Tag: climate change

Categories
ideological culture

A Sweltering Storm of Orthodoxy

Can we agree to tolerate disagreement?

Swedish climatologist Lennart Bengtsson’s “defection” from an alleged climatological consensus has been greeted with hysteria from some colleagues. His sin was joining the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which challenges the received wisdom.

The alleged scientific consensus is that mankind, in its industrial phase, is not only a cause but the pivotal cause of recent global warming/“climate change.” Also that our carbonic effusions are triggering not mild, normal, nothing-​to-​panic-​about global climate variation but imminently catastrophic variation.

Is it okay to dispute these and related hypotheses?

Debate about complex scientific contentions isn’t a bad thing. New knowledge is gained both by positive investigation and by correcting errors and misinterpretations. One does not abet scientific inquiry by treating any challenges to a favored explanation as per se illicit, regardless of evidence or argument.

But Bengtsson reports that he has been subjected to enormous pressure “from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me … I see therefore no other way out … than resigning from GWPF. I had not been expecting such an enormous world-​wide pressure … from a community that I have been close to all my active life.”

What’s the message? “Regardless of your reasons or credentials, don’t dare deviate from our ‘consensus,’ at least not publicly — or else we’ll make your life very very hard.” Whatever the motives and goals here, they have nothing to do with either the methodological or the social requirements of science.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

Harappan Puzzles

Civilization first emerged around rivers: In Egypt, the Nile; in the Near East, the Tigris and Euphrates; in China, the Yellow River; and in the India-​Pakistan-​Afghanistan region, the Indus River Valley. We know the least about the Indus, or Harappan civilization. Its written language is the only one of these major civilizations’ forms of writing that remains uncracked, there being no “Rosetta Stone” for the curious ancient script.Examples of Indus Valley artifacts

Harappan culture sported elaborate plumbing, but no great monuments. This leads experts to suspect that the culture was “more democratic” than in the other cradles of civilization.

Truth is, we know next to nothing about Harappan governance or politics. By “democratic,” they probably mean “decentralized.” Or at least not heavily militaristic.

And, if that is borne out in further research, that’s huge. The hand of political governance lay quite heavily upon early city folks, and is generally associated with conquest. Could it be that Harappan civilization was freer, more voluntaristic and individualistic than Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Xia and Shang Dynasty societies?

We can only guess. But on a different Harappan puzzle, there’s a new theory out, purporting to explain what happened to this largest of ancient “empires”: climate change.

The weather got warmer, their riverways dried up, and the people scattered, mainly heading east.

Too bad for the civilization. But note two things:

  1. The climate change was natural, and
  2. People reacted naturally, by moving.

If we are experiencing, today, the beginnings of a global climate change, it may very well be natural, and (natural or not) people freely moving about may be the best response to the worst of it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Fingernail Adjustment

The oldest method of fraud is the classic merchant’s trick of “putting finger to the scale,” in days before pre-​packaging. Buy a pound of grain? Watch the seller’s hands, make sure they’re clear of the measurement device …

Some climate scientists might have been engaging in similar rigging of measurement, in this case of the sea’s much-​prophesied rise, as FoxNews​.com reports:

The University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group decided in May to add 0.3 millimeters — or about the thickness of a fingernail — every year to its actual measurements of sea levels, sparking criticism from experts who called it an attempt to exaggerate the effects of global warming.

So, instead of putting a finger on the scales, they’ve put a fingernail’s worth of bias to the data.

The scientists say they have to offset for other factors in the land-​sea ratios, and, for all I know, they are correct. But in the context of the “global warming” debate it doesn’t look so good, especially when what we hear from climate change alarmists includes scant talk of complex, offsetting factors. Indeed, in that light, the repeated fingernail addition looks like a piling onto the data, to make the evidence match the prophecy.

Ideally, scientists would not ever dumb down their opinions — or skew their forecasts — to the point where we become suspicious of every complexity they add to their models.

But, as we have learned, we don’t live in an ideal world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies

Ice Is Also Great

We all like talking about the weather, and one reason “global warming” theory caught on was not because of the science, but because it gives us a “just-so”-type scenario to spice up any conversation.

Here on the East Coast, we’ve endured one of the snowiest winters in years. Elsewhere, the winter’s been moderate.

Must be global warming!

The tendency to make every kind of weather a paradigm-​case instance of global warming has become something of a joke. We all know that “weather is not climate,” but we’ve also heard a lot of silliness about how this or that weather proves a coming global warming catastrophe.

Al Gore almost invented the technique.

Last week a quip — a “tweet” — from Senator Jim DeMint made the rounds. He wrote that “It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries ‘uncle.’”

Droll. But the truth remains that one cold snap does not a climate make. What counts for global climate depends on averages, highs, lows, medians, means, and all that.

Knowing this — and knowing that world climate has been much cooler than now as well as much warmer — still leaves me something of a skeptic about the notion that human civilization is the major factor.

Or that warming is altogether bad. An Ice Age, which scientists have been saying we’re overdue for, would be worse.

Brrr. Do I know!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Expensive Solutions

I’m skeptical of the notion that climate change is being driven by human activity … and thoroughly unconvinced that the planet will continue to warm causing catastrophic results.

But what if? If the globe is warming, what to do about it?

For starters, sell your beach house in Florida. Global warming means ice sheets melting, oceans rising, shoreline lost.

But for those of us without the beach house, what is the cost of global warming compared to the cost of fixing the problem?

Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, looked at this question and concluded that solving the problem of climate change is not cost-effective.

Lomborg is indeed concerned about warming and says that in an ideal world we’d “solve it.” But he says we have to set priorities, and that “[w]hat we can do about [global warming] is very little at a very high cost.”

In a Washington Post column, Lomborg warned that the damage done — especially to the world’s poor — by cutting carbon emissions will far outweigh the benefits. The estimated cost from projected climate damage is $1.1 trillion dollars. The projected expense of cutting enough emissions to avoid that damage is $46 trillion.

I’m skeptical about global warming. But spending $46 for every buck saved takes me well beyond skepticism. I’m against any such idiotic plan. If we must have catastrophe, I prefer the cheaper one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.