Blogito

If you think the planet is in dire peril if carbon dioxide emissions and temperatures are not cut, and immediately, then you might as well bend over, put your head between your legs, and kiss...well, you know the rest. As the WSJ reports by a Berkeley physics professor:

Even if the goals are all met, emissions will continue rising to nearly four times the current level. Total atmospheric CO2 will rise to near 700 parts per milion by 2080 (the current level is 385), and—if the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models are right—global temperature will rise about six degrees Fahrenheit at mid latitudes.

The reason is that most future carbon emissions will not come from the currently industrialized world, but from the emerging economies, especially China. And China, which currently emits 30% more CO2 per year than the U.S., has not promised to cut actual emissions. It and other developing nations have promised only to cut their carbon "intensity," a technical term meaning emissions per unit of GDP.

China claims it is already cutting CO2 intensity by 4% a year as part of its five-year plan. President Hu Jintao has hinted that at Copenhagen China will offer to continue such reductions. By 2040, that will add up to a 70% reduction in intensity.

Sounds good, but here's the catch: With 10% annual growth in China's economy, a 4% cut in intensity is actually a 6% annual increase in emissions. India and other developing countries have similar CO2 growth. That 6% yearly increase is what is shown in the nearby chart.

True, China's CO2 per capita is only a quarter of the U.S. emissions rate. But warming doesn't come from emissions per capita, it comes from total emissions.

That, of course, would be the bad news. On the other hand, if warming doesn’t come from emissions at all, but from some other source, that’s different.

And good news, too...unless, of course, you slashed your GDP and your economy to smithereens trying to fix something that couldn’t be fixed that way.

Some journalists positively have orgasms over how much effort China is making to “go green”...but:

That number doesn’t sit well with me, seems awfully big although I haven’t done any research, but I have no reason to doubt that the number is going to be quite large, at any rate.

No matter what the U.S. does it won’t be reducing by five New York Cities every year.

Another option is that we could learn to live with global warming. Despite claims to the contrary, storms aren't increasing. The rate of hurricanes hitting the U.S. coast has been constant for a century, and the number of damaging tornadoes has been going down. Will Happer, a former director of research for the Department of Energy, argues that additional CO2 may have helped the agricultural revolution. And chilly Berkeley might be nicer with a few degrees warming.

All of the predictions always emphasize the bad side of global warming...well, maybe emphasize is the wrong word because they don’t even talk about the good side at all.

And yet human beings know, almost instinctively, that they can survive being too warm a lot easier than they can be too cold. When winters are unusually long, the spring thaw comes late and the first freeze of fall comes early, food is in short supply that winter.

And even dumb farmers know that they can increase crop yields when they can expose the plants to more carbon dioxide as well as a longer growing season.

But the bottom line is that 80% cuts in U.S. emissions will have only a tiny benefit. The bulk of our effort is best directed at helping the emerging economies conserve energy and move rapidly toward efficient solar, wind and nuclear power. Developing cheap carbon capture and sequestration is also a priority. Above all, we need to recognize that make-the-West-bear-the-burden Copenhagen proposals are meaningless. ...

A dollar spent in China can reduce CO2 much more than a dollar spent in the U.S.

Take, for example, the controversy that erupted on the eve of the global climate conference in Copenhagen, when hackers skeptical about global warming stole and released e-mails and documents from computers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. The center is an important source of baseline historical data on climate change, and the hackers claim the e-mails show that scientists there manipulated, suppressed and even falsified numbers to make a case for global warming. Others who've looked at the material say taking e-mails out of context creates misleading impressions, and that the worst you can say about the British climatologists is that they evinced an arrogant desire to keep what they regarded as the skeptics' "junk science" out of peer review journals.

Except those “others say” would be very close to out-and-out lying. For one thing, the e-mails weren’t taken out of context, the whole damn things were published. Algore lies that the latest one was 10 years old...it wasn’t even a year old.

Some of the writers promised to destroy data rather than give it up to FOIA requests. That’s a criminal offense, pure and simple. So, no, the worst you can say about the British climatologists isn’t merely that they were arrogant.

If you didn’t know this man was gaming you before, you do now. The dollar numbers these scientists have already received read in the hundreds of millions, and the numbers being currently tossed about in Copenhagen are in the billions.

Long ago, Cicero suggested that a mysterious public act could be best assessed by asking: Who benefits? Is it really any accident that Palin and most of the GOP lawmakers trying to discredit the science on global warming come from states enriched by petroleum production and industries with sizable carbon footprints? (The delegate from Saudi Arabia has taken a similar position at Copenhagen.)

If you feel like you've been here before, think back on the long and agonizing debate over tobacco regulation and second-hand smoke. As additional tens of thousands died,

Big Tobacco produced one eccentric scientific skeptic after another.

So, you see? He understands that enough money will produce sufficient scientific skeptics. His question about who benefits is rhetorical because he figures the only people who can possibly profit from such skepticism are people like Big Oil and Big Tobacco.

He apparently has no idea whatsoever that Big Science and Bigger Government are every bit as interested in money and power as is Big Industry. Color him naïve or just plain stupid, but the fact is that the transfer of money and power over alleged man-made global warming is international in scope and with numbers so large any one industry, even industries as large as oil or tobacco, simply pale by comparison.

It doesn’t get much play in the MSM but the new head of the European Union carelessly announced that this would be “the first year of global governance”.

But you cannot discredit real science. You can’t discredit “f=ma” or “e=mc²”. You can’t discredit the essential truth that the earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around.

The way you let the light of truth shine in is by opening wide the doors and windows and giving every skeptic in the world access to the same data.

The author is right: Big Tobacco didn’t want to do that, they wanted to present only their own side of the debate. You couldn’t look at their data, they said, because it was proprietary, but they’d tell you what it said.

This is exactly what Big Science has been trying to do and if the CRU e-mails revealed nothing else at all they revealed that much for all to see.

What they forgot was that their data wasn’t proprietary, and theirs to destroy if they chose but paid for by the taxpayers demanding to see it under the FOIAs of more than one nation. They forgot that whenever they took the “raw data” and manipulated it by means of filtering or “homogenizing” that this was going to be something they would be expected to openly explain and defend in detail, not only why but how.

...the scientific consensus on the issue is broad and deep. Nor does it rely on science done at the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia. Even if something untoward occurred there, we have two other scientific organizations providing baseline climate data -- both of which happen to be funded and directed by the U.S. government. One is NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the other is the Global Historical Climatology Network -- operated not by the EPA or the Interior Department but by the Commerce Department. Their historical data essentially matches that compiled at East Anglia.

Presuming for the moment that the author truly is as ignorant of the extent to which the NASA, CRU and GISS data overlap in origin and the fact that they aren’t even remotely close to being as independent as he tried to tell you, the fact is that the vast majority of the huge scientific community has NOT seen any of the data, only the reports written by the few scientists currently the subject of debate.

You cannot have an objective broad and deep consensus among scientists who have not handled the actual scientific data themselves because no scientist would be that foolhardy. Instead, they’re basing their acceptance upon their estimates of the proficiency and probity of the scientists who have seen the data and written about it.

This is the real injury done by Climategate. I don’t think there are many scientists who regard themselves as being superhuman or paragons of human morality. A good many of the ones I personally studied under and worked with all recognized at least some tiny possibility of human fallibility. I dare say if you attended a late and alcohol-lubricated bull-session following any scientific conference on any subject whatsoever you could hear plenty of stories about this guy fudged his data and that guy cherry-picked his, another didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground and a surprisingly large number didn’t even deserve to have the positions they did, let alone the opinions.

The e-mails of Climategate, and for me especially those of the computer programmer trying to handle the original data (where it had not unaccountably been, ah, lost) are important in that they attach some names to the subjects of these late-night bull-sessions when hair gets let down by those who still have any.

The only transparency some of those scientific emperors seem to possess is in the form of their new data clothes.

...the UK’s Sun tabloid had this:

The Sun today revealed that Woods is ready to quit golf in a desperate bid to save his shattered marriage.

He told Elin he “will do anything”. And she has agreed to stay with the star for the sake of their two young children.

But she has given him the stark ultimatum: “It’s golf… or me.”

Elin has drawn up a strict list of rules for the world Number One to follow if he wants to win her back.

And the beauty, who would pocket up to $100million if she walks away, is insisting he puts their marriage and two kids before his golf career. ...

Exit question: How freaky would the details have to get before the world’s richest pitchman becomes poison to advertisers? If Marv Albert can come back from Bitegate, surely history’s greatest golfer will get plenty of leeway.

What I know about Tiger and Elin is that he’s a great golfer and she’s a beautiful blonde. The King of England once gave up his crown for far less, in my opinion, and I was pretty young at the time.

And I’m sure he loves his children and will be seeing less of them if he winds up being divorced because that’s the way life is when you work for a living.

Tiger does not HAVE to work for a living in the sense that he doesn’t need the money, but there are more reasons for needing to work than simply the money.

And presuming Tiger loved Elin once (but not enough to remain faithful) and loves her still, he’s definitely now in a situation where he is subordinate to her every whim. One thing I’ve noticed in my longish life is when it comes to sets of rules they never seem to get shorter, only longer.

If Elin has the option of saying “if Tiger does thus and so then I can’t take any more” then certainly the same has to eventually become true of Tiger, too. At some point you come to the ultimate question: is it really better for my kids if I stay rather than if I leave...or kick him out?

What would Elin’s position be if Tiger kept the kids and she took the $100 million and left because she could no longer tolerate him but the kids preferred him? Ouch.

On the first count — the global- warming question — I’m like most Americans: I lack the technical background to investigate and judge the data myself. Is climate change real? Yes. But the climate has always changed in great cycles. Are today’s changes man-made and newly destructive? I don’t know — although I suspect we make things worse.

Interesting. Why would you suspect worse, Ralph? Worse than what? The Ohio Valley and Great Lakes full of ice? Why would the long-sought Northwest Passage be worse rather than better? Because some polar bears die?

Worse if malaria and other tropical diseases move further north? More people have died of malaria as a result of a faulty scientific scare over the perils of DDT than because any mosquito widened its habitat. (Mosquitoes exist in Alaska today in what I have been told are astonishing numbers large enough to carry of Sarah’s caribou if she doesn’t get to it immediately after shooting it.)

Peters opens and closes with the answer to his own question, if he only listened to himself:

In the most notorious trial in the history of science, the Inquisition condemned Galileo in 1633. The aged scientist was forced to recant his life’s work. The fact that the earth revolves around the sun threatened the church establishment’s doctrine. Galileo was worse than right — he was inconvenient.

Since his trial, scientists have mythologized him as their secular saint.

How times have changed: With the Climategate scandal, we now find scientists in the role of inquisitors — suppressing inconvenient facts and persecuting researchers who challenge the doctrine decreed by the Global Warming clergy.

...

There is some justice in this prankster universe: Those ideology- driven scientists have done colossal damage to the extremist platform for which they cheated, lied and bullied. But now who can we trust?

Why not try today’s Galileos? How about the guys facing house arrest, risking their jobs, their grants, the scorn of the Goreacle Pope?

How about the guys who report the truth when they DON’T stand to benefit from it?

That foolish LATimes journalist earlier thought the solution could be found in the famous “cui bono?” question, but why not try looking for the truth in the other direction, instead?

The LAT journalist thought he perceived truth because he could see that Big Oil would benefit if the climate change argument went away, not even considering looking at the fact that Big Gore and Big Government would benefit even more if it did not.

But why not look for truth from the scientists saying the unpopular things which can actually cost them their jobs and positions in return for honestly reporting politically incorrect facts?

Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said Friday that he did not know details of the proposal put together by Mr. Reid in an effort to break an impasse over the legislation.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said Republicans were exasperated because they did not know any details of Mr. Reid’s proposal, which could affect one-sixth of the economy.

Responding to Mr. McCain on the Senate floor, Mr. Durbin said, “I would say to the senator from Arizona that I am in the dark almost as much as he is, and I am in the leadership.”

And I know I am in the leadership because, well, because, uh, I know almost everything as well as Senator McCain does...