Tonight, PBS is re-playing the Frontline special on the politics of Global Warming. I strongly recommend that you watch it, record it, TiVo it, or otherwise check it out.
UPDATE: If you missed it, you can watch the whole program on-line here.
The “evidence” for this was always rather weak and now the very mechanism by which it was supposed to happen has been pretty strongly shown to be incorrect:
The Svensmark hypothesis is that when the solar wind is weak, more cosmic rays penetrate to Earth.
That creates more charged particles in the atmosphere, which in turn induces more clouds to form, cooling the climate.
The planet warms up when the Sun’s output is strong.
Professor Sloan’s team investigated the link by looking for periods in time and for places on the Earth which had documented weak or strong cosmic ray arrivals, and seeing if that affected the cloudiness observed in those locations or at those times.
“For example; sometimes the Sun ‘burps’ - it throws out a huge burst of charged particles,” he explained to BBC News.
“So we looked to see whether cloud cover increased after one of these bursts of rays from the Sun; we saw nothing.”
Over the course of one of the Sun’s natural 11-year cycles, there was a weak correlation between cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover - but cosmic ray variability could at the very most explain only a quarter of the changes in cloudiness.
And for the following cycle, no correlation was found.
The kicker? It never made any bloody sense to begin with:
The Svensmark hypothesis has also been attacked in recent months by Mike Lockwood from the UK’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory.He showed that over the last 20 years, solar activity has been slowly declining, which should have led to a drop in global temperatures if the theory was correct.
New rationalization for ignoring human created climate change coming in 5 ..4 …3 …
New satellite images reveal what scientists call the “runaway” collapse of an enormous ice shelf in Antarctica as the result of global warming.
The chunk of coastal ice was some 160 square miles (415 square kilometers) in area—about seven times the size of Manhattan.
… “The collapse underscores that the [Wilkins Ice Shelf] region has experienced an intense melt season. Regional sea ice has all but vanished, leaving the ice shelf exposed to the action of waves.”David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey noted that the larger formation from which the chunk detached—the Wilkins Ice Shelf—could itself collapse in 15 years.
Global warming deniers to appear in 5 … 4 … 3 ….
It looks like Investors Business Daily is getting in on the “grasping at anti-global-warming straws” act. They write:
Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.
To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better “eyes” with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth’s climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.
And they’re worried about global cooling, not warming.
Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.
Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.
Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.
This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.
Tapping reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.
Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a “stethoscope for the sun.” But he and his colleagues need better equipment.
In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun’s emissions more rapidly and accurately.
As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth’s climate over time has been the sun.
Of course, never one to think critically when somebody tells him what he wants to hear, frequent anti-AGW commenter Number9 eats this up over at TennesseeFree.com:
Better hope this is not the case. It would make Global Warming look like a good deal. This has actually happened before. It wasn’t pleasant.
Of course, I pointed out in comments that for one thing, the Maunder minimum is still quite controversial as a cause for the “Little Ice Age,” and I’ve pointed out several times that the best information we have says that solar variance could account for at most a quarter of the warming we’ve been seeing.
But I’m not a scientist. I just do basic research. And, when I noticed that the IBD never actually directly quoted Dr. Tapping, and only talked about him (all of the direct quotes come from R. Timothy Patterson, a fairly well-known AGW denier), I decided to do something that the “fine journalists” over at IBD couldn’t be bothered to do: I contacted Dr. Tapping directly and asked him about it. Dr. Tapping responds:
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the message. The stuff on the web came from a casual chat with someone who managed to misunderstand what I said and then put the result on the web, which is probably a big caution for me regarding the future.
It is true that the beginning of the next solar cycle is late, but not so late that we are getting worried, merely curious.
It is the opinion of scientists, including me, that global warming is a major issue, and that it might be too late to do anything about it already. If there is a cooling due to the solar activity cycle laying off for a bit, then the a period of solar cooling could be a much-needed respite giving us more time to attack the problem of greenhouse gases, with the caveat that if we do not, things will be far worse when things turn on again after a few decades. However, once again it is early days and we cannot at the moment conclude there is another minimum started.
Thanks for the heads-up.
Regards,
Ken
Wait, what? A business magazine and a mostly right-wing web site took a scientists statements and work out of context in the service of a political agenda? Stop the presses!
Given the history of the anti-AGW movement and their ever-moving target, $10 says they ignore how wrong they were on this one, and instead seize on the “might be too late to do anything about it” part as their next windmill to tilt at.
NOTE: Upon requesting permission to publish the above, Dr. Tapping responds:
Please feel free to quote what I said. I think it is a real shame that we sometimes see the downside of the freedom of the web, and that an investment journal would quote reports like that without going to their source.
Clearly, Dr. Tapping is a tough man to get a hold of, given that John Q. Nobody in Memphis, TN [that would be me] was able to correspond with him twice in one day. Mental note: Don’t trust anything you read in the Investors Business Daily.
And extra-special thanks to Dr. Tapping for being so cooperative in all of this.
Cross-posted at TennesseeFree.com
(Or, as Uncle would say, “They have to lie to win.”)
Over at Tennessefree, poster Serr8d triumphantly produces a graphic that contrasts sea ice concentrations from yesterday’s date in 1980 against yesterday. (See the graphic here.) Quoth Serr8d: “Nice bit of rebounding, eh?”
Only there are two problems with his graphics, one minor and one major. The minor problem is that the 1980 graphic doesn’t include snow cover, while the 2008 graphic does, making the comparison look a bit more favorable than it ought to. But the major problem is that the dates he chose are in the winter! Anyone who knows a damn thing about the polar sea ice problem knows that winter isn’t the problem, summer is. And lookie what happens when you rewind five months from both dates, so that you have a late summer date to compare rather than a late winter date: there was substantially less sea ice this past summer than there was 28 years earlier. I don’t have exact figures, but from eyeballing it, I’d say it’s something like 33% less. See that graphic here.
And they wonder why I accuse them of cherry-picking.
Meanwhile, Serr8d also clings (for dear life) to the tired, old “it’s really the sun that’s doing it” even though solar intensity has been decreasing for the last several years, even as the planet continues to warm, and even though the most generous estimates say that solar activity could account for a quarter at most of current warming trends.
Still, if my past experiences with AGW deniers are any indication, the odds of a retraction, correction, or other mea culpa approach zero.
So the president signed the new energy bill today. It’s progress, to be sure, but I’m having a hard time getting too excited about it. For one thing, it’s a watered-down bill compared to what was originally proposed, with renewable energy funding stripped out, less-aggressive CAFE standards, and continued subsidies for oil and coal. For another, the new CAFE standards don’t take effect until 2020. For those keeping score at home, that’s twelve years away. 2010 or 2012 would have been something to get excited about. As it is, it’s better than nothing, and it’s worlds better than what a GOP congress would have given us, but still: Meh.
Your thoughts?
Remember all the hubbub a while back about Al Gore’s house? He said at the time that his house was being renovated to become more energy efficient, and it seems he’s a man of his word:
Al Gore, who was criticized for high electric bills at his Tennessee mansion, has completed a host of improvements to make the home more energy efficient, and a building-industry group has praised the house as one of the nation’s most environmentally friendly.
The former vice president has installed solar panels, a rainwater-collection system and geothermal heating. He also replaced all incandescent lights with compact fluorescent or light-emitting diode bulbs.
“Short of tearing it down and staring anew, I don’t know how it could have been rated any higher,” said Kim Shinn of the U.S. Green Building Council, which gave the house its second-highest rating for sustainable design.
…snip…
Shinn said Gore’s renovations are impressive because his home, which is more than 80 years old, had to meet the same rigorous standards as new construction.
“One of the things that is tremendously powerful about what the Gores have done is demonstrate that you can take a home that was a dog, and absolute energy pig, and do things to correct [that],” Shinn said.
So, yeah, that global warming thing. Seems it’s gonna be pretty bad:
Global warming is destroying species, raising sea levels and threatening millions of poor people, the United Nations’ top scientific panel will say today in a report that U.N. officials hope will help mobilize the world into taking tougher actions on climate change.
The report argues that only firm action, including putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, will avoid more catastrophic events. Those actions will take a small part of the world’s economic growth but will be substantially less than the costs of doing nothing, the report will say.
And it seems that some of the deniers were right about one thing: the IPCC was not entirely accurate. Unfortunately for them, the effects of climate change are happening much more quickly than the IPCC claims:
Even though the synthesis report is more alarming than its predecessors, some researchers believe that it still understates the trajectory of global warming and its impact. The I.P.C.C.’s scientific process, which takes five years of study and writing from start to finish, cannot take into account the very latest data on climate change or economic trends, which show larger than predicted development and energy use in China.
“The world is already at or above the worst case scenarios in terms of emissions,” said Gernot Klepper, of the Kiel Institute for World Economy in Kiel, Germany. “In terms of emissions, we are moving past the most pessimistic estimates of the I.P.C.C., and by some estimates we are above that red line.”
Climate change is real and it is happening rather quickly. It is going to kill a lot of people, displace countless others, and disrupt the farming and economic patterns of the entire globe. It is long past time people got past their “I hate hippies” hang ups and started treating this problem as if we were all adults. In exchange for a minor, temporary blip in economic growth, we can literally save millions and avert a catastrophe. That has to be mor eimportant than the profits of a handful of campaign donors and your dislike of long hair and bad acid rock.
Because in twenty years, when your children and your grandchildren are asking you how the hell did you let this happen, I don’t think they are going to be sympathetic to “James Inhofe said the dirty f*cking hippy scientists were wrong!”
The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at record lows, scientists have announced.
Experts say they are “stunned” by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone.
So much ice has melted this summer that the Northwest passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the Northeast passage along Russia’s Arctic coast could open later this month.
If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030.
But global warming is a myth that will have no effect on our lives and we should just all ignore it anyway because it costs to much to fix and the damn dirty hippies want to take my Hummer away and force me to drive a horse drawn wagon in the snow, up hill, both ways while the use hysteria about the non-existent global warming that’s melting the Arctic much faster than predicted to establish their One world Socialist government with its Global Warming Collective farms and mandatory dirt hut residences and Hillary Clinton as King and Al Gore as Pope.
Look a this piece of propoganda from Senator Inhoe:
“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing the new study which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Another scientist said the peer-reviewed study overturned “in one fell swoop” the climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore. The study entitled “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System,” was authored by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz.
…. The new study was also touted as “overturning the UN IPCC ‘consensus’ in one fell swoop” by the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Joel Schwartz in an Aug. 17, 2007 blog post.
“New research from Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes,” wrote AEI’s Schwartz, who hold a master’s degree in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology.
The whole piece reads like that: its a mish-mash of “the sun is the cause” nonsense that has already been thoroughly debunked and breathless claims that the new study has disproved, “in one fell swoop”, global warming consensus. People interested in the truth would not trout out the sun causes it nonsense, and people who were serious about the truth would not breathlessly claim that one study — that hasn’t even been published yet and thus hasn’t had the full thrashing out in scientific circles it needs to be taken seriously — overturns anything, much less a scientific consensus with the enormous work behind it that the global warming consensus has. There are no qualifiers in these statements, not even a token “if this holds true …”, no discussion of why this study is right and the other work done on this issue to date has been wrong. There is no attempt, then, to grapple with the very real questions about this work — or any new piece of scientific work, for that matter. There is just the headlong rush into claims of certainty and victorious whooping that their enemies have been defeated. All that is missing is the phrase “nyah-nyah” and claims that their daddy can beat up yours.
No one with an ounce of honesty or intellectual independence could look at this as anything other than a crude piece of propoganda published by people with little interest in the actual truth of the matter. If global warming skeptics want to be taken seriously, then perhaps they should act more like adults and less like eight year olds at a ballgame.
Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, now that the paper is out, its been shown to be poor work:
Usually, I am happy to let RealClimate debunk the septic dross that still infects the media. In fact, since I have teased them about their zeal in the past, it may seem slightly hypocritical of me to bother with this. However, this specific paper is particularly close to my own field of research, and the author is also rather unusual in that he seems to be a respected atmospheric scientist with generally rather mainstream views on climate science (although perhaps a bit critical of the IPCC here). However, his background is in aerosols, which suggests that he may have stumbled out of his field without quite realising what he is getting himself into.
… His numerical values for t and C are 5+-1, and 16.7+-7 respectively (with the uncertainties at one standard deviation). It is not entirely clear what he really intends these distributions to mean (itself a sign that he is a little out of his depth perhaps), but I’ll interpret them in the only way I think reasonable in the context, as gaussian distributions for the parameters in question. He claims these values gives S equal to 0.3+-0.09, although he also writes 0.3+-0.14 elsewhere. This latter value works out at 1.1C+-0.5C for a doubling of CO2. But the quotient of two gaussians is not gaussian, or symmetric. I don’t know how he did his calculation, but it’s clearly not right.
In fact, the 16%-84% probability interval (the standard central 68% probability interval corresponding to +- 1sd of a gaussian, and the IPPC “likely”) of this quotient distribution is really 0.18-0.52K/W/m^2 (0.7-1.9C per doubling) and the 2sd limit of 2.5% to 97.5% is 0.12-1.3K/W/m^2 (0.4-4.8C per doubling). While this range still focuses mostly on lower values than most analyses support, it also reaches the upper range that I (and perhaps increasingly many others) consider credible anyway. His 68% estimate of 0.6-1.6C per doubling is wrong to start with, and doubly misleading in the way that it conceals the long tail that naturally arises from his analysis.
… He estimates a “time constant” which is supposed to characterise the response of the climate system to any perturbation. On the assumption that there is such a unique time constant, this value can apparently be estimated by some straightforward time series analysis - I haven’t checked this in any detail but the references he provides look solid enough. His estimate, based on observed 20th century temperature changes, comes out at 5y. However, he also notes that the literature shows that different analyses of models give wildly different indications of characteristic time scale, depending on what forcing is being considered - for example the response to volcanic perturbations has a dominant time scale of a couple of years, whereas the response to a steady increase in GHGs take decades to reach equilibrium. Unfortunately he does not draw the obvious conclusion from this - that there is no single time scale that completely characterises the climate system - but presses on regardless.
… In fact there is an elementary physical explanation for this: the models (and the real climate system) exhibit a range of time scales, with the atmosphere responding very rapidly, the upper ocean taking substantially longer, and the deep ocean taking much longer still. When forced with rapid variations (such as volcanoes), the time series of atmospheric response will seem rapid, but in response to a steady forcing change, the system will take a long time to reach its new equilibrium. An exponential fit to the first few years of such an experiment will look like there is a purely rapid response, before the longer response of the deep ocean comes into play. This is trivial to demonstrate with simple 2-box models (upper and lower ocean) of the climate system.
Changing Schwartz’ 5y time scale into a more representative 15y would put his results slap bang in the middle of the IPCC range, and confirm the well-known fact that the 20th century warming does not by itself provide a very tight constraint on climate sensitivity. It’s surprising that Schwartz didn’t check his results with anyone working in the field, and disappointing that the editor in charge at JGR apparently couldn’t find any competent referees to look at it.
Even more here, but the above gets the gist of the matter in an easily understandable fashion. One wonders if Senator Inhofe will offer a retraction. An serious man interested in the truth would.
More signs of the effects of global climate change?:
About twice as many Atlantic hurricanes form each year on average than a century ago, according to a new statistical analysis of hurricanes and tropical storms in the north Atlantic. The study concludes that warmer sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and altered wind patterns associated with global climate change are fueling much of the increase.
The study, by Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology, will be published online July 30 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
“These numbers are a strong indication that climate change is a major factor in the increasing number of Atlantic hurricanes,” says Holland.
The analysis identifies three periods since 1900, separated by sharp transitions, during which the average number of hurricanes and tropical storms increased dramatically and then remained elevated and relatively steady. The first period, between 1900 and 1930, saw an average of six Atlantic tropical cyclones (or major storms), of which four were hurricanes and two were tropical storms. From 1930 to 1940, the annual average increased to 10, consisting of five hurricanes and five tropical storms. In the final study period, from 1995 to 2005, the average reached 15, of which eight were hurricanes and seven were tropical storms.
This is suggestive because we know that the global climate has warmed considerably over that same period. It also is what one would expect to find if the Atlantic were warming: the extra energy in the water would translate to more storms being created and those storms that are created being more powerful. This study does not address the last question, however. It just looks at the frequency of storms. It does note that the ratio of hurricanes to tropical storms has remained the same. That could support the notion that global warming is not having an effect on the strength of severe storms in the Atlantic. It could also mean nothing of the sort: climate change could be making storms much stronger than they normally would be, resulting in the same ratio of tropical storms to hurricanes but more powerful hurricanes and tropical storms in general.
At any rate, this study looks to be more evidence that we are making the planet more and more hostile to our presence.
UPDATE: [tgirsch] Link
I would love to see this paper:
Verdes, now at Novartis Pharma, examined data on temperature anomalies, the strength of the radiation emitted from the Sun, and volcanic activity. The relatively recent increases in solar radiation, combined with reduced volcanic activity, contribute to the increase in world temperatures. However, Verdes’ analysis demonstrates that these natural causes do not completely explain the observed warming.
Verdes calculated the amount of non-natural influence required to match the increases in temperature observed in the last 150 years. He plotted the influence over time. Then, he compared it to the evolution of greenhouse gasses, taking into account the cooling due to aerosols. With allowances for error, he found that influences attributable to greenhouse gasses mirror the graph of non-natural influence needed to explain the observed temperature increase of recent decades.
His research shows that, if you look at global warming as a puzzle, and you put together the natural factors such as increased solar radiation and reduced volcanic activity, a hole remains. The human factors of greenhouse gas and aerosol emission complete the picture.
This makes intuitive sense — add up all the known effects and then see if they can account for the known change in temperatures. If they cannot, then either there is some natural factor or combination of natural factors that we are unaware of or human beings are causing the difference. When you take note of the other evidence in support of human contributions to global warming, this approach could act as strong corroboration of the existing scientific consensus. But I would liek to see the math, and I would really like to see how they deal with the issue of potential “unknown” natural effects.
Tgirsch’s post has brought some of the usual anti-climate change talking-points. I want to deal with a few of them here in the service of a larger issue: the refusal of right-wingers to believe in environmental science. First the points.
Commentator Tman says:
No it doesn’t. If this was the case then we would not have had the period of cooling between 1940 and 1970. The point about CO2, which your article actually addressed is that the computer models haven’t been able to accurately predict the influence of CO2 in terms of global temperature. If you believe that “CO2 exacerbates those trends and causes additional warming” then why did the temperature fall between 1940 and 1970? This “incovenient truth” tends to send the CO2 models in to a tizzy.
There is a simple and well-known answer to this: sulfate aerosols. As I have linked before:
Of the other strand, aerosol cooling, Rasool and Schneider, Science, July 1971, p 138, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate” is the best exemplar. This contains the quote that quadrupling aerosols could decrease the mean surface temperature (of Earth) by as much as 3.5 degrees K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!. But even this paper qualifies its predictions (whether or not aerosols would so increase was unknown) and speculates that nuclear power may have largely replaced fossil fuels as a means of energy production (thereby, presumably, removing the aerosol problem).
… The cooling trend from the 40’s to the 70’s now looks more like a slight interruption of an upward trend (e.g. here). It turns out that the northern hemisphere cooling was larger than the southern (consistent with the nowadays accepted interpretation that the cooling was largely caused by sulphate aerosols); at first, only NH records were available.
This is well understood and well accepted. Five minutes with Google would have proven sufficient. Heck, just reading the link in the original post would shown Tman the error of his position. His comments are filled with tidbits like that. Take this:
Then with the other planets they produce the facts about how these other planets warm and cool, but neglect to mention that the warming that is taking place whilst different in intensity and temperature for obvious reasons, has changed in correlation to our planets change in climate. So no, they didn’t address the gist of the question.
There have been claims that warming on Mars and Pluto are proof that the recent warming on Earth is caused by an increase in solar activity, and not by greenhouses gases. But we can say with certainty is that even if Mars, Pluto or any other planets have warmed in recent years, it is not due to changes in solar activity.
There are two big problems with the idea: the evidence for warming on Mars and Pluto is sketchy, while the Sun’s energy output has not increased since direct measurements began in 1978 (see Climate myth special: Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans). If increased solar output really was responsible, we should be seeing warming on all the planets and their moons, not just Mars and Pluto.
That is from the article linked to in the original post. But Tman just ignores it and writes something that is simply not supportable, and something he should know is not supportable.
But there is actually worse:
There is no scientific consensus in regards to how much of global warming is due to the effects from human activity
This is stunning in either its ignorance or its mendacity. The IPCC report laid out the scientific consensus pretty clearly, and it was all over the mainstream media:
“We can be very confident that the net effect of human activity since 1750 has been one of warming,” co-lead author Dr Susan Soloman told delegates in Paris.
The report, produced by a team tasked with assessing the science of climate change, was intended to be the definitive summary of climatic shifts facing the world in the coming years.
The agency said that it would use stronger language to assess humanity’s influence on climatic change than it had previously done.
In 2001, it said that it was “likely” that human activities lay behind the trends observed at various parts of the planet; “likely” in IPCC terminology means between 66% and 90% probability.
Now, the panel concluded that it was at least 90% certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases rather than natural variations are warming the planet’s surface.
That is a strong consensus, backed, in a very literal sense, by the weight of the scientific establishment. It is inconceivable that anyone who took this matter seriously would not know about this and not understand its meaning.
I have written about this before. Much of anti-global warming consists of discredited theories or outright and blatant lies. And yet these things are defended as if they were somehow worthy of anything but contempt.
And it is not just climate change that gets this treatment. It is something of a religious belief among a section of right-wingers that Rachel Carlson is mass-murderer because she got DDT banned and now hundreds of thousands of people are needlessly dying of malaria. Glenn Reynolds, for example, has made that notion something of a personal hobby horse for years now. The problem is that it is all nonsense:
The answer is that many lives have been saved because of Rachel Carson and it’s scandalous the way Reynolds and Karlgard mislead their readers.
Because of Carson, the agricultural use of DDT was banned, but not the anti-malarial use of DDT and it has continued to be used to this day. You can buy it from Yorkool Chemical:
… And banning the agricultural use of DDT saved lives by slowing the development of resistance. Furthermore this is exactly the case Carson made in Silent Spring, warning that overuse would destroy the effectiveness of insecticides:
…Karlgaard is also wrong to claim that malaria was almost eradicated. It was almost eradicated in some places like Sri Lanka, but then returned with a vengeance, not because DDT was banned (again, it wasn’t) but because mosquitoes developed resistance to DDT.
Reynolds and the people he links to have to know that they are wrong. They have to: the facts are so clear and plain that they command assent. But Reynolds and his ilk continue their dishonest smears. I’m not really sure why people abandon their rationality in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are wrong. I suspect that for people like Reynolds, the fact that the environmental movement and its preferred tactics have succeeded in protecting the planet where the Market that men like Reynolds worship had failed miserably is a bit too much to bear. That the dirty f-cking hippies were so spectacularly right and the cool, cool, considerate men of business and economics were so spectacularly wrong on this issue is something that men like Reynolds are not strong enough to face.
We often get into climate change debates here, so I was thrilled to see that New Scientist has created a list of the most common climate change myths, linking to the truth about each one of them, complete with links, references, etc. It’s very well-done, in that it discusses everything in simply language and at a high level, but provides plenty of links to the gory details. And it’s remarkably even-handed, warning against blaming things like Hurricane Katrina entirely on climate change.
What I find intriguing about it is that the list reads like a “greatest hits” list of objections that AGW skeptics generally give when claiming that the “science isn’t in yet” on climate change: global cooling, “the hockey stick has been disproved,” cosmic rays/the sun, “Mars is warming, too,” etc. Not surprisingly, all of these claims turn out to be almost total bullshit, often with just the tiniest grain of truth misappropriated to grant the appearance of legitimacy to fool those who don’t bother look at the details.
There seems to be some sort of stupidity contest underway on the conservative blogs, triggered by this (old news) report from the London Times Online about rising temperatures on Mars:
Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.
Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.
Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.
The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.
Yeah, the “could be natural phenomena” line was dumb. But not nearly as dumb as the reaction among conservative commentators.
Interesting piece on global warming’s effects on hurricanes:
llustrating the bewildering complexity of the climate, a study scheduled for publication Wednesday found that global warming will strengthen a phenomenon called ‘’wind shear'’ — crosswinds that tear apart or substantially weaken hurricanes
… The new study, also conducted by Gabriel Vecchi of the federal government’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., examined 18 computerized forecast models that were tweaked to reflect a steadily warming climate.
It concluded that one dramatic consequence of global warming will be the creation of stronger crosswinds over much of the tropical Atlantic, the primary breeding grounds of hurricanes.
The average intensity of those winds could increase by 10 to 15 percent by the end of the century, said Soden, who also helped write an influential warming study released in February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
That wind shear is related to the development of El Niño conditions in the eastern Pacific. El Niños, slightly warmer than normal seas, tend to generate strong crosswinds that move eastward and can inhibit hurricane development.
The opposite conditions are called La Niña, slightly cooler than normal seas that are less likely to produce storm-destroying crosswinds.
This year, scientists say, La Niña conditions are developing — one reason why they expect an especially active hurricane season.
The study also predicted increased wind shear in the eastern Pacific (near Mexico and Latin America), but less wind shear farther away in the Pacific, meaning that parts of Asia might experience more and stronger storms, called typhoons there.
Whether or not hurricanes in the Atlantic are strengthened by global warming now appears to be a race between the warmer water’s ability to contribute to their power and wind sheer’s ability to shred them before they grow too large. I would love to read this paper; more of these journals need to allow the public access to their articles.
The reporting here is pretty poor, though. Does this report mean that we could see fewer hurricanes - -as the slow developing or weaker ones are suppressed by the wind shear effect — but the ones we see are more intense — as the extra warmth in the water super charges big storms? Does this mean that all hurricanes will have their strength suppressed by the cross winds, so that we can expect little change in the number of hurricanes but even less change in their average strength? I don’t know — because the reporter did not tell me. These are obvious questions with answers that will have strong consequences for policy decisions. And there is not the remotest attempt to raise those questions, much less answer them.
There are days when I think the press is involved in a giant conspiracy to make all of us dumber.
It snowed in Cincinnati yesterday, exactly two weeks into spring. Glenn Reynolds believes, apparently sincerely, that that proves global warming isn’t real.
HAS AL GORE BEEN TO CINCINNATI LATELY? Because I’m visiting my brother here and drove the last hour or so through heavy snowfall. It’s freezing (literally) and it’s April. Ugh.
Greenhouse effect? Global warming? Faster, please.
Insty interpreted: “I’m a seriously stupid fucker who makes global-level policy recommendations on the basis of my personal religious, or in some cases, skin temperature, considerations alone. Complex planet-wide phenomena can be verified by what happens on one day in my direct line of sight.”
Charles Karel Bouley, at the Huffington Post, has a lacerating column today that is breathtaking for its incisiveness and audacity.
He riffs on the recent cancer-related stories in the media, and has a few testy things to say about Tony Snow, so, unquestionably, the wingers will quote two angry sentences from it, dump their usual vitriol on the blogger, and scamper, still blissfully oblivious. But for those who can read and think and who try to care, here’s the medicine you need:
if [CNN] wants to do some good, they’ll talk about the real cancers in this country, and there are plenty; no, not the tumors growing in Elizabeth or the lesions in Tony Snow, but the terminal cancers festering in the political system, in the heartland of America, and on the news networks.
First, let’s talk about the cancer that is festering in the American news media. . . . Our news is one step short of Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition or American’s Most Wanted. Our journalists don’t ask tough questions, don’t do much research, take press releases as fact, report things from the web that have no basis in fact, and if a celebrity OD’s they go in to overdrive. And we, the nation, are dying because of this. . . .
What about the cancer that is in Washington D.C. these days? We’ll call it elected official fearanoma. I openly laughed this week when I read the Chuck Hagels interview where he said that if things don’t change he’s aware that impeachment is a possible solution. . . . So, Mr. Hagel, you FINALLY read the Constitution? It just dawned on you that impeachment is an option when the president has become a dictator? Please, keep reading, it’s a good document. . . . [B]ecause some of you are running for president, others running for reelection and yet others living in some haze of complacency. Your cancer is terminal. You are weakened by it and do nothing. You’re not taking aggressive steps to cure it.
And then there’s the possibly terminal case of Lack of Reality Carcinoma. We are at war and we, the people, sacrifice nothing, demand nothing, expect nothing. Instead of tax increases, you get a tax break. Instead of demanding that Hummer stop producing their gas guzzling completely unnecessary vehicles for the self indulgent and retool their factories to make the Cougar vehicles that are needed in Iraq to keep our troops safe from IEDs you rent limos made of these beasts . . . . Your light bill should be double, the same with gas at the pump. Why? To make the companies switch to green fuels, renewable resources. Most of you haven’t called your power company to see if you are getting greener energy, don’t know your carbon imprint on the planet, nothing. Why is this important? Because Osama attacked us because we have bases is Saudi Arabia. We are at war in Iraq protecting oil reserves and are about to go to war with Iran. We need to leave the middle east entirely and that means leave their oil behind. Not in 100 years, but now. We have the technology, but you have to pay for it. And you won’t. Do you go to city council meetings and demand that all new construction in your city is energy self-sufficient? Have you priced solar for your home? Do you drive a hybrid if you can? What’s the last thing you said to your Congressman? Senator? Sacrifice, we simply haven’t. Most of you haven’t even sacrificed your children, and that includes George Bush. For most of you, it ’s not your kids fighting. No, the cancer of apathy, of gluttony, of conspicuous consumption grows stronger every day. . . .
It is not a given that the U.S. will remain the world’s super power forever. In fact, history says it won’t. If we don’t cure these aggressive cancers growing in our media, in our government and in our society, we will fade away and become a shell of what we once were.
There’s more. Read it.
I don’t think there is a Senator I hold in more contempt that Inhofe, and today’s hearings gave a good example. Not only did he act like a spoiled brat (really, how atrocious does your behavior have to be t get a Senate gallery to openly laugh at you in derision?) he was stunningly dishonest in his “pledge” request from Gore. His pledge read:
As a believer:
· that human-caused global warming is a moral, ethical, and spiritual issue affecting our survival;
· that home energy use is a key component of overall energy use;
· that reducing my fossil fuel-based home energy usage will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions; and
· that leaders on moral issues should lead by example;
I pledge to consume no more energy for use in my residence than the average American household by March 21, 2008.”
Put aside for the moment that Gore’s is not an average household. Put aside for the moment that both he and his wife run their businesses out their home. Put aside for a moment that he lives in a part of the country that uses more energy, becasue of the weather. Concentrate, instead, on what Inhofe asked. He wants Gore to pledge to reduce his energy use. Not his C02 or greenhouse gas output, but his energy output. No one has ever claimed that the problems of global wamring are caused by energy consumption, only by consuming too much energy that produces greenhouse gases. Inhofe knows this. But he chose to frame the question in this manner. The only reason to do so would be to conflate “energy” with “greenhouse gases”.
There are many ways to get energy and not all of them create greenhouse gases. In fact, Gore pays extra to get his home’s energy from non-greenhouse gas producing sources. So in terms of his house, Gore has already done an amazing amount to reduce the production of greenhouse gases. But judged by the terms of Inhofe’s pledge, Gore looks bad. Which, of course, is the point. Inhofe is lying — there is no other word for it — in order to create the impression that Gore is not trying to follow his own advice. More, Inhofe wants to lie to the American people and convince them that ending the production of greenhouse gases means radically reducing the amount of energy regardless of source available. And the reason to do that is to make people believe that fighting global warming would have a disastrous effect on their lives.
In short, Inhofe’s pledge was nothing more than a means to lie to the American public. A decent man, a decent skeptic, would not have resorted to such blatant dishonesty. Shame, it seems, can no longer touch Inhofe’s soul.
Senator Inhofe thinks he’s clever:
GORE REFUSES TO TAKE PERSONAL ENERGY ETHICS PLEDGE
WASHINGTON, DC – Former Vice President Al Gore refused to take a “Personal Energy Ethics Pledge” today to consume no more energy than the average American household. The pledge was presented to Gore by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, during today’s global warming hearing.
Senator Inhofe showed Gore a film frame from “An Inconvenient Truth” where it asks viewers: “Are you ready to change the way you live?”
Gore has been criticized for excessive home energy usage at his residence in Tennessee. His electricity usage is reportedly 20 times higher than the average American household.
It has been reported that many of these so-called carbon offset projects would have been done anyway. Also, carbon offset projects such as planting trees can take decades or even a century to sequester the carbon emitted today. So energy usage today results in greenhouse gases remaining in the atmosphere for decades, even with the purchase of so-called carbon offsets.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people who adore you and would follow your example by reducing their energy usage if you did. Don’t give us the run-around on carbon offsets or the gimmicks the wealthy do,” Senator Inhofe told Gore.
“Are you willing to make a commitment here today by taking this pledge to consume no more energy for use in your residence than the average American household by one year from today?” Senator Inhofe asked.
Senator Inhofe then presented Vice President Gore with the following “Personal Energy Ethics Pledge:
As a believer:
· that human-caused global warming is a moral, ethical, and spiritual issue affecting our survival;
· that home energy use is a key component of overall energy use;
· that reducing my fossil fuel-based home energy usage will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions; and
· that leaders on moral issues should lead by example;
I pledge to consume no more energy for use in my residence than the average American household by March 21, 2008.”
Gore refused to take the pledge.
Because the entire property of a former Vice President, housing multiple residences, office space, and a Secret Service detail, is just like a two-bedroom apartment in Queens.
Well, as long as we’re making pointless and arbitrary demands . . .
Waiting . . .
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
