http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy.../04/11/AR2007041102109.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 Fuzzy Climate Math By George F. Will Thursday, April 12, 2007; A27 In a campaign without peacetime precedent, the media-entertainment-environmental complex is warning about global warming. Never, other than during the two world wars, has there been such a concerted effort by opinion-forming institutions to indoctrinate Americans, 83 percent of whom now call global warming a " serious problem." Indoctrination is supposed to be a predicate for action commensurate with professions of seriousness. For example, Democrats could demand that the president send the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate so they can embrace it. In 1997, the Senate voted95 to 0 in opposition to any agreement that would, like the protocol, require significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in America and some other developed nations but that would involve no "specific scheduled commitments" for 129 "developing" countries, including the second-, fourth-, 10th-, 11th-, 13th- and 15th-largest economies (China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico and Indonesia). Forty-two of the senators serving in 1997 are gone. Let's find out if the new senators disagree with the 1997 vote. Do they also disagree with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist"? He says: Compliance with Kyoto would reduce global warming by an amount too small to measure. But the cost of compliance just to the United States would be higher than the cost of providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation, which would prevent 2 million deaths (from diseases such as infant diarrhea) a year and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill each year. Nature designed us as carnivores, but what does nature know about nature? Meat has been designated a menace. Among the 51 exhortations in Time magazine's " Global Warming Survival Guide" (April 9), No. 22 says a BMW is less responsible than a Big Mac for "climate change," that conveniently imprecise name for our peril. This is because the world meat industry produces 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, more than transportation produces. Nitrous oxide in manure (warming effect: 296 times greater than that of carbon) and methane from animal flatulence (23 times greater) mean that "a 16-oz. T-bone is like a Hummer on a plate." Ben & Jerry's ice cream might be even more sinister: A gallon of it requires electricity-guzzling refrigeration and four gallons of milk produced by cows that simultaneously produce eight gallons of manure and flatulence with eight gallons of methane. The cows do this while consuming lots of grain and hay, which are cultivated by using tractor fuel, chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides, and transported by fuel-consuming trains and trucks. Newsweek says most food travels at least 1,200 miles to get to Americans' plates, so buying local food will save fuel. Do not order halibut in Omaha. Speaking of Hummers, perhaps it is environmentally responsible to buy one and squash a Prius with it. The Prius hybrid is, of course, fuel-efficient. There are, however, environmental costs to mining and smelting (in Canada) 1,000 tons a year of zinc for the battery-powered second motor, and the shipping of the zinc 10,000 miles -- trailing a cloud of carbon dioxide -- to Wales for refining and then to China for turning it into the component that is then sent to a battery factory in Japan. Opinions differ as to whether acid rain from the Canadian mining and smelting operation is killing vegetation that once absorbed carbon dioxide. But a report from CNW Marketing Research ("Dust to Dust: The Energy Cost of New Vehicles from Concept to Disposal") concludes that in "dollars per lifetime mile," a Prius (expected life: 109,000 miles) costs $3.25, compared with $1.95 for a Hummer H3 (expected life: 207,000 miles). The CNW report states that a hybrid makes economic and environmental sense for a purchaser living in the Los Angeles basin, where fuel costs are high and smog is worrisome. But environmental costs of the hybrid are exported from the basin. We are urged to "think globally and act locally," as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has done with proposals to reduce California's carbon dioxide emissions 25 percent by 2020. If California improbably achieves this, at a cost not yet computed, it will have reduced global greenhouse gas emissions 0.3 percent. The question is: Suppose the costs over a decade of trying to achieve a local goal are significant. And suppose the positive impact on the globe's temperature is insignificant -- and much less than, say, the negative impact of one year's increase in the number of vehicles in one country (e.g., India). If so, are people who recommend such things thinking globally but not clearly? georgewill@washpost.com
some good points in the article. there is a legit debate here, despite what gore says. should humans try to preserve their environment? of course and there are many small ways to do that. but sometimes the alternatives that are superficially "better" are really not. This is why people dont need to overreact and make such quick judgments about changing , without truly observing all costs and all benefits on every level.
Paralysis by analysis. Why, it's just reasonable that we look at everything related to lung cancer before we draw a line between it and cigarettes. In the meantime, pick up some Camels.
No all this article does is question the basis of some conservation practices. None of it questions the link between greenhouse gases and global warming or how humans might have contributed to that phenomenon.
i wasnt drawing a distinction between conservation and greenhouse gasses/global warming. I was thinking in more general terms of taking care of our environment as a whole
lol. This type of "analysis" is just abysmally stupid. The physics is there, the benefits are obvious, and yet we are waiting for some magical "consensus".
We need to have a national debate on the issue. A one-sided, exaggerated documentary by Al Gore isn't a debate. The costs to society of CO2 emissions controls are going to be huge. Voters need to be aware of both the costs and benefits of any legislation. This can't be ram-rodded down our throats based on the superficial analysis conducted for a sensationalist movie. The anti-global warming crowd has yet to have their turn.
"The Great Global Warming Swindle " I believe it aired in the UK. The above link takes you to the entire program. Here's some background on it: http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindle/index.html
The debate has been going on for decades now. Why do conservatives act like this suddenly started with An Inconvenient Truth?
I don't think anyone's arguing that it started with it. I think people are arguing that it seemed to end with it.
good point. i think it was just how it was presented as a known fact and then to imply there is no discussion, at all, is what really sent people over the edge.
The science of the matter is a known fact. what to do about it, is the debate. Anyone stating otherwise is full of hooey, unless you buy into some goofy concept of "consensus".
I just wonder if anyone really asks themselves from a policy standpoint - if Global warming is trully happening - then why hasn't the environmentalists come up with a single cost-benefit analysis???? Not a single one. Should someone say - ok, if we cut x% - it will result in the lose of x jobs, have this cost, make us lose this much GDP, in exchange, it will result in sea levels being reduced x cm? This is why there will not be policy passed on the issue - because no one knows what should be done. just doing "something" isn't enough. It's reckless in fact and may end up doing more harm than good. I wish the Al Gore crowd and hollywood would think more pragmatically - is that so much for a moderate to ask for?
im not sure what you mean, in particular, with the science of the matter...the matter that green house gasses can increase the earth temperature, or that the recent warming is because of humans? im affraid it is
From the Great Global Warming Swindle. "For some people, the final nail in the coffin of human-produced greenhouse gas theories is the fact that carbon dioxide is produced in far larger quantities by many natural means: human emissions are miniscule in comparison. Volcanic emissions and carbon dioxide from animals, bacteria, decaying vegetation and the ocean outweigh our own production several times over." I had read this before but was not sure of its validity. This piece has some compelling arguments as to humans lack of affect on global climate shifts. Especially that there was a much warmer period before 1940, and then a cooler period for a number of years. http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindle/arguments.html
The IPCC disagrees. I tend to believe them over some goofy documentary - just as some of Gore's data is extreme and should be viewed carefully.
Both. Although I'd argue it's not just "recent" warming. Atypical warming has been ocurring for about 6000 years, or roughly around the time that agriculture picked up. In theory, one could argue that this warming delayed an ice age. This data was uncovered from the Vostok ice core, although (not surprisingly) it is quite controversial.
This was from Paglia's column in Salon, yesterday: http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2007/04/11/global_warming/index3.html Just wondering what your thoughts are on the global warming issue. Have you seen the Al Gore movie? Any thoughts on the current debate on climate science? Many thanks, April Vancouver Oh, great, here comes the hornet's nest! As a native of upstate New York, whose dramatic landscape was carved by the receding North American glacier 10,000 years ago, I have been contemplating the principle of climate change since I was a child. Niagara Falls, as well as the even bigger dry escarpment of Clark Reservation near Syracuse, is a memento left by the glacier. So is nearby Green Lakes State Park, with its mysteriously deep glacial pools. When I was 10, I lived with my family at the foot of a drumlin -- a long, undulating hill of moraine formed by eddies of the ancient glacier melt. Geology and meteorology are fields that have always interested me and that I might well have entered, had I not been more attracted to art and culture. (My geology professor in college, in fact, asked me to consider geology as a career.) To conflate vast time frames with volatile daily change is a sublime exercise, bordering on the metaphysical. However, I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area. Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse. From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved. Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth's system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida -- as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done. Who is impious enough to believe that Earth's contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault. I began "Sexual Personae" (parodying the New Testament): "In the beginning was nature." And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe. I voted for Ralph Nader for president in the 2000 election because I feel that the United States needs a strong Green Party. However, when I tried to watch Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" on cable TV recently, I wasn't able to get past the first 10 minutes. I was snorting with disgust at its manipulations and distortions and laughing at Gore's lugubrious sentimentality, which was painfully revelatory of his indecisive, self-thwarting character. When Gore told a congressional hearing last month that there is a universal consensus among scientists about global warming -- which is blatantly untrue -- he forfeited his own credibility. Environmentalism is a noble cause. It is damaged by propaganda and half-truths. Every industrialized society needs heightened consciousness about its past, present and future effects on the biosphere. Though I am a libertarian, I am a strong supporter of vigilant scrutiny and regulation of industry by local, state and federal agencies. But there must be a balance with the equally vital need for economic development, especially in the Third World. Here's a terrible episode from my region that made the news just last year. A bankrupt thermometer factory in Franklin Township, N.J., vacated its building in 1994 but ignored a directive to clean the premises of residual mercury toxins. There was a total failure of oversight and follow-through at the state and local levels. The result: In 2004, a daycare center opened in the renovated building and for two years subjected children and pregnant women to a dangerously high level of mercury vapors from the contaminated site. The degree of permanent health effects on those children is still unknown. This kind of outrageous negligence should not be tolerated in a civilized nation.
