This is no certainty, but depending how things play out, we might see a short-term but serious dip in world temperatures:
In a cosmically ironic twist of fate and timing, nature may be set to empirically freeze any and all anthropogenic global warming talk: a blast of Arctic cold may encase the earth in an icy grip not seen for 200 years.
This is not alarmist fantasy or 2012 babble—several natural forces that are known to cause cooling are awakening simultaneously, raising speculation of a “perfect storm” of downward pressures on global temperature. These forces let loose one at a time can cause the Earth to cool and can bring about harsh winter conditions. If they all break free at once, the effects could be felt not just in the coming winter, but year-round, and for several years to come.
Read the whole thing for the details. As you can probably guess, we should all be watching Iceland’s volcanoes very closely.
The theory of anthropogenic (i.e., human-caused) global warming is in serious trouble, but you wouldn’t know it if you get your news from the big U.S. outlets. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a list of climate stories broken by the British media that have been ignored by the American media. His list is an impressive one, and it doesn’t even include the Daily Mail story challenging the credibility of Dr. Phil Jones, the former director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The evidence mounting against AGW—and against the integrity and credibility of the folks pushing it—has grown to such an extent that even Canada’s Grey Lady, the Globe and Mail, felt compelled to take note of it; but the New York Times? Fuhgeddabouddit. When your motto is All the News that’s Fit to Print, and “fit to print” means that which fits your agenda, then clearly, there’s no reason to take notice of such inconvenient stories. “When the facts and the politics conflict, sir, print the politics.”
One of the most interesting stories of the past couple of months has been the whole Climategate scandal. I'm not going to dig that up and rehash the substance of it (though if you didn't see Bill's posts on the Thinklings about the lousy quality of the computer models behind the anthropogenic global-warming argument and the dubious nature of the standard assertions that the results of such models are truly properly peer-reviewed, you ought to), I just wanted to throw an observation out there. To wit, I recognized the spirit in those leaked e-mails, with their insistence that the theory must be right regardless of the data, and their willingness to adjust the facts as needed to fit the dogma: it's the spirit of fundamentalism. It's the exact same tone one meets in people arguing that the Earth must be only 6,000 years old and therefore, whatever facts that would seem to indicate otherwise must be incorrect.
Now, to call someone a fundamentalist doesn't mean they're wrong, by any means. I don't happen to believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and I don't happen to believe in AGW, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one or both couldn't be correct. But the spirit in which many who call themselves Christian fundamentalists argue (which is not, be it noted, equal with fundamentalism itself; one can hold to fundamentalist positions without this sort of attitude and approach) is one which is absolutely certain it has discovered the truth, unquestioningly convinced of its own rightness, and thus is committed to maintaining its position by whatever means necessary. This is the sort of spirit one also finds in Islamic fundamentalism—and it's the spirit that's in view as well in Michael Mann and the leaked CRU e-mails.
Again, that doesn't mean their position is wrong; to argue that would be to commit the genetic fallacy. It does, however, give the lie to their claims that they alone are scientific and their opponents are anti-science. In truth, what we have here is a religious dispute, complete with threats by the high priests against the heretics; and the pretensions of those high priests to be above ideology, their insistence that they are disinterested seekers of the pure flame of fact, have been shown to be a sham. This will be, I think, the long-term effect of Climategate: it's knocked AGW proponents off their pedestal, and I don't think they're going to be able to climb back up.
We have a center-left grassroots political action organization here in Indiana, focused on state environmental and energy issues, that comes around once a year wanting petition signatures on whatever their latest issue is—so far, it’s always been something beating up on the energy companies and always something to do with coal-fired plants. I was amused to note that this year, they have two big pushes: one against the local utility, and one against the American Clean Energy and Security Act, better known as Waxman-Markey or the cap-and-trade bill. I wouldn’t have expected that second one, but here was this self-labeled hippie solemnly explaining to me that Waxman-Markey is a bad bill because it’s nothing more than a massive bailout for the coal industry; the way he talked about it, you would have expected to find it was a Republican idea.
The sheet he handed me described the bill thusly:
While Americans have been clamoring for a national energy policy that helps their pocketbooks and the environment, Congress has caved to special interests and drafted a bill that is nothing more than a massive giveaway to the utility industry. ACES . . . was railroaded through the U. S. House (by a vote of 219-212) without proper public input. Now in the U. S. Senate, the bill is subject to even more manipulation from coal and utility lobbying.
The claim is that ACES, drafted in large part by Duke Energy, will protect ratepayers, reduce carbon emissions, and help solve global warming. But it is an attempt to maintain business as usual in the electric utility industry.
The reason for ACES is that in the past 2 to 3 years numerous coal plants have been cancelled because lenders would not assume the risk of financing overly expensive and polluting coal-fire power plants that take years to build. . . .
Coal plants are already financially unviable. Now utility companies need ACES to keep their coal plants running and have an excuse to build more.
Not “a” reason, mind you—“the” reason. The folks who put this together seem completely convinced that there is no environmental motivation behind the cap-and-tax bill at all, only the desire to do favors for coal and energy producers. I don’t have a very high opinion of Nancy Pelosi (who hails from that noted coal-producing city of San Francisco) or Harry Reid (I’m sure coal is king in Nevada, too), but even to me, that seems unduly cynical. Still, if what they’re saying about all the loopholes that have been written in for utility companies is correct, that is indeed another good reason to oppose this very bad bill; and if those of us who oppose it from the Right can make common cause with folks on the Left to bring it down, so much the better.
In addition to my snark in the previous post, I do have a serious comment on the BBC's admission that the Earth has been cooler since 1998—or perhaps I should say, sparked by that article. The remarkable thing about that article is that it's a deviation from the liberal political orthodoxy on global warming (and it is a political orthodoxy, for all that it claims scientific status), which is not the sort of thing one expects from the BBC. Of course, it was a deviation driven by the facts; the author of the article did his best to uphold the global-warming storyline anyway, but facts are hard things to get around.
Which brings up the problem I have with the global-warming orthodoxy: it's an orthodoxy based on an agenda. The agenda itself is not necessarily bad; in fact, I agree with its declared goals, though I disagree with the socialist/big-government approach to reaching them. From both a theological and a public-health perspective, as well as with an eye to future unexpected consequences, it's obviously important that we continue to reduce pollution; I just think that encouraging innovation rather than regulating it is likely to be more productive in doing so.
The problem is, rather, that what we have here is an agenda in search of a crisis, because whipping up a crisis and motivating people by fear is considered to be the quickest and most effective way to drive action, particularly when that action involves expanding government control over the economy and people's lives. The agenda comes first, and it looks for a plausible threat to which to attach itself, so as to be able to tell people that they must enact the agenda or Bad Things will happen. This is what we might call the Houghton Strategy, after Sir John Houghton, the first person to chair the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.”
Now, the problem with that is that even when it finds success at first, that approach will ultimately collapse. Eventually, as even a global-warming believer like Gregg Easterbrook recently noted, the facts refuse to cooperate, and the truth becomes inconvenient for the agenda. That's when you get people rooting for disaster, because they'd rather be proved miserably right than happily wrong; getting their own way is the most important thing to them, and they react accordingly.
That's when orthodoxy gets ugly, and when it fails. I am, obviously, not opposed to all orthodoxies as such; I believe there's such a thing as truth, and that fact provides at least a philosophical and theoretical justification for orthodoxy (and, in my view, a good bit more than that). Humble orthodoxy that arises out of the search for truth and that recognizes that it is at best an imperfect grasp on that truth is, I firmly believe, a good thing; it's also a flexible thing, able to discern what is truly essential and what isn't. Orthodoxy that arises out of an agenda, however—that exists in service not to the truth and the desire for understanding, but to the desire to do certain things—is of necessity dogmatic and inflexible; it also tends to end up being shrill, because it's forced to defend itself and advance its cause through denunciations and alarmist statements. By its very nature, it's committed not to understanding what is true, but to winning the argument—and when winning is everything, it very quickly becomes the only thing, and all other concerns (such as truth and fairness) fall by the wayside, leaving behind only a naked power grab.
This applies to orthodoxies of all types—political, religious, cultural, scientific, legal, you name it. You can meet this in the church (whether the local congregation or the international denomination), in politics at every level, in business, and indeed in most spheres of human life. You can find it among the cynical and power-hungry, and in the hearts of the most selfless and altruistic. It is a universal danger for all of us who are strongly committed to any belief or set of beliefs: are we truly seeking to under-stand the truth, to pursue it and stand under it and allow it to shape us, or are we concerned with winning the argument, with being acknowledged to be right, whether in fact we are or not?
I didn't have the energy to post on this Friday night, and it's taken a while to get back to it, but I can't help thinking that we've seen the definitive moment of the Democratic leadership of this Congress: they were in such a hurry to ram through their energy tax, they passed a bill that didn't even exist. Seriously. As David Freddoso put it,
Through a series of parliamentary inquiries, the Republicans learned that the 300-plus page managers' amendment, added to the bill last night in the House Rules Committee, has not even been been integrated with the official copy of the 1,090-page bill at the House Clerk's desk, let alone in any other location. The two documents are side-by-side at the desk as the clerk reads through the instructions in the 300 page document for altering the 1,090 page document.
But they cannot be simply combined, because the amendment contains 300 pages of items like this: "Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)..." How many members of Congress do you suppose have gone through it all to see how it changes the bill?
Global Warming is apparently so urgent that we can't even wait until members of Congress know what they're voting on.
There's supposed to be a section of the bill establishing and regulating a financial derivatives market (that's the "trade" part of "cap-and-trade"); as of the time the bill was passed, that hadn't been written yet—there was only a "placeholder." Barney Frank said it was OK because he was sure they'd put a good system in place, and that was apparently good enough. Somehow, the thought of Barney Frank presiding over a sub-prime carbon market, when he refused to see the collapse of the sub-prime housing market coming, isn't encouraging.
More than that, the purpose of this haste is to keep people from thinking about the economic effects of this bill, which aren't going to be good. Bloomberg, the Heritage Foundation, and Investor's Business Daily have all laid it out:
As we've said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million (see charts below).
Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family's annual energy bill by $1,500.
Hit hardest by all this would be the "95% of working families" Obama keeps mentioning as being protected from increased taxation. They are protected, that is, unless they use energy. Then they'll be hit by this draconian energy tax.
Of course, the Democratic majority has been clever enough to make sure that the bill won't actually take effect until 2012, so that it won't mess up their chances for re-election in 2010; but once it does, as the Heritage Foundation notes, people will notice:
For a household of four, energy costs go up $436 that year, and they eventually reach $1,241 in 2035 and average $829 annually over that span. Electricity costs go up 90 percent by 2035, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent by 2035. The cumulative higher energy costs for a family of four by then will be nearly $20,000.
But direct energy costs are only part of the consumer impact. Nearly everything goes up, since higher energy costs raise production costs. If you look at the total cost of Waxman-Markey, it works out to an average of $2,979 annually from 2012-2035 for a household of four. By 2035 alone, the total cost is over $4,600.
That's not the only cost, though; Bloomberg notes that this bill will drive a lot of jobs overseas and give foreign energy producers a competitive advantage over American companies. At a time when we're trying to reduce American dependence on foreign oil, this bill will only increase it.
America's biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. . . .
"It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment," Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. . . .
The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported, according to energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie in Houston. Contrary to President Barack Obama’s goal of reducing dependence on overseas energy suppliers, the bill would incent U.S. refiners to import more fuel, said Clayton Mahaffey, an analyst at RedChip Cos. in Maitland, Florida.
"They’ll be searching the globe for refined products that don't carry the same level of carbon costs," said Mahaffey, a former Exxon Corp. refinery manager.
According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050—the goal of the Waxman-Markey bill—would reduce global temperature in 2050 by a mere 0.05 degree Celsius.
Doesn't sound all that impressive, does it? It's partly because the countries to which we'll be shipping all those jobs have significantly poorer environmental records than the US, as Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) notes:
If one truly cares about the planet, why do we want to make steel in China rather than in the United States where our carbon emissions are one-third that of the Chinese per ton of steel produced? One Arkansas refinery recently testified that under a cap-and-tax regime, they would be forced to close their 1,200-employee plant while India builds the largest in the world to ship fuel to the United States with nowhere near the environmental protections we have. We’re not helping the environment by sending industries that operate cleanly and efficiently in the United States to a regulation-free China or India.
Now, it seems to me there's hope that the Senate defeats this bill—Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) certainly expects that to happen, and he has a reasonable case—but there was never much for the House, since the House Republicans are functionally irrelevant. That said, I have to give House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) credit for making the most of irrelevance; he didn't have the votes to back him up, but he did a grand old job of carving up this turkey anyway, in what some dubbed a "mini-filibuster." The reason for his speech? Informing the House as to what was in that 300-page "managers' amendment," so that no one who voted for the bill could claim they didn't know. Bravo, Mr. Minority Leader. Bravo.
Inconvenient truth? I think there are several very good reasons to reduce pollution, but the alleged scientific case for anthropogenic global warming still doesn't hold water.
is the distinguished cosmologist and mathematical physicist Frank Tipler, of Tulane University. His letter of a few weeks ago (which I missed at the time) to blogger William Katz, detailing the agenda-driven work behind this issue and its relationship to government funding of research, and the developing efforts to suppress scientific challenges to global-warming theory (since its supporters can't disprove them, they must resort to force to silence them), should concern anyone who cares about the state of scientific research in the West.
courtesy of Harold Ambler in HuffPo (which is nowhere I would have expected to see global warming called "the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind," but there you go). He does a nice job of exposing the baloney "science" underlying global-warming claims (including a point about the limited ability CO2 has to absorb heat); perhaps more importantly, he also points out that bowing to global-warming hysteria would misdirect our environmental efforts and do considerable damage to the world economy—which would not only increase human suffering, it would also further damage the global environment by moving the world collectively back toward more primitive, and dirtier, technologies for energy generation.
One of my fellow debaters in high school used to say, "I'm pro-environment, but anti-environmentalist." Issues like this make me think he was right.
When individuals lose their memory to Alzheimer's or another form of dementia, we universally recognize this as a tragedy, and so we pour large amounts of money into research to identify the causes and work toward developing a cure. But when the nation loses its collective memory? As any lover of history knows, that's what's happening year by year. The great historian David McCullough put it this way thirteen years ago in his National Book Award acceptance speech:
We, in our time, are raising a new generation of Americans who, to an alarming degree, are historically illiterate.
The situation is serious and sad. And it is quite real, let there be no mistake. It has been coming on for a long time, like a creeping disease, eating away at the national memory. While the clamorous popular culture races on, the American past is slipping away, out of site and out of mind. We are losing our story, forgetting who we are and what it's taken to come this far. . . .
The decided majority, some 60 percent, of the nation's high school seniors haven't even the most basic understanding of American history. . . .
On a winter morning on the campus of one of our finest colleges, in a lively Ivy League setting with the snow falling outside the window, I sat with a seminar of some twenty-five students, all seniors majoring in history, all honors students—the cream of the crop. "How many of you know who George Marshall was?" I asked. None. Not one.
At a large university in the Midwest, a young woman told me how glad she was to have attended my lecture, because until then, she explained, she had never realized that the original thirteen colonies were all on the eastern seaboard.
The liberal news site MinnPost celebrates this glimpse into the state of public education in Minneapolis:
When asked what historical figure they'd most like to study this year, an astounding 22 of the 35 students in Ms. Ellingham's eighth-grade history class at Susan B. Anthony middle school in Minneapolis answered, "Yoko Ono" and/or "John Lennon."
I weep for the future.
The great historian David McCullough was on C-SPAN this past week, looking like a beaten man while describing the crushing level of historical ignorance among America's youth. He summed up with the warning that one can never love a country one doesn't know. It sounded like an epitaph.
A lot of people will look at this and blame it on history being boring—a perception which I've never understood, since history is the human story, the summation of all the interesting (and not-so-interesting) things that have ever happened; sure, it's boring if badly taught, but so is anything else. The real problem, I think, is ideological: the teaching of history, and especially American history, just isn't valued by the elites who controle public education, because too many among them don't especially value the country which that history has produced. Like Barack Obama, their chosen candidate, their conception of the good of America is primarily forward-looking—it's about the changes they want to make and the good they believe they can create; they don't want to learn from history, they want to be free of it. Thus John Hinderaker writes,
My youngest daughter started middle school this year. After around a month of classes, as far as I can tell the curriculum consists largely of propaganda about recycling. My high school age daughter told me tonight that in Spanish class she has been taught to say "global warming," "acid rain" and "greenhouse effect" in Spanish. . . .
The schools can teach anything if they care about it. The problem is that they don't care about teaching history, least of all American history. Public education is agenda-driven, and American history—the facts of American history—is not on the agenda.
The problem is, we cannot get free of history—not as long as human beings are still sinful; the attempt to do so only leaves us blind to what others may do. The study of history is in large part a way of learning from the mistakes (and the insights!) of others so that we don't have to reinvent them all ourselves. This is why the philosopher George Santayana was right to declare that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it; it's also why progressives who try to evade this truth by dismissing it as a truism are self-defeating, because any true progress requires escaping the historical loop, which requires learning the lessons of history and taking them seriously. True progress must be founded on a chastened realism about human behavior, not on utopian optimism about human potential.
The nub of the matter here is that the command of the Delphic oracle is still essential to any human wisdom: "Know thyself"—and our ability to do so rests on our memory, because to a great extent, as I've said before, memory is identity. We cannot know ourselves if we've forgotten who we are, what we've done and why we've done it and whom we did it for (or to, or against)—and this is no less true of us as a nation than it is of us as individuals. We cannot understand who we are and why we do things the way we do if we don't understand how we got here; and as a consequence, we may well throw away treasures because we don't know enough to see their value.
The last word on this really should belong to David McCullough, of whom I am a great and fervent admirer, who put it beautifully in his 1995 acceptance speech (which is well worth reading in its entirety):
History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. History is—or should be—the bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country.
At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation. Everything we have, all our great institutions, hospitals, universities, libraries, this city, our laws, our music, art, poetry, our freedoms, everything is because somebody went before us and did the hard work, provided the creative energy, provided the money, provided the belief. Do we disregard that?
Indifference to history isn't just ignorant, it's rude. It's a form of ingratitude.
I'm convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.
What history teaches it teaches mainly by example. It inspires courage and tolerance. It encourages a sense of humor. It is an aid to navigation in perilous times. We are living now in an era of momentous change, of huge transitions in all aspects of life-here, nationwide, worldwide-and this creates great pressures and tensions. But history shows that times of change are the times when we are most likely to learn. This nation was founded on change. We should embrace the possibilities in these exciting times and hold to a steady course, because we have a sense of navigation, a sense of what we've been through in times past and who we are.
The conventional wisdom is that the earth is warming, that it's the fault of human activity, and that we need to make major changes to reduce CO2 emissions or we're heading for disaster. Certainly, that's the line pushed by the scientific and media establishments, and by much of the political establishment as well; as for the cultural elite, they showed their view of the matter when they gave Al Gore an Oscar for his film expounding that point of view, and then topped it off with the Nobel Peace Prize (in one of the stranger awards in the already strange history of the Nobel Prizes).
Which is a very good thing, if this is a real problem. But is it? Is the science really there? Maybe not. For all the worry about shrinking ice caps, for instance, the ice has come back under the Northern Hemisphere's coldest winter in decades, which has given it its greatest snow cover in over 40 years. For all the concern about polar bears, their population is up. And for all the insistence that global warming is caused by human CO2 emissions, the temperature data and the CO2 data don't correlate; that's why 30 years ago, the alarmists were proclaiming that human CO2 emissions were driving a cooling trend that would send us into another ice age.
The fact of the matter is, we know beyond a doubt that the climate has been heating and cooling all through human history; around the turn of the 17th century, we had a "little ice age" that saw the Thames and the Hudson freeze, while earlier, during the Viking period, Greenland was pleasant enough to warrant the name they gave it. We know that the sun's behavior varies, and it seems likely that fluctuations in solar activity is one of the major drivers in global temperature change; the fact that other planets of our solar system have also been experiencing “global warming” certainly suggests that this is the case. The driving force behind the global-warming argument appears to be not science, but the wisdom of Sir John Houghton, the first person to chair the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.”
That said, does it necessarily follow that we can ignore the question of CO2 emissions, or other forms of pollution? While I think it's inappropriate of the establishment to smear dissenters as “in the pay of the oil companies,” there are certainly those who oppose the global-warming argument not because it's bad science, but because they have their own agendas. As Christians, we should be very careful about that. Regardless of the scientific case one way or the other, we have powerful theological reasons to fight pollution; we know from Genesis that God has not given us this planet, but has rather entrusted it to our care as stewards under his authority, and we will most assuredly be called to account for how we have taken care of it. I believe the earth God has made is much more resilient than we often believe, and that our capacity to damage it permanently is quite a bit less impressive than we, in our twisted pride, tend to think—but that in no way frees us from our responsibility to enhance the earth by our labors rather than diminishing it. Will continuing to pump our pollutants into the air cause catastrophic warming that will kill billions of people? I rather doubt it; but if we continue to do so without doing everything we can to clean up our act (bearing in mind that today's solutions often produce tomorrow's problems), we'll still pay for it in the end.
(Update: here's an excellent column by Thomas Sowell on the subject of global warming.)
