WUWT reader Jim asks:
I am the reluctant presenter of Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert to our book group and I am a skeptic. Any advice?
I’ve not read the book, so I could not help him, other than to say that Hurricane Katrina, a class 3 Hurricane has not been repeated and the USA is currently experiencing a record drought of major hurricanes. Note that Sandy was not even a hurricane when it made landfall, having been downgraded to an extratropical cyclone. Here’s the book synopsis:
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change is a 2006 non-fiction book by Elizabeth Kolbert. The book attempts to bring attention to the causes and effects of global climate change. Kolbert travels around the world where climate change is affecting the environment in significant ways. These locations include Alaska, Greenland, the Netherlands, and Iceland. The environmental effects that are apparent consist of rising sea levels, thawing permafrost, diminishing ice shelves, changes in migratory patterns, and increasingly devastating forest fires due to loss of precipitation. She also speaks with many leading scientists about their individual research and findings. Kolbert brings to attention the attempts of large corporations such as Exxon Mobil and General Motors to influence politicians and discrediting scientists. She also writes about America’s reluctance in the global efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Leading this resistance, she explains, is the Bush administration which has been opposed to the Kyoto protocol since it was ratified in 2005. Kolbert concludes the book by examining the events surrounding the events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and arguing that governments have the knowledge and technologies to prepare for such disasters but choose to ignore the signs until it is too late.
More at Wikipedia
“She also writes about America’s reluctance in the global efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Leading this resistance, she explains, is the Bush administration which has been opposed to the Kyoto protocol since it was ratified in 2005.”
Who ratified the Kyoto Treaty in 2005? The Kyoto Treaty was negotiated during the Clinton administration and was never submitted to the US Senate for ratification. Instead, the Senate passed a resolution 95-0 against adopting Kyoto in 1997 (The Byrd-Hagel Resolution – http://www.nationalcenter.org/KyotoSenate.html).
I’d also be cautious about using Wikipedia as a resource regarding the actual contents of the book. It sounds like the publisher’s promotional summary and may or not be accurate.
I wouldn’t dare offer specific criticisms without reading the book first. Be specific.
America has seen a 13% reduction in CO2 emissions over the last 5 years and that will be due to a change in energy sources and de-industrialization as production of so many products has moved to the Far East.
A few years ago we were supposed to “burn up”…but instead we have had severe cold, more snow, more changeable weather…some hot weather in places but less Hurricanes.
Two weeks ago I looked at the climate page in the UK Independent…talk about depressing.
It is difficult to believe that so many outwardly intelligent people could be so thick, so stupid and so easily led.
This was followed late last week by a scientist being suprised that the planet was greening up…..give me strength…what the hell did this moron think CO2 did?
Beggars belief.
If your looking for a solid skeptics piece you can start with the fact that hurricane Katrina damage was mostly to the town of NOLA. This was s government disaster of the worst kind. Basically the levees that NOLA depends on broke because the government embezzled funds that were meant to repair or replace them. Then you can go on about how the dew inches of sea ruse we have experienced in the last century dont equate to the few feet of water that came crashing through the levees which had been listed in critical condition some years earlier.
As I am currently repairing my house flooded by Hurricane Isaac, a ‘drought of Hurricanes’ seems a tad harsh. But that being said, having lived on the Gulf Coast almost my entire life (44 of 51 years), Hurricane Isaac is the FIRST hurricane that has done ANY damage to me. We had no personal damage from Katrina, Rita, Ivan, Gustav, etc. etc. etc.
Katrina was only a Cat 3 when it hit based upon wind speed. When using the other two scales, pressure and storm surge, she was still the Cat 5 that she was the day before she hit land.
There was an excellent Times Pic. story done about a year after the storm that documented when each of the levees had actually failed. The impression that I had from our evacuation shelter in Monroe was that the levees had survived the initial storm and then failed. This was not correct. Using direct eye-witness accounts, the Times Pic showed that most of the levee failures happened as the eye of the storm, and the peak storm surge, reached that particular latitude/location.
There was a particular levee design that was prone to failure – the I-beam design. The massive earthen river levees all pretty much survived in the New Orleans area. However, the cheaper canal levees, with their I-beam concrete design tended to get undermined and failed.
The catastrophe on New Orleans could have been mitigated with storm gates at the river/lake end of all of the canals coupled with a rapid levee repair/design/effort.
New Orleans had been expecting a major hurricane for decades.
The year before, we had Cat 5 Ivan that went in just slightly east of the city. Because of that storm, there was a lot of additional preparation/improvements made to evacuation plans. Those plan changes were effective and the evacuations went much smoother for Katrina.
As I am currently repairing my house flooded by Hurricane Isaac, a ‘drought of Hurricanes’ seems a tad harsh. But that being said, having lived on the Gulf Coast almost my entire life (44 of 51 years), Hurricane Isaac is the FIRST hurricane that has done ANY damage to me. We had no personal damage from Katrina, Rita, Ivan, Gustav, etc. etc. etc.
Katrina was only a Cat 3 when it hit based upon wind speed. When using the other two scales, pressure and storm surge, she was still the Cat 5 that she was the day before she hit land.
There was an excellent Times Pic. story done about a year after the storm that documented when each of the levees had actually failed. The impression that I had from our evacuation shelter in Monroe was that the levees had survived the initial storm and then failed. This was not correct. Using direct eye-witness accounts, the Times Pic showed that most of the levee failures happened as the eye of the storm, and the peak storm surge, reached that particular latitude/location.
There was a particular levee design that was prone to failure – the I-beam design. The massive earthen river levees all pretty much survived in the New Orleans area. However, the cheaper canal levees, with their I-beam concrete design tended to get undermined and failed.
The catastrophe on New Orleans could have been mitigated with storm gates at the river/lake end of all of the canals coupled with a rapid levee repair/design/effort.
New Orleans had been expecting a major hurricane for decades.
The year before, we had Cat 5 Ivan that went in just slightly east of the city. Because of that storm, there was a lot of additional preparation/improvements made to evacuation plans. Those plan changes were effective and the evacuations went much smoother for Katrina.
Second point. She seems to be blaming the Bush Admin for not passing Kyoto. “Chapter Eight – The Day After Kyoto”
1) I recollect that it was the entire Senate that rejected Kyoto.
2) Bush has been gone for years now and Kyoto is still not passed.
3) The Dems had full control of the Government for two years and did not pass Kyoto.
Jim Ryan has it right,
” 1. Present your opponent’s case as well as it can be presented, and let the audience see that you are not reluctant to do so. They now grasp his case well and trust that you have not hidden its best arguments from them.
2. Then carefully demolish his case and bounce the rubble. The audience now sees that even on its best footing your opponent’s case is unsound.”
Then go to Pilke’s site and get the data as your refutation.
as in: “Leading this resistance, she explains, is the Bush administration which has been opposed to the Kyoto protocol since it was ratified in 2005. Kolbert concludes the book by examining the events surrounding the events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and arguing that governments have the knowledge and technologies to prepare for such disasters but choose to ignore the signs until it is too late.”
The disaster of Katrina was spoken about in a Nova program several years before it happened. The basically said that there is a high probability that if a major hurricane hits NOLA, that NOLA would be toast. Hurricanes have never disappeared over history, warming, cooling or just sitting there. Of course, the biggest cyclone known to man is the Red Spot on Jupiter and it is really fairly chilly out that way. The levees in NOLA were maintained by 70 plus levee districts. Most of those districts acted as if they thought that they existed to promote river boat gambling in NOLA and not maintain the levees.
I would quit the book club.
You might bring up a topic that has nothing at all to do with climate: barges. The Mississippi Gulf coast was lined with beached barges, many loaded with HUGE rolls of who knows what from stem to stern, as Katrina was blowing in. You can board up as many windows as you want to keep out the water, but a barge riding a surge wave is going to take your house right off it’s foundation. And that is exactly what happened all along the coast.
Barges were also left in the Mississippi River/Gulf Outlet in New Orleans, which crashed through the levee wall protecting the 9th Ward.
There are always pictures of melting ice. Glacier Bay in BC Canada began retreating in 1796, and had pulled back over 40 miles by 1865.
NASA has a study called NVAP-M. Satellites have measured atmospheric water vapor content since 1988, and found NO TREND. All climate models depend on increasing water vapor to be able to forecast a significant increase in temperatures, but NASA has blown this up. They have been sitting on the full report since August 2012, but Forrest Mims III, my new hero, has leaked the graph. It was on here mid-December, but since than not much, about the most important story of them all IMHO.
Check out the Enron/Kyoto connection. I wish I could find the New Zealand investigative piece that found out how Enron pushed for CO2 cap-and-trade in the early 90s after their $20 billion success with sulphur dioxide. Enron’s problem was that CO2 was not considered a pollutant. They had to reinvent it as one. Enron dropped big bucks into Gore’s campaign and molded him to care for the issue.
Andrew Bolt via the Climate Realists site:
http://climaterealists.com/?id=11133
3 excerpts:
“The data confirms the existence of a `pause’ in the warming,” confirms Professor Judith Curry, chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.No, we are not seeing more or worse cyclones and hurricanes.”
“MIT’s Professor Richard Lindzen, arguably the world’s most famous climate scientist, has argued for two years “there has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995”.
“No, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide have not run out of water. The world’s rice and wheat crops have not fallen, but set new records. In fact, “there has been no increase (in Australia) in the frequency of natural hazard events since 1950,” says Professor John McAneney, director of research group Risk Frontiers.”
And of course Monckton of Brenchley:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/no_global_warming_for_almost_two_decades.html
It all depends on how firmly you want to nail your colours (as a skeptic) to the mast. A lot of people are highly resistant to ideas which contradict what they have learned – over many years – through the mainstream media (from places like CNN with that science twat to the the BBC and the Murdoc press, with all their lies and proven bad behaviour).
All I’m saying is tread carefully while spreading the truth – it’s easy to put people’s backs up with the wrong approach. You may have to live around some of them afterwards.
I think you should try and have some fun with it and get people questioning, but be aware that it can be like entering a minefield, exposing youself as a skeptic of whatever “official” story it might be – from the global temperature stats to the GDP numbers to the safety of to who is the most popular person in the USA. If you go down this road you may find that it seems like one (large) group of people believes the mainstream opinion, because they are programmed to by the MSM and never become aware of the information available on places like WUWT (for example and with regard to the climate/energy-con issue in particular).
Ultimately it’s a question of how much you want to stand up for what you believe in, Just be prepared to take some flak and, who knows, make some good friends too. Fortune favours the brave! Good luck!
Steve, Katrina leveled parts of LA, most of Mississippi, and parts of Alabama. An area the size of the United Kingdom was severely affected by Katrina. NOLA got all the attention because it had an incompetent mayor and an incompetent state government and the disaster there could be used to bash Pres. Bush. Mississippi and Alabama had competent governors and so weren’t as photogenic to the disaster mongers. NOLA is also sexier than Pascagoula MS and so that’s where all the reporters congregated.
RE:
Jim Ryan says:
February 12, 2013 at 9:24 am
“…reluctant…”
Maybe it goes without saying, but… (step 2?)
1. Present your opponent’s case as well as it can be presented, and let the audience see that you are not reluctant to do so. They now grasp his case well and trust that you have not hidden its best arguments from them.
2. Encourage people to read it critically for themselves.
3. Then carefully demolish his (her?) case and bounce the rubble. The audience now sees that even on its best footing your opponent’s case is unsound.
Les Johnson @ur momisugly February 12, 2013 at 9:37 am might be a starting point for rebutting the book’s claims.
4. Sometimes an author will respond to an invite to respond to an e-mailed question. If Kolbert is a journalist she might.
You should point out that, as with any catastrophe book, there is a ggod guy and a villian. and what are they going to say to get you to buy the book , “there is no catastrophe, don’t worry?”, of course not.
Then spin to, but there is a catastrophe here and its what has happened to science.
Say this. ….”I can read readin,but I can’t read writin,and
this wroten is writen rottin” ….besides the print
is to close to the paper. ]:{)….
Alfred
Katrina was still not the storm NOLA has long feared as the eye was to its East. My experience with storm surges is that they are affected by the storm strength that was that will impact what comes ashore at what height more than the wind speed as it comes ashore.
Steve’s commentary on the pilfering that had left the infrastructure dangerously weak is on the money. Nagin was ridiculously inept as was Blanco and Bush too deferential on federal/state/local issues of sovereignty. And those graphics were exploited by groups like ACORN with ties to LA and a desire to exploit any image that fed a belief in the need for social change.
On the Bushes and global warming, they were unwilling to sign Kyoto for good reasons but in general they are very cozy with UN aspirations. Probably going back to when Poppy was the Ambassador there. GWB unfortunately got us back in UNESCO causing further damage to American education. Laura chaired the UN Decade for Literacy. I seem to remember that Barbara Bush chaired the US delegation related to Education for All in 1990.
If anything any hands off may have stemmed more from Gore making it such a personal issue than reluctance to embrace international initiatives on climate. Many in the oil business love all this green hyping. Which has always intrigued me.
Sir karl Raimund Popper said that it gains nothing to attack the weak argument. It is necessary to state the opposing arguement in the strongest terms possible so that the attack on it and the defeat of it actually means something.
Steve Mosher is correct. First, state her position fully, not as truth but as assertions. Second, show that the assertions are incorrect by presenting data and facts that contradict those assertions. After the Sandy event you may have to agree on the inability of government to efficiently do things.
Les Johnson gave a very good listing of proof against. I would add that the presentation is best done in graphs…visual means and not just verbal. I have been of late copying charts from the presentations on WUWT and other sites. I want to make a small presentation on a tablet so that in 5 or 10 minutes I can show what the issue of “global warming” really is, in simple visual form. (I must state that I am from Las Vegas, a delightfully wicked place, and revel in the heat…105 at 7% humidity is an extraordinary experience approaching ecstasy.)
This is the sequence I am looking for:
1. A graph showing the paleoclimate for 400,000 years to show that the earth is a cold planet with warm interludes and that all the plants and animals have gone through these interglatials before…there is nothing new under the sun.
2. A graph of the temperatures in the present interglacial. Note that the interglacial started warm and the temperature has been declining, with the peak of each warming period being lower than the next. This has not been mentioned much in the discussions, but when the end of an interglacial is an ice age and that the transition is only one lifetime, that is scarry. There have been references to some articles stating that the danger is a new ice age, but I have not gotten around to them yet.
3. Les Johnsons stuff and that of others above. Also talk about black carbon, UHI and waste heat, and the siting of weather sites, and adjustments to the raw data…as you are a WUWT reader this is readily available.
4. There was a graph the last week +/- on WUWT that showed agricultural production from historical times to present. No catastrophe. Use it.
For awhile I have thought that there is a great need for a short presentation of graphs and charts that addresses the point of the “warming hysteria” crowd. It must have an elegant simplicity that is understandable by the common person. We are not trying to convince the leaders and alarmists, we are trying to show the common person who votes that what the issue is and that there are problems, but not catastrophe and doom.
Not enough of a scan of her book at Google Books for me to look into it. But I’d suggest taking a close look at the section where “Kolbert brings to attention the attempts of large corporations such as Exxon Mobil … to influence politicians and discrediting scientists.” Who does she cite as her source, and does it filter back to the same guy I mentioned in my November WUWT guest post http://ow.ly/hEEB5 ? If she can’t do any better than others on the ‘big oil funding’ accusation, then her book is just another log thrown on the fire for an accusation that relies on a single unsupportable source when saying skeptics should be ignored.
Visuals are good.
Here are the state high temp records. Almost all are from the 1930s.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/weather/wheat7.htm
The arctic was ice free in 5000 BC.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020095850.htm
The Hypsithermal was 5 degrees F warmer than now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum
And here is the GISP2 temperature reconstruction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greenland_Gisp2_Temperature.svg
Poke around on here for the weather stations that show us “warming.”
http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm
Here is an analysis of the deaths due to Katrina by location. It was the old who were left to die AFTER the levees failed AND the political leadership fled. This was a political failure.
http://new.dhh.louisiana.gov/assets/docs/katrina/deceasedreports/KatrinaDeaths_082008.pdf
It has been hotter in the past in the S Hemisphere.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/14/global-warming-it-was-warmer-in-sydney-in-1790/#more-77477
As for social aspects, here is what occurred when it got colder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315-1317
Here is my own checklist for a non-fiction critical review. My words, organization, but with ideas from UTEP and ECU,OK
What is the author’s thesis? Is it stated or is it your interpretation?
Did the author’s thesis agree with your own beliefs prior to reading it?
What facts or topics did you learn from this book?
What elements are well reasoned and presented.
What elements are poorly reasoned or confused?
What elements are unfairly presented or slanted?
What pieces are missing? What topics should be there given the thesis, but are not?
What may have changed since the book’s printing?
Was this book worth your time?
What will you most remember from the book?
Who should take the time to read it?