A post by Maynard
This provocative and comprehensive new British documentary has been uploaded to Google video and YouTube.
I hesitate to comment emphatically, because the technical arguments aren’t fully understood by the scientists, not to mention the general public. Like all politicized issues, most of what we hear is agenda-driven propaganda. The Left wants to exert greater economic control over the individual, so the global warming scare serves their purposes. Likewise, the Right would prefer this not be true, because we don’t want to be controlled. Somewhere behind the manipulation there’s truth to be found. I can’t tell you exactly what that truth is.
The fact is that atmospheric carbon dioxide has been rising, and common sense suggests the massive burning of fossil fuels may be responsible for this rise. Common sense also cautions us against unnecessary tampering with the balance of a working system. So I won’t casually dismiss the doomsayers.
On the other hand, the climate has always been changing. The factors are so complex that the process isn’t fully understood. In the mid-1970’s, the doomsayers predicted global cooling, with Time Magazine foreseeing “Another Ice Age” and Newsweek presenting a dire scenario of a “Cooling World”.
Climate change is generally a bad thing, because our infrastructure is built to deal with current conditions. If you were to swap, for example, Minneapolis and Honolulu, both cities would grind to a halt for years. It’s vastly inefficient to be forced to re-arrange farms and factories and roads and populations to make up for changing conditions. So we would rather face a stable climate. Don’t let anyone tell you that a warmer earth would be a good thing. But the world is a dynamic system, and it will continue to change, just as it always has.
I’ve noted before that I’m more concerned about our growing dependence upon hostile foreign nations to meet our energy needs than I am about carbon dioxide. I’ll argue that this alone is an excellent motivation to seek alternatives to oil.
See also my earlier note about Al Gore’s movie.
So Al and Mike (see “Manufacturing Dissent”) both got statues for telling big lies. It proves that “feelings” are much more important than facts to both Hollywood and the MSM.
At least it is not the Dark Ages or Al would have the scientists who call him a liar burned at the stake! But it soulds like they get something akin to it from the PC “progressive” crowd.
The way science works is, in part, by eliminating alternative explanations.
The most that can be said for the human-cased global warming idea is that it is not obviously absurd on its face. Hence it is not a clear waste of time to ask the question — if indeed the world is getting warmer (in the aggregate), could it be because of something that people are doing?
And that’s it.
That said, let’s assume for the moment, that the world actually is getting warmer in the aggregate.
We know that the world has been both warmer and colder than it is now, and that the world has been getting warmer and colder by turns since forever, people or no people.
So it is incumbent on “scientists”, or at any rate the global-warming worriers, to show that this time it’s different.
One has to be able to say, the last few times the world got hotter it was because of X, but this time it’s different because X isn’t happening now, so it must be something else.
To argue as is generally done that A could be causing B, and B could be causing C and C could be causing D, and so on, is absurd and has almost nothing to do with scientific method, unless it happens to be your personal favorite way of forming hypotheses.
One has to be able to say that the cause of Z, could be X and couldn’t be anything else.
To the best of my knowledge nobody has established (or even tried to establish) that this global warming is in any way different from all the ones that came before.
Not in degree, speed, extent, duration, scope, anything.
So if we haven’t extablished that anything different is happening, there’s no reason to imagine a new cause.
To use a crude example, after 35 years of life, a woman doesn’t go rushing to the emergency room when her menstrual bleeding starts — unless she sees or feels something significantly, meaingfully different from the 240 times it happened before. (Assuming puberty at 15).
Bleeding, as scary as the word “bleeding” sounds, is a normal natural condition. It would be insane to ask what’s causing it every time it starts.
I would be greatly comforted if the “scientists” at the scam infested UN displayed half as much common sense as the average house-wife — or at least gave us credit for having such common sense ourselves.
Typical of the Socialist Marxists do not argue , and stop presenting those silly things called facts. What bothers me is that Bush is repeating this crap.
They did the same thing in the seventies with nuclear power plants. Good old Jane Fonda at her countries service again .
After 30 yrs they are only talking now about “discovering ” Nuclear power to produce electricity .
This green movement makes me so sad for future generations. I work with numerous scientists in the medical research field and you would be stunned to learn the percentage of them that accept man-made global warming without question. I am not saying man-made global warming does not exist – I am saying it has not been proven and the scientific ‘evidence’ never seems to make any sense.
And to think how long it has taken me to get over the killer bee scare of the 80’s!
Nice post Maynard!
What ever became of acid rain? The ozone hole? Overpopulation? When I was a kid they wouldn’t let me eat snow because it was full of radioactive fallout from Soviet H-bomb tests. I actually fell for the global cooling myth in the seventies, because we had some hellacious winters up here. Wake up folks! Chicken Little and her friends were “saved” by Foxsy Loxsy, who urged them all to take shelter in his gunny sack.
RAYGARB
“What bothers me is that Bush is repeating this crap.â€
Your are absolutely right! Like Jimmy, W ran as a conservative, but once in office governed as a liberal. In Bush’s case a far left wing liberal. Evidenced by his alliance with Chappaquiddick Ted 5 years ago to get “Hillary care Phase 1†passed; and his current alliance with Teddy on the pardon of 8 – 12 million criminal aliens! Who knew in 04 what an extreme left winger Bush was?
Al Gore has a neat little scam working for him. He buys carbon offsets from Generation Investment Management LLP (GIM), a tax-exempt corporation. Al Gore is co-founder and chairman. This company does nothing itself to improve the environment. It is an investment management company making long-term investments in so-called sustainability research companies. These companies receive government funding as well for their research. So, nothing is happening right now to improve the environment, but these “research†companies get lots of money for pie-in-the-sky environmental solutions. The investors in these companies see a return on their investments now. Carbon Offsets: Al Gore’s Big Easy
GIM : “We invest in long-only, global, public equities…” “The global context for business is clearly changing—Capitalism is at a Crossroads. Shareholders will be best served by companies who maximize their financial return by strategically managing their performance in this new economic, social, environmental and ethical context.â€
A company named Molten Metals Technology (MMT) was praised by Gore as one of these pioneering companies. This company was run by the notorious Maurice Strong (see Tammy’s Feb 9 post The Shadowy World of UN’s Maurice Strong) and a group of Gore cronies including Peter Knight, Gore’s former top Senate aide. The company received over $34 million in research and development grant money from the DOE and other federal sources. At one point federal grant money was the company’s only source of revenue. With Gore touting the company, the stock hit $35 a share. When the company made no progress delivering the technology, federal funding was cut. Prior to the public announcement of a funding cut, seven corporate officers–including Maurice Strong–sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value. Creators of carbon credit scheme cashing in on it. MMT subsequently filed for bankruptcy. Legal papers cited: “The Chapter 11 Trustee (by separate special counsel) brought suit…for alleged wrongful acts: breach of fiduciary duty, breach of duty of loyalty, corporate waste, insider trading , and gross negligence.
Another interest of GIM is funding a foundation. So far, according to it’s website, the only grantee is Jed Emerson who is promulgating Capitalism 3.0 based on a theory called Blended Value.
“Under Capitalism 3.0, the rules will shift to ease the dissonance. In the realm of the new model, then, if you want to maximize economic value by generating financial returns for investors, you should no longer be able to do it without taking into account how your execution of a business strategy is effected by social and environmental factors.†Blended Value PDF That would be the kinds of companies Al Gore is investing in.
This is socialism by a sillier name. Surprise! The new incarnation of capitalism involves lots of government oversight. Who will decide what the social value of a company is? The stench in the air is a cesspool of racketeers who empower and enrich themselves while gradually enslaving the globe in the name of the good. We are waking up late—again
The whole world needs to “lighten up” about global warming. The worst case scenario of the consequences of climate change place any significant effects 50 to 100 years in the future. We, as a species are characterized by our great adaptability. There are cultures living in igloos in the Artic Circle and other cultures living in the steamy equatorial jungles, surviving, thriving, and perpetuating their way of life. If Malibu or Long Island are inundated by polar melt, we have at least 50 to 100 years to adapt(move inland in this case). The skyscrapers on the skyline of NYC will not be there in 100 years anyway. We could even exploit climate change to our advantage and financiers could create new financial empires from the evolution of a new way of life. Social change is almost always good in the long run. Nothing bad will happen and the climate change could reverse, making the issue moot.
It’s March 16th in NY. It’s snowing. Enuff said.
fact is we do need to be stewards of the environment but not at the expense of our rational minds. It seems from the Brits documentary that our main concern is rainfall which is lessened if the sun is the prime factor.
If CO2 is the cause of the warming then we would expect that as the oceans warm and evaporation increases then more clouds are formed and more rain and more cooling. Also more plants, and a longer growing season thus more productive farms.
There may be steps that need to be taken both individually and governmentally. FIRST HAVE THE OPEN DEBATE not some lie like “all the scientists agree that man is causing global warming”
(hey for $20 i’ll give you a share in the carbon offset from the two trees i planted in the backyard)
Thanks for posting this video, Maynard. It’s the most informative show I’ve seen on this topic. I noticed there was a complaint against it by one of the participants in the show, a Dr. Wunsch, oceanographer at MIT, who felt that his comments were misused and mischaracterized. Looking carefully at the complaint, he was upset because he felt the show implied by his comments that he was saying something he doesn’t believe–that human-caused CO2 buildup and climate change are not a big problem. I didn’t see it implying he was saying that. Other scientists in the show were saying it outright. There was no need to infer it on his part. Somehow he thought his involvement in the show damaged his reputation. All I can say is it makes the show’s point: Anyone who comes out against the hysteria, or even appears to, is villified and must be made to repent. He has done so, and is now being used as a poster child against the show. In any case, it appears to me that Wunsch was asked for his expertise about how the ocean system works, and how it contributes to the climate system, not his views on how the climate system works as a whole, or the dangers it poses.
As someone who has studied this issue a bit with a critical eye, I can say that there is valid scientific information in this show, particularly as it pertains to CO2 following temperature–not leading it. I was particularly intrigued by the information about how climate changes in relation to changes in solar energy and cosmic radiation from space. Very interesting stuff!