Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)
Meanwhile, we have a bait and switch:
The stink surrounding the Pelosi-Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill has become vomit-inducing overnight. Representative Waxman has decided to replace the 1091-page bill with a 300-page bill that will be debated for no longer than three hours today. So your elected representatives will have virtually no time to debate the merits of an economy-spanning bill they will not have had time to read. Speaker Pelosi and her sidekick Waxman are displaying nothing more than complete contempt for the democratic process.
If you’re as utterly disgusted by this as I am, you can send a message to Pelosi and her cronies by telling your Congressmen to vote against this bill. You can e-mail them, call them (202-225-3121), or text the National Taxpayers Union on 54608 and they will help.
Calling the Democrats the “Democratic Party” is the biggest fraudulent advertisement since The Never-Ending Story.
Tar. Feathers. Rail.
We called this morning.
[Afternoon update]
Fifteen reasons to oppose the bill.
Well, Jim seems to think a couple degrees rise in “mean” temperature will cause all the ice to melt right away in a big whoosh!
As for the rest of the doom scenario, my, what a bunch of glass-half-empty gloomy gusses you global warmy climate changenists are. Human ingenuity managed to survive the last great Ice Age, and that was when we were a small, fragile population that used bones and rocks as tools. And in fact, we increased and civilization was formed as the climate started warming — yes, floods and all — and the glaciers receded, leaving more land to learn to grow stuff in. You’re saying the human race is now too weak and stupid to survive a possible moderate increase in global temperature? (Which actually seems to be decreasing, but never mind.) Maybe we should start a new slogan: “Surviving Climate Change: So Complicated, Only A Caveman Could Do It.”
Andrea, you’re being a little harsh. After reading all of his comments, it’s not fair to expect Jim to be as smart as a cave man.
Seriously, I wonder if Jim understands either physics and more specifically thermodynamics? Most warm mongers I’ve run across don’t seem to be familiar with it.
Yeah, that was almost a GEICO commercial right there.
That was long ago. We adapted.
I reject that utterly. I await “Jim”s response.
How did such a fine thread spring up while I was at work? I hope we’re starting to veer away from the religious nonsense that surrounding global warming early in this decade.
My view is that as long as a significant carbon emission reduction bill needs as much pork attached as this one does, then we’re not ready for carbon emission reduction. I agree with Jack. Global warming isn’t being treated seriously. I’m not going to take a massive hit to my standard of living merely because some chicken little thinks I should. My view is that there is something to global warming, but no where near enough to justify large scale carbon emission reduction.
I apologize to any cavemen I might have involuntarily insulted by comparing them to Jim.
Has the CBO ever overestimated costs on a program?
Yes, the cost of Clean Air Act compliance was overestimated.
That’s one of your biggest howlers yet. Did you make that up on your own or are you quoting someone else?
That’s all me, and on reflection you’re right, it isn’t accurate. The point I was (poorly) trying to make was that technological advances don’t necessarily make it easier for the poorest people on earth (e.g. subsistence farmers in Africa) adapt to climate change. We already have lots of technology that could make their lives much better today, but for a variety of reasons its benefits don’t reach them. To expect that this will change, and that they will be suddenly be able to harness technology to adapt to climate change (when they can’t do so to adapt to the occasional drought), is fantasy.
All this ignores the fact that it would take a thousand years to melt Greenland, due to the specific heat requirements to melt ice.
I’d like to hear more about this — do you have suggestions for where I could learn more about specific heat (my physics education ended in high school).
That said, it would not take the melting of the Greenland ice for things to get very bad. Having it slide into the ocean would raise sea levels just as much, reduce the planet’s albedo, etc.
I reject that utterly. I await “Jim”s response.
My response is that we want to save more than the human race, we want to save humans. The loss of millions, or tens of millions, of human beings would not put a dent in the world population, or the longevity of the human race, but it would still be an epic tragedy. All the more so if it could have been averted.
And that is not even mentioning all the non-human species that actually do face extinction as we change the climate.
The point I was (poorly) trying to make was that technological advances don’t necessarily make it easier for the poorest people on earth (e.g. subsistence farmers in Africa) adapt to climate change.
And if we make ourselves poor, we won’t be able to help them either.
Have you read this book
, by someone who believes in climate change?
“But again: we’re headed for CO2 levels and temperatures that no human has ever experienced”
Since our meaurement of CO2 levels has been over a timepsan that is miniscule compared to human history, this statement can’t possibly be anything other than a baseless assertion (and if you want to base all of this on proxy measurements then you probably see nothing wrong with using hearsay evidence in court). There’s nothing wrong with proxy measurements when engaging in speculation, but there’s a whole Hell of a lot wrong with it when formulating policy and law.
There’s as much evidence that humans are causing climate change as there is that aliens are abducting humans. When’s Congress going to do something about that “problem?”
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation WRT the Greenland ice, it would take over 200000 years of the ENTIRE energy of the Sun that impinges on the Earth to melt that ice (not taking into account raising its temperature to the melting point, i.e. based solely on enthalpy of fusion). I based this on a very quick Google search that produced an estimate of 2.5 million cubic km of ice in Greenland and 4E18 J per year from the sun. Someone might check me on that. So over one year’s time that would roughly be 10 cubic km of ice converted to water (if all of that eneergy from the Sun went straight to Greenland). Since the Greenland ice is believed to represent 10% of the earth’s total, that would indicate that worldwide ice melt would result in 100 cubic km converted to water each year. This of course assumes that the effects of the Sun are constant. In short, it seems to me that there are many orders of magnitude discrepancy between the amount of energy received from the Sun vs. the amount of ice that is supposedly melting. It’s possible that some or most of this energy is instead supplied by the Earth itself, but I still find the magnitude of the numbers involved extremely difficult to believe.
The notion that we can get rid of all the ice on earth…
Idiot. Nobody sane is claiming that melting icecaps also means worldwide snowfall ends. Another straw man from Jim.
Care to estimate the cost of moving a billion people to Greenland?
Is this the movie version where it all has to be done in ninety minutes or reality where people are moving all the time?
…Arizona is the crown jewel of American agriculture [not]…
There’s plenty of agriculture here in AZ Jim. If the world needed AZ to, it would produce more (basic economics.) Your ignorance is astounding.
Yeah, India will be fine when there’s no more snowmelt coming down from the Himalayas.
Idiot. Again.
it would take over 200000 years of the ENTIRE energy of the Sun that impinges on the Earth to melt that ice
How much energy is there in the warmth of the oceans? I.e. how long will that ice last if it slides off Greenland?
Is this the movie version where it all has to be done in ninety minutes or reality where people are moving all the time?
It’s reality where we’ve never seen a resettlement of hundreds of millions of very poor people over the course of a few decades. We get upset about a million Mexicans coming to the U.S. in a year; imagine trying to resettle 150 million people from Bangladesh.
There’s plenty of agriculture here in AZ Jim. If the world needed AZ to, it would produce more (basic economics.
Basic economics does not create good topsoil out of thin air. Warmer does not equal “better for agriculture”.
Idiot. Again.
Now that’s an argument.
And if we make ourselves poor, we won’t be able to help them either.
This assumes that the only thing that would keep us from helping them is our ability to afford it (which is doubtful, judging by how much help we give today), and that Waxman-Markey will make us poor. For data on the latter, click my name; the impact of carbon controls reaches 1.5% of GDP in 2050. Since growth averages about 1.5% a year, addressing climate change will make us so poor in 2050 that we’ll have to wait all the way until 2051 to be as rich as we would have been otherwise. Ouch!
Have you read this book, by someone who believes in climate change?
No. Lomborg should probably ask Amazon to have it reviewed by someone other than Michael Crichton, who didn’t believe in climate change.
I’m well aware that there are smart people who don’t think that climate change is real, or who don’t think it makes sense to do much about it. There are also smart people on the other side. People can have good faith disagreements. But I don’t see a place for straw man arguments like “cavemen survived the ice ages, aren’t we smarter than cavemen?”
For data on the latter, click my name; the impact of carbon controls reaches 1.5% of GDP in 2050.
Why should we believe that?
No. Lomborg should probably ask Amazon to have it reviewed by someone other than Michael Crichton, who didn’t believe in climate change.
It was reviewed by many people.
I see that you want to avoid more inconvenient truths.
imagine trying to resettle 150 million people from Bangladesh.
You don’t move them–you do what the Dutch do, with technology advanced decades beyond what we have now, but only if you haven’t pauperized the planet with loony socialist policies for no purpose.
and new findings that water vapor will moderate, rather than exacerbate, temperature.
Nature has done the experiment of what happens when the forcing suddenly changes, when Pinatubo reduced the effective insolation by a small but significant amount. Global temperatures declined in a way consistent with the climate sensitivity of climate models with positive water vapor feedback. If water vapor feedback were negative, the temperature decline would have been smaller.
It was reviewed by many people.
And yet its biggest fans seem to be people like you and Crichton, who don’t/didn’t think climate change is happening.
I see that you want to avoid more inconvenient truths.
If climate change is as easily addressed as Lomborg says, that would be a most convenient truth. The problem isn’t the convenience part, it’s the truth part.
Why should we believe that?
Because it’s the best estimate we have. The costs could be more, they could also be less, or negative.
Because it’s the best estimate we have.
Sometimes the best we have isn’t good enough.
If climate change is as easily addressed as Lomborg says
How would you know what Lomborg says? You’re afraid to read his book.
…its biggest fans seem to be people like you and Crichton, who don’t/didn’t think climate change is happening.
Its biggest fans are rational people like him, who don’t want to wreck the economy for religious purposes.
Unfortunately, the Mt. Pinatubo analysis by Soden et al…
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/296/5568/727
…isn’t quite the cast-iron proof of positive feed-back that Mr Dietz suggests.
Other analysis indicates large uncertainties…
http://www.springerlink.com/content/37eb1l5mfl20mb7k/
…or even proof of negative feed-back…
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL026355.shtml
…so the jury still seems to be out on the real-world “evidence” for AGW.
How would you know what Lomborg says?
I read a summary of his book.
You’re afraid to read his book.
I’m trembling in my boots. I’ll make you a deal: I’ll read his book, if you’ll read Jared Diamond’s Collapse, or Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Maybe we’ll both learn some things.
I read a summary of his book.
[laughing]
Don’t you think that it matters who “summarizes” it?
I’ll read his book, if you’ll read Jared Diamond’s Collapse
I’ve read all of Diamond’s work. Plus, I understand physics, thermodynamics, and mathematical modeling. I’ve done it for a living.
It’s a short book, Jim. A smart guy like you could knock it off in an hour or two. It’s inexpensive, too.
“For data on the latter, click my name;”
Kind of hard for examination of it considering the bill wasn’t even finished when it was voted on. The truth is we don’t know how expensive this bill will be but given the track record, betting on more, ALOT MORE, than estimated is the better idea.
Some data and analysis in case you are interested, Rand.
You are interested in data and analysis, right?
DouglassKnoxComment
suppressed-carlin-report-based-on-pat-michaels-attack-on-epa
You guys just don’t get it, and even worse, refuse to get it.