On the blindness of moral crusades

The debate is over, we are told. All the evidence is in: Our machines, our industry, our capitalist system is making the world hotter and if we do not repent the effect will be irreversible.

But how do we know this is true? What’s the evidence? ‘Why, our models predict it. Do you doubt the models, unbeliever?’

The good news is that those-who-know-better-than-us have a plan. They are willing to save us from our sins and keep the planet from being made utterly lifeless and void, but it won't happen until, "we regain our moral authority."

Gore urges moral crusade against global warming

OAKLAND — Al Gore brought corporate executives and environmentally minded investors roaring to their feet Thursday with multimedia images of an overheating planet and a call for Americans to reclaim their "moral authority" by tackling global warming.

"This is really not a political issue, it is disguised as a political issue," Gore said. "It is a moral issue, it is an ethical issue — If we allow this to happen, we will destroy the habitability of the planet."

(Cartoon courtesy Cox and Forkum)

So do we rely on Facts or Faith? Is this an issue where we need to act first and then get the facts straight or should we get the facts first and then decide what action is necessary? Because no one has convinced me the planet is in danger yet. Much less proven that global warming is all our doing. What we have is proof by propaganda. Where scientists suggest and then the journalists and activists preach the end of the earth unless we repent.

"Climate change: Only 10 years to act"

NEW figures show urgent action must be taken to avoid climate change becoming unstoppable within ten years, a leading environmentalist warned yesterday.

..."Once levels cross a certain threshold, climate change may become unstoppable and lead to catastrophic impacts on the environment and on the economy." scotsman.com

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Sir David King issued a stark wake-up call that climate change could cause devastating consequences such as famine and drought for hundreds of millions of people unless the world's politicians take more urgent action. news.independent.co.uk

Is this science or Religion? Science is supposed to dwell in the realm of the quantifiable and reproducable in order to explain natural phenomenon. But with the Global Warming agenda we are treated to a situation where climatologists, environmentalists, journalists, and activists have crossed the line from science to hyperbolic religious crusade.

"We have been blind to the fact that the human species is now having a crushing impact on the ecological system of the planet," Gore said. After Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, federal hurricane scientists used the Greek alphabet in naming tropical storms.

"This is the first foretaste of a cup that will be offered to us again and again and again until we regain our moral authority," Gore told members of Ceres, an organization of companies, investors and environmentalists pressing for greener behavior by corporations. insidebayarea.com

The wrath of the climate gods? Yeah, verily, I say unto you, unless you turn away from the Republican blasphemers the environment will continue to pour out it's wrath on itself...

A MAN named Noah is predicting floods across the US. But Noah Diffenbaugh is no biblical prophet. He is a climate scientist at Purdue University, Indiana, and his computer model of the continental US is predicting at least a doubling of extremes of both rain and drought across the US by the end of this century. newscientist.com

What we don't know

Are you sure global warming is caused by industrial society?

Everyone knows trees are "A Good Thing". They take in the carbon dioxide that threatens our planet with global warming and turn it into fresh, clean oxygen for us all to breathe.

But now it seems we need to think again. In a discovery that has left climate scientists gasping, researchers have found that the earth's vegetation is churning out vast quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent even than CO2. This is not a product of trees and plants rotting, which everyone already knew was a source of methane; it is an entirely natural side-effect of plant growth that scientists had somehow missed. Yet it is by no means trivial: preliminary estimates suggest that living trees and plants account for about 10 to 30 per cent of the methane entering the atmosphere. ft.com

We apparently need to cut down more trees to fix this problem... and maybe get rid of some dirt.

Unexpectedly vast quantities of carbon released from British soils since 1978 may be critically reducing their effectiveness as carbon sinks, claims a rigorous new survey. The phenomenon effectively cancels out the UK's recent successes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the finding could have wider global implications.

It suggests that so-called terrestrial sinks across the planet are mopping up much less carbon than predicted, on balance, and so the planet may warm at an even faster rate than expected. Most climate models assume that forests and soils absorb about 25% of the greenhouse gases humans produce. newscientist.com

Is there any reason at all to doubt the accuracy of assumptions of the climate models? Any reason at all?

CLIMATE predictions for many regions of the world may have to be rethought, following the discovery that global warming may have a bigger effect on air pressure than anyone thought. newscientist.com

The climate models do not even purport to be fully accurate models of the physical processes of climate. We simply don't have all the information we need to model all the physical properties of the world's climate because we do not know all the variables of the world's climate. We are still learning.

We are only now, in the last few years, actually monitoring global temperatures in any comprehensive and standardized way. Any insistence on comparing current temperature readings from the last decade and comparing them to reconstructed average temperatures is quite frankly either dishonest or delusional.

Through a glass darkly

In other words, when you are looking at averages of temperatures which measure periods of possibly three hundred years, extrapolated from tree ring data, sediment, or ice cores and comparing them to modern thermometer readings from the last few years, you are comparing apples and oranges.

Consider this graph: Holocene Temperature Variations. These are temperature reconstructions made from ice core samples, undersea sediment samples, and pollen distributions going back 12,000 years.

How accurate are these reconstructed temperatures? Do we know exactly how climate change works and has worked for the last several thousand years? Is it possible to proclaim on the basis of this data that we are in the warmest period of the last thousand years?

Because of the limitations of data sampling, each curve in the main plot was smoothed (see methods below) and consequently, this figure can not resolve temperature fluctuations faster than approximately 300 years. Further, while 2004 appears warmer than any other time in the long-term average, an observation that might be a sign of global warming, it should also be noted that the 2004 measurement is from a single year (actually the fifth highest on record, see Image:Short Instrumental Temperature Record.png for comparison). It is impossible to know whether similarly large short-term temperature fluctuations may have occurred at other times, but are unresolved by the resolution available in this figure. The next 150 years will determine whether the long-term average centered on the present appears anomalous with respect to this plot. wikipedia, Holocene Temperature Variations, paragraph 3

The data is interesting, even fascinating, but not conclusive in any way to be able to say that humanity is causing a runaway greenhouse effect.

Occam's razor

"...when you have two competing theories which make exactly the same predictions, the one that is simpler is the better."

If climate change has been happening throughout history naturally, without the input of man, is it not likely that present day climate change is... dare I say... natural?

We know that climate change is natural. This is an established fact, because even the data presented as proof of wholly human induced global warming shows climate change when there are no people alive and no industrial age to blame it on.

What this data shows are patterns. The pattern of our climate is an oscillation of warm and cold. With smaller oscillations of warm and cold within the broader strokes of climate change.

So too, we see patterns in the religion of doomsday forcasting. I started this post with an article entitled, "Climate change: Only 10 years to act", because it matches perfectly with this Newsweek article from 1975 with a similiar predeliction:

April 28, 1975 Newsweek

There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. [Emphasis mine.]

This is practically the same article. Perhaps only ten years from now... The next quote is tellingly, 'the evidence is so massive', i.e. that global cooling is going to result in famines and catastrophic disaster...

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it...

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth's climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale, warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.
The Cooling World, Newsweek 1975

Keep your consensus, and your 'moral crusade', I want facts.

Posted by Eric Simonson at April 19, 2006 03:44 AM

[H]egemonic Word count: 1740

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