Saturday, March 22, 2008
Has the climate stopped warming?
Regular readers know that while I accept that greenhouse gases can, at the margin, warm the Earth's climate, I am also skeptical that intensive regulation of greenhouse gases is necessary to avoid global catastrophe. Against that backdrop, I am justly accused of preferentially linking to articles and stories that suggest that cataclysm is neither visible nor predictable. So: the latest story that wonders whether the planet's climate has stopped warming and possible explanations therefor.
If that is not enough to get you to click the link, then perhaps this is:
Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)
This, I think, explains why I am not a leftist and never will be. I am too optimistic! I do not find pessmism to be "intellectually delicious" or "thrilling"; I consider it to be tedious and banal. That does not mean that I do not take risks seriously, but it does mean that when a risk of harm appears to diminish the news of improvement cheers me. I wonder, though, how many environmentalists and other climate change activists would actually be happy if the scientific "consensus" shifted and concluded that greenhouse gas emissions were no big deal after all.
CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.
15 Comments:
By 
JPMcT, at
Sat Mar 22, 04:01:00 PM:
Along those same lines, I think that it is sophomoric to presume, with environmental science in it's infancy, that the earth's current temperature is the optimal temperature for civilization. Perhaps global warming (or cooling) can be a good thing. Who knows? Certainly not those who have invested thier political and financial futures in a certain part of the global thermometer. It's really quite foolish, isn't it?
By TigerHawk, at
Sat Mar 22, 04:16:00 PM:
Well, two things are not in doubt. The first is that most human settlement has occurred in a blink of an eye cimatically speaking, so big changes that raise or lower sea levels or alter crop yields in large parts of the world could be enormously expensive to adjust to. If, for example, Canada and northern Europe became unproductive and the Sahel became much more productive, it would take quite some time to adjust food production. Moving major cities would be a hassle, too. So rapid change is difficult to manage for humans, and would be impossible to manage for less adaptive species.
By 
, at
Sat Mar 22, 04:18:00 PM:
This has been accoring for mnay many years long before we had cars,airplanes,coal powered ships and AL GORE
By Christopher Jamison, at
Sat Mar 22, 06:48:00 PM:
There is a reason for the pessimism: continued crisis = more grant money.
By , at
Sat Mar 22, 07:14:00 PM:
Its kinda ironic, actually. It has always been acknowledged that a certain darkness lies at the root of the conservative mind. And that optimism is necessarily a part of progressivism.
If you arent optimistic about the capacity for progress, then why bother?
It is just so hard to take seriously all this RW denial. There is so much trafficing in dishonesty. Take for instance, the quote embedded in the post here. We need to be attentive to the data, to repsect the peer review system etc. Of course, it is the gw deniers who ignore the data, and ignore the heavily peer reviewed science. As ever, it seems the deniers will say anything whatsoever - especially if it can serve some pseudo-profound pop psychological point. It all comes down to being too much in love with dark pessimism.
No. Maybe it just comes down to the weight of evidence.
By Steve M. Galbraith, at
Sat Mar 22, 09:04:00 PM:
In his terrific work, History of the Idea of Progress, the great sociologist Robert Nisbet noted that there were 5 critical components in a belief that the world could be better:
1. Value of the past;
2. The nobility of Western civilization;
3. The worth of economic/technological growth;
4. A faith in reason and scientific/scholarly knowledge obtained through reason;
5. The intrinsic importance and worth of life on earth.
If you accept those requirements, it's not really difficult to see why men on the right would be more optimistic about the future than those on the left.
After Tocqueville, Nisbet was the greatest sociologist of America.
By , at
Sat Mar 22, 09:37:00 PM:
I gotta admit, I hope you're right about this global warming thing. However, if you read up on jennifer marohasy at Sourcewatch.org, it's kind of obvious that she's just another mouthpiece for corporate interests that want to roll back all kinds of regulations related to the environment, labor practices, workplace safety and etc.
For a refutation of the "global warming has stopped" hypothesis, see here:
http://tinyurl.com/2rl2tz
As far as being too optimistic to be a leftist, I guess you must join me in believing optimistically that:
- A US withdrawl from Iraq would force Iraqis to work together to build a stable autonomous government
- A two state solution is possible in Palestine
- A peaceful accomodation can be made between the Christian/secular West and the islamic world, whereby extremists including al Queda are marginalized and rendered powerless
- Smart diplomacy backed by the threat of sanctions can deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons
- Via a combination of intelligent regulation and investment in energy technology, damage from global climate change can be minimized while new opportunities for economic growth are created.
;)
By TigerHawk, at
Sat Mar 22, 09:43:00 PM:
Actually, Anon, I agree with four out of five of those! Guess which one I do not agree wtih...
By Escort81, at
Sat Mar 22, 10:01:00 PM:
I'm going to jump in and say that TH will not agree with the first one of the five points, regarding the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. At least, that's the one I most disagree with.
The one about Iran could use a little more language about the diplomacy and sanctions being unanimous with respect to Europe, Russia and China.
By SR, at
Sat Mar 22, 11:37:00 PM:
I half expected a CC "rocks in the head" comment.
By randian, at
Sun Mar 23, 06:49:00 AM:
Its kinda ironic, actually. It has always been acknowledged that a certain darkness lies at the root of the conservative mind.
Acknowledged by whom? The liberal echo chamber? Starting a post off with an insult isn't improving your credibility.
Of course, it is the gw deniers who ignore the data, and ignore the heavily peer reviewed science.
Much of the "data" is, to put is mildly, bogus. But climateaudit.org and climate-skeptic.com are gw deniers, which is like holocaust denial, so by all means don't bother refuting their arguments.
By randian, at
Sun Mar 23, 07:02:00 AM:
A peaceful accomodation can be made between the Christian/secular West and the islamic world, whereby extremists including al Queda are marginalized and rendered powerless
Which proves you don't know anything about Islam. Al Qaeda isn't, in Islamic terms, extremist. Murdering infidels in order to eliminate obstacles to the spread of Islam and ensure that Islam rules, everywhere and for all time, is mainstream Islamic theology. There can be no accomodation with Islam because the proper place of Christians in Islam is as dhimmis, and the proper place of atheists in Islam is the grave. Every school of Islamic jurisprudence that is considered orthodox says so.
Via a combination of intelligent regulation and investment in energy technology, damage from global climate change can be minimized while new opportunities for economic growth are created.
Government mandates do not create economic growth, public works projects (which all such mandates are whether or not the jobs in question are nominally public sector) do not create jobs, and obeying such mandates is not investment.
By JPMcT, at
Sun Mar 23, 11:42:00 AM:
You know, I really bristle when people use the word "deniers" in reference to global warming. Anyone can "deny" Dogma or Belief. However, when it comes to Fact, Hypothesis and Theory, the proper term is to "dispute". Copericus did not "deny" that the earth was the center of the universe, he offered an alternative cosmology that is the basis of our modern understanding of astronomy. For those whose political mindset makes them prone to use a particular collection of scientific measurements as a means to achieve a political end, then the game becomes one of creating an atmosphere of Inquisition where denial is heresy. This, my friends is NOT Science. The truth is that we have a VERY poor handle on the global temperature measurements, what they mean and whether we are in a position to do anything about them. Turning a difficult (if not currently impossible) scientific task into a media frenzy and liberally (pun intended) applying massive grant allocations to muddy the water does very little to actually define the problem. In short, my "BELIEF" (feel free to deny this)is that Global Warming, Inc. has ceased to be a science. I will support no politician who runs on this agenda and call for a return to the scientific method to properly analyze it. Obviously we need more than a separation of church and state, we need a separation of science and state.
By , at
Mon Mar 24, 11:17:00 AM:
Some people treat AL GORE like he is the messiah i mean they believe all that malarkey he spews from his mouth and from his books or his fruadulent documentry AL GORE IS A FALSE PROPHET
By Simon, at
Wed Apr 16, 10:07:00 PM:
The claims by Marohasy about global temperature leveling off or dropping are unfounded. A simple email to her source, Roy Spencer at NASA, can clear it up. Which is what I did. Roy says that Marohasy is confused. He states that the data is not from the much vaunted Aqua satellite project as Marohasy claimed, and is not global average but a much smaller sample of 20 degrees either side of the equator.
Paper published by Roy Spencer can be found here:
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Spencer_07GRL.pdf
Now for some clearly needed Ad hominem. Marohasy, the scientist who has misrepresented the information in the interview, appears to have published only a dozen scientific papers or so in areas such as biological control. Her expertise is clearly not climate. She has had a long association with banking, industry and anti-conservation environmental groups that advocate actions like whale hunting. Not the person I would be quoting on climate change.
Check out Marohasy's web site:
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/about.php
