Slashdot Mirror
Skeptical Environmentalist Saga Continues
"The Ministry critique holds that the Committee's procedure was unfair. It does not address the scientific issues. Lomborg's book caused outrage among many environmentalists and scientists, while right-wing organizations such as the Cato Institute have defended Lomborg. Scientific American devoted eleven pages of its January 2002 issue to a critique of Lomborg. Lomborg was only allowed to publish a one-page rebuttal, to which Scientific American replied here. When Lomborg defended himself by posting the Scientific American critique on his web site and that of Greenspirit with his commentary [PDF file] interspersed, Scientific American threatened to sue and both sites took it down. It is, however, still available at the iGreens web site."
(Slashdot ran a review of Lomborg's book early last year.)
Jerry Pournelle posted a link to this on his site.
Aliens Cause Global Warming
By Michael Crichton
It is a very good read. Crichton claims that the public believes in things like Global Warming and Nuclear Winter for the same reasons that it believes in little green men. He says that science has failed to act as "a candle in the dark."
That teaches him for questioning orthodoxy.
Lomborg's book has 2 930 footnotes which allows you to fact check every single assertion that he makes. I've never seen that level of detail from the environmentalist movement and I speak as someone who has read more than just their pamphlets.
It should be noted that the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation published its own response to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty:
"[T]he DCSD has not documented where [Dr Lomborg] has allegedly been biased in his choice of data and in his argumentation, and...the ruling is completely void of argumentation for why the DCSD find that the complainants are right in their criticisms of [his] working methods. It is not sufficient that the criticisms of a researcher's working methods exist; the DCSD must consider the criticisms and take a position on whether or not the criticisms are justified, and why."
Oh, you mean the DCSD has done what they are accusing of Lomborg on? Right then...carry on!
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
This story reminds me of what I hear many smokers say when they're challenged over smoking. They say that there has never been any proof that smoking causes lung cancer, just that it's circumstantial. When A happens, then B happens, this doesn't mean that A caused B. If B happens after A in 95% of cases, that's not proof, and merely circumstantial (although compelling).
Disregarding the carcinogen tests on mice, a pure statistical approach should at least tell you if there is some kind of correlation.
If the probability of getting lung cancer for smokers differs statistically significantly (there are tests for this) from the same probability for non-smokers, then you can say with a certain margin of error (say 99% certainty) that smoking and lung cancer are not independent variables but that they are correlated. Yes, correlation does not equal causality, but if the odds of getting lung cancer are less for non-smokers then I certainly know how not to spend my spare change. Others are free to auto-darwinize themselves with tobacco products.
The problem with fighting a theory backed by overwhelming evidence is that you'd really have to come up with your own bulletproof theory that explains all the results as well as predicts something previously unknown. This is where all the crackpot theories usually fail. They attack existing theories and ridicule their shortcomings then introduce new models which explain all the data adequately but do not accurately predict anything new. Worse, they usually introduce new assumptions and special conditions that the old theories didn't need in order to work.
Just want to post my agreement:
I am an environmentalist, in that it seems obvious to me that we are destroying much natural beauty and causing damage to human health with pollution. I also suspect (although I am just a layman) that we are causing global warming, and that we should avoid changing the climate until we are more capable of understanding what impact this will have. To me, "first doing no harm" is the truly conservative approach to the environment, not the "we'll do nothing until the proof is overwhelming" argument that some so-called conservatives make.
I do not drive an SUV. In fact, I do not own a car at all, and I take public transportation or walk everywhere.
BUT...I am becoming more and more skeptical of the environmental movement. Too much of it seems to be pushing an anti-capitalist morality with which I do not agree (e.g., I have a friend who once argued that subcontinent Indians are better off in abject poverty than as computer programmers in air conditioned offices). I don't want people to have less goods - I just want to make sure that we all have iPods in such a way that we don't destroy the earth in the process.
More importantly, I am seeing cases where the environmental movement is wilfully exaggerating how bad things are, and is arguing that no matter what the choice, the environment is both the first and the only thing.
Well, I obviously want a clean, healthy environment. But it must be balanced against other needs. And to make the correct decisions, we must have accurate, not exaggerated, accounts of the situation.
That is why I appreciate people like Dr. Lomborg (or Gregg Easterbrook at the New Republic), who bring some balance to the debate between environmentalists and oil-company-sponsored "non-profits."
I'm not so sure that humans are the root cause behind any global warming, especially after seeing that Mars is just coming out of an ice age of its own. Given that humans have had, like, zero impact on the climate of Mars, but solar output has impact on both Mars and Earth, doncha think that global warming might, just might, be caused by the sun, not humans?
I'm not saying that humankind has no impact on Earth's climate, but that maybe blaming us for global warming is just another Chicken Little espousing that the sky is falling. We'll likely know better, in a few million years or so. Till then, I'm not holding my breath.
Lemon curry?
So what if global warming is not caused by humans? If it really is a farce we should just continue to burn coal and oil to provide electricity and pump absurd amounts of gasoline into our vehicles, right? Well, last checked, burning gas, coal, or oil also produces other nasty pollutants (other than CO2) that cause awful things like acid rain and kill little children with asthma and other breathing ailments. Burning fossil fuels is not just causing global warming, it's screwing up the air we breathe. Isn't that reason enough to want to find alternatives???
Did Adam Smith ever talk of trees or clean water? No he did not. It simply did not occur to him that we might one day run out of either substance.
"it's that capitalism assumes scarce resources with imperfect but real fungibility (and inevitable but minimizable tradeoffs) which makes money-based exchanges the least friction-bound way to allocate them."
Not quite true. Capitalism measures the rate at which natural materials are extracted but not the rate at which they are restored. In other words capitalism has no way of measuring sustainibility until it's too late. Let me illustrate with an example.
Let's say that G.W decided that trees cause pollution and ordered all forests logged. The market would be flooded with wood and the price of wood would drop down to nothing. At that point a capitalism would say "the price of wood keeps decreasing so that must mean there are more trees in the world, in fact I predict that in 6 months there will be infinate amount of trees in the world". You see these kinds of arguments all the time "the price of such and such is going down so there must not be a shortage". They are measuring the rate of extraction not long term sustainability.
I once saw Milton Friedman talking about pollution with Charlie Rose and he said "if my shirt gets dirty from pollution then I can sue the factory" (something to that effect). It never occured to him that pollution might cause a deformed baby or cancer. To him pollution means getting his brooks brothers suit cleaned more often.
War is necrophilia.
The first page states a claim that is very difficult for the global-warming denialists: "...since 1980, the solar constant has steadily decreased by 0.02 percent per year."
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The 2000 blackouts weren't only because of fraudulent energy trading practices (although that did play a part). You portray the Wackos as demanding good design of nuke stations. When was the last time a nuke station was built in California? Over 20 years ago, thanks to the Wackos. They don't care about good design; now they only care about no design at all.
You say you've toured the Diablo Canyon facility, and that's how you know it was built right? If you know that's the case, why aren't you in the business of nuclear reactor design? Or do you think that simply touring the facility gives you all the knowledge you need to verify its soundness and robustness?
You sound exactly like the people Bjorn Lomborg looks at. Why not take a look at how much you really don't know, before you make such an ignorant conclusion.
Thanks for saving (?) me from a nuclear disaster. Can I please have some more nuclear plants in California now? It might help with the whole energy thing? No? Hmmm, so you've traded one potential problem for a very real one in my name then? Thanks I guess?
What? You don't know? I'm not surprised.
Heat islands have been the subject of intense discussion and research in this area for as long as I've been following it, and a quick search immediately turns up refutations of that claim. From physicist Martin I. Hoffert (who is certainly more qualified to expound on the issue than Lomborg): Here's another take on the issue: and another independent measurement: (I can't believe the things that get modded up. Okay, given the lack of research obvious in what gets posted, maybe I can believe the credulousness obvious in what gets modded up. But it's still dismaying.)Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
We never got 24"+ of snow in the first week of December, either. If I use that as my data point, then we'll be up to about 10 feet by springtime...
Not saying if humans are/aren't making an impact, and certainly not the magnitude of any influence we might have, but using one anecdotal data point doesn't really help your argument.
But even if we're not really destroying the environment as much as everyone fears, I do agree that less pollution is a Good Thing(tm).
=Smidge=
Yep.
A climatologist researcher friend of mine was going along with the global warming consensus while he was running Global Circulation Models. Then he got deep into paleoclimatology and changed his position, because he saw first hand how terribly bad the historical climate record was, and what large, important conclusions were drawn from inadequate data coupled to very suspect indirect causation chains.
Other acuaintances of mine in the field, at least during the Clinton administration, would not publish their skepticisms and didn't want to be quoted by name because being a GW skeptic meant not getting research grants!
Another acquaintance doing research on increased CO2 on plant growth had trouble getting grants once he started showing very positive results.
Global Warming "science" is already highly politicized. And I put "science" in quotes because forecasting something 100 years in advance is not particularly scientific, given the lack of testability in reasonable time frames. Furthermore, there is a sampling bias in the models... huge amounts of assumptions go into models, many in what is called "paramterization" - which means literally sticking in fudge factors to account for many phenomenon either too fine grained, too poorly understood or just too hard to model to put into the program. Naturally, those models which can "forecast" the historical record tend to be considered the best ones. However, given the level of tweaking the models require, this is more likely to be a matter of chance than to indicate that the model is really correct.
Finally, what BL says about the Kyoto accords is true. Put in different terms, the change in temperature as a result of Kyoto would not be measurable (separable from noise) in 100 years. In other words, Kyoto does nothing to help the environment (the other formulation is to say it delays warming 6 years out of 100). If one pins down a knowledgable Kyoto proponent, they will admit that Kyoto doesn't achieve anything of significance with regard to the climate, but rather gives a start to what is really required, which (if you believe the IPCC models) is a reduction in CO2 emissions so great that with current technology it would destroy the economies of the world and result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 3rd and 4th world.
In other words, Kyoto was meant as a trojan horse (with goodies in there to make the US economy less competitive with Europe, and a complete lack of regulation of the largest and fastest growing countries). Its purpose was to get people used to suffering to reduce CO2, and to get agreements in place that could be used to tighten the CO2 rules over time.
Finally, many environmentalists believe in the "precautionary principle" which in effect says that if we suspect something might be harmful, but can't prove it, we should stop it anyway.
This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that it is applied to restrict CO2 emitting activity, but is not applied to the potential social impacts of those restrictions. In other words, precautionaryism (to coin a term) is okay for the environment, but potential harm to man does not receive the same level of caution. Furthermore, it is easy to extend the precautionary principle to end all progress. For example, the precautionary principle, applied to genetic engineering, would cause us to shut down all efforts in the area, because it is likely (yes, likely) that the technology will be used by terrorists to create dangerous pathogens.
On another topic, I read the Scientific American criticism of The Skeptical Environmentalist. It almost caused me to cancel my subscription after forty years. It was an poor excuse for a rebuttal - it was an attack on the person, BL, more than on what he had to say. It ignored most of his main points and where it found specific fault (and there was almost none pointed out), it was on trivial details. And yet, they only gave him one page to respond. Furthermore, the threatened him with copyr
The only good weather is bad weather.