attacked their ancient enemies, the mountains.
New Scientist magazine, while not the greatest thing on the planet, has put together a handy collection of questions and answers regarding climate change. They are here - Climate Change: A Guide for the Perplexed.
"A guide for the perplexed" is rather a fucking cool name for something, and has been used for everything from books on Levinas to ecology. However, it was originally come up with by a Rabbi named Maimonides. If you're interested, because of your nascent interest in the mystical philosophy of 12th century Judaic philosophical mystics, it is available online at Wikisource.
Anyway. If you want to skip straight to the 26 Myths of Climate Change, click hard like Rickard:
• Human CO2 emissions are too tiny to matter
• We can't do anything about climate change
• The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong
• Chaotic systems are not predictable
• We can't trust computer models of climate
• They predicted global cooling in the 1970s
• It's been far warmer in the past, what's the big deal?
• It's too cold where I live - warming will be great
• Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans
• It’s all down to cosmic rays
• CO2 isn't the most important greenhouse gas
• The lower atmosphere is cooling, not warming
• Antarctica is getting cooler, not warmer, disproving global warming
• The cooling after 1940 shows CO2 does not cause warming
• It was warmer during the Medieval period, with vineyards in England
• We are simply recovering from the Little Ice Age
• Warming will cause an ice age in Europe
• Ice cores show CO2 increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming
• Ice cores show CO2 rising as temperatures fell
• Mars and Pluto are warming too
• Many leading scientists question climate change
• Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming
• Higher CO2 levels will boost plant growth and food production
coloured a photograph of a testicle.
First it was denial - that it wasn't happening, that the globe was cooling, in fact. Then that it might be happening, but wasn't caused by man. Then that it was happening, but was caused by... the sun. Yes, the sun. A recent documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, makes the increasingly popular claim that it's not that we're keeping more heat in, it's just that more heat is arriving from the sun.
Well, that little notion has been cleaned up by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the World Radiation Centre:
They conclude that the rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen since the late 1980s could not be ascribed to solar variability, whatever mechanism is invoked.
The UK's Royal Society says the new research is an important rebuff to climate change sceptics.
"At present there is a small minority which is seeking to deliberately confuse the public on the causes of climate change. They are often misrepresenting the science, when the reality is that the evidence is getting stronger every day," it says.
As Leigh Dayton of The Australian reports, regarding the results of the study (published by the Royal Society soon), University of Melbourne climate scientist David Karoly commented: "These findings completely refute the allegations made by some pseudo-scientists that all recent global warming is due to solar effects."
The phenomenon of climate-change denial is fascinating and complex. It's not as simple as scientists being bankrolled by oil companies, though this certainly does happen. Spokespeople for organisations called things like the Institute for Honest and Truthful Science that Doesn't Lie tend to be publicity experts rather than science experts, though that doesn't stop them having a doctorate. And interestingly, we can thank tobacco companies for some of the larger wholescale misinformers. Organisations that began as official-sounding denial of passive smoking find new funders in ExxonMobil and the like, now denying anthropogenic (that's manmade, kids) climate change.
Concern about climate change has become identified with The Left, thanks partly to Al Gore (who passes for left-wing in American politics) and the left-leaning social and economic policies of environmentally concerned groups (like, say, the Greens). What this means is that the massive self-supporting propaganda structure of Blog Punditry swings into action to counter it.
I'm sure I've said this before, but I'll say it again. It means that those people who normally identify with The Right will consider changing their mind to be some kind of loss in a very important game. And so when a theory is put forward that offers a chance of not losing a point to the Enemy, it's leapt on. When, like this sun thing, it is debunked, either the debunking is ignored or some other theory is found - preferably unfalsifiable.
And so it goes on, playing games while the world burns.
Ignoring, for a moment, that they agree on practically everything, isn't it nice to see a Republican and a Democrat agreeing on something? Congressmen Roscoe Bartlett (R) and Tom Udall (D) have written a nice op-ed piece about how, you know, fuck saving the world, there's good money in ecological technology (or "teconology", as I don't call it).
On financial reward, for example, the American auto industry’s ranking as the world’s top manufacturer is slipping because apparently bigger is not better: the top selling hybrid is a Toyota, not a General Motors or a Ford. While the U.S. invested in gas guzzlers, Japan invested in energy efficiency. With gas at $3 to $4 per gallon, consumers made the switch and Toyota won out in the end. Lest that happen with other industries, America must wake up fast to the consumer trend towards energy-efficient, and thus cost-efficient, lifestyles. With oil prices on the rise, the money is in efficiency.
The Guardian reports that the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research has sent out letters to scientists and economists offering them $10,000 to "emphasise the shortcomings" of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report last Friday.Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash."
Nicely said, Ben. Meanwhile, the imaginary debate continues to rage, as average citizens are under the sincere impression that there's something like a 50-50 split in academic opinion on climate change. In fact, that's all that's necessary for private interests like AEI to succeed in their goals. They want to shape policy, policy is shaped by public opinion, and regardless of what the academic concensus is, it doesn't translate into votes unless people understand and believe it.What's interesting, and has been for some time, is the way that essentially lay followers take up the cause of those private interests. Because there is a pre-existing framework of "left" versus "right", especially in social environments like the US, all someone has to do in order to prevent there being concensus on an issue is encourage voters to frame it in left-right terms. People on the left worry about climate change, people on the right think it's bullshit.Certainly, that's becoming less and less true as time goes on. Plenty of people who identify with "the right" are very concerned about climate change, but in doing so they're going against an entrenched trend - a trend that was initially established by linking climate change with the general air of polarisation in Western (and especially American) politics.When encountering a new contentious issue, birds of a feather seek each other out. When climate change came more into the popular consciousness, those who wanted to have an opinion looked first to those they had agreed with in the past - those in favour of invading Vietnam or Iraq, those in favour of tax cuts, those in favour of "family values". Once they learned the appropriate position, they could then get the pleasure buzz of reading articles and blogs that agreed with them, lending the support of actual arguments (dodgy or not) to their now pre-existing position on the matter.With the Internet, and especially the Blogosphere, there is a much accelerated mimetic evolution of arguments and ideas. One person strikes across what sounds rhetorically like a convincing argument against climate change - perhaps because of its wit - and passes it on to anyone who reads his blog or his message-board posts. It spreads quickly, evolving as it encounters obstacles.Global cooling is one example. It's very rhetorically appealing to say, "Global warming? Hah! Hell, 30 years ago we were worried about global cooling! Those climate scientists never know what's what." If I remember correctly, PJ O'Rourke mentioned that in one of his books. It spreads. Being debunked by academic concensus doesn't matter, if it can spread and back up pre-existing opinions drawn down the traditional left-right divide.What this existing framework does is make it very easy for an issue with near-consensus in the academic community to become a contentious issue of great debate in the public sphere. With the flick of a subtle association, you can cause an identification in a previously unexposed listener's mind, where a stance on an issue is linked with socialism or with capitalism, with bleeding-heart liberals or money-hungry conservatives.And, sadly, there's almost no getting around it. You can't present major issues in a way that won't settle down into that 50/50 divide. Because whoever leaps on the topic first defines who's going to reflexively disagree with them.
Reason Magazine science correspondent Ronald BaileyThis actually happened last year, but I hadn't heard about it, so maybe you haven't either. Ronald Bailey is a science writer for a magazine that receives funds from ExxonMobil. In fact, he features on ExxonSecrets. Not strictly a climate-change denier, he's been sceptical of some of the science, which can lend further assistance to those who - for whatever reason - out and out deny that manmade climate change is occurring.
It's interesting to hear him say, "Actually, no one paid me to be wrong about global warming. Or anything else."It's no huge surprise, but he holds an attitude towards environmental problems similar to Rodney Hide's.Just to bring my intellectual journey in reporting and opining about the global warming issue up to date, I reviewed former vice-president Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth for Reason. I agreed that Gore has "won the climate debate" and that "on balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science" though I argued he exaggerates just how bad future global warming is likely to be. However, I agree that the balance of the evidence pretty clearly indicates that humanity is contributing to global warming chiefly by means of loading up the atmosphere with extra carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.
ExxonMobil has been a supporter of the Reason Foundation. Folks at the foundation confirmed when I called yesterday that the company has donated a little over $250,000 since 2000. The company's latest contributions were $10,000 in 2003 and $20,000 this past January. The last contribution poses a possible conundrum for hard-line corporate conspiracy theorists because it arrived about five months after I declared, "We're All Global Warmers Now." I would suggest that ExxonMobil supports the Reason Foundation because my colleagues robustly defend the free enterprise system. "Follow the money" is often pretty good advice when evaluating the source of information, but in the think tank and public policy magazine realm money tends follow opinion, rather than the other way around.
Bailey: "I have long argued that the evidence shows that most environmental problems occur in open access commons-that is, people pollute air, rivers, overfish, cut rainforests, and so forth because no one owns them and therefore no one has an interest in protecting them. One can solve environmental problems caused by open access situations by either privatizing the commons or regulating it. It will not surprise anyone that I generally favor privatization."
Rodney in an '05 interview with me:
You say some things that don’t belong to anyone, don’t belong to private property – coastways and airways – can you list briefly those things that should belong in private property?
Well, as much as you can, because the more resources you have privately held, the better they’ll be looked after and, indeed, the better access you’ll have. I think the Department of Conservation does a disastrous job of looking after our environment.
You think that private-property owners would do better?
Yeah.
<GIR>Yay! We're doomed!</GIR>Meteorologists are predicting that 2007 will be the hottest year on record yet. Perhaps due to meteors. And polar ice caps are melting. So polar bears have no place to live and starve to death. And now they're considered an endangered species, because some guys got together to sue the US government if they weren't. One of those guys was a guy called Greenpeace. Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! interviewed the head guy of those guys, the melodiously named John Passacantando. Full transcript here.
Why has the United States been so far behind the other industrialized nations in recognizing that global warming is from our emissions, CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels, and so far behind taking actions? It comes down to a concerted effort by companies like ExxonMobil. Our records at Greenpeace show -- and this is all documented on a research website called exxonsecrets.org -- that between 1998 and 2005, ExxonMobil funded groups that were going to be skeptical of global warming, in some cases lie about the truth about global warming, gave them almost $20 million to confuse the American public about global warming.
Don't think that this is confined to the United States of America, either. Follow the money in New Zealand, see who's framing the debates.
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Haha. But seriously, folks. We're all gonna die.
Al Gore just won't quit, God bless 'im. He's trained a bunch of people to present his slideshow. Among the volunteers were Cameron Diaz, and also a 14-year-old kid, who's going to present the warnings about climate change to people his own age. Awesome.
This is good stuff. A few weeks ago, the ever-stylish Alec Hutchinson noted that if necessary changes are going to be made at the governmental level, people need to be as aware of climate change as they are of the dangers of smoking. The social stigma associated with having a cigarette, the subtle guilt/shame involved, needs to be present in taking an air flight or not carpooling, etc. Only then will sane policies become politically convenient.
One group taking an opposite view is the conservative/libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, where a critic called Gore an alarmist and The Climate Project "odd." Marlo Lewis, CEI senior fellow, political philosopher and author of A Skeptic's Guide to An Inconvenient Truth, said the proselytizing, which includes suggestions for reducing pollution to cut global warming, is a waste. "If global warming were really a problem, and I don't think it is, the idea that you can save the planet by carpooling or eating less meat is really silly."
This doesn't help. The "bias of balance", which compels journalists to present "the other side of the story", even if that means giving the ridiculous impression that anyone with any credibility seriously disagrees that global warming is a problem. Fortunately, we have internal documents from ExxonMobil that shows the Competitive Enterprise Institute has received $2,005,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. Marlo Lewis himself, far from being an authority on matters of science, is a politician through and through. Why would any self-respecting journalist give the impression that this guy represents anything other than the interests of carbon-emitting industry?
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Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park and famous climate-change denier, has done something hilarious. He's put someone he doesn't like into his latest book. As a child rapist. (That's a person who rapes children, not a child who rapes people.)
In March this year, New Republic columnist Michael Crowley wrote a cover story about Crichton, whose fi-sci propensities saw him chatting with George W. Bush about climate change. The meeting had been arranged, unsurprisingly, by political genius Karl Rove. Apparently Bush found Crichton's 2004 book State of Fear a real page-turner. State of Fear suggests that global warming is just a theory, like various other liberal plots.
Anyway, poor old Michael Crowley is a bit worried about "Mick Crowley", a Washington journalist, child rapist, and character in Crichton's latest book, Next. Haha, fair enough. After all, let us not forget poor old Billy Velociraptor, the kid who picked in Crichton in high school.
So, I think it's fairly safe to say that I have now quit smoking cigarettes. I did it by shutting myself off from society, playing a lot of World of Warcraft, taking a 10-day detox plan, and cutting all alcohol, sugar and caffeine at the same time. All in all, financially sound. Reading The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius helped.
Anyway, the following is a ZNet post by George Monbiot on climate change, altered slightly to be more relevant for New Zealand (Monbiot tends to focus on the UK). His latest book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, published by Penguin, is in stores now. I recommend it, unless you intend to be able to sleep at night.
"Almost everyone now agrees that we must act," he says, "if not at the necessary speed. If we're to have a high chance of preventing global temperatures rising by 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, we need, in the rich nations, a 90% reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030. The greater part of the cut has to be made at the beginning of this period.
"So how do we do it without bringing civilisation crashing down? Here is a plan for drastic but affordable action the government could take. This is what the science demands."
- Set a target for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions based on the latest science. While I can't find any specific goals set by the NZ government, one Cabinet Climate Change Policy document refers to the UK's plan to reduce carbon emissions to 60% below pre-1990 levels by 2050 as "bold". That's disturbing. It goes on to suggest that "too great a focus on emissions runs the risk of remaining somewhat high level and distant from everyone’s day to day lives" and that "we concentrate on setting some bold goals or objectives, but at a level that people will be better able to relate to." Sadly, what people relate to is not always what will work, and what is distant from everyone's day-to-day lives is sometimes what has to be done.
- Use that target to set an annual carbon cap, which falls over time. Then use the cap to set a personal carbon ration. Every citizen is given a free annual quota of carbon dioxide. He spends it by buying gas and electricity, petrol and train and plane tickets. If he runs out, he must buy the rest from someone who has used less than his quota. This accounts for about 40% of the carbon dioxide we produce. The rest is auctioned off to companies. It's a simpler and fairer approach than either green taxation or the [EU's] Emissions Trading Scheme, and it also provides people with a powerful incentive to demand low-carbon technology. Timescale: a full scheme in place by Jan 2009.
- Introduce a new set of building regulations, with three objectives.
a. Imposing strict energy-efficiency requirements on all major refurbishments (costing $5000 or more). Timescale: comes into force by June 2007.
b. Obliging landlords to bring their houses up to high energy-efficiency standards before they can rent them out. Timescale: to cover all new rentals from Jan 2008.
c. Ensuring that all new homes in New Zealand are built to the German passivhaus standard (which requires no heating system). Timescale: comes into force by 2012. - Ban the sale of incandescent lightbulbs, patio heaters, garden floodlights and several other wasteful and unnecessary technologies. Introduce a stiff "feebate" system for all electronic goods sold in this counrty. The least efficient are taxed heavily, while the most efficient receive tax discounts. Every year, the standards in each category rise. Timescale: fully implemented by Nov 2007.
- Redeploy some of the money in the budget surplus and/or superannuation fund towards a massive investment in energy generation and distribution. Two schemes in particular require Government support to make them commercially viable: very large wind farms, many miles offshore, connected to the grid with high-voltage DC cables; and a hydrogen pipeline network to take over from the natural-gas grid as the primary means of delivering fuel for home heating. Timescale: both programmes commence at the end of 2007 and are completed by 2018.
- Oblige all chains of petrol stations to supply leasable electric-car batteries. This provides electric cars with unlimited mileage: as the battery runs down, you pull into a forecourt, a crane lifts it out and drops in a fresh one. The batteries are charged overnight with surplus electricity from offshore windfarms. Timescale: fully operational by 2011.
- Abandon road-widening and road-building programmes and spend the money on tackling climate change.
- Freeze and then reduce NZ airport capacity. While capacity remains high, there will be constant upward pressure on any scheme the Government introduces to limit flights. We need a freeze on all new airport construction and the introduction of a national quota for landing slots, to be reduced by 90% by 2030. Timescale: immediately.
- Legislate for the closure of all out-of-town superstores and their replacement with a warehouse and delivery system. Shops use a staggering amount of energy (six times as much electricity per square-metre as factories, for example), and major reductions are hard to achieve. Warehouses containing the same quantity of goods use roughly 5% of the energy. Timescale: fully implemented by 2012.
Monbiot continues: "These timescales might seem extraordinarily ambitious. They are, by contrast to the current glacial pace of change. But when the US entered the Second World War, it turned the economy around on a sixpence. Carmakers began producing aircraft and missiles within a year, and amphibious vehicles in 90 days, from a standing start. And that was 65 years ago. If we want this to happen, we can make it happen. It will require more economic intervention than we're used to and some pretty brutal emergency-planning policies (with little time or scope for objections). but if you believe these are worse than mass death, there is something wrong with your value system.
"Climate change is not just a moral question, it is the moral question of the 21st century. There is one position even more morally culpable than denial. That is to accept that it's happening and that its results will be catastrophic, but to fail to take the measures needed to prevent it."