Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
At Public Opinion, Gary Sauer-Thompson takes a look at the craziness of a climate change denialist clothing himself in the raiment of the Enlightenment. Astonishing.
Update [by Mark]: Tim Watts at Tree of Knowledge links to a piece by David Karoly at Unleashed which debunks a lot of the climate change “scepticism” and has a neat statement of what scientific rationality is actually about.
Please read the comments policy. If you would like an icon beside your comment, please register a Gravatar.
There is a Comments Preview function below the typing box which activates when you start typing.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
While he’s clearly misguided on climate change, nothing he said there was particularly objectionable. It’s not as if the Enlightenment and the rationalism it aspired to are themselves antithetical to skepticism about man-made climate change. The fact that you are so incredulous about someone with whom you disagree invoking Enlightenment values is telling, Kim. The only justification I can think of is that this guy has a reputation for being thoroughly disingenuous on the issue. Does he?
BBB
Follow the link, BBB - the article is thoroughly disingenuous.
Have to agree with Kim, BBB.
We can sum up his argument thus - AGW=Hitler=WTF?
The article generally proceeds by way of flawed and inflammatory analogy, preceded by talking points which have been quite satisfactorily debunked.
The author is an historian whose books include an exculpatory biography of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Another of his works, The Idea Of Decline In Western History, attempts to equate contemporary concerns about global warming and other environmental issues with a recurring discourse of “decline” of Western civilisation, and condemn them on that basis. In other words he has no particular competence in relation to the science of AGW, but he dislikes and disapproves of the possible political consequences of accepting that mainstream climate science is probably right.
Methinks Hume would be turning in his grave. At the moment I’m totally unconvinced GW is some kind of superstition parallel to the idiot theologies of Xanity.
There is, of course, an important discussion to be had about the complex relationship between environmentalism and Enlightenment rationality. Herman’s effort in the OO is the reverse side of the coin to the sentiment in some sections of some new social movements that Enlightenment modernity is the greatest tragedy to have befallen the planet; indeed, if people like Herman didn’t exist, the anti-Enlightenment romantics would have to invent them.
Gary Sauer-Thompson links to an article in The Age yesterday about the melting of polar ice in the context of the Four Corners program Tipping point last night.
The program site links to site where they’ve assembled background reports and research. One of the more interesting reports is the one addressing extreme weather events. Here there is a document on extreme weather in the US (pdf).
Arthur Herman would more profitably spend his time telling us why the melting polar ice is not a problem and explain why extreme whether is a figment of our fevered imagination. But if we did he’d home in on one graph in the last linked document which shows just how hot it was in the 1930s in the US, ignoring that this was an anomaly that occurred on just 2% of the earth’s surface. It happens.
For those who came in late, we recently had a look at the melting Arctic ice and Greenland and Antarctica.
It’s not pretty.
Noticed today a proposed ocean front development knocked back by a (Tasmanian/NSW?) council with global warming mentioned as a factor.
An ocean front development in northern Russia might be a sound investment. All those arctic oil and resource miners will be cashed up and ready to spend. The pressure for real estate from CC refugees further south would provide for some heady returns.
Not sure what the sea level situation is in northern Russia, wbb. The firetree map thing seems to go missing around the Arctic area.
Brian, it’s very difficult to get accurate maps of Russia. (Monmonier’s book “How to Lie with Maps” explains why - state secrets, deliberate errors, that kind of thing.)
In fact I suspect most arctic maps’d be flakey - it’s difficult to accurately map a coastline that’s icebound for 8 months of the year, and there’s too much cloud and bad weather to fly aerial photography the rest of the time. (Apropos which, that’s why there are still bits of the maps of New Guinea which are blank except for the label “Obscured by cloud”.)
Sublime Cowgirl, it’s a Council in Gippsland, Victoria.
David and Brian
It’s all very well worrying about the Russian coastline, after watching the bit about permafrost last night I’d be more worried about finding a spot in Siberia that is going to stay level long enough to warrant putting a building on it.
The CC deniers have actually painted themselves into a corner with their “cooling trend since 1998″ thing, a year after the strongest El-Nino of the last 100 years. Since then the Pacific Ocean has seen fairly neutral conditions with a few moderate deviations (refer to
this link and also this one from BoM)- this sequence alone might be sufficient to create a short-run negative trend in global mean atmospheric temperatures, though I know Brian has posted extensively on reports and studies debunking such a “trend”.
Where will the denialists turn when the Pacific inevitably returns to an El-Nino state, and the “cooling trend” of the past 10 years mysteriously vanishes, much like those Artic ice floes studiously ignored by denialists?
There is a danger of getting the message across so strongly that people in despair think it too late to stop/slow things and instread focus on mitigation.
Indeed, lesleym. I’ve not seen 4 Corners yet as I was out listening to Devo last night, but I’ve recorded it for tonight. (What a show! Regurgitator were excellent as well. But I digress.) I believe they’re already having a problem with building subsidence in Alaska.
I do think we’re going to be able to make accurate maps of the coastline very soon, though it probably won’t do us (or the polar bears) a lot of good.
Update [by Mark]: Tim Watts at Tree of Knowledge links to a piece by David Karoly at Unleashed which debunks a lot of the climate change “scepticism” and has a neat statement of what scientific rationality is actually about.
I’ve just watched “4 Corners”. I feel like we’re fucked. The polar bears are double-fucked. I’m really depressed.
Ophuph Hucksack,
Please refer to NOAA’s weeekly ENSO update. At the bottom of that report on the last couple of pages, you would see that an El Nino is not expected to reform in the near future and La Nina conditions are expected to redevelop next Febuary or March. So the CC deniers are going to have a good case if NOAA is correct with their current predictions at least through next spring.
NOAA assumes a warming trend for their predictions for US weather as a result of ocean temps, if they are wrong about their assumptions due to a weaker solar cycle, its very possible that much of the US could experience a very cold winter that will extend well into the next President’s first 100 days.
Think the AGW hoax which is already in its death throws can survive another cold winter while people are paying out their nose for energy? Maybe, but given that the rest of 2008 is going to cool or near normal, and 2009 is going to be another cool year how long can the hoax continue if the world does enter a cooling period?
Johnnyb, have a look at these graphs and note how temperature and GHG have been tracking each other over the last 450,000 years. Now look carefully and note that the tracking is not absolutely precise. Lumps, bumps and small divergences occur, presumably as the main pattern is varied by other influences, sometimes for thousands of years. But you wouldn’t bet against the main trend.
Now have a look at what’s been happening in recent times in Figure 1 of this paper by Rahmstorf et al over the last 30 years. Again there are lumps and bumps and small divergences in the temperature graph, but the trend is clear.
Now look at this temperature graph in more detail from NASA GISS, the one that found 2007 as tied with 1998 as the second warmest year ever, forget that and notice the down dips in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, not to mention the flat tracking for 30 years mid-century.
Now have a look at what Kenneth Caldeira said about the impact of new coal-fired power stations. Apparently they have a cooling effect in the first 7 years as short-lived muck of the type you can see every night on your TV screen in China spews into the air. After 7 years this effect is overwhelmed by the cumulative effect of long-lived GHGs, principally CO2. After that it’s all bad news. Think about the coal-fired power station building frenzy going on in Chindia at present.
The dip in the early 90’s was apparently due to Mount Pinatubo.
Would you really put your money on a cooling trend for the next 30 years? It seems to me the odds are stacked firmly against it. There is even less chance that such a trend would persist for 50 or 100 years. But it could happen.
If perchance that did happen, rational people would thank their lucky stars and spend their time preparing for the inevitable.
David @ 18, absolutely agree. The stuff about the permafrost was really scary.
The Shrill Shill reports that Arthur Herman predicts that in five years time a spate of very silly books and articles will be written (presumably by people like himself and Janet).
if they are wrong about their assumptions due to a weaker solar cycle,
We are not in a “weaker solar cycle”. Variation in solar output does not correlate with, nor hence explain, temp trends over the last 30 years.
Paul, I observed that Planet’s rant (or at least the 3 sentences I read before I got too irritated to continue) appeared to have been composed (for want of a better word) without a hint of irony. How someone can be so unreflective yet still breathe is beyond me.
Johnnyb,
“Cool” relative to what exactly? Perhaps slightly cooler than the record warmth of the late 1990s, but the first decade’s average temperatures are still well above what was experienced for pretty much the whole of the 19th and 20th centuries. In other words you are confusing the short-term fluctuation with the long-term trend, no doubt wilfully. Look at the GISS graph that Brian linked to above; only when the global average temp. anomaly returns to 0, then stays there for a significant period (e.g. 1 decade), will I start to seriosuly doubt the potency and threat of AGW.
NOAA’s definition of the “near future” would be to the autumn of 2009. In other words they consider the chances of an El-Nino forming THIS year to be low. As for 2009 and beyond, there is currently not enough knowledge to be able to predict fluctuations in the El-Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) with any great confidence beyond the (southern) autumn of any year. Given that ENSO variability has a roughly 3-5 year periodicity there is a decent chance of an El-Nino arising during later 2009, and the probability rises for each successive year an El-Nino doesn’t occur.
Even if another La-Nina does form I can’t see CC deniers having a good case, as any resulting SHORT-TERM fluctuation in global temperature would probably be due to this PERIODIC phenomenon - entirely separate to the TREND caused by increasing the concentration of GHG in the atmosphere.
Once an El-Nino does happen I expect the global average temperature to again rise to near or above 1997 levels (barring a big volcanic eruption or aerosol shielding due to Chinese coal-fired power stations) - at that point the short-term “cooling trend” denialists are clutching at will vanish.
The development of another El-Nino won’t