Ahmadinejad, considered the Iranian bad cop, is said to be in (partial) eclipse these days. I don’t know if those rumors are true, but I suspect they don’t matter that much. The Iranian president seems to be doing his job and, more importantly, their nuclear program continues whether hardliners or “traditional conservatives” are running the show. A recent article in the NYT Magazine, apparently endorsing the Ahmadinejad-in-trouble line, curiously didn’t mention that nation’s nukes at all. Perhaps, like Chirac, they wanted to assure us that all is well and that even if the Iranians obtain nuclear weapons they wouldn’t use them. The mullahs are reasonable folks, we are to assume, and all this Twelfth Imam talk is just a side show. The writer of the NYT piece, Laura Secor, went her merry hijab-clad way across Iran (no Fallaci she), taking down notes from mullahs and regurgitating them as if the vevak and taqqiya did not exist.
Well, believe what you will. The message we are being fed now is that we shouldn’t worry so much about Iran and pay attention to what’s really important – global warming. Indeed, it probably is, to some degree or another. But it strikes me that both sides – right and left – are open to accusations of lack of seriousness at the present moment. There is an opportunity to come together over energy independence, which would cut in both directions at once, but not nearly enough people are seizing it. Some right wingers look upon the sanctity of “free markets” with as much religious devotion as Al Gore appears to regard the sanctity of the environment. Enough of this new form of idol worship. What we need is pragmatism and cold hard facts – facts about the environment and facts about Iran. Neither are easy to get.
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23 Comments
1. syn:JR Dunn over at http://www.americanthinker.com has an excellent article about Global Warming ignorance.
I know in California ya’ll don’t really care much for pragmatism but give it a try anyway.
Feb 1, 2007 - 3:32 pm 2. Roger:Thanks for pointing to Dunn’s article, syn, which I just read.
From historical sources, it makes the valid point that some warming in the global climate may be a good thing. Unfortunately, the author doesn’t deal with the larger question of whether the rapidly increasing pace of world industrialization is going to push that gnetle warming beyond the benign point. From the writing, I assume Dunne not to be a scientist (he quotes an anonymous NASA source as his scientific evidence).
From my POV these days, I am less and less interested in the views of non-scientists on this matter. That includes, naturally, politicians who are almost all completely unqualified to discourse on this subject and… of course… me.
Feb 1, 2007 - 3:50 pm 3. Sandy P:Dennis Avery was on Medved again today, boy, were the loons frothing!
Feb 1, 2007 - 4:39 pm 4. Sandy P:Via Tim Blair:
Via Reason
Feb 1, 2007 - 4:41 pm 5. syn:From a pragmatic and non-scientific point of view, I think it is rather arrogant for human beings to assume they have the power to influence or control the weather; what I know is that without the ‘human footprint’ Nature has the capacity to kill me without remorse.
Climates change; humans just don’t have the power to alter this Nature. For hundreds of millions of years Nature has survived and conquered this earth, I want the human footprint to aid me in surviving Nature’s wrath. At one time in history the American tribes frequently burnt acres of land to aid hunting for food, only a fanatic environmentalist would force the Indians to starve to death in order to save a tree.
Say we do ration ‘carbon output’, drive 3X5 box cars, change the light bulbs, etc, etc, etc what will we do when Nature continues to wreak havoc across the planet? Come up with some other ’scientific’ explanation to which everyone will consentually agree is happening because it must always be something we are doing? Raise taxes to justify the fear?
If you want a pragmatic answer to Global Warming, live out in Nature for a year without any ‘human footprints’ to aid your survival, hopefully you’ll survive the first nite without freezing to death. Even the most hardened humans forced to live outside the industrial world (results of Western environmental imperialism) have difficulty surviving Nature’s elements, the words Global Warming aren’t even in their vocabulary.
Respecting Nature is appreciating its capacity for destruction, protecting Nature from ourselves is suicidal.
Feb 1, 2007 - 5:20 pm 6. Luther McLeod:Well, I have a solution, just let the jihadist’s take over, shortly after, the highest technology around will be hand scribed copies of the koran. Everybody wins, or, well, maybe not. Sorry, but right now, I worry about what will kill me, not about what might kill me.
Feb 1, 2007 - 5:30 pm 7. Paul Hager:Back in 1977 I started taking the anthropogenic warming hypothesis serious – around the time the hysteria over global cooling was starting to die down. I’m rather more skeptical about how much effect humans will have these days but that’s beside the point. A major part of any attempt to reduce CO2 is to go nuclear.
Had the U.S. government not hamstrung nuclear power – in other words, if the U.S. government had behaved like the French government – we’d probably be getting 80% or more of our electrical power from that source today. Perhaps we would have also developed thorium fuel cycles, high temperature helium cooled reactors, and even exotic molten salt reactors. The bottom line here is that the feds effectively strangled our domestic nuclear industry with red tape so I’m not particularly sanguine about the wisdom of government bureaucrats.
Ironically, the feds earlier facilitated the development of nuclear power. There were two promising military nuclear power technologies being considered for commercial development and being pushed by the Atoms for Peace program. One was based upon pressurized water reactors used in marine propulsion. The other was based upon molten salt reactor technology used in – believe it or not – the attempt to build a nuclear powered bomber. The naval technology was more mature and also less challenging and it won out.
So, the history of nuclear power in the U.S. is that the government gave and then then the government took away. I’m reminded of what Barry Goldwater said in his acceptance speech at the 1964 convention: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.” Q.E.D. I believe that we got nuclear power faster, through government, that the free market would have provided. However, once the market provided it, nuclear power would have taken off and would have relegated fossil fuels to the same status as whale oil on about the same time scale.
What’s needed now is for the feds to make it easy to license nuclear reactors and make it essentially impossible for Luddite anti-nukes to block them.
Feb 1, 2007 - 5:36 pm 8. Foobarista:On global warming, I’m willing to put it in a hopper of good reasons to reduce use of oil and move to non-polluting energy sources, but I’m not willing to bankrupt the world economy or weaken ourselves in the face of our enemies because of it. Also, there’s a dangerous whiff of millennialism about the whole thing.
Also, I’m old enough to remember global cooling, the Club of Rome, and a whole bunch of other stuff that was supposedly going to destroy mankind according to a lot of really smart people running numbers.
As for global warming, if someone talks about nuclear power, I’ll consider them credible. If they talk about bicycles and solar cells, or the wonderful agrarian communities led by the Gaia Central Committee, they’re a bunch of ninnies.
Feb 1, 2007 - 7:34 pm 9. Godzilla:Now might be a good time to dust off one of the classic disaster books of bygone days. Ever hear of “Earth Crust Displacement”? That was a theory developed by Charles Hapgood, and expounded upon in his book “The Path To The Pole”.
He and his team of collaborator’s advanced a theory in which the poles do not always shift gradually, as the geologists believe (in that various locations around the earth were once magnetic poles), but that sometimes the poles shift RAPIDLY, in effect realigning the planet’s continents, taking some areas into warmer zones, others into colder zones. Essentially creating world-wide havoc, the like of which has survived in myths throughout the world’s cultures, of the sky falling down and fire raining and so on and so forth. The cause of these sudden displacements is due to the centrifugal forces acting upon the crust as the earth spins around on its axis. Everything goes along hunkey dory for so many tens of thousands of millenium, then WHAM!
What is interesting is that the Earth Crust Displacement theory was never disproved (it would be hard to disprove, admittedly), only ridiculed. But Einstein himself, in a forward to the book, agreed that the theory was sound, and if true would explain a few oddities that geologists have a hard time accounting for.
Ever wonder how the perma frost in the great Siberian North was able to freeze so many animals who normally lived in temperate zones, and froze them so quickly that their bodies are still fresh enough to cook and eat after tens of thousands of years. How rapidly must that catcaclysmic event have occured to cause that kind of instantaneous freeze? Hapgood’s earth crust displacement theory can account for it, and part of the book explains how a crust displacement would have caused that sort of phenomenon.
*If* global warming is happening, and the ice caps start melting faster than normal, and *if* Hapgood was right, something is brewing that is much more deadly then surface hurricanes and rising water levels. If the Earth Crust Theory is correct, this future cataclysmic event is going to happen anyway someday, but melting ice caps will probably speed up the timing.
Path To The Pole is still in print I believe. It is not a fast read, and contains reams of scientific data. So if you need something else to dread, getting tired of the sameo sameo life altering scenarios (comets, nuclear self-destruction, global-warming), you can’t go wrong with Path To The Pole.
Feb 1, 2007 - 10:34 pm 10. Paul:“From my POV these days, I am less and less interested in the views of non-scientists on this matter. ”
I’ll take it a step further and suggest that of the body of scientists only meteorologists have any real credentials, and of them I’m much more likely to trust older more experienced individuals who recieved their education before academia became such an entrenched bastion of the left. They, not suprisingly, are the most skeptical of AGW theory.
I also stridently reject the idea that it’s OK to use AGW as justification for increases in nuclear power, the reduction of our consumtion of imported oil, developing alternative energy sources, etc.
While all these things may be worthwhile to pursue, using politically correct junk science as a means to promote these ends only serves to give validation to the lies and liars promoting this agenda, and who will increase their power and influence to the detriment of free people everywhere.
They are the same old bunch of anti American, anti capitalist, pro central planning tranzis bent on forcing a Procrustean equality on the world, and it looks like they might finally succeed.
Watching the tsunami of global warming hysteria rising up around us these days is almost as alarming as Islamic terrorism, because its proponents are just another brand of fundamentalist fanatics who will just as surely strip us of our freedoms. And they seem far more likely to actually grab the reigns of power.
Feb 2, 2007 - 12:09 am 11. Terrye:I think the community of global warming enthusiasts out there have put far too much time and energy into all this to say they were wrong now. So instead we will get reports saying “it is very likely” that man is the cause of global warming. Tell that to the dinosaurs who were killed out in mass extinctions millions of years before man walked upright. And I am not talking about asteroids hitting the earth either. There have been several mass extinctions in the history of the planet and one of them came about when the world was so warm there were no polar caps to melt. Things change whether people are around or not.
So whatever happens, dry…wet…cold…hot…it will be a direct result of bad people doing bad things.
No way it could have anything to do with that big ball of fire in the sky.
I think nuclear power and bio fuels is the best answer in the short term to energy independence, but it would help if people like John Edwards would stop building homes the size of football fields. It would also help if people like John Travolta would stop beep bopping around in their private air forces.
But that will not happen. If the UN or anyone else tries to create policy around this the only thing they will accomplish is to freeze a lot of poor unemployed people to death in the dark.
So yes, pragmatism would be nice and so would a good deal less hysteria on the issue.
As for the mullahs, I keep thinking the Iranian people will get tired of this 12th imam stuff and figure out what century they are in. Maybe not.
Feb 2, 2007 - 2:20 am 12. AlanC:AGW is pure anti-capitalist, anti-American, pro-Tranzi bull crap.
All of it is built on demonstrably bogus statistical methodology. Even their Holy Grail of the Kyoto treaty will, BY THEIR OWN NUMBERS, only lower the temp. by a half a degree in the next 50 years, BUT, they claim that we will be in irreversible peril within 10 years!
Their “science” which produced the original IPCC report based on the infamous hockey stick has been disproven.
Their models do not account for the complex solar cycles of activity that were recently at their peak, nor do they take into account the warming of Mars. Do Martians drive SUVs?
As I mentioned in a comment on a previous thread the “catastrophic” melting of glaciers which is such a key in their doom mongering just uncovered a Roman mining site that had been hidden by a glacier in the Alps! Guess that glacier has come and gone before, huh?
The climate system is too complex and too unknown to ever be modelled given current understanding.
Hell, we only have reliable temp data from a significant number of place for the last 30 years. Does anyone think that is a sufficient data set to model climate? Of course not. So they use proxies which can be manipulated and massaged to make whatever point they want.
Again, take the Mann hockey stick model. If you remove ONE tree species from one location (the bristle cone pine) from their proxy set, the entire graph goes basically flat. Biologists have stated that the tree rings analysed really only should drought NOT temp.
Think about who all the Lilliputians are pushing this and how they’re trying to tie down the US Gulliver and it all makes sense.
I’ll believe they are serious the day every Hollywood maven and politician in the world give up their private jets and stretch limos.
Feb 2, 2007 - 6:27 am 13. stu:To a non-scientist as moi it seems that the most logical explanation for the moderate warming we have experienced is correlated to sun spot activity. This correlation is well documented in the literature. The surface temperature of Mars has been getting warmer over the same period. Last time I looked thru my telescope I didn’t spot any SUVs or flatulent cows on that orb. I believe that planet is served by the same sun. Am I correct that CO2 is approximately 10% of all greenhouse gases and the man-made portion approx. 14%. According to my humble math man made CO2 makes up 1.4% of greenhouse gases. So if we cut man made C02 by 20%(you thought the decade of the 30’s was rough economically!),we will reduce greenhouse gases by 0.7%. Is that what’s all the shouting about or is it big brother’s desire to control our lives?
Feb 2, 2007 - 7:55 am 14. Andy Freeman:> Some right wingers look upon the sanctity of “free markets” with as much religious devotion as Al Gore appears to regard the sanctity of the environment.
When something else comes along with a better track record of improving people’s lives ….
Feb 2, 2007 - 8:23 am 15. photoncourier.blogspot.com:The actions that improve energy independence are not always consistent with those that reduce “greenhouse” emissions. For example:
Ethanol conversion plants need a source of heat, which is (usually) natural gas and (sometimes) coal. If we build more coal-fired ethanol plants, then that is a good thing for energy independence, because it reduces the cost of ethanol relative to oil-based fuels…but there are more CO2 emissions from the coal plant than the nat gas plant.
Feb 2, 2007 - 8:51 am 16. Roger:I’m for free markets too, Andy Freeman. But the word “sanctity” is operative here. I’m for free market because (and when) they work. Not because I worship them.
Feb 2, 2007 - 8:55 am 17. Rhod:Vostok ice core samples indicate atmospheric CO2 levels for about the last four to five hundred thousand years. The apex of each wave precedes, or is a trigger for, ice ages. At least four of the preceding (similar) curves of CO2 achieved their arcs without the presence of homo sapiens releasing sequestered carbon, planting, farting, or introducing greenhouse gases of any kind. We near the top of the current cycle. What causes CO2 without man’s interference? Microbial activity not offset by photosynthesis? That’s all I can recall from my pre-1960 science.
There is also an inexplicable neutrality of CO2 acceleration for at least the first 100 years of the industrial age, from 1850 to 1950, with an unusual spike from 1950 to today. We’re about ten millenia late for the current CO2 wave which precedes and triggers ice ages, and this has no explanation at all. Does the spike have something to do with the delay? Who knows? The Hockey Stick offers no proof, because it eliminates at least two events of importance in order to achieve it’s radical acceleration.
Th current CO2 spike is a vector within a potential wave of CO2, and seems to follow industrial combustion rates, but it might have no relationship at all.
The cliche “consensus science” is tossed around, but it makes sense in a way. Consensus is the goal of a consensus-ocracy, because it validates and uphold its purpose. That’s reason for suspicion in the first place.
Feb 2, 2007 - 10:40 am 18. LarryD:RICHARD S. LINDZEN, MIT PROFESSOR OF ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE on Larry King Live.
Climate forced atmospheric CO2 variability in the early Holocene: A stomatal frequency reconstruction. Paper, key phrase from the abstract: “The reconstructed CO2 changes also show a distinct similarity to indicators of changing solar activity. This may suggest that at least the Northern Hemisphere was particularly sensitive to changes in solar activity during this time and that atmospheric CO2 concentrations fluctuated via rapid responses in climate. ” Bottom line, climate can drive CO2 level changes, which is the opposite of Global Warming Doctrine.
The solar constant isn’t. Constant, that is. A Russian scientist believes that global cooling, caused by a cyclic drop in solar output, could begin in 2012-2015.
The CO2 level (currently 0.038%) has been nowhere near stable during geological time either. And it’s decrease during the last 150 million years does not correlate with the estimates of average global temperature either.
Feb 2, 2007 - 12:12 pm 19. Rhod:This isn’t the place to argue all the facts, but I’ve read that solar reflection (albedo) from the earth is increasing…something we can even measure from earthshine on the moon…while the earth’s heat retention is increasing. It’s contradictory. More reflection, less absorbed energy, which means less infra-red radiation (heat) trapped by carbon. The solar connection is confusing. But it’s a good point. Does climate follow CO2 or does CO2 follow climate.
Feb 2, 2007 - 12:34 pm 20. AlanC:From the Nat Post (Canada) via Tim Blair…
“Don’t tell that to Nigel Weiss, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, past President of the Royal Astronomical Society, and a scientist as honoured as they come. The science is anything but settled, he observes, except for one virtual certainty: The world is about to enter a cooling period.”
Professor Weiss goes on to describe the relationship between sun spot cycles and ice ages which are documented in history for the little ice age.
In summary, we’ve been in a very high activity cycle and are due for a crash.
Last time this happened you could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island with neither boat nor bridge.
Feb 2, 2007 - 2:55 pm 21. Soldier's Dad:“Perhaps, like Chirac, they wanted to assure us that all is well and that even if the Iranians obtain nuclear weapons they wouldn’t use them.”
I had a complete different take on the Chirac comments.
The rationales for having nuclear weapons is
1) They make the owners safer.
2) They make your enemies less safe.
Chiracs points were clear -
1)If Tehran decided to use a nuclear weapon, it would be razed before the weapon reached its target
2) The real risk is that all of Irans neighbors would also feel compelled to acquire nuclear weapons.
The Eqgyptians and Saudis have already announced that they would also like to have “nuclear energy” programs, just like Irans.
Hence, the Iranian nuclear weapons program serves no purpose but to trigger a regional arms race.
Even worse, given the flight times between the various protagonists in the Middle East, they would all have to adopt a policy of “Launch on Warning”.
IMHO The purpose of Chirac’s comments was to point out to Tehran that they were arguing about something that makes them less safe. The only rational reason for any nation to give up any weapons is because it makes them “less safe”.
Feb 3, 2007 - 2:17 pm 22. Daniel Simon:Roger,
You’re unfair to Laura Secor here. I remember her excellent piece on the Iranian dissident movement from late 2005 in the New Yorker… I strongly suggest you go back and look at that article before branding her an apologist for the mullahs.
Feb 4, 2007 - 8:52 pm 23. lae12345:I agree with your post in spirit, but to give equal moral authority to Gore’s environmental polemics vs. the proven benefits of free markets is pandering to the left to try to sway them to your view. You are usually very careful to avoid such false dichotomies – why the change?
Feb 5, 2007 - 11:22 am