Post by Dr. Ryan Maue
Distinguished MIT Professor Dr. Kerry Emanuel, who has waded gradually — but head-first into the politics of climate change, showed up on NPR’s Talk of the Nation last Friday to expound upon his previous LA Times interview/opinion editorial. As a refresher on January 6, Emanuel uniquely declared his particular political allegiance in the article, something very few scientists in any field dare do (see John Tierney’s piece on Social Psychologist liberal bias). As a lifelong Republican, Emanuel admired Reagan, opposes gay marriage, backs a strong military, yet voted for President Obama. [See WUWT Cambridge Conservative…] Why do we need to know any of this quite personal information? Simple: using his self-ascribed conservative credentials and the helpfully crafted straw-man argument encapsulated in the headline “Scientist proves conservatism and belief in climate change aren’t incompatible”, Emanuel could position himself as a unique entity in the field — a Republican that supports doing something about climate change. In the follow up interview on NPR entitled “Take the Science Politics out of Climate Change”, Emanuel accomplishes the exact opposite: he applies a “litmus test” to political candidates based upon their “belief” in climate change:
Prof. EMANUEL: My feeling is that at this point in history, if a politician simply denies that there’s any human influence in the climate, in face of all the evidence, it so much casts doubt on that person’s ability to weigh evidence and come to a rational conclusion that I can’t see myself voting for such a person, no matter what they say about other issues.
Aside from Dr. Michael Mann who launched a preemptive broadside attack [October 8 Washington Post editorial] on the incoming GOP Congress prior to the November election tsunami, which has subpoena power, it is unusual for an internationally renowned and well-respected scientist in any field to publicly declare their political ideology AND then turn around and ask that we delicately separate politics and science when we consider policy prescriptions on global warming action. If you indeed do that with this interview, one can find much scientific agreement between Emanuel and another outspoken scientist Dr. Judith Curry.
Read the NPR transcript or listen to the interview with Dr. Kerry Emanuel.
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In my opinion, climate science has been mixed with politics since Al Gore declared that the “debate was over”. Furthermore, when the policy prescriptions are indistinguishable from the economic platform/goals of the left, it is very difficult to gather much in the way of bipartisan energy to legislate — especially from a recession-weary populace that wants to see government shrink. Did anyone in the media or on the left ever figure out the Tea Party. No.
Prior to the election of number 41, fellow Massachusetts conservative Scott Brown, President Obama and the Democrats completely controlled the Senate with a filibuster proof 60-votes, had a supermajority in the House, and could literally pass anything they wanted — assuming they stuck together. The problem was that so-called moderate or blue-dog Democrats from coal producing states looked at the economic destruction on the horizon from the “necessary bankruptcy” of that industry, and balked at passing Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman’s House bill. Currently, other Senators are looking towards 2012 and in no way want the burden of a climate change vote around their neck. Alas, Obama and the EPA are trying to implement new rules in spite of bipartisan opposition.
The November 2010 elections ended the dream of (federal, not state) cap-and-trade — and what did liberals get out of the last two years for their faithful and America: a failed stimulus bill, 9%+ unemployment, exploding deficits as far as the eye can see, and a health care law that is on life support without a Supreme Court ruling. But don’t take it from me, Joe Romm at the ClimateProgress does an excellent job summarizing: “The Failed Presidency of Barack Obama Part 1 and Part 1.5 and Part 2. Odds are in November 2012, part 3, 4, or 9 will be forthcoming.
Joe Romm laments, “The country can only contemplate serious environmental legislation when we have the unique constellation of a Democratic president and [large] Democratic majorities in both houses, an occurrence far rarer than a total eclipse of the sun.”
Note: this post is an analysis of the politics of climate change which has been inextricably linked with the actual science. No personal attacks will be tolerated!
There is an issue here that should be seriously considered before further spleen venting.
Global warming reached its cresendo during a republican watch, biofuel iniatives a very dangerous example with dramatic consequences for global food stocks. Obama like most academics trust the credibility of science. No blame can be foisted on him or them for that. Exposing the fallacies and agendas has put wuwt where it is, dont muddy the water.
Ps. I am not an american.
The skeptics are a loosely linked band of people who for various reasons don’t like the idea that humans are seriously influencing the climate. Or rather, they oppose the sort of actions deemed necessary to stop unfortunate climate changes occurring. For the most part, they are entirely sincere in their beliefs. Even those who aren’t sincere believe that the consequences of action to combat climate change are so awful that they are doing the right thing in opposing it.
In general they do a good job of discrediting themselves by holding many inconsistent and contradictory positions. The failure of skeptics to agree on what is known and what is not known about the climate is their key weakness. Having people argue that the greenhouse effect is inconsistent with the 2nd law of thermodynamics is an example. This argument is obviously wrong, but it got a very thorough airing by skeptics everywhere. Cherry picking is another technique that discredits skeptics. Choosing two data points that support an assertion, while totally ignoring a mass of data which doesn’t is not a good look. One can only assume that people who do this are trying to mislead rather than enlighten.
I don’t see any problem for anyone, be they scientist or other, to come out and say that they won’t support climate skeptics as they currently exist.
If at some time in the future, climate skeptics get organised and work out exactly where they stand on the science, and weed out the obvious deceivers in their midst, then they will deserve to be taken seriously. But if skeptics abandon their current tactics, will they lose relevance?
Although a non-GOP conservative, I’d vote with the guy to do something about climate change. End all the greenie projects and build a new nuke power plant each week in gas and oil and oil shale and oil sands and coal producing country to power the extraction and processing of hydrocarbons. And do the same to process oil in the gulf. Then give me “free” fertilizers. Tomato growing season is right around the corner. And corn requires vast amounts of all fertilizers from phosphates to nitrogen to CO2.
I agree with Latimer Alder above. Human activity does have an effect on the climate. But unlike the unsupported catastrophic beliefs of the alarmist crowd, the effect is at best minuscule, and too small to be accurately measured.
The total human population on the planet could fit inside a one kilometer sphere, with room to spare. The effect of termites is greater. Yes, there is an effect from human activity. But it is not altering the climate in any meaningful, or even any measurable way.
Mainstream climate scientists exaggerate the threat because such exaggeration has been extremely lucrative. But they have not been able to show any global harm as a result of the rise in carbon dioxide which, on balance, is beneficial to the biosphere – and to grant recipients.
“In the follow up interview on NPR entitled “Take the Science out of Climate Change”, Emanuel accomplishes the exact opposite: he applies a “litmus test” to political candidates based upon their “belief” in climate change:”
It would be nice if they did take the science out of climate change and just admit AGW is about politics.
“I can’t see myself voting for such a person, no matter what they say about other issues.” = Single Issue Fanatic
I’ve never read such drivel in my life. I’m no scientist, but I don’t need to be to recognise sophistry raised to an art form. The fact that sceptics don’t necessarily all agree with each other is a strength, not a weakness. It means that they are willing to assess the issues on their merits and reach their own conclusions. It is not sceptics who are advocating draconian measures affecting the life and liberty of everyone. All they are doing to trying to hold the warmists, who do advocate such measures, to account and force them to prove their case.
This is another example of trying to reverse the null hypothesis, trying to put the onus on people to prove a negative instead of actually proving the case for change.
Sceptics are not, and have never been, an organised group. They are simply individuals following their own reasoning and horrified by the trainwreck they see if the warmists prevail.
FrankK says: February 9, 2011 at 1:10 am
“Mike:Problem is when you have both politicians and scientists talking this rubbish, with an effective one party state in science, no opposition allowed.
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i.e. An Orwellian Climate Society”
No, not really. It’s just plain common sense. If we see a debate where both sides have equal access to the facts and there is a fair playing field so that the argument of one side can be tested thoroughly in a public arena. If something is right, the presence of sceptics does not diminish the strength of the case but dramatically improves it because the public can see that it stands up to scrutiny.
The big mistake of climate science was to hide the facts, hide the argument and go hell for leather for a propaganda war against the “deniers”.
The public could see the argument had never been subject to public scrutiny … worse they could see the proponents of global warming were afraid to subject it to public scrutiny, actively trying to prevent public scrutiny, pretending there had been public scrutiny, fabricating inquiries to inquire whether there had been public scrutiny.
It’s a fundamental part of human nature that we support most ardently those things which we choose to support after having examined the argument. So, unless you give the public the opportunity to hear the argument, their support is skin deep at best and actively hostile at worst.
John Brookes says:
February 9, 2011 at 2:30 am
I broadly agree with many of your comments about sceptics. However, the same can be said about “warmers”. For example:
1. I can’t understand why AGW proponents claim that modern warming is ‘unprecedented’ when it clearly isn’t. The GISS global temperature record shows that between 1915-1945 temperatures rose at a rate which is virtually indistinguishable from the current trend. The arctic rate of warming, in particular, was almost exactly the same.
2. I can’t understand why “warmers” so readily accept that sulphate aersosols were responsible for for the cooling (or non warming) trend in the 1945-75 period. Even Realclimate scientists now question this. The cooling effects of aerosols are “regionally specific” (Mann & Jones 2003). The pattern of cooling was inconsistent with an aerosol effect. The arctic cooled at ~4 times the rate of any other latitude band (See again GISS zonal record). BUT – sulphates in the arctic cause WARMING not cooling due to a phenomenon called “arctic haze” (See wiki article).
3. Leif Svalgaard (and others) now suggest that solar activity has been less variable than previously thought. Along with points 1 and 2, this means the IPCC’s attribution and detection studies are in tatters. The basic forcings (solar and aerosols) which they claim explains earth’s climate before the large increase in CO2 concentrations are almost certainly in error (by a sizable margin).
4. I really, really can’t understand why anyone – let alone a serious scientist – would widely publicise a temperature proxy record when the proxy reconstruction diverged from actual observations so markedly. Apart from the calibration period (when we’d expect some agreement) the proxy reconstruction in both Briffa and MBH massively disagree with temperature record.
“Smokey says:
February 9, 2011 at 3:02 am”
Agree with what you say, and about termites too. But alarmists will state termites and termite activities are in “balance” with the Earth. Humans and human activities aren’t, thats why we have CAGW/CCC/CCD etc.
The problem with the climate debate is that the nuances are passed over for an all versus none paradigm. Obviously, the planet has warmed about 0.7c in the last hundred years. Some part of this is due to a rise out of the Little Ice Age, some part is probably due to AGW. But AGW isn’t all about CO2 and methane. There is the question of land use by human populations.
Dr. Emanuel is right. Any politician who denies that human civilization has some effect on climate is ignorant of the evidence. But that’s a self-serving straw man argument designed to obscure the real argument in which the Catastrophic AGW hypothesis (CAGW) has been exposed as an epic fail.
The real question is two part….. ONE: whether reliance on hydrocarbons as the energy-base for human civilization will cause CATASTROPHIC warming later this century.
And TWO: Whether human political institutions have the ability to control the climate.
The empirical evidence so far is a resounding NO and NO.
Therefore, Like Dr. Emanuel, I can’t see myself voting for a politician who believes the climate can be managed by technocratic government coercion or that AGW is catastrophic, “no matter what they say about other issues.” That’s the real bottom line.
Any politician who seeks to control the Earth climate through increased taxation and the limiting of my God-given individual liberties is nothing more than a scoundrel using what ever crisis he/she can drum up to seize power beyond the constitutional limits.
You know, never let a good scare campaign go to waste.
Fact is, government can’t cope with the basic stuff, like maintaining the highways, securing the borders, balancing the budge or winning the peace in their various wars, but they want us to believe that they can legislate fine weather for our children, if only we surrender even more of our liberty??? Do we look that stupid?
Annie, git yer gun. It’s time for a revolution.
John Finn says
February 9, 2011 at 3:44 am
Apologise for typos in above post.
“aersosols” should be “aerosols” (point 2: end of first line)
“sizable” should be “sizeable” (end of point 3)
What I love is that Emmanuel thinks one is deficient when they see all of the “evidence” for “climate change” when there really isn’t any. Where is all of the evidence that has not been shown to be political propaganda complete with junk science and falsified data?
This is so similar to the Bible fundamentalists who say that you have not converted (been born again) yet, not because you have not been convinced of their schtick, but because you simply are not listening hard enough. It’s all the listener’s fault.
Brooked says:
“In general they do a good job of discrediting themselves by holding many inconsistent and contradictory positions. The failure of skeptics to agree on what is known and what is not known about the climate is their key weakness. Having people argue that the greenhouse effect is inconsistent with the 2nd law of thermodynamics is an example. This argument is obviously wrong, but it got a very thorough airing by skeptics everywhere. Cherry picking is another technique that discredits skeptics. Choosing two data points that support an assertion, while totally ignoring a mass of data which doesn’t is not a good look. One can only assume that people who do this are trying to mislead rather than enlighten.”
Silly man, this is the only place where people can air their thoughts and ideas freely. Real Climate might have had some success if it were more interested in exploration and less interested in propaganda. Us lay person deniers are here because as soon as we dug just a little into the surface we became aware of the giant hill of crap that was being shoveled our way daily.
For me it was surface stations.org originally. Really, Anthony Watts is a hero. The
enlightened Kerry Emanuel can keep on imagining that all this global warming evidence is irrefutable, but he’s got some blinders of his own on and so do you my friend.
The proof of my case that AGWers are the ones really in denial is that if you talk to any of them they’ll tell you that wind and solar is the answer, if we only had the political will, damn those obstructionist republicans, we could solve this problem. Well, you might as well believe that the tooth fairy will come down and power your Prius for you because it’s just as realistic.
You’ve failed with people like me, Brookes, because people like Hansen and Gore over played their hands and plain lied to us, so now we don’t trust them. Phd. or not, I wouldn’t trust Hansen to walk my dog. He’s clearly an ideologue.
I can go down the list of failed models, rediculus studies like Briffa Tree ring, or the fraudulent hockey stick graph, penguins killed by their researchers who blamed it on global warming and now suffering fools like Krugman who apparently has a degree from Harvard blaming snow storms on global warming without a shread of evidence.
You want to convice me, bring something to the WUWT table, it will be treated fairly by this group, if it has merit.
The comments of John Brookes above (that AGW skeptics hold inconsistent and contradictory opinions, and therefore can and should be dismissed) illustrate the failure of the current public debate to address, much less resolve, the real issues.
Mixing politics with science is insane, from a dispassionate scientific viewpoint, but that is what was originally done, more than 20 years ago, in creating the UN IPCC to promulgate the environmentalist views of scientists like James Hansen. The result of politically favoring AGW in the funding of climate science has been, quite simply, an incompetent climate science — the fundamental answers everybody wants simply have not been there, and the lack of that fundamental knowledge has been hidden behind politically correct assurances that “the science is settled,” for a generation. A whole generation of scientists (and the interested public) has been miseducated, and now believes obvious nonsense. The most obvious example: Science has had the detailed temperature and pressure profiles of both Venus and Earth for over 19 years, and their proper comparison definitively proves there is NO greenhouse effect (increased global warming due to increase in the atmospheric CO2) whatsoever on either planet, as I have shown (see my blog site). It further proves that warming in the two planetary atmospheres is by direct absorption of one and the same infrared portion of the incident solar radiation, NOT by infrared emissions from a warmed surface, but because that experimental fact, ENCOMPASSING TWO WHOLE, DETAILED PLANETARY ATMOSPHERES, is counter to what scientists have been taught to believe, it is simply beyond their mental grasp to embrace the overwhelming objective evidence, rather than the pretty lie of current radiation transfer theory, as applied (clearly incompetently) in climate “science”. I have submitted the Venus/Earth evidence to “Physics Today”, in answer to the recent article there by Raymond Pierrehumbert, proclaiming the “settled science” of the current theory, but there is little chance it will be published there, because it would force all of science to confront the evidence, and their own incompetence to this point.
In short, most skeptics are no more capable of escaping the power of the consensus to befog and render powerless the reasoning, than are the alarmists (who have only a political ideology behind their beliefs, not solid science at all).
The only thing clear from Emanuel’s comments is that he isn’t a conservative.
Well, we know Dr. Emanuel’s hurricane forecasts and research can be thrown out now.
Effectively, he tortured the data so much he convinced himself (and others) that hurricanes were increasing in lock-step with the GHG forcing. Well they certainly were not. And we know that because of Dr. Maue’s objective analysis and the actual untortured hurricane numbers.
I note in the model Dr. Emanuel presented in Nature in 2005, hurricanes should have gone way over record levels this year, since his ocean box areas were very high this year.
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~joel/g280_s09/recent_atmosphere/emanuel_nat05a.pdf
Well, they didn’t so why would we believe Dr. Emanuel’s forecasts now?
…and Ward Churchill was a registered Republican, too.
It’s not what they say they are, it’s what they do.
I don’t want to wear my science hat but Emanuel like so many politicians has no science background. They look at a graph and believe what they are told. A scientist ought to look at a graph and ask “what is this graph saying?”. Is it saying what I assume or is there some other explanation which is equally valid that is hidden under the data.
People like Emanuel do not understand cause and correlation. It is not true to say that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer. This does not mean that it is true to say that smoking cigarettes does not cause lung cancer. Most people cannot get their heads around this. What is true is that there is correlation between smoking cigarettes and increasing the risk of getting lung cancer. The more you smoke the greater the risk. Some non-smokers get lung cancer. Some heavy smokers do not get lung cancer. Therefore causation is not proved but it may still be the case.
There is no cause without correlation. There is limited correlation between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures. Carbon dioxide levels may influence temperature but there are other factors also in play which may be more important.
Prof. Emmanuel uses carefully crafted weasel words and phrases to make the official CAGW position as acceptable as possible to the masses. Lysenkoism at its finest.
@John Brookes
Can you come up with one thing that humans can do that will definitively stop the climate changing, and can you show, definitively, that there will be no unintended consequences?
Can you guarantee that we won’t have the floods like we saw in Pakistan, or Australia or Brazil, or the Snowzilla that America, and before that Europe, experienced these last few months? Or the heatwave in Russia last year and in Europe in 2003.
Reducing CO2 emissions isn’t going to cut it, because even when the atmospheric concentrations were 280ppm, the climate changed. When they were much higher than present, the climate changed.
Why do you and people like you sell the line that we can all do better than King Canute and turn back the tides, for we would need that level of power over Nature to stop the climate changing.
I’ve never once heard from a warmist what exactly is an acceptable level of climate change, what temperatures should prevail in given places, how much rain and humidity, how windy it should be.
The reason there are skeptics is because the “scientists” have totally abbrogated their responsibilities to be honest about the uncertainties in their findings and to release their data so that other people can test those findings.
Yes, there are various levels of competency among us, from the absolutely brilliant (as seen from some of the posters on WUWT) to the still learning like myself. For a lot of us, “climate science” is not our day job, we go to excellent sites like WUWT because we are alarmed at the way science has been misused to sell us a totally impossible proposition.
When he made his original essay, I said he was acting like a [trimmed] for his academic friends.
Now he proves I was correct.
I would submit that most everyone believes in HIVES, Human Influenced Variations in Ecological Systems. The real argument amongst us is what we believe to be the extent of human influence, whether or not we should be counteracting that influence and at what cost. What is the logical balance of those arguments? What sense would it make for someone to spend so much money on insurance to protect themselves from financial ruin that they are financially ruined?
@ur momisugly John Brookes
“The skeptics are a loosely linked band of people who for various reasons don’t like the idea that humans are seriously influencing the climate.”
Please provide evidence of a weather event or series of weather events which are unique and have not occurred previously. Of course you will not be able to and hence you are incapable of demonstrating that mankind is seriously affecting the climate.
The following link is Harlech Castle constructed 700 years ago, in one of the pictures you can see the sea in the distance. Way to go before the sea again laps at the gate. By my rough estimation at 3mm per year it will take 20000 years before it gets back to its original level?
“Ice free ” conditions prevailed in the arctic in 1922 and 1817 check this blog out or google?
The alarmists punch at shadows and expect sensible people to think that the shadows have some substance.
Then, corrections are in order; (1) the farm lobby is a very powerful one in the US. Some number of years MTBE was eliminated from the gasoline (added or the purposes reducing air pollution as MTBE was an oxygenate – see ref below). But, MTBE had ‘issues’, e.g. leaking into groundwater and was becoming a liability issue, congress at the time would not indemnify … enter stage left: EthylAlcohol as an ‘oxygenate’ (debate on that merit left for another time) added to motorfuels for pollution reduction … at the time it looked innocent enough, there was no shortage of corn for ethanol feedstock … and the rest is history …
(2) The Republican party is the current home of conservatism, recalling set theory, therefore, not all Republicans are conservative (consv are subset of repub).
(A little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing; look at the conclusions that can be wrought!)
Regards, _Jim
Ref MTBE, Oxygenates, and Motor Gasoline eia.dow.gov link