No, this is not a warning about global warming per se, but about the high levels of global warming blather we are certain to be hearing as the presidential campaign – you should excuse the expression – heats up. As I’m sure you can imagine, each one of the major candidates is going to be asked his/her opinion on the subject ad infinitum and it will all mean nothing because none of them knows much about the science of the matter other than what they are told by advisers who themselves usually know little. And even if some of those advisers know more, are the candidates themselves qualified to understand and analyze the information? I haven’t seen too many science PhDs in the field.
That science itself is far from unified in their view of the situation came to the fore again today when NASA’s top official, of all people, made a statement to the effect that the global warming problem was over-rated. Was he right? Beats me. (I’m not qualified to analyze it either.) But he certainly generated a response from another NASA official who evidently had made a prominent appearance in Al Gore’s film. Three guesses where he stood.
Maybe we should make people take a pop science quiz before they are allowed to offer a public opinion on global warming – something like “define the second law of thermodynamics” and if they can’t do it, they shouldn’t bore us with their opinion on the subject. That would take care of most movie stars, politicians, Hannity & Colmes and ninety-five percent of the pundits on television. Sooner or later, however, we will have to suck it up and allow the pols some say because some kind of political action will have to be taken on the matter. But it’s much simpler and far less controversial to me to look at energy consumption as a conservation and quality of life issue. That’s somewhat more, even a lot more, comprehensible than the level of anthropogenic global warming, which has to be, as we have seen, taken largely on faith. Pollution is something we have all observed. Also, easy to understand is not wanting to enrich our enemies. We’ve all seen what they’ve done with our oil money. That doesn’t take, as they say, a rocket scientist.
I could easily explain the second law of thermodynamics-if only I could work up the energy.
As to climate change or more precisely AGW I am sceptical but to be frank I know very little about it-actually I know about as much as Al Gore.
I think you lay it out pretty well Roger.
I do believe “NASA Administrator Michael Griffin” has made, as Lem mentioned in an earlier post, a “perfectly cogent statement.” Astounding in its simplicity, reasonableness and logic. I’m quite surprised that it made it onto the public airwaves.
I don’t think though that he was implying that GW was overrated, I think he was saying, ‘who’ is it who gets to decide what the ‘perfect’ earth should be. A deeper question that we all should ponder. Though the ‘true’ believers will not hesitate to answer…me,me,me,me.
Any serious candidate for POTUS should bookmark Griffin’s quote and ask his contenders exactly how they disagree with it.
Now for my (is it even possible) wackier thoughts. We need escape velocity from this planet/solar system. We cannot stand in place, we cannot retreat to the past, forward to the stars is the only way too perpetuate ourselves. Else why bother? No, I don’t depend on quarterly reports. I’m a very long term type of guy.
If you want to have fun with the Goracle’s disciples, ask them this question:
“If climate change is anthropogenic, that is, caused by the CO2 we’re spewing into the atmosphere, why is Mars getting warmer?”
Then watch their brain lock.
If they can ever give me a reasonable answer that support anthropogenic climate change, I’ll buy Al a carbon offset.
(http://tinyurl.com/24k59w in case the link to the Mars article doesn’t work.)
Evidently, the liberals at the archaic World Bank are aiming to change its mission, now that Wolfowitz is gone, to that of becoming a global global warming watchdog bureaucracy. Evidently Zoellick, the new president, has his work cut out for him.
Although this topic has much complexity and will for the near future, eventually some signs may be clear enough in one direction or the other for the public. However, solutions are best aired in a democratic process. I do not want the elites, like Al Gore to tell me that this is too complicated to be left up to the masses. There is “red” all over the place in the global warming hysteria. Many of the “solutions” are repackaged commie crap. Even the Russians aren’t buying it.
For another view of GW check this article,
http://www.mises.org/story/2571
What amazes me is that this type of story gets
no air time.
The debate is not over. But it has been squelched
by the new religion of Global Warming.
Anthony, it’s perfectly reasonable that there may be some anthropogenic component to global warming. You could make a pretty good argument for up to about 30 percent. Which is to say, less than a third.
When someone tells you it’s all anthropogenic, cover your wallet.
Of course it’s overrated. It’s a political movement to get some “global governance” leverage over big corporations, and especially over the US.
While we’re throwing out wacky ideas, I’ve just received the insight that the global controllers/alarmists have shot their bolt, and missed. Think of it….they’re threatening the End of the World, essentially, and it’s going nowhere now, with the Mars warming info and scientists defecting from the IPCC “concensus” right and left. That was the most powerful card up their sleeve, and now it’s wasted.
The silly goobers should have come up with a word for climate change that rhymes with Holocaust; then they could just jail all the Warmocaust deniers and get on with global taxation!
Did I already say I’m a grouch and a paranoid?
After awhile people just get tired of listening to the rhetoric. Global warming people have made the mistake of a lot of political movements, they are beginning to bore people.
I graduated with majors in math and horticulture and I have noticed something extremely cold about Photosynthesis that our scientists have completely missed, yet totally proven.
They known plants use photosynthesis to separate hydrogen from water to make plant food, carbohydrate. (
If CO2 (a green house gas) is so hazardous to life on the planet how come we are still around after all that oil and gas has managed to cook without any help from us?
Is the earth’s “natural” process of making oil “green”?
How green is mother earth giving us oil and gas?
Keep asking questions.
Roger, bear in mind that the projects/technologies that improve energy independence and the ones that reduce carbon emissions are not always the same. For example, coal-to-liquids technology is excellent from the standpoint of reducing oil imports, but it has relatively high carbon outputs.
We are likely to find ourselves in a deadly embrace between these two goals.
If AGW is real, why wouldn’t those afraid of it agree that any measures to alleviate it should be proportional to the actual amount of warming that takes place? If in five years the earth does warm as predicted and the link to man is proven, appropriate steps would be taken. But if the “denialists” are right and no significant man-linked warming occurs, the Chicken Littles should be willing to concede that no extraordinary measures are called for.
If we look back at predictions of warming over the last twenty years, it should be possible to tell if the models predicted what happened or not. Oh, and if the earth gets cooler, why couldn’t that be caused by Man as well? So then measures would have to be taken to boost the CO2 in the atmosphere. No more CFLs or nuclear plants. We do want the earth to always stay at the perfect temperature, don’t we?
I’d like to point out that the biofuels have a serious drawback, they displace food production.
May I suggest that anyone who hasn’t had statistical mechanics doesn’t even have the most rudimentary knowledge to understand climate. And frankly even then……
It took man 400 years to build DaVinci’s helicopter, a relatively simple machine with a few hundred or few thousand moving parts.
I would suppose Climate is somewhat more complicated than a helicopter.
All that anyone knows for certain is that the climate is experiencing a warming trend.
Whether this warming trend will self resolve as it has thousands of times in Earths history is not provable until it actually resolves.
Just as man for millenia thru virgins into a volcano to placate the angry gods…we will once again throw the proverbial ‘virgin’ into the volcano to placate the “warming” Gods.
Charlie (Colorado):
You could make a pretty good argument for up to about 30 percent. Which is to say, less than a third.
I wonder even at that. Since the end of the Little Ice Age (roughly 1850), the greatest portion of warming since then took place from 1850-1870 and 1920-1940, long before we were throwing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Mind you, I’m in favor of pollution control just on the general principle that it’s not a good idea to pee in the pool we live in. But, as you say, when people tell me “there’s a consensus about global warming” and that we need a controlled economy (with international regulatory regimes, &c.), I fear for my wallet.
I would, and occasionally do, ask them to give the dates of the Medieval Warm Period and tell me why Greenland is called that. The anthropogenic effect is about 10,000 years old, dating to when man first began to alter the ecosystem by cutting down Europe’s forests. It is thought that the last primeval European forest, in Poland, still contained aurochs, ancestor of the cow, until the First World War destroyed it. The preent hysteria is mostly anti-capitalism and is a substitute for the religion that has vanished from Europe. Since religion is still fairly popular in the US we see far less fervor about GW.
By the way, the woodland in the US exceeds that acreage at the time of the Revolution although it has more softwood and less hardwood.
Frankly, I am tired of hearing that some sort of specialized degree is needed to understand global warming research. The fact is that the papers establishing the 0.6 degree increase in global temperature since the 1860′s do not rely on physical laws at all. They are statistical analyses of temperature records from weather stations. Similarly for the ‘hockey stick’ papers; they are based on statistics, not the laws of thermodynamics.
Er… SteveBrookline … I might point out that the issue here is anthropogenic global warming … a causality that is vastly more difficult to measure and quantify. That global temperature changes nobody disputes.
In his defense I have to say that even though Al Gore never took a class in statistical mechanics he has been briefed by someone who talked to someone who did.
All I want from the global warmists is blanket permission to build more nuclear power plants. And pay me not to cut down my trees.
They are statistical analyses of temperature records from weather stations. Similarly for the ‘hockey stick’ papers; they are based on statistics, not the laws of thermodynamics.
And those weather stations were stationed where? And what happened to the areas around those weather stations? And the Hockey Stick is quoted, why? Prior to answering this question please explain where the little ice age and medieval warm period went in the “Hockey Stick” graph?
Then when you have completed that assignment please explain where the idea comes from that the earth’s temp should be static.
I think that Goracle actually slept in a Holiday Inn.
It’s interesting that a couple of replies to my initial comment seem to assume I have accepted the global warming scientific conventional wisdom. I have not! On the contrary, I am extremely skeptical about the methods of the works mentioned above, for the same reasons to which Pierre alludes… lack of world-wide data, especially from the 19th century, urban heat island effects, etc. And yes, the anthropogenic component is not established at all, in my opinion. My point was that global warming “proponents” are using the “you don’t have a climate PhD so you don’t understand and should shut up” argument to silence debate. I have read the major papers. There is very little science there. It’s mostly retrospective statistical analyses of weather station data. It’s not thermodynamics, it’s not statistical mechanics, it’s not physics at all. You don’t need an advanced or specialized degree to understand it and form a defensible opinion.
I’ve watched the data accumulate over the years, and here’s my take.
1) The climatological models we have are still very incomplete. It is far too complex for us to come to any definitive conclusions about anything.
2) The models EAS scientists are using are useful for study, but are not viable as “evidence” of anything. Vary the starting variables you use even a little (well within the margin of error of measurements of those variables in nature) and you get a wildly different result. Mathematical models built empirically are valid only within the range of existing data– go too far outside that data and new factors start creeping in that you can’t anticipate.
3) With all that said, I’ve become persuaded that man-made global warming is true. Life on Earth has been slowly building up hydrocarbons in the soil for hundreds of millions of years. They are now being released into the atmosphere pretty much all at once. It’s almost certain that such an event will have a profound impact on our climate, and any strong perturbation is going to be negative from our point of view because our infrastructure is adapted to the current climate. Even an overall *improvement* is going to be painful at first.
4) Conservatives are burying our heads in the sand about this. We laugh when liberals go into denial about the threat of radical Islam– and yet we’re doing the same thing about global warming. Sure, the evidence is far from definitive, but evidence in science usually is. We use much less reliable economic models every day. And there’s no better interpretation out there that I’m aware of. We can hold this idea at arm’s length or we can sit down and say, “OK I’m not convinced but I’d rather err on the side of caution. So what’s an appropriate reaction?”
We do this in foreign policy all the time. At the moment, the balance of evidence is that our use of fossil fuels has a dangerous long-term side effect on the climate. So let’s go from there, be pre-emptive, build some nuclear power plants instead of coal-fired ones. Look at alternative energy systems. Money spent on science and technology rarely produces the result you were expecting, but nearly always returns benefits way great than their costs.