I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to avoid wasting my time on points of view that I have already concluded are nonsensical. This makes sense from the point of view of saving time. But it also makes you less likely to discover shortcomings in your own thinking. It makes sense to look at what the other side is reading, writing, and thinking.
That's why I had a look at one of the "end of the world" global warming books. I couldn't bring myself to read Al Gore's execrable Inconvenient Truth. But I did have a look at Tim Flannery's book, The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What it Means for Life on Earthy.
This is almost certainly the best book on global warming ever written by a paleontologist. This is -- with one exception -- the most truly definitive junk science book, written by someone with zero scientific background in climatology. Only Al Gore could have done it worse, not even counting the pious posturing that permeates all that he does. Everything the author knows on the topic, he picked up through self-study driven by his fear that the sky was falling. In other words, the author already had his mind made up that the world was going to be fried to a crisp before he did any serious scientific study out of his field. This seems to be a defining characteristic of liberal thought: first learn the politically correct conclusion, then master talking points to justify it.
So perhaps we should not be too amazed that the author found everything he was looking for: all the evidence needed to verify his worst fears.
He begins his book with an apocalyptic observation: “ Sometime this century, the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all other natural factors.” This would be truly amazing, as, right now, humans have almost nothing to do with global warming. A few good belches from a sizable volcano and you've more than duplicated a year's worth of human air pollution.
But these are mere facts. In one of the most astounding displays of blended junk science and naivete, Flannery stresses the need for “good information and careful thinking.”
If only!
But the reason for "good information and careful thinking" is not to assess the reality of global warming, but because “in the years to come this issue will dwarf all others combined. It will become the only issue; we need to reexamine it in a truly skeptical spirit, to see how big it is and how fast it is moving so that we can prioritize our efforts and resources in ways that matter.”
If we buy Flannery's point of view, global warming is to become a greater issue than war, poverty, disease, ignorance, and tyranny. He has seen the future and it is global warming and nothing but global warming. Clearly, this is an author so dominated by his cause that he is unable to escape the power of his own pre-determined conclusion.
He cites the usual observations that convince the unsophisticated and uninformed that we’re all riding around on an overheating boiler that will blow up any minute: “Over the past decade, the world has seen the most powerful El Nino ever recorded, the most devastating hurricane in 200 years,
the hottest European summer on record, and one of the worst storm seasons ever experienced in Florida.”
But if you look at each of those claims, they evaporate. As for the “most powerful El Nino ever,” the first flow of this southerly warm current along the coast of Peru has been flowing for billions of years and was first recorded in the early 1500's. It has been happening every four years around Christmas and no one knows that today’s are any more “powerful” than those of a few hundred million years ago or merely a thousand years ago.
His claim that we’re experienced the most devastating hurricane in 200 years, acknowledges implicitly that 200 years ago there were hurricanes just as devastating as those we experience today – and that was before the Industrial Revolution with its fossil fuel burning and supposed impact on global temperature.
He calls for good information and careful thinking because "in the years to come this issue will dwarf all others combined. It will become the only issue; we need to reexamine it in a truly skeptical spirit, to see how big it is and how fast it is moving so that we can prioritize our efforts and resources in ways that matter.” In other words, he wants better information and analysis not to evaluate the reality of any threat but to deal with the threat whose reality is a matter of near religious faith to him. No religious bigot was ever more confident in his beliefs – or accepted them less critically – than Flannery.
His biggest blunder is the usual one: assuming that the current trend will continue forever. It’s the same sort of classic mistake that Paul Ehrlich made in The Population Bomb, the eco-disaster de jour back in the 70's. According to Ehrlich, we have all starved to death by now. He was colossally wrong for the same reasons the doom-sayers are usually wrong: he overlooks change. He sees a trend and projects it to continue forever. Noticing that the sun disappears at sunset, it’s a wonder such thinkers haven’t committed suicide during the night as projecting the trend’s continuance, clearly the sun is gone forever!
Anyone can project a current trend into the future and speculate intelligently on what the consequences of this unbroken trend would be. The problem with this is not identifying the trend but knowing when and if the trend is going to change. If the market has gone up every day for the last two weeks, chances are it’s going to go up tomorrow and we may well make money
betting on this. But one of these days the trend will change and no one knows when that will be.
Most of the global warming believers put their faith in computer models. The earliest versions have already been proven to be way off base, and there can be no reason to have more confidence in newer programs. All of them make assumptions that are fundamentally without bases in reality. The one thing we know for sure is that the earth’s ecology is dynamic, always changing. Sometimes it gets warmer, sometimes it gets cooler. Looking over the past, some scientists have identified a 1500 year cycle of heating and cooling and this certainly seems more established than the garbage-in/garbage-out computer models based on an assumption of straight line thermal increase.
Right now, the earth’s temperature does seem to be increasing slowly. But the evidence that carbon dioxide -- which accounts for only 3 particles out of every 10,000 molecules of the atmosphere -- is a key variable is far from convincing. And the evidence that human activity is an important component of the supposed increase in CO2 is even less certain. The earth’s temperature has
always demonstrated large variation; change seems likely to continue.
The plain truth is that we simply do not know enough to be able to see far into the future. We barely have a decent idea about what the weather is going to be next week. No one on the planet knows what the climate is going to be like in 50 years. Because we happen to be in a period when the average temperature is going up a degree or so every fifty years, the Chicken Littles of global
warming assume that this rise in temperature is going to continue unabated until the seas are boiling.
As a phenomenon, global warming is real, but it is a political reality, not a scientific one. Follow the money. Whose nest gets lined if the prophets of worldwide sauna whip up enough fear to justify government grants? You have no excuse to shove your face into the government trough if what you are predicting is an untroubled future for the environment.
I did learn something from Tim Flannery. I now understand a great deal about the link between junk science and the liberal mind. In reading The Weathermakers, you learn as much about Flannery’s feelings as you do about his views on climate change. (I always had this idea that a scientist's feelings should be irrelevant, but Tim wants to share.) For example, he tells about flying over a large city and seeing lights from horizon to horizon. When he saw all these fossil-fuel powered lights blazing into the night sky he “became alarmed. He reported a near religious experience of perceiving the atmosphere at 30,000 feet as so "thin and fragile," that it was “with a jolt” that he realized that the world is full of such cities and the world in grave danger.
By late 2004, his interest in global warming had “turned to anxiety.” I’m afraid he was panicked by articles in the science journals claiming that the world’s ice was melting ten times faster than before.
What these articles don’t tell you is that most of the ice in the northern hemisphere is sea ice. True, since 1970, the sea ice covering the polar sea has shrunk some 20%. Plus it’s only about 60% as thick as it was forty years ago. The radical environmentalists point to this melting as a threat to our coastal cities.
But what they don’t seem to understand is that all this melting has absolutely no effect on sea levels. The time to start worrying about the ice cap’s melting and drowning the Statue of Liberty is the next time that melting ice cubes in your full glass of whiskey make it overflow. The point is that the Arctic ice cap is sea ice, nine-tenths of it underwater and when it melts it has zero effect on
sea level.
He claims that the “atmosphere has reached CO2 levels not seen for millions of years.” What is interesting about this assertion is that it implicitly acknowledges that the supposed increase in CO2 is nothing new. The earth has experienced many times CO2 levels just as high as today’s when human beings weren’t even around. There was no wealth and pollution producing capitalism to blame then. It must have been dinosaur flatulence.
Personally, I am much more worried about new ice ages than global warming. The evidence for global cooling is much more compelling. We are still just emerging from the last ice age, and I, for one, am happy to see the earth warmer. It would let me spend less on costly fossil fuels to heat my house. And I imagine the residents of Siberia wouldn’t mind things warming up a bit.
His unexamined assumption that the earth is going to get steadily hotter over the next century or so leads him into making statements like this one: “With one out of every five living things on this planet committed to extinction by the levels of green house gases that will accumulate in the next few decades, we are reaching a global climactic tipping point, how can lawmakers and individuals take action to prevent what seems to be an impending cataclysmic change to our environment?”
Frankly, I do not believe that one out of five living things are going to be dead within the next few decades because I want an automobile with an air conditioner in it. The other notable thing about this quote is that Flannery makes clear that the government is the first choice of a way to solve this
supposed problem. In fact, his great hope for the future is that most of the developed nation’s leaders have signed the Kyoto accord.
His initial concern about the climate came while climbing mountain in New Guinea in 1980's and finding that the forest was expanding at a rate greater than anticipated. He was troubled by this excessively healthy natural reforestation. (At the same time, one of his favorite ecological concerns is the disappearance of the rain forest!)
Flannery suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method. He says that a theory remains true only as long as not disproved, but this is a wrong view of science. A theory is not true just because it has not been disproved. A theory is true only when there is real evidence of its validity, and the theory of global disaster lurking around the corner from the earth’s slowly getting warmer is NOT true; that is, it remains an unproven theory and a good way to sell junk science books to the easily panicked.
The global warming phenomenon is primarily a political reality. It reveals the strong link between liberalism and fear. Liberals lack confidence in their ability to cope with life on this world; they are always on the lookout for something to be afraid of, something to justify their anxiety. Liberalism is a lack of maturity. They see the earth warming as a terrible threat when there is just as much reason to see that it means a better place to live.
Many communists, no longer having the Soviet Union available to believe in, have put their faith in the environmental movement as a way to attack capitalism. They join the liberals who are looking for someone to blame for climate change, looking for a justification for bigger government to take care of them. Much of the junk science they promote derives from junk economics. They simply do not understand that free enterprise is the one way to create the wealth needed to deal with the world’s problems.
Flannery’s book is just another instance of the proliferation of misleading articles and books as special interests -- primarily scientists looking for grants to support their research -- promote their agenda. Thirty years ago, the experts were agitated about global cooling. Reality shows that in the past, they had things badly wrong, and there is no reason to think they have it right now.
The first computer models suggested that a doubling of CO2 would raise the temperature 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Those turned out to be completely off base. The fact is that for the last 10,000 years, the earth’s thermostat has kept the average surface temperature at about 57 Fahrenheit. But the weather and the climate are highly dynamic. Things change and change changes.
The claim that human beings have the capability to destroy the balance that the earth has maintained for hundreds of millions of years is the height of hubris.
Flannery sees carbon dioxide as a waste product of the fossil fuels we use for heat, transport, and other requirements. He seems not to understand that the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a natural process that has been going on for millennia. If a tree falls into the forest and gradually disintegrates, returning its minerals to the earth, it “pollutes” the atmosphere
with precisely the same amount of carbon dioxide as if the tree were cut down and burned as fuel.
Flannery does not seem to understand carbon dioxide’s role in the natural cycle of life, or he would not make statements like this: “Because we produce CO2 whenever we drive a car, cook a meal, or turn on a light, and because CO2 lasts for a century in the atmosphere, the proportion
of CO2 in the air we breathe is rapidly increasing.”
Flannery evidently does not realize that we also produce CO2 when we breathe. Every animal produces the deadly odorless colorless gas. Should we kill off all the animals and maybe a few billion people to see if we can’t take the CO2 level from 3 parts per 10,000 down to 2 parts?
Like other environmentalist whackos, Flannery wildly overestimates the impact of human beings. While he was panicked by how thin and fragile the atmosphere seemed at 30,000 feet, what he needs is a trip in orbit to see how huge the earth is and how little of it human beings have impacted. Perhaps then he would be less troubled when those he “loved and respected continued
to buy large cars with air conditioners.”
Flannery thinks that to keep from wiping out life on this planet, we need to reduce by 70% our CO2 emissions by 2050. He does not understand the law of unforeseen consequences. The way the enviro -mental cases want to do this is by shackling the one economic system with the power to produce the wealth needed to eliminate poverty, ignorance, and disease. It is really all about the
liberal hatred of capitalism, a fear and distrust based on ignorance of basic economics. Liberals like Flannery look to government to save us. He pleads: “If you vote for a politician who has a deep commitment to reducing CO2 emissions, you might change the world.” I think leftist politicians are a much greater threat to the world than global warming.
Sadly, but inevitably, liberal politicians are exploiting the widespread ignorance of the public to call for bigger government programs that waste the resources needed to end ignorance and poverty. It’s a case of the cynical exploiting the ignorant, the blind leading the blind.
Flannery has a good heart but a weak mind. He has done the cause of science a disservice with his book, contributed to the lack of understanding and confusion, providing support for the special interest groups who have seized on global warming as a way to boost their own power, perks, and prestige.
Flannery is no doubt a kind, caring and sensitive person. But he needs to stick to paleontology where he can do some good and abandon climatology where he is doing only harm.
