Take all the psuedo-quasi-scientific stuff you read in the media about global warming. Of all that mess, it turns out there is really only one scientific question that really matters on the topic of man-made global warming: Feedback.
While the climate models are complex, and the actual climate even, err, complexer, we can shortcut the reaction of global temperatures to CO2 to a single figure called climate sensitivity. How many degrees of warming should the world expect for each doubling of CO2 concentrations (the relationship is logarithmic, so that is why sensitivity is based on doublings, rather than absolute increases — an increase of CO2 from 280 to 290 ppm should have a higher impact on temperatures than the increase from, say, 380 to 390 ppm).
The IPCC reached a climate sensitivity to CO2 of about 3C per doubling. More popular (at least in the media) catastrophic forecasts range from 5C on up to about any number you can imagine, way past any range one might consider reasonable.
But here is the key fact — Most folks, including the IPCC, believe the warming sensitivity from CO2 alone (before feedbacks) is around 1C or a bit higher (arch-alarmist Michael Mann did the research the IPCC relied on for this figure). All the rest of the sensitivity between this 1C and 3C or 5C or whatever the forecast is comes from feedbacks (e.g. hotter weather melts ice, which causes less sunlight to be reflected, which warms the world more). Feedbacks, by the way can be negative as well, acting to reduce the warming effect. In fact, most feedbacks in our physical world are negative, but alarmist climate scientists tend to assume very high positive feedbacks.
What this means is that 70-80% or more of the warming in catastrophic warming forecasts comes from feedback, not CO2 acting alone. If it turns out that feedbacks are not wildly positive, or even are negative, then the climate sensitivity is 1C or less, and we likely will see little warming over the next century due to man.
This means that the only really important question in the manmade global warming debate is the sign and magnitude of feedbacks. And how much of this have you seen in the media? About zero? Nearly 100% of what you see in the media is not only so much bullshit (like whether global warming is causing the cold weather this year) but it is also irrelevant. Entirely tangential to the core question. Its all so much magician handwaving trying to hide what is going on, or in this case not going on, with the other hand.
To this end, Dr. Roy Spencer has a nice update. Parts are a bit dense, but the first half explains this feedback question in layman’s terms. The second half shows some attempts to quantify feedback. His message is basically that no one knows even the sign and much less the magnitude of feedback, but the empirical data we are starting to see (which has admitted flaws) points to negative rather than positive feedback, at least in the short term. His analysis looks at the change in radiative heat transfer in and out of the earth as measured by satellites around transient peaks in ocean temperatures (oceans are the world’s temperature flywheel — most of the Earth’s surface heat content is in the oceans).
Read it all, but this is an interesting note:
In fact, NO ONE HAS YET FOUND A WAY WITH OBSERVATIONAL DATA TO TEST CLIMATE MODEL SENSITIVITY. This means we have no idea which of the climate models projections are more likely to come true.
This dirty little secret of the climate modeling community is seldom mentioned outside the community. Don’t tell anyone I told you.
This is why climate researchers talk about probable ranges of climate sensitivity. Whatever that means!…there is no statistical probability involved with one-of-a-kind events like global warming!
There is HUGE uncertainty on this issue. And I will continue to contend that this uncertainty is a DIRECT RESULT of researchers not distinguishing between cause and effect when analyzing data.
I am really just amazed by these remarks by NCAR’s Dr. Ken Trenberth to be given, apparently planned for the American Meteorological Society gathering this month. The pdf is here and Anthony Watt has reprinted it on his blog.
It is hard to know where to start, but the following excerpt is an outstanding example of climate science process where 1. Conclusions are assumed; 2. Conclusions are deemed unequivocal by reference to authority; 3. Debate rules are proposed wherin it is impossible to refute the conclusion; 4. All weather events that make the news are assumed to be caused or made worse by man-made warming, and thereby, in circular fashion, further prove the theory.
Normally, when I cite the above as the process, I get grief from folks who say I am mis-interpreting things, as usually I am boiling a complex argument down to this summary. The great thing about alarmist Trenberth’s piece is that no interpretation is necessary. He outlines this process right in a single paragraph. I will label the four steps above
Given that global warming is “unequivocal” [1], to quote the 2007 IPCC report [2], the null hypothesis should now be reversed, thereby placing the burden of proof on showing that there is no human influence [3]. Such a null hypothesis is trickier because one has to hypothesize something specific, such as “precipitation has increased by 5%” and then prove that it hasn’t. Because of large natural variability, the first approach results in an outcome suggesting that it is appropriate to conclude that there is no increase in precipitation by human influences, although the correct interpretation is that there is simply not enough evidence (not a long enough time series). However, the second approach also concludes that one cannot say there is not a 5% increase in precipitation. Given that global warming is happening and is pervasive, the first approach should no longer be used. As a whole the community is making too many type II errors [4].
Are you kidding me — if already every damn event in the tails of the normal distribution is taken by the core climate community as a proof of their hypothesis, how is there even room for type II errors? Next up — “Our beautiful, seasonal weather — proof of global warming?”
Remember that the IPCC’s conclusion of human-caused warming was based mainly on computer modelling. The IPCC defenders will not admit this immediately, but press them hard enough on side arguments and it comes down to the models.
The summary of their argument is this: for the period after 1950, they claim their computer models cannot explain warming patterns without including a large effect from anthropogenic CO2. Since almost all the warming in the latter half of the century really occurred between 1978 and 1998, the IPCC core argument boils down to “we are unable to attribute the global temperature increase in these 20 years to natural factors, so it must have been caused by man-made CO2.” See my video here for a deeper discussion.
This seems to be a fairly thin reed. After all, it may just be that after only a decade or two of serious study, we still do not understand climate variability very well, natural or not. It is a particularly odd conclusion when one discovers that the models ignore a number of factors (like the PDO, ENSO, etc) that affect temperatures on a decadal scale.
We therefore have a hypothesis that is not based on observational data, and where those who hold the hypothesis claim that observational data should no longer be used to test their hypothesis. He is hilarious when he says that reversing the null hypothesis would make it trickier for his critics. It would make it freaking impossible, as he very well knows. This is an unbelievingly disingenuous suggestion. There are invisible aliens in my closet Dr. Trenberth — prove me wrong. It is always hard to prove a negative, and impossible in the complex climate system. There are simply too many variables in flux to nail down cause and effect in any kind of definitive way, at least at our level of understanding (we have studied economics much longer and we still have wild disagreements about cause and effect in macroeconomics).
He continues:
So we frequently hear that “while this event is consistent with what we expect from climate change, no single event can be attributed to human induced global warming”. Such murky statements should be abolished. On the contrary, the odds have changed to make certain kinds of events more likely. For precipitation, the pervasive increase in water vapor changes precipitation events with no doubt whatsoever. Yes, all events! Even if temperatures or sea surface temperatures are below normal, they are still higher than they would have been, and so too is the atmospheric water vapor amount and thus the moisture available for storms. Granted, the climate deals with averages. However, those averages are made up of specific events of all shapes and sizes now operating in a different environment. It is not a well posed question to ask “Is it caused by global warming?” Or “Is it caused by natural variability?” Because it is always both.
At some level, this is useless. The climate system is horrendously complex. I am sure everything affects everything. So to say that it affects the probability is a true but unhelpful statement. The concern is that warming will affect the rate of these events, or the severity of these events, in a substantial and noticeable way.
It is worth considering whether the odds of the particular event have changed sufficiently that one can make the alternative statement “It is unlikely that this event would have occurred without global warming.” For instance, this probably applies to the extremes that occurred in the summer of 2010: the floods in Pakistan, India, and China and the drought, heat waves and wild fires in Russia.
Now he has gone totally off the scientific reservation into astrology or the occult or something. He is saying that there is a high probability that if CO2 levels were 120ppm lower that, for example, the floods in Pakistan would not have occurred. This is pure conjecture, absolutely without facts, and probably bad conjecture at that. After all, similar events of similar magnitude have occurred through all of recorded history in exactly these locations.
Some Notes
1. For those unfamiliar with the issues, few skeptics deny that man’s CO2 has no effect on warming, but believe the effect is being enormously exaggerated. There is a bait and switch here, where the alarmist claims that “man is causing some warming” is the key conclusion, and once accepted, they can head off and start controlling the world’s economy (and population, as seems to be desired by Trenberth). But the fact that CO2 causes some greenhouse warming is a trivial conclusion. The hard part is, in the complex climate system, how much does it cause. There is a an argument to be made, as I have, that this warming is less than 1C over the next century. This number actually has observational data on its side, as actual warming over the last century, given past CO2 increases, is much more consistent with my lower number than various alarmist forecasts of doom. Again, this is discussed in much more depth here.
2. One interesting fact is that alarmists have to deal with the lack of warming or increase in ocean heat content over the last 12 years or so. They will argue that this is just a temporary aberration, and a much shorter time frame than they are working on. But in effect, the core IPCC conclusions were really based on the warming over the 20 years from 1978-1998. So while 12 years is admittedly short compared to many natural cycles in climate, and might be considered a dangerously short period to draw conclusions from, it is fairly large compared to the 20 year period that drove the IPCC conclusions.
At the American Geophysical Union meeting late last month, University of Miami geologist Shimon Wdowinski argued that the devastating earthquake a year ago may have been caused by a combination of deforestation and hurricanes (H/T Treehugger). Climate change is spurring more, stronger hurricanes, which are fueled by warm ocean waters….
The 2010 disaster stemmed from a vertical slippage, not the horizontal movements that most of the region’s quakes entail, supporting the hypothesis that the movement was triggered by an imbalance created when eroded land mass was moved from the mountainous epicenter to the Leogane Delta.
I have heard this theory before, that landslides and other surface changes can trigger earthquakes. Now, I am not expert on geology — it is one of those subjects that always seems like it would be interesting to me but puts me in a coma as soon as I dive into it. I almost failed a pass-fail geology course in college because in the mineral identification section, all I could think to say was “that’s a rock.”
However, I do know enough to say with some confidence that surface land changes may have triggered but did not cause the earthquake. Earthquakes come from large releases of stored energy, often between plates and faults. It’s remotely possible land surface changes trigger some of these releases, but in general I would presume the releases would happen at some point anyway. (Steven Goddard points out the quake was 13km below the surface, and says “It is amazing that anyone with a scientific background could attempt to blame it on surface conditions.”)
The bit I wanted to tackle was the Thin Green Line’s statement that “Climate change is spurring more, stronger hurricanes.” This is a fascinating statement I want to attack from several angles.
First, at one level it is a mere tautology. If we are getting more hurricanes, then by definition the climate has changed. This is exactly why “global warming” was rebranded into “climate change,” because at some level, the climate is always changing.
Second, the statement is part of a fairly interesting debate on whether global warming in general will cause more hurricanes. Certainly hurricanes get their power from warm water in the oceans, so it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that warmer water would lead to more, stronger hurricanes. It turns out the question, as are most all questions in the complex climate, is more complicated than that. It may be hurricanes are driven more by temperature gradients, rather than absolute temperatures, such that a general warming may or may not have an effect on their frequency.
Third, the statement in question, as worded, is demonstrably wrong. If he had said “may someday spur more hurricanes,” he might have been OK, but he said that climate change, and by that he means global warming, is spurring more hurricanes right now.
2010 is in the books: Global Tropical Cyclone Accumulated Cyclone Energy [ACE] remains lowest in at least three decades, and expected to decrease even further… For the calendar year 2010, a total of 46 tropical cyclones of tropical storm force developed in the Northern Hemisphere, the fewest since 1977. Of those 46, 26 attained hurricane strength (> 64 knots) and 13 became major hurricanes (> 96 knots).
Even with the expected active 2010 North Atlantic hurricane season, which accounts on average for about 1/5 of global annual hurricane output, the rest of the global tropics has been historically quiet. For the calendar-year 2010, there were 66-tropical cyclones globally, the fewest in the reliable record (since at least 1970) The Western North Pacific in 2010 had 8-Typhoons, the fewest in at least 65-years of records. Closer to the US mainland, the Eastern North Pacific off the coast of Mexico out to Hawaii uncorked a grand total of 8 tropical storms of which 3 became hurricanes, the fewest number of hurricanes since at least 1970.
Global, Northern Hemisphere, and Southern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclone Accumulated Energy (ACE) remain at decades-low levels.
The source link has more, and graphs of ACE over the last several decades (ACE is a sort of integral, combining the time-average-strength of all hurricanes during the year. This is a better metric than mere counts and certainly better than landfall or property damage metrics).
So, normally I would argue with alarmists that correlation is not causation. There is no point in arguing about causation, though, because the event he claims to have happened (more and stronger hurricanes) did not even happen. The only way he could possibly argue it (though I am pretty sure he has never actually looked at the hurricane data and simply works from conventional wisdom in the global warming echo chamber) is to say that yes, 2010 was 40-year low in hurricanes, but it would have been even lower had it not been for global warming. This is the Obama stimulus logic, and is just as unsupportable here as it was in that context.
Postscript: By the way, 2010 was probably the second warmest year in the last 30-40 years and likely one of the 5-10 warmest in the last century, so if warming was going to be a direct cause of hurricanes, it would have been in 2010. And yes, El Ninos and La Ninas and such make it all more complicated. Exactly. See this post.
Gennaro has received numerous accolades for his work as Chairman of the Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection, and has authored many of the Council’s most progressive environmental bills. Gennaro has spearheaded efforts to cut the city’s global warming pollution emissions,… put more “clean air” vehicles on city streets, …make the city’s electricity more reliable, clean, and affordable,… and promote “green buildings”.
Thinking about the public and private resources invested in these efforts, I wonder how many snow plows they would have paid for.
Paul Krugman has become pretty famous for being able to peer into the complex economy and find something to justify whatever he is promoting. Higher interest rates, lower interest rates, more growth, less growth, unemployment, or boom times all simultaneously are proof of whatever theory he currently holds (which, in turn, is generally exactly the theory required to support actions by the Democratic leadership).
In the same way — hot weather, cold weather, drought, wet weather, mild weather, lost of hurricanes, a lack of hurricanes — are all simultaneously the proof for man-made global warming. Whatever the weather currently is, someone can use a government grant to build a model to prove that it is due to anthropogenic global warming. Thus this story — Global warming causing freezing.
With United Nations climate negotiators facing an uphill battle to advance their goal of reducing emissions linked to global warming, it’s no surprise that the woman steering the talks appealed to a Mayan goddess Monday.
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving.
The Mayans used to also cut the hearts out of living human beings as sacrifices to their gods, an apt metaphor for what the assembled UN delegates want to do to development and the world economy.
Regular readers will have no doubts about my skepticism of the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming. In particular, in these pages and at Climate Skeptic, I have repeatedly criticized the details of Michael Mann’s work on the hockey stick. I won’t repeat those issues today, though some of the past articles are indexed here.
That being said, efforts by Republicans in Virginia to bring legislative or even criminal action against Mann for his work when he was at the University of Virginia is about the worst idea I have heard in quite some time. Though nominally about forcing public disclosure (something I am always in favor of from state entities) the ultimate goal is to drag Mann into court
Cuccinelli has said he wants to see whether a fraud investigation would be warranted into Mann’s work, which showed that the earth has experienced a rapid, recent warming
[As an aside, this is actually NOT what Mann's hockey stick work purports to show. The point of the hockey stick is to make the case that historic temperatures before 1850 were incredibly stable and flat, and thus recent increases of 0.6-0.8C over the last 150 years are unprecedented in comparison. His research added nothing to our knowledge about recent warming, it was on focused on pre-industrial warming. The same folks that say with confidence the science is settled don't even understand it].
For those frustrated with just how bad Mann’s work is and upset at the incredible effort to protect this work from criticism or scrutiny by hiding key data (as documented in the East Anglia climategate emails), I know it must feel good to get some sort of public retribution. But the potential precedent here of bringing up scientists on charges essentially for sloppy or incorrect work is awful.
Bad science happens all the time, completely absent any evil conspiracies. Human nature is to see only the data that confirms ones hypotheses and, if possible, to resists scrutiny and criticism. This happens all the time in science and if we started hauling everyone into court or into a Senate committee, we have half of academia there (and then likely the other half when the party in power changed). Team politics are a terrible disease and the last thing we need is to drag them any further into science and academia.
Science will eventually right itself, and what is needed is simply the time and openness to allow adversarial scrutiny and replication within academia to run its course. Seriously, are we next going to drag the cold fusion guys in to court? How about all the folks in the geology field that resisted plate tectonics for so long. Will we call to account the losers in the string theory debate?
If legislators want to help, they can
Make sure there are standards in place for archiving and public availability of any data and code associated with government funded research
Improve the governments own climate data management
Ensure that state funding is distributed in a way to support a rich dialog on multiple sides of contested scientific issues.
Robert Orr, UN under secretary general for planning, said the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming will be much worse than the last one.
Hmm, that kind of confirms what critics have been saying for years, that the IPCC has nothing to do with science. Because, you see, to my knowledge the scientists of the next IPCC have not even started their work, but the UN leadership has already determined what the report will say. Which is consistent with their process in the last go around, where the UN political guys crafted the management summary first, and then circulated it to the scientific teams with instructions to adjust their sections of the report to fit the pre-existing conclusion.
In the same article, we get more of the “accelerating” nonsense:
He said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would make it clear to world leaders in Cancun “that we should not take any comfort in the climate deniers’ siren call.”
“The evidence shows us quite the opposite– that we can’t rest easy at all” as scientists agree that climate change “is happening in an accelerated way.”
Its not even clear what the value of the first derivative is for climate change, or even if such a metric has any meaning in the complex climate system where regional trends can easily be going in opposite directions. But anyone who can tell you that we know the second derivative, or even its sign, is totally full of crap.
Never (except perhaps with shark attack scares which come and go) have I seen such a classic case of observer bias. Certain events occur in the tail ends of the normal distribution. Suddenly everyone claims that these events are happening with more frequency, mainly because they get reported with more frequency. I reported on a great example of this from a supposedly scientific government report here, where researchers mistook improved measurement of certain events as a real underlying increase in the number of such events. Another example here.
Of course, 95 percentile events can’t be, by definition, happening more frequently. The only thing that can happen is the normal distribution can have its standard deviation increase. Similar to the second derivitive argument above, I am not a statistician, but my sense is that the odds that we could detect a standard deviation shift in the distribution of weather events using just a few years of highly imperfect data, even if such an underlying shift existed, is really really low.
I wanted to link to Richard Lindzen’s Congressional testimony. For slides, they are pretty easy to follow as they are mostly text. I want to particularly point out slide 4, which I think on one page outlines the single most important point to understand about anthropogenic global warming theory. When given just one minute to discuss climate, this slide embodies the message I give.
Here are two statements that are completely agreed on by the IPCC. It is crucial to be aware of their implications.
1. A doubling of CO2, by itself, contributes only about 1C to greenhouse warming. All models project more warming, because, within models, there are positive feedbacks from water vapor and clouds, and these feedbacks are considered by the IPCC to be uncertain.
2. If one assumes all warming over the past century is due to anthropogenic greenhouse forcing, then the derived sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of CO2is less than 1C. The higher sensitivity of existing models is made consistent with observed warming by invoking unknown additional negative forcings from aerosols and solar variability as arbitrary adjustments.
Given the above, the notion that alarming warming is ‘settled science’ should be offensive to any sentient individual, though to be sure, the above is hardly emphasized by the IPCC. 4
My most recent climate video, which discusses this issue and more, is here. I also have an older, shorter video focusing on just the issues in Lindzen’s fourth slide here.
In 8th grade, my son won his science fair with this easy and fun project to measure the urban heat island effect around our city. I know parents and kids alike can struggle to find a good project. This is one that not only is interesting, but helps to prove the existence of a phenomenon that many climate alarmists work hard to deny. Imagine a temperature measurement point in downtown Phoenix, which we found to be 7-10F hotter than the outlying areas just 30 miles away.
What did that thermometer read 100 years ago? How much of measured global warming is due to this effect, particularly since our airport, the typical place where temperature records are based for large cities, is right in the center of town?
Anyway, we had to kluge together some stuff to make this work, but the Weather Shop now offers a simple kit. The site suggests keeping track of position in a log vs. time, which is what we did the first time and works just fine. However, the second time through, we got fancy and also had a GPS logger.
Once upon a time, years ago, I actually had one of the original twitter accounts. I had (I guess I still have it) a really short name, sort of the equivalent of having a 2-letter URL. I quickly gave it up for a variety of reasons, the most compelling of which is I find it impossible to say anything I want to say in 140 characters. I am just not a master of the glib and witty little phrase. Even one of my shortest blog posts ever, which read
My summary on the immigration debate: Republicans want immigrants who work but don’t vote. Democrats want immigrants who vote but don’t work.
Nigel Leck, an Australian software developer, grew tired of debating climate realists on Twitter so he created a spambot to “wear down†his opponents. The bot, @AI_AGW, scans Twitter every five minutes looking for key phrases commonly used by those who challenge the global warming orthodoxy. It then posts one of hundreds of canned responses hoping to frustrate skeptics. CFACT’s Twitter account @CFACT (follow us!) often receives many of these unsolicited messages each day. Since the bot became active on May 26, 2010, it has sent out over 40,000 tweets, or an average of more than 240 updates per day!
Technology Review gushed that Leck’s bot “answers Twitter users who aren’t even aware of their own ignorance.†Leck claims that his little bit of trollware is commonly mistaken as a genuine Twitter user leading the unsuspecting to sometimes debate it for days. Eventually it wears people down.
Here is a good rule of thumb: Anyone on either side who thinks anything substantive can be argued for or against the science behind the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming in 140 characters can be safely ignored.
Nick Rahall, a Democratic Congressmen from WV and a supporter of the global warming alarmist position (probably an issue in coal-dependent WV this election cycle) gave an analogy I think is right on:
“Climate change — to deny it exists, to just put your head in the sand and, ‘oh no, it doesn’t exist, what are you talking about,’ is about like standing on the floor of Macy’s during the month of December and claiming Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
While he was trying to actually denigrate climate skeptics, in fact he confirms exactly what we believe. Saying Santa Claus does not exist is absolutely correct, but doing so would get in the way of everyone around us making money off the myth. Via Climate Depot
I suppose one cold say that climate alarmism jumped the shark years ago. But they have certainly moved to a new level, one for which there is not even a term, in this video. This video has everything – the government school teacher politically indoctrinating the kids, followed by bloody gory death dealt out to the kids who refuse to toe the government line. I am not kidding.
When I first saw it, I was sure it was a skeptic satire, ala Jonathon Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal,’ and I am still afraid that this may be some elaborate put-on because the video and its message — that skeptics need to be killed — is so obscene. But apparently, according to this article at the Guardian, it is totally for real and includes contributions from some fairly prominent artists, as well as funding from the UK government and the 10:10 program (a plea to reduce carbon emissions by 10% per year, eerily with a name probably purposely similar to 9-11).
Our friends at the 10:10 climate change campaign have given us the scoop on this highly explosive short film, written by Britain’s top comedy screenwriter Richard Curtis, ahead of its general release….
Had a look? Well, I’m certain you’ll agree that detonating school kids, footballers and movie stars into gory pulp for ignoring their carbon footprints is attention-grabbing. It’s also got a decent sprinkling of stardust – Peter Crouch, Gillian Anderson, Radiohead and others. But it’s pretty edgy, given 10:10′s aim of asking people, businesses and organisations to take positive action against global warming by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% in a year, and thereby pressuring governments to act.
“Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody’s existence on this planet? Clearly we don’t really think they should be blown up, that’s just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?” jokes 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid film maker Franny Armstrong.
But why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask her: “Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”
The latter claim is hilarious. Over the next four years, CO2 levels will likely increase, if they stay on trend, from .0392% of the atmosphere to .0400% of the atmosphere. I would love to see these so-called science-based folks demonstrate how the next .0008% shift in atmospheric concentration triggers the point-of-no return tipping point. In actual fact, the have just latched onto the round number of 400ppm and declared, absolutely without evidence, that this number (which the Earth has crossed many times in the past) will somehow lead to a runaway chain reaction.
Anyway, I have teased it long enough, here is the video. Beware — there is gore (no pun intended) here worthy of a zombie movie.
Wow, its sure good that the world has decided that skeptics are the mindless, thuggish, anti-science side of this debate, because if that had not already been made clear, we might think that key climate alarmism groups had lost their freaking minds. It will be interesting to see if this gets any play in the US media — my guess is it will not. Magazines are happy to spend twenty pages dissecting the motives of the Koch family in funding skeptic and libertarian causes, but environmentalists get a free pass, even with stuff like this.
Lubos Motl is all over this, and has mirror sites for the video if (or more likely when) the video gets taken down. This is one of those propaganda offers that are the product of an echo chamber, with a group of like-minded people all patting themselves on the back only to be surprised at the inevitable public backlash.
I have mirrored the video here in case it gets a youtube takedown.
Update: As a reminder, this is not satire. It is made by a group of true believers. It was funded and approved and released by a climate alarmism group, which paid top dollar (including UK taxpayer funds) for a large professional team of actors, writers, and directors. All interviewed participants, including the first little actor blown up, have stated how proud they were of the film and its contribution to educating people on the need for immediate action on global warming.
For the last hour, I have sat and tried to think if, as a skeptic, I had wanted to make a satire critiquing the excesses of global warming alarmism, could I have made a better video. The only thing that might have made it better would have been if the final button-pusher was someone famous like James Cameron or Bono, who after then pushed the button climbed on their Gulfstream jet to fly home. But that’s just a quibble. I have changed my opinion. This may be the greatest skeptic video ever, and the Koch family didn’t even have to pay a dime for it. Thanks 10:10.
Update #2: This movie reminds me of nothing so much as Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards. It is clearly not reality, but the author’s fantasy. Tarantino fantasizes about a group of jews kicking ass on the Nazi high command and ending the war early. 10:10 fantasizes about blowing up skeptics, in a video that, amazingly, is more blood-spattered than Tarantino’s.
Update #3: The group pulls the video with a classic “I’m sorry you guys are so easily offended” apology.
Update #4: Unsurprisingly, Joe Romm (in the italics in this post) goes to the kindergarten argument of “he started it,” arguing that the video is just the flip side of the stuff skeptics are doing all the time. In making his pitch, he shows the mindset that allowed this stupid film to get made.
I am not sure exactly what comparable films skeptics have produced that are similar, and the only example he can cite is Anthony Watt’s blog post comments on the shooting of an eco-terrorist. I did not even go back and look at Watt’s comments, but I generally think that lots of people are too gleeful when suspected criminals, who are innocent before the law, are gunned down by police.
Never-the-less, its seems a stretch to equate the offhand comments in real time of an independent blogger with a film involving probably a hundred people (including those who commissioned it in the 10:10 organization), commissioned in an official and thoughtful act (after all this had to be months in the works), and funded in part by the British government. He takes the opportunity of his team’s screw-up to launch this broadside on people like me (in bold no less).
None of this excuses that disgusting video. But the difference is that those who are trying to preserve a livable climate and hence the health and well-being of our children and billions of people this century quickly denounce the few offensive over-reaches of those who claim to share our goals — but those trying to destroy a livable climate, well, for them lies and hate speech are the modus operandi, so such behavior is not only tolerated, but encouraged.
Is anyone else getting tired of this working definition that “hate speech” is any speech by people who disagree with me, because I have the best interest of humanity in mind so clearly those who oppose me hate the human race?
Note you can see this right in his statement — “for those trying to destroy a livable climate.” That’s absurd. Does he really think anyone is trying to destroy a livable climate? I could say that through CO2 controls he is trying to impoverish billions of poor people in lesser developed countries by halting development, but I don’t think that is really his motive. I think that is an outcome of what he advocates, just as he thinks an unlivable climate is an outcome of what I advocate, but I can distinguish between motives and assumptions, but he apparently cannot. This attitude is EXACTLY what causes this kind of unfortunate video to be made — it is only a small step from believing, as he says he does, that skeptics are “trying to destroy a liveable climate” to making a movie that jokes about killing them all (or, to be frank, to feeling justified in acts of eco-terrorism).
I encourage you to watch my climate video and decide if folks like me are trying to thoughtfully decipher nature or are engaging in hate speech.
Update #6: I guess this was inevitable, but all the rats in the 10:10 ship are claiming that they had no idea what the video would be like and were appalled when they saw it. Right. An organization funds a major film production, including any number of high profile participants, and no one asked to see a script, screened the video before release, or even asked for some kind of written treatment of the concept? Yeah, right. No one in the 10:10 organization or who funded the video even peeked at it before it was released to the entire planet? This is so utterly lame but will probably be enough of a fig leaf for most of the media to hide behind and allow them not to follow up on a video whose basic premises they likely agree with.
As y’all know, I am not a member of either the Coke or Pepsi party, so I find all the partisan mudslinging on the political blogs to be just kind of funny. Particularly when both sides are piously accusing the other of exactly the same behavior, while maintaining that they are immune from said behavior (or only engaging in it because the other guy started it).
I really don’t understand political strategy. I admit this. Take global warming. I really thought the CRU email thing was a minor distraction. After all, the there were so many fundamental flaws in the science and scientific process that a lot of the CRU stuff was old news to those who have paid attention. But I was wrong. There was something about the scandal that was more compact and easy to tell, it fit into a box or storyline familiar to both the media that had to report it and the public that had to consume it. I understood the whole scandal and its impact so poorly that I have done little blogging at my climate site lately, as I still can’t get excited blogging about commissions and investigations into the scandal that seem to obsess the skeptic community currently.
So I won’t say that this strategy by Kevin Drum is wrong, I will just say I don’t understand it:
On Twitter, here was my insta-reaction to Obama’s oil spill address from the Oval Office:
What a terrible speech.
Unfair? Maybe! I mean, compared to Sarah Palin’s (literally) incomprehensible burbling on Bill O’Reilly’s show afterward it was a model of straight talk and reassurance. But that’s a pretty low bar.
What’s the deal with Sarah Palin? I swear she gets more pub from her enemies than her supporters. How does it somehow help a sitting President — who was supposedly elected because he was the most competent person of all time — to be compared, however favorably, to a woman with limited political experience who holds no office? Granted the Republicans really have no one of distinction leading them right now, and Palin is about the only Republican in years with any modicum of charisma. But since when have losing VP candidates been the standard against which Presidents are measured?
One contentious comma inserted two years ago into the United Nations road map for a new deal to fight global warming is again causing squabbles among delegates from the 193 nations in Copenhagen devising the pact.The comma was inserted on the first page, section 1 b (ii), of the so-called Bali Action Plan at the meeting on the Indonesian island in 2007 at the insistence of the U.S. It caused a debate that ran for two hours as the punctuation mark left open to interpretation the responsibilities of rich and poor nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions….
Delegates from the U.S. argued for the comma to be inserted so that “actions†by developing countries and not just support from industrialized nations, would be measurable, reportable and verifiable, or MRV in UN jargon.
“It took almost two hours to debate the comma,†Quamrul Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi envoy who’s negotiated climate issues since before the Rio Earth summit in 1992, said in an interview in Copenhagen. “One comma creates a lot of trouble.â€
Even with the comma, the clause is still argued over….
“The comma is a manifestation of a massive area of disagreement still among the parties,†Havercamp of the Environmental Defense Fund said.
I am sort of the anti-conspiracy theorist. I have written a number of times that events people sometimes explain as orchestrated conspiracies often can be explained just as well by assuming that people with similar preferences and similar information and similar incentives will respond to these incentives in similar ways.
I think the great herd-think around climate alarmism is a good example, and the Bishop Hill blog brings us a specific illustration from the comment section of Watts Up With That. A commenter observed that it was pretty hard to believe that thousands of scientists could be participating in a conspiracy. Another commenter wrote back:
Actually not so hard.
Personal anecdote:
Last spring when I was shopping around for a new source of funding, after having my funding slashed to zero 15 days after going public with a finding about natural climate variations, I kept running into funding application instructions of the following variety:
Successful candidates will:
1) Demonstrate AGW [ed: Anthropogenic Global Warming]
2) Demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of AGW.
3) Explore policy implications stemming from 1 & 2.
Follow the money — perhaps a conspiracy is unnecessary where a carrot will suffice.
If only alarmist results are funded, then it should not be surprising that only alarmist studies are produced.
By the way, it is probably incorrect to think of climate science really being driven by 2500 scientists. Here is an analogy: Strategy at General Motors is in some sense driven by thousands of workers – salesmen who know the market, channel managers who know their distribution partners, planners who watch econometric trends, manufacturers who know what can and can’t be done with costs, engineers who see what the next technological opportunities, etc. — you get the idea.
But realistically, there are probably 20-25 people who are really setting and driving and communicating the corporate strategy for GM. And those 20-25 people will likely say to the public that their strategy is supported by all those 200,000 workers. But in fact there are thousands, maybe even a majority, that would say that they don’t support the strategy and don’t think that strategy is consistent with their bit of knowlege.
I think climate science works roughly the same way. The same 20-25 people are lead authors on the IPCC, write key reports, contribute to Al Gore’s movie, get quoted in the NY Times, run the Realclimate web site, and, of course, feature prominently in the CRU emails. And while these 25 may claim thousands of scientists support their conclusions based on the mere fact that these other scientists contributed to an IPCC report that had these conclusions, many of these scientists, when actually asked, will disagree.
Here is one thing that is never mentioned — most of the scientists outside of climate science who have gone on the record somewhere as supporting catastrophic man-made global warming theory, if you really talked to them, would say they made their statement in support of science, not global warming theory. Most of these folks really haven’t dug into the details, but the problem was presented to them as one of science vs. anti-science. They are told by their peers and the media that AGW skeptics are all fundamentalist super right-wing anti-science evolution deniers who think the Earth is 4000 years old.
By saying they support AGW, these scientists are really trying to make the statement that they support science. The bitter irony is that they are doing the opposite, enabling those in the core of the climate community who are trying to duck criticism and replication by demanding unquestioning respect for their authority. The fact is that nearly every time one of these outsider scientists – a physicist or a geologist or a statistician, say – digs into the science, they are appalled at what they find and how bad the science behind catastrophic AGW theory really is.
One of the great appeals of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory in certain sectors is the fact that what it takes to fight the imagined threat (reduced trade, reduced economic growth, government controls on the economy, populist hammering of energy companies, micro-controls on individual decision-making) are exactly the things the socialists wanted to do before their schtick became tired. Global warming has become the back-door to state control, combining some exaggerated science with a lot of folks’ uninformed desire to “do the right thing”, to create a new vector for old objectives.
Today, 56 newspapers are all allowing some global warming activist to take over their newspapers to run the same panicky plea. Bruce McQuain picks up the story:
In reality, I’ve come to understand this isn’t about “climate changeâ€, this is about the politics of income redistribution. I’ve spoken of it in the past. This has been a goal of the third-world debating club, also known as the UN, since it has come into existence. The IPCC is just a convenient vehicle on which to base their claims and put them forward to the industrialized countries for fulfillment. The underlying “scienceâ€, like a wet paper box, is coming apart at the seams. And not a single mention in the editorial. But it becomes clear, the further you get into it, that it is about what I contend it is about:
Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of “exported emissions†so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europeâ€, must not suffer more than their richer partners.
If you were playing buzz word bingo with this paragraph you’d be at the prize table right now picking one out. It hits all of the favorite themes of income redistributionists. And its blatancy should scare you. This is about your wallet, your money and the rest of the world making a claim on it. This is the third world’s dream come true.
I have to object somewhat to his last line. This is the third world leader’s dream come true, as I think most adults understand from past experience that aid like this gets siphoned off by the ruling regime. What the Third World’s people really need is what Southeast Asia and India and China have – real private investment making for real economic growth (to be fair, I think Bruce would accept this correction).
I thought this bit was hilarious:
It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.
Apparently we are supposed to be dazzled that 56 institutions that all, in unison, blindly cling to the same 150-year-old failed business model, hoping that some other group can be prevailed upon to bail them out, would actually think alike about some issue. Amazing!
When someone starts to shout “but its in the peer-reviewed literature” as an argument-ender to me, I usually respond that peer review is not the finish line, meaning that the science of some particular point is settled. It is merely the starting point, where now a proposition is in the public domain and can be checked and verified and replicated and criticized and potentially disproved or modified.
The CRU scandal should, in my mind, be taken exactly the same way. Unlike what more fire-breathing skeptics have been saying, this is not the final nail in the coffin of catastrophic man-made global warming theory. It is merely a starting point, a chance to finally move government funded data and computer code into the public domain where it has always belonged, and start tearing it down or confirming it.
To this end, I would like to share a post from year ago, showing the kind of contortions that skeptics have been going through for years to demonstrate that there appear to be problems in key data models — contortions and questions that could have been answered in hours rather than years if the climate scientists hadn’t been so afraid of scrutiny and kept their inner workings secret. This post is from July, 2007. It is not one of my most core complaints with global warming alarmists, as I think the Earth has indeed warmed over the last 150 years, though perhaps by less than the current metrics say. But I think some folks are confused why simple averages of global temperatures can be subject to hijinx. The answer is that the averages are not simple:
Let’s say you had two compasses to help you find north, but the compasses are reading incorrectly. After some investigation, you find that one of the compasses is located next to a strong magnet, which you have good reason to believe is strongly biasing that compass’s readings. In response, would you
Average the results of the two compasses and use this mean to guide you, or
Ignore the output of the poorly sited compass and rely solely on the other unbiased compass?
Most of us would quite rationally choose #2. However, Steve McIntyre shows us a situation involving two temperature stations in the USHCN network in which government researchers apparently have gone with solution #1. Here is the situation:
He compares the USHCN station at the Grand Canyon (which appears to be a good rural setting) with the Tucson USHCN station I documented here, located in a parking lot in the center of a rapidly growing million person city. Unsurprisingly, the Tucson data shows lots of warming and the Grand Canyon data shows none. So how might you correct Tucson and the Grand Canyon data, assuming they should be seeing about the same amount of warming? Would you
average them, effectively adjusting the two temperature readings
towards each other, or would you assume the Grand Canyon data is cleaner
with fewer biases and adjust Tucson only? Is there anyone who would not choose the second option, as with the compasses?
The GISS data set, created by the Goddard Center of NASA, takes the USHCN data set and somehow uses nearby stations to correct for anomalous stations. I say somehow, because, incredibly, these government scientists, whose research is funded by taxpayers and is being used to make major policy decisions, refuse to release their algorithms or methodology details publicly. They keep it all secret! Their adjustments are a big black box that none of us are allowed to look into (and remember, these adjustments account for the vast majority of reported warming in the last century).
We can, however, reverse engineer some of these adjustments, and McIntyre does. What he finds is that the GISS appears to be averaging the good and bad compass, rather than throwing out or adjusting only the biased reading. You can see this below. First, here are the USHCN data for these two stations with only the Time of Observation adjustment made (more on what these adjustments are in this article).
As I said above, no real surprise – little warming out in undeveloped nature, lots of warming in a large and rapidly growing modern city. Now, here is the same data after the GISS has adjusted it:
You can see that Tucson has been adjusted down a degree or two, but Grand Canyon has been adjusted up a degree or two (with the earlier mid-century spike adjusted down). OK, so it makes sense that Tucson has been adjusted down, though there is a very good argument to be made that it should be been adjusted down more, say by at least 3 degrees**. But why does the Grand Canyon need to be adjusted up by about a degree and a half? What is biasing it colder by 1.5 degrees, which is a lot? The answer: Nothing. The explanation: Obviously, the GISS is doing some sort of averaging, which is bringing the Grand Canyon and Tucson from each end closer to a mean.
This is clearly wrong, like averaging the two compasses. You don’t average a measurement known to be of good quality with one known to be biased. The Grand Canyon should be held about the same, and Tucson adjusted down even more toward it, or else thrown out. Lets look at two cases. In one, we will use the GISS approach to combine these two stations– this adds 1.5 degrees to GC and subtracts 1.5 degrees from Tucson. In the second, we will take an approach that applies all the adjustment to just the biases (Tucson station) — this would add 0 degrees to GC and subtract 3 degrees from Tucson. The first approach, used by the GISS, results in a mean warming in these two stations that is 1.5 degrees higher than the more logical second approach. No wonder the GISS produces the highest historical global warming estimates of any source! Steve McIntyre has much more.
** I got to three degrees by applying all of the adjustments for GC and Tucson to Tucson. Here is another way to get to about this amount. We know from studies that urban heat islands can add 8-10 degrees to nighttime urban temperatures over surrounding undeveloped land. Assuming no daytime effect, which is conservative, we might conclude that 8-10 degrees at night adds about 3 degrees to the entire 24-hour average.
These adjustments are supposed to adjust for station moves – the procedure is described in Karl and Williams 1988 [check], but, like so many climate recipes, is a complicated statistical procedure that is not based on statistical procedures known off the island. (That’s not to say that the procedures are necessarily wrong, just that the properties of the procedure are not known to statistical civilization.) When I see this particular outcome of the Karl methodology, my mpression is that, net of the pea moving under the thimble, the Grand Canyon values are being blended up and the Tucson values are being blended down. So that while the methodology purports to adjust for station moves, I’m not convinced that the methodology can successfully estimate ex post the impact of numerous station moves and my guess is that it ends up constructing a kind of blended average.
LOL. McIntyre, by the way, is the same gentleman who helped call foul on the Mann hockey stick for bad statistical procedure.
I know this might sound retro to some readers. But we need to finish what the early 1970s environmental pollution control laws set out to do: clean up all the sources of air and water pollution. The environmental movement has run out of steam and gotten distracted. Get back to the basics.
Agreed. Another point I often make – we don’t know how to keep growing China without creating CO2, but we do know how to grow China without making the air in cities like Beijing breathable. Instead of talking to them about CO2 capture, what about air pollution 101 type things like ash bags and exhaust scrubbing?
And while I am on the topic, do we have to keep destroying the Amazon just to clear land to grow more plants for ethanol that in the end does nothing to abate CO2 emissions?
The video from my climate lecture on November 10, 2009 is now available online. I have overlaid the slides on the video so you can see them better. If I have time, I may some day re-record the sound track over the slides in a studio setting.
The HD video is available full length via Vimeo embedded below. This is a lower resolution version — to see it in its full high-resolution glory click here. This higher resolution version is greatly recommended – the Vimeo engine works well and I find it streams even better than low-resolution YouTube videos on most computers.
You can also view it on YouTube, though by YouTube’s rules the resolution gets crushed and it has to be broken up into nine (9!) parts. The YouTube playlist is embedded below or is here.
The slides from this presentation can be downloaded here.
I am disappointed to see folks like Lord Monkton calling for scientists to go to jail over what has been discovered in the Hadley CRU emails. No one is going to jail, at least based on what we know so far. Laws were broken, but of the type that perhaps people lose their jobs but not their freedom. And demanding that people go to jail just paints skeptics as opportunistic, over-the-top and vindictive. We sound like the looniest of the alarmists when we say stuff like this.
This is not to say that the emails (as well as the source code, which Steve McIntyre and his readers are starting to dig into) don’t give us useful insights about the climate science process. And what they really point to for me is the danger of a monoculture.
For years, with the media’s active participation, criticism of the mainstream scientific position on global warming has been painted as somehow outside the bounds of reasonable discourse. Skeptics are called “deniers,†with the intent to equate them with those who deny the Holocaust. At every turn, global warming activists with the help of the media, have tried to make it uncomfortable, even impossible, to criticize the science of catastrophic man-made global warming. In the extreme, this has degenerated into outright threats.
In June 2009, former Clinton Administration official Joe Romm defended a comment on his Climate Progress website warning skeptics would be strangled in their beds. “An entire generation will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds,†stated the remarks, which Romm defended by calling them “not a threat, but a prediction.â€
The examples go on ad infinitum. Several folks have emailed me and asked why I have not joined the feeding frenzy over the “climategate.†In part, this is because I don’t think there is anything in the emails that is a whole lot worse than what many of the actors have been saying publicly. The media has played along not only because many of its members were sympathetic to the message, but because the catastrophe played well into the “if it bleeds, it leads†culture. Even when the media was not “picking a winner†in the science, it supported the catastrophist message in its editorial decisions, choosing to cover (for example) ad nauseum a 30-year low in Arctic sea ice but failing to even mention a 30-year high in Antarctic sea ice which occurred on nearly the same day (more here). Ditto hurricanes, tornadoes, floods droughts, etc — only events and records in one particular tail of the normal distribution were covered. Even when they worked to be fair, the media were frequently criticized by alarmists for allowing even a mention of the skeptic position in an article otherwise generally supporting the orthodoxy. The term “false balance†was coined.
The result was a group who were effectively exempt from criticism — and knew it.
The most amazing thing to watch has been the absolute scorn and obstructionism piled on Steve McIntyre and his readers and partners. I have read Steve’s work for years, and find it to be incredibly fair and deeply analytical. I took as one of my early roles at my climate site the explanation to laymen of exactly what McIntyre was talking about in his posts. He often challenged the climate orthodoxy – which in most scientific disciplines is highly valued, but in climate science is a crime. In the emails we even see scientists within the monoculture raising the exact same issues that they have blasted McIntyre for — apparently it is OK to raise such issues as long as 1) you are an insider and 2) such concerns are suppressed in any public document.
Perhaps the single most abusive part of the monoculture has been its misrepresentation of peer review. Peer review was never meant as a sort of good housekeeping seal of approval on scientific work. It is not a guarantee of correctness. It is really an extension of the editorial process — bringing scientists from relevant fields to vet whether work is really new and different and worthy of publication, to make sure the actual article communicates the work and its findings clearly, and to probe for obvious errors or logical fallacies.
Climate scientists have tried to portray peer review as the end of the process– ie, once one of their works shows up in a peer-reviewed journal, the question addressed is “settled.†But his is never how science has worked. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal is the beginning, not the end. Once published, scientists attempt alternatively to tear it down or replicate its conclusions. Only work that has survived years of such torture testing starts to become “settled.â€
The emails help to shed light on some aspects of peer review that skeptics have suspected for years. It is increasingly clear that climate scientists in the monoculture have been using peer review to enforce the orthodoxy. Peer review panels are stacked with members of the club, and authors who challenge the orthodoxy are shut out of publication, while authors within the monoculture use peer review as a shield against future criticism. We see in the emails members of the monoculture actually working to force editors who have the temerity to publish work critical of the orthodoxy out of their jobs. We are now learning that when alarmist scientists claim that there is little peer-reviewed science on the skeptic’s side, this is like the Catholic Church enforcing a banned books list and then claiming that everything in print supports the Church’s position.
History teaches us that whenever we allow a monoculture – whether is be totalitarian one-party rule or enforcing a single state religion, corruption follows. Without scrutiny of their actions, actors in such monocultures have few checks and little accountability. Worse, those at the center of such monocultures can become convinced of their own righteousness, such that any action they take in support of the orthodoxy is by definition ethically justified.
This, I think, is exactly what we see at work in the Hadley CRU emails.
I often conclude my presentations on climate that conservationists will likely look back in 10-20 years on the global warming hysteria as the worst thing that has ever happened to the environmental movement. While we focus 110% of our attention on a trace, naturally occurring atmospheric gas that our bodies exhale and plants need to live, here is what we are not focusing on.
All the problems in these pictures are ones we demonstrably know how to solve while still allowing for the economic growth that is pulling a billion Asians our of poverty. The same cannot be said for our current ability to eliminate CO2, and therefore most combustion, without imploding our economy.
From a press release from the Environmental News Network that landed in my inbox:
It’s Time to Re-think Economic Growth for Advanced Nations
LONDON – In Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, published by Earthscan this week, Professor Tim Jackson raises fundamental questions about the economics needed to tackle climate change. Jackson argues that, faced with the limits imposed by carbon sinks and the scale of ‘de-carbonization’ of the world’s economy required to stay within them, continued economic growth in the already affluent world does not offer the solution; it represents the problem….
there is a strong case for the developed nations to make room for growth in poorer countries. It is in these poorer countries that growth really does make a difference. In richer countries the returns on further growth appear much more limited; for example subjective well-being diminishes rapidly at higher income levels.”
Assuming that such thinking is not just a crass excuse for totalitarian control, it represents an enormous failure of imagination. The author cannot imagine what benefits increased wealth would provide, so he assumes those benefits to be zero. There is absolutely no reason that this same exact thinking could not have been applied in 1300 or 1750 or 1900. Fortunately it was not.
Wonder where the communists went when their philosophy was shown to be bankrupt? Wonder where the anti-globalization folks went after they looted in Seattle. Look no further than the global warming movement. The author suggests, among other things:
support for ‘ecological’ enterprise – resource efficient, community-based activities that offer meaningful employment and deliver low-carbon goods and services
clear restraints on unbridled consumerism
the protection of public spaces and a renewed vision of social goods
investment in the capabilities for people have to participate in society in less materialistic ways
I am sick and tired of so many people treating the economic growth of India and China like it is bad news. The astounding numbers of people emerging from almost unimaginable poverty is fabulous news, and perhaps one of the ten greatest events in all of world history. Too many people — from neo-Malthusians to global warming alarmists to cold warriors looking for the next enemy to trade protectionists — treat these countries’ emerging wealth like it is some sort of disaster.
