Global Warming - the inside scoop
By
(Remarks on Global Warming to Austin Republican
Women's Club
5 April 2007)
"When it's over I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."
Nor just, I add, having strutted and fretted my time upon some stage.
In this cosmic theater, we are flawed, bit players. We do indeed strut and fret. But, wonder of wonders, every now and then, our scripts are so perfectly aligned with who we have the greatest potential to be, that we resonate truth. We touch others. We speak to the remnant. We are listened to. We are taken seriously. We are understood.
Such occasional understanding probably reflects that some important traits and values are shared: Our rebelliousness. Our laughter. Our spirituality. Our itchy curiosity. Our chaos. Our order. Our responses. Our responsibility. Our valuing freedom.
Our embrace of freedom, our belief in the dignity of the individual, has been, and, against strong odds, continues to be the single human social contract that creates health, creates wealth through knowledge, promotes justice, creates opportunities for happiness, guards life, and can deliver equality of authority, as John Locke intended.
So, experience my remarks on global warming with this awareness - I really, really value liberty. I really value policy that enhances and stimulates innovation and knowledge, not coercive restrictions and red-tape. Ideally, I do not wish to force another human to live her life for my benefit. I do not wish to be coerced into living my life for hers. I might choose to do so, but "choose" is the operative word.
That said, you can begin to imagine that there is very little today of the political scene on either side of the aisle that I find appealing or comforting. But then, perhaps I view the political institution, everywhere, has having fashioned itself as the would-be director of the whole stage. It has fashioned would-be dictators for some part of the performance; would-be energy czars for other parts.
Global warming as a political, institutional cause is pure theater. Its stage characters are costumed as Planet Protectors sharing the fatal conceit that they know best for the rest of us what human controls must be enforced, what wrenching transformation must occur, in order to save the planet.
But I won't invest in this morality production. I would shut this theater down. Sixteen years of seeking to know what is or isn't so about this issue, still has me convinced that the frightful claims behind the cause are doubtful. I continue to test my position. I am quite willing to confess that my breathing out is killing our world, if facts prove up that position. Facts have not done that.
Scientists and Political Scientists should not play the same parts, nor should jurists.
The inconvenient facts that pin me to my sticking point include:
Temperature is currently a little below the 3,000 year average.
Last warm period was about the Middle Ages, called the Medieval Climate Optimum.
Last cold period was about the time of our American Revolution, called the Little Ice Age.
Climate models do not reflect these established warm and cold periods.
Eleven-year moving average of temperature and solar brightness are strongly correlated. Correlations are not causations, but hypothesis testing must continue.
Mars is currently warming, just as Earth is warming. No known humans on Mars.
Glacier length (169 glaciers) maximized around American Revolutionary War time. Three-quarters of shortening occurred before CO2 had risen.
No increase in number or severity of hurricanes since 1940, when carbon dioxide emissions by man's fossil fuel use primarily began.
Sea-levels are also benign.
Remarkable increase in standing timber as response to CO2 enrichment. CO2 is atmospheric fertilizer for all plants. Food chain is enhanced.
Carbon is the universal keystone to all information. To demonize carbon is suicidal.
Greenhouse effect is robust and stable
The Earth is warmed by the radioactivity in its elements and by the Sun. The Sun's warmth is amplified by greenhouse gases within the atmosphere, principally water vapor, that capture solar energy that would otherwise be radiated into space. This greenhouse effect is robust and stable. There is not a shred of scientific experimental evidence that this stability has been affected by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide or that it will be so affected in the future. (Arthur B. Robinson, president and research professor of Oregon Institute on Science and Medicine, in "Global Energy Rationing," complete with graphs, published 7 March 2007, LewRockwell.com) Note that global warming and ozone holes are unrelated as issues, although many confuse them.
These are points I have inquired of for sixteen years, from every scientist and climatologist I can reasonably study or meet. I don't know if Dr. Claude Allegre has followed exactly the same points of interest, but I do know that his present refutation of his past positions ought to have been considered by the Supremes.
The Financial Post published this article titled "Allegre's second thoughts" by Lawrence Solomon on Friday, March 02, 2007.
Claude Allegre, one of France's leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming.
"By burning fossil fuels, man increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, for example, has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Dr. Allegre, a renowned geochemist, wrote 20 years ago in [a geologic magazine]." Fifteen years ago, Dr. Allegre was among the 1,500 prominent scientists who signed "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming's "potential risks are very great" and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe's fragility in order to stave off "spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic, and environmental collapse."
In the 1980s and early 1990s, when concern about global warming was in its infancy, little was known about the mechanics of how it could occur, or the consequences that could befall us. Since then, governments throughout the Western world and bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have commissioned billions of dollars worth of research by thousands of scientists.
With a wealth of data now in, Dr. Allegre has recanted his views. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena. Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank."
Another scientist-friend whose integrity is unimpeachable, is Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Center for Meteorology and Physical Meteorology M.I.T., in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Lindzen's position on the global warming issue has always focused on his own specialty - the computer models relied upon to predict changes.
Dr. Lindzen has written:
The thought that CO2 is a polluting gas is particularly daunting. After all, CO2 is a product of virtually all burning - including breathing. Increasing CO2 is closely related to increasing population and standard of living. Pre-industrial concentration of CO2 was about 280ppmv. There is little question that CO2 has increased about 25 percent over the last century, and that it will double by some time in the next century... Atmospheric water vapor and clouds, themselves, are much more important than CO2... There is an even more important complication in the simple picture of the "greenhouse effect": namely, the surface of the Earth cools primarily by processes other than radiation. These processes are evaporation and turbulent heat exchange.
The U.N. projections are based on models. It is from model results that our fear of profound greenhouse warming arises. There are currently five large scale climate models. Dependence on these models is an awkward situation to be in. The treatment of water vapor and clouds are among the weakest and most uncertain features of these models.
A newer voice, Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere. This, he says, is responsible for much of the global warming we are experiencing. In February 2007, Svensmark said: "It was long thought that clouds were caused by climate change, but now we see that climate change is driven by clouds."
But, don't scientists at the United Nations - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - all agree man has caused catastrophic heating of the planet?
I was able to ask many of those IPCC scientists just how the IPCC did operate. Few were proud of it. From The Hague in November of 2000, I published these observations;
"How often has media claimed that thousands of scientists agree that man's emissions are dangerous to the planet and they say that those scientists are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?
Three lead authors of IPCC reports say we have been misinformed.
These authors recently chaired an unusual, but welcome, sidebar for a standing-room only crowd. They unequivocally stated "members of the IPCC are nations (80 to 120 nations), not scientists." As such, their point was that it is misleading to refer to IPCC as thousands of scientists in some sort of agreement. IPCC is based in Geneva as part of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
How do these IPCC nations work?
Nations elect a bureau and working groups of between five to twenty science authors. Summaries of the working groups are drafted by a small subset of these contributors. IPCC is not science. At its best, it is an assessment of science. At its worst, it is political science.
"IPCC is oriented toward searching for supportive evidence," cautioned one presenter. Evidence that is not supportive of the global warming hypothesis is cited as "uncertainty." Those are political choices, not science assessments."
How did IPCC science end up hostage to politics?
The process appears to divide workers and not seek their collaboration in the end result. "Scientists never get their reports back," lamented one author. Politicians write the policy summaries, not the scientists. Politicians leave much out of the final reports. "Summaries make the message "on line" by including, at the last moment, new authors such as Michael Grubb," offered one presenter.
Rarely is underlying work in total agreement. Some chapters may actually disagree with each other and may have reached two different conclusions, but final reports are cleansed to present one supportive position. Working group chair, Ben Santer, became infamous a few years back with his last minute change of mind and subsequent cleansing of the underlying work in WG 8 of the Second Assessment Report (SAR). Santer simply left out several conclusions of working scientists that were disclaimers to the thesis that unique anthropogenic forcing (human influence upon climate) was evident.
"Bob Watson is determined to drive the scare factor up," commented one of the lead authors at this sidebar about the two presentations in plenary sessions that had been made by Robert Watson, Chairman IPCC.
"In the end, they are just politicians," concluded a scientist tiredly."
The latest IPCC assessment is due out this Friday. Prepare for scary headlines.
This is how stage direction leads from scientists to political scientists. This is how five jurists become climatologists. This is how Global Warming is packaged as an energy-rationing morality play.
Is Global Warming comedy or tragedy? Walk; don't ride, in order to save the planet? Give up your HDTV in order to save the planet? You can breathe in, but not out, in order to save the planet or the coastline of Massachusetts?
I am fond of energy. I won't fight you over my dishwasher, but don't even consider taking my vacuum cleaner away from me. I like it all. I like it by any means.
America and China have large reserves of affordable and available coal. Argentina sits atop a huge reservoir of natural gas. Remember that coal, gas, oil, peat, and biofuels are simply stored forms of solar energy. France utilizes mostly nuclear power, and sells her surplus to her neighbors. Hydro is dominant in a few particular places. However, no one can yet run manufacturing or large cities on output from solar panels, wind farms, or hydrogen fuel cells. Note that nuclear, which is not CO2-producing (although that should not matter) and is quite cost effective is dismissed out of hand by the environmental community as "unsustainable." I strongly contest that.
Some label fossil fuels as public enemy #1. Five fearful Supreme Court jurists-as-climatologists decide to call an element of our atmosphere "a pollutant" that "may endanger public welfare." Carbon dioxide today. Oxygen tomorrow? Water vapor, surely.
Rather than clearing the air of carbon dioxide, shouldn't we be clearing the air of faulty science, fearful jurists, and harmful economics?
Climate is not a human-scale topic. In the Earth's 4.5 billion years, climate has ranged from melting hot temperatures to deep ice ages for millions of years. Sudden warming or cooling is part of our past and our future. Only because civilization has emerged during the Holocene stability and pleasantness during the past ten thousand years do human beings think that what we have had is the climate rule. It's not; it's the exception.
55 million years ago, the Arctic's average temperature was in the mid-70s. It had palm trees and crocodiles. Sea levels were twenty feet higher. 18,000 years ago, Florida was twice the size it is today, but cold and dry. No humidity, and none of today's flora and fauna.
No change - homeostasis - is unnatural. Change and transformation are the natural forces. Nature does not preserve. Nature's mantra is "Mutate. Migrate. Adapt. Or die."
Every suggested policy designed to prevent warming will have almost no effect on warming. The elimination of America's 20 percent contribution to CO2 production will merely reduce warming by a fraction of a degree - a reduction that would be wiped out in a few years.
The Court has decided that the inundation of some of Boston by a few centimeters' rise in the sea level is harm that must be redressed. I was born in Boston. It's well known that most of her is human ingenuity's work called landfill. It should also be well known that the Earth's land mass there, as along our Texas coast, subsides. It sinks. Calculating sea levels is not straightforward.
Our Supreme Court displayed this week the same illustrious wisdom it evidenced when it decided that "public benefit" was the same intended phrase as the constitutional one, "public use." The Court in KELO selected spandex to stretch the right of eminent domain from the right of government to take private property for public use, to include the right to take private property for private projects simply because the fresh project would produce greater revenue for the local government and thus, "revitalize the economy" - a "public benefit."
This week, the spandex was green, and it stretched both the meaning of "pollutant" and "standing." I commend to your reading Tuesday's April 3 editorial in the WSJ - "Jolly Green Justices."
So, how much are we going to spend to have no impact on global warming and why?
Global Warming may be a morality play, but it isn't being financed by play money. It is financially the costliest political project ever. According to U.N. estimates, plans will cost $553 trillion over this century. The cost in human capital could be as devastating as any global plagues. Only full testability of the hypotheses by actual scientists and open debate, rather than disinformation can possibly provide us with facts, not just convenient and scary projections, upon which we can make informed, not frightened, decisions about this challenge to our futures.
I do know that Al Gore has won an Oscar about this. I understand that I should have told you that, thereby, there couldn't possibly be anything left to say about global warming, especially with five of the Supremes themselves frightened. But, here I am. And I continue to keep some good company.
Flemming Rose and Bjorn Lomberg of Denmark tried to engage Al Gore in just such a debate as I desire. A recent Wall Street Journal article about Gore's refusal to even be questioned about his beliefs is entitled "Will Al Gore Melt?"
"One can only speculate [about why Gore cancelled all interviews]. But if we are to follow Mr. Gore's suggestions of radically changing our way of life, the costs are not trivial. If we slowly change our greenhouse gas emissions over the coming century, the U.N. actually estimates that we will live in a warmer but immensely richer world. However, the U.N. Climate Panel suggests that if we follow Al Gore's path down toward an environmentally obsessed society, it will have big consequences for the world, not least its poor. In the year 2100, Mr. Gore will have left the average person 30 percent poorer, and thus less able to handle many of the problems we will face, climate change or no climate change."
The authors mentioned several inconvenient facts in the article:
Even Al Gore's pool is inconvenient. His poolhouse burns $500 per month worth of natural gas. His home uses more electricity in a month than the average household does in a year. Although Gore's lifestyle is 180 degrees out of sync with his pronounced beliefs, he is unlikely to experience any of the wrenching transformations that he desires of the rest of us.
Over sixteen years, I have seen at these international gatherings so much ego, money, and meeting time being poured into this global plan to ration energy - to control carbon dioxide by controlling people. To control people by controlling carbon dioxide. Political, activist, and business careers, especially legal careers, now depend upon creating this new bureaucratic layer of rules and regulations. The new-age rulers want the wealth and power that will accrue to them as they impose their consummate plans upon us. All accumulated forward motion will be lost if it is acknowledged that controlling the energy of the whole world is neither doable nor desirable.
I desire that acknowledgement. I believe that loss of their forward sweeping agenda for all the rest of us humans would be positive - positively enlightening and flourishing.
Haven't you noticed that fewer and fewer people around the globe seek dependence upon politicians as the core to their existences, anyway? Don't we see more and more people seeking the creativity and dignity of responsibility and self-governance?
This trend reflects a position, not of apathy, but of empowerment as information is horizontally available in a truly equitable opportunity age based upon knowledge-capital. It is part of the style of a flat world. Collapse the hierarchies; don't invent a new global one. Perhaps what is seen as indecision about global warming is actually a decision to reject a centrally-controlled planned economy. I fervently hope so.
In concluding, I repeat Mary Oliver's words and add my final few...
"When it's over I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."I want to help this world discover freedom.
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