When the Climategate emails came out, people like Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert were in enormously difficult positions. McKibben, an extremely talented writer, had centered his entire professional life around stopping climate change. Kolbert, also a very talented writer, hadn’t become an activist, like McKibben, but she had made the dangers of climate change her journalistic specialty. She wrote a book about it, for example. For them to say that the Climategate emails revealed something important — namely, that the case for man-made climate change is much weaker than the public realizes — would have been like the Pope saying God might not exist. It wasn’t going to happen. And it hasn’t happened.
But other journalists are not so committed to one side. They are free to react honestly and intelligently. One sign of what an honest and intelligent reaction would be came during a New Yorker podcast about Climategate. On one side was Kolbert, on the other — saying that Climategate mattered — was Peter Boyer. Kolbert came off as nervous and defensive; Boyer came off as reasonable.
Another sign of what an honest and intelligent reaction would be is this column by Clive Crook, an Atlantic editor. Crook ridicules the inquiries that followed for reasoning such as this:
Had Dr. [Michael “Hockey Stick”] Mann’s conduct of his research been outside the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions . . .
Crook is right to ridicule this. Ranjit Chandra, a nutrition professor, received the Order of Canada, an extremely prestigious award, yet some of his research appears fabricated.
Yet it turns out “Climategate” really was all a lot of noise about nothing. The results were solid, the criticisms were hollow, the accused were multiply vindicated. Everybody who took it to mean anything about the climate embarrassed themselves. The confusion lasted long enough to sabotage treaty negotiations, so its instigators achieved their aim.
The only conduct questioned, in the end, was rudeness toward people ultimately working for Exxon, resulting in expensive-for-everyone overuse of freedom of information laws.
Stephen McIntyre and Marc Morano will be sorry to hear that, Nathan.
If McIntyre and Morano are still clinging to that phony scandal, too bad for them. The Clinton impeachment is still the high point of Ken Starr’s life too.
In current news, the first half of 2010 was the hottest ever recorded.
This narrow focus on CO2 is like a cosmic joke. We’ve got a runaway high-consumption culture that flies in the face of thermodynamics; no hi-tech energy solution guaranteed to be just around the corner; we can’t countenance any measure that impacts economic ‘growth’ unless it’s the growth of some other country; we aren’t recycling or taking proper care with how we dispose of toxic waste – I mean, you have to mind how much fish you eat cos of the mercury for god’s sake; we aren’t about to go extract minerals from space anytime soon, etc, etc…
All this, and we are stopping the presses for CO2. Which, I gather, was present in several times the concentration during the Jurassic era, when Earth supported lush rainforests and massive dinosaurs.
Why don’t we just take robust measures and leave a smaller footprint in general instead of prioritizing carbon to the near-exclusion of other environmental issues? I’ll tell you why: because it requires bigger sacrifice, more thought, and it pisses off more powerful people with a big stake in how things are done just now. You can maybe convince China to make token reductions in CO2 but you can’t convince them not to want to live in tower-blocks and drive everywhere in hummers.
This CO2 stuff is a distraction even if it’s good science. A distraction like, a fat person drinks Diet Coke with their Big Mac, invests heavily in Diet Coke, tells his friends to drink Diet Coke.
(Also, carbon trading has ‘racket’ written all over it; to think that system won’t be played to breaking-point requires… some naivety, I think.)
Please try to understand the distinction between absolute level of CO2 and the rate of change of CO2. Life can adapt to any level of CO2 if it gets there slowly enough. Too fast, and you get mass extinctions, ecological disruptions, agricultural crises, pervasive changes in rainfall patterns, famine, and world war (in that order). Previous large changes in CO2 level that did not result in mass extinctions happened over thousands of years. Those that happened fast show up as mass extinctions in the fossil record, and serve as boundaries between named geological periods.
In other news, Los Angeles has had record low temperatures in July.
https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/07/record-cold-at-lax-airport-as-july-gloom-continues-in-southern-california.html
But Nathan, the changes we’re looking at now are small changes over a short period of time – we don’t have reliable enough data to know whether such changes happened hundreds or thousands of years ago, and if so, exactly what impact they had. The main measurements used all differ from each other hugely, so we can’t comment on the impact of micro-changes in prehistory.
“The main measurements used all differ from each other hugely”
– though they can be said to very broadly mirror each other as far as overall trends are concerned.
Also:
Yes, sudden changes can overwhelm a system; I see that – not that that relatively nuanced point is what generally comes across in the media (more carbon = bad).
But still, even if this is right, why only focus on CO2? It’s not a robust strategy. Way we’re going, we avert one catastrophe and stumble into another. It’s not good enough. We’re like a dysfunctional family trying to solve our problems with a trip to Disneyland. It won’t do any harm, but it’s not going to address the root of the problem.
The root of the problem is that we are idiots almost to a man. Our culture is selfish and venal. People don’t want to leave a light footprint because they are greedy. They’d rather believe that somebody else can redesign hummers to run on clean fuels and go on driving to the recycling place to make a token gesture once a week.
Things need re-thought from the ground up. Superficial measures help to defer that junkie’s rock-bottom realisation. You need to know how wrong you are to get right. But the climate-change people think they have all the answers – they are so self-righteous. Even if they’re right about the science, they’re really wrong.
“This narrow focus on CO2 is like a cosmic joke.” I agree. Overdependence on a single resource has been a recipe for disaster for a long time. In the past, it’s been manufacturers who’ve made that mistake — e.g., Manchester textile factories. Now thinkers have managed to make the same mistake, saying that we can solve overdependence on one thing (fossil fuels) by . . . doing one thing (reducing CO2). It’s like this: “Yur litter to me cantained meny mispillings”.
G: You seem to be saying that because we have lots of potential sources of worldwide disaster (and I can list many of them: overfishing, over-fertilizing, oversubscription to fresh water sources, pollution, peak oil, peak phosphates, deforestation, antibiotic-resistant disease bacteria, mono-cropping… I could go on) we should ignore the biggest one. The same argument applies to each of the others, with the result being that we must ignore them all. This argument is appealing to people who are doing well now at the expense of those already affected, but it’s ultimately both selfish and disastrous.
No Nathan, you’ve set up a straw man there. I wasn’t saying anything like that.
When anyone writes “strawman” in place of a reasoned response, I know they’re not interested in a serious discussion. Good day, sir.
This is laughable – you should bring a better class of debate around here. You made up a lot of crap that had nothing to do with my point – does that phrasing suit you better than ‘straw man’? Cos either way, it’s what you did buddy.
If you disagree, make a real point and demonstrate it.
…I mean, did I really say “that because we have lots of potential sources of worldwide disaster we should ignore the biggest one.” ? Did I? Go back and read what I wrote – did you really represent it fairly? Really? Ha ha.