Some people want to classify me as a “climate-change denier.” Instead, call me what I am, a skeptic of the highest order.
I originally majored in geology because I wanted a broad science background to become a science reporter. My school wouldn’t have any of it, and instead wanted me to narrow down into a little box. I don’t like boxes so much, so I switched majors and went for a journalism major with a political theory minor.
I also don’t like people using bullying tactics in an attempt to make others go along. The scientists I looked up to never bowed to consensus, nor did they attempt to silence others with the billy club of popularity. Believe me, the moment you speak out against such things, people will come out of the woodwork to pick apart everything they can about you personally, because ad hominem is a great way to shut up dissenters without considering the merit of the argument.
[Ad hominem works both ways, by the way – as there are those who try to connect all environmentalists with a hidden agenda of socialism.]
Folks, no matter what they tell you, the science is not settled, and the case is not proven. Science is never, ever settled. And the academically-honest scientists will tell you that they aren’t making a scientific case for radical environmental change, they are asking for you to make an economic one based on Pascal’s Wager.
Betting on the Angels
Pascal’s Wager is a simple one: given the costs for believing in God (the entry fee, so to speak) and the risk/reward for the existence of Heaven/Hell – it makes sense to believe in God. The eternal reward is so great if you’re right, and if you’re not, you didn’t lose very much.
What we’re being offered on the environmental front is a variation on Pascal’s Wager. Worst-case scenarios are being trotted out, and we’re told that we simply “can’t wait” for the science to prove conclusively that we are beyond the point of global extinction. What’s the harm in living a little cleaner and greener, anyway?
Turns out, there can be quite a lot. Cleaner and greener is a great way to go if all things are equal, but they almost never are. Every choice has a consequence, there’s a trade-off and an opportunity cost: what else could we have done with that money? (Conversely, the opportunity cost of doing nothing at all about the environment is the same as Pascal’s Wager; going to Hell.)
Before you bet on the Angels, though, there are some things I’d like you to consider about the data regarding Climate Change.
Assumptions to Challenge
What is “normal?”
Are we talking about within a lifetime, or within a nation’s written history? Are we talking about centuries on the average, or millenia? Are we talking geologic time?
Oh my God, glaciers are retreating! (We are coming out of an ice age, you know…)
Oh my God, we could lose the polar ice caps! (Some estimates show that within the last 6-million years, we’ve had polar ice around 20% of that time. So polar ice is the exception, not the rule.)
Oh my God, the coastal cities will drown! (Ever see a map of Pangaea? Coastlines aren’t permanent.)
Oh my God, Earth is getting warmer!
That last one is even subject to some debate. Forty years ago, science was convinced we were heading into irreversible Global Cooling (caused by pollution.) And all of those computer models and projections failed to predict that the Earth would peak in 1998 and has been cooling since.
Can models be trusted?
Of course models can be trusted, to the extent they are programmed correctly. You can make a virtual model of a card game, and use it to predict which strategies work and when to double down. You can make very good assumptions over time about how to maximize your profits at the blackjack table. But what if you were playing blackjack and these starting showing up?
The +4 card forces you to draw an additional four cards, and would almost assuredly force you to go over 21. That’s not fair, though! That’s not a part of the game!
If the card starts showing up in real blackjack games but isn’t accounted for in your model, then who is at fault?
Models are only as good as their inputs. I have no doubt that the scientists working on climate change projections have every good and noble interest at heart, but their models have missed some pretty big influences over the last few years, such as El Ninos, sunspots, and variations of solar radiation. The models have been tweaked and poked, but will only be as useful as they are based in reality.
Fundamentally, it is a given that carbon dioxide levels are the engine for the warming as a greenhouse gas. This ignores other, more potent and influential greenhouse gases – and the pressures they exert.
Give or Take a Billion
The genesis for this post came from reading this article in Wired, about the possibility that Earth might be inhabitable for an additional billion years than previously thought.
King Fai Li and his colleagues at Caltech hypothesize that Earth’s atmospheric pressure has always varied, and that it could fall in the distant future, keeping Earth from frying for far longer than previous research had shown.
The theory here is that atmospheric pressure has always varied on Earth. A theory. Completely unsupported at this point, but the Caltech team is doing the math to see what the consequences might be. And why is he doing that math?
“I am glad that Li and colleagues have raised the issue of how overall variation in atmospheric pressure may have affected past and may affect future climate,” ecologist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University said in an e-mail. “This could be relevant for understanding climate change on the billion-year time scale.”
Despite this potentially important role, atmospheric pressure in the distant past has gone uninvestigated.
“We have a lack of data about the past history of the atmospheric pressure,” said Li.
What is that again? A lack of data? No one has even measured it before, and it’s only now being theorized that it has varied much (or will in the future). Which brings us back to all those climate change models:
- They don’t know nearly as much about the past as they’d like us to believe
- They use an arbitrary “norm”
- They have not shown any true predictive capability, even on the timescales and outputs we can measure.
And they want us to bet trillions of dollars that could instead be put to use for education, health, disease prevention, innovation, quality of life improvements, preventing hunger, relocation, or any of a laundry list of social goods that we might have instead?
They haven’t even accounted for the pressure. So for now, I refuse to bow to theirs.
Ike: Totally agree – this is not science – it’s a religion founded by anti-capitalist true believers.
Fortune talked about how the underlying data many of the Global warming folks are using is flawed.
As well as the fact that the whole hypothesis is based on an assumption.
Great Post!
Thank you for this post, Ike. For many people, the belief in global warming (or “climate change” as it’s now being termed to explain the extreme colds as well) has become akin to religious dogma. I wrote about this a couple of years ago when I started seeing people who questioned the model being compared to Holocaust deniers.
There are many reasons for us to promote things like using alternative energy sources and taking care of the environment, but this “no room for dissent” approach just alienates many people.
“Dogma” is such a good word for it. In dogma, as in ideology, the fundamental assumption is never challenged, and any evidence to the contrary becomes re-incorporated into the theory.
For instance, after hearing about “warming-warming-warming,” there’s now evidence that we’ve plateaued and are slowly cooling. Well, now there is a codicil, an amendment to the theory that explains (only after the fact) how this might be without invalidating the theory. None of the models predicted cooling, yet we are to follow them blindly?
Ike: Can you give us the link to that guy who spoke i Utah? Need to add that to my library. I have – not well organized yet — a set of links to a bunch of global warming articles of various sorts that might be interesting to folks. As soon as I organize them, I’ll post ’em here, FYI. But I think The Great Global Warming Swindle (despite its tabloid-like title) provides a great intro to this stuff; as does “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming,” which collects data from dozens of impressive sources. Or junkscience.com . . Or or or . . I’ll be back. . . DD
Sit in a domed stadium filled with 85,000 cigarette smokers (not even in cars!) and tell me that humans aren’t affecting environmental conditions adversely and that your respiration is unfazed, and that the dome itself isn’t turning brownish-yellow.
No, there is no absolute “right” or “proof” and the possibility of opportunist exaggeration is real and legitimate and probably true, but global warming hype or not, you’re missing the point by focusing on being a naysayer and worrying about something as superficial as “cost”. Amusing the “whole hypothesis is based on an assumption” line. Tell me what on earth isn’t!!?? Matter of fact you all sound like a bunch of nicotine addicts in denial, but you’re hooked on a polluting lifestyle instead.
Why is the writer of this post any better or different than any enviromnental scientist with a differing viewpoint? Isn’t this post based on assumption too? Truth: yeah, we don’t know either way. But sitting in traffic or in the stadium example, do the math on the amount of cars, smokers, etc. worldwide and tell me your health is not being affected using your common sense. Tell me it’s not denial to say it’s no big deal, again trying to use that apparently limited resource called common sense. Who gives a crap if they’re right or wrong about temperature? What’s the difference when it’s your and especially your children’s health that’s really at issue? Explain to your children as a “responsible” parent that it’s no big deal, it’s crap science, or whatever else you need to tell yourself to avoid changing your habits and cleaning up your act. Don’t let the exaggeration for media profit detract from common sense.
@trailman, you bring up some points that deserve a response:
Interesting analogy, but the failure is one of scale. Putting 85,000 people in an enclosed domed stadium would involve a population density several orders of magnitude beyond even the nightmare scenarios of the zero-population movement.
For instance, about a year ago the Sierra Club made recommendations about how to limit the footprint of suburbs, and the problem of “urban sprawl.” The Sierra Club’s initial recommendation for “effective urban density” was 500 households per acre, later reduced to 100 households/acre. The larger number was considered untenable, and even at the smaller number you’re only looking at a permanent population of 2,900 people in an area the size of the Georgia Dome (with parking).
Simply put, you’ve got too many people in one place to represent the impact of mankind. It would be like me calling for the banning of candles because they are a fire hazard on birthday cakes.
I’m not “focusing” on being a naysayer. I am facing the reality that the massive program to “change” our climate will come with an incredible cost, and the BEST case scenario is it won’t make a dent.
Why spend trillions of dollars we don’t have to “fix” a problem that may very well be natural? Why spend trillions of dollars to delay the warming of Earth by TWO years out of the next 100?
Why not allocate money to help people deal with the effects, IF the effects are all bad?
Cost is NOT superficial. Cost is everything. It helps us rationally assign our resources to solve the problems that matter most.
I am not advocating for the hijacking of global economies and global quality of life, just to assuage the fears of scientists whose computer models have failed to model reality.
I don’t HAVE to make my case to prove Anthropogenic Climate Change is false… it is incumbent upon those who believe it is true to prove to us otherwise. The burden of proof is always with those making the assertion.
I will teach my children to use their brains, and be smart about things (including the environment.) Be green and clean for its own sake, but don’t cram a dangerous and monumentally expensive plan down everyone’s throats (especially when the plan, even if executed perfectly, won’t have any effect).
Don’t just read the Summary Reports from the IPCC. Read the science underneath. Beneath all the scares and nightmare scenarios, you’ll find plenty of assumptions, plenty of holes, and a grand total of FIVE computer models that are so accurate they have completely missed the last ten years.
Never knew it was called ‘ad hominem’. I just called it ‘ugly personal attacks’.
I feel a little more reckless than you about spending money on environmental stewardship. I’m one of the nutcases that wants to heal the LA River, and other ridiculously expensive stuff. I figure financial waste isn’t going away anytime soon. If you’re going to squander it, why not squander it on beauty.
Don’t get me wrong… I am all for good stewardship and being responsible.
There’s nothing “nutty” about wanting cleaner rivers or cleaner air. What is “nutty” is spending trillions of dollars of other peoples’ money on a series of changes that will not have the impact being promised.
The scare that has been put into children about the environment is appalling. My kids are being led to believe that our water and air is the dirtiest it has ever been, yet they have no idea how dirty things really were 40 years ago.
I liken the tactics to the statements used last September about TARP and Stimulus. “We need to inject money into the banks now or the world will end! It has to happen this weekend!” Yet most of the money was never spent (or was spent on things other than what we were told they would.)
There are more than a few parallels about how fear is used to motivate people into irrational or dangerous behavior. Responsible environmentalism looks at the whole picture: comparing real and attainable results with the associated costs, and comparing them to other projects.
One more link I just found, from over the weekend.
It highlights several instances of spurious logic and poor recommendations for spending in the recently-released Kofi Annan report.