As some of my readers may know, I am actually rather attentive to environmental concerns. For several years, I have put my money where my mouth is and volunteered for local cleanups (including ocean cleanups our krewe specializes in – we have a special focus on the ocean), helped out at local animal sanctuaries, and spread a message of good stewardship with regards to our home. My wife is even more attentive than I am to these matters. She has spent most of her career working in zoos, aquariums, and veterinary hospitals.
So for me the fanaticism of Global Warming proponents is particularly irritating. Last night, my wife was watching a documentary on the Great Barrier Reef, and the mass coral bleaching event that happened in 2016, and the spin was obvious from the very beginning. Cameras panned over rows of crying academics, watching the coral turn white, and then die, pieces of flotsam carrying off into the current to music that sounded like it belonged in a funeral.
Marine Biologists and Climatologists (all on government payrolls) went on a series of adventures collecting the raw camera footage of dead and dying coral. It was explained to the viewer that even a 2C degree shift in water temperatures was sufficient to kill most of the Great Barrier Reef, and if we did not act soon, it would surely die. The rhetoric in the media was particularly extreme. The reef was declared “dead” in scare quotes, even though most of the reef survived the event intact.
By act, of course, they mean to have government regulations and taxation schemes put into place that would make things more expensive for the average Joes of the United States. It is, you see, always America’s fault. And it is thus America which must be taxed and penalized for the environmental problems somewhere else. Governments have, historically, been excellent polluters and destroyers of the environment. Why they should be trusted on this matter is beyond me.
The hole in this logic was immediately apparent to me. If a 2C shift in temperature was sufficient to wipe out the reef, how has this 18 million year old reef system (the current iteration is approximately 8000 years old) survived so long?
Here are two graphs which illustrate my point:
Notice that in both graphs, during both the 18 million year period, and the 8000 year period, temperatures have been higher than 2016, the time of the Great Barrier Reef mass bleaching event. So how is this reef still here? Why did it not die long before man starting dumping CO2 into the atmosphere? If a mere shift of 2C is sufficient to kill it, why is it there in the first place? Did similar mass bleaching events occur in the years when temperatures were higher than today?
This is only one of many inconsistencies which bother me, both in the climate models and the data itself. Correlation, as any idiot knows, is not necessarily causation. Perhaps there is an explanation for the why the Great Barrier Reef has survived previous warm periods, but is having trouble with this one. I cannot say. But so far, the explanation of the warmistas is insufficient.
Simple fact is, I don’t trust them. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say, these people don’t have any skin in the game. Indeed, it’s quite the opposite. They are paid by the very agency which wishes to push this agenda for its own benefit. Conflict of interest is readily apparent.
Thinking of this, I decided to peruse Taleb’s opinion the matter, which I located here. The thrust of the brief article is that the climate models and scaremongering are not required, nor are the specific policies espoused to correct them. Taleb’s skepticism of such modeling techniques is a matter of record. But, he tells us, the risk of global catastrophe from screwing around with Mother Nature shouldn’t be ignored. We have only one Earth, after all. It sounded sensible to me.
I’ve often thought that, were the Left truly honest about their concern for the environment, this would be the position to take. In other words, the models don’t work well, and the data is conflicting and, in any event, not accurate over a sufficiently long amount of time to be particularly useful. But, polluting the Earth is bad on general principle. Put simply, we have one planet (for now). Don’t fuck with it.
Instead, the warmistas have taken very specific policy positions but have failed to live by those same principles themselves. They will tell John Doe to give up his car, use less A/C, and to have less kids, but they will fly around in private jets, cool 14,000 sqft mansions, and do whatever they like with regards to their own families. If they really believed the Earth was doomed unless drastic measures were employed to alter human behavior, they would alter their own behavior as well.
I continue to maintain that financial wisdom is the path forward for us to be good stewards of Earth. Every time you load your shopping cart up with useless trinkets shipped over from China, running up consumer credit, you are contributing to the problem. This is an axiom I live by personally. Skin in the game. Similarly, don’t throw out the old for the new just because it is new. If you’ve ever watched those HGTV shows, you’ll see folks throwing out perfectly good refrigerators and ovens for fancy, new, “green” units. They moralize about it, patting themselves on the back for how environmentally aware they are. It amuses me how few people take into account the manufacturing expenditures necessary to make that new “green” appliance, nor understand that often times, the new models are less reliable than the old, and will eat up such savings in other ways.
Similarly, you see many Toyota Priuses, other hybrids, and new fancy electric cars driven by people who consider themselves to be proper environmental stewards. The effects of the cocktails of chemicals in the batteries are not taken into account, nor that, in effect, for a hybrid you must build two whole motors, with all the attendant manufacturing pollution. If the environment were truly their most valued goal, they would buy a used economy car, with good gas mileage, in reasonable shape. Or, perhaps, they would even ride a bicycle to work. This, of course, they rarely do. I’m much more inclined to listen to the rare environmentalist who does, however. He has skin in the game, after all.
Being frugal with your expenditures is an excellent way to both avoid loads of debt, and be a good steward. And given that China is the worst polluter anyway and is often exempted from the ire of Leftists (why let the biggest polluter off the hook?), the best things America can do is to buy less Chinese kitsch, and bring more manufacturing back to the United States. After all, we are generally cleaner about the process. The latter, of course, is anathema to the Left. They’d much rather tax American business into oblivion and let the third world dump as much pollution as it wants in an effort to punish the evil, racist United States. Such punishment is a higher concern to them than the planet they live on.
I mean, I wonder if all the crap China dumps into the water is having any effect on the Great Barrier Reef? After all, in the very same period quoted in the documentary as being extensively warming, China was rising as a major manufacturing concern. It’s entirely possible man is causing the damage, just not in the way Western academics are obsessing over.
Reducing pollution is a good and noble concern, and I support it, both in my own life and as a suggestion to others. I do not, however, support the specific policy positions of the Left, nor trust the government’s conclusions or ability to repair any damage. Notions that they can model the entire climate of Earth are foolish. Their obsession with carbon dioxide and warming has outstripped pollution concerns that could be much more pressing. They excuse the world’s biggest polluters out of political expediency, and fail to live by their own rules. They praise superficialities like “I drive a hybrid” over real volunteer work. The Leftist governments they support are often far worse environmentally than any private concern. They have no skin in the game. They are terrible stewards of the Earth. We should not listen to them.
But let’s not make the mistake of giving up proper stewardship of our home, either. As Taleb tells us, we only get one, and it is best not to play games with it if we don’t have to. And such stewardship often comes with financial benefits anyway. Leftists are determined to make their version of “good” stewardship expensive, to punish. I propose the opposite: being wise and less wasteful with your spending probably benefits the environment, too. And it is individual citizens who can best help, not bloated governments loaded with corruption, waste, and rent-seeking behavior.
” as any idiot knows” It seems like the most common error to me.
For the leftists to crash and burn would be the best thing for the future of Ma nature.
Quite true. After all, the USSR wasn’t exactly known for taking good care of the planet…
Always rough on everything.
USSR knew it couldn’t make an omelet without destroying the chickens.
I remember reading an article back when the USSR was a going concern about a school in East Germany that was looking for an air filter for its building good enough that the students could exercise INSIDE the building without having to wear their individual breathing masks.
Read: Ecocide In the USSR, by Feshbach and Friendly
https://www.amazon.com/Ecocide-USSR-Health-Nature-Under/dp/0465017819
No private companies that are law abiding pollute nearly as much as goverments do. Even before the alphabet soup of EPA, RCRA, SARA etc. in the U.S. property rights meant that you could sue a polluter for damaging your property. When the government owns everything there is not even that protection against pollution.
FWIW, tangentially, I wish my lefty Jewish brothers and sisters would recognize that Jews have suffered most when Jew-haters had the power of the state behind them.
Dystopic,
I must say no, it is not a Prius, it is as they all are a Pius, driven proudly by the modern day Pharisee.
Always. They do love to sound the moral trumpets, don’t they?
Heh, yes they do.
Point of information: All religiously observant Jews today are Pharisees. The rabbis were known as “perushim” because they separated themselves from the Saduccees, whom they considered religiously and politically corrupt. Jesus himself, most of his disciples, and his brother James were very clearly in the Pharisee camp. Considering how corrupt the ruling class Saduccees were, how much they had embraced Hellenism, the New Testament’s focus on Pharisees is a bit odd, perhaps a case of criticizing the familiar.
Paul was a Pharisee, and he wrote about half the New Testament.
The bike-riding, green-living environmentalist might be worth listening to, but I’ve found that very often their lifestyle is just a substitute for the medieval hairshirt, and they’re just punishing themselves for their irredeemable sins. They’re no more rational than the scientismists who worship the Great Computer Model.
My favorite “bike riders” are the ones that put there bikes on their little racks on the back of their Subaru Foresters and DRIVE to the park to ride their bicycles.
Then you have the bike riders who have names like Jef with one F. And they have their bikes on the back of Piuses.
Heh… I know my limits, and it’s a half mile of uphill either direction from my house to get anywhere worthwhile. And when I do hang my ride on a car, at least it’s an Accord old enough to drive itself with 220k mi on the clock; don’t want to reward the environmental blight of cadmium mines and the low energy density relative to octane and benzene of batteries! 🙂
Of course, during the last ice age, the Great Barrier Reef was dry land. It was dry land during each of the previous ice ages (at least six, maybe 25).
Standing atop the temple ripping the hearts out of sacrificial victims to appease the weather gods. Chanting to the mindless mob below that without their divine intervention surely famine and pestilence will follow. It’s an old scam, but still works great.
O/T
June Foray; the voice of Natasha Fatale (Bullwinkle), Witch Hazel, etc has died.
So, Moose, you are losing squirrel, da? My Natasha she is being gone also. We should not be in the quarrel no, nyet. Perhaps we set aside quarrel, get drink at bar, and go to rocks-and-rolling concert or hockey on ice game, da?
Interestingly, all of the various predicted apocalyptic eco-disasters over the past half century or so (overpopulation, ocean death, ice age, GW, ect.) have all had the same solution of transferring our wealth to unelected, unaccountable international ‘elites’ along with a diminution of our freedoms while at the same time our ‘betters’ don’t restrict their lifestyles at all.
I was puzzled by the paper Taleb issued a while back. Yes, he seemed to be saying that we must proceed as if we had confirmed the cagw theory because if it is true, and we don’t, we’re doomed, whereas we would survive the consequences of excessive caution. Is that your take? But surely there must be some threshold of uncertainty, otherwise we should treat any number of other fanciful threats in the same way. I didn’t read carefully, and i don’t recall seeing such a threshold. I know the ipcc puts out some sort of estimate of uncertainty, but it sounds more like a description of their feelings than am objective evaluation of their ignorance. I would have thought the failure to accurately predict climate and the absence of any compelling precedent made even a hazard-based approach unsupportable. I guess I’ll have to go read the paper more closely.
Taleb’s position is that the risk is real, even if the models and self-anointed experts are wrong, and even if there is no evidence for man-made climate “change” or damage. In other words, excessive pollution is not wise on basic principle, because you don’t know what the effects may be in a complex system. That I agree with.
Note, however, that he *never* mentions, not even once, that government policy is the method to curb pollution. His disdain for bureaucrats, economists, and politicians is a matter of record. He also regularly refers to their policies as taking advantage of moralizing suckers.
So, what I think he’s telling us – and what I agree with personally – is that excessive pollution is a bad idea, and we probably ought to *voluntarily* curb it, because we don’t know what the risks are (climate scientists claim they know the risks – they don’t). And, in line with what I mentioned in the post, a lot of this is just being smart with your money.
I sure as hell wouldn’t support government action on this. And, in any event, governments tend to be the biggest polluters anyway. Why the hell should we trust them?
Air pollution control via the government is what my professional career mostly consisted of. The problem isn’t the government (at any level) creating and enforcing regulations to deal with air pollution. As Glenn Reynolds likes to say: “govt is what we chose to do together”. Air pollution is a real threat, was recognized as such a long time ago, and has been dealt with in modern societies quite effectively.
The problem is the weaponization of these very same regulations by those who seek to dominate everyone else. Just look at the monster NEPA has become. This is also the greatest task and challenge of Trump and Co: getting into these regulations and rooting out the evil intent. I wish them luck, they’ll need it.
Glenn Reynolds says: “govt is what we chose to do together” in abject **mockery** of that original statement of Barney Frank.
Frank and Democrats use that term to justify government controlling every facet of our lives.
Totalitarianism. Big Brother watching, limiting, controlling. This is the end goal of those who use climate change as a threat. They think they will be exceptions, though. Like Al Gore.
I choose another of Professor Reynold’s quotes: “I’ll believe that climate change is a problem when those who are scolding us (example: Al Gore) start living like they mean it.”
The other thing that he and most of the others fail to mention is that flaming ball of hydrogen up there has way more impact, and that solar physicists are showing data (actual solar observation) indicating that we are headed for another Maunder Minimum, the event that produced the Little Ice Age.
Another Maunder? Say it ain’t so? We hams (especially VHF types like me) live and die by the sunspot numbers! 😛
As the Instapundit says, I will begin to believe the Climatistas when they act as though they truly believe what they are saying. So…no 10k square feet houses, no fleett of SUVs, no private jets and multiple jaunts across the oceans…
We’re going to break up as a nation, aren’t we?
I see no possibility of bridging the divide between progressives and normal people. “Climate Change” is just one of the many issues and principles on which we are hopelessly divided and diametrically opposed.
Regarding trashing old appliances to buy new “energy efficient” ones, go Google “cash for clunkers”, one of the truly awesome accomplishments of the Obamazoids —and under the creative stewardship IIRC of erstwhile enviro czar Van Jones, the green T Geenius Coates— which destroyed millions of good used cars by means of seizing up their engines while-u-waited with silicate solution that turned the crankcase lubricant into glass. Far out!
The kickback dough, sourced from the hapless taxpayers, went mostly to buying Toyotas and Hondas and MPG-lousy Ford F-150 pickups. Yer fifteen minutes of back-of-envelope calculations showed that once the energy costs of recycling the cubed victim vehicles, factoring in the s’pozed improvement in mileage and efficiency, the scheme was irrational under every possible analytical model.
Exactly as anybody who looked at it in advance for 2 seconds predicted.
Keeping older cars running may be great for the environment (cars on the road are NOT modering away in scrapyards or landfills), great for parts manufacturers/distributors/retailers, great for mechanics, and great for enthusiasts, but the practice is lousy for auto manufacturers who have to keep moving new product to keep THEIR employees employed and their stockholders compensated and their government loansharks repaid. So from the point of view of the manufacturers and the banker-supported congresscritters and administration apparatchiks (sp?) it makes perfect sense to expedite the extraction of elderly cars from the plane of useful material existence. And it allows the said ruling class to wave their hands and go “See??!! We’re Doing Something™!!” without, as several have observed above, making any substantive changes to their OWN lifestyles. That this gives the lie to their pious environmental concerns like Toto pulling back the curtain on the Wizard seems to escape their notice. Or they just don’t care because they can’t hear anything over the sound of their own self-evident towering moral rectitude.
Of course. In the end, it’s always about the money.
Yeah, this is my big frustration too. The current debate is framed like this: Scientists have proven Anthropogenic Global Warming, ergo, you must accept a command economy. Either you accept both or neither. So I’m constantly arguing the science with my right-wing friends who are trying to counter with how bad a Command Economy is (no duh! I’m not talking about that!), while my left-wing friends bristle at any point that undermines the current scientific understanding of global warming, while they’re (everyone really) perfectly fine with debating the various possibilities for what could be at the heart of Dark Matter.
The science is not settled; there are flaws in the models, there is additional information we need and we may never have perfect models. But the science we do have is compelling and suggests that we might need to take action. What action we should take is not a scientific one, but a political, economical, and ethical one. Why not geo-engineering? Why not nuclear? Why not carbon credits? We can debate these points and should! And we can debate the science and should! But we should understand that they’re not connected (except that if you can prove global warming isn’t happening, it changes the math for the environmental question, but only so much because fossil fuels have more than enough problems that we can justify moving away from them to some other energy source whether or not global warming is real)
No, the science we do have is NOT compelling. The science we do have is woefully, ridiculously incomplete.
Question: what effect does global temperature and/or CO2 composition on high-level cloud formation? No one has any answer for that, not even an attempt, scientifically speaking, and the albedo effect alone could dwarf every other effect we have measured. We’re arguing about effects that we have some vague idea about (and even that understanding is poor at the very best), while other effects are completely ignored, simply because we don’t know enough about them to even argue about them. CO2 concerns could be worrying about deck chairs on the Titanic – we need to miss the ice berg, and the deck chairs are utterly irrelevant in comparison.
Also, the benefits of fossil fuels are two-fold, and they will not be replaced until you deal with at least one of these, likely both:
1) They are an energy source – essentially, they are the world’s battery, and trying to collect enough energy from any other source is going to be very expensive in comparison (solar is near theoretical maximum efficiency already, and still can’t compete)
2) They are a great storage medium because they are incredibly energy dense while still being easy to use – even if we ran out of fossil fuels tomorrow, if we had the energy, we might well just make more (it’s not hard to do in the lab), as nothing else comes anywhere close in convenience.
When you find a liquid-at-room-temperature fuel that is even half as energy dense as gasoline or diesel, or you advance the state of electrical storage by a radical revolutionary change or 3, then we can talk.
In short, yes, there are pollution problems, but so far, we’ve cleaned that up (see the output of modern fossil fuel electricity plants – hint: 0) in a fraction of the energy differential of switching to anything else.
If scientists cannot EXPLAIN the historical climate, how can they presume to predict the climate of the future?
If their models cannot model the historical climate (where the “answers” are known), then how can it be presumed that the models are correct?
Several times in the distant past, the earth’s climate switched from warm into very cold (e.g. into ice ages) and from very cold into much warmer. What caused this?
Nobody knows.
By the way, check out graphs of historical CO2 levels. You will see that CO2 levels today are in the
LOWEST DECILE of all historical CO2 levels. Frankly, we live today in a near CO2 starving atmosphere.
I generally agree with your take. I use the term stewardship regarding taking care of the planet. I do have a question, because I have been caught on this without documentation other than regarding “the great and wonderful inventor of the internet” Al Gore, can you provide any support for the following
Instead, the warmistas have taken very specific policy positions but have failed to live by those same principles themselves. They will tell John Doe to give up his car, use less A/C, and to have less kids, but they will fly around in private jets, cool 14,000 sqft mansions, and do whatever they like with regards to their own families. If they really believed the Earth was doomed unless drastic measures were employed to alter human behavior, they would alter their own behavior as well.
Logic is not the strong suit of the Climatites. I just bought a hybrid. (I’m almost embarrassed, but I live in Japan where gas is $4 a gallon and the taxes on them are lower. So the surprisingly small premium is worth it…it’s not a model sold in the US). I really didn’t want a Pious because of the virtue-signaling factor, but even still, the two enviro-leftists I work with were all smug, thinking they had had something to do with it because they drive electrics (Leafs? Leaves?) and certainly I had come to my senses and decided to save the planet. They were disappointed when I said it was economics, and got a bit miffed when I reminded them that although I wasn’t particularly concern about GW, I had actually checked out our area’s power mix, and their cars are actually powered by 60% coal, 38% oil and 2% nuclear. Mine is by far the best as far as carbon and air quality goes. And I can drive all damn day and not have to spend 3 hours filling up.
It gets worse I watched a show about Turtles living on the GBR and the scientist was proclaiming that they might not survive global warming. This is a species that has survived 300 million years of climate change…
Minor quibble…the last ice age never ended…we are still in an ice age called the Quaternary that began around 2.5 million years ago. We are also in an interglacial, a period of global warming, called the Holocene that began 12,000 to 10,000 ago. When the Holocene ends, the continental ice sheets will return.
A quick google of the internet shows that while summer water temperatures at the northern end of the GBR can reach 29 deg C, in the Red Sea coral reefs survive summer water temperatures of 34 deg C. Corals have been around in significant numbers for the last 450 million years have have survived all of the major extinction events. I think they’ll be around for a while yet.
Epoch-wise, the Holocene ended 17 years ago. We’re now in the Obscene. Please update your Geologic Time Scales.
This has gone from theory to “the science is settled” in such a short time it’s amazing. New theories take many years to reach that distinction, because it takes time to test and prove them. All this is so far is a computer model, which aren’t any proof at all.
But when I first saw it mentioned in Scientific American, i knew it would become a major tool for fundraising for the environmental movement and therefore, would receive very little skeptical review. Isn’t that the essence of true science? The only way to test a computer model is to wait and see how accurate its predictions are.
Actually, you can do a pretty easy version of that test in just minutes.
Take your model, feed it data up to 10 years ago, then ask it to “predict” today. So far, none of the models even pass THAT test, much less actually waiting 10 years…
Basically, they are fitting a polynomial to a curve using known data, then claiming to predict things outside the range of points given. Anybody who knows anything about polynomials knows what happens then… (Hint: your “prediction” is male bovine fecal matter.)
I’ve seen that documentary, I had to show it to some students this past school year. It was scaremongering to the highest degree, but IIRC there was more to the dying reefs than JUST an increase in temperature, supposedly the acidification of the water was the biggest issue. Not that I disagree with the main point you’re making.