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There will be a story featuring Al Gore and his climate views on CBS 60 minutes this weekend. Normally I don’t pay much heed to this program, but Gore is publicly calling those who question the science “…almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat…”.
To me, a person who has at one time been fully engaged in the belief that CO2 was indeed the root cause of the global warming problem, I find Gore’s statements insulting. In 1990 after hearing what James Hansen and others had to say, I helped to arrange a national education campaign for TV meteorologists nationwide (ironically with CBS’s help) on the value of planting trees to combat the CO2 issue. I later changed my thinking when I learned more about the science involved and found it to be lacking.
I’ve never made a call to action on media reporting before on this blog, but this cannot go unchallenged.
The press release from CBS on the upcoming story on Gore is below. You can visit the CBS website here and post comments:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/27/60minutes/main3974389.shtml
See the video clip here
But let’s also let the producer, Richard Bonin, know (via their communications contact) what you think about it, as I did when Scott Pelley aired a whole hour long special telling us Antarctica was melting. They did no follow up.
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Well, I have lit up the CBS forum pretty good.
(Possibly a few have migrated back here!) #B^1
Evan, regarding pre/post industrial societies and clean-up activities, I think a better way to think about it is… if we found some pre-industrial societies that created toxic waste we could examine which ones cleaned up and which ones didn’t and how their economies compared. But I can’t think of any that created toxic waste. That’s largely a post-industrial phenomenon. On the other hand, I can think of several pre-industrial societies which started out successful but ultimately failed because the supply of a necessary commodity could not keep up with demand and they couldn’t figure out a way to adapt.
That’s really the question. In that regard, in our modern technological world the purpose of burning fossil fuels is not to create emissions, the purpose is to create energy. So if you could find a source that didn’t create emissions at the same price (considering all of the internal and external costs throughout the life cycle of each alternative), wouldn’t you be foolish not to use it? That way you wouldn’t have to worry about cleaning up.
Stephen Fox (14:53:33): Your quote from the Russell Seitz article is puzzling.
It might be less so if you read the whole article. And with all due respect, given what you said about it, I think you may have even misinterpreted some of the little I highlighted. But let’s ignore that for the time being.
The asymmetry is that AGW is the gravy train, isn’t it?
My perspective is that there are gravy trains on both sides of the issue, because there are vested interests on both sides. What’s best for business, as percieved from the lens of given industry, is not necessarily what’s good for society, or the economy as a whole.
But I believe what you’re driving at is the attitude among the more rabid AGWers that we have to eliminate fossil fuels no matter what the effect on the economy. I think that’s crazy and self-defeating. It would at best replace one catastrophe for another. But I think that is a false choice. I think we can substantially reduce the use of fossil fuels in a way that could be economically neutral at least, and very possibly economically positive. As with anything else, though, it will require an investment. And the resistance there is associated with the assumption that the free market will take care of everything if the government would simply get out of the way. I argue that the situation isn’t as simple as that. The government certainly is in the way. They always have been, and they always will be, because there is no way for them to get OUT of the way.
Said differently, I argue that we don’t have much choice. For example, a study by the DOE a while back concluded, The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.
One could argue that we’ve heard this before (Club of Rome, etc.). But not from the DOE, and not from a variety of oil company executives, and certainly not the Pentagon. Now we are. That’s particularly disturbing, because these are not think tank people (though there are those too), not people walking gilded halls of ivory towers (though there are those too), these are people on the ground with big bucks and lives at stake and who actually have to deal with the issue. So maybe it’s time to listen. And the response has to be coordinated. It’s not something you can leave to the market. It goes without saying that replacing oil in the transportation sector will require strong government action two decades before a peak because of the time needed to replace vehicles and fuel infrastructure. And any attempt will have ripple effects throughout the entire energy sector, so those have to be addressed too.
Regarding Stephen Fox’s question, “You seem to be saying, if the end is ok, then ’science without questions’ is ok too.”… No, I’m not saying that. Science should always be questioned. That’s a good thing. I have problems with the level of inquiry sometimes, but that’s beside the point (for now anyway). The point is that the intense interest in climate science is largely driven by its policy implications. And if the policy implications were only dependent upon the science, then it would be exceedingly important to get the science right. But what I’m arguing is that many of the same policy implications are driven by considerations which have nothing to do with climate science, but which combined overwhelm the science. So a broader scope is required. To advocate maintaining the status quo you don’t have the luxury to only argue that AGW is total bunk. You are also compelled to argue that fossil fuel demand will not outstrip supply any time soon, that the price of alternatives will never be brought lower, that burning fossil fuels is worth the health effects, that the $500 billion/yr we currently spend on oil imports is a terriffic idea, as is remaining beholden to regimes in places like Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. To the extent that you are prepared to argue all of those things, then the implications of climate science are a big deal. But to the extent that you aren’t, then they aren’t. That’s what I’m saying.
And no one forms groups as quickly as Anarchists.
I am no longer financing this Orwellian nightmare. I have stopped all political donations and donations to environmental organizations and causes. Their propaganda is out of control and threatens a witches brew of unnecessary and regressive carbon offset and green tax legislation, which will bleed all of us to death. Xxx knows where the money would go.
Folks, I know you already are ‘doubters’ but thought I should inject one little voice in support of orthodoxy here.
Climatological models aren’t perfect. They certainly aren’t right. Data are incomplete. Predictions are not 100% certain. Causal factors are imputed based on plausible hypotheses.
Welcome to science. This is the way we do it. Complicated things are teased out, modeled and hypothesized over and we compare various scenarios to the data as they come in.
Scientists get a lot of respect for two different things. On the one hand, showing that all this fits together to strengthen a theory is good. You get published along with the hundreds of other papers all in the same vein.
But work that shows a prevailing model to be wrong either in a small way or a big one is a guarantee of prestige, grant support, tenure, etc.
What I’m saying is that you guys are missing two key aspects of science.
Science is rarely certain. We just keep refining and tightening and nailing down our expectations until we’re really darned sure.
Scientists stand to gain MORE from falisifying theories than from validating them.
The American citizenry is more informed on the science of climate change than any other field. Papers are widely disseminated and often presented in simplified form so that non-scientists can parse them. We are also much more aware of the internal dynamics of scientific communities on this subject than on most. Climate scientists frequently go on record as endorsing the overall gist of human-induced global warming, for example.
All of this together should make reasonable people wonder if maybe, just maybe, the likelihood is high that human-induced global warming is real and really a threat.
The alternative is to position yourself as intellectually more capable than the collective scientific community. Or, it is to simply embrace the lower-probability hypotheses that are widely seen as very unlikely indeed. Or, it is to imagine some kind of weird lefty conspiracy in which smart young people all over the world are scurrying around their labs and computer equipment eagerly building a doomsday scenario just to mess with your heads.
As with evolution, this one is pretty much in the bag. We will certainly lean new things and there will, no doubt, be new and interesting tweaks to the theories (as, by the way, there are likely to be to Darwinian genetics). I wouldn’t say that the theories of human-induced global warming are yet as solid as, say, Newtonian mechanics. But remember it took hundreds of years before Einstein presented a refined version of Newton that took us to the next level while still leaving the essence of the older theory in operation.
The scientific consensus may be wrong. But it is the best we have on offer and deploys the most active, engaged and well-educated minds available. It might be a better use of energy to quit fighting this rising tide and direct your energy toward thinking about how humanity can best come to grips with the global alterations unfolding around us.
In the meantime, Bill14, here in Southern Ontario our temps are 15 degrees below normal. The Earth’s temp is slowly falling even though CO2 is up 5.5% since 1998. The oceans have been cooling since 2003. These are FACTS that the models can’t even begin to answer.
That suggests that the science is Flawed and needs serious revision. Agw isn’t working out the way they would like us to believe. Simple as that.
Al Gore is the Ignatius J. Reilly (Patron Saint of the Democratic Party) of the environmental movement. Pay a (carbon) tax and change the weather. I don’t think so.
Not a doubter, Bill, just need real proof and not computer models. There are plenty of correlations, but where is the causation??
So the scientists who are part of the “Consensus” are the most “active, engaged and well-educated minds available”, but those who aren’t are…what? Why then are so many of the “deniers” so high in current and former positions of scientific and academic authority?
Perhaps I am beating a dead horse here, but I think this is well worth a read (or listen). Basically, it’s about smart, coherent policy management to stimulate economic growth — with specific regard to renewable energy. It’s worth reading (or listening) all the way through, but it really picks up steam at the end, when they start talking about production tax credits, among other ways of stimulating investment. If you’ve spent any time listening to what key venture capitalist entities are saying (as I have, lol!), almost to a one they say… PASS A LONG-TERM PRODUCTION TAX CREDIT and we’ll take care of the rest!
While I’m not sure I’d leave it at that, I am sure that that one thing would spur investment many times over, and would create more revenue in the long run than it costs in revenue in the short run. Obviously, there are never any guaratees, but that rates up there in the realm of “no brainers”. There’s a lot more in the interview worth paying attention to, but this one comment was, to me, the take-home message (emphasis mine):
It left me with the belief that President Bush, personally and individually, professionally believes these incentives should be in place and should be long-term, if not permanent. That is my understanding of his position. Now, there’s a lot more to the administration, a lot more to the politics of this that has to be worked out, but I left that meeting in the belief that he believes that these are good incentives. Tax credits cause capital to flow. That capital flow creates immediate economic development. That capital gets spent immediately in the marketplace to buy equipment and employ construction jobs and installers and so forth. So, it creates immediate economic development and all that development pays taxes. So, the supply-side economists of the 1980s would argue here, if they were still here, that these tax credits actually pay for themselves. In fact, all of the supply-side analysis proved, in the 80s and 90s, that a tax credit like this causes $4 to $5 of capital flow for every dollar of the tax credit. You have$4 to $5 dollars flowing in, which creates tax revenues back to the government that pays for the tax credit. It pays for itself. And I’d like to see that supply-side argument, even though it’s not so popular these days, come forward and justify that these tax credits actually pay for themselves on a current basis. I believe that and I believe that’s true.
I believe it too. I’m sure there are many here that believe tax cuts, any tax cuts, are a good thing. I have a more nuanced view. I don’t believe all tax cuts are the same. I believe the best ones are the ones that increase capital flow most directly. Sadly, I believe that for the most part the tax cuts that have been granted in the past few years make more sense from a political perspective than from an economic one. If Bush really wanted to make a serious difference economically, he would have started out with cutting corporate/business taxes. That’s where you get the most bang for the buck. But it is also the one that would have required the most heavy lifting politically. The capital gains cuts saved me a large amount of money. But objectively, it did more to reduce capital flow than to increase it. Reduced corporate taxes while maintaining capital gains taxes the way they were would have motivated companies to recirculate the money rather than distribute it to their investors. And the inheritance tax cuts… I don’t even want to talk about that. At any rate, production tax credits, in the whole realm of tax cuts, make the most sense of all. IMO, it’s just plain stupid not to extend them — and in a way that is dependable. As I said before, the government can never get out of the way. But relatively speaking, this one thing would more qualify under that definition than any other. The second would be to standardize, in a meaningful way, the regulations associated with deploying infrastructure improvements like smart grids, inter-state (or inter-regional) energy deployment, high voltage feed lines, decoupling utility company profits from energy use… that sort of thing. Right now those sorts of things represent impediments that are very difficult for any alternative to overcome. They represent regressive, rather than progressive forces that retard rather than stimulate changes which would be otherwise revenue neutral in the worst case, and revenue positive in most.
… if we found some pre-industrial societies that created toxic waste we could examine which ones cleaned up and which ones didn’t and how their economies compared.
Well, the standard pattern of the chiefdom was to kill every animal, deplete every field, chop down every tree, foul every water source (incl. groundwater), and then simply moved on. Some ancient societies added mining runoff as well.
There weren’t any that cleaned up their environment, though Rome managed to bring in clean water and the Romans cleaned up themselves (resulting in life expectancy that was not rivalled until after 1900).
A truly clean environment (e.g., NY City today) is an entirely modern phenomenon. Industrial societies are dirty, but once they become wealthy past a certain point, they always have cleaned up.
So if you could find a source that didn’t create emissions at the same price (considering all of the internal and external costs throughout the life cycle of each alternative), wouldn’t you be foolish not to use it? That way you wouldn’t have to worry about cleaning up.
Sure. But right now that doesn’t exist. I assume it will exist at some point. But prohibiting or unreasonably restricting the use of fossil fuel is not the way to achieve that. You make it sound like it’s “dirty apples-to-clean-apples, so why not go with clean”. it ain’t.
“The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem.”
Yes, management is going to have to fugure out what a completely false notion “peak oil” is. This will present quite a risk management problem.
One could argue that we’ve heard this before (Club of Rome, etc.). But not from the DOE, and not from a variety of oil company executives, and certainly not the Pentagon
Yes we have (but not sure about the Pentagon). In 1949 we were hearing it from the Dept. of the Interior. Nothing new here. We had c. 3.4 tba potential reserves from all sources in 1975. The number is 6.5 tbls today. We continue to discover roughly 2 bls for every 1 we consume. There are limits. We will probably never get anywhere near them before moving on from oil voluntarily.
As with evolution, this one is pretty much in the bag.
Mmmmm. I must respectfully beg. to differ. (Ook! Ook! Scritch-scratch.)
The acceptance pattern here is different, as is the nature of the evidence.
Evan, if it’s not too much to ask would you PLEASE provide whatever objective documentation you have to demonstrate “what a what a completely false notion “peak oil” is?” Really… where are you getting your information? And how dated is it?
Bill, thanks for the lecture on how science works. We know. The problem is, the AGW folks aren’t doing it. Witness the “hockey stick”. Oops. See, for those folks, when the facts don’t fit the theory, throw them out, and twist and distort the remainder. That’s how AGW pseudoscience works. Stick around. You just might learn something.
“It Will Happen In 2008” … what, may you ask?
Famine … due to cold.
Basically, it’s about smart, coherent policy management to stimulate economic growth — with specific regard to renewable energy.
I know.
But judging by the past record regarding government energy policy, my belief remains that the smartest, most coherent management to stimulate economic growth — with specific regard to renewable energy is to keep the government the heck out of it.
I also realize we fundamentally disagree on this point. But, as with climate, I feel I have to consider past correlations. (I find the PDO to be more reliable than the DoE.)
(I’ll steer clear of tax policy. I have too much to “contribute” and it is too off-topic.)
Evan, if it’s not too much to ask would you PLEASE provide whatever objective documentation you have to demonstrate “what a what a completely false notion “peak oil” is?” Really… where are you getting your information? And how dated is it?
Hmmm. Refer to “The Next 200 Years” for a rather detailed list (not unlike the Rev’s 1922 newsclips) about how oil is running out Real Soon Now, and potential reserves as of 1975. As for today’s reserves, just look up oil and it sources in Wiki and add it up (it’s probably ‘way lowballed, but that’s the way it goes), which is what I did. (I have the list somewhere.)
Same old story. A.) We are about to run out. B.) we continue to expand our potential reserves two barrels for evey barrel we actually use, in spite of expanded use.
The only thing “new” about “Peak Oil” is the word “Peak”.
It may even turn out that the recent “abiotic” theory (a severe misnomer) is correct and reserves are vitually unlimited (not renewable, just humongous).
Interesting, reading the transcript of the 60 minutes piece.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/27/60minutes/main3974389_page4.shtml
It seemed that 60 minutes was more concerned and spent more time about who Gore was endorsing in the Democratic nomination, rather than global warming-other than the small comment:
“”I think that those people [deniers, skeptcs, etc] are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view. They’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the earth is flat. That demeans them a little bit, but it’s not that far off,” Gore said. ”
Really doesn’t contain much, it will be interesting to see what kind of advertising campaign 300 million can purchase.
From my experiences here in Michigan, after seeing one of the worst winters in decades if not longer, not too many people I talk to are all that worried about global warming.
I think the whole 300 M ad campaign is kind of a “last resort of desperation” by Al Gore and the rest of the AGW “prophets of gloom and doom”.
If this current solar minimum continues, and as of right now, there still is no sign of Cycle 24 starting any time soon, we will likely see late frosts this spring, and a shorter growing season this summer, especially in the more northern agricultural areas.
If that happens, and the dropping temp trends continue (provided the numbers don’t get deliberately cooked up) I think the whole CO2/AGW propanda machine will start falling apart within a year or two.
P.S. Am I the only one that got the impression that Al Gore’s “meeting/traintings” are more of an “AMWAY” pyramid multi-level marketing type format???
So the successor to Ron Hubbard & Scientology is
Al Gore & Climatology?
🙂
Dell,
GR?
Some comments here indicate that Gore “believes” the science of global warming. This I believe is not the case.
Gore now knows his science is rubbish. He may have believed in it earlier, but not now. This is all about advancing a socialist agenda – a huge government takeover of energy and our lives. He’s attempting a coup d’etat.
Unfortunately, the climate is not cooperating, and he’s quickly running out of time. We’re only 0.5°C – maybe a couple of years – from a cooling trend, and Gore is about to be humiliated. Panicked and desparate, he is now launching one last huge propoganda campaign to brainwash more people, hoping to tip the scales of public opinion. His most urgent target is taking over all worldwide climate data centres and, like the Soviets, put out phoney numbers no matter what the climate does, to fool the public.
For the GOP, every day is July 4th,
For Dems, every day is April 15th,
And for Al Gore, every day is April 1st.
It’s going to get real ugly, and so I urge all skeptics to step things up. This is a fight the world cannot afford to lose.
Evan is trying to give the impression he knows something about the oil economy but he misplaces a few facts along the way. You don’t see Bush kissing and holding hands with Canadians, nor do you see him rushing off to Canada to discuss quotas and oil prices. Hmm why is that? Simply because Saudi Arabia is more important wrt the oil price and petrodollars have underpinned the US economy since Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system. Without petrodollars the US cannot print money out of thin air without causing price inflation. Incidentally Evan it is money supply inflation that causes price inflation – read Von Mises again and blame Greenspan, not Gore.
With peak-oil Evan is actually correct but for the wrong reason. There is no peak in expensive heavy oil, shale oil or hellish-to-extract oil but there is certainly a peak in cheap oil. Regarding getting oil in Alaska, it would be rather simpler and more effective for Americans to buy cars that got more than 15 mpg, like the rest of the world, then more drilling wouldn’t be needed. In this case responsible government would have helped since it’s quite clear that if petrol is cheap, people simply burn more of it (supply and demand and Smith’s invisible hand).
Dogma and idealogical prejudice is ever-present with all the warmers, the warmongers, the socialists and the free marketeers. They are all mostly wrong but partly right. But if they’d just learn that all facts are important, not just the ones that support the theory they learned at their mothers teat, they might realize that the world cannot be easily improved by any ‘ism. The truth snakes between them all.