KAZ in Wonderland

Part 2 in my response to the Key-words blog:

MacIntyre posted the following: KAZ Kills Scientific American's "Global Warming Certainty..."

In response to this : Two More Pundits Whistle Past the Graveyard by John Rennie

Which was a response to this: Samuelson & The Nature Fallacy by Jonah Goldberg

Convoluted enough? OK, here we go ...

MacI * Let's start with the very tone ... arguments must be as terrifying as possible."

Maybe it amused the author to say this, but it's irrelevant.

MacI * Refusing to accept the example for the sake of argument: ... "

Rennie is quite clear in that he rejects the "what if" because it is meaningless and irrelevant to whether climate change is real or not. If MacIntyre feels he should have accepted it he has to show that it was in some way relevant.

That would be quite the rhetorical feat as Rennie is correct, the example is totally irrelevant, so MacIntyre wanders off into some even more irrelevant (if it were possible) comparisons to the Inquistion. As Alice said in Wonderland, "curiousor and curiousor."

Aside: It is fascinating how often the climate deniers cast themselves as Galilean heros oppressed by by a powerful, misguided old order. The irony is that actually they are the defenders of the old orthodoxy supported by the powerful corporate interests. At a different time it is they who would have called for Galileo's damnation for upsetting the old order.

Rennie: Specifically, in Goldberg's hypothetical world, if the global warming is purely natural, then it must be caused by solar activity, orbital perturbations or similar phenomena.

MacI * No. It could be from any number of other sources as yet undetermined, including a natural increase in CO2.

Actually Goldberg says "(i.e. from sunspots or some such)?", so Rennie is correct.

Rennie: Conversely, though, one of the following must also then be true about the huge quantities of CO2 that humans have introduced into the atmosphere.

The CO2 is simply not there (in which case industrial development in Goldberg's world is very different from that in ours).

Or the CO2 exists but does not have greenhouse effects (in which case the physics of Goldberg's world is very different from ours).

MacI: * Absolutely untrue, yet again. In fact, the pseudoscientific assumptions involved in this false dichotomy are pretty damning, as well. The natural system which has created a self-maintaining balance in the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, first of all, enforces its own level of CO2. It isn't some wild accident that we hit upon the level we already had, with the level changing wildly every time CO2 production changed throughout natural history. Instead, when CO2 production increases, its absorbtion into the ocean also increases. Water naturally aborbs CO2 and naturally expels O2. What's more, infinitesimal increases in CO2 presence in water cause the blue-green algae there to increase their activity, of course, which increases CO2 consumption.

The retort above takes NONE of that into account, as if we live in a zero sum game where all anthropogenic CO2 production increases must stay in the atmosphere and build up. That brings into question the basic knowledge of the author about the topic at hand.

Actually it brings into question MacIntyre's basic knowledge. The oceans absorb some of the CO2 if there is more added to the atmosphere, and releases some if CO2 is removed from the atmosphere. If you add CO2 or other greenhouse gasses to either the oceans or the atmosphere a portion of it will move to or remain in the atmosphere. Basic chemical equilibrium cf Grade 10 again.

Further, MacIntyre implies that the oceans are the principle regulator of historical CO2 levels. They have acted as a short term damper of wild perturbations, but the biosphere has been the principle agent removing carbon from the atmosphere and putting it into geological storage. Here again this is climate change 101 found in any introductory pamphlet.

However, MacIntyre does say "The natural system which has created a self-maintaining balance..." which is true. What he neglects to add is that those natural systems have been seriously degraded and no longer function at anywhere near the capacity they once did. Up until WWII only 6% of the world's forests had been destroyed, since it has risen to 1/3rd destroyed and a further 1/3rd seriously degraded. What remains is at serious risk from the twin assaults of continued human activity and climate change itself.

MacI: Not only do variations in CO2 production get damped naturally by the self-balancing nitrogen cycle, but the author also fails to address the possibility of variation within the cycle, itself. ANY kind of factor involved in the conversion of CO2 to O2 could be naturally changing, so that the balance level of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. If, for example, blue-green algae, which comprise nearly all of the important part of the cycle (rain forests, for example, consume more O2 than they produce, and create more CO2 than they consume) , could have some natural, long-term cycle of activity which is now on the decline, so that they would be striking a CO2 balance in the atmosphere that would increase even if humans didn't exist.

Here MacIntyre seems to conflate the oceans and the algae that inhabit them; sloppy to mix up biological and geophysical factors, but his comments about the capacity of the oceans to absorb CO2 makes slightly more sense in the light.

MacI: The levels of CO2 certainly have gone up and down in the past, before humans were part of the equasion.

No one claims they haven't, so what's your point? There have been any number of historical events such as meteor strikes and massive volcanic eruptions that disturbed the system and led to massive die offs ... that is part of the evidence we have for how catastrophic climate change can be.

Rennie: But if either of those is true, we humans have lost significant leverage on climate change. We can't change the sun's radiance or the Earth's orbit. Maybe we could throw more aerosols into the atmosphere to try to reflect away more solar radiation but we don't know much about how to calibrate the effects and there could be other environmental consequences of such an action that might be unwelcome

MacI: Wow...suddenly the author sounds almost like a scientist. A real scientist would say, of any claim that we can control the atmosphere and should take action to force its control, "this is a chaos system, and we don't have the science sufficient to make any more than the wildest guess at what effect our forced changes would have".

As with some of his points there is a half-truth lurking in there. We have a very clear idea of what our forced changes are doing to the atmosphere and real scientists acknowledge it - it's called climate change. The part that IS true is that we understand the system too poorly to have much idea of what the consequences of playing around with aerosols, cloud generation, and all the other Rube Goldberg schemes that techophiliacs are advocating. "More of what caused the problem" is never the solution.

MacI: And yet that's precisely what those claiming there is definitely anthropogenic climate change, and that we must violate the economic liberties of everyone in order to force eggs-in-one-basket "fixes" of it, are failing to do. They are claiming they CAN predict the effects of coerced change, and that they SHOULD take huge, active steps to "control" the atmosphere, as if they had the slightest idea of the consequences.

We have a very clear idea of the impact of reducing carbon emissions, it would slow, although not stop, climate change.

MacI: Indeed, perhaps our forced "environmental protections" up to now HAVE caused any increase in the global mean that is occurring. This would explain why it originated with surface temperatures, instead of oceanic and atmospheric temps as global warming would. Perhaps, as has been recently introduced into the climate discussion scientifically, our pollution was cooling the atmosphere via Global Dimming, and having forced cuts in "pollution" has caused an increase in the global mean.

It is true that in the short term dimming can mitigate the effects of CO2 increases, but it is disingenuous not to point out that in the medium term the dimming either ceases to be effective or must be so intense as to cause the collapse of natural systems, which in turn results in the collapse of the societies creating the pollutants supporting the dimming. At that point you get total social collapse AND climate change. Excuse me if I do not see that as desirable, or even remotely sane.

MacI: If we should consider forcing everyone to cut their society-beneficial increases in energy use "just in case", perhaps we should LIFT the economically damaging pollution controls which were imposed "just in case" in the past, which reduced the amount of head reflection in our atmosphere.

Why, one wonders, do all the solutions demanded happen to err on the side of socialist control of our choices? Why does the logic used suddenly flip on its head when the solution might INCREASE freedom instead of violate it?

Here is a fascinating case of reverse libertarianism. It is OK for one group to wreck everyones planet, but not OK for some to object. It's as if I go into a guys home and start stealing everything in sight, and then scream that he is infringing on my rights if he attempts in any way to stop me. He is interfering with my economic liberties!

Rennie: Not adjusting climate isn't really an option for us anymore; we're stuck with trying to moderate our influence and hope for the best.

MacI: If there's anything more arrogant...and ignorantly foolish...than glibly affecting the climate without thinking about it, that would be imagining we can intentionally do it and somehow make things better instead of worse.

So having discovered that beating your kids with iron rods is crippling them, it would be arrogant and foolish to stop? Rennie is not advocating more interference, he is explicitly calling for less. "Ignorantly foolish" should be reserved for suggesting that having learned that something is highly damaging you just keep doing it, as you are suggesting.

Rennie: Sullivan rushes for comfort into the arms of scientist skeptics like Richard Lindzen when he knows that Lindzen's position is very much at odds with the climatological consensus--the "objective, empirical judgment" he says we should heed.

MacI: Ah, but I know firsthand that it is NOT objective.

It is driven by Fear Equals Funding, which is an openly touted creedo in the halls of government-funded science.

When I was a consultant in DC, I had a friend who was head scientist on a major environmental project, one key to "proving" that global warming and ozone depletion were as you would claim.

Science does not "prove" anything, it merely gathers and interprets data, formulates hypothesis and then seeks to disprove them.

Ironically, HE did not believe in anthropogenic global warming, nor in most of the nonsense around ozone depletion. He said, in fact, that his project's results were invariably disproving them.

Yet the published results of his project either supported, or were neutral to, those two issues. Why? Because he said that if he did NOT massage the data to protect global warming and ozone depletion, he could not get the paper past peer review, no matter how sound his methodology. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" translates to "if you claim something that we don't like, we will pick it apart in any way possible, whereas if you want to publish something which supports our beliefs, we will simply make sure there are no gaping issues". Peer review becomes, as one would think it must naturally in a coercive system, a tool of censorship and agenda-control.

If true, then this was clearly wrong. Since you do not give details it is not possible to assess, but it may have happened. However I know from personal experience that you reject all kinds of crap science based on methodology and the author always claims it is because they broke from orthodoxy.

However, I can't help but feel there something odd here. It seems to me that it is surprising that at least some of the scientists you allege have not gone to the media with their experience. After all, there is both a number of ideologically motivated journalists eager to discredit climate change (see those cited at key-words blog for a partial list) and significant cash rewards for doing so (see links below). So why have none come forward with their tale of oppression? or if they have, why have the media so eager to discredit climate change not published their story?

And of course we now know that there has been massive, chronic interfernce in scientific work in an attempt by the Bush administration to suppress evidence of climate change.

I have to wonder how many OTHER scientists out there in the 700+ papers famously agreeing on global warming were written by people who simply didn't want their project punished for the real results. Certainly the pretense that it was 900+ papers in a row without a SINGLE one published against is bogus, as at least a whole series in the middle of it...those of his government project...would have been against, ruining the (already inevitably symptomatic of some censorship problem) perfection of the record.

So you would suspect a series of papers that all supported gravity because such a run is not believable? As noted, we only have your say so as to your friends competence. It may or may not be so.

Rennie: The irony of Sullivan stretching for scientific justification is that he himself draws a parallel with the the Iran "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco but doesn't take the lesson. Matt Stoller has had the pithiest response to that:

MacI: The retorts to this ignore the REAL parallel, the methodological and rational ones which do not require such a laughable appeal to authority as "our funding-driven, suspiciously PERFECT consensus is superior to your government-driven opposition":

I think you mean "government driven fixing of the results". See the above link - the interference with science has been overwhelmingly by the Bush administration to suppress evidence of climate change. Is there any chance that your friend was part of an agency that had the courage to not give in to the pressure.

MacI: Real logic NEVER says "we will ASSume this is true because of the scaryness of the outcome". That's neither scientific nor rational. The public sheep are more likely to assume you guilty in proportion to the seriousness of the accusation.

And where did you get that from? please cite who is saying this and where they say it.

An accused child molester, if he is hithero unknown to the public, is presumed guilty and subject to lynching-style outcry.

The Bush League, likewise, argued "IF Iraq had WMD, and IF they gave them to their mortal enemies in Al Qaeda, and IF Al Qaeda somehow got them into the states, then this would be horrible, therefore we must attack"

They banked on fear to overcome our correct opposition to coercion and any weighing of the odds.

Ahhh, you weren't talking about climate change. OK, I agree with you on this point, although it has nothing to do with the topic.

MacI: Scientists aren't supposed to be like that.

And yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

And yet, because our "scientific" community is driven by fund-questing more corrupting that profit motive, this kind of "it sounds so bad that we should violate people in order to give my project power" has become the standard means of acheiving success in many scientific fields.

Again ironic that you suggest that scientists supported climate change because they could get more funding that way, when in fact the exact opposite has been the case. The Bush administration has tried to support anything that questions climate change either directly or through foundations such as the American Enterprise Institute, and the oil industry has been throwing money hand over fist at anyone who will attack climate change. Apparently 30 pieces of silver now translates to $10,000 US. (Brits got a better deal, 10,000 pounds).

To their credit most scientists balked at prostituting themselves like this, except for a tiny handful of hacks who prefer to be referred to as "skeptics".

When I was consulting for NOAA, I asked one of the actual organization executives why their website on El Nino focused solely on its ostensible negative effects, ignoring completely the NET result of El Nino, which is lower property damage and life loss in the US (because it actually produces milder winters, here). His response was, literally, "Yeah, but you can't justify your budget by telling people something WON'T hurt them".

Likewise during my time with NASA, I was given exactly that explanation for the "impending asteroid impact" spin. It was necessary for funding, though of course everyone there knows it's so laughably unlikely that we should be more worried about bigfoot (a comparison seriously made).

I regularly heard actual scientists (and others working on their projects) in DC say "Fear Equals Funding". This is their creedo.

Sad if true. It was certainly not my experience in either the University system or working for a different government.

You can no more trust a publically funded scientist saying what will bring him the most money than you can trust a tobacco scientist with exactly the same motive.

Again the irony that it is the climate deniers who have been funded by both the oil industry and the Bush Administration. Your point is correct, you've just got the wrong group.

--
Words of the Sentient:

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has. -- William Burroughs

And how is the world that I and my children must inhabit not my business? It, more than anything else, is my primary responsibility and business.

Anyway, in sum: as with the previous article there is nothing offered here that in any way contradicts or refutes climate change. There is mention of one anecdote that would be an unfortunate corruption of the scientific process, if true, but that hardly constitutes evidence.

For the most part this whole "KAZ" piece is a rant against the corruption of science, but which mistakenly assumes that the climate deniers are the downtrodden, when in fact it is they who have been corrupt and corrupted.