I flew to Denver yesterday from Phoenix after the conference, and drove down to Colorado Springs for the National Space Symposium, which has a crazy schedule of events, so blogging will be light. I haven’t talked about the insanity of what the Attorney General of the Virgin Islands (and others AGs) are attempting to do, but Megan McArdle has some thoughts:
I support action on climate change for the same reason I buy homeowner’s, life and disability insurance: because the potential for catastrophe is large. But that doesn’t mean I’m entitled to drive people who disagree with me from the public square. Climate activists have an unfortunate tendency to try to do just that, trying to brand dissenters as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers.
It’s an understandable impulse. It seems easier to shut down dissenters than to persuade people to stop consuming lots and lots of energy-intensive goods and services.
But history has had lots and lots of existentially important debates. If you thought that only the One True Church could save everyone from Hell, the Reformation was the most existentially important debate in human history. If you thought that Communist fifth columnists were plotting to turn the U.S. into Soviet Russia, that was also pretty existentially important. We eventually realized that it was much better to have arguments like these with words, rather than try to suppress one side of them by force of law.
Unfortunately those who wield the law forget that lesson, and we get cases like the CEI subpoena, intended to silence debate by hounding one side. The attorney general doesn’t even need to have the law on his side; the process itself can be the punishment, as victims are forced to spend immense amounts on legal fees, and immense time and money on complying with investigations. (And if the law were on the attorney general’s side in a case like this, then that’s a terrible law, and it should be overturned.)
“The process itself can be the punishment.” Gee, where have we heard that before?
[Update mid-afternoon]
Not to mention, Attorneys General, that conspiring against free speech is a crime.
Laws are for the little people.
“…because the potential for catastrophe is large.”
That’s one of the weirdest parts of the whole campaign. To date, even the advocates believe that CO2 has contributed 0.6 deg or so to global temperatures, as half of the rise since the 1800’s is acknowledged to be natural. Well, from aerosols, anyway. A very convenient fudge factor.
Zero point six degrees is less than the deadband on my thermostat. Purported sensitivity is on the order of 2 deg per doubling, and there is no scenario under which we could possibly get above slightly more than that. Well, we could, but only if natural influences were to push us back toward the Mesozoic era, which seems highly unlikely, and totally out of our control in any case (not that any of it is within our control, but that’s a different discussion entirely).
But, but, we’d get sea levels rising! Well, not all at once, and if we couldn’t deal with it, we’d be like that guy who screamed as the bulldozer ran over him in Austin Powers.
But, but, extreme weather! We’ve always had extreme weather, and always will. But, a more uniform distribution of temperatures would reduce extreme weather which, as it happens, is driven by temperature differentials.
There is no potential for catastrophe whatsoever. It’s nuts.
The Everbody Panic position is that there is, somehow, an H2O
positive-feedback loop hidden somewhere in the processes which the (not particularly impressive) increased CO2 forcing will cause to trigger, resulting in catastrophic warming down the line. This turns the rather dull prospect of a 1.[mumble] degree Celcius increase into something much more cinematically impressive.
And no, I don’t find that particularly likely, but I’m not a weather scientist. I just work in proximity to some of them. Yes, there’s some global warming. No, I don’t think there’s a penny’s worth of justification for green policies – carbon taxes, “renewable” energy/fuel subsidies, the lot – in that rather minimal set of facts, and the ongoing corruption of climatological records by interested parties trying to spark a panic is an utter obscenity.
Yes, but the 2 degC/doubling is what the latest over-the-top estimates are saying including that positive feedback. Without it, the sensitivity is more like 1 degC/doubling.
In actual fact, while increasing CO2 should increase temperatures all things being equal, it is now apparent that not everything remains equal, and natural cycles are dominant.
And, that’s not even getting into the question of whether we actually have a significant impact on atmospheric CO2. Eventually, I predict even that detail, so taken for granted, will fail.
But, that’s not the point. The point is that, even if it were all true, there is no catastrophe in the offing.
B. Bond-Lamberty and A Thomson (2010) Temperature-associated increases in the global soil respiration record,
Nature 464, 579–582. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7288/abs/nature08930.html
The rate of CO2 emissions from soils is correlated with temperature over multi-decadal time horizons (not simply ‘a couple years” as Ferdinand keeps saying) and the correlation is such that the increase in the rate of CO2 emission from soils is about the same as in the increase in the rate of CO2 emissions from the anthropogenic sources — fossil fuel combustion, cement making, and forest clearance.
There are two ways to view this. One is that we are seeing evidence of a “positive feedback”, that is, as the atmosphere warms, we are getting increase emission of CO2 into the atmosphere.
The second way to view this is that it has been warming as part of a natural cycle, and fully half of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is the result of the temperature-driven emission of CO2 from the soil.
I don’t go as far as Salby to claim that nearly all of the Keeling curve increase in CO2 is not from human causes, but a goodly fraction has to be to account for the temperature-net atmospheric CO2 emission correlation.
The other challenge in modeling the carbon cycles is whether or not to assume that CO2 was in equilibrium in the mid 1800s. If natural warming drives natural CO2 emission, and if there are natural variations in temperatures, we should see more CO2 variation in the ice cores. Salby makes a statistical-analysis case that the temperature-ice core CO2 record shows a phase response in the correlations indicating diffusional smoothing, but the “bubbles are locked into the ice and don’t move” contingent is pretty adamant. I am going to have to work on understanding ice cores better.
My lab experience has taught me that, until you have validated a concept with controlled experiments, you really do not know. I do not think the ice core estimates have been validated. Indeed, I do not know how they could be. The ice core-ists reject stomata data which tend not to validate their conclusions, so what else is there?
Reason number one why I contribute money to the NRA anonymously instead of joining. If an activist conservative Republican (Cruz??) ever becomes POTUS, it would be fun to give this same treatment to the AGs of these states – after they no longer are on the public payroll, of course.
Almost everyone believes in liberty. Until, of course, they know they’re right – then it goes out the window.
Some interesting observations on the subject from Glenn Reynolds, the InstaPundit (and law professor):
Federal law makes it a felony “for two or more persons to agree together to injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the Unites States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).”
I wonder if U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, or California Attorney General Kamala Harris, or New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have read this federal statute. Because what they’re doing looks like a concerted scheme to restrict the First Amendment free speech rights of people they don’t agree with. They should look up 18 U.S.C. Sec. 241, I am sure they each have it somewhere in their offices.
“The process itself can be the punishment.” Gee, where have we heard that before?
I don’t know about you, but when I hear of Attorney Generals getting involved in the climate debate I think of Cuccinelli’s witch hunt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney_General_of_Virginia%27s_climate_science_investigation
Cuccinelli’s “witch hunt” involved public funding.
He was wasting public funding conducting a personal ideological crusade with no justifying evidence.
The leaks from CRU provided plenty of justifying evidence.
The leaks from CRU provided plenty of justifying evidence.
Already investigated throughly (several times) with no evidence of scientific fraud exposed.
What’s followed can be summed up with the hope that if you throw enough mud some will stick.
Several people, including Mann, were told to destroy emails. We don’t know if he did or not. If he did, he destroyed evidence. It was legitimate to seek it.
No, the people who refused to provide work done using public funding were.
The source of funding is orthogonal to the question of whether it’s legitimate to use the legal system to harass people for expressing opinions one disapproves of.
The source of funding is orthogonal to the question of whether it’s legitimate to use the legal system to harass people for expressing opinions one disapproves of.
What opinions? Cuccinelli wasn’t trying to investigate opinions, he’d bought in to the lies claiming a conspiracy of scientific fraud.
You can receive taxpayer funds, or you can keep your communications on how you do your research confidential. Pick one.
I’m confident that the Virginia Supreme Court understands the legal requirements better than you or I.
Yes, partisan courts are never wrong.
All courts are partisan when the ruling goes against you.
No, not necessarily.
You can receive taxpayer funds, or you can keep your communications
on how you do your researchconfidential.Something Hillary and Powell should have understood.
“Something Hillary and Powell should have understood.”
Fine. Prosecute them both and let the chips fall where they may.