I was reading drational's insistence that we all should be wary of accepting Greg Palast's 'facts' at On Why Greg Palast is Dangerous, and ended up comparing drational's arguments to the global warming issue.
I long ago tried on dkos to do something of the same about global warming and got abused for my concern. People were NOT welcoming any rational discourse on the topic at the time. I generally don't post anything on that subject here anymore. This is the first I've touched on it in a very long time. (Trying to un-convince someone of their misconceptions is a waste of time.) The quality of actual facts backing up global warming being anthropogenic are quite a bit less locked-in than what Palast uses to back up his claims that those are Rove's emails - but people here aren't ready to be discerning about that issue yet.
I am a person who wants to go straight to the source whenever possible, and the closer to the source the better. And the closer I got to the source, the more the arguments about humans being the cause for global warming stopped making sense. I had no agenda going into it. But after looking into it, I came away unconvinced.
DISCLAIMER: I do not work for an energy company or an oil company, nor any of their subsidiaries, nor do any of my relatives, as far as I know.
"How could I be so hard-headed?" my girlfriend has asked me on several occasions. I get that from some friends, too. Don't I KNOW that all the scientists are agreed on it: global warming is a fact, and humans are the cause of it? It is as plain as the nose on my face, isn't it? When I ask them what they have read, they mention magazine and newspaper articles (which are watered-down for public consumption), and when I read those articles (a LOT of them) inevitably what I have seen are very alarming headlines about urgency and disasters to come, just around the corner, and in the text of the articles there are - almost 100% - hedged quotes from climatologists with a lot of "maybes" and "coulds" and "possiblies" that decry the blaring of the headlines. But in the articles' conclusions, nearly all have some definitive statement about the certainty and close proximity of the cliff we are all about to hurtle off in our pursuit of material comfort and bigger and more gas-guzzling SUVs.
I recommend to anyone open-minded about global warming the series of articles (subscription required) on The Nation by Alexander Cockburn, one of which is Is Global Warming a Sin?. Cockburn states the case much more clearly than I can. An excerpt:
...There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind's sinful contribution... [emphasis added]
And one from another of his articles The Greenhousers Strike Back, and Strike Out:
...The greenhousers endlessly propose that the consensus of "scientists" on anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming. By "scientists" they actually mean computer modelers. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and their computer-modeling coterie include very few real climatologists or atmospheric physicists. Among qualified climatologists, meteorologists and atmospheric physicists, there are plenty who do not accept the greenhousers' propositions. [emphasis added]
This is quite true, by the way; I have spoken to a seasoned climatologist and a trained atmospheric modeling meteorologist about it, and they don't agree at all with the alarmism.
Many others have been intimidated into silence by the pressures of grants, tenure and kindred academic garrotes.
Peer review, heavily overworked in the rebuttals I have been reading, is actually a topic on which the greenhousers would do well to keep their mouths shut, since, as the University of Virginia's Pat Michaels has shown, the most notorious sentence in the IPCC's 1996 report ("The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate") was inserted at the last minute by a small faction on the IPCC panel after the scientific peer-review process was complete. The former head of the US National Academy of Sciences (and president of the American Physical Society), Frederick Seitz, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report."
These are heavy indictments. I trust Cockburn did not put these in without fact-checking.
Note that when I saw Cockburn's articles, I did a double-take, since I'd always thought The Nation was a liberal publication. Well, it certainly still is, and I was dumbfounded. But there it was, to my utter amazement. But weren't all Liberals and Progressives 100% on board on global warming? Maybe not!
For those who think every intelligent person who is not on the payroll of the oil or power companies is in agreement on global warming, maybe Cockburn's articles would be a good introduction to one or two of the contrary arguments.
Accepting any position simply because others around us are accepting it makes us like the Red Staters. Falling prey to fearmongering is abdicating our mental capacities and telling someone else to think for us - whether it is the Bushies and its bogeyman or the progressives and global warming. It took a LONG time for most of the U.S. to wake up to Bush's phony alarmism. And it is taking a long time for people to begin to question the global warming alarmists.
If Palast is preaching to the choir and he is required to put up or shut up, let us not forget to require the same on all the issues here.
As drational is requiring of Palast, I want answers to these questions:
- Is the global temperature really rising?
- Where is the data?
- Is there any contradictory data?
- How far back doe the data go?
- How reliable is the data of long ago?
- How precise is the data of long ago?
- How well does the data of now and long ago cover the entire earth?
- Are there natural variations that might explain any warming observed?
- Have ALL other explanations for the current conditions been ruled out?
- Have ALL the parameters been included in assessing the situations?
- Are the computer models reliable?
- Are all the factors in the computer models fully understood?
- Are all the factors in the computer models verified and accurate?
- Have any variations in sampling occurred which might skew the data?
Each of those could be broken down into several specifics, on things like satellites and weather balloons and ENSO and PDO and the massive reduction in weather stations world-wide since the 1980s...
If I sound like an apologist to the oil companies or the energy companies, please point out which of those questions is showing this bias.
Personally, if the energy companies are ruining our climate, I support any and all efforts to get them to clean up their act and to punish when it would help - jail, the gallows, whatever it takes.
BTW, in the 70s and 90s I worked on the design of water treatment plants, scrubbers and oxidizers to ensure effluent and emissions were cleaned up. I know to some degree how much money U.S. companies have spent to keep from fouling our air and water. Trust me, when Cockburn talks about the gargantuan amounts of CO2 we pumped into the atmosphere when we all heated with coal in the pre-1970 era, I know what he is talking about. If there was going to be some connection between human-produced CO2 and global temperatures, it would have showed up clearly on the record. It did not.
Well, that is a start. I am hoping there are some people out there who have begun to question the present mantra. There IS a discourse to be engaged in, and I would like to see it happen. All the arguments are not in favor of the global warming alarmists; to the contrary, as Cockburn says,
There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend.