The Past Future Tense
George Will reviews environmentalism’s track record at predicting the future of the earth by the technique of reviewing the past. Using newspaper archives, Will takes us back to yesteryear where we are confronted by one of environmentalism’s many predictions of doom. Then he speeds the archival time machine forward to show what actually happened. The depressingly consistent result is that environmentalism has missed the mark by a country mile.
The modern disaster cycle began in 1972, when “when we were warned (by computer models developed at MIT) that we were doomed. We were supposed to be pretty much extinct by now, or at least miserable. We are neither. So, what went wrong?” Will asks.
That year begat “The Limits to Growth,” a book from the Club of Rome, which called itself “a project on the predicament of mankind.” It sold 12 million copies, staggered the New York Times (“one of the most important documents of our age”) and argued that economic growth was doomed by intractable scarcities.
The modelers examined 19 commodities and said that 12 would be gone long before now — aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten and zinc …
Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings and thermometers; mercury consumption is down 98 percent, and its price was down 90 percent by 2000. Since 1970, when gold reserves were estimated at 10,980 tons, 81,410 tons have been mined, and estimated reserves are 51,000 tons. Since 1970, when known reserves of copper were 280 million tons, about 400 million tons have been produced globally, and reserves are estimated at almost 700 million tons. Aluminum consumption has increased 16-fold since 1950, the world has consumed four times the 1950 known reserves, and known reserves could sustain current consumption for 177 years. Potential U.S. gas resources have doubled in the past six years. And so on.
The modelers missed something — human ingenuity in discovering, extracting and innovating.
They missed a lot else. What went wrong was the mistaken application ceteris paribus — the idea that initial assumptions would not change over time. The environmentalists took man out of the equation, discounting both the effects of his genius and the equally limitless possibilities of his stupidity. The result is that the predicted future looked nothing like the actual past as seen in hindsight.
George Will flips through the other doomsday predictions and compares it to the results. A “population bomb” was going to overpopulate Europe, according to Paul Erlich. In actuality the Europeans are having to import people to make up for the lack of a replacement workforce. And so forth and so on. Time after time the environmentalists called out a result like a wannabee Babe Ruth. Time after time they struck out, their credibility saved only by the media’s inability to keep score and inexplicable tendency to give them one more turn at bat.
Still the Greens got some things right. They predicted a day when “the furnaces of Pittsburgh are cold; the assembly lines of Detroit are still. In Los Angeles, a few gaunt survivors of a plague desperately till freeway center strips . . . Fantastic?” No. In actual fact, these came true, at least in part. As Victor Davis Hanson reminds us, parts of California are actually reverting to 3rd world status, but not for the reasons the Greens predicted. It was not a lack of raw materials or famine which blighted them but policies that were at least partly caused by the environmentalists themselves. Hanson describes the gaunt survivors in California’s interior.
in the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood, and the wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about trivia — and so their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects in order to save the three-inch-long Delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents.
But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by coastal utopians who have little idea where the fuel for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil, and pasta.
As to the rest of the prediction, the furnaces of Pittsburgh are indeed cold and the assembly lines of Detroit are in fact still — but not for the reasons the environmentalists imagined. Pittsburgh, once known as “Steel City” has no steel mills left within the city limits. In Detroit the automotive assembly lines are kept fitfully moving only under the impetus of government subsidy. As for the remains of what used to be called Motor City, “the city of Detroit has a very strange, wild appearance, in some parts like a city of ruins many years older than it actually is, where nature reasserts itself in vegetation that spreads over the city’s crumbling structures.”
But the catastrophe which leveled these proud capitals was not due to anything the environmentalists predicted. On the contrary they were due to the failed attempts of the political process itself to manage that future. The combination of suicidal economic policies, a relentless pandering to unions and the special interest meddling of politicians — each undertaken for the ostensible purpose of making things better — succeeded in making things worse to a degree that is wondrous to behold. Surveying the ruins of industrial America Hanson notes elsewhere that “Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit”, raising the interesting possibility that recovering from a nuclear blast may be possible or at least a lot more likely than surviving terminally stupid political projects.
The worst thing about political crusades is that they manufacture “facts”. That is to say they mass-produce lies. As a now-skeptical environmentalist Fritz Varenholt noted, movements to save the world tend to force the data into the narrative. After a while the public, force fed a diet of press releases, come to believe the narrative is the fact. Writing in the Telegraph Varenholt describes when he first noticed that the books were being cooked:
Scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are quite certain: by using fossil fuels man is currently destroying the climate and our future. We have one last chance, we are told: quickly renounce modern industrial society – painfully but for a good cause.
For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN’s climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too.
They might happen in other IPCC reports indeed. But his warning is clear: by torturing the facts to serve a political consensus activists created an enormous temptation to lie — and got it. They poisoned their own feedback loop and launched themselves into headlong destruction. The political trends which have ruined California for example and which on a wider scale threaten the Western world had their roots in good intentions. Yet as each of these falsehoods crashed against the hard reef of fact they were rescued by a successive lies until with numbing inevitability we had nothing left but the Palace of Falsehoods. Today large parts of the world live in that mansion. Great ain’t it.
Belmont Commenters
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Climate change has no data and no theory. Other than that, it’s fine.
1. No data. You can’t tell a cycle from a trend with data short compared to the cycle you need to exclude. (Mechanism: the eigenvalues of the discriminating matrix blow up. No measurement whatsoever is good enough to tell.) A cycle can’t be man-caused.
2. No theory. You can’t solve the Navier Stokes equations. (Mechanism: in three dimensions flows tend to shorter and shorter scales, so no resolution whatsoever is adequate. You need the short scale flows though because they act as a sort of ersatz viscosity back on larger scale flows. So you can’t solve the equation governing the medium you want to predict. Instead, they pull a different equation out of their ass and solve that. That’s not physics.) It’s much worse than just the NS equations, but that will do.
Modellers have taken what physicists call an alternate career path, that you might characterize as an absence of curiosity about physics and an interest in management.
But there’s no reason to pay attention to them, except to sell audience eyes to advertisers.
What George Will is predicting is the reason Peak Oil will never happen either. Consumers will change their habits in connection with prices. Eventually oil will not make economic sense, but alternatives will arise to fill the gap. Many already exist but they are not cost effective yet.
We still include petroleum in the list of “fossil” fuels.
I understand why COAL is defined that way – you can clearly see the leaves and stems and even the occasional body part of some critter all carbonized and black within the mass of the stuff. It’s mighty compelling evidence that the coal is made up of stuff that used to be alive, and that there must be some finite amount of coal from any one period. That would be coal<all the plants that used to be alive.
But Petroleum isn't coal, and neither is Natural GAS. It's quite possible that the THEORIES telling us they are the product of buried dead stuff are WRONG.
Experiments about the origins of life done since the 1950's have demonstrated conclusively that the chemicals associated with biologic processes can be generated with the extremely finite resources of a laboratory bench using heat, electric sparks, and a few basic chemicals.
The benthic ocean floors have numerous giant accumulations of CLATHRATES – water ice mixed with methane. Methane can be created by biologic metabolic processes, but it is also created by the "sterile" processes of vulcanism and lightning.
It is quite possible that the theory of the biologic origin of petroleum and natural gas is completely wrong. How would you test?
Abiotic petroleum might account for the re-filling of a number of petroleum reservoirs thought to have been exhausted.
Anyone know of any current studies or theories?
@ #3
Fiddler, I read a very long pdf written by Anthony Zuppero (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Zuppero) :
http://www.scribd.com/doc/31815709/To-Inhabit-the-Solar-System-Using-the-Water-in-Space
Who pointed out that we KNOW many comets have hydrocarbons embedded in various ices, like methane. Conventional wisdom is that petroleum is dead dinosaurs and vegetation. How the hell do you get that on a meteor/asteroid/comet? And if those hydrocarbons are NOT organically based, how do we know they’re not being formed right now, versus a finite commodity?
As I said, that’s a long pdf but I recommend taking the time to read it. AZ is a very interesting guy.
“The political trends which . . . threaten the Western world had their roots in good intentions.” Brilliantly analyzed in the Great Course “Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century.”
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=8313
I think that the political trends that threaten the West, Western culture, Western governments, are the same poison that was fashioned in the alternate intellectual circles of the West.
The hunger, the desire, the impetus toward collectivism. The struggle never stops. Every few generations it re-appears with a new name and a new Utopia promised, if only everyone would submit to more government management to end these silly ideas about liberty and freedom and accept the mandate of equality in their place. The equality of collectivism.
It never ends, and there are no good intentions at the root of it. Some people want to invent some peripheral good intention “it’s for the children”, “it’s for the future”, “it’s more fair”, “we have to save the planet”.
If only you proles and kulaks learn to sacrifice for the betterment of all, and accept equality mandated by the government. And these ropes that bind you are all made of satin and silk, and won’t hurt a bit.
They feed this crap to kids in school everyday. It’s fun to watch my kids revolt in little ways, and they will revolt in bigger ways when they get a little older and more confident and mature.
Star Trek IV hypothesized whales as earth-watchers, whose songs were needed to prevent a doomsday device from triggering a deluge or something. If they can’t convert people to eco-worship, they can still say “God says so” within your own religion.
Shark fins are latest cause for alarm and ethnic warfare… although I’m pretty sure whale wars guy is a security detail for the whalers. How else could Discovery be allowed to profit from that?
Facts do not matter for environmentalists, Wretchard. What matters is power and priveledge for themselves. Today they demand power over others in order to stop global warming, aka climate change, aka the weather. Back in the 1970s exactly the same arguements were made – things are changing for the worse, we must stop the impending disaster – in order to stop global cooling and the next ice age.
Making situations worse also does not matter, as long as environmentalists get to have power and feel good about themselves. Case in point: modern energy efficient bulbs, very nice, very environmentally friendly – except for the mercury heavy metal poison they contain. Break one, and you have your very own miniature toxic waste site in your house.
At the root of all this enviro-crap is not some noble goal to save the planet-it’s $. Always follow the money: right, Mr. Gore?
“… [B]y torturing the facts to serve a political consensus activists created an enormous temptation to lie — and got it. … Yet as each of these falsehoods crashed against the hard reef of fact they were rescued by a successive lies until with numbing inevitability we had nothing left but the Palace of Falsehoods. Today large parts of the world live in that mansion. Great ain’t it.”
If you want to see how many are living in the mansion, at least those inhabitants heaping condescension, contempt, and indignation on Will at the Post web site, pour yourself a beer and have at it. The total was at 2,384 and counting when I took my snapshot, and suffice it to say the great majority of comments are not sympathetic to your viewpoint, Wretchard. When I say many of them are hysterical, I’m being literal. Nothing threatens so much as someone who questions the narrative. Just wondering, has Will’s home ever been besieged by people carrying torches and farm implements?
Maturity as a precursor to superior understanding of the human condition. Where have I heard that before?
Histrionic personality disorder (HPD) is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as a personality disorder characterized by a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention-seeking, including an excessive need for approval and inappropriately seductive behavior, usually beginning in early adulthood. These individuals are lively, dramatic, vivacious, enthusiastic, and flirtatious. HPD affects four times as many women as men.[1] It has a prevalence of 2–3% in the general population, and 10–15% in inpatient and outpatient mental health institutions.[2]
HPD lies in the dramatic cluster of personality disorders.[3] People with HPD have a high need for attention, make loud and inappropriate appearances, exaggerate their behaviors and emotions, and crave stimulation.[3] They may exhibit sexually provocative behavior, express strong emotions with an impressionistic style, and can be easily influenced by others.
Rodney King for The New Age: Can’t we all just be adult about this?
“… raising the interesting possibility that recovering from a nuclear blast may be possible or at least a lot more likely than surviving terminally stupid political projects.”
That’s a great quote!
Mark Twain once said “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” He left one out: mathematical models that purport to predict the future.
Given a finite segment of a graph of something such as unemployment as a percentage over time it is relatively easy to find correlations with other factors over that same time frame that, when blended together into a function, seem to describe the rate of unemployment within a small margin of error. And the shorter the segment of time over which they are compared, the easier it is to do.
One could perhaps determine that at any given time within the last year the unemployment rate can be determined by: (percentage of prostitutes who are of Lithuanian descent) times (number of rolls of toilet paper bought). The solution to unemployment then? Kill all the Lithuanian prostitutes or make the sale of toilet paper illegal. Unemployment will shrink to zero. Silly? Of course. When you kill all the Lithuanian prostitutes and the unemployment rate does not fall you do not fault the model, you merely refine it. It was not the prostitutes per se, but all the folks they infected with STD’s. The model is actually quite sound. All we need to do is round up all those Johns and pump them full of penicillin. And so it goes…on and on and on. The more it fails, the more its “refined,” the uglier and more grotesque it becomes.
And really, that’s what the Narrative truly is: a flawed model from the past which claimed to be the key to understanding everything. But there are those who just cannot let go of it, they still have faith that the rotten termite infested log is really a god.
“It is quite possible that the theory of the biologic origin of petroleum and natural gas is completely wrong. How would you test?”
Like ANY other theory. You make observations and check them against the theory.
With the OIL from Dinos theory, you observe that at least one moon of Juipter is covered with oceans of hydrocarbons (oil). So for this observation to validate the OIl from dinos theory, one has to postulate the moons of Juipter were a graveyard for Dinosaurs;
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090406091234.htm
I worked with a team of Geologists during the Clinton administration. We were looking for OIL. The favorite beers after work theory (hypothesis would be better) was that OIL was formed by the heat and pressure at the core-mantel junction. The core spins faster then the mantel, which creates fricton and therefore heat. OIL is the earth’s lubricant.
There are issues with that hypothesis also but not as many as the dead dino theory.
Applying the scientific method to AGW, one comes to a major logical flaw. As far back as human science can measure (1.2 million years) there has been climate change. Humans have existed for only 40,000 years or so. 100,000 with the wildest estimates. Now archaeology is a new science and I have my personal doubts about both 40,000 and 100,000 years but 1.2 million gets us back to an atmosphere that would be inimical to human life.
Current atmosphere was created by the Glaciers withdrawing. That added water to the system, which in turn increased the amount and variety of plant life. That increased the amount of both Oxygen and carbon. Both re-cycle naturally but Oxygen does so much faster then carbon. There is more evidence for global warming creating CO2 then there is for CO2 creating global warming.
As far as the Rome Group failing, I beg to differ. If their purpose was to scare humanity off of technology then they failed. If their purpose was to F.U.D. their way into Billions of dollars, then they did a bang up job.
What is needed is for the EPA to be down graded from a regulatory agency to a research only branch of the Interior.
Haji can’t shoot.
David @ 6: “They feed this crap to kids in school everyday. It’s fun to watch my kids revolt in little ways, and they will revolt in bigger ways when they get a little older and more confident and mature.”
Interesting how the Baby Boomers who started out as iconclasts revolting against the Establishment have now become that Establishment — albeit a much stuffier, less tolerant, more boring, overpoweringly hypocritical version of an Establishment.
But the young rebell against the old — and the Boomers are now definitely yesterday’s news. (Forget Hillary! Clinton; have you seen Paul McCartney recently?). And there is only one clear path for youth these days to rebell against this hideous Establishment — smoke, go to church, and join the army. Big wheel keeps on turning, and no victory is final; not even today’s victory of the stuffy old unscientific arithmetically-challenged poorly-prognosticating Left.
Recently Gov Jerry Brown here in CA bragged about his new web page slamming “deniers.” http://www.opr.ca.gov/s_denier.php
Not that many folks at Belmont Club are either surprised or threatened by this, but he is CEO of my state with a lot pf power available to do mischief.
Just this afternoon, the estimable Anthony Watts posts about a huge, glaring error on Jerry’s page, missed by CA’s Office of Planning and Research!
http://tinyurl.com/8dj5ov5
We should know by now that this type of “planning and research” is entirely political with little relevance to actual events.
It’s a little known fact of history, but environmentalists almost nipped the game of baseball in the bud.
I tell you, Abner, this won’t do
Your game will harm a thing or two
Our forests are denuded now
So wooden bats we can’t allow
Removing grass for infields will
Reduce the food for horses till
They become scarce and that’s a fact
So playing ball’s a harmful act
The ball you say is horsehide too
So you can see with horses few
That making balls with scarce resource
Will lead to taking hides by force
Your uniforms are made of wool
And as we know the threads all pull
Resulting in more sheep to shear
And that will lead to what I fear
Is ecologically, alas
A drain upon our dwindling grass
Our corn is finite too as well
So all the popcorn you will sell
And peanuts yes and crackerjack
Will mean that all these things we’ll lack
With people singing Take Me Out
To The Ballgame with a shout
The strain on trolleys will be great
And then we’re in a sorry state
A girl’s game, Rounders, that’s the truth
Your game will lead to boys named Ruth
And if your game becomes a hit
We’ll soon have Mantle, Mays and Schmidt
No Abner this will never do
For all our sakes we order you
To listen to your betters, us
Your players will all spit and cuss
And Goddess Gaia will be pleased
When strain upon her Earth is eased
The Earth is finite in its yields
So we forbid these baseball fields
And as we know, the environmentalists were right. The horses are gone, the corner lots are filled with the ping of aluminum bats, woolen uniforms are no more, and nobody sings Take Me Out To The Ballgame anymore, except Harry Carey in the seventh inning stretch at Wrigley. Everybody else is at home watching on television,drinking beer and wondering what the heck happened to the Phillies.
I saw Will’s column, it’s excellent, and wretchard’s trope that the greens are self-fulfilling doomsters, is better yet.
Still I protest Will’s crediting the difference to human ingenuity. I’d rather credit the bad predictions to human stupidity. Will quotes Simon’s bet with Erlich even in 1980. As far as I can tell the attempted association of CO2 levels and global warming is just incredibly bad science, the stuff that gets you flunked from chem 201. Water vapor is *the* greenhouse gas. Maybe watering our lawns and growing crops in arid regions is “dangerous”, but not running our SUVs (actually the oceans were and are large enough, a few acres of wheat aren’t going to cause the Earth to spiral into the Sun, I don’t think). There may be economic reasons for a carbon tax, but saving the Earth is not one of them.
Regarding abiotic petroleum I would point out that even that would be finite, and even much of the finite amount might be too deep to get. I have no dinosaur in the race, I can’t see that it matters a whole lot, we find it, we get it, or we don’t.
15. Kinuachdrach
The dragon to be slain is always the dragon of the status quo.
Of course, not all dragons of the status quo are as bad as others but that’s beside the eternal generational point. Each generation slays the dragon of their own status quo. Then the dragon slayers themselves build a new status quo which must in turn be vanquished.
Our dragon of the status quo happens to be goofier than most and it lives in wretchard’s Palace of Falsehoods. Maybe the coming generations can whack the dragon and pull down its Palace at the same time.
”Mark Twain once said ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ ”
I believe Disraeli said that in a debate in Parliament, in response to something like: ”Statistics have shown … ”
Twain knew him and heard it in that way.
“The worst thing about political crusades is that they manufacture “facts”.”
Several years ago a femanist leader stated that “50,000 American women die each year due to eating disorders.”
People went “Wow! I had no idea it was that bad!” It never occurred to most that number is equal to the number of Americans killed each year in automobile accidents. There ought to be expiring bolimics as far as the eye can see.
But then someone investigated that number. Turned out it came from another femanist leader who had got it from another one, and eventually it was traced down to a claim that 50,000 American woman suffered from eating disorders – suffered, not died – and even the validity of that number was suspect. The actual number that have died is more like between zero and 3.
The Left has learned the value of the Big Lie. Lie big enough, and specifically enough, and it sounds like it must be real.
Small changes have big effects;
http://mobile.slate.com/articles/business/transport/2012/08/pallets_the_single_most_important_object_in_the_global_economy_.single.html
“Looking to improve turnaround times for materials handling, a Navy Supply Corps officer named Norman Cahners—who would go on to found the publishing giant of the same name—invented the “four-way pallet.” This relatively minor refinement, which featured notches cut in the side so that forklifts could pick up pallets from any direction, doubled material-handling productivity per man. If there’s a Silver Star for optimization, it belongs to Cahners.”
2 small notches produced a 50% increase in productivity. With a corresponding decrease in the need for unskilled labor. That is why the Socialist Job creation program failed and will continue to fail. Labor cost is to high to pay 50 guys to dig a ditch when you can hire a back hoe and operator for the same or less money and do the job much quicker.
The sort of people that make prediction about the future never thing about this stuff.
Celer, Silens, Mortalis.
My favorite invention story today is the development of an an endless aerospace pipeline.
Aerospace Materials Used to Build ‘Endless’ Pipeline
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120817093046.htm
Basically the pipeline is made of lightweight materials familiar to the aerospace industry. But that’s only half of it. The pipeline is made by the extrusion process. That is, instead of building heavy cumbersome steel and concrete pipeline off site and the hauling to the site and jointing them together every 20 feet….–this pipeline can be extruded forever onsite with cheap lightweight materials that are easy to bring onsite.
I’ve been calling for a process like this for the last 10 years. Why because it will collapse the cost of building and maintaining pipelines. You would be able to run ten pipelines of desalinated water 1000 miles inland from any seacoast for the cost of 1`of today’s pipelines with this process. No expensive time consuming joints are required.
Now couple this with thorium reactors producing dirt cheap electricity. And the capital and maintenance costs for shipping rivers of water inland are well on their way to making desert farming cost effective.
For more details on how to collapse the cost of energy and water go here
If the love of money is the root of all evil then the love of theory is the root of all folly.
“The depressingly consistent result is that environmentalism has missed the mark by a country mile.”
disada and stoicheon are correct. It was meant to be a money and power pump and as such it has worked.
George Will is on to something. The public square is littered with windbags and their offal. We need to exhume the opinions of public intellectuals politicians pundits and entertainers and document their track records. The government should not restrict speech that is not clearly an incitement to violence or otherwise dangerous. Private actions should possibly be allowed for civil damages when falsehood creates costs.
My theory is that End of the World hysteria was discovered in the late ’50s to early ’60s to be a great way to get girls. “End of the world party. Do you want to die a virgin?”
Repeating myself, but what the hell:
1. The Greens win the argument. We pass Kyoto, ride bicycles, tax methane.
2. Er, there was a problem with the model. The earth warms several degrees more than if we’d continued our polluting ways.
3. Siberia thaws and becomes the new Iowa. World hunger disappears, even in the media. Obesity epidemic strikes Africa. It’s paradise on earth.
4. The Greens show up again and take credit for the whole thing.
#8. “Facts do not matter for environmentalists, Wretchard. What matters is power and priveledge for themselves.”
That may be true for the some the movement’s leaders. For the rank and file true believers I think it is something else. Remember, most of these folks don’t cotton to traditional religion. I think much of their motivation is to be heroes, saviors of humanity, thus giving their lives meaning.
Their contempt for those who disagree matches the knight’s loathing of a villian. Don Quixote’s indeed.
Back in the 1970′s I had some sympathy for environmentalism but wasn’t very impressed by the so-called science behind the Club of Rome. All the stuff Will says in his column was said at the time. Hell, even I said it. What I came up with to explain my thinking was the twenty-year rule. If there is more than a twenty year supply of oil then no one looks for it. You’ll spend lots of money, take huge risks and then sell into a buyers market. If there is less then twenty years then you look for it — by the time the fields are developed the price will be going up. A similar process would be at work with other resources. There was something like a twenty year boom-bust cycle in oil documented at the time and large easy-to-get Middle Eastern fields put a damper on exploration.
Back in 2008 when the Peak Oil people were in full throat I said — look for it and it will be found. Punishing people who looked for oil seemed to be policy so few people looked — except for those wildcatters.
When talking about global warming I noticed a tendency for the advocates to make stuff up (like entire climate models). So I’d tell people that for billions of years volcanoes pushed CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. Then this activity slowed and over millions of years these gases got trapped in the oceans and in rocks and in organic matter. So the planet cooled and we entered the age of ice (we are currently in an inner glacial period). Fortunately we now have the ability to return these gases to the atmosphere on an industrial scale and prevent the return of the glaciers and give the planet the climate it was meant to have. It’s fun.
7. Baobo
What an incredible internal struggle this must represent.
21. RWE
I hate myself eternally for admitting it, but I have to confess for even a longer period: I am a partial bulimic.
I know, I know; no one wants to hear about my personal problems.
But, here it is. I’ve got the binge schtick down perfectly, but I’ve yet been able to master the purge.
So…there you have it.
Well, you could argue that WWII was a terminally stupid political project on the part of Imperial Japan.
Josh
The original CO2 greenhouse theory was a reasonable hypothesis, and it did account for water as the most significant greenhouse gas. The theory was that CO2 could cause additional water vaport in the atmosphere, serving sort of as the input to an amplifier. The oceans would warm, pump more vapor into the air, increase greenhouse effect, etc. etc.
Of course in the end it wasn’t correct, and the guy who first proposed it (Roger Revelle of Scripps) closed out his career trying to debunk his own theory once he realized it was wrong (he was a genuine scientist who believed theories needed proof, not marketing agendas). But by then the hucksters had grabbed hold of it and he was vilified by the Greenies.
But thinking about Revelle’s original hypothesis alongside the Club of Rome/Erlich-esque static thinking, I’m amused. In a sad way.
The entire carbon-crisis farrago is based on dynamic modeling. Hyper-dynamic in a sense. There’s no linear changes (else there would be no crisis!), and the doomsday scenario comes from changes that the environment will supposedly make in response to the relatively small increase in CO2 we are allegedly responsible for.
On the other hand, the Peak Oil (or Food, Water, Clean Air, insert commodity here) crisis always is based on static models – nothing changes in response to whatever happens, it’s just inevitably down a greased skid to despair.
No consistency. Odd isn’t it, that the only trace of consistency in environmentalist doomsayers methods is that their conclusion always demands we give them more money and power so they can save us.
There is a certain type of person who enjoys predicting the world is going to end real soon and that global warming is the cause. They worship Gaia.
In 1348-1350 Europe was much warmer than it is today. This medieval hot period stretched from 1200 to 1550, a period in which many cities were built. Unfortunately when the Mongols invaded Europe they brought their fleas with them. These fleas carried the Black Death which killed 50-60% of Europeans in 1348-1350.
The experts decided this plague meant that God was coming to render the Last Judgement and anyone tainted with sin would burn in Hell or Purgatory.
However, if a person did immediate penance he would go to heaven. Soon there were large crowds of flagelants whipping themselves, singing Dies Irae, going from village to village spreading the word.
As you may suspect the world did not end and there was no Last Judgement. The remaining 40% of the population were immune to the current strain of Black Death. Nevertheless, the experts claimed the world was saved by prayer and penitence.
Even in these modern atheist times, the experts at the EPA (the priesthood of Gaia) preach the same message as they did in 1350. Prayer, penitance and self-punishment. Today they warn about Global Warming rather than the fires of Hell. Same thing.
The weather is never predictable.
I am an environmentalist. I am not a villain, and I am not your enemy. I just encourage common sense. Don’t allow industries to heedlessly pour toxic stuff into the rivers and oceans. As an individual, please don’t poisin needlessly. Be aware of repercussions of your actions. I am not a global-warming fanatic. Do not paint all environmentalists as nuts, it’s not a black and white world.
hdg @ 28: What I came up with to explain my thinking was the twenty-year rule. If there is more than a twenty year supply of oil then no one looks for it.
Yes, that’s a great way of putting it.
Look, today’s environmentalism is a tremendous advance over the prevailing worldviews pre-1970s, when everyone just dumped industrial waste out the back, we had the Love Canal business and the Ohio River catching fire, death smogs in London and Pittsburg, etc. The rise in consciousness is a good thing, but what we have more lately learned is that it MUST be linked to good science, or can zag in the other direction and instead of recognizing externalized costs it can incur unnecessary externalized costs. Moderation in all things, and truth before hysteria.
I am mildly concerned about rising CO2 levels because I’m not a plant and at some point it could become a problem, I’m mildly in favor of a carbon tax because it’s a good way to recognize some remaining externalized costs and can put both green energy and advanced thorium fission on a rational economic basis. But with blowhards like Algore flying off the handle with a random factoid locked in his teeth, well, we have to expect that from the political system, I guess, and Obambus shows us daily with his enthusiasm for green energy (as if) what a half-bright and spectacularly poorly advised politician can earnestly believe in, no matter that it is utter nonsense. Especially if a little graft and corruption can follow from said morally and fashionably held belief. It’s all for the kids that we sink $500,000,000 into Solyndra, well, it might have worked.
Politics is a blunt instrument, and science is harder than it looks.
ge @ 32: The remaining 40% of the population were immune to the current strain of Black Death.
I think that oversimplifies a bit, I think the immunity was not a dominant trait and it took several waves of plague before a majority of the population had at least one copy of the gene, enough to raise odds of survival, where it takes two copies to resist infection. And even the great plagues didn’t reach every village and farm, leaving susceptibles in the population. And then, lo and behold, the AIDS virus uses the same cellular gateway as the bubonic plague, so there is some preexisting genetic resistance to that, too.
d @ 33: I am an environmentalist.
At the risk of misunderstanding you – what’s your point? Do you think there are people running around who are anti-environmentalists, who want to pollute and destroy the environment, so that there is some point to claiming you are better than them?
Jonathan Tobin notes at Commentary that the latest bugaboo of the eco-nuts is air conditioning: “. . . the latest New York Times feature about the evils of air conditioning and how the increasing demand for it in the Third World is unsustainable tells us a lot more about the left and its mindset than it does about the future of society.
The piece in the Sunday Review by Elisabeth Rosenthal at least is honest about why more air conditioning is needed. It is a major factor in productivity around the world. The economic boom in places like Singapore and other warm-weather cities was made possible in no small measure by air conditioning. As population growth and economic activity rises in other Third World cities, more AC will be needed. But for the Times, this spells environmental doom since they tell us the energy used to run the units and the emissions from the coolants will create more global warming. The answer from the left to this conundrum is typical of the sort of eco-Luddite argument we’ve been hearing for decades. People will have to learn to live without air conditioning in the same way they are told to live without the freedom that automobiles give them. Sweat more and shut up about it seems to be the mantra. But the problem with this sort of thinking is not just the arrogance of western liberals telling people to do without modern conveniences; it is that it reflects a lack of understanding of human potential. . . one need only read the hundreds of comments by the liberal readership of the Times in response to the article about air conditioning to see that many of them are still focused on the thesis that underlined that original fallacious Club of Rome report about scarcity: there are too many people on the planet and laws must be passed to limit procreation.”
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/08/19/eco-luddites-new-target-air-conditioning-global-warming-scarcity/#more-802636
Given what this past summer has been like on the East Coast, the NYT crowd will have to pry my one-room A/C from my not-so-cold dead hands. And the cats feel the same way.
33 @Darryl
I doubt many here would disagree with you; I certainly don’t disagree with the gist of your post. Where conservation went bad is when it morphed into “environmentalism”, embracing one doom prophecy after another, like a fickle lover. I agree with the posters who mentioned that the guys at the top of the enviro food chain mostly use it as a political vehicle, and as a way of making money. The pols have latched onto it as a method of concentrating more power into their hands.
Nobody wants dirty air and water. Where we may differ is in where the point of diminishing returns sits, in regards to how regulations choke freedoms and economic activity needlessly for a negligible return.
@4 lescoulee
[Anthony Zuppero] Who pointed out that we KNOW many comets have hydrocarbons embedded in various ices, like methane. Conventional wisdom is that petroleum is dead dinosaurs and vegetation. How the hell do you get that on a meteor/asteroid/comet? And if those hydrocarbons are NOT organically based, how do we know they’re not being formed right now, versus a finite commodity?
There’s a big difference betweeen abiotic methane and abiotic petroleum. That abiotic methane exists is known, accepted or mostly accepted by the “mainstream,” etc. The question is whether abiotic petroleum exists.
Darryl @ 33: “I am an environmentalist.”
Goodness! That sounds a little like an introduction at an AA meeting.
Maybe it is simply that you (and all the rest of us) really are excessively susceptible to peer pressure.
Read some of the accounts by the Conquistadores of their subjucation of the Americas. Along with their graphic descriptions of peeing their own pants when they realized how big were the Indian forces arrayed against them, there are constant references to the support they got from God & his Saints. Or watch some of the Saudi video coverage of Ramadan services at the main mosque in Mecca, where there are more fighting-age males praying than could be found in the entire Church of England on any Sunday. Then think of respondents telling the pollsters how concerned they are about Anthropogenic Global Warming, or maybe it is Climate Change, or maybe it is … Hell, whatever it is, we are just like our neighbors and are really concerned about it too.
It is genetic — we human beings tend to go with the flow, whatever the flow of the moment happens to be. Peer pressure is not just for the young!
Let me introduce myself to the meeting. I used to be an environmentalist; and then I started to think for myself. I am in favor of clean air, clean water, and polar bears. I am also in favor of human beings having enough to eat, roofs over our heads, and good medical care. I know that Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, and the charlatans at the Sierra Club are incapable of getting the balance right between those disparate desireable goals.
@14 stoicheion
With the OIL from Dinos theory, you observe that at least one moon of Juipter is covered with oceans of hydrocarbons (oil). So for this observation to validate the OIl from dinos theory, one has to postulate the moons of Juipter were a graveyard for Dinosaurs;
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090406091234.htm
No, not oil. Simple hydrocarbons: methane (CH4) and ethane (C2H6). They are liquids on Titan because the temperature is so low. Oil is a very different item – long-chain hydrocarbons.
No, the mainstream theory does not say dinosaurs. It says vegetation and microbial life.
Applying the scientific method to AGW, one comes to a major logical flaw. As far back as human science can measure (1.2 million years) there has been climate change. Humans have existed for only 40,000 years or so. 100,000 with the wildest estimates. Now archaeology is a new science and I have my personal doubts about both 40,000 and 100,000 years but 1.2 million gets us back to an atmosphere that would be inimical to human life.
No, the atmosphere 1.2 million years ago was not “inimical to human life.”
No, 100,000 years is not one of the “wildest estimates.” Homo sapiens is thought to have been anatomically modern for 200,000 years, and behaviorally modern for 50,000. Homo neandertalis appeared 350,000-600,000 years ago. Human ancestors became fully bipedal 3.6 million years ago. The great apes appeared 15 million years ago. Primates appeared 65-85 million years ago.
@14 stoicheion
I see that I overlooked something. You seem to think that the withdrawal of the glaciers was a one-time event 1.2 million years ago. That’s not true. There have been about 20 glacial periods and interglacial periods during the past 2 million years, with the most recent of them ending about 20,000 years ago. Anatomically modern h. sapiens lived through two glacial periods, and behaviorally modern h. sapiens appeared during the most recent one, about 30,000 years before it ended.
But since you think that the atmosphere before the glaciers withdrew was “inimical to human life,” I really shouldn’t worry about “behaviorally modern” or even “anatomically modern.” Creatures something like humans lived many millions of years ago, and animals whose atmospheric composition requirements were similar to ours lived many tens of millions of years ago.
Stoicheion, do you want to know why I post very few messages at the Belmont Club? It’s because I don’t know much about war and stuff. I’m in awe of some of you guys. Hell, I don’t even know all that much about science.
I’m probably older than most of you. Herewith two old-guy memories: First, we have been hearing for at least forty years, probably more but I don’t recall, that we have no more than twenty years of oil left. The only question about that assertion is whether the asserters know better.
And, subbing in a HS science class in the 68, I discovered global warming, CO2 heat trapping, in the lesson plan. No catastrophe predicted, afaik, but the point was out there, in at least in HS.
21. RWE
“The worst thing about political crusades is that they manufacture “facts”.”
Several years ago a femanist leader stated that “50,000 American women die each year due to eating disorders.”
—
We are bombarded with the dangers of smoking, and its burden on the health care system.
The obese of the USA cost the health care system $43B annually. I used google. That is more than smokers cost. We should outlaw eating near children and in closed in spaces. Cars, even. The horror.
Second hand smoke causing cancer studies do not pass the smell test, so to speak.
Science. Abused and used grotesquely to warp facts to fit theories.
tom
29. Sgian Dubh – “What an incredible internal struggle this must represent.”
Yes. I like seafood, but I don’t want sea creatures to die. They belong in the ocean. Also I’m not sure who I hate more: spies or criminals like Paul Watson… Both types of people should admit publicly who they are, and reform.
@ 33 Darryl
“I am an environmentalist. I am not a villain, and I am not your enemy. I just encourage common sense. Don’t allow industries to heedlessly pour toxic stuff into the rivers and oceans. As an individual, please don’t poisin needlessly. Be aware of repercussions of your actions. I am not a global-warming fanatic. Do not paint all environmentalists as nuts, it’s not a black and white world.”
I have a lefty friend who says similar things. In our discussions, I have learned that he justifies state intervention tactics (and taxes) using the kinds of common sense points that you make. What he does not understand is that trying to dictate solutions instead of encouraging private sector solutions leads to costly, inefficient programs that end up creating cynicism in those who once were supportive. Frankly, the world will not come to an end because of questionable methods of dealing with garbage or occasional oil spills or the use of plastic bags. You could do more good for the “cause” by arguing with the fanatics out there rather than the readers of this blog.
For a similar review of predictions see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/17/apocalypse-not-i-love-the-smell-of-skepticism-in-the-morning/.
It’s interesting how those on the left so often talk about things not being black and white yet like to use simplistic terms like “common sense”, “smart diplomacy”, “tough decisions”, “mend it, don’t end it”, and best of all “it’s for the children”. Someone once said “the value of common sense is inversely proportional to its abundance”.
#32 The first outbreak of plague hit the middle East about 550-600. The fleas came with rats brought from India by Arab sailors/traders on dhows. Plague was there waiting for the proper set of conditions of population density, warmth, and food (garbage)for mass rat population explosion. Plague is resident in the flea/rat complex in our SW deserts. What we don’t have is a large, dense, urban infected urban rat population in contact with man.
Look up the Thomas Golds theory of hydrocarbon production. He thought that hydrocarbons were part of the original material of universe formation and are formed/reformed in the earths core.
Most of the environmentalists I have met seemed to be naive. The leaders are shysters out to make a buck like most hustlers. There followers in large part want to be deluded and aren’t intellictually curious and can’t/won’t critically think.
Tomw #42:
For some time here they have been describing in TV spots how horrible it is to go to a park and find there are people who are smoking.
In a park. And outside, not in a park building.
Now, when they go to the park people usually drive a car to get there. And how many people commit suicide by putting their car in a garage, engine off, and light up a pack of Luckys? It’s like the old joke about the guy who succeeded in doing that; he starved to death.
Cars have been cleaned up a lot but I still think they emit more hazardous emissions that a guy smoking a cigarette outside.
Darryl #33:
And as for “environmentalism” in general, you can see that given the amount of clean up we have done so far, it really is not about the environment any longer. It is about people. Control over people. Extracting money from people. Providing a soapbox for otherwise useless people to become celebrities. It’s not really even about diddling with the margins, upping that incremental 0.0001% that will make something “cleaner.”
Frog @ 39 & 40 – We could spend considerable effort debunking the AGW theories and various models employed to support them. It’s great that others with more knowledge have led the way in that arena. It needed to be done.
Somewhere there was a bone flute found in a cave, dated to 40,000 years old. It’s not difficult to believe that humans used that flute. Now we come to the fossil record of Human ancestors became fully bipedal 3.6 million years ago . Those are interesting fossil records. Is it a necessary conclusion that humans are descendant from those? Can we not hypothesize another way humans could come into existence?
@42: The obese of the USA cost the health care system $43B annually. I used google. That is more than smokers cost.
Who can forget the hoots and jeers of “centrally planned nutrition” when control of obesity was first raised as a potential cost mitigation factor. Number of smokers in USA has declined on all fronts including those who smoke and how much they smoke. Obesity OTOH has skyrocketed. The studies and the numbers are publicly available for anyone interested in policy as something more than a tool wielded with fiendish righteousness by a cabal of central planners who actually care what you eat.
@44: What he does not understand is that trying to dictate solutions instead of encouraging private sector solutions leads to costly, inefficient programs that end up creating cynicism in those who once were supportive.
The out-of-the-gate Green initiatives (under Nixon) were specifically directed at policy and programs to repair and maintain clean and healthy air, water, and land resources. Over a broad spectrum of matrices, the Greens and their policy/programs were successful, wildly successful. The Chinese will be entering this phase of their industrialization sooner rather than later.
The Greens stumbled when they moved into the arena of policy/programs to support ecosystem sciences, climate science being but one and the most well known of a large field of research. Success in the second generation of initiatives has been marred by scandal, and politicization derived directly and completely from complex resource economics, carbon trading being the best example of a growing set of controversies without compromise solutions. Solving resource-related problems where the economics create cross-currents of conflicting objectives will be difficult regardless of whether the frame of reference is private or public. To expect, let alone desire, a private enterprise to make an economic decision of value distributed over a shared resource is asking for trouble. Considering just the performance of private facilities providing care/treatment for the disabled and the elderly suggests that private sector profit drivers are not sufficient to meet the objectives of industries where value is neither directly nor easily correlated with cost.
There is no easy answer but one can evince a reserved display of approval that the policy debate is being engaged by both sides. What “answers” there are will likely come in the form of a compendium of small but meaningful changes to make current state delivery systems more responsive to users and cost-effective to providers (such as the suggestion by one of the BC posters that government benefits overlap re-entry into the job force to help the recipient over a longer-term time horizon.) To condemn policy out of blind hatred of government is to invite a future where all goods and services are delivered for profit. There are times when I wish Ayn Rand had been hit by a truck.
Robot @ 49 – Most folks don’t want the neighbors dumping crap in the well or piling animal dung in the commons. But, over long periods such as decades, peace and freedom are unstable arrangements. Economics of the nation state plays a role in establishing and maintaining those attributes.
Politicians, otoh, don’t usually have that longevity. Policies, derived from laws, often seem insensitive to the requirement to have a thriving economy to support those attributes. Once you put power in the grasp of well intentioned environmentalists, they exercise authority without restraint.
It is entirely possible to consume too much of scarce resources to obtain clean rivers & lakes. Then you risk losing your freedom, as well, to people who have other objectives. It is unwise to allow regulations of any kind to destroy competitiveness in the global market place, no matter how well intentioned.
Mankind has not discovered a golden key to restore garden of eden on earth. We will leave a mark on the planet. Unfortunately, the allowable balance of environmental burden on individuals and businesses is elusive to people who have no grasp of the ultimate cost.
Radioactive dating is full of flaws (Minor and Major ones) that it requires more faith than just believing in God! Sediment (layering) dating is nearly as flawed as Radioactive dating… Less proof is required from these “Sciences” then the other “Sciences” (i.e. physics, chemistry, molecular biology, physiology, etc.) so believe in what shifts like sands as the years go by or stand on the solid rock of God!
Ultimately the cure is to normalize the idea that fact assertions should be machine readable and trackable and then going off and tracking them and establishing a track record that will follow pundits around and inform their readers whether they have a habit of being wildly wrong. The tools are under development as international web standards, specifically the Semantic Web, or Web 3.0 stack of standards.
Josh @ 34
It was not the Ohio river but the Cuyahoga that burned. Cleveland is not Cincinnati!
@50:
Once you put power in the grasp of well intentioned environmentalists, they exercise authority without restraint.
It is unwise to allow regulations of any kind to destroy competitiveness in the global market place, no matter how well intentioned.
Unfortunately, the allowable balance of environmental burden on individuals and businesses is elusive to people who have no grasp of the ultimate cost.
Three subjects: balance of power, economic competitiveness as the optimal mediator among power centers, and imperfect knowledge of the future.
The reliance on inherent self-corrective responses to provide systems regulation is naive at the small scale and foolishly dangerous at the larger scales of human organization. The obvious example is failure of the markets to self-correct, as per the Efficient Market Hypothesis, as acknowledged by Alan Greenspan (self-described Ayn Rand disciple.) The tobacco industry and chemical dumping did not self-correct either. There are other examples. One may or may not escape the label of closet totalitarian by proposing the occasional need to impact a target of consequence, such as competitive edge, in order to redirect the path of the capitalist engine based on universal principles of social cooperation, such as the need for and the desirability of clean and healthy natural resources. The world does not end and the markets regroup in repeated displays of rather remarkable resilience.
How to move into the future? The answer provided by the totalitarians of the last century was based on a long-term vision, and was brutal and intransigent. The answer provided by capitalist markets tends to be short-sighted, equally brutal and equally intractable. The answer provided by regulated markets has been “better” in a number of areas, including natural resource management. One could add civil rights and social security to the list.
Robot – take a look at this from the earlier post. The Chinese will be entering this phase of their industrialization sooner rather than later.
What phase of environmental protection were the Germans entering when they rolled into Paris on June 14, 1940? But, but, that’s ancient history. The future will be a time of enlightened civilization governed by humanitarians with universal principles of social cooperation, such as the need for and the desirability of clean and healthy natural resources . We’ll all respect each other. There will be clean air, water, and social security for all. There will be no unfulfilled need.
This is an illusion that the future is just an improved version of that fraction of the past which you are old enough to remember.
Life is a damaging, some would say damning, experience. Some recover. Some do not. Some move on. Some can not. The empirical evidence points to substantial improvements in air, water and land resources from, say, 19th c England and 21st c USA, or pick any two space/time points in human history. If one wanted to gin up the ideological waters, one might label those improvements as “progress.” To argue that such “progress” is nullified because every air and water molecule is not yet purified, or the respect for our fellow neighbor is too often lacking, is little more than a refusal to admit that man can overcome. Maybe not this time around. But eventually. (Depends on how the current crop of elites navigates the nuclear age.)
If the only point of life were to suffer the endless grind of a miserable existence in penance for the permanent stain of sin cloaked in chains that must be respected and obeyed as good little sycophants, then hand me the strychnine. In point of fact, I believe the markets are designed to further man’s personal interest in “making things better.” It’s just the yardstick that is still being debated. In point of fact, I have trouble conceiving of a higher power that would be much impressed (given the viability of an anthropological context for “god”) with such an abject degree of subservient obeisance.
What little man knows about climate indicates that long term i.e. 10,000 years climate is determined by orbital perturbations. Short term climate is determined by the sun which is a variable star and ocean currents. Their are many other factors operating both long and short term plus unpredictable events affecting climate severely; Asteroid impacts, Super Volcano eruptions etc. A trace gas in the atmosphere constituting a 4 in 10,000 concentration is insignificant in comparison to other inputs to the climate. 20,000 years ago the ice sheets a mile thick began to melt raising sea levels 100 meters over about 5000 years. Co2 was not a factor in these events; orbital mechanics were. If man survives the next 10,000 years perhaps we will learn enough to affect climate through manipulation of Earths orbit. Until than all thought of adjusting Earths thermostat is hubris!
@48.epignosis
Somewhere there was a bone flute found in a cave, dated to 40,000 years old. It’s not difficult to believe that humans used that flute. Now we come to the fossil record of Human ancestors became fully bipedal 3.6 million years ago . Those are interesting fossil records. Is it a necessary conclusion that humans are descendant from those? Can we not hypothesize another way humans could come into existence?
First let me say, that has nothing to do with Stoicheon’s claims. Regardless of how humans came to be, his claim that the composition of the atmosphere was “inimical to human life” up until 1.2 million years ago is based on an extreme misreading of what scientists claim, not an alternative to what they claim.
No, it is not a necessary conclusion that humans are descended from the hominids, the chimps, the great apes, and so forth, but you need a plausible alternative, and I don’t think you or anyone could come up with one for which it would be at all likely that evidence could be found. For example, some people think space aliens engineered us, but this is compatible with descent from the hominids etc., since the easiest and cheapest way of engineering us would have been to tweak the chimp genome or an even more recent genome.
One has to “actually talk about something,” because “anything is possible” is not a valid argument.
@57 Katana
If man survives the next 10,000 years perhaps we will learn enough to affect climate through manipulation of Earths orbit. Until than all thought of adjusting Earths thermostat is hubris!
That doesn’t follow from your claims. For example, it’s entirely likely that continually injecting sulfates into the stratosphere would cool the earth. Why not? If you raise the albedo, you cool the earth. It you say that something would compensate for it, you’ll be arguing for subtle causes, which is precisely the type of idea that you reject.
Besides, there are climate changes smaller than the glacial-interglacial changes, such as the Roman Warming, the Medieval Warming, and the Little Ice Age.
I’m an AGW skeptic. I am not arguing for AGW alarmism. Just because I say that treating the stratosphere with sulfates would cool the earth does not mean that I think such a treatment will be necessary or even desirable.
Katana is not saying that we can’t manipulate ‘climate changes smaller than glacial-interglacial changes’ like ‘treating the stratosphere with sulfates to cool the earth’by changing the albedo. He is saying that it is hubris for humans to think that we are responsible for all climate change since there are many other possible natural causes, which he does not exhaustively list, I believe. He is saying that maybe 10,000 years in the future we might have the “wisdom”, not just the knowledge, to try to affect the climate, if it is even necessary.