MAYBE R.E.M. WAS WRONG

Matt Ridley has a fairly recent Times article that features this brilliant statement:

My children have seen more snow in Northumberland in the past 11 months than I had before in any year of my life. That’s not a trend. It’s not climate change. It’s weather: just a cold snap.

I have no problem with climate science. I have no problem with admitting the effects that mankind has on its environment. I do have a problem with politicizing climate change in the name of a self-aggrandizing moral crusade.



I also don't like it when opposing views are dismissed in the name of the supposed consensus [1]. A recent Forbes article reads,

Another lie claims that there is a consensus among climate scientists that a known man-made global warming crisis exists. Official statements to the contrary presented by more than 650 international climate-related experts who presented contrary official testimony recorded in a 2008 U.S. Senate minority report suggest otherwise. So do petitions signed by more than 30,000 scientists that have challenged IPCC's 1995 procedures and report representations. Those circumstances prompted Dr. Frederick Seitz, former president of the U.S. Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society, and Rockefeller University to write in The Wall Street Journal: "I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than events that led to this IPCC report."



MIT climatologist Richard S. Lindzen writes,

One might have thought the revelations [i.e. the "Climategate" emails] would discredit the allegedly settled science underlying currently proposed global warming policy, and, indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December's Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits. But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the impact of the emails appears to have been small...The IPCC's position in its Summary for Policymakers from their Fourth Assessment (2007) is weaker, and simply points out that most warming of the past 50 years or so is due to man's emissions. It is sometimes claimed that the IPCC is 90% confident of this claim, but there is no known statistical basis for this claim -- it's purely subjective. The IPCC also claims that observations of globally averaged temperature anomaly are also consistent with computer model predictions of warming. There are, however, some things left unmentioned about the IPCC claims. For example, the observations are consistent with models only if emissions include arbitrary amounts of reflecting aerosols particles (arising, for example, from industrial sulfates) which are used to cancel much of the warming predicted by the models. The observations themselves, without such adjustments, are consistent with there being sufficiently little warming as to not constitute a problem worth worrying very much about...In France, several distinguished scientists have recently published books criticizing the alarmist focus on carbon emissions. The gist of all the books was the scientific standards for establishing the alarmist concern were low, and the language, in some instances, was intemperate. In response, a letter signed by 489 French climate scientists was addressed to "the highest French scientific bodies: the Ministry of Research, National Center for Scientific Research, and Academy of Sciences" appealing to them to defend climate science against the attacks. There appeared to be no recognition that calling on the funding agencies to take sides in a scientific argument is hardly conducive to free exchange. The controversy was, and continues to be, covered extensively by the French press. In many respects, the French situation is better than in the U.S., insofar as the "highest scientific bodies" have not officially taken public stances -- yet. Despite all this, it does appear that the public at large is becoming increasingly aware that something other than science is going on with regard to climate change, and that the proposed policies are likely to cause severe problems for the world economy. Climategate may thus have had an effect after all.

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, views the global warming (or "climate change" as it has predominantly been called since the Climategate emails) as an "anti-human ideology":

It is not a new doctrine. It has existed under various headings and in various forms and manifestations for centuries, always based on the idea that the starting point of our thinking should be the Earth, the planet or nature, not man or mankind. It has always been accompanied by the plan that we have to come back to the original state of the Earth, unspoiled by us, humans. The adherents of this doctrine have always considered us, the people, a foreign element. They forget that it doesn’t make sense to speak about the world without people because there would be no one to speak.

I don't engage much in this particular debate. It isn't one that interests me all that much. However, I have to agree with Ridley, who concludes (after laying out many reasons for doing so) [2],

Even if the world warms as much as the consensus expects, the net harm still looks small alongside the real harm now being done by preventable causes; and if it does warm this much, it will be because more people are rich enough to afford to do something about it [3].

Or maybe Tim Minchin is right: we just need to get rid of plastic bags.





1. See "Estimated 40 Percent of Scientists Doubt Manmade Global Warming," National Association of Scholars (Jan. 3, 2011). Also, see the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

2. This includes the following: whatever possible warming will be quite mild; the last three decades of slow average temperature changes are more compatible with a low-sensitivity than a high-sensitivity model of greenhouse warming; clouds may slow the warming as much as water vapor may amplify it; the increase in methane has been decelerating for twenty years; the earth was warmer in medieval times and about 6,000 years ago; humanity and nature survived much faster warming lurches during the ice ages. See Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (HarperCollins, 2010): pg. 329-330, notes on pg. 413. For an interesting read, see Ch. 10 "The Two Great Pessimisms of Today: Africa and Climate After 2010" in its entirety.

3. Ibid.: pg. 341. He has a fantastic list of proven wrong environmental predictions in his recent blog post "Punctured Pessimists."