House speaker Nancy Pelosi intends to bring the Waxman-Markey bill to a vote on Friday over the objections of farm- and coal-state Democrats and almost all Republicans, figuring that she has the votes to pass it. Then it will go to the Senate, where everyone expects it will die. The opposition complains that the bill, which would impose caps on emissions alleged to be causing global warming, will raise the price of energy, especially electricity, which is simply stupid in the midst of a recession. The blow would fall heavily on the states whose coal provides most of our electricity and on rural areas where electric costs have the most impact. The bill aims to ameliorate these effects by allowing emitting plants to continue for a while by buying permits or allowances from other producers whose emissions are below their allowances—hence “cap and trade.”
Of course the setting of allowances is highly subject to special pleading and dealing. Already the vote-seeking compromises in the bill have outraged environmental purists. Expect a continuous mess. If you liked credit default swaps, you’ll really love the emissions trading market—if it should ever come to pass.
Meanwhile on the international scene climate politics is slouching toward Copenhagen in December, where a successor to the ineffective Kyoto treaty is supposed to be enacted. At this point most sage observers expect this project to fail. Endless preliminary negotiations have been unable to resolve the differences. No agreement will pass our Congress without firm emissions control commitments from China and India, which aren’t going to happen. The European Union, once the proud leader in climate policies (by its own estimation) is in internal disarray. Japan, home to Kyoto, has proposed such a small emissions reduction target for itself that they have almost opted out of the debate. Russia has gone them one better: By picking a 1990 baseline, before the collapse of the Soviet Union’s economy, they figure they can actually continue to increase their emissions and still claim a long-term reduction.
The Chinese, brilliantly cynical, and joined by India and a number of African states, have hit upon a perfect non-starter: The climate problem was created by the West, the industrialized nations, so they should fix it, cutting their emissions to forty percent below 1990 levels, until the developing nations have had a chance to catch up. Anyway, Chinese per capita emissions are so far smaller than the West’s that to curb their development would be grossly unfair. Finally, say the Chinese, the West should give them, free of charge, billions of dollars in climate control technology. They know perfectly well that this is a recipe for economic suicide by the West, so their demands seem to be posturing either as a start to bargaining, or more likely to excuse their determination to continue their growth path without restrictions.
All this diplomatic turmoil is proceeding against a backdrop of growing public indifference. So the alarmist community has reacted predictably by issuing ever more apocalyptic statements, like the federal report ”Global Change Impacts in the United States” issued last week which predicts more frequent heat waves, rising water temperatures, more wildfires, rising disease levels, and rising sea levels—headlined, in a paper I read, as “Getting Warmer.” This is mostly nonsense, and it is certainly not “getting warmer.” The earth stopped warming in 1998 and since 2002 has been getting slightly cooler. Sea ice in the arctics is growing. Sea levels are not rising faster than their usual steady tiny pace. The incidence of severe storms is not increasing. And so on. If you want to worry about the climate, worry about colder weather and lower crop yields as the sun remains unusually quiet.
For heaven’s sake, climate people, pay attention to real life, real time data and not your wobbly and unreliable computer models.
June 25th, 2009 | 10:10 am
Also expect some former politicians, e.g., Al Gore, to profit handsomely from “cap and trade” transactions. After all, this is what this is all about, right?
June 25th, 2009 | 3:16 pm
I’m curious where you get your global temperature data. According to NOAA,”seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.”
June 25th, 2009 | 3:28 pm
Dave: According to NOAA,”seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.”
That is a reference to the U.S. Derr’s post is about global, not regional. temperatures.
But even that claim by NOAA can be a bit misleading. According to the report: “For the contiguous U.S., the December 2007 mean temperature was 33.6°F, near the 20th century average of 33.4°F. The Southeast was much warmer than average, while 11 states — from the Upper Midwest to the West Coast — were cooler than average.”
If we’re worried about warming, why aren’t we as concerned about the 11 states were cooling has occurred?
June 25th, 2009 | 4:47 pm
That’s not true, Joe. The NOAA’s 4/28/08 report (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/ann/ann07.html) says, under the heading of “Global Temperatures“, that “[i]ncluding 2007, seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001 and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1995″. For the U.S. alone, the statistic they give is that 6 of the 10 warmest recorded years have come since 1998.
And the cooling you cite presumably isn’t going to be especially worrisome until it becomes part of a long-term trend.
June 25th, 2009 | 5:01 pm
John: That’s not true, Joe.
You’re right, I stand corrected. Fortunately, you forced me to read the report which seems to show that such statistics are rather meaningless.
The comparison is not to absolute temperatures, but to anomalies—and to the anomalies of a mean period (1951-1980), which is relevant to your next point:
And the cooling you cite presumably isn’t going to be especially worrisome until it becomes part of a long-term trend.
If we make comparisons to the mean we find that there was a long period between 1900-1930 when global cooling was a trend. Should we have been alarmed and taken measure to heat the planet?
Again, my point is that we don’t know enough to make solid inferences. Extrapolating the climate change on a 4 billion year old planet by looking at a forty year period is rather silly. We simply don’t have the data to make claims about what is occuring either way. (After all, we could be in an eons long cooling trend and the past decade could be an anomaly.)
June 25th, 2009 | 5:12 pm
I don’t understand why you say this. The “Global Temperature” data compare yearly averages to the overall average for the 20th century, and the anomalies are the extent to which the yearly temperatures are higher than that average.
So the widespread, indeed well-nigh universal, consensus among the expert community that the trends we’re observing – which are century-long, and not just a matter of four decades – are abnormal, dangerous, and at least partly the consequence of human behavior is “silly”? Sorry, but I’ve got a bit more trust in human reason than that.
June 25th, 2009 | 5:38 pm
All four of the generally recognized world temperature record-keepers record global averages flat from 1998 and declining slightly from 2002. 1998 was exceptionally warm (though 1934 was warmer) because of a strong El Nino event — so it wouldn’t be hard to say that subsequent years which were flat or declining slightly were among the warmest on record, even if you still had a slight decline. Statistics can be used deceptively and often are. As for the long term, the 1930’s were probably warmer that the 1990’s, and the period from 1940 to 1970, roughly, was a notable cooling trend which spooked people about an incipient ice age (which will happen eventually, just not any time soon). And going back further, there’s the Little Ice Age in the 18th and into the 19th century, and the Medieval Warm period before that, warmer than today, and so on, back and forth.
June 25th, 2009 | 5:43 pm
I don’t understand why you say this. The “Global Temperature” data compare yearly averages to the overall average for the 20th century, and the anomalies are the extent to which the yearly temperatures are higher than that average.M.
I hate to get nitpicky but in a discussion like this we have to be clear about what is being claimed. So let me first correct your statement. The “Global Temperature” data does not compare yearly averages to the overall average for the 20th century. No one even knows how to track the actual temperature on the ground so they have to make a guess based on computer models that take observations and “guesses.”* These computer model projections of what the yearly averages are then get compared to the median period (1951-1980).
In other words, we don’t really know what the temperature actually is (we just use a best guess) nor do we know what the temperature should be (we just compare it to a 29 year median). But if it increases above the median by a fraction of percent we can expect global catastrophe.
So the widespread, indeed well-nigh universal, consensus among the expert community that the trends we’re observing – which are century-long, and not just a matter of four decades – are abnormal, dangerous, and at least partly the consequence of human behavior is “silly”?
Again, the comparison is not “century-long” but a 29 year period which provides the median from which all comparisons are made. Why did they choose these particular 29 years? Who knows? But they are unlikely to be the true baseline for global temperatures.
Also, even if the consensus really is “universal” (which I doubt), the problems begin when you look closer at how the data is collected and what extrapolations are made about it. The fact that an “expert” can’t even provide an adequate way to measure surface temperatures does not give me confidence that they know what will happen when it rises .1 degrees celsius.
Sorry, but I’ve got a bit more trust in human reason than that.
I have trust in human reason, but not in “empirical extrapolations.” You can’t take poorly collected data for less than 100 years and make claims about a system (the earth) that has been around for billions of years. The hubris of the “experts” appears to be inversely proportional to what they actually know. These same folks can’t even predict the weather for tomorrow but yet can claim what will happen to the climate in 20 years?
* As NASA says, “We may start out the model with the few observed data that are available and fill in the rest with guesses (also called extrapolations) and then let the model run long enough so that the initial guesses no longer matter, but not too long in order to avoid that the inaccuracies of the model become relevant.
June 25th, 2009 | 6:01 pm
Unbelievable, Joe. It doesn’t matter what period they choose as a baseline against which to measure the anomaly: what matters is that there is a baseline, and relative to that baseline it’s clear as day that the planet is getting warmer, and our best scientific evidence tells us that this is abnormal, dangerous, and significantly the result of our own actions. If you don’t trust the scientific state of the art, then come up with some better methods and show that they give different results. Until then, we’re bound to do the best we can with what we’ve got.
June 25th, 2009 | 7:20 pm
Unbelievable, Joe.
I know, right? Who would have thought you’d be defending a technocratic “Trust the Experts, they know best.” line against epistemic humility? ; )
It doesn’t matter what period they choose as a baseline against which to measure the anomaly:
Actually, it matters quite a bit. Recall that in the 1970s the consensus was that global cooling was occurring and that we were entering a new ice age? They were comparing the the current temperatures against a baseline that caused a misinterpretation of the data. How do we know the same is not occurring now?
what matters is that there is a baseline, and relative to that baseline it’s clear as day that the planet is getting warmer, and our best scientific evidence tells us that this is abnormal, dangerous, and significantly the result of our own actions. If you don’t trust the scientific state of the art, then come up with some better methods and show that they give different results.
My purpose is not to come out with different results—my point is not that global warming is not occurring, but merely that we don’t have an adequate way of knowing. And we shouldn’t make rash, irrevocable judgments based on inadequate data.
Take, for example, your baseline. We don’t know how to take accurate temperature readings now, so we have to do computer modeling. Could we take better measurements during the baseline years of 1951-1980? Of course not. So we make assumptions about the temperature in those years too. Essentially, we are comparing assumptions about what we think the temperature is now to assumptions about what we think the temperature was then.
So far, so good. I don’t necessarily have a problem with this approach as long as the “experts” account for the fact that they are bound to be spectacularly wrong. If they were to say that the margin of error is likely to be about 5 to 10 degrees, I could buy the argument. Then if they told me that the earth was expected to be 20 degrees warmer by 2080 I’d start freaking out.
But that’s not what they claim. Here, for example, is a claim in a Global Warming FAQ by the Union of Concerned Scientists:
“Examples of observed climatic changes . . . Increase in global average surface temperature of about 1°F in the 20th century.”
First off, no one knows how to accurately measure “global average surface temperature” so they are either being intentionally misleading or they don’t know what they are talking about. But for them to claim that they were able to measure the increase to 1°F in 100 years assumes they think we are stupid. There simply is no way to know that for sure since it is not based on collected data but from computer modeling.
Also, I assume that you think this cause is science-based and data-driven. If so, do you think anything would change if it turned out that the computer modeling was flawed? If the actual empirical data showed that the earth has not been warming over the past decade, do you think it would change the minds of the “experts”? (My answer is “no.” Like the stem-cell debate, this topic is more often about non-science based views than it is with deductions from empirical evidence.)
Until then, we’re bound to do the best we can with what we’ve got.
I sorta agree. I think the best we can do right now to change “global warming” is “nothing.” The earth does not come with a knob that we can tweak to cool it down 1 degree Celsius. We had the stupid idea in the 70s to melt the ice caps(!) to “heat up” the planet. Imagine if we’d had actually done what the “experts” that was the right thing to do.
You were skeptical of the Iraq invasion in part because of the unintended consequences of the “just do something” approach to regime change. Do you really think that a bunch of guys in white coats really knows the right actions to take in order to save the planet? I’m a bit more skeptical than that.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t take such steps as reducing pollution—actions that are good for us regardless of whether they affect global warming. But until China and India get on board (read: never) we are never going to significantly reduce carbon emissions. Even if it does cause climate change—and could be proved—it wouldn’t matter since no one is willing to do anything about it. (Even the folks in Berkley ain’t giving their cars.)
June 25th, 2009 | 11:16 pm
For one thing, Joe, the idea that the belief in global cooling in the 1970s was anywhere near the kind of consensus that the belief in global warming is now is simply false; see here for more on that.
As to the accuracy of climate models and temperature measurements, of course they’re not perfect – so if that’s what you mean by “accurate”, then you’re right. But they’re more accurate than guesswork, and scientists explicitly account for margins of error in the way they evaluate their findings.
Then your answer is wrong, Joe. Aren’t you the one who was just going on about those crazy 1970s scientists with their global cooling theory? Well, what happened to them? Suiting one’s mind to the facts when they consistently point in a single direction is rationality, not ideology.
And you supported it, because …? Other differences, of course, include the fact that there wasn’t a reason to invade Iraq, together with the fact that the invasion meant that a handful of people ended up, you know, dead. Also, my post wasn’t at all about what actions we should take to deal with this problem, but only about the fact that there is one. I have, however, absolutely no faith in the capacity of the political process to solve it.
June 26th, 2009 | 12:01 am
…in the 1970s was anywhere near the kind of consensus…
I certainly will agree that there wasn’t much of a consensus. But then that was back when it was still possible to disagree on the issue without being considered “anti-science” or a “denialist.”
BTW, I loved this part of the page you cite:
What has changed since 1975? What great breakthroughs have we made in complexity studies and systems theory that we suddenly have a “good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course”? I’m not asking rhetorically, I’m serious. I’m skeptical that climatologists really have such a complete understanding of the complex system that is our earth’s climate. (If they do, they certainly haven’t provided any evidence to show that we should have such confidence in them.) Instead, the process has become politicized (and I don’t mean in the partisan way) so that what we have now is “science as consensus”—claiming that the issue is settled despite the fact that there is not enough evidence to know for sure.
Again, I reiterate that I am not denying that the earth is warming. I’m denying that these scientists—who can’t even take accurate measurements of global surface temperatures—have sufficient evidence that requires we accept their word without dispute.
I can not think of one significant issue in history when scientists completely agreed that they were not eventually proved to be wrong. It’s almost as if the establishment of “consensus” is a sign that they are about to proven wrong. Of course, this could be the one time when the pattern does not hold. I guess we’ll see.
But they’re more accurate than guesswork, and scientists explicitly account for margins of error in the way they evaluate their findings.
Really? What’s their margin of error for temperature change over the next century? I’d really be interested in knowing. All I’ve ever heard is that over the next 100 years the increase is on the order of 2.5°-10.4°F What is the margin of error for such a claim? (Considering the fact that they also say that the temperature hasn’t changed more than 1.8 degrees in 10,000 years, they need to be accurate within 2 degrees.)
Suiting one’s mind to the facts when they consistently point in a single direction is rationality, not ideology.
You mean like the claim about junk DNA? It was where all the “facts” were consistently pointing (at least after filtered through an ideological view) that much of the genome had no function. This was “consensus science.” And it was wrong. In my opinion, genomics is more advanced that climatology, a relatively recent science.
And yet we’re to believe that these scientists have figured out a complex system like the earth’s climate to such an extent that they can not only filter out man-man causes from natural ones but that they have surpassed the subdiscipline of meteorology, which can’t even tell you what the system will be doing next month, much less next century?
Maybe they have. Maybe climatology is the most advanced field in modern science. Maybe I’m wrong. But even if I’m wrong, its not irrational to be a bit skeptical about the level of the scientific understanding of climate change.
Also, my post wasn’t at all about what actions we should take to deal with this problem, but only about the fact that there is one.
Again, let me clarify that I’m making any claims whether anthropomorphic climate change is real or not. Since we can’t do much about it, I find the topic interesting, but not essential to form an definite opinion about. I’m more of an acognostic—I don’t think we’re smart enough to even know what we don’t know about climatology. As a race we are very advanced technologically. But what we know about science—what we really know, not just think we know—is rather limited. It could be that the scientists claiming that earth is warming are right that the earth is actually warming and that its our fault. I’m just not sure that can be established as an indubitable justified true belief.
I have, however, absolutely no faith in the capacity of the political process to solve it.
We’ll we’re definitely in agreement there. That’s why its sort of like arguing about the orgins of life. It may be fun to debate but its never going to matter too much who is right and who is wrong on the issue.
June 26th, 2009 | 1:30 am
Well our computing power has increased vastly, for one thing, and three and a half decades are a pretty long time to improve our understanding of how to measure the climate and refine the accuracy of our models. Somehow those seem more likely explanations than the “Scientific Establishment Gets Cocky and Erects a Massive Conspiracy” theory.
Again: it depends what you mean by “accurate”, Joe. And no one’s saying that their word be accepted “without dispute”, but only that any dispute be empirically motivated, and not the product of a quasi-Cartesian “skepticism” that seems to crop up whenever it comes to ideologically inconvenient conclusions.
Nonsense. There are countless scientific theories out there that haven’t been proven wrong, and in most cases inadequate scientific theories are built upon rather than thoroughly overturned. What a responsible person does is accept the best theories out there, though with an openness to their being proven wrong.
It was proven wrong by science, Joe, which means that by your epistemic standards it could very well be right. If there were real data suggesting that the consensus view on global warming was wrong, then skepticism would be motivated. But there ain’t, so it’s not.
Compare: I’m not making any claims about whether God exists or not. I find the topic interesting, but not essential to form a definite opinion about. I’m more of an agnostic – I don’t think we’re smart enough even to know what we don’t know about God. Where I’m from, we call that functional atheism. It’s only if your “skepticism” is distinguishable in something other than its label – like, say, some hesitancy in turning to every last move from the anti-AGW handbook – that this sort of claim is anything but a cop out.
June 26th, 2009 | 1:32 am
P.S.
No one ever said “indubitable”.
June 26th, 2009 | 3:06 am
Somehow those seem more likely explanations than the “Scientific Establishment Gets Cocky and Erects a Massive Conspiracy” theory.
Oh, I certainly don’t think it’s a conspiracy. I think its merely the way most people form beliefs: Start with a belief that someone somewhere knows what’s going on (they have too right?) so that we can have confidence that the data has been reviewed and is correct.
The problem is that the climate is too complex a system for anyone to have a thorough understanding of what is going on. Its not something like the genome that can be studied in a lab. The data has to be collected all over the globe—most of the time not by the same individuals who will be drawing inferences from the data. There is no assurance that the data is even being collected in the same way, much less in a way that is sufficient to produce accurate modeling.
Still, they have to go with something so individual scientists pull together their research, add it to others, and make generalized assumptions about what can be known as a whole.
Now think of any field outside of science—politics, sociology, economics—in which this method would provide us with knowledge that we should not doubt (without, of course, being called irrational denialists).
My view is that scientists are humans. We don’t have to ascribe bad motives to them in order to think that they are flawed or that their work may be flawed.
Again: it depends what you mean by “accurate”, Joe. And no one’s saying that their word be accepted “without dispute”, but only that any dispute be empirically motivated, and not the product of a quasi-Cartesian “skepticism” that seems to crop up whenever it comes to ideologically inconvenient conclusions.
For me, the level of accuracy needed in a particular scientific endeavor is determined by the cost of it being wrong. Paleontology, for instance, should have a low threshold since even when its spectacularly wrong, the cost is low. Medical research, in contrast, must be held to a higher standard of accuracy because the damage that can be done.
As science, climatology is—in my view—similar to paleontology. It’s object of study is extraordinarily complex, the process of collecting data difficult, and accurate modeling next to impossible. In other words, we should cut climatologists a lot of slack.
But that doesn’t go for the political side, for the policy implications of their work. Because the cost of implementing policies based on their work—whether they are right or wrong—is so extraordinarily high, they must be held to a higher standard of accuracy—a degree of accuracy I don’t think they can meet.
It was proven wrong by science, Joe, which means that by your epistemic standards it could very well be right.
True, it was. But would it have been if trying to find the function of certain “junk” in the genome was verboten? What if merely believing that their were such functions would get you called “anti-science” and cause you to lose research funding? How long would it have taken for the truth to come out?
If there were real data suggesting that the consensus view on global warming was wrong, then skepticism would be motivated. But there ain’t, so it’s not.
Here’s where you and I disagree: I’m skeptical that scientists even have the ability to collect the data and do the observations needed to form a consensus. Computer modeling is not empirical observation. You can’t input “guesses” into a supercomputer that “models” the earth’s climate and expect to get a significant degree of accuracy. You certainly don’t get the level of accuracy needed to use as a basis for world-changing policies.
Have you even heard some of the dumb ideas that have been posited to correct for global warming?
Compare: I’m not making any claims about whether God exists or not. I find the topic interesting, but not essential to form a definite opinion about. I’m more of an agnostic – I don’t think we’re smart enough even to know what we don’t know about God. Where I’m from, we call that functional atheism.
Refusing to form a conclusion would be agnosticism. Claiming that we don’t have the ability to even know is
acognosticism. The problem with that analogy is that a single individual can collect the data necessary to form and test a hypothesis about God. No single individual could collect the data necessary to develop an informed opinion about the climate. Doubting whether others have the relevant knowledge and ability to form a sufficient opinion is not the same as agnosticism.
It’s only if your “skepticism” is distinguishable in something other than its label – like, say, some hesitancy in turning to every last move from the anti-AGW handbook – that this sort of claim is anything but a cop out.
Honestly, my concern is not about global warming itself. My views on the issue are rather simple:
1) Whether it’s caused by man or not, there is no political solution so we’re likely screwed.
2) Whether it’s caused by man or not, focusing on the issue is likely to distract us from more important concerns—like dealing with pollution.
3) As long as the “solutions” don’t destroy the earth or the world economy, I’m fine with doing whatever the current consensus suggest is necessary. (I can be a team player.)
For me, the real issue is epistemic humility. There are certain topics—human nature, bioengineering, climatology—that are simply too complex for us to grasp at our current stage in history. We don’t even know what we don’t know and pretending otherwise is bound to do long-term, possibly irrevocable, damage. This is the root of my conservatism.
So when we start hearing that we need to start pumping sulfur dioxide into the ozone because the “consensus” is that the earth is heating up and we must act on this knowledge, it makes me want to step in and point out that maybe—just maybe—we don’t know as much as we think we do.
June 26th, 2009 | 11:32 am
Two quick notes: First, there are thousands — yes thousands — of reputable scientists who have put there names to statements, and made statements themselves, to the effect that human activity has very little to do with climate change (which used to be called global warming). The alleged overwhelming consensus does not exist, and anyone who will take time to explore the internet can discover that easily. Even a good many of the “expert reviewers” whose names are on the UN’s original document (and who thus shared the Nobel Prize!) have objected that they had serious reservations about the statement, reservations that were bypassed by the political process which dominated the report.
Second point: The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere does not correlate with temperature changes. whether currently (the CO2 keeps rising while the temperature does not) or, more significantly, in ages past. Some have argued that we are actually in a CO2 deficit now and would be better off (human and plant health) if there were more.
June 27th, 2009 | 6:40 pm
[...] CLIMATE Politics (But Not the Planet) Heat Up …. [...]
July 9th, 2009 | 9:47 pm
To Joe and John –
Has anyone completed a retrospective analysis of the consensus computer models?
To me, the most compelling data against human activity’s predominant impact on climate change is the concurrent output of the models. In the past 5 years of projections of global warming – when actually the earth cooled – the one variable in every model that should have had the largest degree of certainty was CO2 output by human activity. The models may have variables with higher degrees of standard deviations, or variables that are missing altogether, but not that one. Yet in the earliest years of projections, which should have the highest probability of certainty, the models were wrong. What degree of certainty can be expected for a projection of what would occur 20, 50 or 100 years from now?
Has anyone attempted to replicate actual climate change from 1930 to 2009 using the consensus models?
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