Friday 6 November 2009

Global Warmists are Starting to Freak Out

Is it All Over, Rover?

Copenhagen must now be dead in the water. How do we know this? Well, the spin machines of various governments and UN agencies over the past three weeks have become busy trying to hose down expectations, having attempted to hype them up to a frenzy over the past nine months. The various propaganda outlets are acknowledging that there is no chance of a global treaty to replace Kyoto.

Like the stalled WTO negotiations, the protagonists are likely to leave Copenhagen with nothing more that a resolve to continue talking. The most telling indication that Copenhagen will be a charade is that President Obama is not planning (apparently) on attending. If he could be seen on the world stage, signing something wild horses would not have kept him away. His coyness about attending betrays the expectation that there will be nothing in Copenhagen to sign.

Kyoto is expiring, and therefore, to all intents and purposes dead. It has been a spectacular failure in curbing so-called greenhouse gases. All this is positive.

Bret Stephen, in the Wall Street Journal, documents another nail that has been driven into the coffin. It turns out that solutions to the "crisis" of anthropogenic global warming would actually be straightforward and relatively inexpensive. But that is an anathema to the one world government types, who view climate change as simply an excuse and pretext to expand vastly the current putative international governmental tutelary administration. As they say in the White House, never let a good crisis go to waste.

Freaked Out Over SuperFreakonomics

Global warming might be solved with a helium balloon and a few miles of garden hose.

BRET STEPHENS


Suppose for a minute . . . that global warming poses an imminent threat to the survival of our species. Suppose, too, that the best solution involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

Good news, right? Maybe, but not if you're Al Gore or one of his little helpers.

The hose-in-the-sky approach to global warming is the brainchild of Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold. The basic idea is to engineer effects similar to those of the 1991 mega-eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which spewed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth by about one degree Fahrenheit for a couple of years.

Could it work? Mr. Myhrvold and his associates think it might, and they're a smart bunch. Also smart are University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, whose delightful SuperFreakonomics—the sequel to their runaway 2005 bestseller Freakonomics—gives Myhrvold and Co. pride of place in their lengthy chapter on global warming. Not surprisingly, global warming fanatics are experiencing a Pinatubo-like eruption of their own.

Mr. Gore, for instance, tells Messrs. Levitt and Dubner that the stratospheric sulfur solution is "nuts." Former Clinton administration official Joe Romm, who edits the Climate Progress blog, accuses the authors of "[pushing] global cooling myths" and "sheer illogic." The Union of Concerned Scientists faults the book for its "faulty statistics." Never to be outdone, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman scores SuperFreakonomics for "grossly [misrepresenting] other peoples' research, in both climate science and economics."

In fact, Messrs. Levitt and Dubner show every sign of being careful researchers, going so far as to send chapter drafts to their interviewees for comment prior to publication. Nor are they global warming "deniers," insofar as they acknowledge that temperatures have risen by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century.

But when it comes to the religion of global warming . . . Messrs. Levitt and Dubner are grievous sinners. They point out that belching, flatulent cows are adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all SUVs combined. . . . They quote Mr. Myhrvold as saying that Mr. Gore's doomsday scenarios "don't have any basis in physical reality in any reasonable time frame."

More subversively, they suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. "The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another." In other words, the herd-of-independent-minds phenomenon happens to scientists too and isn't the sole province of painters, politicians and news anchors.

But perhaps their biggest sin, which is also the central point of the chapter, is pointing out that seemingly insurmountable problems often have cheap and simple solutions. Hence world hunger was largely conquered not by a massive effort at population control, but by the development of new and sturdier strains of wheat and rice. . . .

Hence, too, it may well be that global warming is best tackled with a variety of cheap fixes, if not by pumping SO2 into the stratosphere then perhaps by seeding more clouds over the ocean. . . .

All these suggestions are, of course, horrifying to global warmists, who'd much prefer to spend in excess of a trillion dollars annually for the sake of reconceiving civilization as we know it, including not just what we drive or eat but how many children we have. And little wonder: As Newsweek's Stefan Theil points out, "climate change is the greatest new public-spending project in decades." Who, being a professional climatologist or EPA regulator, wouldn't want a piece of that action?

Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence. It's just the same with global warming, which is what makes the clear-eyed analysis in SuperFreakonomics so timely and important. . . .




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