Global Warming Alarmism

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
21

[quote]
BostonBarrister wrote:
Interesting article in today’s WSJ - I am particularly annoyed by the idea, which comes up again and again in many contexts, that people in authority should lie in order to scare people into doing what they think is best for them.

Wreckless wrote:
Are you sure? Are you annoyed by this idea in every context? Or only in contexts like these? Or only in this context?

My point being, you didn’t seem so annoyed when Bush lied to get his war going.

And you don’t seem so annoyed with the recent lies about Iran either.[/quote]

There is a difference between a lie and a mistake of fact. With Iraq, we had mistakes of fact underlying the decision - but there is no evidence of which I’m aware that we knew we were operating with faulty facts. That is not the case in this scenario.

As to Iran: What are you talking about?

22

[quote]Wreckless wrote:
The Mage wrote:
Starting to get burned out on this issue, but it is so refreshing to find an honest assessment of the global warming propaganda going on.
…

I can clearly see sir that you’re an expert on the matter.

Please inform us, at wich university did you graduate in global climate studies?

I’m sorry sir, but “the university of life” is not a valid answer.
Neither is “the internet” or wikipedia.[/quote]

Oops! That criteria counts Al Gore out as well.

23

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:

BostonBarrister wrote:
Interesting article in today’s WSJ - I am particularly annoyed by the idea, which comes up again and again in many contexts, that people in authority should lie in order to scare people into doing what they think is best for them.

Wreckless wrote:
Are you sure? Are you annoyed by this idea in every context? Or only in contexts like these? Or only in this context?

My point being, you didn’t seem so annoyed when Bush lied to get his war going.

And you don’t seem so annoyed with the recent lies about Iran either.

There is a difference between a lie and a mistake of fact. With Iraq, we had mistakes of fact underlying the decision - but there is no evidence of which I’m aware that we knew we were operating with faulty facts. That is not the case in this scenario.

As to Iran: What are you talking about?[/quote]

There is countless evidence of “faulty facts”. One could certainly make the case they lied by omission?

There is evidence of mobile bio labs.
Omitted: via a source with no credibility, proven liar, CIA doesn’t believe him etc. (curveball)

Aluminum Tubes whose anodized coating could only mean they were for nuclear use.
Omitted: Experts say they could only be used if anodized coating was milled off.

Source says (Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haider) Saddam had buried his WMD.
Omitted: Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haider said this strapped to a polygraph that he failed.

Saddam trying to get yellowcake from Niger
Omitted: documents faked.

and on and on…

these are facts we went to war on, that Powell presented to the UN, that congress used to vote for authorization to use force, most of which were presented without caveats (obviously)

24

Firstly, an intentional false statement is different from a materially misleading omission.

One cannot really have a “lie” by omission - if there is a duty to make a statement, one can breach that duty. In the context of securities laws, there is a duty not to omit statements that would make one’s positive statements misleading. In other contexts, it’s caveat emptor provided one does not make intentional or recklessly false statements.

Secondly, there have been numerous arguments on your alleged facts, which I will leave to the other threads on which they occurred. But I can see why you wouldn’t want to focus on the fact that advocates of policies to deal with climate change seem to think that the most effective way to sell those policies is to make false claims about the threat.

25

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:

BostonBarrister wrote:
Interesting article in today’s WSJ - I am particularly annoyed by the idea, which comes up again and again in many contexts, that people in authority should lie in order to scare people into doing what they think is best for them.

Wreckless wrote:
Are you sure? Are you annoyed by this idea in every context? Or only in contexts like these? Or only in this context?

My point being, you didn’t seem so annoyed when Bush lied to get his war going.

And you don’t seem so annoyed with the recent lies about Iran either.

BostonBarrister wrote:
There is a difference between a lie and a mistake of fact. With Iraq, we had mistakes of fact underlying the decision - but there is no evidence of which I’m aware that we knew we were operating with faulty facts. That is not the case in this scenario.

As to Iran: What are you talking about?

100meters wrote:
There is countless evidence of “faulty facts”. One could certainly make the case they lied by omission?

There is evidence of mobile bio labs.
Omitted: via a source with no credibility, proven liar, CIA doesn’t believe him etc. (curveball)

Aluminum Tubes whose anodized coating could only mean they were for nuclear use.
Omitted: Experts say they could only be used if anodized coating was milled off.

Source says (Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haider) Saddam had buried his WMD.
Omitted: Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haider said this strapped to a polygraph that he failed.

Saddam trying to get yellowcake from Niger
Omitted: documents faked.

and on and on…

these are facts we went to war on, that Powell presented to the UN, that congress used to vote for authorization to use force, most of which were presented without caveats (obviously)

Firstly, an intentional false statement is different from a materially misleading omission.

One cannot really have a “lie” by omission - if there is a duty to make a statement, one can breach that duty. In the context of securities laws, there is a duty not to omit statements that would make one’s positive statements misleading. In other contexts, it’s caveat emptor provided one does not make intentional or recklessly false statements.

Secondly, there have been numerous arguments on your alleged facts, which I will leave to the other threads on which they occurred. But I can see why you wouldn’t want to focus on the fact that advocates of policies to deal with climate change seem to think that the most effective way to sell those policies is to make false claims about the threat.[/quote]

By any measure we definitely went to war on :faulty" facts.

As to the “false claims” on GW, I don’t agree, you’re overblowing the hysteria deliberately to make it seem crazy. There clearly is no widespread panic, no riots, no huddling in bunkers etc… The claims are based on scientific models presenting the normal range of scenarios as is always done. For example see drought scenarios in the south, deforestation,

And your editorial presents the slow evolution of wingnut talkingpoints on GW. For the LONGEST time, as far as the WSJ was concerned GW didn’t exist…finally it exists, but it’s not a big deal. In general, whatever the WSJ editorial says, the opposite it usually true. For some reason the editors (like the WP) aren’t able to read their own front paqes.

26

[quote]100meters wrote:
…

As to the “false claims” on GW, I don’t agree, you’re overblowing the hysteria deliberately to make it seem crazy. There clearly is no widespread panic, no riots, no huddling in bunkers etc… The claims are based on scientific models presenting the normal range of scenarios as is always done. For example see drought scenarios in the south, deforestation,

And your editorial presents the slow evolution of wingnut talkingpoints on GW. For the LONGEST time, as far as the WSJ was concerned GW didn’t exist…finally it exists, but it’s not a big deal. In general, whatever the WSJ editorial says, the opposite it usually true. For some reason the editors (like the WP) aren’t able to read their own front paqes.
[/quote]

It’s not an editorial – it’s an op-ed. Thus not written by the editors, but written by an unaffiliated author. The editors chose to run it, obviously, but your post above seems to indicate the piece originated with the WSJ.

This is the author:

Mr. Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment and professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of “Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century” (Replica Books, 2001).

Also, funny that the front pages of these newspapers are getting involved in making ideological arguments. I guess in your opinion at least the biased editorials (these are supposed to be biased - thus the name “opinion section”) match the biased reporting at the NYT?

At any rate, you don’t seem to be arguing that they aren’t making overblown claims for the purpose of scaring the ignorant masses into supporting their desired programs?

27

Another interesting article:

[i]Save the Earth in Six Hard Questions
What Al Gore doesn’t understand about climate change.
By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Monday, Oct. 22, 2007, at 7:44 AM ET

Barring a last-minute intervention by the Supreme Court, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize will be shared by Albert Gore Jr. Admittedly, Gore has been less of a menace to world peace than some previous laureates (think Henry Kissinger). But there is nothing particularly peaceable about Gore’s rhetorical approach to climate policy. At his most pugnacious, Gore has depicted the fundamental trade-off as one between environmental responsibility and personal greed. Of course, as everyone over the age of 12 is perfectly aware, the real trade-off is between the quality of our own lives and the quality of our descendants’.

In other words, climate policy is almost entirely about you and me making sacrifices for the benefit of future generations. To contribute usefully to the debate, you’ve got to think hard about the appropriate level of sacrifice. That in turn requires you to think hard about roughly half a dozen underlying issues.

  1. How much does human activity affect the climate? This is actually a whole menu of questions: What can we expect given the current level of carbon emissions? What if we cut those emissions by half? By two-thirds? And so on. These are questions for physical scientists, not economists or politicians.

  2. How much harm (or good!) is likely to come from that climate change? This is partly a matter of physical science and partly a matter of economics. If the world temperature rises 3 degrees, agronomists try to predict the wheat yield in Oklahoma; economists try to predict when Oklahomans will turn to alternate ventures�??and when it will become profitable to grow wheat in Alaska. Climatologists estimate what it takes to put New York underwater; economists estimate the cost of moving New York inland.

  3. How much do we�??or should we�??care about future generations? Edmund Phelps, the 2006 Nobel laureate for economics, argued long ago that you (and I) should care exactly as much about a stranger born 1,000 years hence as we do about a stranger who’s alive today. Phelps’ view has been highly influential among economists, who now take it as more or less the default position. But even economists are sometimes wrong, and there are powerful arguments for “discounting” the welfare of future generations. First, many people (myself excluded, however) believe we should care more about our countrymen than about a bunch of foreigners�??hence the sentiment for a border fence. If we are allowed to care less about people who happen to be born in the wrong country, why can’t we care less about people who happen to be born in the wrong century? And second: Few of us feel morally bound to churn out as many children as we possibly can, which means we think nothing of denying future generations the gift of life. If it’s OK to deny them their very lives, shouldn’t it be OK to deny them a temperate climate?

There is a ton more to be said in response and counter-response, but in the end, you’ve got to take a stand. Does the next generation count 100 percent as much as our own, as Edmund Phelps demands? Or 99 percent? 95 percent? 90 percent? I’ll show you later how much the answer matters.

  1. How likely are those future generations to be around, anyway? If you think life on Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid in 200 years, it makes little sense to worry about the climate 300 years from now. (Of course, the issue is complicated by the fact that our climate policies change the survival odds.)

  2. Just how rich are those future generations likely to be? If you expect economic growth to continue at the average annual rate of 2.3 percent, to which we’ve grown accustomed, then in 400 years, the average American will have an income of more than $1 million per day�??and that’s in the equivalent of today’s dollars (i.e., after correcting for inflation). Does it really make sense for you and me to sacrifice for the benefit of those future gazillionaires?

  3. How risk-averse are we? This matters not just because of uncertainty about the effects of climate change but because it affects the way future generations want us to behave. Imagine yourself as a disembodied soul, waiting in line to be born�??possibly next year, possibly 100 years hence. If you have little tolerance for risk, you’ll want us to pursue policies that make life about equally good at all times; if you’re willing to roll the dice, you might prefer a policy that allows some generations to live riotously at the expense of others.

Only after you’ve addressed each question in turn can you say something sensible about climate policy. To carry out that program in detail would indeed be a Nobel-worthy achievement. I don’t propose to earn my Nobel Prize in this column space, but I can at least offer a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation to show you how this stuff works.

First, I’ll make the extreme assumption that our environmental recklessness threatens to shave 1 percentage point off economic growth forever. Because of compounding, our disposable incomes will be reduced by 9.5 percent a decade from now and by 63 percent a century from now�??perhaps because we’ll spend 63 percent of our incomes relocating coastal cities. Now toss in some standard (but arguable) assumptions about risk aversion and discounting. (Note to econogeeks: I assumed a risk-aversion coefficient of 1, and I discounted future generations’ welfare at an annual rate of 5 percent, partly because we might care less about them and partly because we’re not sure they’ll exist.) Run this through your calculator, and you’ll find we should spend up to about 17 percent of our incomes on climate control�??provided that our investment is effective. That’s an expenditure level that I expect would satisfy Al Gore.

Change the numerical assumptions, and you’ll change the numerical conclusion. Make the discount rate 1 percent instead of 5 percent, and you can justify spending up to a whopping 62 percent of our incomes on climate control; lower the discount rate to 10 percent, and you can’t justify spending more than 8 percent of our incomes.

The moral of that story is not that economists can justify anything; it’s that assumptions really matter. Therefore you need to be clear about your assumptions, and you need to be prepared to justify them. If you’re not talking about discount rates and levels of risk aversion, you’re blathering.

The most thoughtful assessment of climate change is the Stern Review, prepared in October 2006 at the behest of the British government. The Stern Review reaches conclusions generally compatible with Al Gore’s worldview, but only after laying out the underlying assumptions so clearly that skeptics like me can tinker around with them and see how the conclusions change. In other words, they’ve taken a hot-button issue and reduced it to its constituent pieces so that opposing parties can stop yelling at each other and say, “Let us calculate.” That’s what I call a contribution to world peace. I wish the Nobel Committee had agreed.

Steven E. Landsburg is the author, most recently, of More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics. You can e-mail him at armchair@troi.cc.rochester.edu.[/i]

28

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
100meters wrote:
…

As to the “false claims” on GW, I don’t agree, you’re overblowing the hysteria deliberately to make it seem crazy. There clearly is no widespread panic, no riots, no huddling in bunkers etc… The claims are based on scientific models presenting the normal range of scenarios as is always done. For example see drought scenarios in the south, deforestation,

And your editorial presents the slow evolution of wingnut talkingpoints on GW. For the LONGEST time, as far as the WSJ was concerned GW didn’t exist…finally it exists, but it’s not a big deal. In general, whatever the WSJ editorial says, the opposite it usually true. For some reason the editors (like the WP) aren’t able to read their own front paqes.

It’s not an editorial – it’s an op-ed. Thus not written by the editors, but written by an unaffiliated author. The editors chose to run it, obviously, but your post above seems to indicate the piece originated with the WSJ.

This is the author:

Mr. Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment and professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of “Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century” (Replica Books, 2001).

Also, funny that the front pages of these newspapers are getting involved in making ideological arguments. I guess in your opinion at least the biased editorials (these are supposed to be biased - thus the name “opinion section”) match the biased reporting at the NYT?

At any rate, you don’t seem to be arguing that they aren’t making overblown claims for the purpose of scaring the ignorant masses into supporting their desired programs?[/quote]

They aren’t making overblown claims. In fact thus far reality has been exceeding the models (arctic ice melting, temps). And regardless of the author it is still the editors framing the debate falsely.

anyway in the real world:

29

On this same topic, a post I may have posted before:

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/000990looking_away_from_mi.html

[i]Looking Away from Misrepresentations of Science in Policy Debate Related to Disasters and Climate Change

Posted to Author: Pielke Jr., R. | Climate Change | Disasters | Science + Politics

For me the most amazing aspect of the repeated misrepresentation of science related to disasters and climate change is not that political advocates look to cherry pick science or go beyond the state of the science. What is most amazing is that in the face of incontrovertible and repeated misrepresentation that the overwhelming majority of scientists, the media, and responsible advocacy groups have remained mute (with a few notable exceptions such as Hans von Storch).

More than anything else, even the misrepresentations themselves, the collective willingness to overlook bad policy arguments unsupported (or even contradicted) by the current state of science while at the same time trumpeting the importance of scientific consensus is evidence of the comprehensive and pathological politicization of science in the policy debate over global warming. If climate scientists ever wonder why they are looked upon with suspicion among some people in society, they need look no further in their willingness to compromise their own intellectual standards in policy debate on the issue of disasters and climate change.

Here are just some of the misrepresentations of science in policy discussions related to disasters and climate change from the Prometheus archives:

Misrepresentation by ABI of UK Foresight flood assessment ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000101 )

Misrepresentation by UNEP of disaster loss trends ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000299 )

Misrepresentation by former head of IPCC of disaster loss trends ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000504 )

Misrepresentation by New York Times of trends in disaster losses ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000590 )

Misrepresentation by editor of Science of detection and attribution of trends in extreme events ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000667 )

Misrepresentation by editor of Science of attribution of Katrina to greenhouse gas emissions ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000681 )

Misrepresentation of literature of disaster trends and climate in article in Science ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000537 )

Misrepresentation by lead IPCC author responsible for hurricane chapter of attribution of Katrina to greenhouse gas emissions ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000759 )

Misrepresentation of ABI report on future tropical cyclone losses ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000793 )

Misrepresentation by Al Gore of state of hurricane science and attribution of Katrina ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000798 )

Misrepresentation by Time of science of hurricanes and attribution of Katrina ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000802 )

Misrepresentation by IPCC WG II of storm surge impacts research ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000851 )

Misrepresentation by AGU of science of seasonal hurricane forecast skill ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000860 )

Misrepresentation by Environmental Defense of attribution of Katrina to greenhouse gases and prospects for avoiding future hurricanes ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000899 )

Misrepresentation in the Washington Post of the science of disaster trends and future impacts ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000905 )

Misrepresentation in Stern report of trends in disaster losses and projections of future costs ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000973 )

Misrepresentation by UNEP of trends and projections in disaster losses ( http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/index.html#000989 ) [/i]

And on economics, a critique of the Stern Report from the same author, Roger Pielke: