Hate Mail? (Part 2)

My other corrector, Jimmy, responds to me as follows:

Yes, more that one scientist. According to those hippys at the American Meteorlogical Society ("The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus" http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf) slightly under 10% of scientists writing about the issue in the 1970's predicted global cooling. Climate science has come along way since then, but most scientists, even then, predicted global warming. Now there is firm scientific consensus.

You say you wish "our side" would stop cherry picking anomolies. I wish "your side" would stop misrepresenting scientific consensus. The World Meteorological Organization[ http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0703-05.htm] and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency[http://yosemite.epa.gov/OAR/globalwarming.nsf/webprintview/ActionsIndustryInsurance.html] have linked increasing extreme weather events to global warming. That last link discusses the insurance industry revising its policies to protect themselves against the new weather patterns. Over 90% of scientists and scientific organizations agree about the basic science and its general implications. These scientists are extremely worried.

You misrepresent the IPCC report. In its last report, 2007, it found that "World temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 °C (2.0 and 11.5 °F) during the 21st century (table 3) and that:
Sea levels will probably rise by 18 to 59 cm (7.08 to 23.22 in) [table 3]." It also links global warming to a change in weather patterns.

What scares me?: scientific consensus that we will experience a wide array of apocalyptic events (mass extinctions, agricultural disasters, and increases in the range of disease vectors, to name a few) if we don't do something. Mass human death.

You don't like Hansen, fine. He is not a radical, and I agree that he is not the final word. Pick your poison. What do you think is a rational carbon level, as measured by PPM? How should we reach and sustain that level?

Me: I still don't buy it. In the last century, starting with Woodrow Wilson (who jailed people who vocally opposed World War I in their own homes), we've seen too many menaces requiring massive government intervention now, now, now! in the way we live our private lives. And this stuff has got the whiff of all that. If I'm wrong, the world won't be the poorer by it; I've only one vote, and I'm going to use it on a guy who unfortunately buys into all of this, McCain. But I don't think I'm wrong.

Having said that, Jimmy is serious about all this, and he's done me the courtesy of supplying a few links. So I'll shut up about all this until I read them over the weekend. Right now--unless the Charles River rises and floods the Back Bay--I've the Yankees and Red Sox to worry about. Happy sailing.

Hate mail?

No, I love it. (An old Houston Press joke.)

The saying is, the easiest job in the world should be head coach of the Notre Dame football team, since in what other job do you have ten million people telling you precisely what you're doing wrong?

On the topic of the climate, I am twice blessed with such help. The first, someone called O'Nan Amos (which I must assume is a pseudonym), who we join in full flight (he--or she--is in italics:

There is a difference between renegade theories like global cooling (picked up by the media because it was sexy and scary) and peer-reviewed, scientific consensus based on years of data collection and mathematical modeling.

Right. Like "the population bomb" was sexy and scary. Like "DDT will kill millions" wasn't sexy and scary. (DDT actually did kill millions--by its absence, when millions contracted malaria.) Like "nuclear power equals the China Syndrome" was sexy and scary. Like "Everyone's getting AIDS" was sexy and scary.

Global warming not "sexy and scary"? Have they been handing out Oscars to movies dealing with dehydration in Africa brought about by kids crapping their innards out due to unclean water? Has Leonardo DiCaprio been speaking on the topic? Madonna singing?

Right now "global warming"--with its blame for oil companies and fat suburbanites with their SUVs and roaring air conditioners--is the sexiest (and scariest) issue on the planet, especially for liberals. I mean, a worldwide crisis that just happens to justify massive government intervention in our lives, our cars, what we put in our cars, the shape of our toilets, our light bulbs. The New York Times has already come out for regulations on political speech, gun ownership, and (thanks to Kelso) the limited extent to which our private property is actually ours. Why not every other aspect of our lives?

It's like the "face" on Mars. There are cool photographs and one guy who claimed to represent NASA but was actually a discredited former consultant, and all of a sudden people think that aliens must have built a face on Mars. That's not science, and neither is using your own anecdotal evidence to "refute" global warming.

Well, I never believed in the "face" on Mars. (It was never peer-reviewed like, say, the Man in the Moon.) But consider these reports from the mid-seventies, which reflected much more than the work of "one guy":

Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976): "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation."

Science Digest (February 1973): "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age."

Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975): "Meteorologists are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling.

New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975): Global cooling "may mark the return to another ice age."

The New York Times (May 21, 1975): "A major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable. . . . (It is) well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."

What "bill of particulars" are you looking for?

Lots, but to start with: what, precisely, would have to happen in the climate for you to believe that this scare is overstated?

Weather examples like Katrina are not the only evidence.

Granted! My only wish is that your side would stop using every example of hot, warm, wet, cold, and average as proof of your conclusions.

There are rigorous scientific studies--the IPCC reports alone are over 800 pages long.

And the IPCC predicts an increase of one degrees Farenheit by the end of the century, and two inches of ocean rise. Number one, both those conclusions amount to rounding errors, and two, even if they were true, I'd take them both and walk away.

Is your real problem here with scientists and not liberals?

My problem is when either group behaves like the other.

Conservation for thee, not for me

Al Gore exits a climate change speech to a long-idling limo.

When those who say it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis, I'll believe it's a crisis.

Oh, Gore's latest proof of global war-- oh, sorry, "climate change": both droughts in California and floods in the Midwest.

Warm means warming, cold means warming, wet means warming, dry means warming.

And if it weren't for global warming, imagine how cold it would be

Take a look at this.

On the second day of spring, no less.

It appears the lifestyle botherers changed their mantra from "global warming" to "climate change" just in time--just in time to keep nagging us about eliminating of Edison's incandescent bulbs (only one of the twenty greatest inventions in the history of the world; the others, if you care, are the wheel, paper, the printing press, the still camera, the clock, the voice recorder, the telephone, the wireless, the movie camera, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, the television, the computer, Sputnik, Apollo 11, the microchip, the internet, and the cellular phone) just as Al Gore flies off in another private jet or returns to one of his four, going-full-blast mansions.

To put it one way: I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who tell me it's a crisis start behaving like it's a crisis.

To put it a second way: what I look forward to is twenty years from now, when the truly intellectually honest people awake as if from a slumber as if to ask, "What the hell were we thinking?"

To put it a third way: What is truly hilarious is how the leaders (you know, movie stars) pick up panics, then discard them as if they were last year's dresses hung limply on racks in Filene's basement. Question: when was the last mention of AIDS during an Oscars broadcast? Five years ago? Ten? Fifteen? The last one I remember was those nags, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, in 1993, and that was in an attempt to co-op the AIDS ribbon to the Haiti matter. Nowadays President Chimpy Bushitlerburton pours billions of American dollars into the cause at the locus of the problem (that would be Africa, not heterosexual America, regardless of the headlines you read in 1987), and to no approbation whatsoever. George W. Bush (who, yes, had the power to marshall the full force of the exectuive branch of the US government) has done more than any person on the planet to combat both African AIDS and African poverty--so says Bob Geldof, pretty much the last popular singer not named Bono who even sniffs in the direction of that dysfunctional continent. One would think Geldof would have the proper ethos to speak about President Bush. One would.

But. But how many high-profile celebrities nowadays invest their prestige in anything African? Brad Pitt, at the edges? George Clooney, decrying genocide in Darfur, but blind to the reality that an end to said genocide would come at the cost of an American-led invasion and occupation?

Okay, got off topic. My point is this: Five years from now, "global warming" will have the same cache as AIDS in Haiti does now. Ten years, starvation in Ethiopia.

The difference? AIDS in Haiti, starvation in Ethiopia, these things are real.

Man0made global warming, with human-activity solutions, is a fraud.

Championship Sunday, Part 3

And now, to relax and enjoy Giants v. Packers.

Oh, Oh, and gotta love tonight's programming:

Fox: Giants v. Packers, in the third-coldest game in NFL history.

CBS: Special Report: "The Age of Warming."

Update: Third Tyne's the Charm--Fox beat me to it.

Giants 23, Packers 20 (OT). Couldn't decide whom to root for or against; based on the "what would help the Patriots most" principle, I measured Randy Moss's ability to run past Al Harris (considerable) against the public sentiment in favor of Brett Favre (again, considerable); plus the trouble for the Pats based on the Giants' having seen the Patriots before (marginal).

It is worth considering, just to consider, that anyone who has bet against the Patriots covering since the middle of November would have made a fortune. Philly was a nail-biter. They came within one stupid Baltimore time-out of losing to the Ravens. The Jets hung in for awhile, as did even Miami. The Giants let by double-digits late. And in the playoffs, both Jacksonville and San Diego hung in for 3 1/2 quarters, San Diego with their best three offensive weapons either out or seriously compromised.

Bottom line: in their last seven games, vs. the spread, the Pats are 0-7. This fact has to be discounted a bit, as the books in Vegas always add a "Cowboy Tax" (or "Irish Tax" or "Trojan Tax" or "Bear Tax") on the chic team of the moment, especially when said team has a certain history of success. But the truth is that the Pats have had to struggle for every win (or in the case of Miami, every win-that-should-have-been-a-stomp) since the 15th of November. Look it up: over two months.

However, the one constant in these seven games has been the wind--and mostly, the cold. They played Philly, Bal'mer and San Diego in outright wind storms. Giants Stadium in December and January is a wind tunnel. And things were hardly better in Foxborough against the other teams. In each situation, Randy Moss was effectively neutralized, Brady's passes fluttered and flew, and the Patriots pass-first offense was reduced to underneath bullets to Welker and Stallworth, plus out patterns to Gaffney.

What saved the Pats was--as Ted Cotrell, the Chargers' DC, said earlier in the week--the ability of the Pats' offense to play seven different types of football. With the Pats' biggest weapon, the bomb to Moss, as effectively neutralized as LaDanian Tomlinson's running game, with a superb and opportunistic Chargers secondary goading Brady into more interceptions this week (three) than he had incompletions last week (two), the Pats switched to grind-it-out, playing two and three tight ends, pounding Maroney between the tackles, and throwing screens and short-short-short outs, including two crucial first-down catches by Kevin Faulk, the game was effectively over by the seven-minute mark of the fourth quarter.

Now, looking forward two weeks, one has to consider all of the previous paragraph, plus the fact that the Giants' defense isn't as good as the Chargers', plus the re-match may favor Belichick over Coughlin--add all that up, and then add that the Super Bowl will likely be played indoors, in 71-degree weather, and no wind whatsoever. What you are left with are the Pats of the last two months plus a Randy Moss and downfield passing game that becomes a factor all over again.

Anyway, what I think as I go to bed.

Boxer's Day: Senate Committee on Not-Energy Votes 11-8 to reduce greenhouse gases by 70% by 2050

Slackers.

Not eighty percent? Or ninety?

Is Barbara Boxer telling us the greatest country on earth cannot reduce its greenhouse gases by a hundred percent?

The fine points of the bill (which is more than an inch thick, though printed on both sides of the paper--who says it's not easy being green?) are meaningless here.

This bill is one of a piece with all those education bills passed in the ninety-nineties: you remember, the ones that promised that American eighth graders would be first in the world in math and science by 2005 or so--a logistical impossibility, given the sprawling, heterogeneous nature of our country compared to, say, Japan or Iceland?

These Jean-Luc Picard "Make it so" bills seemed inspired by one of the great lines in movie history, one spoken by Tim Matheson's Otter in Animal House:

"What this situation absolutely requires is a really stupid and futile gesture be done on somebody's part."

In this instance, Sen. Boxer stands in for John Belushi's Bluto, rejoining, "And we're just the guys to do it."

I mean, what does it mean being a Senator in times like these, voting for a bill that would destroy the greatest economy (hence producer of wealth, hence best apt to deal with whatever the environment dishes out) in the world; a bill that, if passed, would never be taken seriously, a bill that specifies targets that are a joke?

I'm gearing up for my annual viewing of The Homecoming, the TV-movie that essentially served as the pilot for the TV show "The Waltons." Take as good look at "The Waltons," if you ever catch it in re-runs. No air conditioning in the home. No heating, save for a wood stove and a wood fire. One car (also no heat, no air, factory or otherwise) serving as transportation for 11 people.

And a single phone, the one down at Ike's.

That is a life, writ large over an entire continent, that would be required under a 70-percent reduction is fossil fuels or greenhouse gases or whatever, in 2050 or thereafter.

Seventy percent. Getting back to my original point--why stop there? Why not mandate that by, 2050, all cars will fly through the air, powered only by sunbeams, cotton candy and the smiles of pretty girls?

And why do this at all?

In an unguarded moment, Senator Boxer gives the game away, conceding that this bill is to be distinguished from an actual energy bill.

Of course is it.

You see, this is something much bigger than us all. A moral imperative.

Ladies and gentlemen: the Religious Left.

Al Gore . . . again

I'm sorry, global warming doesn't worry me.

One reason: the people who most cry about it are the people the most resistant to changing their own lifestyles to suit their warnings, save for bogus "carbon offsets," a secular form of indulgence that Chaucer mocked, oh, about a thousand years ago.

On that, more in a minute. But first:

A thousand years ago, by the way, Greenland was home to vast tracts of farmland, and English vineyards produced the finest wine in Europe. Today Greenland is a sheet of ice and English wine is sold to London alcoholics out of bargain barrels in Picadelly Circus. A million years ago Chicago was under a sheet of ice a mile thick; ten million years ago the very spot where I sit was submerged under briney salt water a half-mile deep.

So the global warriors blame Bush, Or Halliburton. Or Exxon, or DeLay, or Dick Cheney--anything, anything, except the nature of climate change that has existed since fifteen minutes after the big bang.

As for Gore:

I goose Mike Lupica for throwing in (in his otherwise valorous "Shooting From the Lip" Sunday column) easy shots at Bush and Cheney, views apparently culled from a five-minutes' reading of Kos and the Huffington Post. Greg Easterbrook (Tuesday Morning Quarterback), though ostensibly a sportswriter, actually looks into his declaimings. Understand: Easterbrook's politics are not mine; he, by all accounts, backs Edwards for the Oval Office (a poor choice, in my view, but not an insane one); and his asides tend to the liberal, but nothing, lately, as passionate as his ridicule of Al Gore:

Those Hollywood Searchlights Around Gore's Home Sure Eat Power: Gore wasn't the first quack to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and history suggests he will not be the last. Gore spent eight years in the White House, and in that time took no meaningful action regarding greenhouse gases. The Clinton-Gore administration did not raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks or propose domestic carbon trading. Though Clinton and Gore made a great show of praising the Kyoto Protocol, they refused even to submit the treaty to the Senate for consideration, let alone push for ratification. During his 2000 run for the presidency, Gore said little about climate change or binding global-warming reforms. In the White House and during his presidential campaign, Gore advocated no consequential action regarding greenhouse gases; then, there was a political cost attached. Once Gore was out of power and global-warming proposals no longer carried a political cost -- indeed, could be used for self-promotion -- suddenly Gore discovered his intense desire to demand that other leaders do what he had not! It is a triumph of postmodernism that Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for no specific accomplishment other than making a movie of self-praise. Gore caused no peace nor led any reconciliation of belligerent parties nor performed any service to the dispossessed, the achievements the Peace Prize was created to honor. All Gore did was promote himself from Hollywood, and for this, he gets a Nobel. Very postmodern.

First person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Self-Promotional Hectoring.
An annoying complication of Gore's Nobel is that few realize the award was given jointly to him and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization well worthy of distinction. The IPCC is a group of scientists who have spent two decades studying climate change in obscurity, and in many cases without pay. The IPCC's efforts have been selfless, motivated only by concern for society. Had the Nobel Peace Prize gone solely to the IPCC, it would have been a great day.


An astonishing measure of how out-of-touch the Norwegian Nobel Committee seems is that it gave a prize to Gore for hectoring others about energy consumption in the same year it was revealed that Gore, at his home, uses 20 times the national power average. Gore's extraordinary power waste equates to about 377,000 pounds of greenhouse gases annually, or about 20 Hummer Years worth of global warming pollution. (A Hummer Year, TMQ's metric of environmental hypocrisy, is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in a typical year of driving a Hummer.) When his utility bill made the news -- though apparently not in Oslo -- Gore responded by saying he buys carbon offsets. That takes you back to the offset problem: All offsets do is prevent greenhouse gas accumulation from increasing. If you really believe there will be a global calamity unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced 80 percent, as Gore told the Live Earth crowd, you would buy offsets and cut your own energy use. Instead, Gore flies around in fossil-fuel-intensive jet aircraft telling others: Do as I say, not as I do!

The whole thing here.

Coffee, tea, or carbon offset?

As if the experience of flying has not become excruciating enough (from the near strip-searches at the gate to that flight attendant who yells at you to return your seat to the upright position, and when you explain that you'd love to but the seat is busted, she glares at you as if it's your fault--always one of Mark Steyn's pet peeves), comes the latest news: Virgin Atlantic employees will now be jobbing their paying customers, while in their seats, to pay for their portion of their carbon footprint.

Story here, including this classic passage:

A spokesman for Virgin said the airline had decided on the policy after noticing low participation in schemes offered by competing airlines through which customers were presented with the opportunity to offset the carbon emissions of their flight online.

"If the person sitting next to you chooses to offset their flight, it may prick your conscience and you may pay too," the spokesman told the Times of London.

Questions. Will the captain and crew be asked to fork over their fair share? Will the flight attendants?

Most importantly, will the passengers be asked to provide exact change?

Snagged by Lucianne, one of whose commenters sums up my sentiments exactly:

I would laugh right out loud if whatever that offset stuff is was offered to me. I'd just tell 'em bring me a beer and leave me alone.

Coincidentally enough, just as I'm typing this, a Ford commercial comes on. As a father and daughter approach their SUV, the daughter asks the dad, "Could you drop me off a block away?"

Immediately we're like: Right. Dad's a doofus, can't be seen by the cool kids. But no, Daughter has other ideas: "People in that part of town are riding bikes, driving hybrids."

Well, it's a Ford commercial, so it turns out Dad drives a hybrid, too. A Ford hybrid.

But in the meantime: if daughter is so ashamed of Dad, can't she get her ass on her own bike? Or if "that part of town" is too far, walk to the bus stop?

So she's happy accepting a ride in an SUV as long as nobody knows, and as long as she can feel morally superior to her father, who's being nice enough to take time out on a beautiful day to drive her to her entertainment?

Give that girl a "Gore '08" button and the tableau would be complete.

Headline: "Global Warming rally cut short by cold weather"

And to think I didn't think I'd get a laugh at the end of the day.

This is getting ridiculous

Or too easy. A polar excursion designed to draw attention the global warming has been called off because of . . . wait for it . . . extreme cold weather.

All explain-away-the-data global warming stories invariably contain this quote, or something like it:

"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming . . . but one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."

Because, of course, warm means warming, cold means warming, dry means warming and wet means warming.

And, of course, nothing is as unpredictable as freezing cold weather at the North Pole.

Al Gore: Eco-Hog

If the eco-nuts gain any more traction--if the notion of what we, as individuals, must give up to keep the Statue of Liberty from standing hip-deep in the Atlantic Ocean--stories like this are going to gain more and more currency as time goes by.

Already, stories circulate of those Priuses (you know, those pet cars millionaire celebrities own, the ones parked out back behind the Humvee and the Escalade) driving to LAX, and to at least eighty private jets fueled and ready for take-off.

This is a piece with John Edwards' ugly-ass McMansion. Do these people know the depths of self-parody they've fallen?

What I Always Say

Via NRO's new feature, Planet Gore:

Weather vs. Climate [Jay Richards]

The Center for American Progress has just released a report explaining the difference between weather and climate. The gist of the report is that you can't detect large-scale global warming merely by observing local weather. You may find yourself stuck in a blizzard, for instance, but you can still be darned sure we're causing catastrophic global warming: "The chaotic nature of weather means that no conclusion about climate can ever be drawn from a single data point, hot or cold." OK, but then why don't the global warming Chicken Littles ever make this point when we're having a heat wave?

"Global warming is just guff"

Apparently cow farts contribute much more than SUVs. Details here.

My prediction is that, twenty years from now, we will have wondered what all the fuss was about.

I may be wrong.

But I'm not.