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Cassidy McGurk
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Goodbye, kind world
« on: 2004-08-10 08:10:09 » |
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People choose to believe the climate change deniers because the truth is harder to accept
George Monbiot
Tuesday August 10, 2004
www.monbiot.com
"We live," the cover story of the current Spectator tells us, "in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history." And who in the rich world would dare to deny it? The aristocrats, the cardinals, Prince Charles, the National Front, perhaps: those, in other words, whose former social dominance has been usurped by the times. But the rest of us? Step forward the man or woman who would exchange modern medicine for the leech, sewerage for the gutter, the washing machine for the mangle, European Union for European wars, relative democracy for absolute monarchy. Not many takers, then.
But the party is over. In 2,000 words, the Spectator provides plenty of evidence to support its first contention: "Now is good." It provides none to support its second: "The future will be better." Ours are the most fortunate generations that have ever lived. They are also the most fortunate generations that ever will.
Let me lay before you three lines of evidence. The first is that we are living off the political capital accumulated by previous generations, and that this capital is almost spent. The massive redistribution which raised the living standards of the working class after the New Deal and the second world war is over. Inequality is rising almost everywhere, and the result is a global resource grab by the rich. The entire land mass of Britain, Europe and the United States is being re-engineered to accommodate the upper middle classes. They are buying second and third homes where others have none. Playing fields are being replaced with health clubs, public transport budgets with subsidies for roads and airports. Inequality of outcome, in other words, leads inexorably to inequality of opportunity.
The second line of evidence is that our economic gains are being offset by social losses. A recent study by the New Economics Foundation suggests that the costs of crime have risen by 13 times in the past 50 years, and the costs of family breakdown fourfold. The money we spend on such disasters is included in the official measure of human happiness: gross domestic product. Extract these costs and you discover, the study says, that our quality of life peaked in 1976.
But neither of these problems compares to the third one: the threat of climate change. In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.
Three wholly unexpected sets of findings now suggest that the problem could be much graver than anyone had imagined. Work by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggests that the screening effect produced by particles of soot and smoke in the atmosphere is stronger than climatologists thought; one variety of man-made filth, in other words, has been protecting us from the effects of another. As ancient smokestacks are closed down or replaced with cleaner technology, climate change, paradoxically, will intensify.
At the same time, rising levels of carbon dioxide appear to be breaking down the world's peat bogs. Research by Chris Freeman at the University of Bangor shows that the gas stimulates bacteria which dissolve the peat. Peat bogs are more or less solid carbon. When they go into solution the carbon turns into carbon dioxide, which in turn dissolves more peat. The bogs of Europe, Siberia and North America, New Scientist reports, contain the equivalent of 70 years of global industrial carbon emissions.
Worse still are the possible effects of changes in cloud cover. Until recently, climatologists assumed that, because higher temperatures would raise the rate of evaporation, more clouds would form. By blocking some of the heat from the sun, they would reduce the rate of global warming. But now it seems that higher temperatures may instead burn off the clouds. Research by Bruce Wielicki of Nasa suggests that some parts of the tropics are already less cloudy than they were in the 1980s.
The result of all this is that the maximum temperature rise proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001 may be a grave underestimate. Rather than a possible 5.8 degrees of warming this century, we could be looking at a maximum of 10 or 12. Goodbye, kind world.
Like every impending disaster (think of the rise of Hitler or the fall of Rome), this one has generated a voluble industry of denial. Few people are now foolish enough to claim that man-made climate change isn't happening at all, but the few are still granted plenty of scope to make idiots of themselves in public. Last month they were joined by the former environmentalist David Bellamy.
Writing in the Daily Mail, Bellamy asserted that "the link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth". Like almost all the climate change deniers, he based his claim on a petition produced in 1998 by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and "signed by over 18,000 scientists". Had Bellamy studied the signatories, he would have discovered that the "scientists" included Ginger Spice and the cast of MASH. The Oregon Institute is run by a fundamentalist Christian called Arthur Robinson. Its petition was attached to what purported to be a scientific paper, printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, the paper had not been peer-reviewed or published in any scientific journal. Anyone could sign the petition, and anyone did: only a handful of the signatories are experts in climatology, and quite a few of them appear to have believed that they were signing a genuine paper. And yet, six years later, this petition is still being wheeled out to suggest that climatologists say global warming isn't happening.
But most of those who urge inaction have given up denying the science, and now seek instead to suggest that climate change is taking place, but it's no big deal. Their champion is the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg. Writing in the Times in May, Lomborg claimed to have calculated that global warming will cause $5 trillion of damage, and would cost $4 trillion to ameliorate. The money, he insisted, would be better spent elsewhere.
The idea that we can attach a single, meaningful figure to the costs incurred by global warming is laughable. Climate change is a non-linear process, whose likely impacts cannot be totted up like the expenses for a works outing to the seaside. Even those outcomes we can predict are impossible to cost. We now know, for example, that the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the other great Asian rivers are likely to disappear within 40 years. If these rivers dry up during the irrigation season, then the rice production which currently feeds over one third of humanity collapses, and the world goes into net food deficit. If Lomborg believes he can put a price on that, he has plainly spent too much of his life with his calculator and not enough with human beings. But people listen to this nonsense because the alternative is to accept what no one wants to believe.
We live in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history. And it will not last long.
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Cassidy McGurk
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Re:Goodbye, kind world
« Reply #2 on: 2004-08-13 16:46:05 » |
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so do I my friend, so do I.
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the.bricoleur
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making sense of change
 
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Re:Goodbye, kind world
« Reply #3 on: 2004-08-14 09:23:48 » |
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"To dwell only on horror scenarios of the future shows only a lack of imagination".
-- Kari Enqvist
I am only interested in the scientific arguments posed:
1. "the screening effect produced by particles of soot and smoke in the atmosphere is stronger than climatologists thought; one variety of man-made filth, in other words, has been protecting us from the effects of another. As ancient smokestacks are closed down or replaced with cleaner technology, climate change, paradoxically, will intensify" (ref: Paul Crutzen)
2. "rising levels of carbon dioxide appear to be breaking down the world's peat bogs. .....the gas stimulates bacteria which dissolve the peat. Peat bogs are more or less solid carbon. When they go into solution the carbon turns into carbon dioxide, which in turn dissolves more peat" (ref: Chris Freeman)
3. " Until recently, climatologists assumed that, because higher temperatures would raise the rate of evaporation, more clouds would form. By blocking some of the heat from the sun, they would reduce the rate of global warming. But now it seems that higher temperatures may instead burn off the clouds.....some parts of the tropics are already less cloudy than they were in the 1980s" (ref: Bruce Wielicki)
4. " We now know, for example, that the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the other great Asian rivers are likely to disappear within 40 years" (no ref.)
Monbiot’s bottom line is "the threat of climate change," he considers the cause of the alleged climate change to be predominantly the result of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
I'd like to update his knowledge a bit.
First: The "higher temperatures" in points 3 and 4 above.
In middle an upper troposphere, over 1000 meters above the sea level, there has occurred no perceivable warming due to increased CO2. The only actual warming observed during 1958–2001 occurred at the time of the abrupt climate regime shift in 1977. Therefore, the less cloudy tropics and the Himalayan (and all other) glacier melting have causes other than increasing CO2.
Ref:
Seidel, Dian J., J.K. Angell, J. Christy, M. Free, S.A. Klein, J.R. Lanzante, C. Mears, D. Parker, M. Schabel, R. Spencer, A. Sterin, P. Thorne, and F. Wentz, 2004. Uncertainty in signals of large-scale climate variations in radiosonde and satellite upper-air temperature datasets. Journal of Climate Vol. 17, No. 11, pp. 2225–2240, June 2004, online <http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2004/djs0401.pdf>
Seidel, Dian J., and John R. Lanzante, 2004. An assessment of three alternatives to linear trends for characterizing global atmospheric temperature changes. J. Geophys. Res. – Atm., 109, D14108, doi:10.1029/2003JD004414, July 29, 2004, online
<http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2004/djs0402.pdf>
Second: The 'screening effect produced by particles of soot and smoke" in point 1.
The question is far more complicated. See e.g.:
"Black carbon (BC), the main component of soot, directly warms the air by absorbing solar radiation, converting the solar radiation into internal energy (raising the temperature of the soot), and emitting, at the higher temperature, thermal-infrared radiation, which is absorbed selectively by air molecules. The warmer air molecules, which predominantly have long lifetimes, are transported to large scales, including to the global scale. The soot particles, which are removed within days to weeks by rainout, washout, and dry deposition, do not travel so far. Since the soot particles absorb solar radiation, they prevent that radiation from reaching the ground, cooling the ground immediately below them during the day. During the day and night, BC absorbs the Earth’s thermal-infrared radiation, a portion of which is redirected back to the ground, warming the ground. In sum, soot particles create three major types of temperature gradients (a) a daytime gradient in the immediate presence of soot where the atmosphere warms and the ground cools, (b) a nighttime gradient in the immediate presence of soot where the atmosphere warms and the ground warms, (c) a large-scale day- and nighttime gradient in the absence of soot but presence of advected air heated by soot where the atmosphere warms and the ground temperature is unchanged. In only one of these cases, which covers only a portion of the globe and only during the day, does soot cool the ground. These three types of temperature gradients set in motion feedbacks to meteorology, other aerosols, clouds, and radiation that affect temperatures further."
(Source: Jacobson, M.Z., 2003. The Climate Response of Fossil-Fuel and Biofuel Soot, Accounting for Soot’s Feedback to Snow and Sea Ice Albedo and Emissivity. Submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research, December, 26, 2003, online
<http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/SootAlb.pdf>)
Here again I refer to the 1958-2001 data from the troposphere. According to the IPCC TAR we should have first noticed cooling caused by increasing aerosols and then accelerated warming caused by combined aerosol removal and increasing CO2. But, we see no such thing in the troposphere data.
As far as I know, no climate modellers are able to explain and parameterise to their models the Global Shift 1976/77. Instead, I have noticed how those extraordinary phenomena (turn to cooling in 1940 and to warming in 1976) have been shaded away in all linear mean global temperature series.
Third: The "peat bogs" in point 2.
The study, Freeman, Chris et al., 2004. Export of dissolved organic carbon from peatlands under elevated carbon dioxide levels. Nature Vol. 430, No 6996, pp. 195-198, July 8, 2004, has been evaluated as follows:
CO2 Science Magazine Editorial Volume 7, Number 28: 14 July 2004
A New Twist on the Old Threat of an Imminent Release of Vast Amounts of CO2 from the World's Peatlands.
Earth's peatlands contain a vast amount of sequestered carbon, about as much, in fact, as that contained in the entire atmosphere, or close to one-third of the global soil carbon stock. Consequently, peatlands represent a vital component of the planet's carbon cycle, and it is important to determine how their carbon balance may change in response to the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content.
In this regard, it was long believed that higher ground temperatures resulting from CO2-induced global warming would lead to increased decomposition of the organic matter found in the world's peatlands (some of which are currently encased in permafrost and thereby protected from decomposition, but which could thaw and become active in a warmer world). This phenomenon would obviously have the potential to free up great quantities of carbon, allowing it to either (1) make its way back to the atmosphere as CO2, from whence and in which form it originally came, or (2) exit the land as dissolved organic carbon (DOC) via streams and rivers that drain peatland catchments.
We have previously reviewed a number of studies that refute this hypothesis [see Carbon Sequestration (Peatlands) in our Subject Index]; and the authors of the study that prompts this Editorial (Freeman et al., 2004) agree with us on this point. In addition, they indicate that neither increased stream and river flow nor reductions in the proportion of annual precipitation arriving in summer significantly stimulate the release of DOC from the world's peatlands, as some have suggested they might (Tranvik and Iansson, 2002; Evans et al., 2002). Nevertheless, riverine transport of DOC has increased markedly in many places throughout the world over the past few decades (Schindler et al., 1997; Freeman et al., 2001; Worrall et al., 2003); and Freeman et al. claim they have found the reason why.
Their first piece of evidence comes from a three-year study of peat "monoliths" (11-cm diameter x 20-cm deep cores) taken from three Welsh peatlands -- a bog that receives nutrients solely from rainfall, a fen that gains more nutrients from surrounding soils and groundwater, and a riparian peatland that gains even more nutrients from nutrient-laden water transported from other terrestrial ecosystems via drainage streams – which they exposed to either ambient air or air enriched with an extra 235 ppm of CO2 within a "solardome" facility. This study revealed that the DOC released by monoliths from the three peatlands was significantly enhanced -- by 14% in the bog, 49% in the fen and 61% in the riparian peatland -- by the additional CO2 to which they were exposed, which is the order of response one would expect from what we know about the stimulation of net primary productivity due to atmospheric CO2 enrichment, i.e., it is low in the face of low soil nutrients, intermediate when soil nutrient concentrations are intermediate, and high when soil nutrients are present in abundance. Hence, Freeman et al. concluded that the DOC increases they observed "were induced by increased primary production and DOC exudation from plants," which conclusion logically follows from their findings.
Nevertheless, and to further test this hypothesis, they followed the translocation of labeled carbon (13C) through the plant-soil systems of the different peatlands for approximately two weeks after exposing the monoliths of both the ambient-air and CO2-enriched treatments to ~99%-pure 13CO2 for a period of five hours. This exercise revealed that the plants in the ambient-air and CO2-enriched treatments assimilated 22.9 and 35.8 mg of 13C from the air, respectively, that the amount of DOC that was recovered from the leachate of the CO2-enriched monoliths was 0.6% of that assimilated, or 0.215 mg (35.8 mg x 0.006 = 0.215 mg), and that the proportion of DOC in the soil solution of the CO2-enriched monoliths that was derived from recently assimilated CO2 (the 13C labeled CO2) was ten times higher than that of the control.
This latter observation suggests that the amount of DOC recovered from the leachate of the ambient-air monoliths was only about a tenth as much as that recovered from the leachate of the CO2-enriched monoliths, which puts the former amount at about 0.022 mg. Hence, what really counts, i.e., the net sequestration of 13C experienced by the peat monoliths over the two-week period (which equals the amount that went into them minus the amount that went out), comes to 22.9 mg minus 0.022 mg = 22.878 mg for the ambient-air monoliths and 35.8 mg minus 0.215 mg = 35.585 mg for the CO2-enriched monoliths, which results are indicative of the fact that even though the CO2-enriched monoliths lost ten times more 13C via root exudation than did the ambient-air monoliths, they still sequestered about 55% more 13C, primarily in the tissues of living plants.
From these observations The Independent's Science Editor somehow concluded that "tests on peat samples taken from three different sites in Britain show that increasing the amount of CO2 in the air around the samples causes the peat itself to emit up to 10 times the amount of carbon it would under normal conditions" and, therefore, that "global warming is set to dramatically worsen because of huge amounts of carbon dioxide being released from the world's peatlands." Nevertheless, he does not bear all the blame for these wildly ridiculous claims, as he quotes Freeman as saying (in an interview he had with him???) that the store of carbon locked up in peat bogs "appears to have sprung a leak," and that "by 2060 we could see more CO2 being released into the atmosphere [by peat bogs] than is being released by burning fossil fuel." Quite to the contrary, however, as Freeman et al.'s own data indicate, we will likely see peat bogs of the CO2-enriched world of 2060 extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, and doing it at a far greater rate than they do currently.
Others also got things fabulously wrong in reporting Freeman et al.'s results. Fred Pearce at NewScientist.com a day earlier (7 July 2004), for example, wrote that "after three years, the proportion of DOC in the CO2-rich soil was 10 times that within the normal soil … And there was no sign of the increase tailing off." This 10 times factor actually applies to the two-week study of Freeman et al.; and even in this study the graph of their results indicates that the CO2-enriched treatment's DOC-release was only 10-fold greater than that of the ambient-air treatment during the first day of the two-week period, after which it actually did "tail off," and to something considerably less than a 10-fold enhancement.
What really matters, however, is not what happens over days, but what happens over years and longer; and at the end of their three-year enrichment of peat monoliths with an extra 235 ppm of CO2, the DOC release from the CO2-enriched riparian peatland was enhanced by just 61%, as noted earlier, while that from the fen was increased by only 49% and that from the bog by a mere 14%. And it must be remembered that these percentages apply to something (root exudation) that is generally far smaller in absolute magnitude than net primary productivity. In Freeman et al.'s two-week experiment, for example, it was ridiculously small, at a tiny 0.6% of plant-assimilated carbon, the latter and much larger of which entities (plant-assimilated carbon) was enhanced by 56% by the extra CO2, which finding suggests that root exudation is probably enhanced by close to the same percentage that net primary production is enhanced by atmospheric CO2 enrichment. Also, as an upper limit on the percentage of net primary productivity that can be lost to root exudation, Freeman et al. say that "DOC release from peatlands can account for greater than 15% of photosynthetic carbon capture," but, we would add, probably not much more than that. Hence, it is clear that over the long haul and averaged over all types of peatlands, the net effect of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content should be to enhance the ability of earth's peatlands to sequester carbon, not lose it.
Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso
References
Evans, C.D., Freeman, C., Monteith, D.T., Reynolds, B. and Fenner, N. 2002. Climate change - Terrestrial export of organic carbon - Reply. Nature 415: 862.
Freeman, C., Evans, C.D., Monteith, D.T., Reynolds, B. and Fenner, N. 2002. Export of organic carbon from peat soils. Nature 412: 785.
Freeman, C., Fenner, N., Ostle, N.J., Kang, H., Dowrick, D.J., Reynolds, B., Lock, M.A., Sleep, D., Hughes, S. and Hudson, J. 2004. Export of dissolved organic carbon from peatlands under elevated carbon dioxide levels. Nature 430: 195-198.
Schindler, D.W., Curtis, P.J., Bayley, S.E., Parker, B.R., Beaty, K.G. and Stainton, M.P. 1997. Climate-induced changes in the dissolved organic carbon budgets of boreal lakes. Biogeochemistry 36: 9-28.
Tranvik, L.J. and Iansson, M. 2002. Climate change - Terrestrial export of organic carbon. Nature 415: 861-862.
Worrall, F., Burt, T. and Shedden, R. 2003. Long term records of riverine dissolved organic matter. Biogeochemistry 64: 165-178.
...........................
Perhaps George Monbiot will find, in light of the newest scientific findings, of which I here refer to only a few, that Climatology is not at all settled the way certain scientists still try to argue.
"If the facts change, I'll change my opinion. What do you do, Sir"
-- John Maynard Keynes
"As long as we are unable to explain the evident inconsistencies that fly in the face of climate alarmism, attempts to associate scientific scepticism with Holocaust denial can only be regarded as political incitement."
-- Benny J. Peiser, CCNet January 30, 2003
the bricoleur
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rhinoceros
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Re:Goodbye, kind world
« Reply #4 on: 2004-08-15 19:37:35 » |
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Bricoleur did quite a good job researching scientific arguments that one way or another weaken the conclusions of Freemans's results on global warming, even indirectly. The counter-arguments essentially say:
"There are many phenomena at play here, we can't know for sure."
"These results are a bit local, what about elsewhere?"
"This covers just a few years, we can't be sure about the long term?"
"We don't have good enough climate models and he doesn't either.".
These arguments of doubt are not necessarily wrong. However, there is something for which I have strong reservations. It struck me that the above Co2Science Magazine editorial interprets Freemans results about CO2, peat bogs and global warming totally differently from the science news that I usually follow, such as this one:
Peat bogs harbour carbon time bomb
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996124
Not a happy condition, since I am not a climatologist and I rely much on peer review and mainstream popular publications. It is perfectly rational to be suspicious when you are aware of something like this:
http://uspirg.org/uspirg.asp?id2=5235&id3=USPIRG&
<snip>
The Global Climate Coalition, a powerful coalition of oil, power, and auto companies has followed the lead of tobacco companies by denying the harm they cause. They have spent millions of dollars trying to discredit the scientific consensus of the IPCC and slow steps to combat global warming. The public has not fallen for their deception, but the Global Climate Coalition appears to have had some impact on members of Congress.
Among the members of the Global Climate Coalition are: American Electric Power Service Corporation, American Petroleum Institute, Amoco, Chevron, Chemical Manufacturers Association, Chrysler Corporation, Dow Chemical Company, Duke Power Company, Edison Electric Institute, Exxon, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Illinois Power Company, Mobil Corporation, National Association of Manufacturers, National Mining Association, Texaco, Union Carbide, Union Electric Company, and Western Fuels Association.
<end snip>
Well, what I found may sound like an ad hominem objection, but looking up "who is who" is a standard procedure on scientific issues for which one cannot have a hands-on opinion.
The CO2Science Magazine editorial mentioned above...
A New Twist on the Old Threat of an Imminent Release of Vast Amounts of CO2 from the World's Peatlands
http://www.co2science.org/edit/v7/v7n28edit.htm
comes from an institution run by Keith Idso and Craig Idso who, along with their father, Sherwood Idso, have been accused that they have been in the payrolls of big oil companies:
Corrupt Sherwood Idso, Corrupt Keith Idso, Corrupt Craig Idso
http://www.ecosyn.us/adti/Corrupt_Idsos.html
There are lots of links here where the Idsos appear to be involved in many institutions and sites always with the same object, funded by the industry and arguing for the benefits of CO2 for the plants, even for the benefits of global warming itself.
<snip>
Sherwood Idso created a $250,000 video for Western Fuels in 1991 titled "The Greening of Planet Earth" which touts the virtues of global warming. The highly misleading video which claims that global warming is good for humanity was paid for by the coal industry and was the subject of Congressional Hearings in the early 1990s.
<end snip>
BTW, bricoleur ended his reply with an interesting quote by Benny Peiser:
"As long as we are unable to explain the evident inconsistencies that fly in the face of climate alarmism, attempts to associate scientific scepticism with Holocaust denial can only be regarded as political incitement."
-- Benny J. Peiser, CCNet January 30, 2003
Peiser is essentially right on this one. Hysterics don't help. But I was curious about something else about Peiser. It seems he he was a contributor to this publication, which sums up pretty well the intentions of the corporations funding the climate change denial:
Adapt or Die
Adaptation - not the Kyoto Protocol - is the solution to global warming, say 13 experts in new book
http://adaptordie.info/page.php?instructions=page&page_id=173&nav_id=99
<snip>
“Attempts to control the climate through restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions would have little effect on the earth’s climate, but would harm our ability to adapt to climate change by slowing economic growth and diverting resources into inappropriate uses,” says the book’s editor, Kendra Okonski, Director of the Sustainable Development Project at International Policy Network, a London-based NGO.
“To deal with climate change, we should adopt policies that promote human wellbeing both today and in the future,” explains Okonski. “We could do this today by eliminating disease and poverty, developing new technologies, and reducing humanity’s vulnerability to climate change. In contrast, the Kyoto Protocol requires huge expenditures today for negligible benefits in the far future.”
Under the Kyoto Protocol, parties would restrict emissions of carbon dioxide in the hope that this might mitigate global warming. Yet it is increasingly clear that Kyoto has costs with no benefits, and it is unlikely ever to come into force. Signatories are therefore searching for alternatives that will achieve the goals of the UNFCCC, without burdening the world with unnecessary costs.
<end snip>
I am sceptical myself of this intangible solution. I haven't read the book, so I still wonder what "adapt" means here. They seem to aknowledge global warnming as fact and as a crisis. Does "adapt" mean genetic engineering for global warming? Building bunkers? Manufacturing lab nutrients? In any case, is it rational to ignore the problem and let the industry unfold its potential and get us some solution to which we can adapt? Should we keep our choices to ourselves?
Corporations are not people, they don't have human needs but, in a sense, they are organisms. How? The CEO makes the decisions, but if he does not make his corporation a "winner" he is toast -- kicked out. The successful CEO who keeps his position thinks as if he is the corporation -- not a human, at least when his is in office.
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David Lucifer
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Re:Goodbye, kind world
« Reply #5 on: 2004-08-16 10:08:20 » |
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There is much to disagree with in this short article so I will focus on the conclusion.
Quote:The idea that we can attach a single, meaningful figure to the costs incurred by global warming is laughable.
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The idea to not even attempt a rational analysis of the costs and benefits is hysterical. Literally.
Quote:Climate change is a non-linear process, whose likely impacts cannot be totted up like the expenses for a works outing to the seaside.
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This is true. It means that every climate change model cited is chaotic in that very small changes in the assumptions will lead to wildly different results. Consequently all such models are non-predictive. Notice that the climate change doomsayers can't agree on whether we are going have an ice age or global warming. Therefore...
Quote:Even those outcomes we can predict are impossible to cost. We now know, for example, that the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the other great Asian rivers are likely to disappear within 40 years.
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.... we certainly do not know this and anyone that claims that they do know has a hidden agenda. (Well, maybe not so hidden in the Monbiot article)
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rhinoceros
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Re:Goodbye, kind world
« Reply #6 on: 2004-08-16 14:15:15 » |
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[Lucifer] There is much to disagree with in this short article so I will focus on the conclusion.
Quote:
The idea that we can attach a single, meaningful figure to the costs incurred by global warming is laughable.
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[Lucifer] The idea to not even attempt a rational analysis of the costs and benefits is hysterical. Literally.
[rhinoceros]
That was in response to Lomborg estimate that global warming will cause $5 trillion of damage, and would cost $4 trillion to ameliorate, and that the money would be better spent elsewhere.
Personally, when reading Monbiot's reply I put the emphasis on *single* figure -- not on *attaching* a figure, which makes sense: Who in the world is going to pay for the damage and who is going to pay for the cost of amelioration? There is infringement there.
Anyway, when it comes to an estimate of the cost, it will have to be rather short-term and maybe local, for the very reasons Lucifer gives in his next reply.
Quote:
Climate change is a non-linear process, whose likely impacts cannot be totted up like the expenses for a works outing to the seaside.
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[Lucifer] This is true. It means that every climate change model cited is chaotic in that very small changes in the assumptions will lead to wildly different results. Consequently all such models are non-predictive.
[rhinoceros]
The models do work or else they wouldn't be used. They just have their time/space limitations. The "user's manual" has to be observed.
[Lucifer] Notice that the climate change doomsayers can't agree on whether we are going have an ice age or global warming.
[rhinoceros]
I guess doomsayers would do that. Well, in most reports I have been reading, global warming is considered fact. Even some of the 7 corporate-sponsored institutions mentioned in Wikipedia don't doubt this -- they claim that global warming is beneficial instead.
The new ice age which will allegedly *follow* as a result of global warming is not considered fact generally. It is a theory which has its advocates in the scientific community.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994888
[Lucifer] Therefore...
Quote:
Even those outcomes we can predict are impossible to cost. We now know, for example, that the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the other great Asian rivers are likely to disappear within 40 years.
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[Lucifer] .... we certainly do not know this and anyone that claims that they do know has a hidden agenda. (Well, maybe not so hidden in the Monbiot article)
[rhinoceros]
I agree that it is hard to make a 40 year prediction, but we do know that the Humalayan glaciers are melting. Of course some of the corporate funded institutions such as the "Greening Earth Society" argue that it is just some floods which don't have anything to do with Himalayan glaciers. But a google search for Himalayan glaciers melting brings lots of results -- most of which are not from barefoot grassrooots organizations.
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the.bricoleur
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Re:Goodbye, kind world
« Reply #7 on: 2004-08-16 16:38:22 » |
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Greetings rhino,
Quote:| Not a happy condition, since I am not a climatologist and I rely much on peer review and mainstream popular publications. It is perfectly rational to be suspicious when you are aware of something like this: |
<snip>
Quote:| Well, what I found may sound like an ad hominem objection, but looking up "who is who" is a standard procedure on scientific issues for which one cannot have a hands-on opinion. |
The individuals, like yourself, who probe and track for any hint of industry funding ought to ask themselves if they really think peoples' beliefs are so easily bought and sold. The implication is that the Idsos (etc.) only say the things they do because they get money now and then from corporate sponsors. If that's so, and if they're so easily bought, does that mean that if the greens offered them a few thousand, they'd adopt a pro-IPCC viewpoint? If the environmentalists who so continually fret over their work really believe that, they could quickly scrounge up a pot of money from Pew, Heinz, Sierra and others, cut a cheque to the Idsos, and in exchange get a news conference in which they renounce their opposition to Kyoto and embrace the IPCC position. Imagine the PR victory for the greens! But of course it won't happen. The unstated issue in all this is integrity. Peoples' views are not so easily bought and sold. The greens believe this of themselves, and if they, you rhino(?), were fair-minded they would assume it of others as well, so they could focus instead on the substance of the arguments, which is of course something they prefer to avoid if possible (see for e.g. the Scientific American response to Lomborg’s book, and the projectile pie throwing at his book signing in Oxford).
Not long ago my cousin got a research proposal from some international consortium led by a UK university (Cambridge). I keep it as an example of a disturbing trend. It pre-supposes that stabilising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is the right policy approach and only wants research on how this will be done, under assumptions about "innovation", which in the context is code for ignoring known technological and economic constraints to get the cost estimates down. It talks about the problem of other projects "not geared up to produce literature that would be directly useful to the Fourth Assessment" and proposes a timescale geared to get published in time for the IPCC to use the papers: "The results would then be collated and published as a Special Issue of a leading journal (see Umbrella Programme), in time for the results to be incorporated in the IPCC AR4." Further down they promise: "Arrangements for publication of a Journal special issue including full peer-review, within four months of the submission of final papers from authors" and "Other communication and outreach activities as appropriate (this is proposed to include a review paper on the technology and innovation potentials for stabilisation submitted to Science early in the process)."
If an industry-funded group had proposed a research program that pre-supposed that CO2 does not cause climate change and sought participants for projects that would explain the weaknesses in the IPCC position, with guarantees for an expedited review and publication process in a (bought and paid-for) special issue of a leading journal in time to be used in the AR4, there would be (justified) howls of outrage about the corruption of science and the compromised integrity of the IPCC if they then used this sort of tendentious material. In this case it's government and university money at work, but the situation is just as disturbing. Chris Essex and Ross McKitrick give some other examples (in Taken By Storm) of government research programs supporting pre-determined results, and I've heard even worse examples from people in the field.
There's no getting around the influence of vested interests, but if you keep an open, sceptical mind, focus on the papers and not the personalities behind them and read the original research as much as possible you'll find the contradictory summaries less of a bother.
I know my cousin for one would welcome any funding from industry, but he gets none. There is very little of it, and it mostly consists of commissions to make videos and to provide information for 'handouts'. Indeed, Since the Brent Spar incident energy industries have been spending much, much more on trying to appear to support GW (e.g. funding solar panels and having 'green' policy statements, etc.) than on support of anti-GW matters.
This contrasts starkly with the funding for research and other activities to support the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. This is ‘big money’ business. Total expenditure on this large and growing industry is probably more than $5 billion per year; the US government alone is spending $2 billion per year on it. So why do you not give it a single mention rhino?
Those who have tried to report all the evidence concerning the hypothesis – and not the propaganda – have been subjected to every kind of attack, but have obtained no significant funding and have had publication of their scientific papers suppressed. Meanwhile rubbish that supports GW (e.g. 'The hockeystick' of Mann et al., and the piece by Murphy et al. in the most recent edition of Nature) get published 'on the nod'. These anti-science activities in support of the Kyoto Protocol are starting to be noticed by others. For example, Andrei Iliaranov, Chief Economic Advisor to President Putin, recently said (9 July 2004);
“The next point brings us directly to the Kyoto Protocol, or more specifically, to the ideological and philosophical basis on which it is built. That ideological base can be juxtaposed and compared, as Professor Reiter has done just now, with man-hating totalitarian ideology with which we had the bad fortune to deal during the 20th century, such as National Socialism, Marxism, Eugenics, Lysenkovism and so on. All methods of distorting information existing in the world have been committed to prove the alleged validity of these theories – misinformation , falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda – because what is offered cannot be qualified in any other way than myth, nonsense and absurdity.”
The assertions of significant funding for work that disagrees with GW and the mentions of "the tobacco industry" are examples of what Iliaranov accurately calls "misinformation , falsification, fabrication, mythology, propaganda".
Anyway, why would it be wrong to accept funding from industry if such funding were to exist? Work funded by industry (i.e. businessmen wanting to make a profit) is no more tainted than work funded by governments (i.e. politically motivated politicians).
Speculate, as you have, for a moment and consider the views of a colleague of my cousin. He is a paleoclimatologist and GW critic from the left who perceives global warming to be scare mongering created by assorted research lobbies, nuclear and renewables interests (seeking subsidies) and now bureaucracies seeking a handle over energy policy - but the whole onslaught is in the end against 'the people' who have more urgent problems that need addressing. As far as developing countries are concerned, the real poor need many other things more than renewable energy, unless of course it is the cheapest and most convenient source. This is his view anyway, and I add it for interest and to bring a perspective few outside the industry would otherwise encounter.
Perhaps there are two explanations for 'scientists ' appearing to be in the pay of oil companies etc..
1. They really are in their pay, just as all scientists are. Government funded scientists - those working on specific research programmes and projects set by government, many are not independent either. Are they too not engaged to prove or show what governments want them to show, often as specified by research contracts? Our modern research funding methods make independence increasingly difficult. Note that Greenpeace believes government scientists if Greenpeace agrees, but does not when government funds research for policies Greenpeace disagree with.
Research can also be directed to specific answers, half answers: You are funded to study warming and to ignore cooling, or you study the damage done by warming and ignore the benefits. This could be called selective research - questions that are funded by the public purse. Loads of it about.... and perhaps we need both, for in one sense both types of research are the same: neither is independent, and serve 'policy' or other institutional aims.
2. The scientists that speak for 'corporations' as you suggest are independent, i.e. not in 'their' pay but rather use these corporation because they listen to them, it is in their (perfectly correct) interest to listen to evidence that does not attack or undermine or weaken them. Many contrarian scientists - and many I know are anything but capitalist 'stooges', can’t get their views / evidence / theories in to the heavily censors media and even scientific publications. I think this is more likely an explanation for the people you mention, especially if you want to start facing humanity from a position of trust. By all means take his or her sources of income into account, but do it for everybody.
In my cousins research he has noted that many scientists change their views on retirement, he assumes that they become more honest and in this case (GW) less trusting of the IPCC and its negotiated consensus (by governments committed to 'relevant' energy policies, etc.) and climate computer models (the latest tool borrowed from the military). Global warming is now the expression of the world's greatest recent research effort, with huge monies flowing towards it: on both the problem and solution side. Does it not promise finding replacements for fossil fuels, create huge markets for new technologies? But all this needs large investments... (if only a few more 'sceptics' (about the costs of nuclear generation) at the time had dared to warn of these costs in 1940/50/60, this technology might have fared better). Nuclear physics was the big research agenda for the hard sciences then, today there are several, but global warming has something for everybody, and Greenpeace does the persuasion of the public, for free. Almost every science and even social science is now benefiting from the global warming scare, which makes trust in what they write even harder. They speak in two voices usually: public and private.
Which to believe? The underlying issue is our 'competitive' research funding system. I have only one answer, listen to both and then decide who to trust, if you can, but it is not easy. I’ll reiterate a point I made earlier:
There's no getting around the influence of vested interests, but if you keep an open, sceptical mind, focus on the papers and not the personalities behind them and read the original research as much as possible you'll find the contradictory summaries less of a bother.
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Quote:| The models do work or else they wouldn't be used. |
How certain are you about that?
the bricoleur
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David Lucifer
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Enlighten me.
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Re:Goodbye, kind world
« Reply #9 on: 2004-08-19 17:13:06 » |
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title: The litany and the heretic
source: The Economist
dated: Jan 31st 2002
Why has Bjorn Lomborg created such a stir among environmentalists?
“I'M AFRAID there isn't much scientific controversy about Mr Lomborg. He occupies a very junior position in Denmark (an ‘associate professor' does not exactly mean the same thing that it does in the United States), he has one possibly very flawed paper in an international journal on game theory, no publications on environmental issues, and yet manages to dismiss the science of dozens of the world's best scientists, including Nobel laureates, Japan and Crawford prize-winners and the like. As any sensible person would expect, his facts are usually fallacies and his analysis is largely non-existent.”
Those contemptuous words from Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation biology at Columbia University, are fairly representative of the response from many environmental scientists and activists to Bjorn Lomborg's recent book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist”. In the weeks since the book's release, virtually every large environmental group has weighed in with a denunciation. Numerous heavyweights of science have penned damning articles and reviews in leading journals. Dr Pimm, for one, railed against Dr Lomborg in Nature, while Scientific American recently devoted 11 pages to attacks from scientists known for their environmental activism.
Dr Lomborg's critics protest too much. They are rattled not because, as they endlessly insist, Dr Lomborg lacks credentials as an environmental scientist and is of no account, but because his book is such a powerful and persuasive assault on the central tenets of the modern environmental movement.
Just the facts
Curious about the true state of the planet, the author—who makes no claims to expertise in environmental science, only to statistical expertise—has scrutinised reams of official data on everything from air pollution to energy availability to climate change. As an instinctive green and a former member of Greenpeace, he was surprised to find that the world's environment is not, in fact, getting ever worse. Rather, he shows, most environmental indicators are stable or improving.
One by one, he goes through the “litany”, as he calls it, of four big environmental fears:
• Natural resources are running out.
• The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat.
• Species are becoming rapidly extinct, forests are vanishing and fish stocks are collapsing.
• Air and water are becoming ever more polluted.
In each case, he demonstrated that the doom and gloom is wildly exaggerated. Known reserves of fossil fuels and most metals have risen. Agricultural production per head has risen; the numbers facing starvation have declined. The threat of biodiversity loss is real but exaggerated, as is the problem of tropical deforestation. And pollution diminishes as countries grow richer and tackle it energetically.
In other words, the planet is not in peril. There are problems, and they deserve attention, but nothing remotely so dire as most of the green movement keeps saying.
Nor is that all he shows. The book exposes—through hundreds of detailed, meticulously footnoted examples—a pattern of exaggeration and statistical manipulation, used by green groups to advance their pet causes, and obligingly echoed through the media. Bizarrely, one of Dr Lomborg's critics in Scientific American criticises as an affectation the book's insistence on documenting every statistic and every quotation with a reference to a published source. But the complaint is not so bizarre when one works through the references, because they so frequently expose careless reporting and environmentalists' abuse of scientific research.
The replies to Dr Lomborg in Scientific American and elsewhere score remarkably few points of substance*. His large factual claims about the current state of the world do not appear to be under challenge—which is unsurprising since they draw on official data. What is under challenge, chiefly, is his outrageous presumption in starting a much-needed debate.
Some argue that scientists who favour stronger policies to improve the environment must use the same tactics as any other political lobby—from steel companies fighting for tariffs on imports to farmers demanding more subsidies. The aim, after all, is to win public favour and government support. Whether such a view is consistent with the obligation science owes to the truth is debatable, at best. If scientists want their views to be accorded the respect due to science, then they must speak as scientists, not as lobbyists.
Dr Lomborg's work has its flaws. He has made some errors in his statistical analysis, as he acknowledges on his website. And there are broader issues, especially to do with the aggregation of data and the handling of uncertainty, where his book is open to challenge. For instance, his approach of examining data at a global level, while statistically sound, tends to mask local environmental trends. Global marine productivity has indeed risen, as he says—but this disguises collapses in particular species in particular places. Dr Lomborg argues that such losses, seen in a long-term perspective, do not matter much. Many would disagree, not least the fishermen in the areas affected.
Allen Hammond of the World Resources Institute (WRI) makes a related point. He accepts Dr Lomborg's optimistic assessment of the environment, but says it holds only for the developed world. The aggregate figures offered in the book mask worsening pollution in the mega-cities of the poor world. Dr Lomborg agrees that there are local and regional environmental pressures, and that these matter a lot, but it is fair to point out that the book has little to say about them, except to argue that rising incomes will help.
The book gives little credit to environmental policy as a cause of environmental improvement. That is a defensible position, in fact, but the book does not trouble to make the case. And another important question is somewhat skated over: the possibility that some environmental processes involve irreversible “triggers”, which, once pulled, lead to sudden and disastrous deterioration. Climate scientists believe, and Dr Lomborg does not deny, that too much warming could lead to irreversible bad outcomes such as the collapse of the mid-Atlantic “conveyor belt” (an ocean current that warms Europe). The science here is thin: nobody knows what level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would trigger such a calamity. But the risk argues for caution.
Dr Lomborg's assessment of the science in this area leads him to venture that warming is more likely to be at the low end of the range expected by leading experts than at the high end. He argues that the most-cited climate models misjudge factors such as the effects of clouds, aerosols and the solar cycle. That is plausible, and there is science to support it, but the conclusion is far from certain. Again, it is reasonable to argue that such uncertainty makes it better to err on the side of caution.
Sensible people will disagree about the course that policy should take. Dr Lomborg—a courteous fellow—seems willing to talk calmly to his opponents. For the most part, while claiming in some cases to be men of science, his opponents do not return the compliment.
Homo ecologicus
Despite its limitations, “The Skeptical Environmentalist” delivers a salutary warning to conventional thinking. Dr Lomborg reminds militant greens, and the media that hang on their every exaggerated word about environmental calamity, that environmental policy should be judged against the same criteria as other kinds of policy. Is there a problem? How bad is it? What will it cost to fix? Is that the best way to spend those resources?
This is exactly what Tom Burke, a leading British environmentalist, denied in a debate he had with Dr Lomborg in Prospect, a British magazine. “What I find most egregious [in] your climate-change argument, however, is the proposition that the world faces a choice between spending money on mitigating climate change, and providing access to clean drinking water and sanitation in the developing world. We must and can do both. Such artificial choices may be possible in an academic ivory tower where ideas can be arranged to suit the prejudices of the occupant, but they are not available in the real world and it is dishonest to suggest that they are.”
On the contrary, Mr Burke. Only in an ivory tower could choices such as these be called “artificial”. Democratic politics is about nothing but choices of that sort. Green politics needs to learn that resources are not unlimited
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the.bricoleur
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Re:Goodbye, kind world
« Reply #10 on: 2004-08-20 04:18:46 » |
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Quote:| I'm afraid these models work all too well once you realize their true purpose. |
:)
It may only be hearsay, Lomborg actually set out to falsify the claims made by Julian Simon, but what he discovered resulted in the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Iolo.
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