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Global warming, hallelujah
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And happy Sunday to you all. This week has seen once again the triumph of passion and belief over science and evidence. It marks a retreat from discovery and part of a slow march towards misplaced trust. It has not been a good week for science. I am trying to comfort myself with the thought that the relationship between science and its enemies works like a pendulum, and this has just been a bad week.
The release of the report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, should have helped advance the cause of science. After all, it calls itself a State of Knowledge Report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program. However, a week's worth of review has revealed the document to be more of a religious tract aimed at comforting the comfortable and afflicting the already afflicted. See here, here, here and here for my previous reports.
The report says that we know things that in fact we do not know. It claims to see a future that in fact we cannot see. It claims to be reviewed by peers to increase its trustworthiness. In fact, many of the publications cited were works of the report's authors. Some of the work is not at all peer-reviewed, despite the claims of the report.
The report is criticized more completely here, here, here, here, here, and a summary of other criticisms is found here.
And of course, it repeats the necessary lie--that the science behind climate change is beyond debate. It does so by, as always, mixing one truth with two lies. The truth is the existence and operation of the greenhouse effect, that CO2 will increase warmth retained by the atmosphere. Nobody disputes this, and few dispute the mathematical equations that show that doubling CO2 will increase temperatures by between 1.6 and 2.1 degrees Celsius. But the claims that this will trigger a feedback in other gases that multiplies this warming is not proven (although reasonable, it remains to be demonstrated and certainly nobody can say by how much)--and yet it is an assumption that is built in to the computer models that have replaced evidence in this debate. However, when scientists object to the second assumption about feedbacks--and many have--they are accused by the environmentalist lobby of not believing the first assumption. It is deliberate propaganda, and it is deplorable.
Far more interesting than the report itself are the comments submitted when it was in draft stage. The fact that the paper attracted 359 pages of comments, mostly harshly negative, and that the response of the report writers was so defensive ('We comply with all laws and regulations'?) should have warned us all. I highly recommend a quick flip through the comments to anyone who wonders if the debate on global warming is actually settled. It is obviously not.
It has already been compared to the works of Pravda by one scientist, so I won't pile on any more. But I will say that this report is worse than wrong--it is a mistake. At a time when an ambitious energy policy (which I support) and a controversial funding mechanism (which I support) called cap and trade is before Congress, it will not help the Administration's cause to have a report that is so easily discredited and so thoroughly biased.
Yesterday I compared the report to Iraq's Dodgy Dossier, the manufactured set of lies used to goad us into attacking Iraq. It's actually worse, serving as a prime example of policy-based evidence.
For a quick look at how it could have played out, we turn to Australia, where one Senator has actually started a mini-debate on global warming, bringing climate skeptics into a chamber with an administration official and the administration's scientists to talk through the issues. We should be so lucky. Instead we are conducting a sham debate on behalf of special interests and politicians who apparently want to mislead us on where the science is today.
Maybe next week will be better.
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- thomaswfuller3 at gmail dot com
