periodicity has changed.

0.6 C degrees of warming since 1880!!!!! Ooooh, I'm scared! RUN FOR THE HILLS! Maybe you Leftist liars should expunge the historical records showing all that extreme (record) weather activity prior to the increase in atmospheric CO2....I know you just want to!

Want to make a real difference and think that we are at the point where civilization is threatened? We can detune jet engines so that they emit more carbon in their exhaust, especially when they are flying at their maximum altitude. That would take care of the problem in short order. The health consequences of that act(if any) would pale in comparison to your end-of-world scenarios! And gee, what can make water vapor in the atmosphere disappear???? Let me think about that while I enjoy this rainstorm I'm watching right now....

[Kenny Pierce]

More on the uselessness of scientific "consensus":

When I get the chance I'll dig up Richard Feynman's discussion of how he arrived at the theory that won him the Nobel Prize, just to make sure I have the details accurate. But from memory:

Feynman had this theory, and it worked in all but one respect. His theory said that a certain conditions should generate a particular pair of quarks, but everybody knew that under those conditions you actually got a different pair. But a couple of years after he developed his theory, he was talking with a couple of other physicists and one of them happened to mention that there might be reason to think the received knowledge was wrong -- at which point Feynman explained, "Well, then, in that case, I understand everything!"

He went racing back and looked up the original experiments that everybody referred to, and as he tells it, it was instantly obvious that they were crap -- the conclusions had been drawn from one or two outliers and actually were worthless.

From this, he tells us, he learned a very valuable lesson -- never trust the received wisdom; always go back and look at the original research yourself.

Crichton and Running Roach are I think quite right. I would very much also emphasize the fact that every profession is dominated by unoriginal, conformist group-thinkers (including the professions in which everybody is very carefully "non-conformist" because their peers will look down on them if they are not), simply because the ordinary mode of human thought is unoriginal, conformist group-think. Many scientists appear to think that the scientific community is composed predominantly of calm, perfectly rational, perfectly honest and unemotional supermen; but this is self-congratulatory bullshit. As with any other profession, there are a few real minds surrounded by a bunch of mediocrities who are prisoners of their own desires and preconceptions. Thus the scientific consensus on Newtonian physics lasted right up until the geniunely original and non-group-think-constrained Einstein blew it away.

When you add the fact that the ordinary person who talks about "the scientific consensus on global warming" means "what the radio and CNN the New York Times say is the scientific consensus on global warming" -- well, why should any rational person pay any attention to that?

By the way, Francis's question about Lovins's preconceptions goes directly to the question of the underlying assumptions of Lovins-as-authority, and is very responsibly put: these were his views, but that was a long time ago; does anybody know what they are now? Well done, indeed.

If, by the way, Lovins were to present arguments to defend his views, or if somebody else were to quote Lovins's arguments in detail, then to respond with a complaint that Lovins is a Luddite would be to resort to the ad hominem tactic of distraction. But the point is precisely that the Al Gores of the world do not appeal primarily to Lovins's arguments qua arguments (which Al Gore almost certainly would not be able to follow intelligently); they appeal to Lovins et alia as authorities. An argument ad hominem ("against the person" rather than his arguments) is actually a perfectly appropriate (and potentially devastating) refutation of an argument ad auctoritatem ("to [a person's] authority" as a substitute for presentation of that person's actual arguments) -- since the appeal to authority itself is an appeal based on the person rather than on his arguments.

[Francis W. Porretto]

I think the most significant statement Lovins ever made was this one, in his Nov/Dec 1977 interview with Playboy:

"If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other."

Now, that was 29 years ago this coming November, but it was still a pretty serious thing to say. At that time, Lovins was openly hostile to human increase and human material progress -- a stance which is both short-sighted -- advanced societies pollute less, not more -- and extraordinarily cruel, since it would doom the have-not peoples of the world to endure their current squalor in perpetuity.

Has he changed his opinions in any substantive way?

[RunningRoach]

Alexandra,

While I am neither a climatologist, nor an enviournmentalist, I am a scientist with a healthy background in computer modeling and the properties and effects of toxic chemicals and aerosols in the atmosphere.

This background gives me no license to second guess the “consensus” of a number of scientists who attempt to model the enviournment and predict what may happen one hundred years from now. However, I can study the models used to make these predictions, look at the data developed, and comment on the voracity of the conclusions. First, the two (2) models selected from an array of hundreds available predict the worst outcomes…by a very wide margin. Second, the models selected, when used to describe retrospectively, weather variability of the last one hundred years, fail miserably. So, I ask, is public policy driving the science, or is science driving public policy? I’m afraid it’s the former.

The system is too complex to model. It’s like trying to model the shape of the next cloud or snow- flake that forms. Impossible.

Nobody believes a weather prediction two days ahead. Now we're asked to
believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future and make national public policy based on these predictions? Has everybody lost their minds?

Michael Crichton, world-renowned scientist and author wrote an essay on “consensus science”. Here are a few excerpts of what he had to say:

“I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise
of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an
extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its
tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of
scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is
already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on
something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with
consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary,
requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he
or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In
science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.
The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke
with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't
science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.”

“Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about
people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people
get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse
pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later,
with so many more people riding horses?
But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And
in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was
unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more
than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't
know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know
what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer,
or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI,
ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet,
interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing,
gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar,
prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic
explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction,
superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step,
ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser
surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS. None of
this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn't
know what you are talking about.
Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth
thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're
bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it.”

Read the whole essay here:
http://www.sepp.org/NewSEPP/GW-Aliens-Crichton.html

I recently posted a “Short Note To Al Gore” on my blog. Since nobody reads my posts, I thought I would include it here.

Hi Big Al,

Hope all is going well for you. All serial losers need a break from time to time. Sorry I missed the opening of your new flick. I’ve been real busy formulating strategies for my air conditioning clients to take advantage of this coming global warming thing.

I’ve been doing a lot of research too. Found a bunch of interesting articles/papers on climate change, like, the cycles of the sun. Did you know it gets noticeably hotter every 50-75 years, then cools down again? (There are slighter variations about every 11-12 years caused by more frequent flare activity.). Also read up on the orbit of the earth, including; the changing shape of the orbit, the tilt of the axis and wobble around the axis. All of these phenomena occur in cycles of 10, 40, and 100 thousand years and cause all kinds of havoc depending on which fluctuations are coincident. I couldn’t believe it but the sun and moon even have a cyclical effect on phenomena like the elevator effect in our oceans…which has a lot to do with sea water temperatures and…you guessed it… the weather!

Then I strolled through the Ice Ages. Read all (Well, most. OK. A lot.) of the current research and theories on how they occur and how many we could identify occurring in the last 10 million years, including their severity, size and duration. Wow! Really blows your mind to think that almost the entire North American continent was, and will be again, one big mother of an ice cube!

So I guess your theory and “consensus science” predicts that it’s going to get a lot hotter before we freeze our asses off again. Cool!

The only thing that troubles me is that it’s not happening fast enough. I’m writing this note from a place called New Jersey on May 22, 2006 and the National Weather Service just posted a FROST alert for my county for tonight. This is not good for me, my lawn, my newly planted flowers or my clients. So bring on the heat!

Well Big Al, best wishes that you’ll continue to make a fool out of yourself,

RR

PS; I also found out that methane is a greenhouse gas, so easy on the Tex-Mex food!

PPS; You can find out all this stuff, and a lot more by doing a Google search on “Climate”, Earth Orbit”, “The Sun”, “Ice Ages”, “Global Warming” and “Junk Science”. (Too many references to list in a note.)

Regards Alexandra, JCC

[RJBJ]

Darrell, when you write:

The Left tries to get the head of NOAA fired for not pushing their nonsense about GW and hurricanes, for example.

Are you talking about this NOAA, the one that wrote this?

The strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth's climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. ....the hurricanes that do occur near the end of the 21st century are expected to be stronger and have significantly more intense rainfall than under present day climate conditions. This expectation (Figure 1) is based on an anticipated enhancement of energy available to the storms due to higher tropical sea surface temperatures.

Two House Democrats want NOAA's head to resign "because of the cost overruns and delays in the NPOESS satellite program." Not because of climate change politics.

You list a whole host of irrelevent facts, as if someone out there is actually disputing them. That the Earth's climate has been variable in the past is not in dispute. That man did not cause climate change before the advent of industrial technology is not in dispute. That the Earth will ultimately survive our CO2 emmissions is not in dispute. I've never heard anyone dispute these things. How could anybody argue these points? Not even undercover socialists trying to ruin the U.S. dispute the above.

Saying that global warming makes life possible is like telling a resident of New Orleans that their house flooded by Hurricane Katrina is okay because water makes life possible.

darrell, the reason water vapor is not given as much attention as manmade greenhouse gases is because it is a natural greenhouse gas and the majority of climatologists believe it is involved in a feedback cycle due to increases in temperature, which are due to increases in manmade greenhouse gases. That is the reason why "no one is concerned about water vapor." It's because increases in water vapor are linked to increases in gases that we can control, since we are a major producer of them.

One other thing. I don't often, ever really, hear anyone say that global warming is going to kill us, or bring an end to mankind. Rather, that it will disrupt human activities and cause hardship.

[rich]

I am so dumb that I think it is a hustle.

Not cleaning up spills, the water or air, that is not the hustle. That was one of the real achievements of the environmental movement.

Global warming is the hustle.

Any time people say that something that is totally incomprehensible is going to end the world unless you give them power, because they know the secret solution, I get skeptical.

To me it looks like socialism based on weather, not bad economics. But weather and economics seem to be impenetrable mysteries to a lot of people. Look at all the people socialism fooled in the last century. Many of intelligence and good faith paid with their lives because they were hustled by bad economics.

I must admit I also consider the source. If there is a hustle out there that can justify giving a small group of people power the left will make it their own.

Remember that America was going to go dark when the sperm whale population was devastated, because there would be no oil to put in lamps.

Then people started fooling around with that black stuff that was polluting brine wells. That black stuff made the brine totally unsuitable for preserving food or making salt. It was a total nuisance! Brine wells that produced that stuff were worthless!

Anyone who claims they can predict what will be happening more than five years down the road is a charlatan or a thief. If they say they know what will happen ten years down the road they are liars.

[saus]

Any strident free enterprise supporter should be an advocate of sustainable development, I would hope that's a no brainer..

All these enviro sensationalists though, they preach about cars & coal stacks and the end of the World because of them, I'll tell you what's out of control today and it is also carbon based, it's called population. Forget ethanol, I'm advocating birthanol!

[gringoman]

'Blase'? Well, yes, there probably is a danger of that. For example, in the pre-Internet era I used to get informed by Pacifica Radio, the subsidized "progressive" network which, of course, promised a different take on reality than what "The People" could get from the "corporate media." I didn't even mind, at the time, their version of "the U.S. imperialists in Vietnam," which always seemed to leave out about 90% of the Vietnam I knew. After all, those were pre-9.11 days, and weren't some corporate honchos getting unfairly, obscenely Midas-rich under Clinton's go-go tech-and-Enron bubble? You could still enjoy the good old melodramas featuring noble socialists and evil capitalists. But finally (and it happened before 2001) I began to lose patience, waiting for the rowboats we were going to need in downtown streets after the capitalists melted the polar ice caps and flooded even the poor skishkebab vendors serving the lunch crowds. And there were even some "non-progressive" sources with facts indicating that the hurricane cycle was a lot worse earlier in the 20th century than it has been in these "super-storm" times that do so much for CNN's (much needed) ratings.

So now blase is in? I won't go that far. But I would question anyone who thinks this is more about science than politics. And even the "science" is showing signs of a new religious cult, Warmism, a great branch of Progressivism. The Warmists, who normally feel superior, at the same time have a certain insecurity in face of the emotion and passion of, say, most Islamists and many Christians too. To overcome this sense of superficiality and skin-deep "smarty-pants," they too need faith. Where to find it? Where? Where better than Warmism? Instead of just competing for choice slots in Washington or Libstream industries, they now are part of what the other religions aim to do---save mankind. Better yet, they can do it without crucifixion or parting the Red Sea or blowing themselves up. They can base their faith on "scientific fact."

So what if some scientists and "facts" dispute their faith? There are facts and facts and facts. Everyone disputes someone else. Schism. Sectarian strife. It's almost like a holy war. And why shouldn't it be? Isn't this the tribulation that all true believers must undergo and struggle against? And by the way, the power of this new faith clearly can affect even the serious among us, and put them on the defensive, like Alexandra, who is subjected to the "facts" sufficiently that she will take a quote from a very impressive man who's worked 50 years in the field, even flying into hurricanes, and cite this as anti-Warmist "spin." And maybe it is "spin" if abstracted totally from this man's life and experience, and turned into a "sound bite" for CNN, or even ATB.

Al Gore, now clearly campaigning as a Prince of the Baby Boomers, his new movie in effect establishing him as a Messiah of the Warmists (too modest, of course, to call it Gorianity) might be the perfect holy man for this creed. He can even sound like a southern preacher who's wavering between Baptist and High CHurch. With the firm conviction that he was elected President in 2000, whereas the detested Bush was merely "selected" by lawyers and judges, he's got the passion and ambition to return to national, if not world, prominence. Being in on Google at its IPO beginning, he's also got the bucks, and understands how liberals have always been able to accommodate to filthy rich capitalists. Do they or their media even care that Google in China has bent over nicely for the Internet-constricting Beijingers? Well, in the overall drive to save Planet Earth from the exploiters, how much does selling out to the commisars matter? Let's keep perspective here. Remember, they're only Chinese, and the vanguard of Baby Boomer Warmists is struggling to save the whole planet, which probably includes China.

[Kenny Pierce]

Alexandra,

I'm generally skeptical of the doomsayers, myself.

You're quite right that we very often have no choice but to appeal to authority, even though the appeal to authority is the weakest of all arguments. However, in such a situation it is important to know how to choose your authorities. And it's useful to remember that most people's opinion on global warming is not a matter of trusting scientists. Most people's opinion on global warming is a matter of trusting what somebody who isn't a scientist (like, say, Time magazine or Al Gore or National Review) says the "real" scientists really say. I find that nine out of ten times when somebody starts to give me a hard time about how I ought to trust the scientific consensus, if you simply ask, "How much of the research that goes into that consensus have you personally read?" the answer is, "Um, none." Which means they aren't trusting what scientists say about climate control; they're trusting what journalists say scientists say about climate control. And anybody who has had the experience of being "quoted" as an expert in a local news report knows just how much confidence to have that the "expert" views are being represented accurately.

For whatever its worth, these are the general principles involved in choosing one's authority. You are testing their competence and their honesty: they have to be able to tell what's really true, and they have to be willing to give it to you straight.

The tests of competency are:

1. Qualifications. (Note that if by "qualifications" you mean something like "he has tenure at Princeton" remember that this is in itself an appeal to the authority of the people issuing the qualifications, and thus you should probably ask, "Which department?" and if the answer is, say, "Religion" or "Wymyn's Studies," you discount the value of the qualifications accordingly.)

2. Record. For example, if Julian Simon tells you one thing and Paul Erlich tells you something different and you trust Erlich rather than Simon, then you deserve whatever happens to you. This is, in particular, a test that is devastating to those who wish us to trust the alarmist "scientific consensus" du jour because the "scientific consensus" -- as represented in the popular conception thereof, i.e., what Al Gore tells us is the scientific consensus -- has a long record of having its head stuffed firmly where the sun don't shine.

Here, for example: how familiar does this sound (it is taken from an article that cites the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, George Kukla of Columbia University, "a study released last month by two NOAA scientists", Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin, and Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, all in the space of nine paragraphs)?

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it...Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent...But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic...To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading...Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed...might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

Boy, that scientific consensus is sure something we laymen ought to listen to, and how dare those politicians not let the scientists tell them what to do? Except, um, this is from Newsweek's 1975 article about how global cooling was going to kill us all.

3. Methods. This is a much better measuring stick than qualifications or record; only you have to know something about the subject yourself in order to be able to evaluate their methodology. If I hadn't the benefit of a classical education I wouldn't know what real scholarship looks like and therefore wouldn't know what a complete piece of crap Elaine Pagels's stuff is; but knowing what I know about historical method I'm largely inoculated against her b.s. Your typical Time reporter is not so fortunate.

Even if you don't know specifics of the methodology, though, just being familiar with logic and rhetoric helps a ton. It is worthwhile to read through, for example, the recent exchange between Jason Lee Steorts, Paul Krugman and Think Progress, with a simple eye to the following general methodological points: which people give more evidence of having actually read the other person's writing with attention? Which people deal in specifics, dealing directly with the actual arguments of the other people and not taking refuge in vaguely gaseous generalizations and straw men? Which people, in short, are both thinking and writing rigorously, and which are just talking out of their butts? You don't have to be a climatologist to know that if Paul Krugman can write his recent New York Times piece about this Jason Lee Steorts piece, then Mr. Krugman cannot read, which makes one somewhat cautious about believing Mr. Krugman when he assures you that he has read up on the topic and now knows what the scientific consensus is.

But of course one cannot be confident that Steorts not a liar solely on the grounds that Krugman is patently an ass.

4. Self-consistency. Self-explanatory.

5. Underlying assumptions.

Tests of integrity (don't have time to expand on them at length):

1. Personal record: has this guy shown a pattern of telling the truth?

2. Conflicts of interest: does this guy have an incentive to lie?

[Darrell]

I suggest, Alexandra, that you keep looking if you want to find the voice of reason in this debate. Amory Lovins is just another Leftist ideologue with a slightly different Leftist perspective. Remember 'cottage industries' as the world's salvation? That's Amory. Look to a real scientist for answers. One that defers to science rather than any particular agenda. And let me help you get a good night's rest by telling you that global warming is more of a curiosity than a real concern. "The lockstep/groupthink scientific community" is in itself a lie. It's the lockstep/groupthink of the Left. More than 30,000 real scientists disagree--especially with the anthropogenic cause of global warming. The Left tries to get the head of NOAA fired for not pushing their nonsense about GW and hurricanes, for example. He holds fast relying on observed trends, knowing that we are in a normal period of increased activity. Leftist Dogma vs Science. One can hope which one wins.

The Earth's climate is variable--and has always been. There have been four documented ice ages that we know of, where the northern part of where today's population resides was covered by an ice sheet miles thick. Each of those ice ages was followed by a period of warming. We are in one of those periods now, the tail end truth be told if the observed trend continues. All that climate variability occurred when man could NOT have had an impact.

The greenhouse effect on Earth makes life here possible. The moon's(close enough to use as an example) mean surface temperature by day is 107 °C (225 °F) and by night drops to -153 °C (-243 °F). That assumes no atmosphere at all, of course, and that would affect life as we know it, perhaps;-) The greenhouse effect on Earth is principally driven by water vapor(90% on a simple volumetric basis, more like 95% because of other technical factors), unlike a planet like Venus where the greenhouse effect is driven solely by carbon dioxide, because water simply doesn't exist. To put it in terms that might seem more familiar, water vapor is like the central heating system in your home. Carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases, like methane, are equivalent to the waste heat produced by your refrigerator. You might be asking yourself now, if this is true, why are people giving so much attention to those other gases, like carbon dioxide. If your central heating system and your refrigerator were running on the hottest day of the year, where would you direct your attention? The reason is simple--it's all part of a political agenda, not a scientific concern. The agenda? To increase the cost of doing business in the US--to hurt the US and other Capitalist economies. To save Socialism and Europe who cannot compete with American goods on a level playing field because of the costs associated with all those Socialist "goodies"--lifetime employment benefits, long vacations, socialized medicine, etc, they have burdened themselves with. Combined with low productivity, of course, another artifact of Socialism. Their solution? Demonizing carbon dioxide. Extremely clever, because at 100% combustion efficiency, burning ANY hydrocarbon will produce carbon dioxide and water. That's why we exhale carbon dioxide when we burn those carbohydrates. Talk about moving the goal post! For thousands of years man has sought ways to achieve that 100% combustion efficiency in order to reduce pollution and save money and energy. Now that is no longer good enough. We can try to 'scrub' the carbon dioxide from the combustion gases, certain mineral can adsorb it, but that technology is not in place, nor are those minerals mined in sufficient quantities at the present time. Not to mention that the spent minerals would have to be disposed of, of course.

Why don't we address water vapor if we are truly concerned with the minimal effects[roughly 0.6 degrees C of global warming(in the 20th Century)] that we have observed? Because the people behind the agenda have no interest in solving any problem. Especially one that wouldn't affect the US unilaterally. Their solution(as evidenced by Kyoto)? Hold down European growth, make the US roll back emissions, exempt the world's fastest-growing energy consumers--China and India. Does that make any sense? It does if you just want the US to transfer industry to China and India in the hopes that such an enormous population with a new disposable income might buy some of those Euro products...

I haven't addressed all of the technical and scientific issues here because I'm simply tried of doing it. You might want to read http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/ if you are really concerned about this issue. And you may want to shed a tear for the demise of the scientific method in Europe. And keep a lookout for disappearing data, like denying the warming period in the Middle Ages...

From my link-- "Well, why is the planet warming so catastrophically if it's not CO2 then?
Who says it is warming catastrophically? Humans have only been trying to measure the temperature fairly consistently since about 1880, during which time we think the world may have warmed by about +0.6 °C ± 0.2 °C. As we've already pointed out, the estimate of warming is less than the error margin on our ability to take the Earth's temperature, generally given as 14 °C ± 0.7 °C for the average 1961-1990 while the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) suggest 13.9 °C for their average 1880-2004. We are pretty sure it was cold before the 1880 commencement of record and we would probably not handle the situation too well if such conditions returned but there has been no demonstrable catastrophic warming while people have been trying to measure the planet's temperature. If we have really been measuring a warming episode as we think we have, then setting new records for "hottest ever in recorded history" should happen just about every year -- although half a degree over a century is hardly something to write home about -- so there's really nothing exciting about scoring the highest number when looking at such a short history."

[KnightErrant]

One thing is true. The Earth will survive our tenure upon it. It was here long before humans appeared and it will be here long after we are dust. The question is, will we exit by our own hand a disgrace to our own creation?

As an environmentalist, I have seen a Calvinist approach to conservation that I recognize is self-defeating. As such, I have doubted our ability to live in harmony with the planet we depend on for life. I am embarrassed to say I was not aware of the Rocky Mountain Institute. I have only had the chance to scan their site, but it is very interesting. Thank you Alexandra.