As one who has made a film or two, I can’t understand why it takes a movie for people to come to conclusions (tentative or otherwise) about global warming – whether that film be this unfinished one or Al Gore’s. The degree of anthropogenic global warming would seem to be a subject for on-going (and constantly revised) scientific study, not the source of cinematic fame.
Yet it would seem in this post Michael Moore era that primary way we communicate on these serious matters is in the movie theater. Hmmm…. Anyway, while in New York, I was able to interview Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist and author of Climate Confusion, on his latest thoughts on the subject. Unlike the movie above, you will not have to wait until they appear in a “theater near you” but will be available on Pajamas TV in the next day or so. Watch for a link here. Spencer apparently thinks his global warming skepticism has been validated by the latest satellite information. (Satellite data are his area of expertise.) Please note that (unlike Al Gore) I do not consider myself sufficiently trained to evaluate this. Also, please remember that no matter what the level of AGW, energy independence is still a necessity for the security and economic health of our country. So we must find alternative systems anyway, though perhaps not with the same level of panic.
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26 Comments
1. Wellspring:Several of my friends are scientists, and they, along with my own layman’s understanding of the data, seem to support human-caused climate change. Of course, the climate changes constantly with or without our help, but that’s cold comfort when the cost comes due.
Of course, the plans to slow climate change through CO2 reductions could well cost us more than the actual disaster. Or worse, throw us into such political chaos from the resulting economic depression that we pay for our cake and can’t even eat it. Assuming that the emerging economies will participate, which is doubtful.
Ultimately, a combination of replacement energy technologies (nuclear/wind/solar) can help get our power grid off fossil fuels. As you point out, even without the greenhouse effect this is a good idea for all kinds of reasons. Getting our vehicle fleet off fossil fuels is much harder; there still aren’t good alternatives in this regard.
Believe me, if someone came up with a breakthrough new battery, the market would go nuts rewarding him. Unlike electronics, battery tech has advanced very slowly and is the bottleneck for all kinds of products, not just vehicles.
Nov 17, 2008 - 8:34 am 2. Gippergal:Perhaps someone should make a movie from that blockbuster writer, Michael Crichton’s, book “State of Fear” – on global warming.
What is irksome is the continual attitude of intellectual elitism from the leftist illuminati who declare other opinions to be automatically uneducated and unenlightened. Intelligent design? You must be a snake-handler. Cycles in the earth’s temperatures? You must be someone who funds expeditions to find the original ark.
Nov 17, 2008 - 9:51 am 3. irishlad317:I’m definitely an AGW skeptic. It also seems that even believers have toned down the rhetoric a bit on what the consequences are (I note that the predicted rise of the oceans has dropped considerably). My concern parallels Wellspring’s. Will the political and economic cure be worse than the (possibly non-existent) disease? There seems to be a huge opening for government mischief, particularly with cap and trade programs.
One thing is clear: we don’t yet have a good alternative energy solution. And, the government is the worst possible group to pick the winners and losers (I present for your consideration the corn-based ethanol idiocy). In my opinion, we need to “drill here, drill now” AND keep funding research (that funding would preferrably come from the private sector, which does a much better job of selecting winners and losers). Let’s face it, gas-burning cars will be around for a long time. Even when a great alternative is found, it’s not like everyone will be able to rush out and get one the next day. So we need to realize that this is a process, and while the process is underway, we need energy. It just so happens, we also need jobs and money flowing around the economy. I’d think that part of an econonic recovery plan that makes a lot of sense would be for Pres. Elect Obama to turn the oil companies loose to find and drill for oil. Get them spending some of that cash they’ve been collecting for the last several years.
Nov 17, 2008 - 10:16 am 4. srlucado:Any country that gets its scientific information from the movies is doomed.
Scott
Nov 17, 2008 - 10:26 am 5. plainslow:While oil is below $60.00, put a $4.00 tax on every barreell, as soon as it settles above $60.00. Then another $4.00 if it settles above $70.00 Us the tax to slow down our use (and the money flow to middle east) as well as use the money from the tax to help alterative fuels.
Nov 17, 2008 - 10:27 am 6. good ole charlie:plainslow:
Nov 17, 2008 - 10:43 am 7. chuck:Have you ever heard of the term “Divergent Series”? – that’s what you would get with your plan…a rather rapid approach to an infinite cost per gallon. Try it for yourself…you might be surprised by how rapidly the series would diverge.
Of course, the plans to slow climate change through CO2 reductions could well cost us more than the actual disaster.
Not to mention the fact that the proposed reductions will have an insignificant impact on AGW. It’s a feel good thing at heart. As to scientists, they, like mathematicians, tend to be specialized and are often no more equipped than the layman to evaluate the evidence without real study. What they might possess is a nose for the process of science and experience with the chaotic conditions on the edge of knowledge.
Nov 17, 2008 - 10:45 am 8. Barry Dauphin:If the AGW proponents continue to push phony numbers (like the recent mistake of repreating September’s numbers as if the were October for some Russian stations), they will discredit themselves. Hansen needed someone to bonk him over the head with a frying pan before admitting mistake. Therein is the major problem: trust. Climatology is complex business with many unknowns, but there is a cadre of AGW supporters who treat warming with greater certainty than they treat almost anything else. That is no way to do science.
Nov 17, 2008 - 11:21 am 9. BD57:Issue #1 ought to be “what portion of any warming is attributable to our activities?”
Issue #2: “What’s the effect of that portion?”
Issue #3 (if the answer to #2 is “bad”): “What will it cost to reduce the effect of that portion to where it isn’t ‘bad’?”
As to Issue #3, our focus should be more broad than just “cut out CO2″ – it may be that adjusting to the increased levels would be more prudent.
Nov 17, 2008 - 11:27 am 10. AlanC:1) There is much evidence that CO2 is NOT a cause of warming, but in fact an effect. This evidence is old (the proven ~800 yr lag between warming and CO2 increases) and recent (the proven plateauing of tempreture despite increased CO2)
2) to BD57 #3 you skipped the point “if bad, is it easier to adapt then to try and control climate?” It was much warmer during the climate optimum of the 13th century and the world in general and people in particular thrived. Why wouldn’t that happen now? Why is this oh so terrible now when it wasn’t 800 years ago?
I have enought science, computer modeling and statistical training to understand most of the discussion. The big problem I have is that the fanatics never answer the questions that are raised, they immediately start spewing hate and ad hominem attacks. i.e. it doesn’t take advanced auto-mechanics knowledge to question the position that a faulty radio causes the engine to over-heat regardless of what computer models say.
I love the Michael Crichton movie idea. One of his easy to grasp points is a simple comparison of actual data. NYC is much warmer now than it was in 1950. However, Poughkeepsie has changed since then AND Albany is cooler than in 1950. All 3 cities are about 50 miles apart if the global climate is changing, why are these local differances so great? There are no large geographical features to provide serious micro-climate effects, so what gives?
Nov 17, 2008 - 12:57 pm 11. Insufficiently Sensitive:Ultimately, a combination of replacement energy technologies (nuclear/wind/solar) can help get our power grid off fossil fuels.
That’s the sort of blind faith that the urban ‘intellectuals’ have invested in our newly-elected President, while assuring each other that He Knows What To Do regardless of the lack of detail in his glittering proposals.
Would you mind, if it isn’t too burdensome, giving us some specifics:
How many nuclear plants will it take to ‘get our power grid off fossil fuels’? How many square miles of solar collectors? How many square miles of wind farms? How many linear miles of new transmission mains from generation sites to consumer sites? And what’s the construction cost of all that, compared to our annual fossil fuel bill?
And what size of legal staff will be required to override the desperate efforts of reactionary environmentalists to prevent the construction of the above three modes of power generation? How many years will the legal battles last?
Or is it just more fun to issue languid reassurances of Wonderful New Solutions than it is to evaluate the real-world efforts required to build and operate them?
Nov 17, 2008 - 1:07 pm 12. MG:If brownouts become commonplace, the reactionaries will have no political support — including a legislative change, if required.
The bottom line on AGW (or AGCC, the current ballyhoo) — convince people there is an emergency so government politicians, bureacrats, and big business folks can stampede the hoi polloi into surrendering liberty and dollars.
Nov 17, 2008 - 1:44 pm 13. david foster:“…energy independence is still a necessity for the security and economic health of our country. So we must find alternative systems anyway..”…but maybe not the same systems. The things that work for energy independence aren’t always the things that reduce CO2. For example, the use of coal–either as a power-generation fuel or as a feedstock for gasoline & diesel replacement processes..is great for energy independence, but emits a lot of CO2.
Nov 17, 2008 - 4:14 pm 14. Mike_K:Global cooling will become the issue quite soon as warming stopped in 2007 and ice ages develop quite rapidly. Energy independence is quite another issue. It makes no sense to use natural gas for electricity generation when nuclear power is the ideal method. Natural gas should be reserved for home heating. The second priority, especially for California, is upgrading the electric power grid which is in sad shape. Brownouts are coming and they will be due to the grid. I sometimes wonder if the Arizona Navajos are feeding Obama his lines about bankrupting the coal industry. They have huge coal-fired generation plants on their Arizona reservations and are sovereign there. Oil will remain necessary for home heating, especially as the planet cools rapidly the next decade.
Nov 17, 2008 - 5:17 pm 15. ricpic:Superb post by Insufficiently Sensitive. Which of course will not be answered.
Nov 17, 2008 - 6:00 pm 16. cindy lauper:Yeah, Roy Spencer is an awesome source.
If you want to find a scientist to buttress your theories, Roger, maybe you wanna get one that doesn’t believe in creationism?
Nov 17, 2008 - 7:09 pm 17. Roger L. Simon:Indeed you are right misterbones aka cindy aka mr. anonymous (of course), Roy Spencer supports intelligent design. I don’t. On the other hand, he has considerable scientific background and has won science prizes. Have you? (Oh, you’d prefer to remain anonymous, I suppose. Good for you.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)
Nov 17, 2008 - 10:02 pm 18. HardHeadedWoman:I know several scientists also and all of them say that the idea that climate is changed much, if at all, by anything humans do is ridiculous. Like economics, weather and climate have so many variables that they are virtually impossible to control and the idea that they can be is ludicrous. Having said that I am very much in favor of conservation and not polluting this amazing Planet we live on. Which is what we were taught in school back in the Dark Ages before Environmentalism became a religion.
Nov 18, 2008 - 6:25 am 19. AlanC:HHW I agree wholeheartedly that we should work on pollution. Of course I mean real polution. CO2 is not now and never was a pollutant.
One common method of modelling complex systems such as a climate model is to just stick in a constant for all those variables that you don’t want to deal with. Doesn’t do a lot for accuracy.
Nov 18, 2008 - 6:50 am 20. tim maguire:I like where this thread is headed. In my opinion, the current crop of environmentalists is doing great damage to environmentalism. There is no evidence that anything unusual is happening with the weather and yet there is an entire industry built up around bankrupting industrial society because this year’s weather isn’t like the weather of 20 years ago (as though it somehow should be).
It’s a real problem for people who care about the environment and don’t want the effort to save it to get a bad name by these people. Beware the backlash!
Nov 18, 2008 - 8:10 am 21. hermie:Get rid of coal…Get rid of oil..get rid of nukes.
Then we can enjoy reading by that renewable resource: Whale oil lamps.
Nov 18, 2008 - 8:45 am 22. AlanC:hermie, LOL.
That’s particularly sardonic as one of the first great changes that protected whales was the shift to petroleum (kerosene) for lighting; and the switch to coal allowed the forests to re-grow.
Cut……nose……face.
Nov 18, 2008 - 9:26 am 23. Roy M:Glad to see you’ve got Roy Spencer coming. A real rocket scientist. I have a question…is this chart http://www.roy.macarthur.com indicitave of global wamimg having stopped in 1998? (thickness of the red line is roughly a 95% confidence interval for a five year moving average temperature). It doesn’t look like it to me. If that was a stock chart you’d buy. Well I’d buy anyway.
A more important question is, “Is this the right kind of data to use to answer the first question?” I don’t know the answer to that one. I expect Roy Spencer does.
The intelligent design thing is an issue. Non-AGW is a minority view within climate science. Intelligent design is way out there. Many great scientists have held some extremely strange and just plain wrong ideas on subjects outside of their formal areas of expertise so maybe it should just be ignored.
On the other hand non-AGW and ID do seem to come a set more often than you would expect if people were thinking about them idependently. Why is that?
Nov 18, 2008 - 10:54 am 24. ray_g:I will admit up front that I don’t know much about climate science. However, I know quite a bit about computer modeling. That is why I’m an AGW skeptic. The idea that we can accurately model something as complicated as and that has as many variables as the global climate is simply absurd. And it is not just a matter of processing power, building an accurate model of such a system is very, very difficult, if not impossible. To have any confidence in your model, you must compare it to the observed behavior of the real world system. With global climate you are looking at time constants of hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, and recorded human history is, generously, 20,000 years, with accurate and reliable data records much shorter than that. In computer geek parlance, you don’t have a way to verify your model.
Also, and I know this from painful experience and observing others, it is so easy to introduce experimenter bias into a computer model, even when you are diligently trying to avoid that. When you have an emotional stake in the results, experimenter bias is almost guaranteed. And these folks obviously have an emotional stake, since their reaction to critics and skeptics isn’t to defend their results, but is to compare the skeptics to Holocast deniers or to say they are committing crimes against humanity. (Trials for heresy, anyone?)
Michael Crichton was right. Environmentalism changed from a legitimate and useful concern about excess pollution to a secular religion. We are about to get the theocracy that the liberals warned us about, except it won’t be submission to Christ or Allah, but to Gaia.
Nov 18, 2008 - 4:30 pm 25. ray_g:oops, that should have been …”validate your model”
Nov 18, 2008 - 4:31 pm 26. Roderick Reilly:No such thing as “energy independence.” Never will be any such thing as “energy independence.”
A dramatic reduction in dependence on foreign sources is doable, and a great idea, but it ain’t independence. Get used to that idea, and stop with the delusional fantasies.
No such thing as using “renewables” only. Bad idea.
No way can we become fully sustainable in a decade with renewables only, like that crackpot Obama ad promised. Not possible, and not a good idea. It shouldn’t even be attempted.
We will need to use oil and coal for decades to come. Bringing along other sources is a great idea, and should be done aggressively, but not as a crash program. Let’s get real about this and act like grownups on energy issues. Yes, bring back nuclear — if it’s good enough for Stewart Brand, it should be good enough for everyone else.
Drilling on dry land is as necessary as off-shore drilling. I call it the “1% Solution.” 1% of the total U.S. land mass, and of the continental shelf parts of the oceans bounding the U.S. are all we need to stake out for drilling. We can’t spare one freakin’ percent?
It’s not true that we must discourage drilling and also artificially raise the price of gasoline to coerce people into going for renewables. That’s nonsense. The push for alternate energy is strong enough now that it doesn’t require coercion and bullying of an American citizenry that just got fleeced for a trillion dollars (and counting) for all these bailouts. What is the upside of pissing off millions of potential voters?
Nov 20, 2008 - 4:23 pm