Entries associated with the tag "Global Warming":

Some friends, both blog readers and nonreaders, have forwarded me two articles arguing -- contrary to the consensus view of hundreds of qualified climate scientists worldwide embodied in the new IPCC report -- that climate change and global warming aren't truly problems. Their arguments are unfounded and palpably dishonest to boot.

One comes from Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor writing in the Canada Free Press, a publication whose other causes include promoting hatejock Michael Savage for president. Ball remembers the 70s media scare about global cooling and quotes Lowell Ponte, who back then called global cooling "the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years." Ponte, it turns out, is a radio personality, not a scientist. There was no scientific consensus on global cooling; the best thinking at the time was that we didn't know enough about climate to make any predictions at all. This business of deliberately confusing popular scares with science-based warnings would be silly if it weren't reprehensible, since it falsely demeans the best way our species has of learning about the world and foretelling trouble ahead.

The other is J.H. Huebert's review of Richard Posner's 2004 book Catastrophe: Risk and Response in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Huebert has some good criticisms of the book, but also is dogmatic enough that he can refer to "University of Chicago court intellectuals advocating bigger government" with a straight face. He thinks to dismiss Posner on global warming by quoting him (accurately) as saying, "I am not a scientist and have no authority to make judgments on disputed scientific questions." However, Huebert doesn't mention that Posner then remedies his deficiency -- just as any intellectually honest skeptic with limited time might do (now quoting from my review of Posner in the Reader on March 4, 2005): "He analyzed a random sample of recent articles from the 20 most influential peer-reviewed atmospheric-sciences journals. He observes that of 55 articles, only 2 expressed any doubt that human-caused global warming is real and will have adverse consequences." Huebert gives every sign of having read Posner's book, in which case he read this and chose not to mention it. Such deception is unworthy of a journal that purports to represent a noble strand of political philosophy.

Quite aside from their lack of scientific evidence or credibility, neither Ball nor Huebert is arguing in good faith. I have yet to see any material from this side that meets basic standards of argument or evidence. Having spent some time looking, here, here, and here, I have to wonder whether it's a good use of time and energy to point out the denialists' lies one at a time while they are not ashamed to continue producing them in bulk.

UPDATE: The excellent So-Called "Austin Mayor" Blog does the necessary demolition work on Mark Steyn as well. 

Federal appellate judge Richard Posner's decision-making is way too conservative (as in unfair) for my taste, but he's no wingnut. Consider this entry in the Becker/Posner Blog: "The global-warming skeptics are beginning to sound like the people who for so many years, in the face of compelling evidence, denied that cigarette smoking had serious adverse effects on health." (Still in denial is Chicago's own "belief tank," the Heartland Institute.)

What to do? Posner notes that many experts are focused on the long-term consequences of warming, but it's very difficult to decide what we should spend to avert a catastrophe a century or more away. Regardless of the outcome of that argument, he urges immediate action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now, even though it's expensive. He lists three reasons:

"The first is that global warming is already imposing costs, and these will probably increase steadily in the years ahead. Discounting does not much affect those costs. They may well be great enough to warrant remedial action now.

"The second argument for incurring heavy expenditures today to reduce global warming is that there is a small risk of abrupt, catastrophic global warming at any time, and a small risk of a huge catastrophe can compute as a very large expected cost.  [Those who can read as fast as Posner can write will recognize this argument from his 2004 book Catastrophe: Risk and Response.]  ...

Maybe he should be in Congress instead of on the court?

The Heartland Institute has been promoting Fred Singer and Dennis Avery's new book Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, so I took a look. The book isn't just wrong -- it's systematically dishonest.

Singer and Avery keep starting to argue the science, then switch to contending that fears about global warming are exaggerated and that proposed remedies will be counterproductive. By page three they're hyperventilating: "Will people give up the scientific and technological advances that have added thirty years to life expectancies all over the globe in the last century?" (Later they call their adversaries scaremongers.)

At first that seemed like an odd stylistic quirk, but it's actually a feature. Their implicit logic -- never stated outright for obvious reasons -- is that if activists exaggerate storm and flood fears, or slap their prefabricated solutions (solar! conservation! organic farming!) onto this problem, then there must be no problem after all. The logic is laughable, but it allows the authors to blur the distinction between sensation-mongering activists and professional climate scientists. (That's worse than being mistaken. Mistakes can be corrected through open debate; sliming the process by which we do that is far more dangerous.)

The book's explicit claim is that because there's a 1,500-year climate cycle (apparently based on solar variation), no other climate change is going on. Again, the conclusion doesn't follow, and the initial premise is dubious.

Most of the book consists of throwing mud at the findings of peer-reviewed climate science and seeing what sticks. The mud is of low quality, but since this is a blog and not a book, I'll limit myself to four examples.

Page 36: "CO2 has been a lagging indicator [in the last three ice ages and subsequent warmings], its concentrations rising about eight hundred years after the temperatures warm ... additional evidence that CO2 is not the forcing agent in recent global climate changes." Singer and Avery quote a 2003 article (PDF) published in the peer-reviewed journal Science to this effect. But they don't mention that the warming episodes in question lasted about 5,000 years! So the fact that CO2 didn't start the warming doesn't mean it had no role in the (much larger) warming that followed. It's as if they were arguing that gravity doesn't exist because someone pushed  a car that was sitting still at the top of the hill. Technical details here from a coauthor of the original paper. (For the record, honest disputants fully lay out the other side's arguments before attacking them and don't cherry-pick them to create a false impression.)

Page 132: "Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas ... have demonstrated" that there was a worldwide medieval warm period warmer than today, so there's no problem now. Again, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise, and the premise is questionable -- in fact, it has been questioned by several climate scientists, writing in Eos (behind a paywall, summary here if you scroll down to "Myth #2"). The climate scientists had serious criticisms: Soon and Baliunas counted as "warm" any place that appeared to be wetter OR drier OR warmer than it was in the 20th century; they took evidence scattered over a 500-year period (800-1300) as signifying a global change; and they compared their results to the 20th-century average, when the relevant comparison should be to the last part of the 20th century. CAVEAT: I haven't read the article or the criticism. My point is that when Singer and Avery present Soon and Baliunas as having "demonstrated" something -- and then fail to mention, much less address, professional criticisms of their work -- they're deceiving their readers, not engaging in reasoned dialogue.

Page 39: Antarctica is cooling. Another case of cherry-picking and twisting a peer-reviewed publication, well answered by its author Peter Doran (previously blogged here).

Page 11: Satellite temperature records show little warming; surface records show more because of the urban heat island effect. Temperature records must be corrected for all kinds of biases; this particular discrepancy has been accounted for, and when it is, the result is a rising temperature record that can be explained only by climate models that include human CO2 pollution. Details here. Singer and Avery cite a 2004 paper Singer coauthored that analyzes temperatures from only 1979 to 1996 -- allowing them to avoid dealing with inconvenient warming data from the last decade.  Full-scale demolition of that paper here, if you need further evidence that Singer, Avery, and their backers -- including Chicago's own don't-think tank, the Heartland Institute -- aren't serious participants in the discussion of these issues.

BTW, over the years I haven't hesitated to call bullshit on environmentalists when appropriate, such as Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. His persistent refusal to acknowledge that he was wrong is intellectually corrupt in much the same way Singer and Avery's book is.

Global-warming denialism, June 11, 2005: "Professor Fred Singer, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project based in Arlington, Virginia ... told the BBC News there was no firm evidence of global warming. He claimed the data was contradictory and there was no consensus within the scientific community. He said: 'There is simply no consensus. That's a myth. Even if there were a warming, it's a question of how much. Obviously, the greenhouse effect is real; the problem is the data do not show a significant warming since 1940.'" (BBC News found at the SEPP Web site.)

Global-warming denialism, October 2006: "The Earth’s recent warming trend isn’t a product of human activity, but rather caused by a solar-linked cycle that creates harmless, naturally warmer temperatures approximately every 1,500 years, write Dennis Avery and Fred Singer in their controversial new book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years." (Press release at Avery's Hudson Institute.)

I look forward to reading the book and finding what striking new research finding led to this dramatic turnaround.

More 2006 climate highlights and lowlights at Realclimate.

Sam Smith at Undernews asks the unaskable: why is the military sacred? He prefers the teachings of Jesus Christ and midwestern socialist Eugene Debs, who said, "I would no more teach children military training than I would teach them arson, robbery, or assassination."

George Schmidt may be a ranter, but you would be too if you knew what he knows: "Problems are festering or growing at every general high school on the west and south sides right now. And the cause of the increase in those problems, this year and for the last three school years, has been the school-closing and 'Renaissance' policies of CPS." All the details are at the District 299 Chicago Public Schools Blog.

"Give everyone a personal carbon ration. If you run out, buy it from someone else," says Treehugger, summarizing the strong global-warming medicine prescribed by George Monbiot the UK Guardian.

Alon Levy of Abstract Nonsense tees off on libertarians who cling to a 60-year-old scripture: "When Hayek said in The Road to Serfdom that the growth of government spending was a threat to freedom, he had an excuse: at that time there was no evidence to the contrary."

Dudes, I swear he means it as a compliment!  Bill McKibben on the new WorldChanging book: "Their book, a compilation of their work over the last few years, is nothing less than The Whole Earth Catalog, that hippie bible, retooled for the iPod generation."

Orac at Respectful Insolence calls the Chicago Tribune's Sunday story on alternative medicine full of a "little too much credulity." For one thing, personal testimonials, "with few exceptions, do not constitute useful data regarding the efficacy of a therapy."

"We need to change the hearts, minds, values and behavior of Americans toward a culture of conservation."

That's not Al Gore or even Mayor Daley talking. It's John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., who added that debating the science of climate change is a "waste of time," and that it's time for action instead. "The nation needs a public policy." 

Whether Shell is putting enough money where its mouth is, I don't know. (A relevant piece of their Web site; they're in deep weeds in Nigeria.) But if Hofmeister was greenwashing, he picked a funny place to do it. He was giving a breakfast talk in Saint Louis, at

--sorry, I just fell on the floor laughing and drooling on myself--

Washington University's Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy.  Founded as the Center for the Study of American Business, the center features publications that study the costs of federal regulation. It's so "nonpartisan" that it never gets around to studying the benefits of federal regulation.

What funnier place to showcase the fact that corporate leaders are far ahead of conservatives and libertarians--let alone the current Keystone Kops administration--in thinking about the country's real problems?  Including, perhaps, the possibility that regulation might be part of a solution?

(Hat tip to Treehugger.) 

Over at Gristmill, John Tirman of MIT's Center for International Studies notes the bogosity of one particular piece of mud the right-wing anti-science machine has been flinging: a petition supposedly signed by more than 17,000 scientists stating that there's "no convincing scientific evidence" for human-caused global warming. Read the whole thing. (If it were what it purports to be, that fact would be reflected in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, which it is not.) But don't hold your breath waiting for Chicago's own Heartland Institute to apologize for its role in spreading this disinformation.

Those who harp on the supposed uncertainty of global warming rarely mention that uncertainty runs both ways, thus there's a possibility that the mainstream view of climate scientists might be unduly optimistic. Florida State University oceanographer Jeff Chanton and colleagues at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Northeast Science Station in Cherskii, Russia, just published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Nature [if there's a link I haven't found it] reporting how one potential positive-feedback loop actually is contributing to warming. As Siberian permafrost melts into lakes, it releases methane--a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent but shorter-lived than carbon dioxide. "My fellow researchers and I estimate that an expansion of these thaw lakes between 1974 and 2000, a period of regional warming, increased methane emissions by 58 percent there," says Chanton in an FSU press release. This methane dates from the Pleistocene. More melting leads to more methane which leads to more melting. Best story so far is at Seed.

At the other end of the earth, Antarctic ice cores dating back 800,000 years have been analyzed now (the last 150,000 years' results apparently haven't been published yet), according to a BBC report quoting Dr. Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey. Current levels of carbon dioxide are outside the natural range seen in that time, and today's rate of change is unprecedented: "In the core, the fastest increase seen was of the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years.  The last 30 ppm of increase has occurred in just 17 years.  We really are in the situation where we don't have an analogue in our records."

In January 2002 Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago published a four-page article in Nature.  A  contribution to Antarctic climatology, after almost five years it's still newsworthy enough that he wrote about it in the July 27 New York Times. (A fuller free version is available here .)

"My research colleagues and I found that from 1986 to 2000, one small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had actually cooled. Our report . . . found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent [58 percent] had cooled than had warmed. Our summary statement pointed out how the cooling trend posed challenges to models of Antarctic climate and ecosystem change."

That's how science works:  a theory (or model) makes predictions, researchers check them out and report the results.  When they don't fit, it's time to check the research findings, and if they seem valid, to revise the model.

This patient iterative process is too slow for the mainstream media, and too impartial to suit climate-change denialists.  Writes Doran, "Our results have been misused as 'evidence' against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel 'State of Fear' and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, 'Godless: The Church of Liberalism.'"

Chicago's Heartland Institute, which purports to champion "sound science," joined this company with an article in 2002 that overgeneralized Doran's findings and linked them to unrelated studies, in order to create the impression (well known to be false) that the globe as a whole isn't warming.  Much as creationists take any revision in evolutionary theory (no matter how slight) as proof that the whole theory of evolution by natural selection is worthless, these special pleaders misread the very process of science in order to deny its results. 

The media echo chamber continues to resound with these misrepresentations.  A newspaper in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, fabricated a Doran quote to suit its purposes on June 25.  In the on-line comments section June 29, Doran denied ever saying or thinking it, and asked that it be removed.  It's still up.

(Which reminds me -- has any denialist outfit ever explained Doran's actual findings and apologized for misrepresenting them?)

Of course, science has been plodding on meantime.  Writes Doran, "Climate models created since our paper was published have suggested a link between the lack of significant warming in Antarctica and the ozone hole over that continent. These models, conspicuously missing from the warming-skeptic literature, suggest that as the ozone hole heals — thanks to worldwide bans on ozone-destroying chemicals — all of Antarctica is likely to warm with the rest of the planet."

Doran includes a fuller version of his Times op-ed and additional materials at his UIC web site.  One of his side comments pretty much summarizes the whole sorry business:

"It has always amazed me that skeptics of climate warming are quite ready to distrust 99% of the scientific community, but they immediately trust me only because I wrote a paper they 'thought' supported their argument."

Twenty-one years ago I kicked off my job at the Reader with a monstrously long profile of the then-newborn Heartland Institute and the philosophy of libertarianism.

For years now, Heartland has been frittering away its credibility, wasting its resources, and discrediting libertarian thought in general by claiming there's no such thing as climate change--and that if there is, people have nothing to do with it.

Libertarians pride themselves on dealing with the economic world as it is, not as do-gooders wish it was. Why should it be different where other sciences are involved? Real climate scientists agree that there's a problem here that we need to deal with. Hell, even Lloyd's of London has figured that out. There are ways of dealing with climate change that will enhance government power, and ways that will harness the power of the market to improve matters. Those are the issues worth debating, instead of presenting Michael Crichton--a fiction writer with a flimsy conspiracy theory--as if he were some kind of authority on the planet's climate system.

A good deal of my writing over the years has been influenced by libertarian thinking, much of which I learned at Heartland. These days I find myself hesitating to mention their good stuff because of their crackpot position on climate change. It gives the impression that libertarianism really is a right-wing philosophy, lined up with anti-science Republicans who think evolution is some kind of dubious hypothesis. What possible reward could be great enough for intelligent people to seek such company?

Forbes editor William Baldwin has an interesting idea:

"An inconvenient truth, not adequately addressed by Al Gore in his movie, is that environmentalism makes life complicated. If SUVs are bad and wind power is good, then we must levy a tax on gas-guzzlers and hand out tax credits for windmills. Those in the business of selling windmills are very happy with this arrangement . . . but in no time our fears of global warming have caused our economy to become littered with subsidies, credits, deductions, tax surcharges, earmarks and research boondoggles. Here's a way to make life simpler: Chuck out all energy legislation, replacing it with a one-sentence statute that levies a tax on carbon emissions. Let's do it big--30 cents a pound. So that people can adjust, start it at 1 cent and increment the tax by a penny a year from now to 2036."

No more CAFE standards or ethanol subsidies, quoth he.

He has a great idea, but it's vulnerable to the same kind of criticism that naysayers here in Illinois have leveled whenever someone proposes raising the state income tax to pay for education, allowing local property taxes to be reduced: How do you make sure the property taxes actually come down?

Same here: How do you make sure the regulations and subsidies actually get undone? And stay undone, with ADM lobbyists everywhere?

"The midwest is the fulcrum for global warming solutions," argues the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center. "The midwest has the largest concentration of old, dirty coal plants that produce large amounts of CO2 which cause global warming, and the Midwest is the center of the United States' transportation industry. The midwest is the most important region in the most important country in the world when it comes to solving our global warming problems." Full strategy paper here.

The ELPC is best known for serving as the legal firm for the midwestern environmental movement on public-policy issues like logging of national forests in Wisconsin, high-speed rail, and renewable-energy portfolio standards. Now it's going beyond policy to the personal, with a list of seven steps anyone can take to retard global warming.

The first step the center recommends is to replace regular light bulbs with compact fluorescents. Like many environmental improvements, this requires you to put up more money up front in order to save $11.38 per bulb per year--plus one slightly less damaged planet. 

“Much of the latest science suggests that climate change will take place faster than we thought,” says Lloyd’s of London in its new 360 Risk Project report, “Climate Change: Adapt or Bust.” (PDF)

“The industry must take a new approach to underwriting, looking ahead and not simply basing decisions on historical patterns," reads the report. "Insurer pricing and capital allocation models must be updated regularly--and not just in extremis--to reflect the latest scientific evidence.” Lloyd’s suggests that insurers need to reconsider their portfolios as well as their underwriting policies--and that people need to quit moving to hazardous areas (i.e. the coasts) and to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.

Now why do you suppose Lloyd’s is far more worried about climate change than the U.S. government or a number of “think” tanks that profess devotion to the free market? Maybe it has something to do with the fact the Lloyd’s faces real consequences in the market if it disregards a pressing danger. And maybe, just maybe, it's because the current Republican administration and the “think” tanks are subject to some incentives that encourage them to take mediocre fiction writers more seriously than the overwhelming weight of peer-reviewed climate science.

(Hat tip to Joel Makower.)