"Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season--these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said?" -George Will, "Bunts"
...
If only George Will understood global warming as well as he understands baseball.
The venerable beltway pundit has often linked his lifelong conservatism to the experience of growing up a fan of the Chicago Cubs in Champaign, Illinois. Cause for despair, surely; in adversity, he is welcome his opinionated excesses.
It has been a frequent theme for the former National Review editor: in his second baseball book, "Bunts," Mr. Will bristled at the "liberal" tendency to "see the world as a harmonious carnival of sweetness and light." This was anathema to a Cub fan, whose mien of hardship and general drudgery presumably better prepared him for a life of pragmatism and toughness. And, you know, tax cuts.
That’s as good a jumping-off point as any.
Alas, liberal or conservative, the world is not a harmonious carnival of sweetness and light.
Still in the teeth of an economic crisis and two wars, Americans shift their gaze to global warming only through loosely woven fingers.
And really, who can blame them? The evidence of manmade climate change is overwhelming, the consequences crystallizing, and each day without a true cultural sea change signals another step toward the precipice—-sweltering summers, more hurricanes, suffering crops. Call it perpetual September 1969, when the cubbies went from five games up to eight back in the blink of an eye—though in climate, as in baseball, things rarely develop that quickly.
In the years since he saw Jim Hickman, Al Spangler, and co. choke away pennant races and positive life views, Mr. Will has become a frequent and vocal critic of those who recognize the threat of global warming—-variously dubbed "alarmists," "zealots," "doomsayers," and "Environmental Cassandras"—odd phraseology, that last one.
Linking the modern and all-too-real specter of runaway global warming to the minor "second ice age" discussions of the 1970s and other short-lived cause celebre hysterias, Mr. Will has sought to discredit the preponderance of scientific climate evidence. He works with a potent pairing of culture-warmongering and dated denier tacks. Science-phobic, all, and appealing because they imply that nothing more need be done.
His latest, on ‘stable’ temperatures in recent years--global cooling?!??--leads down a well-worn path:
The "difficulty" -- the "intricate challenge," the Times says -- is "building momentum" for carbon reduction "when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years." That was in the Times's first paragraph.
...
The Times says "a short-term trend gives ammunition to skeptics of climate change." Actually, what makes skeptics skeptical is the accumulating evidence that theories predicting catastrophe from man-made climate change are impervious to evidence. The theories are unfalsifiable, at least in the "short run." And the "short run" is defined as however many decades must pass until the evidence begins to fit the hypotheses.
...
Setting aside recent kerfuffles over Mr. Will’s veracity on climate, this piece requires less debunking than most of its kind.
Never mind that the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), gleefully mis-cited early and often by the bowtie-loving scribe, reported about a year ago that 2008 was the tenth warmest year on record—-joining nine other post-1997 years; never mind that the global temperatures for 2000-2008 came in almost 0.2 °C warmer than the average for the decade 1990–1999; never mind that a recent study released in July by Judith Lean (US Naval Research Laboratory) and David Rind (NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies) showed that "relative stability in global temperatures in the last seven years is explained primarily by the decline in incoming sunlight associated with the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, together with a lack of strong El Niño events"—i.e. cooling trends have been connected to unusual atmospheric conditions temporarily masking the warming caused by carbon emissions.
(The last bit is borne out in the recent State of the Climate in 2008, a special supplement to the current (August) issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. In it, climate researcher Jeff Knight and eight colleagues at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, U.K. modeled 10-year warming pauses as part of a broader study:
In 10 modeling runs of 21st century climate totaling 700 years worth of simulation, long-term warming proceeded about as expected: 2.0°C by the end of the century. But along the way in the 700 years of simulation, about 17 separate 10-year intervals had temperature trends resembling that of the past decade—that is, more or less flat. From this result, the group concludes that the model can reproduce natural jostlings of the climate system—perhaps a shift in heat carrying ocean currents—that can cool the world and hold off greenhouse warming for a decade. But natural climate variability in the model has its limits. Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and "we expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years," the Hadley Centre group writes. And that resumption could come as a bit of a jolt, says Adam Scaife of the group, as the temperature catches up with the greenhouse gases added during the pause.
But, again, forget it. Never mind evidence.
Mr. Will again:
Warnings about cataclysmic warming increase in stridency as evidence of warming becomes more elusive. A recent report from the United Nations Environment Program predicts an enormous 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit increase by the end of the century even if nations fulfill their most ambitious pledges concerning reduction of carbon emissions. The U.S. goal is an 80 percent reduction by 2050. But Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute says that would require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the 1910 level. On a per capita basis, it would mean emissions approximately equal to those in 1875.
That will not happen. So, we are doomed. So, why try?
This tortured logic, the equivalent of an abstinence-only sex-ed advocate mocking good faith teaching efforts by pointing out the continuing prevalence of STDs, is, in its own way, more persuasive than any annotated Will-checking screed. How can you trust the last-century opinions of a man whose plan is essentially well-insulated denial bolstered by heavily biased, in-the-moment, business-as-usual misinformation?
Sounds like the worldview of an especially delusional bleacher bum to me.
And really, there’s the rub: as a Cub fan, Mr. Will ought to know better. Proof of grinding, debilitating hurt doesn’t come in a year or two—or even ten. Nor, indeed, does evidence of a righted ship: finishing in second in a given year (2009, 1998, 1972, 1970, 1969...) doesn’t make you a long-term contender, and a cool day in August doesn’t mean we’re over the hump on global warming—or that the concept is fallacious.
The dapper righty could take a climate lesson from his own reflections on the quotidian rhythms of the pastime that has exhilarated and embittered him these many years. Many paeans have been written to baseball as a thing of patience and nigh-glacial progress—-an ages-long pastoral chess match which, over the course of 162 games each spring, summer, and fall, requires gradual growth and, yes, pain on the part of its acolytes. In short, it is a fixture of the incremental and everlasting—-of two degree increases and inexorable long term shifts.
On the balance, victory and defeat are in the long haul. Anyone can have a bad century—Mr. Will should know that as well as anyone. We should be trying our damnedest not to make it two.
