Sunday, March 29, 2009
A naturalistically fallacious moment
One of the reasons why people who are inclined to be skeptical or subversive resist the prevailing climate model dogma that drives the anthropogenic warming hypothesis is that the climate policy advocates -- meaning those who favor an affirmative program to change or arrest change in the planet's climate -- so often reveal perverse assumptions that are not in the least bit obvious. For example, here is the first paragraph of an otherwise interesting article on geo-engineering ($) in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (bold emphasis added):
Each year, the effects of climate change are coming into sharper focus. Barely a month goes by without some fresh bad news: ice sheets and glaciers are melting faster than expected, sea levels are rising more rapidly than ever in recorded history, plants are blooming earlier in the spring, water supplies and habitats are in danger, birds are being forced to find new migratory patterns.
Now, I have a transportingly obvious question: Why is the blooming of plants earlier in the spring "bad news"? Recognizing that all of these things are held out to be consequences of unnaturally rapid climate change and that most of them probably are bad for at least some flora and fauna (including some people), who is hurt by a longer growing season?* That would seem to fall on the "good news" side of the scale.
Unless I am missing something -- I admit that I am not the ecologist in the family -- a longer growing season is pretty much only "bad news" if you believe that the objectively "best" global climate for each and every purpose is the one that prevailed from 1880 to 1980 or so, the period during which we were able to measure temperature consistently but before the recent "hockey stick" increase in average global temperature of approximately 0.4 degrees celsius in the last 29 years. Is this not committing the naturalistic fallacy in an extreme and literal sense?
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*Yes, I know that a longer growing season will favor some plants over others and perhaps disrupt local food chains, but that seems like a small price to pay for more and cheaper food and an earlier end to winter's burdens. Earlier springs are mostly good.
13 Comments:
By 
, at
Sun Mar 29, 05:05:00 PM:
I saw my first bluebird of the year in early January. And yep, my first thought was, "Damn global warming."
By Ron Russell, at
Sun Mar 29, 05:14:00 PM:
I think I can say this without contradiction---no One knows for sure if the planet is warming or cooling at the present time. Also no one knows for sure if planet earth will even be here when the sun comes up tomorrow---that, of coarse, with the exception of Al Gore and other like minded fools. Like I said, I have no ideal as to what the earth's temperture is doing, personally I believe we are in a cooling period, but I could be wrong. What I am fairly sure of however, is that man is causing little change in things. What I am more sure of is that man can do little to change the climate. Science has come far in the past 100 years, but even the smallest things remain a mystery (which leaf will fall first on an autumn day), until such questions can be answered I will continue to have grave doubts about those who profess to have the answers.
By 
TigerHawk, at
Sun Mar 29, 05:24:00 PM:
FWIW, my own religious belief is that the planet is warming a bit -- at the moment, the "moment" being the last couple of decades -- and that greenhouse gases pumped out by industrialization have something to do with it. I have no faith, however, in the predictions of the prevailing models that drive the extreme policy reactions. If tens of thousands of different people with a huge financial incentive cannot model the future behavior of financial markets without massive errors, how can we forecast what happens when a small change is introduced into a system so complex as the earth's climate? The confidence that activists have in these models strikes me as extraordinarily counterintuitive.
By , at
Sun Mar 29, 06:46:00 PM:
I believe (from college biology) that plant blooming is based upon length of the daylight hours, not temperature. You might want to check with your favorite plant biologist.
By , at
Sun Mar 29, 07:13:00 PM:
I'm training my two kids to be skeptics: Our house would have been covered by 5,000 feet of ice just 30,000 years ago -- which is nothing in the scheme of things -- but the Earth was hot in the time of dinosaurs. The Little Ice Age "just happened." We had more weird weather in the 1930s than we do right now. Fargo is underwater today because of a cold winter and resulting increased snowfalls.
Until I get a scientific explanation to square these differing points, I don't believe we really know. I remember when the big scare was aerosol cans killing the ozone layer.
Link
By GreenmanTim, at
Sun Mar 29, 07:24:00 PM:
Daylight is indeed the primary trigger for many plants to move out of dormancy, rather than temperature. Plant hardiness, however, corresponds directly to temperature. We invariably get a nice, stressful cold snap after this (after all, it is New England, and weather variability is part of life, here). That leads to stressed trees and more vulnerability to disease. The prospect of a bunch of winters like this are is why I am less than pleased when the maple sap runs on Twelth Night, because if that continues my kids will be getting their syrup from Canada, not our own sugarbush.
By Buku, at
Sun Mar 29, 09:24:00 PM:
TH:
Why dont you call global warming what it really is ... biggest scam in history. Science has nothing to do with this.
By , at
Sun Mar 29, 09:34:00 PM:
This Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh from Phil Chapman, a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who lives in San Francisco. He was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut.
"THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.
What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.
Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.
All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.... This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.
It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790..."
By Kinuachdrach, at
Sun Mar 29, 10:27:00 PM:
"before the recent "hockey stick" increase in average global temperature"
You do know that the IPCC's Exhibit A "hockey stick" has been completely & totally dismissed on multiple grounds -- historical, statistical, & scientific?
The only thing the world is still waiting for is an apology from the IPCC for misleading policy makers.
By , at
Mon Mar 30, 09:24:00 AM:
Hmmm...a large non-elected bureaucratic behemoth with a well earned reputation for graft, fraud and corruption run by faceless people whom routinely skim and spend money for personal gain inrelated to the stated purpose of said behemoth. The lead perpetrator of the theory, affiliated with behemoth, routinely has withheld and/or distorted and/or fabricated, demonstrably, supporting data and algorithms. Supporting individuals of the hypothisis can be ,diplomatically, described as hysterics. Dissenters of said theory are subject to character assasination on multiple fronts without discrete discussion of said dissenter's scientific evidence or conclusions. Supporters of said theory do not, themselves, walk the walk of their stated postion on the theory. Despite "mountains" of ,alledgedly, supporting data and multiple computer models of this data, the models cannot and have not been able to reliably and accurately reproduce todays climate. And, finally and most importantly, the "fix" for the "crisis" purported by the theory is to take money from the productive peoples of the world and give it to the unproductive, and historically, incapable peoples of the world. Excluding, of course, any of their own money. How much of his own money has Al Gore donated , Mr. Hansen..... What could possibly be/go wrong with this fraud...er theory ?
By TOF, at
Mon Mar 30, 09:54:00 AM:
And what kind of impact did that Spring snow storm that hit Oklahoma and Arkansas a few days ago have on the migration of Ruby-throat hummingbirds?
http://www.hummingbirds.net/map.html
By Brian, at
Tue Mar 31, 12:22:00 AM:
1. We're adapted to the climate we have currently. Switching to another climate entails huge costs: see Alaska with its dying forests, sinking buildings and roads, and eroding coastline.
2. Ecosystems can't move north in response to climate change, partly because we're changing it so fast, and partly because we're in the way.
3. Feeling like a broken record here, but commenters who anticipate cooling or even anticipate warming no faster than the 20th Century ought to consider betting me.
4. Economic modeling involves human psychology. Physics is easier.
By Brian, at
Tue Mar 31, 12:26:00 AM:
Sorry, my #2 above was vague: ecosystems that dominate with 100-day growing seasons will be replaced by systems with 120-day growing seasons, and be unable to move north. Uphill is an answer in some places, but there's less habitat uphill, and eventually you reach the top.
