Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

'Gregg Easterbrook (who seems to be better at this stuff than he is at space policy) pans the "documentary" as well.'

Not really. Easterbrook takes off points for style and "exaguartion", but agrees with the film's conclusions.

Posted by Mark R Whittington at May 24, 2006 02:59 PM

He agrees with the conclusions in principle,but the AGW effects he's agreeing with just wouldn't make much of a scarey movie. I saw the trailer to Inconvenient truth, and based on that and the reviews I'd say it's really a Gore presidential enabler. Designed to get the earnest yet naive Democratic base inflamed with passion, and thereby counter the Republican's trump card, the war against Islamofascism with something just as motivating.

Posted by K at May 24, 2006 06:29 PM

Next thing you know, Gore will be blaming global warming on a secret plot by Opus Dei.

Posted by Alan K. Henderson at May 25, 2006 02:59 AM

If global warming was used as an internal politics tool in the USA, it takes off the attention from the important question whether it's true or not. I believe IPCC is in it's latest (yet unreleased) report saying that it is 95% certain it is man-caused.

Posted by mz at May 25, 2006 04:20 AM

It would be more compelling if the TCS "fact check" wasn't pretty dodgy itself.

The first one leaps out, "There is no mention of Revelle's article published in the early 1990s concluding that the science is "too uncertain to justify drastic action."

And so? I know it is hard to believe guys, but the early 1990s were over a decade ago.

A lot of their reasoning in the article is similar to the "facts" presented in a Watchtower publication I was once given on evolution. They're true, but for only certain rather abstract versions of true.

The last item is an appeal to a document which is now 5 years old, and therefore based on even older data analysis.

Poor poor poor reporting.

Posted by Daveon at May 25, 2006 07:08 AM

See also the discussion over on Andrew Sullivan's blog.

Posted by Paul Dietz at May 25, 2006 08:37 AM

It would be interesting to read the whole TCS email which itself is rather rambling.

Posted by Daveon at May 25, 2006 10:11 AM

Here's the thing: I actually believe, on the balance of probabilities, that anthropogenically-generated warming is taking place. It's one of the external costs of industrialization. We're pushing a great deal of previously sequestered carbon into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide, and that carbon dioxide should be acting to trap more heat in the atmosphere (and I suspect that the studies will continue to indicate that into the future, and their plausibility will become ever harder to refute).

That said, Kyoto isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It's a statist, bureaucratic method of dealing with what is fundamentally a technological problem. Of course Al Gore loves to push it. It sings to every fibre of his being. If ever there was a man who would rule the US as the quintessential statist technocrat, it would surely be him.

The simple fact, however, is that there's no way back. The organic agrarian dreams of the hard-core environmentalists is just so much masturbatory fantasy. You can't feed, clothe, and shelter all of the Earth's peoples using their methodology. Not without plowing under every green acre and turning the clock on human progress back about two hundred years (which would be a fine state of affairs if we were to spot an inbound comet--quick, hitch up the horses!).

The way back is an illusion: the only way to combat global warming is to effectively become climate engineers. Yes, yes, gasps of horror about the God-playing that I'm implying, but the reality is that we've been mucking about on his turf for a while now, and the only difference is that right now we're doing it rather poorly. But technology and knowledge, and the ability to create and gather ever more of each, is increasing exponentially. We can and will find ways to mitigate the effects of climate change, and we can do so without buying into Kyoto (indeed, my own government has recently been talking about dropping our participation in the thing--finally).

If I had to offer a thought, it would be to bet on solar in the medium term, but hedge with more nuclear reactors (I'm really not a fan of wind power, no pun intended). I'd also suggest more prizes in the area of solar research. Watching the effectiveness of the DARPA Grand Challenge and X-Prize has been rather inspriring. Obviously, getting solar truly cost-effective is a complex, multivariate problem. After all, if it were trivially resolvable, someone would just take that last step, and reap the profits. What you need instead, I think, is a foundation that could bring together some of the better minds in the field, and break down the overall challenge of cost-effective solar into a set of small, independent prizes. Design them so that the advances could be achieved as independently as possible, but the end result would be solar systems that could compete with other means of generation in terms of cost. The ingenuity is out there, it just needs to be guided a bit to achieve this end.

In the end, I say bet on solar because I think that over the long run, it'll be able to achieve gains somewhat analogous to Moore's Law (though probably not as extreme, due to the sheer raw material requirements of power collection arrays). I think once you can get cost-effective (as opposed to the current, often heavily subsidized) solar into the marketplace, you'll get a virtuous circle of further research and development, further cost reductions, and so forth, eventually putting solar ahead of other technologies in terms of cost.

Posted by Peter at May 25, 2006 12:12 PM

There is more than one indication of global warming on Mars. That "fact" seems rather inconvenient to me.

Posted by Dan DeLong at May 25, 2006 01:21 PM

Dan: why does that fact seem inconvenient? The atmospheres of Mars and Earth are very different.

Posted by Paul Dietz at May 25, 2006 02:17 PM

"Dan: why does that fact seem inconvenient? The atmospheres of Mars and Earth are very different."

And yet both share the same sun.......hmmmmm.....

Posted by Mike Puckett at May 25, 2006 02:32 PM

And yet both share the same sun.......hmmmmm.....

Gosh, you're right! If two planets are illuminated by the same sun, the behaviors of their climates must be identical.

Why didn't I see this obvious fact? D'oh!

[/sarcasm]

Posted by Paul Dietz at May 25, 2006 02:40 PM

Why does anyone believe Al Gore anyway? Unless they too are delusional.

My favorite algoreism is from his monumental speech back in January 2004. During one of the coldest bouts of weather in decades in NYC, Al steps up to the mic and says something to the effect that the ultra-cold weather was proof of global warming.

Even some of the diehard AlGoreites got up and left.

When the Weather Channel gets my local weather right 8 days out with 100% accuracy, I might begin to believe the Global Alarmists.

Posted by Steve at May 25, 2006 03:15 PM

There is more than one indication of global warming on Mars. That "fact" seems rather inconvenient to me.

Hardly.

We certainly don't have anything like enough sensible data to draw any firm conclusions about Mars.

It is very likely that the sun is contributing to the warming we are seeing on Earth, and there have been plenty of warm periods over the last few thousand years - however, based on the current data that really doesn't explain the current warming.

That said; we can't go back and, frankly, reversing warming through CO2 emmisions is pointless. We need to find ways to move away from Hydrocarbons - which, frankly, we need to do anyway.

It seems that the British government is at least agreeing to more Fast Breeder reactors which is the first, and currently, most sensible step.

We should reserve hydrocabons for essential purposes and not waste them on electricity etc...

Posted by Daveon at May 25, 2006 03:19 PM

Why does anyone believe Al Gore anyway?

Well, because all Al is doing is repeating what others are saying.

That the climate is getting warmer is not in doubt. The question is if it anthropomorhpic.

The data is suggesting ever more strongly that it is.

Posted by Daveon at May 25, 2006 03:28 PM

Just a reminder of the main problem with alternate energy sources...

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/08/Quicknon-fixes.shtml

Nuclear looks like the best option for reliable, controllable power, but the same folks who don't want us to burn hydrocarbons don't want us to burn uranium, either.

As to global warming on Mars... yes, more data is needed. But then, I feel like I need more data--collected without bias, as in the hockey stick--to assure myself that we're truly experiencing an abnormal warming *here*.

Posted by Big D at May 25, 2006 03:41 PM

"And yet both share the same sun.......hmmmmm.....

Gosh, you're right! If two planets are illuminated by the same sun, the behaviors of their climates must be identical.

Why didn't I see this obvious fact? D'oh!

[/sarcasm]"

I don't know? Perhaps it is hard to see simple facts when your head is buried so deeply inside a strawman. Perhaps next time you can try addressing what I posted instead of some hyperbolic straw tangent. Or is that too 'identical' for you to comprehend?

Posted by Mike Puckett at May 25, 2006 03:47 PM

Nuclear looks like the best option for reliable, controllable power, but the same folks who don't want us to burn hydrocarbons don't want us to burn uranium, either.

Yeah, true. But frankly, who cares about them. Seriously, the sooner that right thinking, technology minded people get behind this, the sooner the neo-luddites will be history.

I need more data--collected without bias, as in the hockey stick--to assure myself that we're truly experiencing an abnormal warming *here*.

For me, we've already passed that point. Even my most skeptic scientist friends are starting to change their minds which is what really turned me.

Based on what I was told at a panel at a conference a year ago, most of the serious data is still being processed and won't be public domain for until later this year. But it is coming.

We need more nuclear power and we need it now.

Posted by Daveon at May 25, 2006 03:56 PM

Mike, if your comment wasn't that strawman, it was a snarky content-free bit of noise.

Perhaps you could try again, this time actually making a point?

Posted by Paul Dietz at May 25, 2006 06:22 PM

Why Paul? Everyone else seems to have understood that my point was the same sun burns in the sky of both worlds. Do I have to further spell it out or are you starting to see the picture?

PS, has Rand yet to school you as to what does and does not constitute a strawman?

Perhaps Wiki will be of some help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman_argument

Posted by Mike Puckett at May 25, 2006 06:41 PM

1) Why does anyone care if Global Warming was caused by man? Are we really just putting forward blame, or is someone just saying that if we caused it we can probably uncause it?

2) Why is everyone so afraid of Global Warming? The dinosaurs seemed to do just fine in a much warmer climate. In fact, it seems that while the average Earth temperature goes up dramatically, the highest temperatures do not - so basically everyone gets to have tropical weather, and we farm Antarctica? Other than lots of storms and dikes for coastal cities, what bad effects are forseen?

Posted by David Summers at May 25, 2006 08:41 PM

Other than lots of storms and dikes for coastal cities, what bad effects are forseen?

Well, the one that affects me the most is the possible shut down of the Atlantic conveyor. While the planet will be warmer, that doesn't actually mean uniformly warmer weather around the globe. A lot of European cities are much too far North and survive because of warm water in the Atlantic. Remove that and Britain and Ireland suddenly have a climate like Labrador, having previously had a damp but very mild one.

Apart from that, a lot of other regions rely on winter rainfall/snowfall and glaciers for their summer water supply. Particularly in South America - it's already becoming a problem in Chilli and Peru that tens of millions of people might run out of water.

Then there's the shear economic cost of the "coast" defences which are only of limited success against really serious increases.

Finally, the weather patterns might shift completely and remove rainful from currently efficient agricultural areas leading to wide spread food shortages while we, as a species, try and figure out where we can grow food now.

Posted by Daveon at May 26, 2006 01:46 AM

Why Paul? Everyone else seems to have understood that my point was the same sun burns in the sky of both worlds.

And this merits the 'hmmm...' ... why? This fact is so banal and obvious that it is at the level of noise. Your comment would rise above that level only if there were some relevant implication of this completely trivial fact.

So, were you wasting our time, or did you actually have something to say with that comment? If so, state it clearly.

Posted by Paul Dietz at May 26, 2006 06:30 AM

"So, were you wasting our time, or did you actually have something to say with that comment? If so, state it clearly."

It was clearly stated. You are the only one upon which the profundity escapes.

Posted by Mike Puckett at May 26, 2006 07:26 AM

Gregg Easterbrook "pans" the documentary? " 'An Inconvenient Truth' comes to the right conclusions about the seriousness of global warming..." -- a statement which Easterbrook then surrounds by continual trivial nibblings at Gore's supposed Dreadfully Wooden Style (as Mark Whittington points out above).

The one substantive point Easterbrook makes against the movie is Gore's failure to mention that the only way we can drastically reduce our CO2 emissions without disastrously impoverishing the human race is to develop new technologies for energy production, energy conservation, and re-sequestering atmospheric CO2 -- which will require really major research of a sort that the free market will not induce by itself (just as the market can't properly handle any form of pollution by itself, because of the free-rider problem). If ever there was justification for a second Manhattan Project, this is it.

And TCS' review by Mark Bolling -- in which he nibbles away at a small part of the scientific evidence, while ignoring most of it -- fails to mention that Bolling, even back in 1991, was one of a small minority of climatologists to deny that there was any likelihood that anthropogenic global warming would be serious, as shown by a Gallup poll of 500 of them. Since then, the belief has considerably strengthened. (I'm looking, as I write, of my copy of that poll, which the Gallup people sent me accompanied by an indignant cover letter on how George Will, Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Bailey had totally distorted it in their articles on it.) Granted that scientific truth is not determined by polling, but the rest of us really have no alternative but to rely on consensus scientific opinion in setting policies -- and the landslide scientific consensus in this case suggests that we had damn well start making plans to deal with a highly likely problem. (For a look at how the climatologists who run the "RealClimate" blog on the subject -- and who are far closer to representing consensus scientific belief on this subject -- regard the movie, see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/al-gores-movie/#more-299 .)

As for the wranglings above about whether Mars' apparent recent warmings tell us anything useful about Earth's climate trends: the answer is "no" -- because there is one gigantic additional natural factor working to warm Mars up which does not affect Earth at all: Mars' wild swings in axial tilt over cycles of about 100,000 years (currently between about 0 and 45 degrees, although about 5 million years ago the arc was between 15 and fully 60 degrees -- that is, there have been long periods in Mars' history when it was the third planet in the Solar System "lying on its side"). Computer analyses of this phenomenon, caused by the gravitational nudgings of the other planets (particular Jupiter), consistently predict that currently its axial tilt is increasing -- which, by itself, will cause the poles to warm up significantly. The stabilizing tidal effects of the Moon, by contrast, prevent Earth's axial tilt from changing more than 1.3 degrees (although that is still quite enough to bring on ice ages).

Posted by Bruce Moomaw at May 26, 2006 08:16 PM

http://www.acton.org/blog/index.html?/archives/898-Global-Warming-on-Jupiter.html

Correlation may not equal causation Bruce but now add JUPITER to the mix.

Posted by Mike Puckett at May 26, 2006 08:49 PM

There have been a great many studies of the extent to which fluctuations in the output of the Sun itself may be causing the current global warming -- that output, after all, is something we've acquired the ability to measure with increasing precision over the last half-century. The study which makes the strongest claim that solar output might explain part of current global warming(Solanki et al, "Nature", 10-28-04, pg. 1084-87) nevertheless says: "Although the rarity of the curent episode of high average sunspot number may be taken as an indication tuat the Sun has contributed to the unusual degree of climate change during the 20th century, we stress that solar variability is unlikely to be the prime cause of the strong warming during the last three decades... Reconstructions of solar total and spectral irradiance as well as of cosmic ray flux were comapred with surface temperature records covering approximately 150 years. It was shown that even under the extreme assumption that the Sun was reponsible for all the global warming prior to 1970, at most 30% of the strong warming since then can be of solar origin."

Posted by Bruce Moomaw at May 26, 2006 10:28 PM

As for the Competitive Enterprise Institute's current ad campaign against Gore's movie -- not counting its cretinous ad claiming that excessive CO2 can't possibly be bad for us because plants breathe it (which is like saying that you can't drown in water because we drink it) -- see the New Republic ( http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060612&s=editorial061206 ):

"CEI's second ad takes a stab at refuting the science behind global warming--specifically, studies documenting melting polar ice sheets. 'The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner,' the ad cheerily declares, while an image of a study from 'Science' flashes across the screen. Just one problem with the claim: It's completely misleading. The study's author, Curt Davis of the University of Missouri, was so horrified that he released a statement. 'These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate,' he said. 'They are selectively using only parts of my previous research to support their claims.' Global warming is melting sea ice and the coastal areas of Antarctica at an alarming rate, which in turn has increased precipitation, thus thickening the ice in the interior. In other words, the melting coasts are making it snow more in the middle. But this is a bug, not a feature. Overall, the ice sheet is losing mass, not gaining it. As Davis said in response to the CEI ads, 'The fact that the interior ice sheet is growing is a predicted consequence of global climate warming.'

"The CEI ads really are a new low. Washington think tanks are not always paragons of intellectual integrity, but we can't quite remember the last time that an institution ostensibly devoted to research so transparently whored itself to its corporate backers--in this case, the oil industry."

Posted by Bruce Moomaw at May 26, 2006 10:31 PM

That's "Robert Balling", not "Mark Bolling". *sigh* My bad.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw at May 26, 2006 11:33 PM

It was clearly stated. You are the only one upon which the profundity escapes.

My intepretation: you were being coy and not explicitly stating a dubious bit of anti-global warming propaganda (look! Mars is warming too! Therefore CO2 emissions on Earth are not to blame!) but have allowed yourself plausible deniability by not actually stating this explicitly.

Of course I'll never know for sure, since you've retreated, squid-like, in a cloud of obscurantism.

Posted by Paul Dietz at May 27, 2006 06:04 AM

"Of course I'll never know for sure, since you've retreated, squid-like, in a cloud of obscurantism."

That may be the way it appears to someone who wears blinders.

Posted by Mike Puckett at May 27, 2006 09:03 AM

OK, let's just examine the alarmist statement that sea levels will rise significantly if there is global warming.

#1: Going back to Archimedes, and the fact that solid water is less dense than liquid water but exactly displaces its weight, we can conclude that if floating sea ice (Antarctic shelf ice, for instance) were to melt, it would occupy exactly the sub-sea-level volume it does now. No net sea-level change there.

#2: Warming is alleged to cause increased deposition of snow and ice on the interior of the continents. This would lower sea levels.

#3: Warming would likely cause additional melting in polar coastal regions. This would raise sea levels.

The Global Warming advocates assert that sea levels will rise some 20 feet by the end of the century.

Question: Do #2 and #3 balance each other out, or not? Their answer is based on what science?

Such confident assertions by the advocates cast doubt on the whole theoretical construct they present. As does the downfall of the hockey-stick graph.

It's as likely that warmings drive glaciations, that in turn drive ice ages. With some perturbation by axis tilt and solar variation.

Personally, I think humans drastically overestimate their influence on the universe. It's an ego thing.

Posted by Arlo Ames at May 28, 2006 02:22 AM

we can conclude that if floating sea ice (Antarctic shelf ice, for instance) were to melt, it would occupy exactly the sub-sea-level volume it does now. No net sea-level change there.

Actually, not correct. Firstly, the ice shelves are quite large and while they float, a lot of it is above sea level.

Secondly, the ice shelves are holdingback giga-tonnes of glaciers on the land mass which is Antartica which would effectively spill off the continent and into the sea.

Posted by Daveon at May 28, 2006 07:23 AM

Daveon is quite correct on his second point -- the fears have always entirely involved the huge amounts of ice on the Antarctic (and, to a lesser extent, Greenland) land masses sliding into the sea.

As for Arlo Ames' statement that "statements #2 and 3 may cancel each other out", see the conclusion I quoted above from Curt Davis that his studies show they definitely WON'T -- and that the Competitive Enterprise Institute is lying through its teeth when it quotes his studies to say that they will. Naughty boys.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw at May 28, 2006 01:18 PM

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is primarily funded by Exxon Mobil. So is TCS Daily.

Exxon has an interest in denying global warming and CEI and TCS Daily are their shills.

Posted by Bill Chase at May 31, 2006 09:33 AM

"primarily" = 9%

Posted by Mike at June 5, 2006 01:01 PM

Post a comment