Guest post by Thomas Fuller
Climate Central’s interview with Harold Shapiro, head of the InterAcademy Council which reviewed the IPCC, had the money quote–but it didn’t come from Shapiro, it came through him.
Shapiro reported that John Christy said, “if they do this, if they adapt both the letter and the spirit of what you’ve said, things would be a lot better. ”
One can hope.
In the spirit of assessment, we can offer a sort of ‘back to school’ look at climate change as a cultural and political phenomenon at this point. Let’s at least try.
Shapiro’s team at the IAC provided lots of meat and potatoes advice and recommendations to the IPCC on how to do its job better.
The jury’s obviously still out, but they could improve dramatically in time for their fifth assessment report. But there’s no doubt that the IPCC has been put on notice and that they understand that some of the things that got them in trouble in their 4th Assessment Report cannot be repeated. This should lead to a more centrist, consensus-driven look at the evidence.
The United States Congress is clearly not going to pass Cap and Trade. However, they are evidently not going to kneecap the EPA, which will be free to force utilities and very large emitters to reduce emissions. Also a centrist move.
Bjorn Lomborg has switched the emphasis of his message, in time to help get publicity for his new film, and is now stepping up his calls for concrete action (and concrete sums of money) to fight climate change. It’s a move back to the center for him. This time around, the heatwave in Moscow and floods in Pakistan and China were only briefly blamed on climate change, before cooler heads made it clear that at worst they served as previews of coming attractions.
And the transition between El Nino and La Nina is actually being discussed in fairly reasonable tones–this year’s heat is not being extravagantly pronounced an irrevocable tipping point, and next year’s cooling may be the reason why. We all know it’s coming, and we all know it’s La Nina, not the ultimate end of global warming.
Is there a center growing for discussion on climate change? It would be certainly nice to think so. In the blogosphere, more bloggers and commenters on the ‘skeptic’ side seem willing to preface their criticism with a frank admission that the physics of CO2 acting as a greenhouse gas is not very controversial. On the ‘warmist’ side, there are some who are beginning to examine some of the claims made in their name, and to admit that people like Steve McIntyre or Anthony Watts are not devils incarnate.
As a ‘lukewarmer’ I’ve been in the middle for a while, with some very good company, people like both Pielkes, Lucia Liljegren, and more. It’s tempting to think people are moving in our direction.
But being in the middle doesn’t automatically make us right, and some of this movement is illusory, end of summer tolerance in all probability. Joe Romm will certainly launch another tirade against the existence of Roger Pielke Jr. on this planet, and Keith Kloor will call out Michael Tobis and we’ll probably be back at each other’s throats by Labor Day.
Kind of a pity–there’s a lot we could be doing. We could be agreeing to let wind kind of rest for a couple of years and pushing for solar power to get more attention. We could be trumpeting the energy efficiency gains from LED lighting. We could be examining in closer detail the new nuclear power plant designs and the specification sheets for the new electric cars.
When the advocates for a better climate are all busy ripping each other apart (and I have been as guilty as any in this regard) the people making the decisions are a more detached lot, who may not feel the same sense of urgency.
Hard core skeptics may say that’s okay. But even they think that better technology will supplant, or at least supplement, fossil fuels as it becomes cost-effective–and most would cheer it if it came.
I read elsewhere that ‘We’ll never have a kumbaya moment. Too much bad blood.’ But the Palestinians and Israelis have just agreed to face-to-face talks. This puts some of our quarrels in perspective.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
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Is climate science so unimportant or precious that modern interactive technologies are ignored in favour of a lumbering report produced in near-secrecy every 5 years, and which is probably out of date before it is printed?
Indeed there is bad blood. This “daemonization” of scientists such as Phil Jones and Michael Mann just to score points is bad for the debate and our effort.
Writing stuff just to rile up the base and have them attack (by e-mail, FOI requests, telephone) the scientists is not in my book.
Is Lomborg credible? He has to explain his views on the science, and take a position on what he actually believes.
In this Internet age, what are are saying is saved for the future, and we can visit back and see who was wrong, and who was actually right all along.
Ouch! They sill don’t get it!
“This should lead to a more centrist, consensus-driven look at the evidence.”
Science is NOT “consensus-driven,” it is driven by the solidity of the science itself. Can it be tested and confirmed? Consensus includes opinion and opinion is not science.
Drifting to the center with finger on the scale? Where is the interest in bringing science to the data sets. Auditable data, accurate measurement, archive of programs. How can “decisions” be made without accurate data and tested hypotheses. Lets cap and tax when it was a solar maximum? Lets renewable without knowing the net cost? This is engineering 101 not lets make a climate deal (you know twirl hula hoops to generate power).
“Bjorn Lomborg has switched the emphasis of his message, in time to help get publicity for his new film, and is now stepping up his calls for concrete action (and concrete sums of money) to fight climate change.”
All that concrete!!!!! What about the CO2? Concrete is a good insulator against fire! It’s also very good for molding to form channels with which to course water run-off away from where it can do no harm, & to where it can do lots of good! (It’s called drainage).
> I read elsewhere that ‘We’ll never have a kumbaya moment. Too much bad blood.’ But the Palestinians and Israelis have just agreed to face-to-face talks. This puts some of our quarrels in perspective.
It’s hard to hold a candle to that quarrel! I think I’ll pass on the kumbaya moment for now. That’s all well and good when the science is as settled as plate tectonics, the period leading up to settled science in any field has been filled with tension and competition, and that’s quite okay. When it spills over into vehement blather, that’s not okay, and science has done a pretty poor job of avoiding that. With the high money stakes and politics thrown in, I don’t think we can do much better than to disagree agreeably, and if we do that, well, perhaps there’s a chance of reconciliation between Arabs and Israelis. Well, in a century or two.
First steps first, and the first big step is to get more people to realize the climate isn’t settled, and that’s happening. The new La Niña should help too. Achieve that and then the politicians will follow, especially if we can get to simply drop the issue instead of using it as differentiation between sides.
Can’t fix what is not broken. The IPCC is not broken. It is doing exactly what it is meant to do. That is to create scientifically sounding propaganda to convince the population of the world to submit to handing over all control of their lives to an international government. It stead of trying to “fix” it, the thing should be put down, as fixing it will not change its mission, just make the propaganda better.
Frankly, I find the calls for rapprochement, while certainly sincere and heartfelt, to be based more on naivete than on reality. The Warmistas, who have been calling the shots, government backing and funding, the full support and valuable hype from the MSM to sway the public, and even a Nobel-prize winning “movie”, have been caught out. They have used lies, bullying tactics, threats, Pal Review, and an enormous amount of pseudo scientific garbage to frighten people, especially children. And now, they want a truce?
I don’t think so.
Hi Bruce,
Actually, I don’t know if the ‘Warmistas’ want a truce. I do. I think we’re spinning our wheels fighting each other instead of working on a) climate change for those who are concerned about it or b) energy efficiency for those more concerned with our balance of payments and dependence on foreign oil.
“We could be agreeing to let wind kind of rest for a couple of years and pushing for solar power to get more attention. ”
Pushing for wind and pushing for solar when the intermittancy problem hasn’t been solved is like filling a car with no tires up with gas.
The best proposed solution I’ve seen is raising Lake Ontario 1 foot with pumped storage.
http://rethink-technologies.com/static/Niagara_Pumped_Storage_Project_ESA_008c.pdf
“I read elsewhere that ‘We’ll never have a kumbaya moment. Too much bad blood.’ But the Palestinians and Israelis have just agreed to face-to-face talks. This puts some of our quarrels in perspective.”
I hope that analogy is wrong, for IMHO the Israeli/Palestinian issue is intractable. The two sides have totally incompatible goals and the current talks are a political exercise in futility. 🙁
The climate change issue, on the other hand, has a lot of room for discussion, and eventual agreement. Both sides can agree on such goals as energy conservation, environmental protection and climate stability or adaptation. The issues are all about uncertainties, and means to a common and desirable end. One hopes that eventually the partisan emotional climate will cool to the point where both sides can begin to listen to and learn from each other.
Fuller is a centrist in the same way that Neville Chamberlain, Joseph Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh were centrists.
When all the facts are on one side and all the brutal power is on the other side, “centrism” means letting the brutal power win while mildly complaining.
I suggest you turn your energy towards pushing decent technology for nuclear energy. That gives the best return on invested money and effort. It is an idea many “skeptics” will get behind as well. Many of us are just as against trashing the environment, polluting and dumping megabucks into the pockets of the oil companies as you are. We are just against bad science as a disguise for a massive ripoff of the middle class and the poor by the wealthy.
Biofuel in its present incantations has been show to use up more fossil fuel in its making than it produces, at least according to David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. Biofuel also has the problem of enriching corporations while causing food riots.
Second according to Charles S. Opalek, PE (Professional Engineer) “Solar pv energy has an EROEI ratio of 0.48 (www.dieoff.org/pv.htm). That is: In the lifetime of a solar pv installaton it will only return 48% of the energy that went into its manufacture, installation and operation. What a colossal waste of my electric bill dollars and taxpayer money.
Wind power is worse. It’s EROEI by my calculations is 0.29.”
EROEI is Energy Return on Energy Invested or:
EROEI = energy / energy used to produce that energy
Other commentors here at WUWT stated: It takes 1,350 tons of coal to make steel for a 850 ton wind turbine tower. That does not include cement and transportation fuel as well as the construction of the special trailers for transport.
All the “Green Energy” stuff does is move money out of the pockets of the little guy in the pockets of the conmen. Is it any wonder that former Clinton and Obama budget adviser Franklin Raines owns a key carbon-emissions patent he developed as CEO of the government-sponsored mortgage giant Fannie Mae, positioning him and his partners to make millions of dollars?
You really think that the PLO is coming to these talks in good faith ? Really ? Wow … talk about a naive view of the real world …
stick to science and data, not models …
It’s a VERY bad idea to compare climate rapprochement to “peace” talks in the Mid-east. There has never been a peace process, only smoke and BS.
This guy is still thinking in political terms rather than scientific. He just doesn’t get it. Yes to sensible scientific debate with good mathematical models which can be VV&T’ed. Yes to the removal of vehement language of the Romms of this world; Yes to the end of the Obama stupidity and hatred. Yes to the return of the FULL scientific method in climate science, if it ever existed and GET RID OF THE IPCC. It is not needed. It wasn’t needed for the resolution of atomic, nuclear and quantum physics it is not needed to resolve the issues around climate ‘science’ and with a person like at Pachy at it’s head it is needed even less. A negative not needed now that’s is novel theory.
“We could be agreeing to let wind kind of rest for a couple of years…”
If by a couple of years you mean a permanent moratorium, then I agree. Wind destabilizes the grid, reduces the efficiency of fossil fueled backup generation, and has almost no impact on CO2 emissions in real-world grids.
“… and pushing for solar power to get more attention.”
That will be difficult to do, given the current gushing media coverage of all things solar. Unless you are suggesting more attention be focused on the un-subsidized costs of solar PV or solar thermal power generation; how environmental groups are fighting to block the construction of thousands of acres of solar farms and the transmisison lines required to transport the generated power to load centers; or how renewable energy credits turn fiscally irresponsible solar projects into revenue generators ( the Nellis Air Force Base solar PV farm is a prime example of this nonsense).
“We could be trumpeting the energy efficiency gains from LED lighting.”
By this do you mean, for example, that LED fixtures are starting to approach the luminous efficiencies and of fluorescent tubes and sodium vapor lamps, but at more than 10x the cost?
“We could be examining in closer detail the new nuclear power plant designs…”
Absolutely agree.
“… and the specification sheets for the new electric cars.”
I would prefer to bring attention to the limitations of existing non-fuel energy storage solutions for vehicles, and how to accelerate the development of an energy storage technology that is competitive (capacity, cost, toughness, safety) with gasoline, diesel, propane or compressed natural gas.
“The United States Congress is clearly not going to pass Cap and Trade. However, they are evidently not going to kneecap the EPA, which will be free to force utilities and very large emitters to reduce emissions. Also a centrist move ”
Not until Jan,2010 then things will change, there too…
The EPA actions would tie things up in court for years..
As we get cooler and cooler….
These kind of views make us look like conspiracy theorists and any arguments that come out of here are not taken seriously.
Is Anthony in a position to appear credible if such views appear in the comments?
[snip – religion topic – policy]
Tom,
Middle? Your journalist background is getting the best of you. I’d be happy with sounder science (or better reported if it’s already out there) no matter middle, one side or the other, no matter where it falls. Wouldn’t you?
I’m with Bruce.
Grind them into the dust from whence they came and start anew with honest people and without
the “Left”over agenda from previous fake crises .
“However, they are evidently not going to kneecap the EPA, which will be free to force utilities and very large emitters to reduce emissions. Also a centrist move.”
We got right at 60 days til you see a big change coming there.
And you brought up the Israelis and the Palestinians – it’s a safe bet that they’ll be shooting at each other again before the snows come.
“In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins.” – General Ulysses S. Grant
Tom Fuller,
Thank for yet another thought provoking article. Keep it up.
There is no compromise between A and not A.
In politics things might appear to be all about compromise. A lot of compromise does properly occur in politics, yet there are things in politics that cannot be compromised and if compromised will cause the collapse of society/culture. If you are calling for things to be compromised that are not essentials for our civilization, then OK. But I think your suggestions may be close to things that cannot be compromised if we wish our modern civilization to persist.
In science A-is-A and A cannot be not A. Are calling for a compromise in science?
Tom, you say “In the blogosphere, more bloggers and commenters on the ‘skeptic’ side seem willing to preface their criticism with a frank admission that the physics of CO2 acting as a greenhouse gas is not very controversial.” No, I do not think that is correct.
What I think, regarding the “physics of CO2 acting as a greenhouse gas”, is correct is that most bloggers who are independent (of consensus climate science who call independent bloggers skeptics) seem to be willing to finally, after many years of trying, engage in direct public/open debate with those bloggers of the so-called consensus.
John
As it currently stands, if reasonable skeptics got as much public airtime as reasonable warmists, AGW hysteria would be long over. The bias required in scientific literature, mass media and education systems is a huge, huge source of potential energy. All of that will come rushing downhill eventually, like it or not.
If cap and trade is passed, and even a little bit of the fallout envisioned happens, do you think anyone disenfranchised in the name of the carbon god is going to go quietly into the night? Once the average energy cost to the US citizen starts to rise? When the cost of doing business on a daily basis starts to creep up? Once you really start hitting people in their pocketbooks, you’ll see some “skepticism”. Bias and treehugging will go right out the window.
Even now, when I point out to my friends that Congress isn’t willing to pass a cap and trade bill because they know it’s unpopular, but are willing to sit by and watch the slow expansion of the EPA’s non-elected powers, I get disbelief. Once businesses start suing the EPA, with high-powered lawyers?
For people lukewarm, warm and hot, you have to realize that not only is the burden of proof on you, but the skeptical machine that exists BECAUSE of the low quality of the proof given will audit you at every single step of the way. And the AGW proponentry can’t afford to look back with a clear eye and say, “yes this was demagoguery, yes this is false, this is misleading, yes we’re making commercials to scare children, let’s throw all this out the window and start over with quality, transparent science.”
If that admission was made, and the scientific research behind the matter moved forward in a nice, objective fashion, people would conclude that predictions are predictions and get on with their lives, to the next big scare. But most of the AGW crowd has too much skin in the game now. Even the people that aren’t fiscally involved. They’ve argued for it, held viewpoints in it, derided skeptics, cited greenpeace and AWF, repeated patently absurd and/or unproven links between “agw” and our world (gores inconvenient untruths, as an example). And the number of people on that side, the believers and the advocates and the companies profiting and the politicians committed and the universities committed is staggeringly large. But they’re committed to an overblown, overstated system of bias. The embarassment for admitting that, alone, is a motivator for all those involved to just ride it out as forcefully as they can.
And they’re going to lose in the long run, because each day the skeptics are getting just a little more airtime. Just a little bit more of a chance to point out this overstated thing, or that conflict of interest. And at some point, to save themselves from embarassment, someone is going to shout “I was tricked!!! This is terrible!!!” and the rapidity with which the house of cards crashes down will be stunning.
The problem of course is that AGW could exist, and even be a scientific conclusion. But once the advocates got ahold of it and blew it out of proportion, it became nothing but a mechanism of guilt, control, fear and money. And that’s not what science is.
But I will rejoice, when the house of cards come crashing down, because people will start to “suspect” the MSM, and “science”. People will become skeptics, questioners. We will evolve better systems of information. We will demand more transparency. We, as the human race, will evolve to be better by collectively learning from our mistakes. Glorious!
If I may. . .
Let us assume right now (for argument’s and reasonability’s sake) that the adjusted GISS and NOAA and everybody’s numbers are okay. Let’s understand, like Tom says, that the Russian and Pakistani weather may have been due to climate change. Let’s accept for non-argument’s sake that some warming – probably 0.7C – has occurred in the last 100 years.
If we stick our heads out our doors and take a feel for what is out there. . .
…The climate right now – in 2010 – is analagous to “drifting into the center.” It is not what it was in 1900, nor 1950, and it is not what the pro-warming folks say it will be in 2100.
If it stayed like this, just like this, the weather in 2010, would any of us really complain so much? The pro-warming folks would be glad it didn’t get any worse. The skeptics would be glad we could get on with our lives and fixing things in other areas of our lives.
With more or less mild winters over the last 10 years, and with crop yields being nicely bumper-level most years, would any of us really bitch and moan if our climate stayed as it has been?
Yes, there are some ups and downs. Even though the global average is staying in a pretty tight range since 2000, our local temps generally vary by ten times that global average, and we all get along pretty well with warm spells and cold spells and some extremes now and then, before it comes back to what our 10-year average has been, more or less. Yes?
So if this was going to be our plight, we’d all be pretty well okay with it, wouldn’t we? If it all found this as the center and it drifted back to this after weather excursions toward some extremes now and then?
Perhaps our weather/climate is somewhat a reflection of our mindsets. Perhaps if our hot and steaming rants – on both sides – mellowed out, we’d see our weather/climate has also mellowed out, too.
After all, is 0.7C warmer than 1900 all that bad? Since 1900 was kind of a cool period, what is wrong with a bit of warmth? Could we all live with it if it stayed here at 2000-2010 levels? I would think so. Some of us might get a little nervous in the dog days of August or when knee-deep in snow, or when a year comes by with a few more hurricanes – but overall, is it all that bad?