Utopian Dreams

Robert H. Nelson puts on his thinkin' cap, adjusts the chin-straps, spins the little propeller on top, and delivers himself of the opinion that environmentalism is a Religion Without God.

Where does that leave conventionally religious people who happen to be environmentalists (or some reasonable facsimile thereof)? Under the rug, where they belong! Earth Day is celebrated, Nelson claims, by more than a billion people in 190 countries. Presumably, some of them see their environmental interests as compatible with some conventional religious viewpoint, while others are committed atheists who simply think it's stupid to mow down forests to make disposable chopsticks.

But so what? Let's just go ahead and treat 'em all as irrational cultists who are responding to the ontotheological crisis of [blah blah blah] with a postmodern neo-primitive embrace of [yadda yadda yadda fap fap fap].

Environmentalists see humans engaged in acts of vast hubris, remaking the future ecosystems of the Earth. By playing “God” with the Earth, humans seek to become as God themselves.

The Bible’s book of Deuteronomy reveals dire consequences for those who try to “play God.” We learn that God will strike down sinners who “worship other gods,” causing them to suffer “infections, plague and war. He will blight your crops, covering them with mildew. All these devastations shall pursue you until you perish.”

It is no mere coincidence that contemporary environmentalism prophesies virtually the same set of calamities resulting from the warming of the earth — rising seas, famine, drought, pestilence, hurricanes and other natural disasters.

I suppose it isn't a coincidence, inasmuch as we still have crops and oceans and diseases and weather, just like folks did back in the Bible Days. But the thing is, the fact that the Bible addresses human concerns does not make all latter-day expressions of those concerns Biblical. I could just as easily claim that seismic building codes prophesy "virtually the same calamities" that befell the Three Little Pigs, and interpret them as a veiled belief in the Big Bad Wolf.

If you think that's a stretch, too fucking bad. You can't argue with analogy!

Thus the Endangered Species Act is the new Noah’s Ark; genuinely wild places are the new cathedrals to find spiritual inspiration; Earth Day is the new Easter.

This is due to the pernicious worldwide influence of Calvinism, as anyone can tell from the fact that Nelson says so, duh.

While the language is now different, environmentalists today, no less than the Calvinists of old, see “excessive” consumption — the constant demand for bigger and better, more and more — as a threat to the Earth’s future.

Hail the new puritan! What is Portland, Oregon but a new Geneva, and Randal O'Toole its Servetus? If you doubt this, consider the fact that Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion says God “revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe." Game, set, and match, ya goddamn treehugging reformist supralapsarians!

Just to make matters worse, these Neo-Calvinist Gaiabots present their religious delusions as fact, and insist that they be allowed to influence public policy, which is not how we do things in America. And besides:

Success in stirring powerful religious feelings about the environment does not automatically lead to wise and effective policies.

Which is a shame, because the environment does matter, to an extent: no one wants to see the Grand Canyon filled with garbage unless it's absolutely necessary. Where environmentalists err, as always, is in trying to force us all to eat acorn mash by candlelight in cruelty-free yurts.

When environmental religion seeks a return to an earlier primitive and natural existence, it is embracing utopian dreams that easily can pose a danger to man and earth alike.

So, to recap: Earth Day = religion without God = Calvinism = a primitivist utopia = no more toilet paper, electricity, or dental anesthesia. And don't say it'll never happen, 'cause what if it did?

Now let us purge our minds of these ancient superstitions, and speak calmly of money.

Predictable Adversaries

At the outset of an otherwise mediocre article on AGW, Leslie Kaufman provides some useful background information for people who came in late:

The debate over global warming has created predictable adversaries, pitting environmentalists against industry and coal-state Democrats against coastal liberals.

To put it another way, a scientific question was reduced to a matter of identity politics, so that it could be debated ad infinitum in the media, according to unreasonable rules that journalists enforce while pretending to be objective bystanders.

But now, "the debate over global warming" is also creating friction between groups that "might be expected to agree on the issue: climate scientists and meteorologists, especially those who serve as television weather forecasters."

Climatologists, who study weather patterns over time, almost universally endorse the view that the earth is warming and that humans have contributed to climate change. There is less of a consensus among meteorologists, who predict short-term weather patterns.

Which is really just a roundabout way of saying that people who understand climate science tend to have a better grasp of climate science than people who don't. The fact that climatologists and weather forecasters both talk about rainfall doesn't make them peers, any more than my ability to play "Chopsticks" makes me Charles-Valentin Alkan's peer. The only surprise here is that anyone imagined otherwise.

Kaufman notes that only about half of America's weather forecasters have a degree in meteorology. It's probably coincidental that a recent study found that "only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring." But either way, who cares? What makes the opinion of these non-experts more compelling than that of any other non-expert?

Kaufman explains:

The split between climate scientists and meteorologists is gaining attention in political and academic circles because polls show that public skepticism about global warming is increasing, and weather forecasters — especially those on television — dominate communications channels to the public. A study released this year by researchers at Yale and George Mason found that 56 percent of Americans trusted weathercasters to tell them about global warming far more than they trusted other news media or public figures like former Vice President Al Gore or Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate.

Some Americans may doubt AGW because they trust weathercasters. Others may trust weathercasters because they doubt AGW. Whatever the case, Kaufman predictably ignores the role of the media: the fact that dissenting TV weather forecasters tend to work for the very same businesses that routinely provide a megaphone to other non-expert denialists is somehow not germane to the issue of "public skepticism."

So some people who are frequently on TV say one thing, and other people who are rarely on TV say something else, an isn't it interesting how people disagree about stuff?

“In a sense the question is who owns the atmosphere: the people who predict it every day or the people who predict it for the next 50 years?” said Bob Henson, a science writer for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, who trained as a meteorologist and has followed the divide between the two groups.

In another, more accurate sense, the question is: who has enough expertise to assess the data and draw conclusions that are likely to be trustworthy?

That's no fun, though. Isn't it better to reduce everything to a pissing contest, even if it means grotesquely misrepresenting the terms of the debate? Granted, you can't say that weather forecasters attempt to "predict the atmosphere" in the sense that climatologists do. And you shouldn't imply that forecasting three days of rain in Portland, OR requires the same knowledge and skills as climate modeling. And you can't pretend that the media are simply watching this Clash of the Titans from the sidelines; allowing one's weather forecasters to strut around in borrowed plumes is a management decision, after all.

But when all's said and done, views differ! And isn't that what matters most in a democracy like ours?

“There is a little bit of elitist-versus-populist tensions,” Mr. Henson said. “There are meteorologists who feel, ‘Just because I have a bachelor’s degree doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s going on.’ ”

Damn straight. I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe climatologists do either.

The fact that meteorologists are vying with climatologists to be accepted as experts on climate data doesn't really strike me as an outbreak of populism. But it's nice to be reminded that although we praise individual effort as the solution to all life's problems, we tend to detest people who are actually rewarded for it. In a scrupulously fair meritocracy like ours, assuming that the people above you are phonies and cheats is almost as important as sneering at the poor.

Since we must maintain the polite fiction that the AGW debate takes place on a level playing-field, it's better to complain about the ignorance of meteorologists than the professional rewards they can earn by putting it on display.

“What we’ve recognized is that the everyday person doesn’t come across climatologists, but they do come across meteorologists,” said Melanie Fitzpatrick, a climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Meteorologists do need to understand more about climate because the public confuses this so much.”

Sure. Because if meteorologists understood more about the climate, they'd stop resenting all those goddamn climatological elitists and admit that AGW probably isn't a hoax. And then, the executives who pay their salaries would reward their honesty by giving them more money and more airtime. And then, any doubters in the audience would conclude that these previously skeptical meteorologists had been swayed by the evidence, rather than indoctrinated into some sort of anti-human death cult. And then, at long last, we'd reach a public consensus as well as a scientific one. Which could conceivably lead to an eventual consensus on some sort of prospective solution, long after we're all mercifully dead and buried.

It's worth a shot, I guess.

Reverting to Type

Thanks to an anonymous benefactor -- who will undoubtedly make up for today's good deed by kicking a puppy -- I now have scientific evidence that public virtue leads to private vice. (And not the good kind of private vice, which leads to public virtue.)

A pair of Canadian psychologists, having noted that exposing people to the Apple logo makes people more creative, naturally assumed that buying green products would make people more ethical, "given that green products are manifestations of high ethical standards and humanitarian considerations."

Imagine their surprise when this hypothesis turned out to be almost as inaccurate as the premise on which it was based.

Mazar and Zhong said their study showed that just as exposure to pictures of exclusive restaurants can improve table manners but may not lead to an overall improvement in behaviour, "green products do not necessarily make for better people".

The only thing weirder than the assumption that green products could "necessarily make for better people" is the assumption that appearance and reality normally coincide when people make buying decisions.

Does all this mean that if I donate to charity, volunteer at a soup kitchen, take in a stray animal, protest an abortion clinic, or engage in any other activity that's typically viewed as an expression of "social responsibility and ethical conduct," I'm (arguably) slightly more likely to feel justified in stealing or cheating or lying? Or is it only green consumerism that threatens to activate my inborn propensity to Evil? Views differ, no doubt. Mazar and Zhong seem to lean strongly toward the former position, but there's no sense letting that get in the way of a good story.

What I found most interesting about their actual paper is the method by which people were identified as "conventional" versus "green" shoppers.

Upon arrival participants were led to a cubicle equipped with a computer and informed that they were going to engage in a number of unrelated tasks. They were first assigned to one of two online stores that carried a mix of green and conventional products but differed in the ratio of these two types of products: the green store carried nine green and three conventional products; the conventional store carried nine conventional and three green products....There was no difference in number of products, product categories, or price....

Participants in the purchase condition were invited to select products that they would like to purchase. Participants were offered to fill their baskets (maximum one item per product) up to $25 and were told that one out of 25 students would be randomly chosen to actually receive their purchased products.

Hmmm. So certain participants were designated as "green consumers," seemingly at random. And they were told to "shop" for goods that appealed to them, which only one out of 25 participants would actually receive. Would it be fair to say that this is an imperfect model of actual buying behavior, not least because it seems as though no money changed hands? And is it at all possible that the "green" participants' like or dislike of the products assigned to them made them more likely to take compensatory measures?

It's hard to say. The only thing that's reasonably clear is that these findings explain why everyone hates Algore, or should.

When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to "green" type.

Isn't science wonderful, sometimes?

UPDATE: Although the conclusions here, such as they are, apply to human behavior generally, Iain Hollingshead of the Telegraph finds it within himself to claim the opposite:

Most people are sufficiently balanced without having to swing to opposite ends of the moral spectrum. We can give money to charity without dipping into the company till at the same time....

No, what this study really does is to confirm our deep-rooted suspicion that there is something fishy about people who profess to be greener than thou.

Mazar and Zhong, of course, make no attempt to claim that there's something uniquely wrong with people who buy green products. Quite the opposite. And as noted above, it seems that the "green" participants in their study did not necessarily subscribe to any sort of green ideology whatsoever, let alone "profess to be greener than thou."

One wonders what good deed "licensed" Hollingswood to misrepresent this study to his readers.

Common Ground

The Washington Examiner has hacked into the Intertubes and discovered a shocking new eco-scandal, which we may as well call Websitegate.

They don't discuss the subject too openly outside their own circles, but environmentalists make crystal clear on their Web sites that they want to stop all coal-based power production in this country. They claim coal can never be made clean, so it must be eliminated before it's too late to do anything about global warming. Ted Nace puts it succinctly in a Grist Web site post: "The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis."

It's just like Poe's "Purloined Letter": if you don't want anyone to know about your radical agenda, you should explain it in crystal-clear terms on a popular Website that's closely monitored by your opponents.

Incidentally, the quote attributed to Ted Nace is actually from a press release by James Hansen and nine other scientists. But what does it matter? These green doomsayers are all alike!

"Regardless of whether one agrees with the goal of eliminating coal-fired power production," the editorial informs us, it's hopeless. Although it'll always be possible for new and better technologies to extract more coal and oil -- and to mitigate the effects of AGW, should they ever materialize -- the average glibertarian's starry-eyed technophilia evaporates the moment we start talking about renewables.

What [environmentalists] don't want to talk about is the fact that there's no way those sources are going to replace coal-fired power production by 2030.

So let's all just stop trying. It's the American way!

Know why else environmentalists are stupid? Because they hate natural gas:

[T]hey don't want to talk about the fact that there's another extraordinarily plentiful and much cleaner energy source — natural gas — that can readily replace coal and lower energy costs more effectively than any alternative source. In fact, the same environmentalists who are shutting down coal plants are also opposing increased natural gas production.

As everyone knows, Grist speaks for all environmentalists everywhere, so it'll be instructive to see what its writers have to say about natural gas. In an article called "Should Greens Ally with Natural Gas Against Coal?", David Roberts acknowledges that "rapidly shifting the nation's power dispatch from coal to gas would be the fastest way to reduce emissions in the short-term." This echoes points made by Joe Romm, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and -- wait for it, now -- Ted Nace, who says that "from a climate perspective shutting down gas while keeping coal would be the wrong outcome because coal is far more carbon-intensive a fuel than natural gas."

Of course, these writers also acknowledge that natural gas isn't a risk-free panacea for all our ills, because they're neither liars nor lunatics. But that's not quite the same thing as saying "no one's allowed to increase production of natural gas, ever, under pain of our displeasure."

We hear a lot about the importance of finding common ground on climate issues. But oddly enough, the fact that many environmentalists basically agree with this editorialist's point on natural gas doesn't obviate the need to lie about their "extremism." Quite the opposite, in fact. I wonder why that is?

In other news, a new study looks at the opportunity costs of extracting tar sands:

The £250bn cost of developing Canada's controversial tar sands between now and 2025 could be used to decarbonise the western economy by funding ambitious solar power schemes in the Sahara or a European wide shift to electric vehicles, according to a new report released today.

Better Days Ahead

An op-ed in the Sioux City Journal reviews the current state of climate science, and finds that the earth may or may not be warming, and so what if it did? Views differ, teach the controversy, Algore's hockey stick is broken, et fucking cetera.

Given that what we don't know can't possibly hurt us, why on earth would anyone pursue so-called "renewable energy"?

[W]hat surprises me the most is that government and other opportunistic institutions are continuing to promote expensive cures for what might after all not ail us. They, for reasons of their own, preach the doctrine of renewable energy (windmills, solar panels, the tides, batteries, subterranean hot water, etc.)

None of these devices, singly or collectively, can deliver the power needed to keep us productive, fed, watered and reasonably comfortable. Yet plans for a renewable energy economy persist often with cooperation of traditional energy companies.

The word choices here are nothing if not judicious. "Hydropower" sounds like a serious occupation for square-jawed men with pick-axes; it might even conjure up images of Gavins Point Dam. But harnessing "the tides" sounds like something a filthy hippie would recommend while picking fleas from his beard (and how would it help landlocked Sioux City, in any case?). By the same token, geothermal heating might possibly be recognized as a good idea (good enough for Sioux City schoolchildren, at any rate). But exploiting "subterranean hot water"? That sounds highly speculative. And kinda gay.

Why go to all the trouble of reporting the basic facts accurately, when you can dream up subtle dysphemisms for widely used technologies, pretend that renewable energy is pointless unless it replaces fossil fuels next week, and establish an alternative history in which AGW threatens us with "fatal sunburn"?

On the bright side, the article does provide us with a handy checklist of logical fallacies:

• Wind power is subsidized. (fallacy of exclusion)


• A green energy program won't solve our unemployment woes. (false dilemma)


• National Review says renewable energy is stupid, and the author likes National Review because it's "conservative and sensible," as evidenced by the fact that it says renewable energy is stupid. (petitio principii, genetic fallacy)
  

• The Himalayan glaciers won't melt by 2035. Therefore, problems relating to AGW will occur so far in the future that there's no sense in worrying about them. (argumentum ad douchebaggium)

Just as you wouldn't serve someone a glass of raw sewage without adding a generous topping of whipped cream, the author takes pains to reassure us that Science is Good. AGW may be a hoax that'd make a cat laugh, but that doesn't mean scientists should stop studying the climate altogether.

No question, scientists should continue studying historical and current global temperatures to make sure we don’t delay needed remedial action beyond the time they cease to be effective and we resign ourselves to frying to a crisp.

See, that kind of research is perfectly reasonable, in theory. It's just that the scientists who are saying right now that we are delaying "remedial action beyond the time they [sic] cease to be effective" happen to be "opportunists" who seek "fat world subsidies for their studies." We know this is true because if they weren't, we'd be listening to them. QED!

So everything's fine. And therefore:

You don’t really have to buy an electric car and dim light bulbs, settle for turnips instead of steak, or even hope for better days ahead.

That's a load off my mind, I must say.

UPDATE: Advocates for renewable energy are hydrocarbon deniers. So there!

(Illustration by Gustave Doré.)

Lurid Warnings

Peter Preston, an opinion writer for the Grauniad, has noticed that lots of people don't believe global warming is real, or manmade, or serious. And he knows exactly who's to blame.

It isn't hard to collate the factors that drive disillusion. Professors with a colloquial touch writing "awful" emails; a recession so tough that it blows future shock away; a cold, cold winter the Met Office didn't forecast; scientific angst about swine flu revealed as way over the top; dodgy figures, dodgy reporting, dodgy issues way up to UN level.

Note that the denial industry and the media that cater to it are conspicuous by their absence. Scientists must take most of the blame for public disbelief: this sort of "disillusion" is what naturally happens when experts treat influenza as a dangerous disease, or fail to reckon with the cold hard reality of winter.

Preston is very upset about all this, because global warming is a damned serious business, dash it all, and something bloody well needs to be done about it...as long as it's OK with "voters."

Voters have to clamber on board when sacrifices are required. They have to see the need for pain, to sense the danger of doing nothing. They have to lead their leaders as well as follow....

How do we get voters to sense danger and lead their leaders, as they did when they found out that Saddam's stormtroopers were tipping Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators? Good question! "Re-examinations of existing evidence" are useless, it seems, because no one's going to listen to professors now that denialists have methodically lied about them their work has been shown to be full of "dodgy figures." And no one's going to listen to Al Gore, because he obdurately insists on being Al Gore, with malice aforethought.

More jaw and Gore from politicians can't cut it. They have come to seem secondhand sources, merely parroting a frail scientific thesis. That goes, alas, for journalists, too – and for pressure groups issuing lurid warnings or staging angry demos....

Journalists, op-ed writers, and their editors can't help (presuming for the sake of argument that they actually want to). And "pressure groups" can't help either, because the public strongly objects to anger and lurid warnings unless they're directed at Al Gore or Phil Jones or the IPCC or the concept of taxation. And that goes double for pressure groups comprising climate scientists:

[M]ore of the same is exactly what we seem to be getting. More re-examinations of existing evidence, monitored by the people who failed to monitor it last time. More supposedly transparent attempts to say precisely when Himalayan glaciers will melt. More United Nations panels, flying lugubriously hither and yon in the cause of consensus. More declarations signed by hundreds of scientists on behalf of a notional "scientific community"....

As the person who may very well have coined the term "concern troll" (over at Eschaton, roughly six years ago), I think I'm qualified to say that Preston is a concern troll par excellence. He ignores the existence of a well-organized denialist movement. He ignores its ongoing support from a variety of business interests, including the media. He downplays the extent of scientific consensus. He reinforces any number of denialist narratives while claiming to be worried about declining belief in AGW. And he treats attempts to set the record straight -- the record, that is, that he himself goes out of his way to misrepresent -- as shabby, dishonest, and ultimately pointless.

So what's his solution?

[T]he plain fact is that we surely need a prophet, not yet another committee. We need one passionate, persuasive scientist who can connect and convince – not because he preaches apocalypse in gory detail, but in simple, overwhelming terms. We need to be taught to believe by a true believer in a world where belief is the fatal, missing ingredient.

In other words, we need someone who can serve as the public face of Scientific Non-Lurid Semi-Alarmism. We need someone whose personal credibility will represent the integrity of climate science, so that both can be pulled down together once he or she is accused of profiteering or preaching apocalypse or what have you, just like every other scientist who has played this role, intentionally or otherwise.

And you know what would be really, really clever and not at all self-defeating in any way? To describe this person in advance as some kind of charismatic, quasi-religious figurehead: an "eco-prophet," if you will. That's just the sort of sensible rhetoric that's been missing from this debate!

I suppose that once this new prophet has been demolished, and his or her "followers" stand revealed yet again as doomstruck cultists, Preston can write a column demanding a new and better figurehead...one who's not so prone to Scientific Angst and Lurid Warnings.

Because the alternative would be to "plod across the wastelands of borrowed time" without ever achieving anything. And that would be a real shame, given what's at stake.

(Illustration at top via Media Matters.)

Increased Runoff

When you're conducting a massive, semiconscious experiment with the climate of the only planet you have, it's important to remember that things may possibly turn out well, for some people.

Certain "experts" argue that we're running a terrible risk, but that's only because they've focused ghoulishly on the worst-case scenario. Which tells you all you need to know about their priorities: Who but an enemy of capitalism would weigh the costs of a devastated world against the benefits of a very slightly improved one, and come down on the side of realism and responsibility?

With these concerns firmly in mind, Anne Jolis of the WSJ does something the Warmists never do. She looks at the science:

According to a 2004 paper [link added, since Jolis couldn't be bothered] by British geographer and climatologist Nigel Arnell, global warming would likely reduce the world's total number of people living in "water-stressed watersheds"...even though many regions would see increased water shortages. Using multiple models, Mr. Arnell predicted that if temperatures rise, between 867 million and 4.5 billion people around the world could see increased "water stress" by 2085. But Mr. Arnell also found that "water stress" could decrease for between 1.7 billion and 6 billion people. Taking the average of the two ranges, that means that with global warming, nearly 2.7 billion people could see greater water shortages — but 3.85 billion could see fewer of them.

According to Jolis, the IPPC emphasizes the negative scenario and "largely ignores the greater number likely to see more water courtesy of climate change."

The problem is, you can't simply balance drought here with extra rainfall there, as though they were debits and credits in some cosmic ledger. What matters is where and when droughts and rainfall and snowmelt occur, and the overall effect on ecosystems as well as population and infrastructure. As a simplistic example, more runoff (and perhaps flooding) in Turkey isn't necessarily going to make up for drought, forest loss, and wildfires in the Amazon. As Arnell himself explains:

People living in these watersheds have an apparent decrease in water resources stress, but in practice the extra water may not alleviate water stress because it may occur largely during increased flood flows.

Jolis gets her information from Indur Goklany, a cornucopian dingbat whom she claims was formerly "with the U.S. Department of the Interior" (even though his career with thinktanks like Cato and the Heartland Institute should be far more impressive in her circles). Needless to say, Goklany is neither a climatologist nor a hydrologist. But then, neither is Al Gore, so it all evens out.

Since Arnell's work provides the evidence Jolis requires in order to trash the IPCC, you might think she'd treat him with a bit of deference. But it turns out that he's part of the problem:

Mr. Arnell, who helped author the summary and some sections in the full report, told your correspondent he is "happy" with the way his work was represented. He said one reason for the omissions was "space"....The other reason Mr. Arnell cited — which he emphasized in his 2004 paper — is that increased and decreased water stress are asymmetrical indicators, and comparing them is "misleading."

"Having a bit more [water] is not as good as having a bit less is bad," Mr. Arnell explained....

Jolis complains that "Mr. Arnell's 22-page paper is rife with caveats and uncertainties," but this doesn't prevent it from being a sturdy club with which to beat the IPCC. After all, "uncertainties" in climate science always support the status quo, even when authors emphasize (as Arnell does) that they're probably understating the problems we face.

What's really sad is that some of the uncertainties in predicting water stress depend on our own willingness to mitigate or prepare for warming, which in turn depends on the extent to which know-nothings like Jolis are allowed to influence the debate.

As a working scientist, Arnell has more recent papers and more current statements on this issue, and they underscore the fact that there really isn't a "bright side" here. But who cares? All that matters is that the IPCC has taken some hits lately, and lots more mud needs to be thrown as quickly as possible. Since Goklany had a readymade complaint from several years ago, which could be recirculated with a minimum of effort, Jolis is dutifully trotting it out.

If you claim that a warmer world will be better world, readers might be tempted to leave all their lights on 'round the clock, regardless of personal expense, in hopes of making their own small contribution to human happiness. That's a slippery slope indeed, and so Jolis is careful to stress that what's needed here is not activism but complacency:

The point here is not to suggest that pollution and any resulting warming will deliver the Third World from its troubles, or that emitting ever-more carbon dioxide should be pursued as humanitarian policy. Clearly any benefits of global warming are extremely speculative — but then so are the costs.

Lovely, isn't it? When Arnell projects water decreases in Europe and North America and China, it's "extremely speculative" and therefore not worth worrying about. Meanwhile, there may be a bit more water in some areas of the Third World, for reasons and with results that don't bear going into. This is also extremely speculative, but it's still useful as a counterweight to the hysterical claims of "alarmists"...like, for instance, Nigel Arnell.

In other news, Brazil intends to dam the Xingu River.

Critics say the Belo Monte plant will be hugely inefficient, generating less than 10% of its capacity during the three to four months of the low-water season.

The At-Risk Population

Yet another cartoon lightbulb has appeared over Bjorn Lomborg's head:

Limiting carbon emissions won't do much to stop disease in Zambia.

See, 'cause malaria is killing people now, whereas climate change may kill or otherwise inconvenience them at some point in the future. Let this be a lesson to all those warmists who insist that we must stop trying to prevent malaria!

Lomborg's not a denialist, so he naturally acknowledges that warming is expected to increase the prevalence of malaria:

Most estimates suggest that global warming will put 3% more of the Earth's population at risk of catching malaria by 2100. If we invest in the most efficient, global carbon cuts — designed to keep temperature rises under two degrees Celsius — we would spend a massive $40 trillion a year by 2100. In the best case scenario, we would reduce the at-risk population by only 3%.

The at-risk population for malaria, that is. Which is a comparatively minor issue, as AGW-related catastrophes go, given that we currently have far more reliable remedies for malaria than for sustained regional drought and famine, or the loss of a keystone species.

Regardless, Lomborg contrasts the eleventy-gazillion dollars it'll cost to reduce emissions with the relatively modest cost of investing in mosquito netting, and comes to the daring conclusion that mosquito netting is cheaper. Which is pretty fucking stupid, since controlling malaria is not the sole aim - nor even a major aim - of reducing emissions.

The sleight of hand on malaria obscures Lomborg's far more bizarre claim that "if we invest in the most efficient, global carbon cuts...we would spend a massive $40 trillion a year by 2100." Climate forecasting, as everyone knows, is dangerously unreliable. But there's apparently no problem with making an economic forecast in which ninety years of investment in efficiency (which presumably includes alternative energy and cleantech) result in steadily climbing costs, and deliver no meaningful benefit beyond maintaining the malaria caseload at its current level.

That, believe it or not, is the sunny outlook that's supposed to serve as an antidote to Algore's hollow-eyed thanatophilia.

Like all of Lomborg's best theories, this one is endorsed by the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which is kind of like saying that L. Ron Hubbard's views are endorsed by the Church of Scientology.

[S]pending $3 billion annually on mosquito nets, environmentally safe indoor DDT sprays, and subsidies for effective new combination therapies could halve the number of those infected with malaria within one decade. For the money it takes to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives.

Again, Lomborg's treating malaria prevention as the goal of carbon cuts, which makes this calculation misleading at best. It's also interesting that a decade of investment in new pesticides and therapies will bring good results and a prompt ROI, while nine decades of investment in energy efficiency will bankrupt the entire planet and bring our deaths halfway to meet us.

In the real world, there are lots of benefits to improving efficiency and cutting emissions. Which is why I think Lomborg would be much better off attacking the Near-Earth Object Program and related alarmist busywork. The world spends huge sums of money to identify asteroids that may never come nearer than a million miles to the earth, and to develop equally expensive deflection strategies that -- let's face it -- probably wouldn't work if they ever became necessary. Shouldn't we be using these resources to eradicate one of the world's most devastating diseases, instead of fussing over some fanciful Doomsday scenario that we couldn't prevent even if it actually were a serious threat?

Alternatively, I suppose we could cut our military budget by one percent, and use the extra six billion dollars per year to address both problems, along with a few others.

It's even possible that a similar approach would allow us to reduce emissions and fight malaria at the very same time. But for some reason, fearless, irreverent, paradigm-shattering heretics like Lomborg never seem to argue along these lines; it's almost as though they understand that they'd vanish overnight from the American media's Rolodexes. As Cocteau said, one must always know how far to go too far.

Susceptible Young People

As a concerned mom, a glibertarian polemicist, and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institute, Laura E. Huggins wishes to advise us that "eco-propaganda" is warping Our Children's Minds.

[C]lassroom textbooks are influenced "by an ideological view that presents human beings as evil," according to Dr. Michael Sanera, director of the Center for Environmental Education Research. Sanera compared science textbooks used in sixth through 10th grades in Wisconsin. Though he felt the textbooks all did a good job explaining the carbon cycle and greenhouse effect, nearly all focused only on the human causes of climate change and all predicted catastrophic impact.

In other words, climate change is real, but some part of it is natural, so there's no sense in worrying about the consequences.

Children who've been browbeaten into compliance with this bizarre worldview have "learned to think," according to Huggins. Those who haven't are being scared stupid by unscrupulous textbook publishers. It's fine to terrify kids by harping on the catastrophic results of healthcare reform, or sex-ed classes, or our collective failure to "cauldronize" the Middle East per Michael Ledeen. And it's not only fine, but essential, to frighten them with sin and hellfire. But calling climate change a serious problem...jeez, that's practically child abuse.

She fails to mention that Sanera's study was published way back in 1996. And that he's a bit unclear on what constitutes presenting human beings as "evil," as opposed to ignorant or shortsighted. And that, as ExxonSecrets notes, the Center for Environmental Education Research was a pet project of the CEI, and may not be entirely reliable.

It's not just eco-propaganda that's turning our kids into terminal mopes. The other problem -- and this is where things get really weird -- is that children are alienated from the natural world.

Top off the eco-propaganda with the fact that many schools have moved away from hands-on nature-study and field trips, and that parents are no longer sending their kids to camps or even outside to play, it is no wonder kids are increasingly disconnected and uninterested in the outdoors....

While researchers debate the root cause of people spending less time outside and its associated impacts on mental and physical health, there is little debate that this trend spells trouble for our commitment to conservation....

Rather than scaring susceptible young people about the environment, why not teach them the truth and get them outdoors?

Good idea! Especially on cold winter days, when the falsity of "global warming" will be obvious even to the dimmest child. It's one thing to sit in your living room watching Glenn Beck spout denialist catchphrases in front of a giant green swastika; it's quite another to go outside and catch snowflakes on your tongue, knowing that each of them is an unanswerable argument against Algore's Warming Theory.

Huggins' remarks about conservation are baffling. Maybe she noticed that it's now fashionable for anti-choice activists to complain that contraception helps men to exploit and dominate women, and figured she might as well try a similar faux-progressive detournement in her own field. Just as you can't call someone who weeps over degraded women a misogynist, you can't call someone who wants children to gambol like fauns through dew-kissed meadows an anti-environmentalist shill. It's just common sense.

It's fun and easy, too. Observe: Turning national parks over to timber companies is conservation! Ignoring evidence on principle is critical thought! Thoreau is the spiritual founder of the Wise Use movement, and would've been infuriated by federal protection of wilderness areas! You're limited only by your imagination and malice.

It's not just the thrill of turning your enemies' rhetoric against them that makes this approach so satisfying. There's also a good chance that you'll be able to render useful terms effectively meaningless (cf. "fascist" and "socialist"), transmute them into their opposites, and treat any attempt to restore their basic definitions as elitist indoctrination.

Schools are an ideal place to wage this battle, since children can be snatched up and used as human shields when the purity of one's motives is questioned. With that in mind, here's Huggins' three-step solution to the eco-indoctrination of our "susceptible young people":

First, say no to the eco-propaganda that dribbles down on them all day. Second, teach them to think about environmental issues. And third, say yes next time your child asks to "go play outside."

Sounds absolutely foolproof. Granted, most of us don't actually know enough about climate science to edit our kids' textbooks. But that's OK...we can just cross out anything demoralizing, using the common sense God gave us. It's gotten us this far.

(Photo by Sarah Posner.)

Variations in the Sun

Having graciously corrected the world's historians on a few elementary points, Jonah Goldberg shifts his attention to climatology and solar physics.

From his God's-eye view, the ant-like labor of climate scientists -- as they rush to and fro, saying this and that -- is both confusing and suggestive. Confusing, because Goldberg doesn't understand it. Suggestive, because this implies that they're trying to hide something.

Simply put, there's a new finding about sunspots, and it has something to do with climate. Don't bother asking Goldberg to explain any of this, though.

What is the significance of all this? To say I have no idea is quite an understatement, but it will have to do.

Ideally, scientists would respond to Goldberg's honest confession of cluelessness in kind, by conceding that they don't understand their pet subjects much better than he does. But instead, they insist on trying to interpret data in ways that strike Goldberg as counterintuitive.

[W]hat I find interesting is the eagerness of the authors and the media to make it clear that this doesn’t have any particular significance for the debate over climate change.

It's not that these scientists are dishonest, necessarily. It may just be that they're a little too close to the issue. What's needed is an outside opinion, preferably from someone who doesn't know the first goddamn thing about climatology, and therefore remains untainted by its rules of entry and its pompous language games.

It's more than a little pathetic, the way these scientists try to hide their sloppy thinking from the blazing searchlight of Goldberg's intellect:

“Global warming is a long-term trend, Dr. Meehl says....This study attempts to explain the processes behind a periodic occurrence.”

This overlooks the fact that solar cycles are permanent “periodic occurrences,” a.k.a. a very long-term trend.

A scientist might try to argue that sunspots are indeed cyclical, while global warming is a trend that represents a marked departure from natural cycles. But look here: If sunspots are periodic occurrences, and have something to do with climate, then why shouldn't global warming, which also has something to do with climate, also be periodic, and therefore natural, and therefore not worth worrying about, probably?

I mean, who you going to believe: A guy whose career depends on seeming to understand climate, or a guy who admits that he knows nothing about climate at all, and therefore has no other concern than strict accuracy?

Which is not to say that man-made pollution has played no role in planetary warming. But the important question to ask here is, how does this fact make Jonah Goldberg feel? Do you honestly think Goldberg would enjoy feeling guilty, or worrying about the world we're leaving for our children, supposing for the sake of argument that he were capable of doing so?

Consider his plight: The poor man can't even go shopping without imagining people attacking him for "frying the earth" by using the wrong type of bags. As if it were possible for individual choice to have some sort of aggregate effect! And all the while, the sun is roaring in the sky, sending glad tidings into our very bones, and the establishment scientists, like, can't even grok it, man!

Which means that they're ingrates. Because the sun is, on the whole, a good thing, and worthy of our notice:

[P]ay no attention to that burning ball of gas in the sky — it’s just the only thing that prevents the planet from being a lifeless ball of ice engulfed in darkness.

I'm not so sure about this. Who told him that the sun is "a big burning ball of gas," and what makes his source credible? Heraclitus said the sun is the size of a man's foot, and forms anew daily. Who is Goldberg to gainsay tradition? Furthermore, the global-warming skeptic Ian Plimer, who happens to be the World's Most Respected Geologist, suggests that the sun is made of iron. Can Goldberg prove it isn't, without resorting to hearsay and prattling about so-called "consensus"?

And if the sun were to go out, would the earth truly become "a lifeless ball of ice engulfed in darkness," or could we rely on innovative free-market solutions -- including nuclear power -- to help us adapt and thrive? And what about the planet's internal heat, as evidenced by volcanoes? Honestly, this sort of alarmism infuriates me.

After directing the attention of solar physicists to certain intriguing qualities of the sun, Goldberg goes on to quote Richard Lindzen (who's from MIT!) to the effect that the climate is not getting warmer. Oddly enough, Lindzen has also "criticized widely publicized assertions by other skeptics that variations in the sun were driving temperature changes in recent decades." Which means that Goldberg is such a ludicrous fucking dilettante that he can't even be bothered to pay serious attention to the preeminent scientist on his side of the "debate."

So what professional advice does Goldberg have for people who've spent their lives researching phenomena of which he is content to remain inexpressibly ignorant?

[M]aybe we should study a bit more before we spend billions to “solve” a problem we don’t understand so well.

Notice Goldberg's humility: Instead of attacking scientists for their pretensions, he's careful to point out that he, too, does not know quite as much as he should.

It's the human condition. We see through a glass, darkly...so you may as well wrap Goldberg's fetid underpants around your head a few times, and go play in traffic.

Our Innocent Children

The irrepressible Bjorn Lomborg has come up with a new argument against AGW: It frightens children. And not in a good way, like clowns, or sirens, or fundamentalist sermons on Hell, or "duck and cover" drills for nuclear war, or balsawood drones laden with anthrax spores.

An article in the Washington Post cited nine-year-old Alyssa, who cries about the possibility of mass animal extinctions from global warming. In her words: "I don't like global warming because it kills animals, and I like animals."

What this child needs to understand is that a) mass animal extinctions are impossible, or at least unlikely, or at least not that big a deal; b) there are plenty more animals where those came from, and anyway this is why we have zoos; and c) it's far more tragic that millions of African children are dying of malaria, so turn off the waterworks or we'll give you something serious to cry about.

Usually, Lomborg is angry because people believe that something can be done about climate change. Today, though, he's angry because they don't. Consistency is for small-minded people, y'see, and Lomborg's wits are as wide as all outdoors.

Exaggeration also wears out the public's willingness to tackle global warming. If the planet is doomed, people wonder, why do anything?

Of course, most of the prominent people who claim that mitigation is impossible or pointless or a Marxist plot -- or all three -- are inactivists like Lomborg.

But so what? This argument allows Lomborg to lean down from Parnassus and sigh theatrically over what fools we mortals be, so it's as true as it needs to be. A boxer's feint isn't strictly honest, either; what matters is whether it throws his opponent off balance. And if you're not thrown off balance by Lomborg's argument that inaction is bad when it's based on despair, but good when it's based on complacency, your mind is a good deal sturdier than mine.

Essentially, Lomborg has translated his standard economic argument into emotional terms: just as the cost of taking action here and now must be weighed against the prospective riches of Third World tycoons from the year 2100, the present-day tears of a few deluded children must be weighed against the abiding joys of a future in which everything turns out just fine, thanks to clever people like Lomborg who understand that there's no sense in fighting fate.

Since catastrophic -- or even seriously disruptive -- climate change is pretty much impossible, normal reactions like anxiety or grief must be pathologized, and the fact that our children are worried becomes an argument against addressing the issues that worry them. To paraphrase Ivan Karamazov, Lomborg is unwilling to found the edifice of climate action on the unavenged tears of a child: the truth is not worth such a price.

The current debate about global warming is clearly harmful. I believe that it is time we demanded that the media stop scaring us and our kids silly. We deserve a more reasoned, more constructive, and less frightening dialogue.

Absolutely. Because otherwise, as Lord Monckton explains, we'll destroy Western prosperity, commit genocide against the Third World, and wind up daubing ourselves with woad and subsisting on fronds and bracken.

The sooner our kids get this through their thick little skulls, and recognize the deadly conspiracy that threatens their future, the better off we'll all be.

(Illustration: "Magic Lantern Alphabet of Animals. London, Paris, New York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, not before 1886.')

A Disengagement From Reality

What America needs, according to conservatives, is a culture of personal responsibility. What it doesn't need, according to conservatives, is to feel bad about the environmental effects of personal choices.

That doesn't make any sense at all, until you consider their need to make everything they say sound like an Eternal Verity, even if it's just some opportunistic gibberish they cobbled together on the spot. It's not the content of their pronouncements that's important; it's the form and the tone, and the implication that Western Civilization itself is speaking.

Which brings us to George Will, who loves personal responsibility unless it infringes on the carelessness and recklessness and greed that made America great.

Basically, Will agrees with those lovable one-trick ponies Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger that environmentalism is stupid and corrupt; this is a position they defend by ignoring any fact that doesn't support their view of environmentalism as some sort of hopelessly bourgeois cargo cult, while holding up equally bourgeois notions of "prosperity" as a beacon of hope for the developing world.

In "The Green Bubble: Why Environmentalism Keeps Imploding" [the New Republic, May 20], Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger...say that a few years ago, being green "moved beyond politics." Gestures -- bringing reusable grocery bags to the store, purchasing a $4 heirloom tomato, inflating tires, weatherizing windows -- "gained fresh urgency" and "were suddenly infused with grand significance."

That "grand significance" is personal responsibility, which I believe you'll find somewhere in William Bennett's Book of Virtures. In the case of tires and windows, there are also economic considerations, which I thought trumped just about everything.

Shopping decisions aren't "beyond politics" any more than voting is. Will knows this, normally, because he belongs to a subculture that sees (scientifically uninformed) consumer choice as a rubberstamp for political dogma; if Hummers are selling well, it means that The People Have Spoken and want Hummers, which means that environmentalism has been repudiated, which means that Freedom is on the march. But if people reject Hummers and start buying hybrids, it means that they're irrational faddists who don't understand that consumers are essentially powerless; they're simply trying to make themselves feel better by buying stuff (unlike, say, the principled patriots who stockpile guns).

A 2007 survey found that 57 percent of Prius purchasers said they bought their car because "it makes a statement about me." Honda, alert to the bull market in status effects, reshaped its 2009 Insight hybrid to look like a Prius.

Sounds like market forces in action, to me. People like Will tend not to question purchases that confer status and prestige unless they're "green" (or the buyer is black, but we'll put that aside for now). A $25,000 Rolex is fine, as is a Maserati or a $1,500 pair of cowboy boots that you'll wear only at board meetings. But when Prius buyers pursue social status...well, that's a different matter entirely. If you thought that private vice inevitably leads to public virtue, think again; there are still a few isolate cases where consumerist self-gratification is a social evil, and this is one of them.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger note the telling "insignificance," as environmental measures, of planting gardens or using fluorescent bulbs. Their significance is therapeutic, but not for the planet. They make people feel better.

The first point I need to make in response is that Nordhaus and Shellenberger are preening douchebags. (It doesn't advance my argument, I know, but it does make me feel better.) More important, the greater urgency and higher concern they claim to feel about environmental issues seems to me to be belied by the fact that they don't quite believe in the processes that actually cause environmental harm. If switching to fluorescent lightbulbs doesn't matter, neither does pouring your waste motor oil down the drain. If planting a garden doesn't matter, neither does spraying your lawn with pesticides. For people who are constantly prattling about the glories of the market, Nordhaus and Shellenberger and Will seem to be a little unclear on the aggregate effects of individual choice.

Except when it's politically useful, natch.

Now, say Nordhaus and Shellenberger, "the green bubble" has burst, pricked by Americans' intensified reluctance to pursue greenness at a cost to economic growth. The dark side of utopianism is "escapism and a disengagement from reality that marks all bubbles, green or financial." Reengagement with reality is among the recession's benefits.

OK, let's recap. People used to be "pursue greenness" because they foolishly believed that individual decisions could affect the environment. But now, the recession has made them realize that green choices hinder economic growth, or that the lack of economic growth hinders green choices, or something. Thus, they're leaving escapism and utopianism behind, in order to reengage with the reality of limitless growth without consequences and personal responsibility without guilt. And we know all of this because of the close attention we've paid to consumer buying patterns and opinions, which are meaningless except inasmuch as they confirm what George Will already believes.

I look forward to future installments of Will's column, in which he'll rail against the Green Bubble as though it had never actually burst.

Immense Good Will

As all good centrists know, extremism in defense of moderation is no vice. If I call Charles Manson a dangerous lunatic, and Squeaky Fromme calls him the new Christ, sensible people will naturally stake out the middle ground while awaiting further evidence.

As Thomas Fuller reminds us, the same logic applies to climate change:

The question before us all today is whether global warming is the major challenge confronting our generation or is it a chimera, a ghost story to be told around a campfire?

Fuller says that we'll know which of these claims is true in thirty years. Which is very judicious of him, God knows. It's ever so balanced and measured and nonpartisan and objective to treat the IPCC reports and The Great Global Warming Swindle as equally plausible interpretations of climate data.

I'm tempted to argue that Fuller is being disingenuous. But according to him, I can't do this without committing a grave sin against Civility. Although we differ strongly on the likelihood that AGW will turn out to be a "ghost story," we must each acknowledge the other's basic honesty and good will.

People are not campaigning for reductions in energy use as a hobby. They do it because they believe the planet is in danger. Scientists do not enter a career with the idea that they will perpetuate a fraud on an unsuspecting public. They are trying to explain the data they find. On the other side, skeptics are not protesting because they like being trashed in the media. They do it because they believe we should be solving other problems. When people of immense good will are calling each other names, there is something badly wrong with the way we are conducting the discussion.

Fair enough. If Lord Monckton's detractors stop calling him a fraud and a fool, and he stops calling them socialist bedwetters, we can all get on with more important things...like admiring the colorful new graph he cobbled together over a bottle or two of Malmsey.

Notice that Fuller doesn't say "skeptics are not protesting because they're bought-and-paid-for industry shills with the ethical sense of a tapeworm." Instead, he tries to disabuse his readers of a nonsensical opinion that none of them actually holds. If I weren't convinced of his immense good will, I'd suspect that he's trying to advance the denialist myth that the mass media have been inhospitable to skeptics, while passing himself off as some sort of modern Socrates.

On the bright side, Fuller supports cap-and-trade, space-based solar panels, raising CAFE standards, improving public transportation, and all sorts of other potentially admirable things. He also wants us "to bring the poorest third of the world's population onto the grid -- converting them from reliance on wood and animal dung for fuel to available electricity powered by natural gas." Apparently, once we've filled the exosphere with solar panels, there'll be none left over for the poor.

Electrifying the developing world with natural gas isn't mere humanitarian busywork, by the way; it's also good PR.

This would...prove that our concerns about climate change do not amount to little more than an exercise in vanity.

The only alternative, I guess, would be to ask the poorest third of the world's population to take our immense good will on faith. And that'd be dumb.

Fuller has a special closing message for skeptics (who, you'll recall, aren't yelling "it's the sun, stupid!" because they enjoy being seen as invincibly ignorant loudmouths).

Above all, to the skeptics I say, first and foremost remain skeptics--there hasn't been enough skepticism on this issue yet, and it sorely needs it.

Arise, take up thy bed, and walk! Just don't accuse people who disagree with you of being "demons or conspirators," when they're far more likely to be garden-variety dingbats and hysterics who'll look ineffably silly in thirty years. As for you dingbats and hysterics, stop calling the skeptics names. After all, their immense good will is a match for your own. At the very least.

We can only hope that from this day forward, climate scientists, erratic British peers, faux-populist Fox News hosts, retired petroleum geologists, and undistinguished economists from conservatarian thinktanks will put aside all the name-calling and conspiracy theories, and meet each other as equals on the field of sober scientific inquiry. What could they possibly have to lose?

(Ad at top via The Guardian.)

The Week in Denialism

Those of you who are worried about climate change clearly don't have Dan K. Thomasson's grasp of the imaginary past:

Not so terribly long ago most everything bad seemed to be blamed on one of three things -- the press, the atomic bomb or sunspots. But that changed when someone discovered global warming, aided of course, by computers that spewed out the dire consequences as toxic as the greenhouse gasses the true believers saw as the major culprit.

Yessir. I mind it was back in ought-six, folks 'round here was all het up 'bout sunspots. Said it was a judgment on us for havin' a pianny in the church. 'Course, all us old-timers knowed it was magnytism what had reduced convection in part o' the photosphere, but they turned a deef ear to us. Burned down half the churches in the county, 'fore we finally rounded 'em up and hung 'em to a tree.

These here computers is no differnt. Once they gits an idear, they take it for God's Own Truth. I tell you what, I wouldn't have one o' them things up my ass if I had room for a sawmill.

Just in case this homespun wisdom hasn't convinced you to be "cautious" about assessing AGW, here's another good stiff dose:

It seems to be accepted theory that unless the industrial nations of the world unite to plug the holes in the ozone, we are all going to end up toast.

Thomasson's thinking of CFCs, which the industrial nations of the world united to phase out some years ago, with heartening results. Things have come to a pretty pass when journalists can't even remember which environmental problem they're trying to downplay.

The Delco Daily Times notes that human beings exhale CO2. Why is this important? Read on, and find out.

Given that CO2 is the stuff that every human being on the planet exhales with every breath we take, mark us up as concerned about what the EPA might propose....

[I]t is no more reasonable to call carbon dioxide a “pollutant” than it is to refer to the human race as “a virus.”

Absolutely right. Anything that comes out of a human being is harmless in any amount, which is why we should be allowed to dump raw sewage in rivers and reservoirs. Anyone who says otherwise clearly hates humanity.

The DDT isn't actually stupid enough to believe that the EPA is going to regulate breathing, of course. But isn't it fun to imagine that sort of behavior, and then get angry about it? (This reminds me of my gay neighbors, who often rape children in their basement. Although I invented this accusation just now, and have no evidence for it, it does communicate the severity of the problem, don't you think?)

Congress will probably not impose any strict regulations any time soon. But what if "the mere threat of the regs will cause any economic recovery to be slower in coming"? Why, that'd practically be tyranny!

Such power, in the hands of one agency and one administration, is breath taking.

Maybe that’s the idea.

Fighting a conspiracy of this magnitude will require uncommon imagination, foresight, and self-sacrifice, so it's only natural that we should turn to the Detroit News for guidance:

Congress should take due notice of the EPA's finding about carbon dioxide and then write legislation that saves jobs and the economy.

I like this approach a lot. I believe I'll take "due notice" of my doctor's advice on reducing my alcohol intake, and then pour myself another glass of bourbon. In parlous times like these, sticking with robotic fixity to business as usual has become a revolutionary act. I know not what others may choose, but I prefer to die on my knees, drunk and retching and free, than on my feet, sober and thirsty and resentful.

Richard A. Epstein doesn't believe that more is always better when it comes to CO2. However, the conclusion he draws from this may surprise you.

[M]ost people find it a bit odd to take after poor CO2 as a pollutant when its presence in the atmosphere is a necessary element to sustain life on earth. The rub is that too much carbon dioxide might choke the environment--assuming we could find that tipping point, which looks more uncertain with each passing day.

Despite the difficulty of finding this tipping point through any other method than trial and error, the fact remains that "no sane libertarian favors death by asphyxiation." This is excellent news, because it means that we have a pretty good chance of reaching a bipartisan compromise.

The IPCC wants to avoid disastrous warming by stabilizing CO2 at roughly 450ppm, and "sane libertarians" want to avoid asphyxiation by keeping it below, say, 80,000ppm. Obviously, a politically acceptable number lies somewhere in between. All we have to do now is find it.

Life Blossoms

Paul Sheehan has read a book by Professor Ian Plimer, and is now an expert on the (natural) causes and (beneficial) effects of global warming, not least because "the book's 500 pages and 230,000 words and 2311 footnotes are the product of 40 years' research and a depth and breadth of scholarship."

By contrast, Einstein's 1905 paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies comprises roughly 7,000 words, and has only nine footnotes. Pilmer's accomplishment clearly puts Einstein in the shade.

Of course, if we were to compile all the words, pages, and footnotes that suggest that Plimer is wrong, they'd dwarf his magnum opus like an elephant dwarfs a dust mite. Which just goes to show you that sheer bulk is not always the best way to gauge the accuracy of scientific papers. It just so happens that Plimer's book is voluminous and heavily footnoted because it's correct, while the myriad papers reflecting the consensus view are voluminous and heavily footnoted because they're the product of conformity. That's the kind of detail you're liable to miss unless you have a science-savvy guide like Sheehan.

Plimer is a mining geologist. This makes him uniquely qualified to assess the climate, because, as he notes, "an understanding of climate requires an amalgamation of astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochronology, geochemistry, sedimentology, tectonics, palaeontology, palaeoecology, glaciology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, ecology, archaeology and history," and Plimer is presumably pretty well versed in roughly half of these subjects. Unlike "atmospheric scientists, who have a different perspective on time," Plimer understands that the earth has been around for many years. And unlike "catastrophists," Plimer knows that "depopulation, social disruption, extinctions, disease and catastrophic droughts take place in cold times...and life blossoms and economies boom in warm times." (Apparently, you can add paleo-economics to the list of disciplines at which the climate researcher must excel.)

Reading a book of 500 pages is thirsty work, especially if you have to master astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochronology, geochemistry, sedimentology, tectonics, palaeontology, palaeoecology, glaciology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, ecology, archaeology, and history before you can form a valid opinion on it. Fortunately, Sheehan has boiled it down to the essentials:

1. The world is getting warmer, but in a good way.


2. Bitches don't know bout the sun.


3. CO2 is life!


4. The climate is incredibly complicated, so it's impossible to predict what it'll do in the future (unless thy name be Plimer, in which case it's fairly light work, and your prediction that global warming will "bring prosperity and longer life" is almost certainly correct).


5. Not only is there no evidence that human activity can warm the climate, there's plenty of "validated knowledge" that it says it can't.


6. Computer models are unreliable, so it's a good thing we have this book by Plimer that explains exactly what they'd say if they were accurate.

Interestingly, Sheehan claims that climate modeling can't begin to deal with the "complex dynamism of the Earth's climate." But if he really believes that AGW is an "extraordinary" hypothesis that's ruled out by "validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology," then any computer model that assumes that human beings can affect climate is wrong from the outset, and the complexity of the system is totally beside the point. Indeed, how can we know whether modeling works or not, unless we start out with models in which CO2 "does not create a temperature rise"? It's almost as though Sheehan doesn't believe his own rhetoric.

Just because Plimer is one brave man standing alone against the forces of conformity, don't go getting the idea that he's an "isolated gadfly." Lots of scientists agree with him, more or less. And not in that bad way that scientists who believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas agree with each other. Plimer's colleagues agree with each other in — how shall I put this? — in a subtle articulative way, partaking — or not partaking, rather — of...of...that essential weltschmerz, as it were, which views clothing and medicine and automobiles as so many cold obstetrical devices that've pulled humanity from the womb of the earth, and motivates so many soi-disant "scientists" to position themselves on the anti-prosperity and pro-extinction side of the debate. In short, they agree with each other because it's the correct thing to do.

The main thing, Sheehan notes, is not to fall prey to conformity and orthodoxy. Obviously, this doesn't mean that you should embrace the heavily footnoted work of Matthias Rath, or David Irving, or — God forbid — Ward Churchill. In some fields, conformity and orthodoxy remain comparatively respectable. But when it comes to climate science, the scientific and moral high ground will always belong to a tiny minority of militant crackpot optimists, just as surely as life blossoms when carbon dioxide rises.

Problematizing Progress

Brendan O'Neill argues that we should sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires:

If you want proof of the miserabilist, misanthropic outlook of contemporary western society, look no further than the curmudgeonly reaction to the launch of "the People's Car" in India yesterday.

The Nano, developed by Tata Motors and costing a mere 100,000 rupees (around £1,200), will make the dream of car travel a reality for tens of thousands of Indians. Yet its launch was greeted by a collective groan from western observers, concerned that if the developing world plays "catch up" with us – what used to be known as "global equality" – the planet will fry in a hellfire of greedy car-drivers' making.

This collective groan is an ugly symptom of "eco-imperialism," which is much like classic imperialism, except that instead of traveling overseas to beat or starve foreign populations into submission, you sit at home and fret over the environmental impact of cheap consumer goods. As such, it's one of the most fearsome weapons in the armamentarium of liberal fascism, and can't be criticized harshly enough.

We have become incapable of judging new developments and breakthroughs by any criteria other than their projected carbon emissions. The fact that the Nano will increase many Indians' mobility, their choices, their personal freedom to travel where they want and when they want – a freedom many in the west have enjoyed for decades – is simply overlooked....

Immeasurable benefits to humanity have been usurped by pseudo-measurable levels of planetary destruction.

By which O'Neill means that these benefits would be usurped, if eco-imperialism actually got its way, for once. But fortunately, no one with any real power seriously believes in the miserabilists' pseudo-measurements of atmospheric CO2, polar ice, animal populations, rainfall, glacier loss, ocean acidification, and related phantasmagoria.

It's easy enough to point out that O'Neill is a flaming asshole. But if we were to concentrate solely on that fact, we might overlook the really interesting aspects of his argument. "Western environmentalists" are worried about the Nano; that's a given. Does this mean that Indian environmentalists and scientists aren't worried? Of course not: environmentalists and climatologists all around the world are brooding over "pseudo-measurable levels of planetary destruction" even as we speak, instead of banishing dull care by riding an ATV through a protected wilderness area. That's what makes 'em miserabilists, regardless of race, color, caste, or creed.

But if O'Neill acknowledged this little detail, he'd have to forego the pleasure of turning what little remains of white liberal guilt against itself, by invoking the horrors of imperialism as an argument for free-market dogmatism. He understands that Westerners are a bit more sensitive than they used to be about dictating terms to the Wogs, and so he figures he can score a few points by painting the IPCC as a new East India Company. Of course, this theory requires us to view Indian culture as monolithic, scientifically backwards, and implacably self-centered...but what matter the victims if the gesture be beautiful?

No one "overlooks" the benefits of the Nano. The people who are worried about it, here and in India, simply see the negatives as outweighing the positives. By contrast, O'Neill and his ilk refuse to concede that any meaningful negatives exist (hence all the talk of "pseudo-measurement"). This tactic is not just necessary, but enjoyable, because once the science is out of the way, there's all the time in the world to dream up neoliberal just-so stories:

In the past it was argued that the developing world was poor because there simply wasn't enough to go around or because Indians and Africans hadn't quite got the hang of this capitalism thing.

Today, the key cultural justification for continuing inequality is the idea that if the south becomes like us – with just as many cars, factories, roads, homes – then the planet will perish.

It's fascinating how many young journalistic firebrands have adapted the language and tone of radical critique to the purpose of blessing things as they are. O'Neill expects us to feel pious outrage at Western arrogance, while suggesting that development in India must follow the Western model or be damned, and that anyone who worries about the consequences is a fraud or a terminal mope, and that India doesn't have competent scientists, diversity of opinion, and a strong and courageous environmental movement. When it comes to purging ourselves of Western arrogance, like apparently cures like.

The funny thing is, O'Neill doesn't seem to believe this gibberish himself. No sooner does he accuse the West of scheming to maintain global inequality than he backpedals, and claims that the real concern is that we're allowing our silly Western guilt to interfere with the Hindoos' progress towards Civilization. This is known as "problematising progress." No, really!

This is a moral righteousness built on privilege rather than principle. The anti-Nano brigade, and all of the rest who problematise progress in the developing world, know the destructiveness of everything but the value of nothing. Just because we have become uncertain about technological progress, guilt-ridden about our luxuries, and cavalier about the feeling of freedom brought about by car travel, that doesn't mean Indians should stay put in their rickshaws.

Of course, it doesn't mean they have to buy a Nano, either. There are other possible vehicles, and wiser forms of progress, and Indian experts who can tell you all about them. (And of course, there are also Western countries that could be setting a good example by cutting their own emissions and working seriously to create a low-carbon economy.) But O'Neill seems to be problematizing every single one of these options except the Nano, for no better reason than that the Nano exists here and now, and environmentalists and climate scientists have dared to measure its carbon emissions instead of hailing it as the salvation of the downtrodden.

So once again, freedom boils down to scrambling to buy what the market offers, instead of demanding what it doesn't, or creating a solution oneself or with one's neighbors. Achieving "global equality" turns out to be a matter of individual access to adequate cash or credit, just as our best and brightest always suspected. And anyone who proposes that there are greater goals or more pressing duties than consumer choice is an Enemy of the People.

This would be a colossally dismal view of human possibilities even if there truly were nothing more to climate change than pseudo-measurements and eco-imperialism. Since O'Neill's theory also happens to be deadly lunacy, it's not hard to understand why he finds his dreary faux-radical boosterism running afoul of "miserabilists."

(Photo: "Roads in India are already congested with traffic." Reuters/Krishnendu Halde.)