Another "Answer": Global Warming

As I occasionally do, I took the time today to answer another "Facebook Question". This time, the question is about Anthropogenic Global Warming, asking:

Do you believe that human-caused global warming is real and a serious long-term threat?

My short answer was "maybe". But as one is supposed to do in these situations, I did take the time to elaborate my position, and since I already did the work, I figure I might as well put it right here as well.

So here it is:

There are multiple issues here that everyone seems to take for granted as all one single, unified question. To say "human-caused global warming is real" is one question, but then to say that it is a "serious long-term threat" is another question which requires better definitions.

So I feel compelled to break it down a little bit:

• Is global warming real? I think it's clear that it is.
• Do people contribute to it? Again - I think it's clear that we must contribute in some way. We are part of the ecology of the planet after all.
• Are human actions the primary driver of GW? Ah... Well, that's much less clear, isn't it? CO2 only makes up a very small fraction of overall greenhouse gases and human beings, with all our cars and power plants, still contribute only a minuscule amount of overall CO2 emissions.
• Is global warming a serious threat? To whom? Certainly not the Earth itself, which has been much much warmer over its 4 Billion year history. To people? Not necessarily... Consider that we are talking about 1-2 degrees C over the course of 100 years based on current models which also require assumptions about rather significant positive feedback loops in order to be accurate to begin with. The evidence for these feedback loops is a lot less clear than it is often portrayed... and estimates of warming without the worst-case assumptions about feedback loops suggests only a fraction of 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature over a Century - which is far less severe than the worst case scenarios. In fact, in either case, over the time frame we're talking about, the effects of global climate change are so slow and small that they are not actually perceivable by direct observation... Which, by the way, makes comments like "its been blazing hot" utterly useless and not at all representative of evidence for global warming.

So now we really have to stop and start thinking a bit more... What aspects of warming are "a threat" to people?

Certainly if we're talking about the whole world turning into the Saharan Desert, that seems like it would qualify as a legitimate "threat", right? But that's not at all what anyone's actually talking about - and the historical record shows that in previous periods of significantly warmer global climate, such as the Medieval Warm Period, resulted in an impressive growth of plant & animal life as well as provided opportunities for human beings in previously inhospitable environments to grow more and wider varieties of crops - and for longer amounts of each year - than in colder times.

That sounds like a good thing to me.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that Global Warming is a serious long-term threat. Let's take all of the most extreme positions we can. Let's say that in 100 years, global mean temperatures will be 2 degrees (C) higher than they are right now. Let's say that causes significant melting of polar ice-caps and higher sea levels and everything else that would be worst-case scenario.

Ok.

How do we solve the problem?

This is where the assumptions of most people arguing these issues really go off the deep-end, as far as I'm concerned. To jump from "global warming is a serious threat", to; "we need to spend trillions of dollars on international programs and control the activities of billions of people around the world to combat this problem" requires dozens of, honestly, really tremendously bad assumptions.

For instance, to get there you'd have to assume that:

1. We know enough about climate to know how to control it. (We don't)
2. We CAN reverse the effects of positive feedback loops by inhibiting CO2 emissions. (Not likely)
3. The best way to reduce CO2 emissions and fight climate change is through government force. (When has that ever proven to be a really viable means of accomplishing any goal effectively or efficiently?)
4. The benefits of such policies outweigh their considerable costs. (Virtually impossible)

The big assumptions that I am frequently shocked that anyone takes even remotely seriously is the idea that a handful of politicians has enough knowledge between them about the huge variety of issues they'd need to understand to make even remotely effective decisions in this arena that they can accurately predict and plan out people's lives 100 years into the future.

Likewise, the idea that taking trillions of dollars worth of potential capital out of the global economy and blowing it on a single (or even a dozen or so) top-down anti-climate change goal makes the even more ridiculous assumption that human beings benefit more from the destruction of wealth than from the creation of it. That's just crazy-talk.

If you really want to save people from even the worst effects of climate change, the best thing to do that I can think of is to encourage global production & innovation on scales never-before-seen in human history.

Don't worry, even in the post apocalyptic world of
global climate change, you'll still get a great pair of Jeans!

And hot chicks... Don't forget about the hot chicks.

Freedom and sound economics can (and very much will if we let it) turn people loose to innovate and engineer new solutions to problems like energy efficiency, air conditioning, biotechnology & food production, and all of the other issues that any potential global warming might effect. The way to help the poorest people in the world is by producing enough wealth that natural disasters have limited effects.

Consider the effects of earthquakes in places like Haiti vs. Los Angeles. Ask yourself why the Hatian people were so screwed over by something that happens fairly frequently in other parts of the world with little of the same consequences. The answer is because of wealth - not the concentration of money, mind you all - but the differences in real productive output of different types of economies. Personally... I think we need to focus way more on bringing people up to our standard of living - and that definitely means finding ways to make energy much more widely and cheaply available to everyone around the world - rather than focusing on capping growth and stalling advancement.

Politically directed solutions are - in my opinion - the worst way to deal with the negative or harmful effects of natural global phenomenon like climate change... So ultimately, even if it was true that it is human-caused and a serious threat, that doesn't instantly give rise to the conclusion that we should advocate the kinds of policies of people like Al Gore.

And that I think is the more salient issue at stake.

Bjorn Lomborg: Smackdown!

A book is apparently coming out in the relatively near future attacking Bjorn Lomborg's two main books critical of the environmental hysteria of the last few decades, "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and "Cool It".  This book is by Howard Friel and is called "The Lomborg Deception", purporting to debunk what appears to be a series of straw men.

Bravo, Mr. Fiel... Bravo.

What's ridiculous though is that Bjorn Lomborg has already written an excessively persuasive 27-page rebuttal to the book.  When "The Lombord Deception" comes out, I'm sure it will be well received by a number of people in the environmental catastrophe camp.  In fact, one such review has already landed - Newsweek's own Sharon Begley writes:

"I don't want to be as trusting as the reviewers who praised Lomborg's scholarship without (it seems) bothering to check his references, so rather than taking Friel at his word just as they took Lomborg at his, I've done my best to do that checking. Although Friel engages in some bothersome overkill, overall his analysis is compelling. Let me pick three of Lomborg's contentions that Friel pretty much blows out of the water."

Let me rephrase for Ms. Begley... What she was saying was that she didn't want to be as "gullible" as other reporters praising Lomborg's work and not fact-check Mr. Friel, and then proceeds to completely take 100% of Friel as accurate, no questions asked.

Riiiiiiiiight.

This is pretty typical, and let's be honest.  She's a writer for Newsweek.  Does anyone with a brain even read Newsweek?  Jesus that magazine is horrific... I don't even think it's suitable for dentist's offices.

Crikey.

At any rate, I don't need to defend Lomborg because he does so himself in one of the most amazing intellectual & literary smackdowns I've ever had the pleasure of reading.  Not only does it seem that Friel spends nearly the entire book arguing against things that Lomborg didn't actually say, he comes across as hugely incompetent in essentially every single aspect of scholarship.  Included in this are his basic understanding of charts & data tables, his basic mathematical ability and what's most distressing of all for a book dedicated to parsing footnotes and fact-checking - even Friel's research skills seem woefully subpar.

Repeatedly Friel apparently calls out Lomborg for inaccurate citations purely because he wasn't able to find a now 10-year old webpage...  In other words, Friel is either being ridiculously disingenuous or he's a complete n00b at teh interwebz.

I wouldn't be surprised at either...  At any rate, I encourage everyone to read Bjorn Lomborg's masterful takedown in all it's glory here: "A Response... (PDF)"  Now.  Unlike Begley, I make no bones about this "smackdown" conforming to my preordained expectations... But I challenge anyone to read it and not find it utterly persuasive.

More on this at Reason.com by science correspondent Ron Bailey...  And also video of Lomborg talking about these things below:


The thing I love about Lomborg in general is that he's one of the few voices out there explaining that global warming, while potentially a problem, is solvable not by huge restrictions in liberty and massive new, centralized government control over everything - but by making sure people have the opportunity to use their available resources in ways that benefit them.  Unfortunately, this doesn't jive well with the apparent mission of most non-skeptical environmentalists, for far too many of whom, no amount of tyranny will ever be too much to accept in the name of "saving the planet".

The trouble, of course, is that like other economically illiterate morons, these folks don't grasp the consequences of the policies that they advocate on real human beings.  As a result, they don't really get how a government fix-all type solution works against the interests of most people (by willfully supplanting individual actions based on distinct, individual goals and dreams with forced collective ones based solely on the views of a few). Bjorn mentions water resources... People are increasingly worried that there will be a massive "water crisis" that plagues the world.

But who manages that, in virtually every single country on the planet?  Private individuals?  Hell no!

Governments manage water resources...  And they do an abysmal job, virtually without exception.  Part of it stems from a poor comprehension of basic economics, and thus we have a situation that essentially amounts to price-controls on water across the board.  What's this do?  Keeps the price of water near $0, for one thing... So you might think, "Fabulous, water should be free!" - but that artificial price leads people to obvious over-consumption.  Go figure...  However, people like Friel and many others, seem to be living under the delusion that you can do things to manipulate (and screw up) the economy with no negative side-effects, especially on things like the unemployment-rate.Lomborg, by contrast, always seems to realize that - so for him, it's about analyzing the trade-offs.

Lomborg's "radical" conclusions - the ones that get books like "The Lomborg Deception" written - are simply that 1. The environment and the human condition are improving on the whole, across the planet and have been for decades (truth). 2. It's better to be prosperous, free and solve problems with innovation than it is to blindly  destroy future growth & wealth in the name of an environmental crusade.

One would think that with the earthquake in Haiti being so recent in everyone's memory, people would wake up to the fact that natural disasters with seriously devastating effects tend to be devastating not because they were many magnitudes more severe than any previous disaster, but because the people effected are impoverished, have no accumulated wealth, and are thus incapable of preparing for or mitigating the catastrophe.  In fact, there have been a number of similarly severe earthquakes in my current home state of California...  Yet, in no case have hundreds of thousands been killed or have we seen half a million casualties.

Why?

Hint: It's not luck... Nor is it corrupt government officials making special deals with their buddies and looting the public.  (Point of fact; California's own situation with politicians looting the public treasury and putting increasingly painful burdens on the citizens here will impair our future ability to protect ourselves in the same way that Haiti's kleptocracy has kept the people impoverished for decades... That will be a fun time...)

Seriously though... Read the smack down, before I go permanently veering wildly off-topic.  It's great, credible, and worth the read.

NY Times Says: No Coverage on Global Warming... What!?

Apparently, Andrew Revkin at the New York Times believes that we haven't gotten enough news stories about Global Warming in 2009...

From his article, today; "The Greatest Story Rarely Told":

"The crew at Journalism.org, which is run by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, had already noted in a year-end wrapup that environmental coverage, including climate, was down somewhat from 2007 and 2008, representing 1.5 percent of overall coverage. (An important note: That analysis used data through Dec. 6, capturing the burst of news about the stolen climate files but missing the tumultuous climate talks in Copenhagen. Also, the weekly analysis for Dec. 14-20 showed a climate spike.) The picture has been very different online, with the same analysts noting sustained heat around climate on blogs.

There are many out there who blame the news media — either for ignoring global warming or mishandling it — for the failure of the public to engage in an energy revolution to limit climate risks. But my sense is such critics have inflated expectations of what media coverage, without a direct punch from nature, can accomplish. Mind you, media coverage of incremental, yet important, issues remains vital, to my mind; it’s just not sufficient (which is one reason I’m branching out).

There are many out there who blame the news media — either for ignoring global warming or mishandling it — for the failure of the public to engage in an energy revolution to limit climate risks."

So first off... Global Warming is a story that's "rarely" told!??

That's absurd! There are piles of media coverage on Global Warming... It was basically beaten into my head since I was a kid. I'd be hard pressed to think of a topic that I *haven't* heard more about or which has had more hysterical coverage over the last 10 years... It's not always about the sheer number of times stories come up either, but about the style, tone and delivery as well (which aren't mentioned in Revkin's article).

As graphical evidence (taken from the Journalism.org data, of course), Revkin points to the following chart...

Revkin whines that this is terrible because people are now underestimating the dangers of global warming and are prone to ignoring it... He even brings in Dr. Robert Brule to discuss the matter further.

From Dr. Brule:

"I think there is a danger that we can get used to global warming. Individuals 17 or under have grown up in a world where global climate change has always existed as a public concern. (The first climate treaty was negotiated in 1992.) So they don’t find the ideas of global warming unusual or outside of the norm. We can get used to a degraded environment. This process is known as normalization."

He's mostly right, but it's not individuals "17 or under". I'm approaching 27... When Fern Gully (which was the most ridiculously blatant "environmentalist" movie I can remember from my youth) was made - also and probably not coincidentally in 1992 - I was 9 years old. If Dr. Brule honestly thinks that people from my generation weren't affected by the same kinds of messages from the time they were 9 or 10 that the kids now are affected by from birth, he's nuts. Everyone from the age of 1-30 has spent effectively their entire lives having fears of pollution, deforestation, overpopulation and yes, global warming, pounded into our skulls.

So Revkin points out that the news media isn't doing great job promoting even more hysteria, but if anything, I think that chart might give credence to a different point entirely: That because of a few black-eye issues on global warming science (i.e. "ClimateGate") and because the models that predicted the Earth would be at it's warmest evar (ZOMG!) by now having failed miserably to predict record cold and a leveling off/gradual decline in global temperature in the past decade - news sources have deliberately avoided it as a topic this year.

I know people in news, I know tons of people in entertainment production... And while they are often dumb in the conventional sense, all the good ones are extremely savvy. They're also extremely ideological much of the time, deliberately in news to "change the world", and overwhelmingly "liberal" in the most stereotypical and uninformed senses possible. And they know that pushing global warming stories right now would be counter productive if the ultimate goal is to push environmental messages (which is all the rage, don't you know?)... So what are they going to say in 2009 Global Warming coverage? "Well, oops, the earth hasn't been warming nearly as much as we thought" or "Wow, those scientists really screwed up over at the CRU".

Of course not.

The point is not to just flood the airwaves with stories about *anything* related to global warming, it's to flood the airwaves with specific types of global warming stories: crazy weather events (caused by global warming), famines (caused by droughts, caused by global warming), greedy oil companies trying to manipulate us, "green" energy schemes creating new jobs or saving the planet... etc. etc. etc. But 2009 has been a pretty terrible year for most of those types of stories since we've seen record colds, a major scandal and are in general a little more concerned with bigger, more tangible issues...

You know... Like that whole economy problem that people seem to be a little more worried about at the moment.

At any rate, the idea that there hasn't been very much coverage of global warming is insane... And while Revkin admits that the chart was produced prior to the Copenhagen climate conference (funny how he asks us to find the words "Copenhagen" on it), I bet the chart or Pew's research doesn't factor in all the tangential coverage either - say on fuel emissions, Al Gore, or on Cap & Trade, carbon taxes and the like - ALL of which have to do with global warming, even if the story itself isn't. What's more, so much of the global warming stuff doesn't come in the form of "news", so much as it comes to people in the form of environmentalist-type movies such as Avatar.

It was Fern Gully and movies like it that first brought fears of environmental destruction to my attention. So let's be honest with ourselves here... 20th Century Fox' "Ice Age 2: The Meltdown" grossed almost $200,000,000 from box office revenue in the United States alone, and most of its audience was obviously children. I've got nothing against the film (in fact I think all the Ice Age movies are pretty cute), but when people like Revkin whine about lack of "news" coverage - they tend to omit the totality of global warming fear as a message in mainstream media & culture.

Most people don't actually get their ideas about the state of the world from "news" at all... They get it from the total sum of all the media they consume and the ideas presented to them by friends and family. News is only a small (though yes, influential) piece of that sum.


It's frankly about time for the news to shut up about global warming - we've got bigger things to talk about right now than what some scientists postulate will happen 100 years from now based on mediocre data and epistemologically impossible models. People are actually suffering right now, so maybe we should deal with that instead of making it worse by artificially jacking up the price of goods across the world.


Revkin's points fall flat for me as I hope they will with anyone who's not been living under a rock the last 3 decades... In the end though, it was kind of his reference of Dr. Brule that made the whole thing a joke for me, since Revkin notes that the good doctor...

"...has joined with Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University and many [he means... a few] other researchers in what they’re calling a “Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior.”"

Hanging out with Malthusian failure Paul Ehrlich pretty much says it all, doesn't it?