Why Climategate doesn’t matter (X)

The series explained.

For some time now, I’ve been trying to figure out how to wrap up this series of blog posts. I can think of no better way than with Ross Douthat’s column in today’s New York Times. Douthat, a conservative, is too grounded in reality to argue anything so stupid as the idea that human-caused climate change doesn’t exist. Instead, he unintentionally traces the devolution of respectable global-warming skepticism.

1. Global warming isn’t real. This position was popular at one time, and you occasionally hear it espoused today, though not by anyone who has spent any time learning about the subject. As has been well-documented, the current decade is the warmest on record, followed by the 1990s and then by the ’80s.

2. Global warming is real, but it’s not our fault. Yes, the earth has been warming and cooling for millennia for reasons that are poorly understood, but that are probably related to solar activity. But the current warming trend is occurring with unusual rapidity. Carbon-dioxide levels are the highest they’ve been since the age of the dinosaurs thanks to emissions from factories, power plants and automobiles, and the science of how CO2 contributes to global warming is well established.

3. Global warming is good for you. Now we have arrived in Douthat Land. After asserting the obvious — “Conservatives who dismiss climate change as a hoax are making a spectacle of their ignorance” — Douthat then goes on to make a spectacle of his own, embracing the views of fringe scientists like Freeman Dyson and others, who claim that even though human-caused global warming is real, we shouldn’t be all that worried about it. Douthat writes:

Their perspective is grounded, in part, on the assumption that a warmer world will also be a richer world — and that economic development is likely to do more for the wretched of the earth than a growth-slowing regulatory regime.

I’m not even going to bother to engage in a debate over whether a hotter planet will be good for us. I think it’s enough that the so-called respectable right, having given up the idea that global warming isn’t taking place, or that humans aren’t contributing to it, have retreated to such an absurd position. If that’s where Douthat and company want to make their stand, they are welcome to it.

And though I am surely not done with writing about climate change, I am done with this series.

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Why Climategate doesn’t matter (IX)

The series explained.

Sharon Begley lays it out:

[N]ot only did British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center of it all, Phil Jones, of scientific impropriety and dishonesty in April, an investigation at Penn State cleared PSU climatologist Michael Mann of “falsifying or suppressing data, intending to delete or conceal e-mails and information, and misusing privileged or confidential information” in February. In perhaps the biggest backpedaling, The Sunday Times of London, which led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of egregious (and probably intentional) errors, retracted its central claim — namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was “unsubstantiated.” The Times also admitted that it had totally twisted the remarks of one forest expert to make it sound as if he agreed that the IPCC had screwed up, when he said no such thing.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

I realize I’m being intellectually dishonest by not pointing out that Al Gore got a massage, but that’s the way it is.

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Richard Lindzen’s curiously unskeptical skepticism

The Boston Globe today fronts a good story by environmental reporter Beth Daley on the feud between MIT scientists Richard Lindzen and Kerry Emanuel. Lindzen, who is described as a global-warming skeptic, has had something of a falling-out with Emanuel over the latter’s rising fame resulting from his advocating strong steps to combat climate change.

No story about Lindzen’s so-called skepticism, though, would be complete without a reference to his classic 2007 essay for Newsweek, in which he revealed himself not to be a skeptic but, rather, someone who thinks global warming could prove to be a boon. The piece is no longer available on on the open Web, so allow me to quote from it at some length. Here are the highlights:

There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it?…

A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now….

Is there any point in pretending that CO2 increases will be catastrophic? Or could they be modest and on balance beneficial? India has warmed during the second half of the 20th century, and agricultural output has increased greatly. Infectious diseases like malaria are a matter not so much of temperature as poverty and public-health policies (like eliminating DDT). Exposure to cold is generally found to be both more dangerous and less comfortable.

OK, I’m being selective. Lindzen does write that his reading of the evidence shows human-caused climate change is less severe than most scientists believe, and that the climate models used to predict catastrophic global warming are inherently unreliable. He discusses that in more detail in the Wall Street Journal piece that Daley mentions.

But, at root, Lindzen the “skeptic” believes that the earth is warming, and that human activity is contributing to that warming. Nor do we have to worry about warming-related disease — all we need is the guts to bring back DDT.

Lindzen is free to believe anything he likes. But his opinions and political beliefs are not science.

Was the moon landing faked, too?

What do global-warming deniers have in common with creationists? More than you might think. They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five.

Moving beyond Al Gore

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that Al Gore, his admirable qualities notwithstanding, has used up his political capital when it comes to climate change. By contrast, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina offers the hope of substantive progress.

Why liberals are condescending

In my latest for the Guardian, I find myself agreeing with Gerard Alexander’s essay in the Washington Post that liberals are condescending. But it’s hard not to be when many on the other side reject evolution, think global warming is a hoax and believe President Obama was not born in the United States.

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (VIII)

Henry David Thoreau

The series explained.

Since the 1850s, when Henry David Thoreau was living at Walden Pond, the mean annual temperature in the Concord area has risen by 4.3 degrees. And that warming has had an effect.

According to a study by scientists from Harvard University and other research institutions, 27 percent of the native plant species that Thoreau documented have gone missing, and another 36 percent are under threat, Carolyn Johnson reports in the Boston Globe.

Explains researcher Charles Davis, quoted by Harvard Magazine: “Climate change will lead to an as-yet unknown shuffling of species, and it appears that invasive species will become more dominant.”

What makes the situation at Walden unusual is that Thoreau kept meticulous records, making it possible for scientists to document changes in ways that just can’t be done in most parts of the country. As University of Wisconsin researcher Mark Schwartz told Wired.com back in 2008, when the study was being conducted:

Whenever you have an opportunity to get a dataset where someone who has made very careful efforts to observe things in a systematic way, it gives you a snapshot of a particular time period and lets you make comparisons.

And before you say “global warming is good for you,” take a look at this assessment from Harvard scientist Davis:

Invasive species can be intensely destructive to biodiversity, ecosystem function, agriculture, and human health. In the United States alone the estimated annual cost of invasive species exceeds $120 billion. Our results could help in developing predictive models to assess the threat of future invasive species, which may become greatly exacerbated in the face of continued climate change.

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Why Climategate doesn’t matter (VII)

Click on photo for GlobalPost slideshow

The series explained.

Ashar Chor, an island that’s part of the desperately poor nation of Bangladesh, is literally drowning, as rising seas eat away at the shore. Within 25 to 30 years, according to GlobalPost, the island could be gone.

“Ten years ago we lived three kilometers farther out to what is now sea, but now we have to move our houses back once or twice a year as the sea takes more of the island,” according to Deb Mondol, described in the GlobalPost report as someone who has worked on the island for 15 years.

The GlobalPost report consists mainly of a photo essay by Khaled Hasan, who provides graphic evidence of Ashar Chor’s watery fate. But the island is far from being the only part of Bangladesh being affected by global warming. Earlier this year, Anuj Chopra wrote in U.S. News & World Report that Bangladesh’s fresh water is being contaminated by sea water, ruining drinking-water supplies and rice paddies.

Bangladesh has been identified by the Global Climate Risk Index as the country most threatened by climate change. But unlike rising industrial powerhouses like China and India, whose output of carbon dioxide rivals that of the United States, Bangladesh contributes very little to global warming. In 2008 Fakhruddin Ahmed, the then-head of Bangladesh’s interim government, was quoted in the Guardian:

There is every reason to feel angry and upset. The least developed are suffering the most. It is unfair. We are suffering the most from climate change, but we did not contribute [to it] at all. We are prepared to do our part, but we require, and demand, access to a large amount of investment, resources and technologies that will be needed to adapt.

According to GlobalPost, Bangladesh has asked that the industrialized countries reduce their CO2 emissions by as much as 40 percent over the next 15 years — a goal that is almost certainly unattainable. Yet if the reduction is not achieved, Ashar Chor may disappear. And the suffering of Bangladesh will grow.

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Green hypocrites

From the you-can’t-make-this-up department: U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, has filed a bill that would prevent solar panels and wind farms from being built in the Mojave Desert. I hope this wrecks her 92 percent rating from the League of Conservation Voters.

Meanwhile, one of Feinstein’s principal critics is the noted environmentalist (and would-be Mojave developer) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who says, “This is arguably the best solar land in the world, and Sen. Feinstein shouldn’t be allowed to take this land off the table without a proper and scientific environmental review.”

No, she shouldn’t. But if you recall, Kennedy — like other members of his family, including, unfortunately, his late uncle Ted — has been a staunch opponent of Cape Wind, our very own Mojave Desert when it comes to untapped energy potential.

OK, here’s where I could say something snarky about “environmentalists.” Sorry. The vast majority of environmentalists favor clean energy projects of all stripes, most definitely including Cape Wind. But save us, please, from politicians and celebrities.

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (VI)

Adélie penguin

The series explained.

In the current issue of the New Yorker, the environmental journalist Fen Montaigne reports on the decline of the Adélie penguin in the northwest Antarctic Peninsula — a decline directly traceable to a catastrophic loss of sea ice in recent decades, compounded by an increase in snowfall, which interferes with the penguins’ ability to protect their eggs.

Unfortunately, the article is not online, though you can listen to Montaigne talk about it here and here. But Montaigne includes a litany of disturbing statistics in his report:

• The average annual temperature in the region is nearly 5 degrees warmer today than it was in 1951.
• Winter temperatures have risen 11 degrees during the past 60 years, an increase that is five times higher than the worldwide average.
• Sea ice off the peninsula arrives 54 days later in the fall and melts 31 days sooner in the spring than was the case in 1979.
• Eighty-seven percent of the glaciers along the Antarctic Peninsula are retreating.

Although the Adélie population has collapsed in the warmer parts of Antarctica, the penguins continue to thrive in colder regions. But if the warming trends continue, extinction is a real possibility.

The problem, according to Bill Fraser, the research scientist who is Montaigne’s principal source (and the subject of a book Montaigne is writing), is that changes that might normally take place over the course of centuries are instead being compressed into a few decades, making it impossible for the Adélies to adapt.

“What we’re looking at here is an entire ecosystem that is changing, and it’s not changing in hundreds of years, which is what we used to be taught,” Fraser tells Montaigne. “It’s changed so quickly that it has encompassed the research lives of a few people who have spent a lifetime here.”

Addendum: In an earlier installment, I noted that Sarah Palin was rather late to global-warming skepticism. As it turns out, her move to the far right on this issue was considerably more dramatic than I had realized. Check out these quotes from September 2007, when she signed an order creating a panel to prepare for climate change. Said the then-Alaska governor:

Many scientists note that Alaska’s climate is changing. We are already seeing the effects. Coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice and record forest fires affect our communities and our infrastructure. Some scientists tell us to expect more changes in the future. We must begin to prepare for those changes now.

Of course, Palin in 2007 was not as interested in impressing the Republican right as she is today.

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Photo (cc) by Robert Nunn and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.