DUCKPOND

“THE CLIMATE DEBATE” March 31, 2010

Former Federal Treasurer and putative national leader, Peter Costello in The Sydney Morning Herald expresses skepticism about the politics of global warming. Others express disbelief about the climate science.

Peter Costello’s observations with respect to apparent change in national policy priorities post Copenhagen and general change in the political climate are correct as far as they go. The analysis is superficial. It is not much of an observation, even from a former prominent politician, that politicians will engage in politics, which is not to say that the underlying public policy issues have long term importance. He might reflect on the quality of the discussion, and ideally add to substantive content.

Politics is about infotainment as spin. The habits are hard to break. And the media is as much caught up in the political circus, to the extent that serious political reporting has become a secondary concern. Once suspects the forth and bubble attracts the readers and viewers. The political climate is more accurately described as the political weather, whereas public policy should be addressing the underlying long term issues.

There are several significant differences between the practice of science and the practice of politics. If Climate Scientists are to be believed – and do we have reason not to? – the storm clouds are gathering on the closing horizon with dire consequences for the earth and the earth community. And that is one problem is it not? We do not have a global vision, nor sense of purpose.

Climate systems are indifferent to national borders, whereas populations are locked in mental boxes. Unfortunately, it is the mental boxes and the screens that set the parameters for the narratives, subject to careful framing reflecting special interests money and influence, especially the fossil fuel industry that distorts the picture and the capacity to take action. Integrity and truth are not their own reward in the political process, although one hopes this is not the case in science, and so it is not surprising that politics is degenerate. The political game is the thing.

If we blame the media, we have to ask who are the media consumers? Then there are issue of responsibility that falls upon each of us as citizens of a democracy. We have to engage as best we are able in the democratic process. In a mass democracy without effective engagement in local government and expressions of community democracy most people are reduced to be being spectators, not watching the game in the flesh but indirectly via the media. Whereas privately owned and public media outlets might be expected to have different priorities, so that the weaknesses on one form might be balanced by the other, the evidence seems to be a convergence of style of presentation and content. For example, in the United States neither Noam Chomsky nor Normal Fingelstein, both of whom are expert commentators, get a run on the major media outlets.

The so-called climate debate has become a asymmetrical one, much like asymmetrical warfare with the two sides fighting by different rules and using different tactics. If the climate scientists were to adopt, as they might be tempted, to use the tactics of the climate deniers then they would and are condemned in their own terms. And yet in this debate the consensus of expert opinion appears to be unanimous in general, with the danger that the disparities that are inevitable are not being robustly and publicly contested in the fear of the misrepresentation by those who would seize on anything and use any excuse to dispute the overall implications.

How much better are the relatively newer forms of media in carrying the political debate? Tim Lambeth at Detroid has included the you tube videos of the debate he had with Christopher Monckton, who is also associated with SPPI (Science & Public Policy Institute). The website background notes describe him as an expert on climate sensitivity, a claim not made in the videos. I was none the wiser after watching the videos, so I find it helpful to look at the summary of the position provided of the climate change deniers.

To avoid flicking between screens, here is what SPPI believe should be the focus of the debate:

The Debate Is Not Over. Early in 2007 there was a concerted, international effort among climate alarmists to suggest that the science was so certain that debate was no longer possible. That effort had no impact on the scientific community, which continues to debate climate change vigorously and sometimes even acrimoniously in the peer-reviewed, learned journals. The debate continues.

Climate change has always been real, but the fact of climatic variability tells us nothing of its cause. The more the climate is researched, the less likely it appears that humankind has had any significant climatic impact.

Climate change is not unprecedented. The medieval warm period was warmer than the present. Even now, melting glaciers in the Alps are revealing medieval trackways, silver-mines and even entire forests that have been buried under ice since the Middle Ages. Some of the Viking settlements in Greenland are still under permafrost to this day.

The chicken and the egg: The temperature changes that led to the ice ages and interglacial period preceded changes in CO2 concentration.

The central calculation: The UN says a doubling of CO2 concentration will push global temperatures up by 3C. Others say less than 1C.

Will warming be harmful? Almost certainly not. Warming is better than cooling. We now know that neither droughts nor floods nor storms have increased or are likely to increase as a result of anthropogenic warming; these events come and go in natural cycles which have scarcely altered over the past 100 years.

What is the cause of the present warming? Even if one assumes that the UN’s estimates of recent warming are not themselves an exaggeration, observations do not confirm the presence, in any climatically-significant degree, of the characteristic signature of anthropogenic warming – namely, a greater rate of increase in temperature at altitude, particularly at low latitudes, than at the surface. These results provide proof that much of the present warming is not anthropogenic but natural, caused partly by millennial alterations in patterns of ocean circulation and partly by the Sun, which has been more active, and for longer, in the past 70 years than at almost any time in at least the past 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2005).

Will proposed mitigative measures cost more than they achieve? Now that the predictions of the extremists have been discredited even by the UN, it is near-certain that the cost of almost any measure to mitigate the volume of anthropogenic CO2 emissions will outweigh the effectiveness and economic benefit of that measure. Most proposed measures would not make any significant climatic difference even if implemented. The few measures that might have some impact would have only a small impact, but will prove impossible both politically and economically, and will not be achieved, though much money will be wasted in the attempt. It is the poorer nations who will suffer most grievously by the proposed restrictions on CO2 emissions.

What is the real problem? Energy is the real problem. Primary energy sources, particularly fossil fuels, are becoming scarce and expensive, and are increasingly in the hands of unstable regimes that are unfriendly to the West. Energy prices are already rising, but could rise very much more quickly in the coming years.

There is a difference between political and scientific debates. This difference may account for the apparent and unexpected alignments of “meteorologists” and climate scientists on the question of climate change as reported by Leslie Kaufman in The New York Times.

The claim that human activity does not affect climate seems to me absurd and self contradictory – what were the heat islands? As far as I can tell the proponents of climate warming is good (as I resist the temptation of reduction to absurdity that they seem to embrace) do not have a systems theory. In the absence of parameters and processes, one set of statistics at one time become equivalent to another, which is to say that causality becomes irrelevant. And yet for public policy is the key issue.

If you have the time, Tim Lambert has set it up, so that the video sequences flow. Christopher Monckton gets into stride in the first video considering the science and economic of climate change, a playlist. There is about an hour or more of the Sydney debate:

Click on playlist to watch the full presentation.

POSTSCRIPT:

Those climate “alarmist” seem to think that we honest “warming is better” and “the problem is the fossil energy sources we have not stolen so we can control it” people of principle that our claims should be subject to skepticism.( I exaggerate, but go back and read what SPPI have actually written) They are even producing videos, via Deltoid:

The tongue in cheek diversion into violent language, which may presage violent acts, raises the question as to whether the much vaunted debate is a fight in which whatever it takes is the ethic as distinct from a disinterested search for truth based on the evidence.

I am not going to spend any time crunching the numbers, supposing I knew enough to do that. I am not much interested, in what seems spurious, discrepancies in the methodology. What would be telling to mind if it were revealed that there were fundamental contradictions between the sets of observations and/or data sets. For example, photographic evidence and personal observation to indicate that glaciers were not retracting, or the ground-based observations in Antarctica contradicting the observations of the geostationary satellite recordings. What is evident to me is the consistency of the observations. The fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas can be demonstrated in any laboratory anywhere on the planet. It would be interesting to say the least if the level of ocean acidification was decreasing rather than increasing. There would need to an impressive conspiracy for the results to be fixed.

ELSEWHERE:

Not just the fossil fuel, particularly oil oligopoly corporations are funding the climate change deniers, but they are having funding assistance from two billionaires owners of Koch Industries according to Muriel Kane in The Raw Story who refers on a Greenpeace Report.