Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Deserting From The Climate Wars

10 Comments

A lefty statistician has had enough:

As a statistician who teaches about the fundamental uncertainties of global climate models and the difficulty of finding data series that are good enough and long enough to find a recent trend in extreme weather and sea levels, I have for years scoffed at claims that “the debate is over.” The climate system is so complex and chaotic, and its many interactions so poorly understood on so many time scales, that I more think that there is little useful information with which to begin, let alone end, a debate.

“Anti-intellectual, and anti-science,” I would complain, as the catastrophists dominated mainstream debate, turning the noble scientific title of “skeptic” into the horrific libel of being a “denier” of a coming Holocaust. At least I could be thankful that the domination of mainstream and leftist debate did not translate into domination of policy. Both rich and poor countries continue to talk down fossil fuels while using them every chance they get, because these low-cost forms of energy have been the source of the economic growth and longer life expectancy the world has experienced in two dramatic waves: the industrialization of Europe, the United States and Japan in the 19th century and the industrialization of Korea, China, India, and others in Asia and to a lesser extent in Latin America and Africa in the 20th century.

…What finally brought me to my retirement from the Climate War was my attempt to think through the claims in a recent film about the Maldives Islands that my think-tank had sponsored. The former president had been a darling of the catastrophists, holding a cabinet meeting under water to show how his country would look if the wicked West didn’t stop warming the planet. A trip through journal articles, particularly one by a noted sea-level expert, Nils Axel-Morner, that disputed the rise in detail, showed me that the president’s claim is very hard to evaluate. Nowhere could I find evidence for dramatic changes over the past 40 years in the Maldives — which of course does not rule out dramatic changes being on the way — and I discovered that land sinks, and rises, to the clock of its underlying tectonic plates and geological formations as well as to the sea’s clock. Sea level is difficult to measure because it sloshes around, over tens of thousands of miles, and the measuring devices must be relative to some standard – the land, a dock, the bottom, all of which are always changing.

So here we are again on the Maldives, facing a question that relies on good historical data, systematic corrections and interpretations, and careful modeling. I could tell even before I read competing studies how the dispute would go. Just as with temperature, hurricanes, droughts, and global sea level, interested parties on both sides, skeptics and catastrophists, control the data and its manipulation, as well as the modeling. Even disinterested scientists are forced into line by the high political stakes, finding themselves either hailed and rewarded or castigated and exiled based on their results. I realized that no matter how much I studied the issue, I could never trust the data, the manipulation, and the models, because of the partisanship. And that is why the debate is over.

I’m gonna miss a lot of it – the excitement of learning about modeling, paleoclimate, satellite sounding, the 100,000 year cycles, how ice cores can provide temperature estimates, and the fun of watching students grapple with the possibility that everything they have been taught about climate change in college might be wrong. But I’m not gonna miss the stress of being the odd man out in my lefty think-tank, or of being in agreement with my usual foes. All I can say is, to people in both developed and developing countries, I hope I’ve helped just a little bit by being part of the resistance to the plan to de-industrialize your economies. So far, so good — not because we skeptics convinced anybody about the dangers of emissions, but because people remain convinced of their benefits.

Yes.

10 thoughts on “Deserting From The Climate Wars”

  1. Pre-fucking-cisely. I’m open to the idea that human activity is having a major negative impact on the climate. I’ve been open to that idea since the ’80s even, well before it was popular in the mainstream, but the closer I look the worse the evidence looks. The data is crap, the models are worse, and the scientific rigor in the community even worse.

  3. He broke his solemn pinky swear a few months ago:

    But I oppose my allies’ well-meaning campaign for “climate justice.” More than 230 organizations, including Africa Action and Oxfam, want industrialized countries to pay “reparations” to African governments for droughts, rising sea levels and other alleged results of what Ugandan strongman Yoweri Museveni calls “climate aggression.” And I oppose the campaign even more for trying to deny to Africans the reliable electricity—and thus the economic development and extended years of life—that fossil fuels can bring.

    The left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false. John Feffer, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in the Dec. 8, 2009, Huffington Post that “even if the mercury weren’t rising” we should bring “the developing world into the postindustrial age in a sustainable manner.” He sees the “climate crisis [as] precisely the giant lever with which we can, following Archimedes, move the world in a greener, more equitable direction.”

    and

    But it is as an Africanist, rather than a statistician, that I object most strongly to “climate justice.” Where is the justice for Africans when universities divest from energy companies and thus weaken their ability to explore for resources in Africa? Where is the justice when the U.S. discourages World Bank funding for electricity-generation projects in Africa that involve fossil fuels, and when the European Union places a “global warming” tax on cargo flights importing perishable African goods? Even if the wildest claims about the current impact of fossil fuels on the environment and the models predicting the future impact all prove true and accurate, Africa should be exempted from global restraints as it seeks to modernize.

    With 15% of the world’s people, Africa produces less than 5% of carbon-dioxide emissions. With 4% of global population, America produces 25% of these emissions. In other words, each American accounts for 20 times the emissions of each African. We are not rationing our electricity. Why should Africa, which needs electricity for the sort of income-producing enterprises and infrastructure that help improve life expectancy? The average in Africa is 59 years—in America it’s 79. Increased access to electricity was crucial in China’s growth, which raised life expectancy to 75 today from 59 in 1968.

    According to the World Bank, 24% of Africans have access to electricity and the typical business loses power for 56 days each year. Faced with unreliable power, businesses turn to diesel generators, which are three times as expensive as the electricity grid. Diesel also produces black soot, a respiratory health hazard. By comparison, bringing more-reliable electricity to more Africans would power the cleaning of water in villages, where much of the population still lives, and replace wood and dung fires as the source of heat and lighting in shacks and huts, removing major sources of disease and death. In the cities, reliable electricity would encourage businesses to invest and reinvest rather than send their profits abroad.

    I think this illustrates the ugliest part of the advocacy for greenhouse gas emission reductions – ignoring the costs to poor people around the world. The way too generous assumption is that somehow adaption to modest climate change will be harder on these people than denying them for a considerable time (perhaps even permanently) the benefits of modern societies.

    1. Among the more radical environmentalists, Increased deaths among poor, dark people is a feature, not a bug, of denying them modern technology.

      1. I have to admit, if you’re obsessed over the number of people and population growth, then sooner or later, you’re going to realize that hey, there’s a lot of people in Africa and they’re making more. And if you believe people are inherently evil and/or should be removed from Earth, that doesn’t make you predisposed to improving the lot of those living in Africa or other poor parts of the world.

        1. The ultimate irony may be that the human hating lefties would best achieve their goal of lower human population by *increasing* the standard of living; as all countries studied to date have lower fertility correlated with higher wealth.

          If you are a lefty, which to you hate more: High standards of living or Humans?

          1. They hate other humans having a high standard of living. The better off other humans are, the less they can use their own high standard of living to argue that they must be better than everyone else.

  4. I have yet to see any evidence that very expensive property along the sea shore in California, Florida or the New England is going down in value because it will soon be under the waves. Given that much of that property is owned by rich lefties, that is all I need to know about global warming and the true threat of sea level rise.

  5. As a newly-minted far Left Progressive, allow me to remind you of a few incontrovertible, inconvenient truths. 99.7 percent of all scientists believe in man-made global warming, the north and south poles are melting at historically unprecedented rates, polar bears are becoming extinct, we have had the hottest recorded temperatures of all times this summer, storm activity is at an all time high, floods are at a record high, drought is the worst it has ever been, and the Maldives are taking a mal dive. It is obvious to anyone who believes in science that man-made global warming is causing catastrophic climate change.

    And finally, if you deniers don’t shut up, we will behead you.

Comments are closed.