Last gasps for global warming “disinformation?”
Photo: bondidwhat.
Scientists have been talking for decades about the potential for human activities to create a warmer world.
Yet, in recent years, the scientific evidence for global warming has seemed controversial. Here’s climate scientist Michael Mann at Penn State University.
Michael Mann: There are a number of so-called organizations. A lot of them, their funding can be traced back to the same fossil fuel corporations. And these quote-unquote organizations, they’re often not much more than a P.O. box and an individual or two who are behind them.
Mann calls this “disinformation” – and he said he believes the disinformation trend about global warming is ending.
Michael Mann: I’m pleased and many of us are pleased to see that Exxon Mobil has announced that they are no longer going to provide funding for many of these organizations – and this was actually detailed in an extensive report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. So we shouldn’t be surprised that there’ll be some talking heads out there. We’re going to see some of that. There’s no question. And it’s important for us to keep in mind that we’re probably seeing the last gasps of this disinformation effort that I think is probably in it’s tail end now that the science just has become ever more strong as time has gone on.
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Scientists report documents ExxonMobil’s tobacco-like disinformation campaign on global warming science The report indicates that the oil company “spent nearly $16 million to fund skeptic groups, create confusion.” From the Union of Concerned Scientists (Jan. 3, 2007)
Our thanks to:
Michael Mann
Director of Earth System Science Center, Professor of Meteorology and Geosciences
Pennsylvania State University
Dear Friends,
In one way, it seems simple.
Say YES to good but imperfect science and great scientists with “feet of clay” like Dr. Michael Mann, Dr. Jeffrey McNeely, Dr. Albert Bartlett, Dr. Joseph Baker, Dr. E. O. Wilson, Dr. Ernst von Weizsaecker, Dr. Mickey Glantz, Dr. John Guillebaud, Dr. William E. Rees, Dr. James Lovelock, Dr. Seti Shastrapradja, Dr. Michael Shelby, Dr. Humam Ghgassib, Dr. Walter Kistler, Dame Jane Goodall, HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal and so many unheralded others who have assumed their certain responsibility support good science as perfectly as they are able.
Say NO to the politicians, economists and demographers; NO to these and other masters of the universe and their minions; NO to the power-brokers, pundits and superstars of the erstwhile ‘only game in town’ known as an unbridled global political economy; NO to the seemingly endless expansion of economic globalization promoted ubiquitously by the mass media and sponsored by “deep, virtually bottomless pockets,” the likes of Exxon, ADM, the late Enron, Halliburton, Monsanto and hundreds of other gigantic, multi-billion dollar business enterprises now overspreading the surface of Earth.
Sincerely,
Steve
Thank you, Steve for clearly exposing the political agenda behind your support of global warming.
And thanks to Earth & Sky for providing a good chuckle on my way to work this morning. Hearing Michael Mann accuse others of “disinformation” regarding global warming was quite hilarious.
Dear Mark P,
Forgive me for being poorly equipped as a communicator.
What I was trying to present above has not to do with a political agenda, despite what you seem to see in my words. My support is of good science and for the people who appear to be adequately discharging their responsibilities as scientists. Certainly, these scientists to whom I make reference do not intentionally mislead the public by discrediting good scientific data; they do not select certain data and exclude other relevant data when examining research; they eschew blatant misrepresentations of peer-reviewed evidence; and they do not foment needless arguments and spread uncertainty.
How politicians, economists and demographers in our time are discharging their responsibilities to science is unclear to me.
How the masters of the universe discharge their responsibilities to science is a subject about which I am prepared to make a guess.
Good science is what it is and has not to do with magical thinking, confused reasoning, misperception, political convenience, economic expediency, social agendas et cetera.
Hopefully, these additional comments are helpful. I look forward to hearing from you again.
Sincerely,
Steve
“...Exxon Mobil has announced that they are no longer going to provide funding for many of these organizations”.
??? – http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2004230,00.html
Please look at this website.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/popup.htm
There is not consensus that human caused global warming exists. This is a hoax being perpetrated by those who wish to control human activity. If you allow the governments to take your liberty and destroy your economy, the future will be dark indeed. The earth will continue to warm and cool at its whim. You just will have no life to speak of. Those who will control humanity know nothing about anything other than politics. The dark ages could easily be revisited.
Hello Ben. I looked in several dictionaries, and in most of them found that the definition for “consensus” means “general agreement.”
By that definition, there is a consensus among climate scientists that human-caused global warming exists. There’s been a consensus or general agreement for many years now. The recent report by the IPCC is just the latest expression of the scientific consensus that global warming is real, and that humans play a primary role.
I’m not sure, but I believe the link you gave – from canadafreepress.com – is one of the organizations funded by Exxon. I tried checking their website to confirm that, but could not access their “about” page.
Dear Monaxle,
The Exxon acknowledgement comes very late in the game, but as the adage goes, “Better late than never.” This one gigantic corporation is not more than the tip of an iceberg. Billions of dollars are being spent by many huge business enterprises to prop up the world’s infinitely growing political economy. To the masters of the universe who underwrite the ubiquitous “disinformation” activities, what matters is the success of their trickle down economic system. In their thinly-veiled economic pyramid scheme, most of the wealth goes to them and to millions of their minions, while billions of human beings worldwide, and out of sight, are left in destitute circumstances without substantial subsistence. That this system of unbridled economic expansion and the unrestrained per human consumption by “the wealthy few” of limited resources in a finite world is patently unsustainable is not something the masters of the universe want anyone to talk about.
I trust you see that our silence and their denial of good science makes them golden.
Oh, please, to all of this. It hasn’t been THAT many decades since the scare-of-the-moment was global COOLING.
Hello Keith, there was never a global cooling scare, at least not in the past several decades. Im not sure where or how that story began circulating, but it isnt true.
The truth is that, in the 1970s, scientists became confident about their belief that ice ages have an astronomical origin. In other words, a combination of cycles related to Earths orbit and spin combine to cause ice ages to come and go. These are called the Milankovitch cycles. Its true that, in the 1970s, stories circulated that another ice age was on the way. But on the way meant 10,000 years from now. This was a big deal then! No one felt very confident before that that ice ages were cyclical. So scientists were pleased and proud to have figured that out.
But no one felt scared of an ice age due in 10,000 years. There was no global cooling scare. I know people sometimes say that now. But its just not so.
I was there, and I remember.
All the best,
Deborah
Perhaps I am one of many elders in a not-so-great generation who are playing out a patently unsustainable endgame with the global political economy by acting as if it is the only game in town.
Except for the masters of the universe, few people are apparently aware that my ‘omega’ generation could be the latest group of proverbial “builders” of a modern-day Tower of Babel….....now nearing the end of its construction.
Why is money from the leftist PEW Charitable Trust better than money from Exxon-Mobil? Mann’s hockey stick has been debunked. That anthropogenic global warming is a hoax is evidenced by the fact that its supporters are no longer debating the science but have been reduced to supercilious name calling.
Funny that especially americans think that global warming is fake. Everyone else in the world agrees that we destroy the earth. America has 5% of world population , but cause 25 % (!!!!) of the worlds pollution. No wonder they want to think that is does not exist. One of the first things that bush when he became president was to quit the climate conference. Isn’t that noble?
The unrestrained consumption of finite resources in a finite world is unsustainable. It is something that “the powers that be” (oil companies and their allies) do not want anyone to know about. Peak Oil is No. 1 on the list. Give them credit for a masterful job of disinformation on these two world changing events (Peak Oil and Global Warming) that we are about to unleash on our children.
In fact it started Dec 2006 See the report on MSN Money.
http://video.msn.com/v/us/Money.htm?g=F527978A-B4ED-4F2F-92FC-50DEECC1C999&t=s216&f=15/64jubak&p=hotvideo_money%20top%20ten&fg=
If you google global ice age you will find many articles regarding the natural warming an cooling of the planet. The more i read the more i am convinced that the global warming scare is just that, a scare. Sure the planet is warming but according to many scientist this is as natural as rain fall. So I will continue to ignore the “chicken little, the sky is falling” approach.
Martin,
You might want to do another google search, putting in the words “carbon dioxide, parts per million.”
Bruce, I already did. Are you aware that carbon dioxide levels have been much higher than they are now and fluctuate from lows as low as 200ppm to over 2000 ppm and these fluctuation occurred over 18,000 years ago before we all had cars to drive. Read up my friend.
I was very disappointed in this edition because it did not define disinformation, but rather painted all dissent from the currently popular view as disinformation. Opponents of the current view were all dismissed as “talking heads” or it was implied that anybody diverging from Dr. Mann’s view were simply corporate shills.
That is BAD science. Science is, above all, about questioning and skepticism. Challenge everything. It’s currently quite politically hazardous to question human-caused global warming: it would be political suicide for any politician outside the US to question it, and it’s becoming that way inside the US as well. So its even more the duty of scientists to step up and ask hard questions.
My understanding of the current state of understanding is that there is little question the globe is warming, but a diversity of opinions on what is causing it. The strongest hypothesis is that it is human burning of hydrocarbons that is the primary cause. Being the strongest hypothesis does not make it above questioning, as Dr. Mann seems (at least in these soundbites) to believe.
Let me think about this for a minute.
Back in the beginning of the global warming issue, many corporations and republicans (mostly) said, “global warming is not happening and the science behind it is flawed”. Then the saying was changed to, “global warming might be happening but there is no proof that this is a man made event”. Then it was changed yet again to, “global warming is happening, but mans part in it is minimal”. Later still, the argument changed to “global warming is probably occurring and it’s is probably mans fault, but it might not be that bad”. Finally, after running out of excuses everyone admits that global warming is occurring and that it is mans fault, but the deniers are yelling one last battle cry.
“Global warming is mans fault, it will cause problems worldwide and it will hurt many more than people than it will help, but the cost to correct the problem is too much. Even if we were to incur the costs now, we wont see the benefits because it will take hundreds of years.
I can only hope that our grand children will understand that what we did was for OUR own good. We screwed them, so that we could live our lives without worrying about how it affects others and we let them carry the costs to correct our mistakes. Kind of like Medicare and Social Security, but I am sure that they will understand our greed.
Hello everyone, we just posted our entire interview with Michael Man as the first podcast in Earth & Sky’s new Clear Voices podcast series. You’ll find it here.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/060407.html
“Are you aware that carbon dioxide levels have been much higher than they are now and fluctuate from lows as low as 200 ppm to over 2000 ppm and these fluctuations occured over 18,000 years ago?”
No, Martin, I have to confess that I am not aware of the fact. It’s my understanding that CO2 levels are higher now than they have been in the last 600,000 years and that this exponential increase is greatly due to human activity.
All my life I have interest in a wide range of sciences and of course in more recent years Ive had some particular interest in the sciences involved concerning global warming. Ive read and continue to read many reports on the subject and listen very closely to reports presented on television and other media. And what I find disappointing about what I observe is the narrow focus generally taken when coming to conclusions about whats involved in significant global temperature changes.
For example, there are those who will point to the CO2 levels and its correlation to global temperature changes and the amount of CO2 we all put into our atmosphere. No doubt that the science confirms that humans are contributing to this at higher levels that ever, but the real issue is to what extent on a global basis. Is it 80%, 50%, 25%, 2% or a fraction of 1%? Ive not seen any comprehensive science that has actually given a good answer as yet. How much do the oceans contribute; how much does world wide organic decomposition contribute; how much do volcanic activity contribute; how much does our Sun and its own weather cycle contribute; how much might the tides of the earths mantel effect it or any changes in the earths magnetosphere? Etc. etc.
There is much that affects our earths short term and long term global weather patterns and I just dont see any science that has yet encapsulated much of what involved in our very complex global weather systems. What I do see is something that is very common about we humans of the present as in the past, which is much fear being generated from conclusions based on what little we happen to learn in the short term with no real understanding of the whole picture.
A thought I recently had of my own had to do with concern over the polar ice caps melting away and that having some contrition to global warming. So, if we lose the reflective effect of the ice caps, well have more liquid water on the face of the earth. And if the oceans the atmosphere tend to be warmer, it seems to me there would be more evaporation of that water into the atmosphere, which would seem to me to create more average annual cloud cover. Wouldnt that cloud cover, besides some of the additional storms that may be involved, also provide a similar reflective effect that the polar ice caps did. And so, I might argue that the earth has more than one way to regulate its global temperatures to sustain life . . . even human life. Whatever set of conditions that is causing the polar ice caps to melt, its not something that began over-night. . . even in geological terms. As in the past, the earth will take care of itself and as our ancient relatives had to do, well have to learn to adjust as best we can. And interestingly I feel, we don’t have as much control as we like to believe. ;-)
Theres nothing to fear except fear itself.
Was it just me or does anyone else think there was some irony in Michael Mann dissing everyone who ever doubted the CO2 Global warming theory.
Seems to me that trying to dismiss them by associating all of them with oil and gas lobby groups (like there’s no environmental lobby groups ,self interest or conflict of interest on the other side) when its his contribution to the IPCC panel (the Mann hockey stick) that has been totally trashed by interested reviewers is a little disingenuous at best.
Interesting that a guy who professes to be so interested in science won’t make his data available to other groups to review.
Hopefully if the Earth and Sky is truly about science and not one of those environmental lobby groups they will invite real scientists who have alternative views and the research to back them up on the show for their side of the story.
I might be what’ja call a diabetic, but I’m goin’ eat sugar anyway. I know for a fact that sugar in my bloodstream is as natural as carbon dioxide in the air. If you look at the big picture – like I do – there’s no denyin’ that sugar and CO2 levels always go up and down over the long course of geologic time. It’s just part of the natural cycle, so it’s important for you to realize how utterly insignificant any so-called spike in blood sugar or CO2 emissions is when you look beyond the here and now. Don’t ya know Nature’s omnipotent, self-correcting cycles totally trump puny human endeavors and aspirations? Live life with impunity, and don’t be too concerned with lifestyle change, because nothin’ you do matters anyhow. And don’t be selfish, like those self-serving scientists who perpetuate the global warming hoax to line their pockets!
To Bruce Mcfarlane … Earth & Sky is about science, not politics. We understand that a handful of scientists do not agree with the IPCC’s position that global warming is occurring now, with humans as a primary cause. We have included in our recent line-up of global warming content one piece by a well-known global warming skeptic John Christy to acknowledge the fact that there are some who still disagree with the severity of the situation. You will never get ALL scientists to agree on anything.
But as a voice for true science, Earth & Sky has now had to take a stand on this issue, like the thousands of scientists who are now also speaking out.
The vast majority of scientists DO believe that Earth is warming and that humans are a primary cause.
To believe otherwise is to believe an information “machine” that was set in motion several years ago to create a false controversy.
As a science writer for 30 years who has covered this subject since the 1970s, I watched this false controversy unfold with my own eyes.
Global warming has been discussed in the science community for decades. Scientists were predicting in the 1970s that human activities were causing Earth to get warmer. And now Earth is getting warmer.
Please open your mind to this reality. It IS a reality.
Deborah
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this.
In the 1970s someone said carbon dioxide would make the world warmer. The world is warmer, therefore carbon dioxide is to blame.
The world is warmer. Every major dataset says that, including the data published by John Christy and Roy Spencer. (Although from 1978 into the late ’90s there was a flat line trend.)
Increasing carbon dioxide levels should make the world warmer and there is more CO2 in the air now than there was 150 years ago.
But how much warmer? And what portion of the warming that we see is due to CO2 and what portion is due to natural causes?
The question I raised in an earlier discussion of this issue still hasn’t been answered: Who is willing to say what Earth’s climate should be doing if it weren’t for human intervention? Should it be cooling? Warming? If so, by how much? (The climate hasn’t been stable for more than a million years, so it probably shouldn’t be stable now.) And, most importantly, would that natural climate change be better or worse than the human enhanced change we’re seeing now?
I could be mistaken, but I think the answers to those basic questions should have some bearing on our environmental priorities.
Climate change is a reality. It has been for hundreds of thousands of years. We should be concerned about pollution and sustainable energy supplies, but that doesn’t mean we can stabilize the climate. The climate isn’t stable, it isn’t likely to become stable any time in the foreseeable future, and there is no scientific reason to believe we can change that.
That is also reality. Until we can begin to put our effects on the climate into some meaningful context, any proactive action we take to influence the climate might be as negative as the effects we are trying to counteract. (Do we really want to go back to the Little Ice Age?)
In the meantime, people in cities around the world are choking on the rotten, polluted air, millions of tons of raw sewage are being dumped into rivers and oceans every day, industrial pollution is growing exponentially in developing countries, natural habitat is disappearing, and the oceans are being fished clean.
Climate change is going to happen. There is nothing we can do to prevent natural cimate change. How much time, energy and resources should we divert from fixing other environmental problems in the name of preventing climate change?
Hello Phil,
I remembered that someone had asked that question – “what would climate be doing without human input?” But I could not remember who. Thank you for asking it again.
Earth & Sky wants to post a blog about your very interesting question. We just haven’t had time to do that yet. So far, we’ve asked two climate scientists this question.
Both spoke of the difficulty in answering the question. There are many uncertainties.
But one, Tom Delworth of NOAA, had actually run a computer simulation on this subject. The following is his response.
Dr. Delworth said, “We use our climate models to run simulations of the past 140 years to ask questions just like this. When we supply the models with all of the relevant climate forcing agents (CO2, aerosols, solar changes, volcanoes, etc), we simulate century scale warming much like the observed.
“When we do simulations that do not include forcings from anthropogenic (human) causes such as CO2, but that do include natural forcings (volcanoes and solar changes), we simulate a slight cooling over the last 50 years or so. This is partly due to increased volcanic activity, particularly Mt. Pinatubo, that cools the climate.
“However, in the real world, this slight cooling due to natural forcing agents is dwarfed by the warming in response to forcings from human activity … “
I hope this helps answer your question, Phil. This is just one study, remember, and climate is very complex.
All the best,
Deborah
Phil asks, “How much time, energy, and resources should we divert from fixing other environmental problems in the name of preventing climate change?”
I’m not at all convinced that this is an “either-or” predicament. For starters, a little less consumption and little more conservation would go a long ways to reducing humanity’s negative impact on the environment, and to solving a whole host environmental problems.
In some ways, yes, you could say life is an experiment without a control, since humanity can’t stand outside the laboratory of Earth. But that’s not to say there isn’t strong evidence linking the spike of human-induced CO2 emissions with global warming. You say there’s nothing “we can do to prevent natural climate change.” I beg to differ. If natural means absent of human influence, we’re “preventing” or at least altering “natural” climate change as we speak. I’d like to think, though, that humanity is capable of making wise (or at least, better) lifestyle choices. Since you’re asking to see global warming in a meaningful context, I’m including this site: http://www.ilea.org/lecture.html
Sincerely,
Bruce McClure
I find it interesting:
First of all, Phil (comment #22) expresses his great worry that “any proactive action we take to influence climate change might be as negative as the effects we are trying to counteract. (Do we really want to return to the Little Ice Age?)”
Then, he concludes in his last paragraph, “There’s nothing we can do to prevent natural climate change.”
Which is it: do we or don’t we have influence on the climate?
Dear Bruce,
As I consider the recent comments blasting the good work of the IPCC, it appears to me that an unusual, remarkably transparent amount of conflicted, self-contradictory thinking is being expressed. Logic seems contrived and reasoning confused.
Could it be that many human beings have a fundamentally inadequate and unrealistic grasp of both biological and physical reality? That means to me that some very basic, widely shared and consensually validated ideas about what it means to be human are illusory….not real. We believe things about ourselves that are simply not true but, rather, borne of mistaken impressions and cortical conceitedness some call hubris.
Steve
Dear Friends,
This remarkable discussion gives rise to three humble questions and a comment:
1) In a finite world is the reality of economic globalization based upon unrestrained per capita consumption and the seemingly endless expansion of production capabilities sustainable or patently unsustainable?
2) Is the global economy not organized as a thinly-veiled, distinctly human pyramid scheme in which most of the wealth is funneled to millions of people at the top of the economic pyramid, while billions of human beings at the ever-widening and -deepening base of the pyramidal construction are left destitute, with very little?
3) Given the current scale and rate of growth of absolute global human population numbers, is there any basis whatever in biophysical reality for concluding that the small planet we inhabit can be treated much longer as if this Earth is an ever-expressive cornucopian-like teat at which the human species can eternally suckle?
Please consider the new science from Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D., Duke University and David Pimentel, Ph.D., Cornell University on human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth. The implications of the apparently unforeseen and unfortunately unwelcome evidence could be profound and call out to scientists for thorough and skillful examination, I suppose.
Always, with thanks,
Steve
Sorry for the questions above. I would prefer that it was not my lot to have ever thought to ask them.
IF only we did not have feet of clay, but actually could prevail by doing what the self-proclaimed masters of the universe believe they are doing: conquering enemies, subjugating the Earth, indefinitely sidestepping requirements of reality, defying biological limits of the human species and daring, like ‘masters’ of old, to ignore that which is imposed upon living things by the limitations of Earth’s body.
Bruce,
I am a scientist, and I am not making a dime telling people that what this planet is experiencing right now is definately a fever – caused by humans. This is not a spike in CO2 or in the climate… what is happening right now is not linear, it is exponential just like the rise in human population. Only a fool wouldn’t be able to look at the history of climate change, industry, and population and see that they are very much so related. And, of course, don’t forget to analyze what the climate and popluation situations were before and after the Industrial Revolution while you’re at it. This isn’t like a minor blood sugar spike after you eat a doughnut – this is much more serious. Compare this to what would happen to you if you ate, oh, 100,000 doughnuts. Are you a scientist? Do you have any analytical training whatsoever? If anyone is taking a position on this subject to make money and create notoriety for themselves, they are the “scientists” who are neighsaying and denying that we are systematically destroying our planet. And most people that I know that deny this is happening (including members of my own family) are denying it because it scares them to believe that it is real. Yes, the earth will survive, but if we don’t quickly and drastically change our ways, we will not, and the earth will have to start over…again. If anything is selfish, it is convincing yourself and trying to convince others that any effort you make to change things by changing your lifestyle is futile. You believe this because you don’t have the willpower to be responsible and do something about it even though it is not the path of least resistance. Every little thing that everyone does matters. The reason change is not occuring is because of people like you. Who are we to think that the Earth owes us this and owes us that – she is our mother and it is high time that we stop cutting down her rainforests and polluting her waters and air, etc, etc. We cannot continue to live in this throw away society. Where do we think all this garbage is going? Can you not see the big picture? As a whole, our society has no respect for this beautiful planet or for life itself. I just want to leave you with a quote by Mahatma Ghandi:
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
It is up to each and every one of us to start being responsible for our actions and to start caring about something other than what is most convienient for us.
namaste…
Jenny,
Thank you for your heart-felt comments, and for taking the time to express them. I want you to know that I’m in complete concurrence with what you’re saying. I believe Mahatma Gandi also said something to the effect that “there’s enough for everyone’s need but not everyone’s greed.”
Namaste,
Bruce
Dear Jenny,
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
It seems to me our society is the ring leader of a predominant world monoculture that is communicating a set of specious ideas about human beings living without regard to limits to growth of certain human activities which are occurring synergistically and overspreading the Earth in our time.
For example, we are told every day by mass media to consume more and more of whatever the economy produces. It would be one thing if the economy produced according to human needs. What is troublesome is the way the managers of the economy are themselves manufacturers of human desire. We are sold a bill of goods we do not need and would have not thought to even want.
For some time I have been trying to understand the basis for the astounding success of the manufacturers of desire. How are the masters of the universe able to ignore biophysical reality and sell others on illusory ideas that humans can consume limited resources as if they are limitless; can deplete scarce resources as if they are available in endless supply or certainly substitutable; and can propagate our species without regard to Earth’s physical limitations?
At least one way to understand this phenomenon could be by considering the seemingly irresistable power of human greed. Human greediness by its very nature denies limits at every turn. More is better; bigger is better, we are told. When have you met a “player” in our society with an amount of material wealth who stopped wanting more of it? Of the masters of the universe in our society I have met, there is one thing they share in common. Millionaires want to become billionaires. Some billionaires with ‘foresight’ can already imagine a moment in the not too distant future when the first trillionaire will be “produced” by our pyramidal economy.
Not so many years ago when millionaires were at the top of the economic pyramid, millions of people were stuck impoverished at the bottom of the ever-widening and -deepening “pyramid.” Today we have a few hundred billionaires worldwide and, not surprisingly, we have billions of people living in material destitution. The manufacturers of desire have organized what they call ‘the only game in town’ so as to take advantage of human greed…....theirs, mine, yours and everyone elses. It does not take a person with an advanced degree in rocket science to see how many poor and hungry people could exist on the surface of Earth on the day the first trillionaire is produced.
One question for us, I suppose, is this: Is the maximal expansion of the global economy sustainable or patently unsustainable, at its current scale and rate of growth?
Another question: Is the appeal to human greed by adamantly encouraging the endless increase of per capita consumption sustainable or unsustainable?
???: Is the unlimited growth of the predominant world economy in a finite world sustainable or not?
????: Who are the actual beneficiaries of economic globalization and is such an economic scheme BOTH intrinscally incompatible with democratic principles AND deleterious to the good interests of the human community?
?????: Has the time come to acknowledge human limits and accept Earth’s limitations?
??????: If not now, when?
Always,
Steve
I was perhaps a little riled up last night, and, Bruce, I appreciate your style of playing devil’s advocate, if that’s what it was. I think you bring up a great point with your quotation of Ghandi as well – greed. Steve, you also hit the nail on the head on this subject. All of this pollution, destruction, and general abuse of our planet and its resources comes from greed. And that same greed is what fuels industries and corporations (for instance, the oil moguls and energy consortiums) to get “experts” to tell everyone that all that we are doing to the Earth is not hurting it in any way. As much as I hate to say it, science can be bought. It just seems strange to me…most scientists I know don’t really believe in coincidence. To their analytical minds there is a reason for everything. But believing that what is happening now is due solely to a natural oscillation is Earth’s climate requires us to believe that the fact that it has begun when it has (i.e. since we have started adding massive amounts of contaminants to the Earth’s biosphere) is just a huge coincindence. It just doesn’t seem very congruous with normal scientific thought, which makes me think that something else is causing scientists to argue against change, be it fear or greed or maybe even something else that I can’t put my finger on.
I do not believe in being fearful. I don’t speak of the damage we are doing to the environment to create fear in others, but rather to create understanding that we need to change. Fearmongering by most of our media and our government is out of control when it comes to a lot of subjects. The government knows it can control the general population with fear, and they do so with much success. But when it comes to real threats, they could care less. I can’t imagine a larger conflict of interest in today’s world than having a president and vice president who are closely tied to the oil industry making decisions that affect the entire world right now. They are making decisions based on what will line their pockets and the pockets of their friends and families, not on what would be best for the people of the world and the environment the we exist in. Just imagine if could have spent the billions of dollars spent trying to procure oil rights for Dick Cheney in Iraq on developing renewable and clean energy sources (In case anyone missed it, and I think most people did, that is exactly what they tried to do less than two weeks into the war until the U.N. said ‘NO WAY!’ and then it was scarcely reported again. I just happened to be watching CNN for the brief few hours it was reported. Of course, now they make it seem as though their mission is and always was democracy in Iraq, and now it very well might be just that. It is what it is, and good, honorable men and women are losing their lives for it.)
I know this isn’t supposed to be political, but the greed of our political leaders is a large part of the problem when it comes to the environment and the obstruciton of propagating positive changes towards an environmentally responsible society.
Money is the evil that plagues this world. The resources are there…now we just need to rid ourselves of the greed.
Jenny, I agree that greed is an evil. There is much heartening work being done on what happiness or well-being really mean. If you’re interested, here’s a post about well-being. Well-being, hard choics and deep change It basically says that, once one’s basic needs are met, money doesn’t buy happiness. But people have a hard time accepting that fact, because it’s part of human nature to have a difficult time accepting loss.
Thank you for commenting here! Welcome.
Deborah
Jenny,
I rarely indulge in satire, unless I deem it the best way to make a point. Comment #21 reflects such an attempt . . .
Bruce
Dear Jenny,
Thanks for overcoming silence and being a clear voice for science.
The thing I fear, and it petrifies me occasionally, is that our brothers and sisters in science will not speak out, as you have done, but choose instead to perversely take refuge in silence. Top-rank scientists in the field of human population numbers appear to be engulfed by silence in our time. If that was so, would their silence not be tantamount to shirking their duties and responsibilities to science?
At least one consequence of remaining silent is that faulty reasoning, contrived logic, preternatural theories and flawed data are allowed to pass among us as if these products provided us with the best available scientific evidence.
Although apparently unforeseen and unfortunately unwelcome research of human population dynamics is emergent, these new data are virtually everywhere denied by most experts in human population science. Do scientists not have a primary responsibility to science? What, pray tell me, explains their silence?
For a scientist with knowledge to maintain silence, is that not a way of deceiving or giving a false impression? Is it not a form of lying to consciously and willfully choose NOT to speak out and tell the truth as one sees it? Of all things, it is the power of silence among scientists that I fear most.
With thank to Jenny and Deborah and Bruce and Friends,
Steve
Objectively speaking, millions of dollars have been spent on a disinformation campaign by corporate giants like Exxon-Mobil. These facts are not secret, and anyone can do a little research and find out just how much bias and misdirection has been funded. Follow the money.
Yet, most of the self-proclaimed “climate skeptics” posting on Earth&Sky see themselves as the purveyors of hard-nosed critical thinking. They dismiss public educational material made by celebrities, such as Leo’s video , because they detect “bias” and “hype”. The irony is astounding.
Even more ironic are the conspiracy buffs who claim that ‘Global Warming’ has been concocted by scientists and “liberals” to make a profit off the rest of us. It is amazing how people are willing to bend over backwards to deny simple truths that they would rather not face.
It all has the same symptoms of an addict trying to justify his/her addiction.
Thanks, Orion and many others, for your comments.
Evidence is beginning to emerge of the systematic repression and pervasive corruption of the good scientific evidence in the IPCC Report. Through many ‘talking heads’ in the mass media, cascading “disinformation” is being foisted every day upon the general public by the powerful and wealthy leaders of the predominant global political economy. These leaders and their many minions appear to have determined that the current scheme, by which the political economy is operated, must be preserved as it is, regardless of the costs. Changes to the current economic scheme are not negotiable. Their one and only ‘right’ way to manage global business activities is so well-established and so successful, they say, that suggestions for changes of the economic system cannot even become the subject of discussion. Such topics are taboo.
Even if the current scale and rate of growth of seemingly endless expansion of the global economy in a finite world is shown by science to be patently unsustainable, these masters of the universe apparently intend that we “stay the course” marked by unrestrained per capita consumption of limited resources and by unbridled extension of ever-larger scale production capabilities now overspreading our relatively small planetary home.
Biodiversity is extirpated; the environment is degraded; natural resources are depleted; Earth’s body is dissipated; and, still, these leaders of my not-so-great generation of elders tell us to pay attention only to economic growth indicators while they would have us ignore the global economy’s very foundation: namely, the Earth.
Can such a thing as a functioning human economy of any imaginable kind exist without that which is provided to humankind for its benefit by the natural world we inhabit, thanks to God?
Always,
Steve
We at Earth & Sky spoke yesterday with the IPCC office in Geneva, Switzerland. We told them that we are a radio show and website … and that we want to produce radio shows and podcasts with IPCC scientists … to help create a clear voice for the scientists who are at work on global warming.
They told us that, while they could help direct us to scientists with whom to speak, they could not help us financially. They have no budget for outreach of this kind. It’s sad! They have the info. We have the distribution outlet. But … despite what climate change skeptics seem to think … and despite our 30 years of experience in the world of raising funds for science outreach … the funding to create radio shows about global warming has been very, very hard to come by. In fact, funding to present science generally has been hard to come by.
It does seem to me that the funding for science education has gotten harder and harder to get, in the past few years particularly.
It’s pretty mind-boggling. There’s solid scientific evidence for global warming. And yet, in the U.S., government organizations seem hesitant to speak out, or support educational groups like ours that see the big picture and are trying hard to speak …
Dear Deborah,
Please do not be overly concerned. When people share an adequate understanding that the ever enlarging size, expanding scope and unbridled growth rate of the world’s predominant man-made political economy are patently unsustainable in the small planetary home where we are blessed to live, we will see shifts occurring in personal and corporate behavior. Regardless of short-term economic successes, arbitrarily and unrealistically maintaining an economic scheme that is foreseeably unsustainable in the long run cannot stand much longer, despite the expressed intentions of so many powerbrokers and their minions in my not-so-great generation.
Money will not always flow upward so as to fuel the maximal expansion of the current artificially designed, distinctly human system we call economic globalization.
Perhaps some day soon money, the kind of money now placed at the disposal of the world’s military complexes, will be removed from the plainly unsustainable global overgrowth economy and put in the service of preserving the natural world upon which we depend for our very existence.
As ever,
Steve
Dear Deborah,
The time is coming, I suppose, when the politicians, economists and demographers are brought face to face with good scientific evidence of biophysical reality already developed by top-rank scientists. They will unequivocally identify certain distinctly human global overgrowth activities: unrestrained per capita consumption of scarce resources, untethered expansion of large scale production capabilities, and unchecked propagation.
Perhaps the scale and rate of growth of these human activities, now overspreading the surface of Earth, will be seen approaching a point in human history when additional increases of our consumption, production and propagation activities worldwide are patently unsustainable on the small, finite planet God has blessed us to inhabit.
During most of my lifetime I have heard a refrain about the evils of “big government” and about the need for the size of government to be reduced. In a time when the Earth itself appear to be threatened by unbridled “big business” and by certain other distinctly human activities thought to be “required” for the continuous expansion of the global economy, could there be value in a discussion focused upon limiting economic globalization, before the very foundation of the predominant human economy is inadvertently and decidely ruined?
Always, with thanks,
Steve
The science is faulty. Please read this: http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speeches/npc-speech.html
Besides we will run out of oil long before Global Warming is a real issue. The Earth will take care of herself….she always has. We are just short lived parasites here. Buy land and stock up, your grandkids will need it when the power goes off for good.
now back to happy thoughts,
Brian
Dear Brian,
You report much with which I am in virtually total disagreement.
Human beings are many things, but I cannot say that our species is correctly described as a parasite. We possess far too many gifts for what you suggest to make sense. What is more worrisome, I believe, is what your point of view means. At least to me, you are saying we have no responsibility for our behavior because we have no control. For me, your view is not only incorrect but pernicious. Human beings are clearly capable of conscious behavior change. Whether or not we choose to exercise our splendid capacities of thinking, judging and willing for the sake of making necessary changes in behavior remains a question.
To “buy land and stock up,” as you put it, is precisely what needs not to happen. Although we are already seeing and hearing about the active pursuit of such strategies by masters of the universe in their already gated communities. Hoarding resources will likely not prove helpful to us, our children or their children for more than a fortnight.
As for the work of Michael Crichton, his stories are enjoyable; however, I do not regard him as one who has demonstrated an adequate appreciation of good science.
Sincerely and respectfully yours,
Steve
Brian cites Michael Crichton as conclusive that Climate Change science is faulty and therefore irrelevant and the issue should be ignored. Others commenting on Earth and Sky have made similar points.
To all of these climate skeptics, I sincerely ask you to engage me in a hypothetical question: “what would it mean to you if Climate Change were real — and that human beings are causing it and could correct?”
Meanwhile, I think as a debater Crichton scores some points, that ought to be addressed:
1)Crichton writes: “Lets be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right…And furthermore, the consensus of scientists has frequently been wrong…Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because youre being had.”
-there is truth in this point. issues in science are not to be decided by vote, but by investigation, evidence, and empirical validity — the ability of a theory to predict future results is the prized criteria, as it helps us understand our world.
-as always there are limits in human understanding, and the world is very complex. models of climate change are based on probabilities, predications are tenuous at best. climate scientists are very honest about this.
-to address climate change we’d need to act today, and take profound costly action – billions of dollars to transform our lives and technology (some of this would generate jobs and help the economy). Yet should we take such intense action based on such limited understandings of the world? That is the question Crichton is raising.
-But simply to raise the question is not enough. It is important to ask tough questions, but to use a tough question as the basis of an argument is simply rhetoric. To actually answer this question one must look at the evidence — which Crichton pretends to do. However, he is highly biased in his selection of what evidence to trust, and he distorts the truth with carefully crafted statements like “with the second graph demolished it is time to return to the first”. But, was the second graph — the famous hockey stick graph— really “demolished”? Not at all.
2. Crichton claims that the “hockey stick graph” has been conclusively discredited in a paper by McKitrick and McIntyre. But who is this pair? Climate scientists? nope. They are an economist and a mining executive whose “research” is paid for by the interests it serves (see http://crookedtimber.org/2004/08/25/mckitrick-mucks-it-up).
-We must wonder if Crichton is truly as disinterested and apolitical as he claims? If he is only interested in good science, why does he rely primarily on the disinformation put out by the oil lobby?
3. Crichton then attacks the IPCC report from 2001 (which is now out of date, anyhow). The IPCC report honestly explains the sources of uncertainty in climate science. Crichton takes this as an excuse to ignore what it says. Seems like someone who is not really interested in the complexity of the world, but more in justifying a position which has already made up his mind about.
-the exact opposite of what he claims to be about. In fact, most of the climate skeptics claim they are hard nosed critical thinkers unwilling to accept the “conventional wisdom” — but they do not undertake an honest examination of the evidence. They pay attention only to those facts and authors who confirm their prejudices.
If you want a good sophisticated discussion of the reality of climate science and its implications, I recommend reading EcoEquity
this website holds many facts and many lies but no one can ever tell. people should never just say something is true or false if they have no proof to back it up.
Amber, that’s right. What you’ve said is very profound. The tricky part nowadays is that people back things up from the internet … and anyone can post anything on the internet! Truth is a very difficult commodity nowadays …
Hi to Amber and Deborah,
Thanks for your comments. From the Qumran Scrolls we have learned that “Not one there is who knows the whole tale.” No person, no group of people, no website, no “ism,” no culture gets to know all there is about the tale of life or to know what is the one right way to live. Therefore, anyone who proclaims, as many are doing in my not-so-great generation, that a single lifestyle is not negotiable because it is the only way to live, could qualify as a member of the group I like to call masters of the universe. The idea that anyone knows what best for everyone seems not quite right.
At least to me, cultural diversity and behavior change are ways of the world we inhabit…..not a predominant monoculture and more fully anticipated, business-as-usual, status quo behavior. The latter manifestations are likely artificial, temporary and unsustainable; whereas, the former appear to endure and to be sustainable because they are expressions of evolutionary fitness.
Perhaps I am mistaken; but it does appear humankind finds itself in the midst of epistemological change and, as a consequence, has some thinking, judging and willing to do, so that viable change will naturally occur, changes that safeguard biodiversity from extinction, protect the environment from degradation, preserve the Earth from wanton dissipation and secure humanity from potential threats to its health, wellbeing and existence.
Sincerely yours,
Steve
Evidently, leaders in my not-so-great generation of elders have set aside concerns like long-term human wellbeing, biodiversity preservation and the integrity of “this tiny planet” we are blessed to inhabit because these noble and necessary achievements are somehow at odds with their most important of all concerns: the success of the global political economy, a system apparently based upon unrestricted consumption, unrestrained production and unbridled propagation by the human species. Could it be the ‘requirements’ of this endlessly expanding economic structure, that include unlimited per capita consumption, maximal expansion of human production and unbridled increase of human numbers, support a patently unsustainable economic pyramid scheme? That is simply to say, the way the global economic system appears to be organized and operated, wealth can be seen rapidly rising pyramidally to a minority of millions of people near the top of economic pyramid while the great majority of 6.6 billion people at the ever-widening and -deepening base of the economic pyramid work hard, but have little wealth to show for their efforts. A symbol of the economic pyramid is printed on every one dollar bill(US).
In the 1980s, this pyramid-like financial structure was called a “trickle down” economy. Most of the wealth flows upward to the few people near the top of the pyramid structure while what little remains trickles down to the many-too-many people near the bottom of the economic pyramid.
Note that more impoverished people are living on less than two dollars per day in 2007 than comprised the whole world’s human population in 1950. Over 2 million children die per year as a result of poor basic provisions for living. Millions upon millions more children go without the nutrition needed for normal growth and development.
Without doubts the predominant, artificially designed world economy is universally understood to be imperfect precisely because it has been constructed by human beings with “feet of clay.” That this distinctly human construction can be changed for the betterment of more people is evident. Reorganizing the predominant world economy for the substantive benefit of a majority of people can be appreciated precisely such changes in the scheme of economic globalization are in keeping with democratic principles. As things stand now, economic globalization is overwhelming democratic principles and practices. The global economy has been made the object of absolute exaltation by those leaders with wealth and power in the predominant culture. Perhaps the principles and processes of democracy will govern economic development in the future.
The self-proclaimed masters of the universe may believe they can live without having to accept “limits to growth” of 1) the world’s ever-expanding human economy, 2) ever-rising per human consumption of limited resources and 3) ever-increasing global human numbers; their wishes may be infinite and desires insatiable; they may hold fast to specious thinking, unsustainable activities and their adamant pursuit of a primrose path; they may choose to have their minions say anything; but, Earth is bounded in space-time, is finite and has limited resources upon which the survival of humanity and other life depends.
Whatsoever is is, is it not?
Job Prospects: Pain From Free Trade Spurs Second Thoughts —- Mr. Blinder’s Shift Spotlights Warnings Of Deeper Downside
By David Wessel and Bob Davis
28 March 2007The Wall Street Journal
For decades, Alan S. Blinder — Princeton University economist, former Federal Reserve Board vice chairman and perennial adviser to Democratic presidential candidates — argued, along with most economists, that free trade enriches the U.S. and its trading partners, despite the harm it does to some workers. “Like 99% of economists since the days of Adam Smith, I am a free trader down to my toes,” he wrote back in 2001.
Politicians heeded this advice and, with occasional dissents, steadily dismantled barriers to trade. Yet today Mr. Blinder has changed his message — helping lead a growing band of economists and policy makers who say the downsides of trade in today’s economy are deeper than they once realized.
Mr. Blinder, whose trenchant writing style and phrase-making add to his influence, remains an implacable opponent of tariffs and trade barriers. But now he is saying loudly that a new industrial revolution — communication technology that allows services to be delivered electronically from afar — will put as many as 40 million American jobs at risk of being shipped out of the country in the next decade or two. That’s more than double the total of workers employed in manufacturing today. The job insecurity those workers face today is “only the tip of a very big iceberg,” Mr. Blinder says.
The critique comes as public skepticism about allowing an unfettered flow of goods, services, people and money across borders is intensifying, including some Republicans as well as many Democrats. (See related article on page A6). The rethinking is helping free-trade foes, underscoring the urgency of helping those battered by globalization and clouding the outcome of a hot debate: Should government encourage forces of globalization or try to restrain them?
Some trade critics are bothered by the disappointing performance of Latin America since it slashed tariffs in the 1980s and 1990s while more protectionist China and Southeast Asia sped ahead. Others are struck by the widening gap between economic winners and losers around the globe. The rethinking on trade issues is the most significant since the early 1990s when many in the U.S. worried that Japan would overtake the U.S., a fear that has since abated.
Some critics are going public with reservations they’ve long harbored quietly. Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson, whose textbook taught generations, damns “economists’ over-simple complacencies about globalization” and says rich-country workers aren’t always winners from trade. He made that point in a 2004 essay that stunned colleagues. Lawrence Summers, a cheerleader for trade expansion as Clinton Treasury secretary, says people who argue globalization is inevitable and retraining is enough to help displaced workers offer “pretty thin gruel” to the anxious global middle class.
Others are finding the debate moving closer to positions they’ve had for years. Ralph Gomory, International Business Machines Corp.‘s former chief scientist who now heads the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, says that changing technology and the rise of China and India could make the U.S. an also-ran if it loses many of its important industries. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik says global trade negotiations should focus on erecting new barriers against globalization, not lowering them, to help poor nations build domestic industries and give rich nations more time to retrain workers.
Mr. Blinder’s job-loss estimates in particular are electrifying Democratic candidates searching for ways to address angst about trade. “Alan, because of his stature, provided a degree of legitimacy to what many of us had come to feel anecdotally — that the anxiety over outsourcing and offshoring was a far larger phenomenon than traditional economic analysis was showing,” says Gene Sperling, an adviser to President Clinton and, now, to Hillary Clinton. Her rival, Barack Obama, spent an hour with Mr. Blinder earlier in this year.
Mr. Blinder’s answer is not protectionism, a word he utters with the contempt that Cold Warriors reserved for communism. Rather, Mr. Blinder still believes the principle British economist David Ricardo introduced 200 years ago: Nations prosper by focusing on things they do best — their “comparative advantage” — and trading with other nations with different strengths. He accepts the economic logic that U.S. trade with large low-wage countries like India and China will make all of them richer — eventually. He acknowledges that trade can create jobs in the U.S. and bolster productivity growth.
But he says the harm done when some lose jobs and others get them will be far more painful and disruptive than trade advocates acknowledge. He wants government to do far more for displaced workers than the few months of retraining it offers today. He thinks the U.S. education system must be revamped so it prepares workers for jobs that can’t easily go overseas, and is contemplating changes to the tax code that would reward companies that produce jobs that stay in the U.S.
His critique puts Mr. Blinder in a minority among economists, most of whom emphasize the enormous gains from trade. “He’s dead wrong,” says Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, who will debate Mr. Blinder at Harvard in May over his assertions about the magnitude of job losses from trade. Mr. Bhagwati says that in highly skilled fields such as medicine, law and accounting, “If we do a real balance sheet, I have no doubt we’re creating far more jobs than we’re losing.”
Mr. Blinder says that misses his point. The original Industrial Revolution, the move from farm to factory, unquestionably boosted living standards, but triggered an enormous change in “how and where people lived, how they educated their children, the organization of businesses, the form and practices of governments.” He says today’s trickle of jobs overseas, where they are tethered to the U.S. by fiber-optic cables, is the beginning of a change of similar dimensions, and American society needs similarly far-reaching changes to cope. “I’m trying to convince a bunch of economists who are deeply skeptical and hard to convince,” he says.
Mr. Blinder, 61 years old, a Princeton college graduate with a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been on the Princeton faculty since 1971. He is known for his work on macroeconomics and a liberal bent captured by the title of a 1987 book, “Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-Minded Economics for a Just Society.” When he talked about trade in the past, Mr. Blinder emphasized its great benefits. His undergraduate economics textbook, first published in 1979, says “the facts are not consistent” with the popular notion that “cheap foreign labor steals jobs from Americans and puts pressure on U.S. businesses to lower wages.”
When Mr. Blinder went to Washington in 1993 to join President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, he became even more convinced of the benefits of free trade. He saw steel, aluminum and farming lobbyists fight for export subsidies or protection from imports, and then passing the costs to consumers. “I came out a much more radical free trader than I went in,” he says.
As a Clinton aide, he helped sell the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, although he says he disagreed with the administration pitch that it would create jobs in U.S. Economic theory teaches that trade changes the types of jobs in an economy, not the overall number. But he bowed to Mr. Clinton’s political savvy. “If he had left the salesmanship to me, Nafta would have failed,” he says.
Mr. Blinder left the White House after 18 months for the Fed in 1994, and immediately was mentioned as a possible successor to Alan Greenspan. He left in 1996 and returned to Princeton, where he still teaches introductory economics. Six years ago, he cashed in on his prominence by joining former Clinton banking regulator Eugene Ludwig in a firm that advises troubled banks and another that deciphers the Fed and other central bankers for a hefty price.
At Princeton, he began to reassess some of his views on trade. Visiting the yearly business gabfest in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2004, he heard executives talk excitedly about moving jobs overseas that not long ago seemed anchored in the U.S.
He was silent when his former Princeton student, N. Gregory Mankiw, then chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, unleashed a political firestorm by reciting standard theory but appearing indifferent to pain caused to those whose jobs go overseas. “Does it matter from an economic standpoint whether items produced abroad come on planes and ships or over fiber optic cables?” Mr. Mankiw said at a February 2004 briefing. “Well, no, the economics is basically the same….More things are tradable than…in the past, and that’s a good thing.”
Mr. Blinder says he agreed with Mr. Mankiw’s point that the economics of trade are the same however imports are delivered. But he’d begun to wonder if the technology that allowed English-speaking workers in India to do the jobs of American workers at lower wages was “a good thing” for many Americans. At a Princeton dinner, a Wall Street executive told Mr. Blinder how pleased her company was with the securities analysts it had hired in India. From New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book, “The World is Flat,” he found anecdotes about competition to U.S. workers “in walks of life I didn’t know about.”
Mr. Blinder began to muse about this in public. At a Council on Foreign Relations forum in January 2005 he called “offshoring,” or the exporting of U.S. jobs, “the big issue for the next generation of Americans.” Eight months later on Capitol Hill, he warned that “tens of millions of additional American workers will start to experience an element of job insecurity that has heretofore been reserved for manufacturing workers.”
At the urging of former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Mr. Blinder wrote an essay, “Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution?” published last year in Foreign Policy. “The old assumption that if you cannot put it in a box, you cannot trade it is hopelessly obsolete,” he wrote. “The cheap and easy flow of information around the globe…will require vast and unsettling adjustments in the way Americans and residents of other developed countries work, live and educate their children.”
In that paper, he made a “guesstimate” that between 42 million and 56 million jobs were “potentially offshorable.” Since then he has been refining those estimates, by painstakingly ranking 817 occupations, as described by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to identify how likely each is to go overseas. From that, he derives his latest estimate that between 30 million and 40 million jobs are vulnerable.
He says the most important divide is not, as commonly argued, between jobs that require a lot of education and those that don’t. It’s not simply that skilled jobs stay in the US and lesser-skilled jobs go to India or China. The important distinction is between services that must be done in the U.S. and those that can — or will someday — be delivered electronically with little degradation in quality. The more personal work of divorce lawyers isn’t likely to go overseas, for instance, while some of the work of tax lawyers could be. Civil engineers, who have to be on site, could be in great demand in the U.S.; computer engineers might not be.
Mr. Blinder’s warnings, and his numbers, are now firmly planted in the political debate over trade, and sometimes invoked by those whose views are distinctly more protectionist than Mr. Blinder. Richard Trumka, for instance, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, cited them in an indictment of “free market fundamentalism” and a call for “more balanced trade policies that protect the rights of workers.”
Diana Farrell, head of the McKinsey Global Institute, a pro-globalization think-tank arm of the consulting firm that has done its own analysis of vulnerable jobs, calls Mr. Blinder “an alarmist” and frets about the impact he is having on politicians, particularly the Democrats who see resistance to free trade as a political winner. She insists many jobs that could go overseas won’t actually go.
Ms. Farrell says Mr. Blinder’s work doesn’t take into account the realities of business which make exporting of some jobs impractical or which create offsetting gains elsewhere in the U.S. economy. He counters he is looking further into the future than McKinsey — 10 or 20 years instead of five — and expects more technological change than the consultants do “even without the Buck Rogers stuff.”
Mr. Blinder says there’s an urgent need to retool America’s education system so it trains young people for jobs likely to remain in the U.S. Just telling them to go to college to compete in the global economy is insufficient. A college diploma, he warns, “may lose its exalted ‘silver bullet’ status.” It isn’t how many years one spends in school that will matter, he says, it’s choosing to learn the skills for jobs that cannot easily be delivered electronically from afar.
Similarly, he says any changes to the tax code should encourage employers to create jobs that are harder to perform overseas. While Mr. Gomory, the former IBM chief scientist, suggests tax breaks for companies that create “high value-added jobs,” Mr. Blinder says the focus should be on jobs with person-to-person contact, regardless of pay and skill levels — from child day-care providers to physicians.
Mostly he wants to shock politicians, policy makers and other economists into realizing how big a change is coming and what new sectors it will reach. “This is something factory workers have understood for a generation,” he says. “It’s now coming down on the heads of highly educated, politically vocal people, and they’re not going to take it.”
Michael Mann is right. False controversy has been created about global warming, but it is the proponents of global warming that have created the falsehood. This is not a scientific debate, it is a political debate and it is being pushed by a bunch of scientific bullies. You on the left have concocted this “crisis” as a means to obtain government funding. The Union of Concerned Scientists is one of those P.O. boxes that you accuse the other side of having. If there is climate change, it is the result of the same natural forces that caused the Ice Ages and the dissappearance of the Dinosaurs.
If you realy believe that emissions from automobiles are the cause of “global warming” then why don’t you with your great scientific minds come up with an alternative energy source instead of just whining and demanding that some one else solve the problem. Or beter still, why don’t you go to China and rail at the government there. What? you are afaid they might throw you into prison or have you exicuted? Well, that is the kind of government you are trying to adopt here. “Global warming” is a hoax, created by liars and bullies, designed to obtain government funding, pure and simple.
Dear Jim Ivie,
While I certainly agree with the first four words of your statement above, your remaining words give rise to the following thought.
Although it is not yet widely noticed by those people who appear intoxicated or, perhaps, deranged by excessive power and conspicuous wealth derived from the leviathan-like, global political economy, our children are already beginning to look back in anger at the way the elders of my not-so-great generation for having mortgaged their future and recklessly devoured resources they will likely need for survival, as well as for having done poorly or failed to do that which we falsely construe to them as exercises of virtue.
Always,
Steve
It is Michael Mann who is engaging in disinformation by falsely implying that all scientists who oppose the theory of man-made global warming are simply the paid hacks of the oil industry. Many reputable scientists have produced solid, scientific evidence that totally refutes the claims of proponents of man-made climate change theories. Block and Bird are also complicit in propagating Mann’s utterly dishonest charge. If Block and Bird have any integrity, they will now have on their show a dissenting scientist who can point out how it is, in fact, the supporters of man-made climate change who are benefiting financially through grants from many government and private Leftist organizations. I wonder if Michael Mann is one of them. Has he received any grants related to his activities as a hatchet man trying to discredit other scientists? It is important for Block and Bird to make clear, in the interest of honesty, that the proponents of this theory have a political, not scientific, interest in shutting down all opposition.
Rogan, we are struggling here to be as honest as we can be. I have followed the global warming story for 30 years, as a journalist, and I’m trying very hard to make sense of what is happening here, in 2007. It is very surprising indeed.
As longtime observers of this issue, we cannot – as you suggest – make it clear that “the proponents of this theory have a political, not scientific, interest in shutting down all opposition.”
That is simply not so. It’s not the truth.
The truth is that the proponents of the theory that Earth is warming due to human activity are not acting for political reasons. They are scientists. They’re acting for reasons of science.
For a moment, ask yourself, what if it’s true? What if Earth is getting warmer due to human activities? What could be happening on Earth today to convince you of this fact? What would be happening that is different from what’s actually happening now, within the scientific community?
We are not suggesting political solutions here. We’re only telling you the facts – the consensus – from the community of climate scientists.
All the best,
Deborah
How does the United Nations learn the consensus on climate change? Get hundreds of scientists with expertise on the subject, being sure they come from many countries, many backgrounds, and many age groups, and that all of them agree to the public act of spending a large fraction of their time over several years assessing the science of the world on the topic. As this writing team works through several drafts, make sure that the worldhundreds of individuals and groups, governments and nongovernmental organizations, technical experts and interested individualscritiques the growing report. Require the writing team to respond to each of the thousands of comments, in writing, based on the scientific literature. Have specially commissioned review editors watch over the process to ensure that the responses are timely, thorough, and scientifically based, and remind the members of the writing team that their responses will become public documents, so that the world can check that the final report really is the distillation of the worlds science. When the governments of the world exercise their right to be sure that the summary for policymakers of the final document is as clear and useful as possible, take the members of the science team to the meeting and give them powerchanges requested by the governments must be consistent with the underlying science.
The consensus on climate change is not something cooked up by a few scientists, or to which they flock in the hopes of fame, glory or funding. Scientific consensus is not an agreement on opinionsis Picasso better than Rembrandt, or pepperoni better than anchovies? Rather, the consensus is formed through the great efforts of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), or national academies of science including the United States National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences (NRC/NAS, which has somewhat different procedures but works equally hard to insure the quality of the results, and which provides the US Government with advice on many other topics in addition to climate change). Science is a vast, seething, exciting mixture of new ideas and old, data and models and hypotheses, striving for the truth. The IPCC or NRC/NAS fulfill their mission by developing reports under clear, carefully overseen, well-understood protocols, insisting that their members and representatives complete the task of providing the best scientific evidence to the people who paid for it. Humanity can always improve, so the consensus is not the last word, but scientific consensus as embodied in the IPCC or the NRC/NAS reports is the best information that humans have produced on the subject.
Richard B. Alley
Evan Pugh Professor
Department of Geosciences, and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute
The Pennsylvania State University
Deborah Byrd,
Thank you for responding to my post. I am glad to know that you take the time to read the comments of your listeners.
As to the content of your response, however, I must first say that you did not address my main point. Michael Manns charge is dishonest. He seeks to simply discredit the character of any scientist that takes a view contrary to the supposedly prevailing one by implying that they have been bought and paid for by big oil. This is not a scientific argument it is simply a crude ad hominem attack. That many proponents of the theory of man-made global warming respond to criticism by attacking the character of their critics should create doubt in the minds of rigorous thinkers.
You asked me, what if its true?. Perhaps, given your 30 year history of research into the subject, you are aware of a Newsweek article, The Cooling World, published on April 28th, 1975. The writer addressed the almost unanimous view among scientists that we were entering a civilization destroying ice age. What if everyone in 1975 had accepted the view that a new ice age was imminent? What if, in response to this impending crisis, the governments of the world had completely restructured their economies, curtailed use of the technologies thought to be the root cause of global cooling and encouraged the emission of massive amounts of greenhouse gases or, as was proposed in the article, the melting of the polar ice caps? Now, 37 years later, the scientists and politicians behind the theory would be patting themselves on the back and saying that they had saved the world and that the sacrifice of a free society was worth it, since there clearly would be no new ice age. And who would dare to disagree? So, I ask you, Ms. Byrd, if science and policy should be determined by the standard of, what if its true?.
It is also difficult for me to believe that you are unaware of the political agendas behind many proponents of the theory of global warming. From the UN to individual scientists, there is always an anti-American and anti-Capitalist slant to the proposed solutions to the supposed crisis. Scientists are not immune to political passions, nor are they immune to the pressure to conform to prevailing popular consensus. History is replete with horrific examples of scientific consensus that led to irrational and destructive political policies. Nazi Eugenics and Soviet Lysenkoism are only two prominent examples.
The truth is that there is no scientific consensus on this subject at all. That your show and other media outlets try to convince the public that there is by discrediting dissenting scientists, as you did with the shameful Michael Mann piece, amounts to a stifling of debate and nothing more than propaganda. You really should make amends if you are honestly interested in getting at the truth, which can only be found through vigorous debate on the science of opposing arguments, not hit pieces designed to discredit the opposing point of view.
So, finally, I ask you if you willing, in the interest of scientific inquiry, to have on your show one of the many reputable scientists, who dispute, based on science, the theory of man-made global climate change? Or, at least let one of the scientists smeared by Mann respond directly to Manns charge. If not, why?
Best wishes,
Rogan
Rogan, yes, I read every comment that comes to this website. At least, I try to keep up. I very much respect your view and appreciate your taking the time to comment here. And I can also tell you that we at Earth & Sky, as a group, have done a tremendous amount of soul-searching throughout the entire 15 years of our time on the radio related to our presentation of global warming. We are trying very hard to be accurate and to represent the science.
But you and I do disagree. From where I sit as the editor-in-chief of a science website, as the producer of a science radio program I see that there is a scientific consensus on the subject of global warming.
Please see response #48 in this discussion, from a scientist. In that comment on this post, Richard Alley does an excellent job of describing what it means to have a scientific consensus.
Earth & Sky represents science. Thus, in our best effort to be correct, we must represent the exact scientific consensus that you claim does not exist but that we know does exist.
Heres why we will not as you suggest have on our show one of the scientists who dispute human-caused global warming. If we present the work of those scientists you mention give them equal weight on our show, or on our website we would be giving that weight to what we know through our years of experience with this subject to be a small minority. In all scientific subjects, we try to represent the thinking of the majority. How could we do otherwise? Youll just have to believe me, trust me, that we are representing the majority here. Or you can choose not to believe me. It really does come down to who you believe.
I can tell you that were in the process now of trying to contact some of the global warming skeptics, not for our radio show, but for our website. We want to understand how they think. Perhaps well be able to present some of our conversation with some of those scientists soon. But give their ideas equal weight? No. That would not be an accurate representation of what the scientific community believes about global warming.
As for the Newsweek article, yes, it is unfortunate that this article exists to muddy this debate. There is a good discussion of global cooling on Wikipedia, if youre interested. But that 1975 Newsweek article did not represent the kind of scientific consensus that now exists on global warming, through the work of the IPCC.
Finally, I ask you, Rogan how can you say that our show with Michael Mann amounts to a stifling of debate when, indeed, it has spawned the very debate we are now having? I value this debate very highly indeed. And I suspect our radio show on this subject spawned other debates like the one we are having around the globe.
Thank you again for commenting.
All the best,
Deborah
The atmospheric C02 levels have been rising alarmingly fast since the early to mid-20th century, and the global mean surface temperature has been rising in tandem. There is no serious disagreement about these trends, because both C02 and temperature can be measured with high accuracy.
The C02 increase is due to anthropogenic forcing. The problem has been establishing that the temperature increase is linked to that in C02 and not, for instance, due to solar variability. This link has now been established, and this has really happened between the releases of the third and fourth IPCC assessments. The climate models are now sufficiently reliable to demonstrate a statistically significant difference between the current climate and one in which the C02 forcing is removed. This means we can now state that solar activity cannot account for the observed temperature increase; it is the C02, and hence anthropogenic activity.
One always likes to have debate on scientific questions, and the media in particular has been eager to present both sides. The striking thing about this issue though is that nearly all the scientists working in the field agree. This means that the (few) naysayers could be seen as mavericks. But the most serious among the naysayers are either playing devil’s advocate (to foster further debate, or for other reasons) or are really not qualified to discuss the science.
J. H. LaCasce
Dept. of Meteorology
Univ. of Oslo
Deborah Byrd,
You have made clear in your response that you are an advocate for one side of a debate that, contrary to your assertions, is far from resolved. You have taken a position and you are an advocate for that point of view. Your listeners should know that clearly and take everything you say on the subject of global warming as the position of a partisan, not science fact. In fact, you should have some sort of disclaimer to warn listeners that, on this subject at least, your show amounts to advocacy journalism, not objective science fact.
You write, As for the Newsweek article, it is unfortunate that this article exists... Yes, from the point of view of an advocate, it is unfortunate, because far from “muddying the waters” it actually clarifies the possible folly of scientific consensus. Yet, The Cooling World is just one example of how wrong both scientists and a willingly sensationalist mass media have been in the past. From the 1950s to the 1970s and on to today, there have been a plethora of predictions of environmental doom, from Rachel Carsons Silent Spring to Paul Ehrlichs The Population Bomb, to name just two of the more popular examples.. Carson had the greatest impact, with the effect that hundreds of thousands of humans have died needlessly of malaria and other diseases in Africa and other impoverished countries because the use of effective pesticides is banned. Paul Ehrlich advocated forced sterilization, limits on the number of children that families could have and even the necessary reduction of the human population in order to prevent an ecological disaster that never materialized. The “Population Bomb” never went off because his Malthusian science was wrong and because he failed to take into account basic principles of economics and human nature that he clearly had no grasp of. Ehrlich is still a prominent environmentalist scientist, despite the fact that he has never been right about any of his myriad predictions of doom. The assertions of The Cooling World and its proponents seem ridiculous from the perspective of 2007. In another 37 years, so will the theory of man-made global warming and its advocates.
Your show is heard around the world, as your web site proudly proclaims. I listen to you in Japan. To suggest that the impact of broadcasting the Michael Mann hit piece on the radio is somehow balanced by the back and forth on this blog is disingenuous. There is no comparison. The fact is that by taking part in the widespread practice of discrediting the motives of those who disagree, your show is stifling debate by suggesting that there is no serious dissent to the theory of man-made global warming. This is simply not true.
So, yes, you and I disagree about the existence of a consensus. Thousands of scientists signed a statement opposing the conclusions of the UN Research Council, which you refer to in your response. This was not widely reported at all. In fact, one scientist went so far as to sue to have his name removed from the conclusions of the panel, since it was added without his approval. That would be a good subject for a show right there. Who objected and on what scientific basis? Other scientists, who began as advocates of the theory have switched sides after their scientific research failed to support the projections of the theory. Exactly how many scientists opinions create truth, Ms. Byrd? I say it takes only one Galileo with the facts on his side to disprove a false orthodoxy, no matter how many true believers try to discredit him. Consensus alone is not scientific proof of anything.
J.H. LaCasce, in post 50, asserts that dissenters to this new orthodoxy must have dishonest motives again, the Michael Mann tactic. In fact, he says, serious dissenters are clearly playing devil’s advocate (dishonest motives) or are not really qualified to discuss the science. Its funny that the same stringent standards never apply to proponents of the theory, only to opponents. Is Al Gore qualified to speak on science issues? Is he a scientist? Are journalists, for that matter?
LaCasce also asserts that the media has been eager to present both sides. That you have clearly stated that you will not allow global warming skeptics to make their case on your show proves exactly the opposite.
Yes, you and I disagree. I think the earth has warmed and cooled, as well as changing in myriad other ways quite naturally and without the influence of mankind from time immemorial. The current theory is not borne out by the facts and coincides too neatly with the political aspirations of modern day Savonarolas like Al Gore. Based on the sorry history of predictions of ecological doom, I think the best course of action is to keep doing objective research and to refrain from precipitously sacrificing freedom in order to protect ourselves from a doubtful apocalyptic vision.
Best wishes,
Rogan
Rogan, there is a public debate on climate change now, and it is very welcome indeed.
In science, this issue has been debated for decades.
Now the best scientific evidence (the consensus) says that while there are indeed natural cycles of climate change there is also a human-caused climate change currently superimposed over those natural cycles. You are correct in saying I'm making that assertion, and I want to add that Im making it based on my 30-year history of following the scientific debate on climate change.
Perhaps, as you suggest, the scientific consensus on this subject will change. As Earth & Sky points out in its about page: Science is not perfect. Its a process, not a body of facts.
If the scientific consensus changes, Earth & Sky will change with it. Until then, Earth & Sky will continue to reflect the consensus view.
Consensus does not mean 100% agreement, by the way. It just means that there is a general agreement. So, yes, you can easily find those who do not agree with the consensus. Next week, well run a story on this website about what it means to have a scientific consensus on climate change. I hope youll watch for it and continue to tell us your views.
Thank you for commenting on our website.
Farewell for now, and all the best,
Deborah
To anyone,
Skepticism is fine, as long as it means honest inquiry. Scientists have studied ice core samples to determine carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere for the last 650,000 years. This study seems to suggest human-induced CO2 emissions are responsible for today’s global warming phenomenon. Moreover, this modern-day spike in CO2 levels appears to be occurring at much faster rate than anything found in natural cycles.
Comments, anyone?
Bruce McClure
Dear Deborah and Rogan,
Please take note of the passage of time, measured in decades, over which the discussion of the scientific facts of climate change has occurred.
What worries me is how long it has taken us to reach this point of scientific consensus and, still, we have this hard-nosed debate about the way the world works with regard to climate change.
Now we have apparently unforeseen scientific evidence of another global challenge, the one posed to humanity and life as we know it by the UNCHECKED increase of the global human population, now numbering 6.7+/- billion. According to UN Population Division estimates, the world’s human population could reach 9.2+/- billion people in the middle of this century.
If decades were to pass before a scientific “consensus” can be reached about the potential threats to life as we know it and to the integrity as a direct result of UNREGULATED human activities now overspreading Earth, what chance do we give our children of addressing and overcoming global challenges that are ominously looming before us, even now, on the far horizon? If the leaders of my generation choose now not to so much as acknowledge these potential, visible threats, what is to become of our children?
At least to me, the self-proclaimed masters of the universe appear to have been somehow rendered virtually apoplectic, as evidenced in the following symptom presentation: willful blindness, hysterical deafness, elective muteness, political convenience and economic expediency. Their malady could lead them to the fateful denial of an adequate enough understanding of the the way the world works and of humankind’s placement within the natural order of living things.
Please forgive me, but I can no longer understand how a small, finite planet the size of our planetary home can support the fully anticipated increases of consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species between now and the year 2050. Given the current scale and expected growth rate of these distinctly human activities, has the time not yet come to at least ask if the UNRESTRICTED “economic enterprise” of the predominant human monoculture on Earth is more likely sustainable or patently unsustainable to the year 2050? Are unrestained increases in per capita consumption of limited resources more likely sustainable or patently unsustainable to the middle of Century XXI?
What is the chance that certain human activities which were once good and benign have reached a point in human history when the size and the rate of their UNBRIDLED growth are deleterious to biodiversity, environmental health, the integrity of Earth and, perhaps, the wellbeing of the human species?
Sincerely,
Steve
Manmade global warming is at best an unproven thesis, at worst, a total hoax seized on by politicians and well-meaning but misguided social critics. Go here to read more:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/08/official-us-cli.html
When will we hear the last of those saying “it’s proven” when it’s clearly not?
This from Coyote Blog continues to demand that both sides of the question be considered:
Breaking News: Recent US Temperature Numbers Revised Downwards Today
This is really big news, and a fabulous example of why two-way scientific discourse is still valuable, in the same week that both Newsweek and Al Gore tried to make the case that climate skeptics were counter-productive and evil.
Climate scientist Michael Mann (famous for the hockey stick chart) once made the statement that the 1990’s were the warmest decade in a millennia and that “there is a 95 to 99% certainty that 1998 was the hottest year in the last one thousand years.” (By the way, Mann now denies he ever made this claim, though you can watch him say these exact words in the CBC documentary Global Warming: Doomsday Called Off).
Well, it turns out, according to the NASA GISS database, that 1998 was not even the hottest year of the last century. This is because many temperatures from recent decades that appeared to show substantial warming have been revised downwards. Here is how that happened (if you want to skip the story, make sure to look at the numbers at the bottom).
One of the most cited and used historical surface temperature databases is that of NASA/Goddard’s GISS. This is not some weird skeptics site. It is considered one of the premier world temperature data bases, and it is maintained by anthropogenic global warming true believers. It has consistently shown more warming than any other data base, and is thus a favorite source for folks like Al Gore. These GISS readings in the US rely mainly on the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN) which is a network of about 1000 weather stations taking temperatures, a number of which have been in place for over 100 years.
Frequent readers will know that I have been a participant in an effort led by Anthony Watts at SurfaceStations.org to photo-document these temperature stations as an aid to scientists in evaluating the measurement quality of each station. The effort has been eye-opening, as it has uncovered many very poor instrument sitings that would bias temperature measurements upwards, as I found in Tucson and Watts has documented numerous times on his blog.
One photo on Watt’s blog got people talking – a station in MN with a huge jump in temperature about the same time some air conditioning units were installed nearby. Others disagreed, and argued that such a jump could not be from the air conditioners, since a lot of the jump happened with winter temperatures when the AC was dormant. Steve McIntyre, the Canadian statistician who helped to expose massive holes in Michael Mann’s hockey stick methodology, looked into it. After some poking around, he began to suspect that the GISS data base had a year 2000 bug in one of their data adjustments.
One of the interesting aspects of these temperature data bases is that they do not just use the raw temperature measurements from each station. Both the NOAA (which maintains the USHCN stations) and the GISS apply many layers of adjustments, which I discussed here. One of the purposes of Watt’s project is to help educate climate scientists that many of the adjustments they make to the data back in the office does not necessarily represent the true condition of the temperature stations. In particular, GISS adjustments imply instrument sitings are in more natural settings than they were in say 1905, an outrageous assumption on its face that is totally in conflict to the condition of the stations in Watt’s data base. Basically, surface temperature measurements have a low signal to noise ratio, and climate scientists have been overly casual about how they try to tease out the signal.
Anyway, McIntyre suspected that one of these adjustments had a bug, and had had this bug for years. Unfortunately, it was hard to prove. Why? Well, that highlights one of the great travesties of climate science. Government scientists using taxpayer money to develop the GISS temperature data base at taxpayer expense refuse to publicly release their temperature adjustment algorithms or software (In much the same way Michael Mann refused to release the details for scrutiny of his methodology behind the hockey stick). Using the data, though, McIntyre made a compelling case that the GISS data base had systematic discontinuities that bore all the hallmarks of a software bug.
Today, the GISS admitted that McIntyre was correct, and has started to republish its data with the bug fixed. And the numbers are changing a lot. Before today, GISS would have said 1998 was the hottest year on record (Mann, remember, said with up to 99% certainty it was the hottest year in 1000 years) and that 2006 was the second hottest. Well, no more. Here are the new rankings for the 10 hottest years in the US, starting with #1:
1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939Three of the top 10 are in the last decade. Four of the top ten are in the 1930’s, before either the IPCC or the GISS really think man had any discernible impact on temperatures. Here is the chart for all the years in the data base:
New_giss
There are a number of things we need to remember:
* This is not the end but the beginning of the total reexamination that needs to occur of the USHCN and GISS data bases. The poor correction for site location and urbanization are still huge issues that bias recent numbers upwards. The GISS also has issues with how it aggregates multiple stations, apparently averaging known good stations with bad stations a process that by no means eliminates biases. As a first step, we must demand that NOAA and GISS release their methodology and computer algorithms to the general public for detailed scrutiny by other scientists. * The GISS today makes it clear that these adjustments only affect US data and do not change any of their conclusions about worldwide data. But consider this: For all of its faults, the US has the most robust historical climate network in the world. If we have these problems, what would we find in the data from, say, China? And the US and parts of Europe are the only major parts of the world that actually have 100 years of data at rural locations. No one was measuring temperature reliably in rural China or Paraguay or the Congo in 1900. That means much of the world is relying on urban temperature measurement points that have substantial biases from urban heat. * All of these necessary revisions to surface temperatures will likely not make warming trends go away completely. What it may do is bring the warming down to match the much lower satellite measured warming numbers we have, and will make current warming look more like past natural warming trends (e.g. early in this century) rather than a catastrophe created by man. In my global warming book, I argue that future man-made warming probably will exist, but will be more like a half to one degree over the coming decades than the media-hyped numbers that are ten times higher.So how is this possible? How can the global warming numbers used in critical policy decisions and scientific models be so wrong with so basic of an error? And how can this error have gone undetected for the better part of a decade? The answer to the latter question is because the global warming and climate community resist scrutiny. This weeks Newsweek article and statements by Al Gore are basically aimed at suppressing any scientific criticism or challenge to global warming research. That is why NASA can keep its temperature algorithms secret, with no outside complaint, something that would cause howls of protest in any other area of scientific inquiry.
As to the first question, I will leave the explanation to Mr. McIntyre:
While acolytes may call these guys professionals, the process of data adjustment is really a matter of statistics and even accounting. In these fields, Hansen and Mann are not professionals – Mann admitted this to the NAS panel explaining that he was not a statistician. As someone who has read their works closely, I do not regard any of these people as professional. Much of their reluctance to provide source code for their methodology arises, in my opinion, because the methods are essentially trivial and they derive a certain satisfaction out of making things appear more complicated than they are, a little like the Wizard of Oz. And like the Wizard of Oz, they are not necessarily bad men, just not very good wizards.For more, please see my Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming or, if you have less time, my 60-second argument for why one should be skeptical of catastrophic man-made global warming theory.
Update: Nothing new, just thinking about this more, I cannot get over the irony that in the same week Newsweek makes the case that climate science is settled and there is no room for skepticism, skeptics discover a gaping hole and error in the global warming numbers.
Update #2: I know people get upset when we criticize scientists. I get a lot of “they are not biased, they just made a mistake.” Fine. But I have zero sympathy for a group of scientists who refuse to let other scientists review their methodology, and then find that they have been making a dumb methodology mistake for years that has corrupted the data of nearly every climate study in the last decade.
Update #3: I labeled this “breaking news,” but don’t expect to see it in the NY Times anytime soon. We all know this is one of those asymmetric story lines, where if the opposite had occurred (ie things found to be even worse/warmer than thought) it would be on the front page immediately, but a lowered threat will never make the news.
Oh, and by he way. This is GOOD news. Though many won’t treat it that way. I understand this point fairly well because, in a somewhat parallel situation, I seem to be the last anti-war guy who treats progress in Iraq as good news.
Update #4: I should have mentioned that the hero of the Newsweek story is catastrophic man-made global warming cheerleader James Hansen, who runs the GISS and is most responsible for the database in question as well as the GISS policy not to release its temperature aggregation and adjustment methodologies. From IBD, via CNN Money:
Newsweek portrays James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as untainted by corporate bribery. Hansen was once profiled on CBS’ “60 Minutes” as the “world’s leading researcher on global warming.” Not mentioned by Newsweek was that Hansen had acted as a consultant to Al Gore’s slide-show presentations on global warming, that he had endorsed John Kerry for president, and had received a $250,000 grant from the foundation headed by Teresa Heinz Kerry.Update #5: My letter to the editor at Newsweek. For those worried that this is some weird skeptic’s fevered dream, Hansen and company kind of sort of recognize the error in the first paragraph under background here. Their US temperature chart with what appears is the revised data is here.
Update #6: Several posts are calling this a “scandal.” It is not a scandal. It is a mistake from which we should draw two lessons:
1. We always need to have people of opposing opinions looking at a problem. Man-made global warming hawks expected to see a lot of warming after the year 2000, so they never questioned the numbers. It took folks with different hypotheses about climate to see the jump in the numbers for what it was – a programming error. 2. Climate scientists are going to have to get over their need to hold their adjustments, formulas, algorithms and software secret. It’s just not how science is done. James Hansen saying “trust me, the numbers are right, I don’t need to tell you how I got them” reminds me of the mathematician Fermat saying he had a proof of his last theorem, but it wouldn’t fit in the margin. How many man-hours of genius mathematicians was wasted because Fermat refused to show his proof (which was most likely wrong, given how the theorem was eventually proved).Final Update: Some parting thoughts, and recommendations, here.
Deborah, you wrote to the effect:
“There was no cooling scare…I was there”
...Oh really? I was there too…read this:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html
Quote:Telltale signs are everywhere from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7 F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round. Unquote, from the Time Magazine cited above.
Clearly global cooling was being portrayed as imminent and current, not 10,000 years off, as you allege.
Deborah, you have ceased to be a scientist and become an advocate…You are misleading the innocent and inexperienced.
Don’t look now, but your pants are on fire.
Doug, I stand by what I said. There was no global cooling “scare” in scientific circles in the 1970s.
Wikipedia has a pretty good discussion of the media’s over-reaction to scientific discussions of global cooling in the 70s here
You simply can’t compare the 1970s discussion of global cooling to the current understanding of global warming. It’s not a fair comparison. That was a discussion, lasting a few years. This is a bonafide, decades-long, gradual understanding – on the part of thousands of scientists around the world – that Earth’s climate is changing.
I believe it’s you – and others who believe in the so-called global warming “hoax” – who have been misled.
Yes, I do believe that. If that makes me an “advocate,” then so be it.
All the best,
Deborah
Deborah,
Several times I’ve seen you ask skeptics, “But what if it’s true?”...as if the consequences were so dire that we should surrender our political and economic freedoms and forswear either population growth or the use of energy at the rate necessary to grow the world economy, or both.
Let me ask you this, since it cannot be proven true…“What if it’s false?”
The consequences of the kind of worldwide action you and your commenters are advocating to stop global warming would of absolute necessity include economic stagnation at best, and shrinking economies (read: world-wide depression) the likely outcome, condemning millions now in poverty to a future with zero opportunity for development and improvement, as well as requiring everyone not now in poverty to back down into it…with the resulting worldwide political upheaval and hopelessness.
...you cannot put a stopper in the tailpipe of the world’s economic engine and avoid these kinds of consequences.
Your fellow travelers in the comments section are making the next logical step, arguing for “sustainable population” (without saying who gets to be part of that population), ...are you going to be on the committee that decides whether, and how many children a couple can have, and how long they can live, if we have to get down to one billion people? By the way, it’s very hard to believe in the “population bomb” when most of the Western world is seeing precipitous population declines, to the point that unless there’s a significant change bordering on miraculous, Russians and Swedes and a number of other populations are heading for extinction.
Personally, I see only nihilism in your point of view, not scientific reason…and the kind of narrow minded negativism that prompted the director of the US Patent office to propose that his bureaucracy be done away with because everything that could be invented clearly had already been discovered… You have no vision for the future that I would want to follow.
Increasingly, the ecological advocates like yourself begin to sound more and more like religious fanatics…you have your unshakable and unprovable articles of faith, and some, like the great Goracle, seem to think that anyone who disagrees is an apostate and should be ignored, marginalized (there haven’t been any beheadings of infidels…yet). Mr. Mann seems to claim that anyone who disagrees is funded by the oil companies. I’m not, and I heartily disagree.
Unfortunately for this eco-religion, it begins to seem that the only way to reach your version of paradise is for five billion people to conveniently cease to be, and the rest to live at nineteenth century lifestyle levels.
Since you have confessed your advocacy, I have lost all respect for your “scientific” credibility.
Regards,
Doug Huggins
Doug, I understand.
We are a science site … not a political site … so I’ll leave the subject of political solutions to others.
I can only say that if the scientific consensus shifts on the subject of global warming – if the evidence begins to show that Earth is not warming, and that climate is not changing due to human activities – Earth & Sky will shift its presentation as well. Until that time, we will present the science of the majority as best we can.
Many thanks for all your comments,
Deborah
I was pleasantly reading the debate in these posts, but when I got to Deborah Byrd’s statement that this is not a political issue I almost gagged on my C02 laden diet coke. Deborah, the issue is ONLY political. Just read the posts and you will see that there is a certain common thread through doom and gloomers. To not recognize that fact is sublime ignorance. There is a consensus for global warming…but there is also a consensus that it is a natural phenomenon. Both are valid. Both need further research. But I for one cannot discount that there were glaciers over much of North America only 10,000 years ago, that CO2 levels were higher in the recent (industrial revolution) past, that man is only a minor producer of the total amount of CO2 released, and that Mars has heated up at the same rate without mans influence. I agree we over consume, I agree that we do not care for mother earth as good as we should, but I do not believe we are as strong as you would like to believe.
Hi Matthew, I didn’t say it was not a political issue. I said we are not a political website. We’re a science website.
Yep, there’s natural climate change, and there’s human-caused climate change … both happening at once at the present time, according to the scientific consensus.
All the best,
Deborah
When I heard the title of this podcast I hoped it would talk about the disinformation of the “hockey stick” or 1998 being the hottest year, but then I remembered this is Earth & Sky and it would be more Americans are evil bashing. I wasn’t disappointed. I didn’t realize until reading the comments that the person interviewed is the inventor of the “hockey stick” theory. That he talks about disinformation from the other side is just too funny.
Perhaps we can understand that Americans have not come as far as people in many others countries to accept the now well-established scientific consensus concerning human-driven global warming.
Even in a world where certain pernicious effects of climate change are already visible, denialists are still many in number and, unfortunately, found ubiquitously among politicians, business leaders and other powerbrokers managing the huge scale and growth rate of the patently unsustainable, unbridled expansion of production capabilities called economic globalization.
When will the denialists simply recognize that there cannot be a successful global economy without the adequate natural resources and viable ecosystem services provided by a complete, soundly functioning, living Earth.
Like life itself, the economy also utterly depends for its very existence upon the integrity of this wondrous planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.
Doug
Thanks for saving me the time of posting the details of the latest revelation of the alarmists data error that shows that the corrected list of the hottest years on record in North America were: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939. As Columnist Lorne Gunter said in his column in the National Post this week:
The 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise; seven occurred afterwards. In other words, there is no discernible trend, no obvious warming of late.
Ever since the correction became a hot topic on blogs, the pro-warmers have tried to downplay its significance, insisting, for example, that the alterations merely amount to “very minor rearrangements in the various rankings.”
It’s true the changes aren’t dramatic. But the optics are. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. Imagine the shrieking of the warmers if we had previously thought that hot years were scattered throughout the past 130 years, but after a correction the warmest years could be seen to be concentrated in the past decade. They would insist the revised data proved their case. They would blitz every news organization and talk show. They would demand to be allowed to indoctrinate school children on the evils of cars and factories. So they shouldn’t be permitted to brush aside this new data, which makes their claims harder to prove.
It is sad the Ms. Byrd, who has done some fine work over the years, has been blinded by the “politically correct” notion of the importance of our species. Dr. Kary Mullis (Nobel, Chemistry, 1993) warned of these folks in his book “Dancing Naked in the Mind Field” where he wrote:
“Scientists who speak out strongly about future ecological disaster and promote the notion that humans are responsible for any changes going on are highly suspect. Turn off the TV. Read your elementary science textbooks. You need to know what they are up to. It’s every man for himself as usual, and you are on your own. Thank your lucky stars that they didn’t bother to change their clothes or their habits. They still wear priestly white robes and they don’t do heavy labor. It makes them easier to spot.”
In her Feb 5 posting Deborah Byrd says:
“.... there is a consensus among climate scientists that human-caused global warming exists. Theres been a consensus or general agreement for many years now. The recent report by the IPCC is just the latest expression of the scientific consensus that global warming is real, and that humans play a primary role.”
The existence of a consensus among a group of learned “scientists” of the day is “mildly interesting” but is meaningless if the research, data, and methodology do not stand up to the rigor of the scientific method and open and credible peer review. When Einstein was asked his reaction to the news that the Nazis were assembling a team of hundreds of scientists who were tasked with proving his theories wrong, he replied: “It only takes one scientist to prove I am wrong.”
A poll conducted at the time of Copernicus and Galileo would have determined that a majority of the educated people of the day believed the earth to be flat and that the sun revolved around the earth. A poll of even educated Mayans would have revealed that a majority believed that the challenge of bad weather repeatedly destroying their crops could be fixed by throwing some virgins in a well. Kyoto, and other politically correct measures are not any more likely (than throwing young women down a well) to affect the ocean currents, shifts of the earth’s magnetic fields, volcanic activity, shifting plates, and sun spot activity that have been driving the ebb and flow of climate change for billions of years.
When the level of scientific understanding does not yet fully explain phenomenon, the massive egos of our species often drive us to choose an explanation that puts ourselves “at the center of the action”. Copernicus refused to have his work, published until after his death because of the persecution of the theologians, or experts of the day. We are slow to change as a species and the Catholic Church only recently apologized to Galileo.
Ms Byrd then goes on in her same posting to deliver a “drive-by smear” on those who do not support the alarmist position by saying: “Im not sure, but I believe the link you gave from canadafreepress.com is one of the organizations funded by Exxon. I tried checking their website to confirm that, but could not access their about page.”
Since the full 68 page .pdf report from the “Union of Concerned Scientists” is posted on her own website, how hard would it have been for her to open the link and do a search on the six page Appendix B of this document that lists the groups and individuals associated with the alleged largess of ExxonMobil. canadafreepress.com is not listed in this appendix.
Since Ms. Byrd seems to place a great deal of weight on the quantity of scientists who support a position rather than the quality of their work, she might want to review postings on a couple of other URLs of organizations who also do not show up in the above referenced Appendix B. These include:
1. A series of articles by Lawrence Solomon in Canadas National Post daily newspaper documenting the detailed objections of more than 30 PhDs to the climate hysteria of the alarmists available at: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/environment/story.html?id=4432a41c-7c52-4b74-934e-f0dac3b2bcb8
Below is a brief excerpt from Part XXXII of this series published in todays National Post detailing the work of Dr. Anastasios Tsonis who has applied chaos theory to analysis of the behaviour of 4 ocean oscillations and their synchronization over the 20th century.
Climate change over the entire 20th century, Prof. Tsonis has convincingly demonstrated, see-sawed between cooling and warming periods, in sync with the regional oscillations. He did more, too. He applied the same mathematical mechanism to a state-of-the-art model that reliably simulates the activities of the same oscillations. The model — the same one used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — produced results consistent with his chaos-theory mechanism.
“In the simulation over the next century, the climate shifts twice: first a cooling period beginning in 2027, and then a warming period beginning in 2065,” he states. Moreover, the shifts in global temperature are independent of human activities.
“The model shows that the climate changes are intrinsic to the natural climate system,” he elaborates. “Man-made activities doubtless also influence the climate, but not through the profound synchronizations that have foretold the climate in the past and will foretell it in the future.”
2. A 31 page Annotated bibliography of recent peer-reviewed papers that question the orthodoxy of climate alarmism available for download from The Friends of Science at: http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=107
3. A detailed analysis of the hoax perpetrated by Mann et al, and published in the March 08, 2007 edition of the Rhinoceros Times an award-winning newspaper in Greensboro, NC, published weekly by Hammer Publications and available at: http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/1editorialbody.lasso?-token.folder=2007-03-08&-token.story=154945.112113&-token.subpub=
The knowledge that both Mann and the IPCC have systematically resisted the standard scientific research practice of open and transparent review of data, has been laid open for all to see for many months now. In this environment it seems surprising that a website that claims to be a science site not a political site . would continue to provide prominent airtime and webspace to individuals and organizations who have been shown to have all but abandoned the scientific method.
In her Aug 13 posting Ms. Byrd says:
I can only say that if the scientific consensus shifts on the subject of global warming if the evidence begins to show that Earth is not warming, and that climate is not changing due to human activities Earth & Sky will shift its presentation as well. Until that time, we will present the science of the majority as best we can.
It would appear that Earth and Sky may have already missed the boat on this commitment as the available satellite data shows no signs of overall warming since 1998! This would appear to indicate that, rather than subjecting various theories, analysis, and data to thorough examination and critical review, based on the scientific method, the Earth and Sky website simply tests to see which way thewind is blowing and adopts the position of the majority. Had Earth and Sky been around in the time of Copernicus, it would appear that this policy leaves little doubt which side the website would have been on.
In her Feb 7 posting Ms. Byrd says:
As a science writer for 30 years who has covered this subject since the 1970s, I watched this false controversy unfold with my own eyes.
Global warming has been discussed in the science community for decades. Scientists were predicting in the 1970s that human activities were causing Earth to get warmer. And now Earth is getting warmer.
Please open your mind to this reality. It IS a reality.
Deborah
Ms. Byrd may have been covering this file for 30 years but it would appear that she might have missed a few entries in this file over the past 110 years. The website of the Business and Media Institute (which also does not show up on the ExxonMobile list) includes a report by Dan Gainor called Fire and Ice that documents the medias role in covering four distinct rounds of predictions about climate change two of impending cooling and two of impending warming. The article can be found at: http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice.asp
In her Aug 13 posting Ms. Byrd says
Doug, I stand by what I said. There was no global cooling scare in scientific circles in the 1970s.
Wikipedia has a pretty good discussion of the medias over-reaction to scientific discussions of global cooling in the 70s.
You simply cant compare the 1970s discussion of global cooling to the current understanding of global warming. Its not a fair comparison. That was a discussion, lasting a few years. This is a bonafide, decades-long, gradual understanding on the part of thousands of scientists around the world that Earths climate is changing.
I believe its you and others who believe in the so-called global warming hoax who have been misled.
Yes, I do believe that. If that makes me an advocate, then so be it.
All the best,
Deborah
The fact that the earths climate is changing is not really news. Geologists whose life work has been dedicated to studying and understanding the dynamic cycles of climate change of various eras have known this for decades. Maybe this is why one finds that a significant percentage of geologists proudly count themselves as climate change skeptics. And please do not resort to the old line that this time it is different because the rate of change is so much greater than past shifts in climate change. The geological record demonstrates that a number of significant shifts in climate were triggered by singular events.
I would respectfully suggest that there are 3 other important reasons why the current media coverage of this fourth episode of climate change discussion in the past 110 years is so different:
1. the ubiquity and complete pervasiveness of todays media makes it impossible for people to ignore;
2. the low level of scientific literacy among reporters in the mainstream media. Few of the individuals we regularly see and read in the media have the faintest idea how to follow the advice of Dr. Kary Mullis and use their own knowledge, skills, and common sense to evaluate if a story passes the scientific method smell test; and
3. the tendency of the public today to want to take their knowledge of science, health, and other issues in spoon-fed sound bites, often orchestrated by Hollywood style interests that may be openly (or covertly) promoting other agendas.
As a method of putting this last point to the test, Earth and Sky might do us all a favor by creating a space on their website for listeners and viewers to make their prediction of what the date and time will be when the Goracle finally announces his Presidential candidacy. Of course, the announcement will be that he has been drafted by ordinary citizens and no longer has any choice but must jump into the race in order to save America (and the world)! Perhaps the winner could be awarded an Ipod so that he or she will no longer have any excuse for not downloading the latest podcast ramblings of Michael Mann et all!
Before dismissing the cynicism of this remark, readers may want to check out A Tale of Two Houses that can be found on the Snopes Urban Legends website at: http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp
While I am not a fan of either of these two men, or their policies, the document provides a valuable insight into the naivety and hypocrisy of the medias coverage of this topic.
In view of NASA saying that 1998 was the hottest year and then bew proven wrong by a scientist who back engineered NASA’s figures and then concluded that the figures that NASA used were wrong. My story was that I was doing a paper in college about “Global Warming”. For me ato get information out of NASA was harder than finding Chicken’s Teeth!
From ice core studies, scientists have been able to determine that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have varied from about 180 to 280 parts per million during last several hundred thousand years. I submit this graph showing the correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide (green line) and temperature (blue line). Presently, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are about 380 parts per million and projected to reach perhaps 450 to 550 parts per million by the year 2050. These increased CO2 levels, totally unprecedented in modern geological history, are probably due, at least to a great extent, to human-induced CO2 emissions.
Too many intelligent people have evidently been duped by the contrived, consistent and bewilderingly persistent “teachings” of the political controversy regarding human-driven climate change.
Too many politicians and corporate CEOs are ignominiously disregarding virtual mountains of overwhelming scientific evidence of global warming and other pernicious forms of climate change. Everyone understands the importance of technology in addressing global problems that are looming before humanity. We hear a lot about techno-fixes for any challenge. What is missing from public discussion, what is unconscionable, is the dearth of reasonable and sensible leadership by those who have assumed positions of power in the political economy.
Business-as-usual that adamantly and relentlessly favors unbridled industrialization and unrestrained economic globalization could be approaching a point in history when the huge scale and rapid growth rate of endlessly expanding business activities become patently unsustainable on a relatively small, finite, noticeably frangible planet the size of Earth.
Perhaps now is the time for national leaders to follow the wisdom of a growing number of people by at least acknowledging a ‘nest’ of world problems, the reality of which most leaders remain in denial. Given the probability that certain clearly identifiable global problems can be expected to fall into the laps of our kids, it appears somehow not quite right both to willfully leave these problems unattended and, even more disturbing, to fail in the exercise of our duty to warn the children: a duty to warn them of potential dangers to life as we know it and to the integrity of Earth.
Bruce:
Thanks for the nice graph. I have seen it many times before and eventhough I am not a “researcher” for a website I have taken the time in the past to look into the claims of what the correlation of such graphs (with an “x – axis” scale covering hundreds of thousands of years) mean, and how they can be misused (as in “An Inconvenient Truth) to encourage viewers to arrive at incorrect conclusions. One needs to apply some critical thinking to the graph and the data that underlie it. There is little doubt that humans have contributed to the increased concentration of CO2 that can be measured today, but given the repeated evidence of the significant lag between temperature and CO2 concentration, it is irresponsible to suggest, in the face of the evidence, that CO2 is the cause of a warming climate cycle as opposed to the result of it. This information is not very hard to find – if you want to find it – such as on the NewScientist.com website. By the way, a search of the Union of Concerned Scientists report shows no evidence of New Scientist or New Scientist.com having received funds from ExxonMobil.
Climate myths: Ice cores show CO2 increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming
17:00 16 May 2007
NewScientist.com news service
“Ice cores from Antarctica show that at the end of recent ice ages, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere usually started to rise only after temperatures had begun to climb. There is uncertainty about the timings, partly because the air trapped in the cores is younger than the ice, but it appears the lags might sometimes have been 800 years or more.
This proves that rising CO2 was not the trigger that caused the initial warming at the end of these ice ages but no climate scientist has ever made this claim. It certainly does not challenge the idea that more CO2 heats the planet.
We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas because it absorbs and emits certain frequencies of infrared radiation. Basic physics tells us that gases with this property trap heat radiating from the Earth, that the planet would be a lot colder if this effect was not real and that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will trap even more heat.
What is more, CO2 is just one of several greenhouses gases, and greenhouse gases are just one of many factors affecting the climate. There is no reason to expect a perfect correlation between CO2 levels and temperature in the past: if there is a big change in another climate “forcing”, the correlation will be obscured.
So why has Earth regularly switched between ice ages and warmer interglacial periods in the past million years? It has long been thought that this is due to variations in Earth’s orbit, known as Milankovitch cycles. These change the amount and location of solar energy reaching Earth. However, the correlation is not perfect and the heating or cooling effect of these orbital variations is small. It has also long been recognised that they cannot fully explain the dramatic temperature switches between ice ages and interglacials.
So if orbital changes did cause the recent ice ages to come and go, there must also have been some kind of feedback effect that amplified the changes in temperatures they produced. Ice is one contender: as the great ice sheets that covered large areas of the planet during the ice ages melted, less of the Sun’s energy would have been reflected back into space, accelerating the warming. But the melting of ice lags behind the beginning of interglacial periods by far more than the rises in CO2.”
Dear Luther:
Are you trying to tell me that the apparent correlation between CO2 concentrations (green line) and temperature (blue line) on this ice core study graph is a total misinterpretation of the data, because of your contention that it’s all a one-way street: an increase in temperature causes an increase in atmospheric CO2, but that an increase in atmospheric CO2 in no way, shape or manner contributes to global warming? That being the case, I guess there is absolutely no need for me to be concerned with today’s unprecedented spike in CO2 levels (380 parts per million and going upward). Is this temperature-CO2 one-way street theory a proven fact? Or not quite proven, but likely to be true because of the preponderance of evidence? Or is it wishful thinking?
I quote in part the article you sent me: “It certainly does not challenge the idea that CO2 heats the planet. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas because it absorbs and emits certain frequencies of infrared radiation. Basic physics tells us gases with this property trap heat radiating from Earth, that the planet would be a lot colder if this effect was not real and that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will trap even more heat.”
Bruce
Dear Bruce:
First of all, since the data shows that the lag of increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere behind increased temperatures can be as much as 800 years (or more), current readings of atmospheric CO2 concentration likely have much more to do with climate related events of the past than they do with the additional human contributions of CO2.
Secondly, while there is no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it is important to understand the effectiveness and relative contribution to warming that can be attributed to all CO2, as well as human produced CO2 compared to other greenhouse gases. Below is an excerpt from a laymans explanation of this from journalist Lorne Gunter (who also did not get money from ExxonMobil).
Think of the atmosphere as 100 cases of 24 one-litre bottles of water — 2,400 litres in all.
According to the global warming theory, rising levels of human-produced carbon dioxide are trapping more of the sun’s reflected heat in the atmosphere and dangerously warming the planet.
But 99 of our cases would be nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%), neither of which are greenhouse gases. Only one case — just 24 bottles out of 2,400 — would contain greenhouse gases.
Of the bottles in the greenhouse gas case, 23 would be water vapour.
Water vapour is the most abundant greenhouse gas, yet scientists will admit they understand very little about its impact on global warming. (It may actually help cool the planet: As the earth heats up, water vapour may form into more clouds and reflect solar radiation before it reaches the surface. Maybe. We don’t know.)
The very last bottle in that very last case would be carbon dioxide, one bottle out of 2,400.
Carbon dioxide makes up just 0.04% of the entire atmosphere, and most of that — at least 95% — is naturally occurring (decaying plants, forest fires, volcanoes, releases from the oceans).
At most, 5% of the carbon dioxide in the air comes from human sources such as power plants, cars, oilsands, etc.
So in our single bottle of carbon dioxide, just 50 ml is man-made carbon dioxide. Out of our model atmosphere of 2,400 litres of water, just about a shot glassful is carbon dioxide put their by humans. And of that miniscule amount, Canada’s contribution is just 2% —about 1 ml.
If, as Mr. Dion demands, we honoured our Kyoto commitments and reduced our current CO2 emissions by one-third — which would involve shutting down all the coal-fired power generating plants in Canada (and living with constant brownouts and blackouts); or taking all the cars or all the commercial vehicles off the roads; or shutting down the oilsands; or some combination of all these — we would be saving one-third of 1 ml— the tip of an eyedropper.
And somehow, that is supposed to save the planet from warming; the tip of one eyedropper out of 2,400 bottles of water.
That might be true if carbon dioxide were the most toxic substance ever discovered by man. But it is not. We each expel it every time we exhale.
While the popular press frequently refers to CO2 as the most important greenhouse gas, the contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect is dwarfed by that of water vapour and methane. If you prefer a more detailed science analysis of the relative contributions to the greenhouse effect of water vapour, methane, CO2 in general, and CO2 produced by human activity, here is the abstract of a paper by: ARTHUR B. ROBINSON, SALLIE L. BALIUNAS, WILLIE SOON, AND ZACHARY W. ROBINSON. The full paper is available at: http://www.oism.org/pproject/review.pdf
ABSTRACT
A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th Century have produced no deleterious effects upon global weather, climate, or temperature. Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth rates. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gases like CO2 are in error and do not conform to current experimental knowledge.
A second paper providing an even more detailed analysis of the role of human produced CO2 se the following link.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
Luther:
First of all, please get to the point and state it simply. Are you saying that an increase in atmospheric CO2 only “insignificantly” increases the temperature of the planet (if at all) because the Earth only has an “insignificant” amount of CO2 in its atmosphere?
Yes, I concur that Earth’s atmosphere consists of about about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 0.04% carbon dioxide. And, yes, I concur that there are other greenhouse gases besides carbon dioxide. However, that’s the whole point: a small amount of a greenhouse gas such carbon dioxide has a significant impact on global temperature. Once again, I submit this ice core study graph that shows the cyclic nature of atmospheric CO2 levels (green line) and temperature (blue line) for the last several hundred thousand years. If you look at the graph, you’ll see that atmospheric CO2 had varied from roughly 180 to 280 parts per millon. Presently, the atmospheric CO2 levels are over 380 parts per million and going upward. This spike in atmospheric CO2 is totally unprecedented in modern geological history.
Once again, I invite you to directly answer the question I had asked you in the previous post. Are you saying that these increased atmospheric CO2 levels are nothing at all to worry about, because this increase in atmospheric CO2 will in no way, shape or form contribute to global warming?
Bruce
Dear Friends,
As a first of a two-step thought experiment, please imagine for a moment that climate change is not more than a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself, and that at least one of the primary causes of certain pernicious and intensifying effects of climate change is the current huge scale and fully anticipated growth rate of absolute global human population numbers.
The second step calls for your careful consideration of an apparently unforeseen technical solution to the global human overpopulation problem from Jack Alpert, Ph.D., which follows,
“ I have found a behavior (that if implemented) would be powerful enough to prevent extinction of the human experiment. I have even come to a plan for implementing it. (that reflects the delays of implementation and response of the present global system.
It follows this line of reasoning.
1) Maulthuss argument holds true with important additions.
a) technology can put an upward slope on carrying capacity,
(overload can put a downward slope on carrying capacity.)
b) its not total population but total human footprint (population times per capita footprint)
that is constrained by carrying capacity.
c) when these two curves come together, starving to death is not as serious a problem as
loses of well being of a class of individuals who do not die because they live above subsistence.
d) these losers create what I have called and ever increasing crisis of conflict.
e) This conflict brings down civilizations (turns Londons into Baghdads)
wasting the wealth of a civilization and the earth to deal with these kinds of crisis
sends populations back to being camel jockeys or worse.
f) The next back sliding will not be regional but global. It will not be serial but simultaneous.
These differences between the crisis we have faced and what we are facing are caused by
everyone sharing (at least in the next 30 years)
common resourvors of resources and common sinks for our wastes.
2) Since these changes in the Malthaus argument now make the collision depend on the product of two variables, population and per capita footprint, (and I accept as a given ever increasing per-capita footprint,) the solution space becomes one of varying degrees of human population decline.
3) Certainly if there are no more children born starting today, then the human population would reduce on average by 63 million a year and in one hundred years humans would be gone from the earth. That would be the end of the human experiment.
4) we also know that if we capped population (nominally 2 kid per family behaviors) the total human footprint which is already too big would continue growing because of per capita increases.
5) We would have total human footprint increases even if we put an additional cap on the max footprint of each individual of the 6.3 billion. Just letting the have nots catch up with what ever cap we make, (e.g. the haves of middle america) would require at least 4x increase in total global human footprint.
6) Now the question is, What number between 0 and 2 will allow per capita foot print to rise and the total human footprint fall enough to avoid
a) the personal loss of well being that creates the crisis of ever expanding social conflict, and
b) allow the environment to repair and balance.
7) I came to an estimate of this number:
Finally I have formulated a plan to implement universal one child per family behaviors in the next 3-5 years”a) rapid population decline, probably at a rate greater than that created by
universal one child per family behaviors was a minimum requirement to
ensure the viability of the human experiment. The rate of decline
would have to be greater if f Ray Kurtzweils longevity predictions are correct.
b) this rate of decline would have to be in place at least for 300 years
if not longer. Leaving a global population of well under 100 million
c) All of the economic and social disruptions caused by such rapid population decline
(aging of pop, changes in family structure, diminishment of the powers of existing groups
(national, regional, religious, race, sex, ethnicity) are small
relative to the benefits that accrue to the people in the future.
(Yes it requires a deep discount of some of the faith based benefits.)
Comments are invited and sure to be appreciated.
Always with thanks,
Steve
Bruce
I am just an ordinary person trying to make sense out of the confusing and often contradictory evidence placed on the public record by credible scientists from a number of disciplines. I am anxious to be corrected if I have misapprehended something and to learn from you if you can provide convincing answers. I will attempt to concisely present what I have been able to glean so far:
1. Reading of the available data and reports from the Vostok ice core samples indicates that if you were to expand the x-axis of the graph, you have referenced, to look at the time surrounding each of the temperature and CO2 concentration maxima that appear to be coincident, one would find that the temperature maxima precede the CO2 concentration maxima by lengthy periods of time.
2. Can you point me to any study or scientific evidence that shows how the increased CO2 concentration that follows a temperature maxima by 500 years (or more) can have been responsible for having caused the earlier temperature increase?
3. If, in the absence of such evidence, we take on faith that increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise (because the CO2 component is so much more important than that of other greenhouse gases) then how does one explain that in the years following the temperature maxima, when CO2 concentrations are continuing to rise, how can it be that the temperatures that accompany this increase continue to decline? Without this evidence it would not appear to be possible to credibly assert that the CO2 concentrations measured today (or even further elevated CO2 concentrations) will yield a different result than the historical record of the ice core data.
4. There is no doubt that the greenhouse effect of a number of gases is what keeps the earth supportive of life, as we know it. Without it, the earth would be a rather inhospitable place.
5. Other gases are known to contribute to the greenhouse effect (although they are not yet well captured in any climate computer models) and are both more prodigious and more effective generators of the greenhouse effect (by both mass and concentration than CO2). Without evidence referenced in item 2 above, how is it possible to suggest that changes in the concentration of a gas that represents about 0.04% of the atmosphere trumps the impact of gases (such as water vapour), which have a much bigger impact? In other words, even if we were to fundamentally alter our practices, and to remove all of the human made CO2 (except of course the CO2 we exhale), even small changes in the concentration of other greenhouse gases, over which we exert little control, could easily make up for and exceed any mitigation of the greenhouse effect from the elimination of human produced CO2.
6. From the available information I have been able to find, there is no doubt that CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas and that human generated CO2 makes a small but measurable contribution to the very valuable and desirable process of keeping the planet hospitable for life (not to mention that CO2 is also a vital component of the symbiotic relationship between plants and animals where plants that are exposed to increased concentrations of CO2 are able to even further accelerate their magic process of generating more oxygen!) That being said, I have yet to find any credible evidence that any change in the tiny contribution of human generated CO2, to the overall such impact of all greenhouse gases, is likely to significantly affect the climate of the earth one way or the other.
What am I missing?
Nitrogen and Oxygen (which are NOT greenhouse gases) make up about 99% of the atmosphere. That means all the other atmospheric gases combined (including all the greenhouse gases) make up about 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere. These greenhouse gases – despite the fact that they’re in such small quantities that they are listed in parts per million (ppm), parts per billion (ppb) or parts per trillion (ppt) – very effectively absorb and emit infrared radiation, thereby heating our planet. The concentrations of many of these greenhouses gases (such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) have risen dramatically since the beginning of the Indudtrial Revolution. More on greenhouse gases – including anthropogenic (or human-produced) greenhouse gases – can be found at this Wikipedia article.
I heard the Mann radio post yesterday. I could NOT believe it! What a hoot.
Mann’s completely discredited “hockey Stick” is the least of his problems. His disgusting refusal to make public his “data” and “algorithm” was his real problem, and that was viciously anti-scientific of him, and blatantly political. He should be ashamed of himself. And so should James Hanson.
And Earthsky has made itself look like a political propaganda machine. They must be in the pocket of the multi-national, multi-BILLION dollar anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) industry: if you do not push AGW, you do not get grants or recognition. And you will be called bad names (deniers, etc).
Does ANYONE really quote wikipedia as an authoritative source about anything? Good grieve, Earthsky, good grieve. Much more of that and you will have as little creditability as wikipedia does; i.e.; NONE.
BTW, that photo above is a location of a weather station used in climate monitoring, is it not? It looks likes so many of the other locations.
Bruce:
I notice that you chose not to respond to the inconvenient truth about the significant lag in the ice core data between temperature maxima and CO2 concentration maxima.
I am quite well aware that Nitrogen and Oxygen are not greenhouse gases. As you may recall from an earlier post, I provided an example of the 2400 1 litre bottles that showed that of the 2400 bottle sample of the atmosphere only 1% would contain greenhouse gases, that of these 24 bottles, 23 would be water vapour, and that 95% of the remaining one bottle is made up of naturally occurring CO2 with only 50 ml of this last bottle containing all of the CO2 from human sources.
Water vapour, (99.999% of which comes from natural sources) accounts for 95% of the earths greenhouse effect while other human produced greenhouse gases account for less than 0.3% of the earths greenhouse effect.
I do not consider a reference to Wikipedia as a credible source for scientific information of this type. To respect your suggestion I did however visit the link you provided and reviewed not only the material, but also the discussion thread. Once again, I encountered posts from folks who would appear to have only a passing acquaintance with the scientific method.
If Wikipedia is the primary research tool relied upon by Earth and Sky, this probably explains all I needed to know.
The primary research tool for Earth & Sky is interviews with scientists. We interview many scientists each week thousands over our 16-year history. We have an extensive review process, where every radio script - such as the one above - is reviewed by scientists before they are recorded for broadcast.
Earth & Sky works hard to be a clear voice for science. If the scientific consensus shifted to disbelieve in human-caused global warming, Earth & Sky would also shift.
Best to all,
Deborah
Deborah, You might want to seriously and thoughtfully interview some of the many, credible, peer-reviewed and published scientists who have a point of view different from Mr. Mann…and refrain from the implication that there is scientific consensus, when in fact there is not, and it’s particularly heinous for folks like Al Gore to suggest that the rest of us should shut up and go away, and for you, by silence or by open advocacy, to give your consent and imprimatur to that kind of dictatorship in the realm of scientific debate.
It would do wonders for your credibility.
Regards,
Doug
Doug, we have looked at the evidence on both sides. Personally, I’ve watched the global warming story unfold for 30 years.
In science, there are always a variety of ideas about any one subject.
But in science a large consensus tends to rule the day. Consensus does not imply total agreement or unanimous assent. We know some scientists disagree with the idea of human-caused global warming. But most scientists who study this subject – a very large majority – now believe that Earth is warming due to human activities.
As a culture, what should we do about this? Knowing that science is not perfect – that the consensus view is sometimes proven wrong – what is the appropriate next step to take? Should we believe the minority rather than the majority? Should we do nothing, because it might not be true?
These are complicated issues, and Earth & Sky is a science website, not a political website. We are not suggesting solutions. We are only telling you what most scientists believe.
All the best,
Deborah
Deborah, you have made science sound like, not only a political system, but also like a religious BELIEF system. And, I must say I am still incredulous that you would cite wikipedia other to point out how totally unreliable it is.
In the late 1970s, I was the computer support guy for some oceanographers; we all dealt with weather and the current consensus on it. I can assure you that global cooling was the chicken little soap opera of the day, the consensus. Mind you, it was not nearly as well funded as the AGW industry is today, so that may account for your lack of awareness.
I am still shaking my head that you cite wikipedia, for anything. But, then, you give voice to Mann; so that he, of all people, can incredulously talk about disinformation! Mann, like Hanson, does not publish his data or his algorithms. Do you think this is appropriate behaviour for scientists? I expect they are both thought of highly at wikipedia.
This discussion has begun to degenerate into personal attacks.
We don’t allow that on the Earth & Sky website.
I’m going to leave this discussion open for another 6 or 7 hours in case anyone has anything to say of any substance. It’ll close by noon today.
Many thanks to all,
Deborah
When HCE, you and I protect God’s sustainable Creation the way MOTU and David Rockefeller protect the rampant globalization of the patently unsustainable human economy, then the world will change.
When ordinary people choose to save the world as we know it by deploying the kind of intensity and energy the elites employ now to endlessly accumulate wealth for the purpose of keeping a stranglehold on political power, accumulating possessions and conspicuously consuming, then the world will change.
I think it’s a big mistake to presume that human beings are pumping “insignificant” amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, because greenhouse gases make up a miniscule part of the Earth’s atmospheric gases. It’s like saying that the tick that causes Lyme’ disease can’t cause Lyme’ disease because of its small size.
In conclusion, I hardly think we’ve seen the last of global warming disinformation. I fear that human prejudice, to borrow the words of Oscar Wilde, “has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend.”
Dear Bruce,
In some sense, human prejudice (and human greed) appear to have robbed good science of its intrinsic value to the human community. It also seems that the masters of the universe, the ones who are organizing and recklessly expanding economic globalization have subrogated and twisted good science by engendering artificial political controversy where there would be otherwise be none. This is at least one source of the disinformation to which you make reference.
Perhaps the time is coming when most scientists will ignore the requirements of the modern robber barons, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and their minions in the mass media. Could it be that now is the time for many scientists to break their silence and, instead, to carefully report of good science regarding the human species and certain of its potentially unsustainable global activities overspreading the surface of the Earth in these early years of Century XXI?
As a way of beginning, if good science makes clear that the economic engine driving unbridled globalization of big business activities threatens the integrity of Earth’s body and its ecosystems, and if good scientific evidence determines that the global economy cannot exist without an adequately functioning, living Earth, then this could be a good time to consider what reasonable and sensible changes can be made to the seemingly endless growth process of the manmade economy, the leviathan, that looks like it could soon become a patently unsustainable human enterprise on the relatively small, finite, noticeably frangible creation of God the size of Earth.
Always,
Steve
Luther:
Concerning the “inconvenient truth” you present about the historic lag between increased temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentrations, I encourage you to reread the article you submitted to me on post #65:“Climate myths: Ice cores show CO2 increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming.”
I once again quote this article in part: “It certainly does not challenge the idea that CO2 heats the planet. We know CO2 is a greenhouse gas because it absorbs and emits certain frequencies of infrared radiation. Basic physics tells us gases with this property trap heat radiating from Earth, that the planet would be a lot colder if this effect was not real and that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will trap even more heat.”
Using this “climate myth” article as your basis, you jump to this far-reaching conclusion: an increase in atmospheric CO2 (even though it’s a major greenhouse gas) can NOT cause global warming. ONLY an increase in temperature can bring about an increase in atmospheric CO2 levels, but an increase in atmospheric CO2 (even though it’s a greenhouse gas) can NOT bring about an increase in temperature.
I hardly think the article you submitted supports this theory of yours, which, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t come close to rising to the level of established, proven fact. I know you’re so very convinced of your all-sweeping claim that you go on to say (1st sentence in post #67) that the spike in atmospheric CO2 levels in the modern world isn’t really due to the burning of fossil fuels. According to you, today’s unprecedentedly high atmospheric CO2 levels must be due to some unprecedentedly high heat wave that took place 800 or so years ago. I view your theory with a healthy dose of skepticism, because I have yet to see any substantiating evidence.