Albigne
He seriously belongs in jail

Wednesday, December 09, 2009


Friedman Tackles Climategate   [Jonah Goldberg]

I have a piece for the magazine due by Friday (on Richard Ely! Who’s he? Wait for it.), so I’m going to be posting lightly today. But everyone keeps sending me Tom Friedman’s column. This is not an omnibus response, merely a few thoughts.

First, as a couple readers noted, Friedman talks about Climategate as if it’s something everyone knows about. I think he’s probably right. But shouldn’t that say something to the news “gatekeepers”? If a top columnist at the Times can talk about a controversy without first having to explain it to the reader, then maybe it counts as “news.”

Second, it’s a bit hard to take Friedman seriously on the subject since he’s already made it clear he doesn’t care if it’s a hoax.

Third, I don’t mind the “precautionary principle” argument he’s making as much as some readers do. But he steals quite a few bases in the course of making his case. That we are in a general warming trend isn’t hotly disputed by the so-called “deniers” (still a terrible bad-faith word which tells a lot about the people who use it). The question is whether it’s outside normal climate variation. We’ve only had moderately reliable measuring devices for a little while and they might have come on line right at the beginning of a mostly natural warming uptick. We don’t know. When we hear that this is the warmest decade “on record” people leave out the reliable record is very short (they also leave out other things).

Then they respond, “Oh, no, the record goes back a thousand years.” And cue the Climategate debate. That thousand-year claim is now officially unreliable. That doesn’t mean global warming is untrue — as Jim Manzi has argued many times, we do know that the carbon molecule has certain properties and it is a plausible hypothesis that it is contributing to global warming and (more troubling to me) the acidification of the oceans. But it is still just a hypothesis. The effect is much better understood than the cause.

Fourth, Friedman is still making the even-if-it’s-a-hoax-it’s-great argument. He writes:

If we prepare for climate change by building a clean-power economy, but climate change turns out to be a hoax, what would be the result? Well, during a transition period, we would have higher energy prices. But gradually we would be driving battery-powered electric cars and powering more and more of our homes and factories with wind, solar, nuclear and second-generation biofuels. We would be much less dependent on oil dictators who have drawn a bull’s-eye on our backs; our trade deficit would improve; the dollar would strengthen; and the air we breathe would be cleaner. In short, as a country, we would be stronger, more innovative and more energy independent.

Again, this is a signal that Friedman — like so many others — really doesn’t much care if the science is right or wrong. Because he thinks global warming is a useful Sorellian myth to drive the organization of our society and political economy in directions he favors. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, it just means his judgment is not very trustworthy. For Friedman, it’s worth doing these things no matter what. For reasonable skeptics, if global warming is either untrue or not a big deal, then  these things might be worth doing either gradually through normal market forces and/or careful reform, or not at all. But in a near-blind panic, spending trillions and exporting much of our economy wholesale to China and India for the sake of a benign hoax is absurd. It’s doubly absurd when we would be doing it for naught, since the developing world will never, ever, follow our lead if it means sacrificing development, and even if all this stuff comes online without much trouble, it will still only reduce temperatures by a teeny-weeny amount.

Last, at the bottom of Friedman’s column it says “Maureen Dowd is off today.” Question: Why don’t they put that disclaimer under Maureen Dowd’s column where it belongs?

12/09 09:39 AMShare

I challenge the executives of organizations involved in global warming denial to step away from their keyboards and allow a neutral third party to download their emails and post them on the web. I would like to see how well they follow the moral requirements that they insist on imposing on others.

A lot of ink and electrons are currently being wasted on a discussion of the contents of some email files stolen from the East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which is heavily involved in climate change research. Those emails have been quote-mined for a few select quotes that suggest that the authors were trying to “hide the decline” and (GASP!) keep sub-standard scientific research out of professional scientific publications.

Spend some time looking over your own emails and see if there you can’t find things in thousands of emails that can’t be quite-mined by somebody with an axe to grind against you.

It is interesting to note, however, that in all of these emails they were only able to find a few select quotes and no evidence as far as I have seen of scientists engaged in a conspiracy for the purpose of maintaining funding that would have otherwise been lost.

This causes me to wonder what we would find if we looked at the email of those who vocally deny the existence of global warming.

One thing we would not find on those emails is an intelligent fact-based discussion of the merits of anti-global-warming science. This is because there is no such thing as anti-global-warming science. All of the science favors the conclusion that humans are putting enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to significantly warm the planet.

There might be a few emails that honestly assess the climate change data, and they may identify a few real problems, but this is going to be an extremely small portion of the overall email content.

Expecting to find good science among the emails of global-warning deniers is like expecting to find good science among the emails of young-earth creationists or the directors of the Creation Museum. It is absurd to expect such a thing.

Instead, the only thing global warming deniers have to talk about - and what is almost certain to occupy the bulk of their emails, is how they are going to muddy the water and hide the scientific facts from the voting public. The objective here is to manipulate the public into behaving the way that benefits a few industry executives - into protecting what amounts to a multi-trillion dollar subsidy by preventing them from understanding on and acting on the truth of global warming - and of what it will cost those people, their neighbors, and their descendants.

I am not talking about some grand conspiracy theory such as the claims that the moon landings were faked or a secret international organization secretly pulls the strings behind every government on earth for their own benefit. I am talking about an industry trying to protect the economic equivalent of trillions of dollars in government subsidies spending a few hundred million dollars muddying the water and burying the facts that would cause people to take away those subsidies.

We are talking here about a group of people who are substantially indifferent to the destruction of whole cities and even whole nations and the misery of whole populations. We have good evidence of this in the poor quality of the arguments that they put forth in denying global warming. They are good arguments that are effective at convincing people who get their information in two-minute sound bytes from the likes of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, but they are arguments that any intellectually and morally responsible person would throw in the garbage.

I will be looking at some of those arguments in the posts to come and showing not only that the arguments are flawed, but that a morally responsible person who is not indifferent to the destruction of whole cities and whole nations would never use those arguments and condemn any who did.

Am I wrong about this?

Well, one way that the global-warming deniers can prove their perfect moral virtue is by stepping away from the computers and allowing people unrestricted access to their email files. If they have nothing to hide, then what reason could they possibly give to refuse having others do to them what they are more than happy to do to others.

Of course, since we are dealing with people who are substantially indifferent to the destruction of whole cities and the misery of whole populations and who show absolutely no moral conscience when it comes to manipulating people into doing things that could cost those people their lives, we should not be at all surprised that they have no problem with the moral crime of hypocrisy either.

Am I wrong about this?

Well, they can prove it easily enough. All they need to do is open their email servers up to public viewing. Let them prove their superior moral and intellectual qualities to the world.

 

Published on NewsBusters.org (http://newsbusters.org)
Al Gore Calls Sarah Palin A ‘Global Warming Denier’
By Noel Sheppard
Created 2009-12-09 15:56

Nobel Laureate Al Gore Wednesday called former Alaska governor Sarah Palin a “global warming denier.”

Speaking with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Gore also repeated his false claim about ClimateGate e-mail messages obtained from Britain’s Climatic Research Unit: “the most recent one is like ten years ago.”

As Andrew Bolt reported Wednesday at Australia’s Herald Sun, the most recent e-mail message obtained from CRU was sent less than a month ago on November 12.

Unfortunately, much like his appearance on CNN earlier in the day, Gore was playing fast and loose with the facts.

Sadly, his MSNBC interviewer was similarly disinterested in challenging the former Vice President about his mistatements, and also never once asked him about his own financial interests in this matter (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

ANDREA MITCHELL, MSNBC: Earlier this morning I sat down with former Vice President Al Gore to talk about climate change, his new book, “Our Choice,” and Sarah Palin. Today, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, Palin is escalating her attack on the Copenhagen Summit. Palin calls it junk science, and writes that “The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.” I asked Al Gore to respond.

AL GORE: The global warming deniers persist in this era of unreality. After all, the entire North Polar ice cap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. 40 percent’s already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this? The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies, drinking water supplies, and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, droughts, floods, fires, and tree deaths in the American west. Climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action. These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists who have warned for years that if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation is going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning.

MITCHELL: Well, one of the things that she has written recently on Facebook is that this is “Doomsday scare tactics, pushed by an environmental priesthood that makes the public feel like owning an SUV is a sin against the planet.”

GORE: Well, the scientific community has worked very intensively for 20 years within this international process and they now say the evidence is unequivocal. 150 years ago this year was the discovery that CO2 traps heat. That is a principle in physics. It is not a question of debate. It is like gravity. It exists.

MITCHELL: If it is so unequivocal, I’ve got to ask you about the leaks of those e-mails. Even today Tom Friedman talks about them massaging the evidence. Why would they feel the need to hype the evidence if it is so unequivocal? Some scientists, I should say.

Gore: Yeah, I don’t think they did. I haven’t read all of the e-mails that were stolen there from — the most recent one is like ten years ago. And what they have done is they have snatched a few phrases completely out of context. I will give you an example. One of the off-quoted phrases has to do with the scientists saying that a particular study isn’t good science and shouldn’t be included in the international report. Well, that was their view. They exchanged it privately. The study was included, fully aired, discussed, the weak points were analyzed. What — the other points were analyzed. So it is an example of how these private exchanges had been blown out of proportion, taken out of context, and misrepresented.

MITCHELL: At the same time, there is an economic impact. It is harder to persuade a lot of people, lot of Americans, unemployed, facing the effects of this recession, that the up-front costs of doing something about global warming are worth it. No doubt that there are, you know, overwhelming economic benefits down the road. But how do you persuade people in the middle of a recession that this should be their immediate priority?

GORE: Well, for one thing, when the world went into the recession, interest rates were already so low that the only economic policy tools that governments had to try to stimulate the economy was to have stimulus spending. And the need to build new infrastructure to accommodate the shift away from imported oil on which we have a growing dangerous dependence pushed many countries including the U.S. to devote a substantial part of that stimulus to a green stimulus. Now we have the opportunity to create millions of good new jobs in making this transition. Just the retrofitting of homes, with better windows and lighting and insulation to save money on their energy bills and put millions of people to work in local communities in jobs that cannot be outsourced. Building the smart grids, building the solar, wind, geothermal renewable energy systems, planting trees. These are all job creators that help to stimulate the economy and produce sustainable growth.

MITCHELL: Even if they are net job creators nationally, there are going to be areas in the Rust Belt, Michigan let’s say, where there is a net loss from the effects of doing something, of making a commitment and of spending billions of dollars to help poor countries adjust, the commitments that are being expected of the President and of the United States government at Copenhagen.

GORE: Well, I think the losses of jobs started a long time ago with the outsourcing to other countries for a variety of reasons, including the cheaper labor costs. It is not — not because of the response to global warming. The response to global warming can bring jobs back. I will give you an example. There’s this company called Cardinal Fasteners in Ohio that is very proud to have made the bolts for the Golden Gate bridge and the Statue of Liberty. And they had some hard times. Now they are — hiring people back, making bolts for windmills, and these wind farm insulations. The governor of Michigan, Governor Granholm, is one of the most vigorous advocates of bringing jobs back into some of these Rust Belt areas that were hard hit years ago, but now see the hope for a renaissance, putting people to work building these new renewable energy insulations.

Stop the tape. Here’s another instance of Gore playing fast and loose with the facts.

On January 29, Cleveland.com reported :

Cardinal Fastener & Specialty Co., the Bedford Heights bolt company that President Barack Obama spotlighted days before his inauguration as an example of a manufacturer able to grow by supplying parts to the wind turbine industry, has laid off about eight of its 65 workers. The layoffs came just two weeks after the company was able to hire two workers to help with expanding orders. President John Grabner said he cut 12 percent of the work force because orders have decreased significantly for the industrial products that still account for 80 percent of his business - bolts for bridges, large buildings and heavy-equipment makers like Caterpillar. “The wind business is good, but they have slowed down also,” he said.  

A LexisNexis search identified no reports of Cardinal Fasteners hiring people since this layoff, although it did identify Gore making this same claim on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” over a month ago:

There’s one example in Ohio, a company called Cardinal Fasteners. They’re proud they made the bolts for the Golden Gate Bridge and for the Statue of Liberty. And they went through some tough times. Now they’re hiring people back to make bolts for windmills. And we’re seeing these jobs.

But I digress:

MITCHELL: As you know in “Our choice,” there is a real partisan divide when it comes to people’s attitudes. The Pew poll that you cite says 75 percent of college educated Democrats believe humans are responsible. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans. How do you figure that?

GORE: It may be partly because the tendency for many people to follow their perceived political leaders and the leadership of the modern Republican Party has really gotten into a global warming denier posture that I think has influenced some people. But it should not be a political issue. It really is a moral issue. It speaks to the responsibility of the present generation to take steps to safeguard those generations yet to come. Because this has now reached the level where if we were not to act, the consequences already beginning at a low level are predicted to reach catastrophic levels unless we take steps to prevent it from happening.

MITCHELL: There’s been, according to the Pew Research, a 20% drop in the number of people in the last year. Since 2008, 71% believed that humans contributed to global warming and now it is only 51%. Do you attribute to that to the economic hard times and people focusing inward?

GORE: Well, I think that result dove tails with the first one that you cited because when you look inside that study, virtually 100% of those who changed their opinion were conservative Republicans.

Stop the tape! Once again, Gore was playing fast and loose with the facts. Here’s what Pew reported on October 22:

The decline in the belief in solid evidence of global warming has come across the political spectrum, but has been particularly pronounced among independents. Just 53% of independents now see solid evidence of global warming, compared with 75% who did so in April 2008. Republicans, who already were highly skeptical of the evidence of global warming, have become even more so: just 35% of Republicans now see solid evidence of rising global temperatures, down from 49% in 2008 and 62% in 2007. Fewer Democrats also express this view - 75% today compared with 83% last year.

Honestly, how does Gore get away with making stuff up like this? But again, I digress:

GORE: And the — this should be a bipartisan issue. It used to be. And the — the extreme partisanship we have seen in recent years, I think has affected the way our country has responded to this. Now, beneath the surface, there have been a lot of Republicans, a lot of people that used to be skeptics actually moving towards an acceptance of this science and a determination to do something about it. Lindsey Graham, for example, from South Carolina, is one of those Republicans in the Senate who is now saying look, the evidence tells us we have really got to take action. A lot of — in the faith based community. A lot of fundamentalist groups are now saying, you know, the earth is the Lord’s and fullness thereof and we have an obligation to be good stewards of the planet. And — so — I see signs of optimism and hope, even though in an economic recession, naturally when you ask people to list their priorities, they are going to place a higher priority on the immediate economic situation.

Later, Mitchell asked an astoundingly preposterous question for a so-called journalist:

MITCHELL: In “Our Choice,” you cite some interesting psychological data. What is it about the way we think that makes it so difficult for people, for many people, obviously not everyone, to accept the facts as you see them?

What is it about the way we think that makes it so difficult for people, for many people, obviously not everyone, to accept the facts as you see them?

Maybe, Andrea, it’s because WE are capable of thinking for ourselves and questioning whether what people are telling us is indeed how they see things and NOT facts.

One would think a journalist would know that.

Of course, one would also expect someone in the news industry to ask Gore about his financial interests in global warming.

Alas, Mitchell never did.

Nice job, Andrea.

Source URL:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/12/09/al-gore-calls-sarah-palin-global-warming-denier

Links:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/climategate_gore_falsifies_the_record
http://www.cleveland.com/businessdiary/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/business-11/123322155881880.xml&coll=2
http://people-press.org/report/556/global-warming
Tags: , ,

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The self-inflicted assault on Al’s reason is now complete:

In his almost 30 years of crusading against global warming, Al Gore has worn a variety of hats. In roughly chronological order these include: congressman, senator, author, vice president, traveling evangelist, filmmaker, investment adviser, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Now, with the publication of his new book, Our Choice, Gore has unveiled a fresh and most unexpected talent: the book’s opening chapter of concludes with a poem he wrote—21 lines of verse that are equal parts beautiful, evocative, and disturbing.

Here is how the poem begins:

One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun

Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea

Video of Al reading his poem (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) here:

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

Ace is having an Al Gore Poetry Slam, if you’re so inclined.



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