Exxon Offered $10k to Scientists to Debunk U.N. Global Warming Report

Scenes from the Climate Inquisition
The chilling effect of the global warming consensus.
by Steven F. Hayward & Kenneth P. Green
02/19/2007, Volume 012, Issue 22



On February 2, an AEI research project on climate change policy that we have been organizing was the target of a journalistic hit piece in Britain's largest left-wing newspaper, the Guardian. The article's allegation--that we tried to bribe scientists to criticize the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--is easy to refute. More troubling is the growing worldwide effort to silence anyone with doubts about the catastrophic warming scenario that Al Gore and other climate extremists are putting forth.

"Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today," read the Guardian's lead. The byline was Ian Sample, the paper's science correspondent, and his story ran under the headline "Scientists Offered Cash to Dispute Climate Study."

Sample spoke to one of us for five minutes to gather a perfunctory quotation to round out his copy, but he clearly was not interested in learning the full story. He found time, however, to canvass critics for colorful denunciations of the American Enterprise Institute as "the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra," with nothing but "a suitcase full of cash."

Every claim in the story was false or grossly distorted, starting with the description of the American Enterprise Institute as a "lobby group"--AEI engages in no lobbying--funded by the world's largest oil company. The Guardian reports that "AEI has received more than $1.6 million from ExxonMobil." Yes--over the last seven years, a sum that represents less than 1 percent of AEI's total revenue during that period.

The irony of this story line is that AEI and similar right-leaning groups are more often attacked for supposedly ignoring the scientific "consensus" and promoting only the views of a handful of "skeptics" from the disreputable fringe. Yet in this instance, when we sought the views of leading "mainstream" scientists, our project is said to be an attempt at bribery. In any event, it has never been true that we ignore mainstream science; and anyone who reads AEI publications closely can see that we are not "skeptics" about warming. It is possible to accept the general consensus about the existence of global warming while having valid questions about the extent of warming, the consequences of warming, and the appropriate responses. In particular, one can remain a policy skeptic, which is where we are today, along with nearly all economists.

The substantive backstory, in brief, is as follows. The 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expressed the hope that scientific progress would reduce key uncertainties in climate models, especially having to do with clouds and aerosols. As the 2001 report stated: "The accuracy of these [temperature] estimates continues to be limited by uncertainties in estimates of internal variability, natural and anthropogenic forcing, and the climate response to external forcing." The IPCC identified 12 key factors for climate modeling, and said that the level of scientific understanding was "very low" for 7 of the 12. What progress have climate models made since this assessment was written, we wondered? Even people who closely follow the scientific journals are hard-pressed to tell.

Last summer we decided to commission essays from scientists, economists, and public policy experts in the hope of launching a fresh round of discussion and perhaps holding a conference or publishing a book. Among the nine scholars we wrote to in July were Gerald North and Steve Schroeder of Texas A&M, who have done scrupulous and detailed work on some key aspects of climate modeling, and we were confident that their work would be seen as authoritative by all sides. (North chaired the recent National Academy of Sciences review of the controversial "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction.) We couched our query in the context of wanting to make sure the next IPCC report received serious scrutiny and criticism.

Our offer of an honorarium of up to $10,000 to busy scientists to review several thousand pages of material and write an original analysis in the range of 7,500 to 10,000 words is entirely in line with honoraria AEI and similar organizations pay to distinguished economists and legal scholars for commissioned work. (Our letter to North and Schroeder can be found readily on AEI's website.)

North declined our invitation on account of an already full schedule. Schroeder shared our letter with one of his Texas A&M colleagues, atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler. Dessler posted our complete letter on his blog in late July, along with some critical but largely fair-minded comments, including: "While one might be skeptical that the AEI will give the [IPCC Fourth Assessment Report] a fair hearing, the fact that they have solicited input from a credible and mainstream scientist like Jerry North suggests to me that I should not prejudge their effort."

Dessler's story was linked on another popular environmental blog (www.grist.org), after which someone in the environmental advocacy community (the Washington Post suggests it was Greenpeace and the Public Interest Research Group) picked up the story and tried to plant it, with a sinister spin, somewhere in the media. Several reporters looked into it--including one from a major broadcast network who spent half a day talking with us in November about the substance of our climate views--but reached the conclusion that there was no story here. In particular, AEI's recent book Strategic Options for Bush Administration Climate Policy, advocating a carbon tax and criticizing Bush administration climate policy, clearly didn't fit the "Big Oil lobby corrupts science" story line.

So instead, the story was taken overseas and peddled to the Guardian, which, like some of its British competitors, has a history of publishing environmentalist hype as news. (In December, Guardian columnist George Monbiot offered the view that "every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.") Add a Matt Drudge link and a credulous recycling of the story by NPR's "Morning Edition," and a full-scale media frenzy was on. Even Al Gore jumped on the bandwagon, calling us "unethical" in an appearance in Silicon Valley and a CNN interview.

We were deluged with calls, but--unlike the reporters who had looked at the story last fall--none of our interrogators last week evinced any interest in the substance of our views on climate change science or policy, nor did any news story that we have seen accurately report the figures we supplied regarding ExxonMobil's share of AEI's funding.

The Guardian story, it should be noted, appeared the very day the IPCC released its new summary on the science of climate change. This was a transparent attempt to discredit an anticipated AEI blast at the IPCC. But no such blast was ever in the offing. As our letter to Schroeder makes clear, our project was not expected to produce any published results until some time in 2008, long after the headlines about the IPCC report would have faded.

Meanwhile, the IPCC's release of a 21-page summary of its work a full three months before the complete 1,400-page report is due to be published is exactly the kind of maneuver that raises questions about the politicization of the IPCC process. Why the delay? In the past, official summaries of IPCC reports have sometimes overstated the consensus of scientific opinion revealed later in the fine print (though, to be fair, it is more often the media and advocacy groups that misrepresent findings or omit the IPCC's caveats and declarations of uncertainty on key points). Is the full report going to be rewritten to square more closely with the summary? The Scientific Alliance in Cambridge, England, noted that it is "an unusual step to publish the summary of a document that has not yet been finalized and released into the public domain."

One possible reason for the timing is that there appear to be some significant retreats from the 2001 IPCC report. The IPCC has actually lowered its estimate of the magnitude of human influence on warming, though we shall have to wait for the full report in May to understand how and why. Only readers with detailed knowledge of the 2001 report would notice these changes, which is why most news accounts failed to report them.

This reining-in has led some climate pessimists to express disappointment with the new summary. Environmental writer Joseph Romm, for example, complained about "the conservative edge to the final product." Which returns us to our starting point.

The rollout of the IPCC report and the Guardian story attacking us coincide with the climax of what can be aptly described as a climate inquisition intended to stifle debate about climate science and policy. Anyone who does not sign up 100 percent behind the catastrophic scenario is deemed a "climate change denier." Distinguished climatologist Ellen Goodman spelled out the implication in her widely syndicated newspaper column last week: "Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers." One environmental writer suggested last fall that there should someday be Nuremberg Trials--or at the very least a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission--for climate skeptics who have blocked the planet's salvation.

Former Vice President Al Gore has proposed that the media stop covering climate skeptics, and Britain's environment minister said that, just as the media should give no platform to terrorists, so they should exclude climate change skeptics from the airwaves and the news pages. Heidi Cullen, star of the Weather Channel, made headlines with a recent call for weather-broadcasters with impure climate opinions to be "decertified" by the American Meteorological Society. Just this week politicians in Oregon and Delaware stepped up calls for the dismissal of their state's official climatologists, George Taylor and David Legates, solely on the grounds of their public dissent from climate orthodoxy. And as we were completing this article, a letter arrived from senators Bernard Sanders, Pat Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, and John Kerry expressing "very serious concerns" about our alleged "attempt to undermine science." Show-trial hearing to follow? Stay tuned.

Desperation is the chief cause for this campaign of intimidation. The Kyoto accords are failing to curtail greenhouse gas emissions in a serious way, and although it is convenient to blame Bush, anyone who follows the Kyoto evasions of the Europeans knows better. The Chinese will soon eclipse the United States as world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, depriving the gas-rationers of one of their favorite sticks for beating up Americans. The economics of steep, near-term emissions cuts are forbidding--though that's one consensus the climate crusaders ignore. Robert Samuelson nailed it in his syndicated column last week: "Don't be fooled. The dirty secret about global warming is this: We have no solution."

The relentless demonization of anyone who does not fall in behind the Gore version of the issue--manmade climate catastrophe necessitating draconian cuts in emissions--has been effective. Steve Schroeder practically admitted as much when he told the Washington Post that, although he didn't think AEI would distort his work, he feared it could be "misused" or placed alongside "off-the-wall ideas" questioning the existence of global warming. In other words, Schroeder was afraid of the company he might have to keep. For the record, AEI extended an invitation to participate in this project to only one so-called skeptic (who declined, on grounds that reviewing the next IPCC report isn't worth the effort). The other scientists and economists we contacted are from the "mainstream," and we were happy to share with them the names of other prospective participants if they asked. Over the last four years, AEI has repeatedly invited senior IPCC figures, including Susan Solomon, Robert Watson, Richard Moss, and Nebojsa Nakicenovic, to speak at AEI panels and seminars, always with an offer to pay honoraria. Full schedules prevented these four from accepting our invitation; a few more junior IPCC members have spoken at AEI.

But the climate inquisition may prompt a backlash. One straw in the wind was the bracing statement made by Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of Britain's leading climate scientists. "I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric," Hulme told the BBC in November. "It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the skeptics. How the wheel turns. . . . Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists, too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror, and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science's predictions? . . . To state that climate change will be 'catastrophic' hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science."

Then in December, Kevin Vranes of the University of Colorado, by no means a climate skeptic, commented on a widely read science blog about the mood of the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where Al Gore had made his standard climate presentation. "To sum up the state of the [climate science] world in one word, as I see it right now, it is this: tension," Vranes wrote. "What I am starting to hear is internal backlash. . . . None of this is to say that the risk of climate change is being questioned or downplayed by our community; it's not. It is to say that I think some people feel that we've created a monster by limiting the ability of people in our community to question results that say 'climate change is right here!'"

The climate inquisition is eliminating any space for sensible criticism of the climate science process or moderate deliberation about policy. Greenpeace and its friends may be celebrating their ability to gin up a phony scandal story and feed it to the left-wing press, but if people who are serious about climate change hunker down in their fortifications and stay silent, that bodes ill for the future of climate policy and science generally.

Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Kenneth P. Green is a resident scholar at AEI. Both are frequent contributors to AEI's Environmental Policy Outlook.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/275tmktp.asp


Link

In addition, Cullen’s December 17, 2006 episode of "The Climate Code" TV show, featured a columnist who openly called for Nuremberg-style Trials for climate skeptics. Cullen featured Grist Magazine’s Dave Roberts as an eco-expert opining on energy issues, with no mention of his public call to institute what amounts to the death penalty for scientists who express skepticism about global warming.

http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=264568


Cullen’s call for suppressing scientific dissent comes at a time when many skeptical scientists affiliated with Universities have essentially been silenced over fears of loss of tenure and the withdrawal of research grant money. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process has also steadily pushed scientists away who hold inconvenient skeptical views and reject the alarmist conclusions presented in the IPCC’s summary for policymakers.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index....ecord_id=21CC88EC-CCA6-4A61-8C2E-78FA8DE4850D

Whoever thought that serious commentators would want it made illegal to have a row about the weather? One Australian columnist has proposed outlawing ‘climate change denial’. ‘David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial’, she wrote. ‘Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence. It is a crime against humanity, after all.’ (1) Others have suggested that climate change deniers should be put on trial in the future, Nuremberg-style, and made to account for their attempts to cover up the ‘global warming…Holocaust’ (2).

The message is clear: climate change deniers are scum. Their words are so wicked and dangerous that they must be silenced, or criminalised, or forced beyond the pale alongside those other crackpots who claim there was no Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. Perhaps climate change deniers should even be killed off, hanged like those evil men who were tried Nuremberg-style the first time around.

Whatever the truth about our warming planet, it is clear there is a tidal wave of intolerance in the debate about climate change which is eroding free speech and melting rational debate. There has been no decree from on high or piece of legislation outlawing climate change denial, and indeed there is no need to criminalise it, as the Australian columnist suggests. Because in recent months it has been turned into a taboo, chased out of polite society by a wink and a nod, letters of complaint, newspaper articles continually comparing climate change denial to Holocaust denial. An attitude of ‘You can’t say that!’ now surrounds debates about climate change, which in many ways is more powerful and pernicious than an outright ban. I am not a scientist or an expert on climate change, but I know what I don’t like - and this demonisation of certain words and ideas is an affront to freedom of speech and open, rational debate.

The loaded term itself – ‘climate change denier’ – is used to mark out certain people as immoral, untrustworthy. According to Richard D North, author most recently of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence: ‘It is deeply pejorative to call someone a “climate change denier”…it is a phrase designedly reminiscent of the idea of Holocaust denial – the label applied to those misguided or wicked people who believe, or claim to believe, the Nazis did not annihilate the Jews, and others, in very great numbers.’ (3) People of various views and hues tend to get lumped together under the umbrella put-down ‘climate change denier’ – from those who argue the planet is getting hotter but we will be able to deal with it, to those who claim the planet is unlikely to get much hotter at all (4). On Google there are now over 80,000 search returns, and counting, for the phrase climate change denial.

Others take the tactic of openly labelling climate change deniers as cranks, possibly even people who might need their heads checked. In a speech last month, in which he said people ‘should be scared’ about global warming, UK environment secretary David Miliband said ‘those who deny [climate change] are the flat-earthers of the twenty-first century’ (5). Taking a similar tack, former US vice president-turned-green-warrior Al Gore recently declared: ‘Fifteen per cent of the population believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona and somewhat fewer still believe the Earth is flat. I think they all get together with the global warming deniers on a Saturday night and party.’ (6)

It is not only environmentalist activists and green-leaning writers who are seeking to silence climate change deniers/sceptics/critics/whatever you prefer. Last month the Royal Society – Britain’s premier scientific academy founded in 1660, whose members have included some of the greatest scientists – wrote a letter to ExxonMobil demanding that the oil giant cut off its funding to groups that have ‘misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence’. It was the first time the Royal Society had ever written to a company complaining about its activities. The letter had something of a hectoring, intolerant tone: ‘At our meeting in July…you indicated that ExxonMobil would not be providing any further funding to these organisations. I would be grateful if you could let me know when ExxonMobil plans to carry out this pledge.’ (7)

One could be forgiven for asking what business it is of the Royal Society to tell ExxonMobil whom it can and cannot support – just as we might balk if ExxonMobil tried to tell the Royal Society what to do. The Society claims it is merely defending a ‘scientific consensus…the evidence’ against ExxonMobil’s duplicitous attempts to play down global warming for its own oily self-interest. Yet some scientists have attacked the idea that there can ever be untouchable cast-iron scientific facts, which should be immune from debate or protected from oil-moneyed think-tanks. An open letter to the Society – signed by Tim Ball, a professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg, and others – argues that ‘scientific inquiry is unique because it requires falsifiability’: ‘The beauty of science is that no issue is ever “settled”, that no question is beyond being more fully understood, that no conclusion is immune to further experimentation. And yet for the first time in history, the Royal Society is shamelessly using the media to say emphatically: “case closed” on all issues related to climate change.’

Or as Charles Jones, an emeritus English professor at the University of Edinburgh, put it in a letter to a publication that recently lambasted climate change deniers, ‘[W]e are left with the feeling that [climate change] is a scientific model which is unfalsifiable and which has not been – and indeed cannot be – the subject of any theoretical counter-proposals whatsoever. As such, it must surely be unique in the history of science. Even a powerful model such as Relativity Theory has been the object of scientific debate and emendation.’ (8)

For all the talk of simply preserving the facts against climate change deniers, there is increasingly a pernicious moralism and authoritarianism in the attempts to silence certain individuals and groups. This is clear from the use of the term ‘climate change denier’, which, as Charles Jones argued, is an attempt to assign any ‘doubters’ with ‘the same moral repugnance one associates with Holocaust denial’ (9). The Guardian columnist George Monbiot recently celebrated the ‘recanting’ of both the tabloid Sun and the business bible The Economist on the issue of global warming. (‘Recant’ – an interesting choice of word. According to my OED it means ‘To withdraw, retract or renounce a statement, opinion or belief as erroneous, and esp. with formal or public confession of error in matters of religion.’ Recanting is often what those accused before the Spanish Inquisition did to save their hides.) Pleased by the Sun and The Economist’s turnaround, Monbiot wrote: ‘Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.’ (10)

Earlier this year, when a correspondent for the American current affairs show 60 Minutes was asked why his various feature programmes on global warming did not include the views of global warming sceptics, he replied: ‘If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?’ Here, climate change deniers are explicitly painted as the bad guys. He also argued that, ‘This isn’t about politics...this is about sound science’, and went so far as to claim that it would be problematic even to air the views of climate change sceptics: ‘There comes a point in journalism where striving for balance becomes irresponsible.’

Some take the moral equivalence between climate change denial and Holocaust denial to its logical conclusion. They argue that climate change deniers are actually complicit in a future Holocaust – the global warming Holocaust – and thus will have to be brought to trial in the future. Green author and columnist Mark Lynas writes: ‘I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put [their climate change denial] in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial – except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have to answer for their crimes.’ (11)

There is something deeply repugnant in marshalling the Holocaust in this way, both to berate climate change deniers and also as a convenient snapshot of what is to come if the planet continues to get warmer. First, the evidence is irrefutable that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis; that is an historical event that has been thoroughly investigated, interrogated and proven beyond reasonable doubt. (Although as the American-Jewish academic and warrior against Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt, has pointed out, even the Nazi Holocaust is not above debate and re-evalution; it is not a ‘theology’.) There is no such proof or evidence (how could there be?) that global warming will cause a similar calamity. Second, it is, yet again, a cynical attempt to close down debate. The H-word is uttered as a kind of moral absolute that no one could possibly question. We are all against what happened during the first Holocaust, so we will be against the ‘next Holocaust’, too, right? And if not – if you do not take seriously the coming ‘global warming Holocaust’ – then you are clearly wicked, the equivalent of the David Irvings of this world, someone who should possibly even be locked up or certainly tried at a future date. At least laws against Holocaust denial (which, as a supporter of free speech, I am opposed to) chastise individuals for lying about a known and proven event; by contrast, the turning of climate change denial into a taboo raps people on the knuckles for questioning events, or alleged events, that have not even occurred yet. It is pre-emptive censorship. They are reprimanded not for lying, but for doubting, for questioning. If this approach was taken across the board, then spiked – motto: Question Everything – would be in for a rough ride.

Sometimes there is a knowing authoritarianism in green activism. The posters advertising George Monbiot’s new book are targeted at various celebrities and businessmen judged to be living less than ethical green lives, with the words ‘GEORGE IS WATCHING YOU’ (12). It comes straight out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some institutions employ Orwellian doublespeak when they use the word ‘facts’. They are not talking about submitting theories or hypotheses or evidence for public debate and possibly public approval – they are talking about using ‘facts’ precisely to stifle public debate and change the way people think and behave.

So in a report on global warming titled Warm Words: How Are We Telling the Climate Story and Can We Tell it Better?, the British think-tank the Institute for Public Policy Research argued that ‘the task of climate change agencies is not to persuade by rational argument but in effect to develop and nurture a new “common sense”…. [We] need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement…. The “facts” need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.’ The IPPR proposes treating us not as free-thinking citizens who should be engaged, but as consumers who should be sold these ‘unspoken facts’: ‘Ultimately, positive climate behaviours need to be approached in the same way as marketeers approach acts of buying and consuming…. It amounts to treating climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold. This is, we believe, the route to mass behaviour changes.’ (13)

Nurturing a new common sense? Changing mass behaviour? Behind the talk of facts and figures we can glimpse the reality: an authoritarian campaign that has no interest whatsoever in engaging us in debate but rather thinks up ‘shrewd’ ways to change the way we behave. From the description of facts as ‘so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken’ to the lumping together of climate change deniers with Holocaust deniers – and even Holocaust practitioners – we can see a creeping clampdown on any genuine, open debate about climate change, science and society. This represents a dangerous denigration of free speech. When George W Bush said after 9/11 ‘You’re either with us or against us’, he was widely criticised. Yet greens, think-tanks, reputable institutions and government ministers are using precisely the same tactic, drawing a line between good and proper people who accept the facts about climate change and those moral lepers who do not; between those who submit to having their common sense nurtured by the powers-that-be and those who dare to doubt or debate.

If anything, the greens’ black-and-white divide is worse than Bush’s. At least his was based on some kind of values, allowing us the opportunity to say yes or no to them; the greens’ divide is based on ‘facts’, which means that those who decide that they are ‘against’ rather than ‘with’ can be labelled liars, deniers or crackpots like moon-landing conspiracy theorists or anti-Semitic historians.

Effectively, campaigners and officials are using scientific facts – over which there is still disagreement – to shut down what ought to be a political debate about what humans need and want. This is the worst of it. Whatever side you take in the climate change clash of facts, this undermining of debate should be a cause of concern. In place of a human-centred discussion of priorities and solutions we have an unconvincing battle over the facts between two sides – between those in the majority who claim that their facts show the planet is getting a lot hotter and it will be a disaster, and those in the minority, the ‘deniers’, who say the planet is getting a little hotter and it won’t be so bad. We could urgently do with a proper debate that prioritises real people’s aspirations. If parts of the planet are likely to be flooded, then where can we build new cities and how can we transport the people affected by the floods to those cities? If natural disasters are going to become more frequent, then how can we urgently and efficiently provide poorer parts of the world with the kind of buildings and technology that will allow them to ride out such disasters, as millions do in America every year?

We need to elevate the human interest over the dead discussion of fatalistic facts – and challenge the ‘You can’t say that!’ approach that is strangling debate and giving rise to a new authoritarianism.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1782/

 

Hayes, you're posting a press release from Senator Inhofe's office now and charging others as being politically motivated?

Sorry but that guy's credibility on this (or any scientific issue) is beyond sh-t.

I don't understand your need to try to be an apologist for these guys, or your need to try to discredit GW theory at all costs, it borders on the pathological.

 

That was just a link to the story about Cullen.

Hmmm...since I acknowledged basic GW theory I'm not sure how you can accuse me of being 'pathological,' lol. Although sadly enough your response does serve as a shining example of exactly the kind of marginalization through labeling that I am posting about. One might consider the AEI response to the issue relevant and important to the discussion, but again it appears you aren't interested in a discussion.

 

big Dub is an under achiever by saying we'll cut gas consumption by 10% by 2020(am i correct on this?) even if its a lil better than what i stated still its not enough.

 

I really am in favor of global warming. I hate the cold.

Anyway, what I don't get about yall "environmentalists" is how come you are so ready to cap CO2 emissions without considering the negative impact it will have economically.

Even if man is changing the planet and all the theories are true (although the hurricane case is grossly exaggerated to the point of being a lie - Al Gore loses all credibility for blaming Katrina on global warming), no one has said that a warmer planet is worse then a cooler one.

No one has done that kind of study. A warmer planet may benefit more people actually. But environmentalists can't accept that. Anything industry does is bad - no matter what.

And if warming was such an issues, why doesn't Greenpeace advise going nuclear?

Apparently even they have bigger priorities.

Yea Global Warming! Die Granola Scum!

 

Allow me to relate to you a commercial that just exemplifies what I'm talking about when I talk about the "sky is falling and we're all going to die" followers of global warming.

The commercial starts out as a man standing on the railroad tracks talking about global warming. He then states that in 30 years the world will be doomed but that he doesn't care because it's 30 years from now. He then moves out of the way and a small child is revealed as she is about to be run over by a train. I kid you not.

Again, my big problem is with the over-exaggeration of what's going to happen because of global warming and this is a prime example of it. All children are going to die because of global warming. You don't hate children do you?

 

I've seen that commercial. It's like that commercial LBJ ran against Goldwater with a little girl plucking flower petals while counting down. When she reaches one, you see a mushroom cloud.

I do have some concerns with the "fear mongering". We don't really know at what rate global warming will increase. Our projections rely on CO2 models, so environmentalists will have set themselves for public disappointment if they don't match predictions. Then again the world can warm 3 degrees overall for two hundred years and these scientists can still claim victory. But I don't think Chicken Little is an accurate description. If the falling sky is a natural process, then the naysayers are conceding that we're ****ed no matter what we do.

Not that any half assed effort will be a waste of money. As long as there's money to be used, there's creativity involved to get it. The Y2K bug improved some corporations productivity because of upgrades to their tech infrastructure. But that might be what some environmental extremists want...to spread fear as a catalyst for more green spending beyond global warming. These tactics are commonplace for all special interests that it isn't really negative anymore.

 

I don't think there is much economic benefit to diminishing coastlines especially when many of the great economic centers are built on those coastlines.

I get the feeling your post though is another part of your internet forum game where you pretend to be radical.

 

I agree such blatant fear mongering is over board but the threat of Global Warming isn't something that should be ignored. As I've said repeatedly I understand we are dealing with probabilities but given the probabilities why take the risk?

Imagine the Global Warming future as a roulette wheel. Considering that there is a widespread but not absolutely unanimous agreement that Global Warming is happening If we betting our money on 36 and 35 is equivalent to listening to the scientific nay sayers and keeping the status quo and everything stays fine. The probably is though we've got 34 chances to hit on something bad since that would be scientists who agree that Global Warming is happening and its not going to be good. Instead of just betting on two numbers we could spread our money onto several more numbers and increase our chances of hitting a successful number. That would be taking action to prevent human caused global warming. There is a cost to this since if we spread our money we are going to lose some each time the wheel spins but compare that to the chance of possibly losing all our money on one spin. In Global Warming that would be the situation where we do nothing and Global Warming happens and its too far gone to do anything about it.

From the policy side it is a matter of looking at the probabilities so yes there is a chance that nothing might happen and that Global Warming proponents are engaging in fear mongering. OTOH though Global Warming opponents though are being pollyanish to ignore the possibilities that things could be bad.

 

and my understanding is the new report suggests that the old estimations for diminished coastlines were over-exaggerated. that their worst-case scenarios have been revised. maybe i'm wrong on that, though.

look, what halfbreed is saying is what i'm saying. tell me why we need to clean up the environment. but stop with the sky is falling stuff. stop with the fear-mongering on stuff you're not certain of. let's clean up the environment. let's fund alternative energy sources BIG TIME!!! i'd be all for that. for environmental and political reasons. all for it. but the fear-mongering based on theory is just too much. eventually it backfires and causes much more harm because you "lose" people.

 

A couple of problems. If the World warms 3 degrees celsius over the next 2 Centuries that will be disasterours. Given the size of the Earth we are talking about only a few degrees here and there on a global average to make a hot Earth vs. an ice age. Natural processes could play a role in Global Warming and my own feeling is that this is a process with a few factors. The problem is that even if its a natural process are we exacerbating it? This would be like if a fire starts next door to your house do you start pouring gasoline on your yard. Even if Global Warming is natural its not going to be good for us since our economy and settlements have been built for the climate and shorelines we've known the past hundred years. Shifts in those whether human or natural caused still will be bad for us.

This is a good point that should be factored into considering reducing greenhouse gases as there are many side benefits. Its a given we will run out of fossil fuels and internal combustion as a power source has many other problems associated with it. By reducing use of fossil fuels and internal combustion we not only save resources but reduce other pollution that is harmful by itself along with with reducing greenhouse gases.

 

My understanding though is that while the rate is still in question coastlines are diminishing and average sea levels have risen. These are due to many factors but even an average rise of a few 1/4" would be disastrous to low lying areas.

[edit]Also my response to New Yorker wasn't a matter of discussing probabilities but in regard to his statement regarding economic benefits of a warmer world where global warming is a fact.[/edit]

Consider the roullete wheel analogy though. Everything may be right and you hit on 36 or 35 but how much do you want to risk on it?

 

Give me a break. Here in Austin we are STILL paying for the South Texas Nuclear Project, a plant that was estimated to cost $974 million in 1971, and ended up costing over $4.5 Billion dollars. It took almost 20 years to complete the damn thing. If there is ever an accident, the prevailing winds will blow radioactivity over the Austin/San Antonio area, a region with a population in the millions.

There are still many questions about the safety of nuclear plants, and what to do with nuclear waste. I don't know what it has to do with Greenpeace, but I'm certainly not surprised that they aren't singing the praises of nuclear energy. We're far from proving that nuclear energy is a viable long term solution to the energy crisis. There are countless things this country, and the world, can do to address providing clean energy for us all. It's far past time to get serious about tackling the problem. As far as I'm concerned, nuclear energy is a work in progress, and not a solution anytime in the near future, or the next couple of decades.



D&D. We Glow in the Dark.

 

we need to know probabilities better than this. are you suggesting that the chances of the sky falling for the whole world are as good as the chances of there being localized problems with benefits for other areas??

the roullete wheel is not a good analogy. in that sense every outcome has the same probability of occurring. i'm no scientist, but i don't think that's the case. you can not make policy on stuff that flimsy.

 

^ The problem is that if you are going to look at probabilities then the more widely held scientific opinions should be considered as more likely probabilities. In the case of my analogy not every outcome has the same probability if it did then we could say there is roughly a 50% chance that Global Warming is bunk and everything is OK. Given what we know that isn't the case which is why I assigned only two numbers on a wheel of 36 numbers to the likelyhood that everything is OK.

The problem I see with your position is that you are saying "lets drop the sky is falling rhetoric. Global warming is likely to not be that bad and addressing it will cause a lot of problems when we have no consensus." I agree the sky is falling rhetoric isn't helpful which is why I am studiously avoiding saying that its a given that the worst will happen. The problem though with trying to take a more optimistic view and placing more weight on shortterm pain with addressing potential solutions is that the stakes are too great if the worst case scenario actually happens. I will also agree that the probabilities aren't fully known but we may never know the probabilities while in the meantime the concentration of greenhouse gases continues to increase. By the time we get to the point of saying we can definatively state the probabilities it might be too late to do anything.

I would rather prepare for the worst and have people like Dr. Lindzen come by and say "I told you so." than potentially have the worse happen. Even if Global Warming never comes to pass though there are many side benefits with addressing it like Invisible Fan mentioned in regard to Y2K which ended up not being a big deal but a lot of good still came from the effort to prepare for it.

 

Here's a conversation that would never happen...
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Well gee, that fire's still 8 miles from town.

Yes, but it's aligned perfectly with slope and vegetation. The right wind could push it there in an afternoon.

But in order to protect the town, we'll have to close the forest, put people in to do an emergency fuel break around town, and maybe even evacuate a few people just so we can prepare for this wind that may not come. People will be inconvenienced and upset because they won't be able to live their lives like they want for the next few days and their views will be altered by the fuel break.

Well, if the fire burns through town, they won't be able to live the way they did forever and the view of burned trees and houses isn't exactly a boon to property values.

Still, let's study it a bit more before we commit to such a radical action. I really don't think the wind will pick up.

OK, that's fine. Let me document this conversation in my notes so I can tell the investigators when they come.
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Using the best available information, you prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Preparing for the best gets you Iraq.

 

so at all costs you prepare for the worst of what might happen according to some??? at all costs??

this is what we're talking about. i'm not disagreeing with you that we should be doing something. i just don't know what. i don't know what is too far.

 

This is what I mean when you are obsessed with extreme scenarios.

"At all costs" means we turn out the lights and use candles and horses and buggies.

Proposing a cap & trade system for CO2 combined with lower emissions limits, greater fuel efficiency standards - etc. is not an "all costs" scenario.

 

that's not what i mean when i say it. honestly, i don't know what i mean when i say it. i don't know what the "costs" are of the various proposals.

 

playoffs? you wanna talk about playoffs?