inebemm
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Wednesday, April 12, 2006
The Heat is On
... and the crooked timber (the eponymous blog, that is) is catching fire about
Bjørn Lomborg and his book The Skeptical Environmentalist. First I thought I'd pour some oil on the water on that comment thread, but then, since it's a fire, oil might no be a good idea; so I pour the stuff here instead.
I borrowed it from Peter, which was, if not a global warming denialist, at least very skeptical of the whole thing, whereas I was arguing for the opposite side. After reading it, I thought it was excellent and I agreed with at least 99% of it. I think he has also refined his views after our discussions, and reading Diamonds's Guns, Germs, and Steel . Well, what do you expect between civilised friends?
I made a parabole based on this book about the Greenland Vikings, and how it is plain in hindsight that, faced with the Little Ice Age, they should had either moved or changed their lifestyles.
Framed in our terms, their Greenpeaceniks hippie equivalents would have argued "we cannot continue with our lavish way of life, where every middle-class Viking wastes farmland growing barley for cows and pigs, has two drakkars on the beach, for importing French claret all the way across the Atlantic, and cuts down all the trees to build them. You need 8,3 Greenlands to live like that. We must abandon those extravagances, and instead live in igloos and subsist on sour herring and seals' eyes, or Wotan will strike us down!"
Similarly, the equivalent of the drakkar, timber and wine importers' lobby would say that this whole Fimbula Winter threat was a ploy to increase the Midwinterblot sacrifices, and we know who's eating all that bacon that Wotan doesn't take with him to Valhalla, eh?
It's a shame that such a complex and important question cannot be discussed without that kind of fiery polemics. Recently, I noticed that the Skeptical Environmentalist was on the economic shelf (Qade) of the Stockholm's Library, when they have a whole sub-section with at least a dozen meter of booksheves devoted to the environment (Uh, 'Miljölära'); talk about beeing reminded of CP Snow's The Two Cultures, or rather the n cultures...
Firstly, the Earth climate is not simple at all, and even if its general principles are on the whole grasped by scientists (I highly recommend James Lovelock's Gaïa to get the basics), details and predictions is about as good as guessing. Which doesn't make anybody's opinion on the problems as good as everybody else's, but many seem to think so.
Furthermore, it is highly controversial politicaly as well. We're talking about at minimum hundreds of billions of dollars affected by which policies are chosen, and that kind of money talks very loud indeed.
And in America, there is the "sound science" lobby, which wants to discredit evolution, smoke-induced cancer as so-called "bad science", climate change, on behalf of ideological and/or commercial interests.
On the other hand, the Kyoto Protocol is a at best a mixed (in disfavour of the) blessings. I support it, but I don't want to see it implemented. That sounds like heresy is some ears, where the thinking between those auditory appendices is that ideas are either Good or Evil; chant with us: "Kyoto Good, Exxon Evil".
Emission reduction are probably a very bad way of fighting climate change, even if the mechanism is based on a good princple, tradable emmission permits (and even that is in practice not so good as the Protocol does not implement it fully)
Technology development, specifically development of better and new energy sources, will have a much more effective impact, by order of magnitudes, compared to emission reduction, beside beeing a benefit in itself instead of a cost. That's exactly what the Climate Change Partnership sez it's all about, but I suspect that like Bush's state of the union hydrogen proposal some years sgo, it is just that, hot air for the proclimatomutationist orthodoxy.
Which is why I want the Climate Change Partnership implemented, but I don't support it.
But maybe I should beware of orthodoxs, considering how the other side's zealots have treated Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore as an apostate after he commited nuclear heresy in a WaPo editorial a little over a week ago.
So, what to do? Like most other such grand questions, the best thing is to increase one's knowledge, in a skeptical and open-minded manner, not because you will find a solution, you won't ,(unless you're Nobel stuff), but because increasing the global degree of cumulative knowledge will cool heads.
So, you can chill out by checking, besides all the links above, cool places like for instance the Ergosphere and Real Climate.
(1) people said something about this
Bjørn Lomborg and his book The Skeptical Environmentalist. First I thought I'd pour some oil on the water on that comment thread, but then, since it's a fire, oil might no be a good idea; so I pour the stuff here instead.
I borrowed it from Peter, which was, if not a global warming denialist, at least very skeptical of the whole thing, whereas I was arguing for the opposite side. After reading it, I thought it was excellent and I agreed with at least 99% of it. I think he has also refined his views after our discussions, and reading Diamonds's Guns, Germs, and Steel . Well, what do you expect between civilised friends?
I made a parabole based on this book about the Greenland Vikings, and how it is plain in hindsight that, faced with the Little Ice Age, they should had either moved or changed their lifestyles.
Framed in our terms, their Greenpeaceniks hippie equivalents would have argued "we cannot continue with our lavish way of life, where every middle-class Viking wastes farmland growing barley for cows and pigs, has two drakkars on the beach, for importing French claret all the way across the Atlantic, and cuts down all the trees to build them. You need 8,3 Greenlands to live like that. We must abandon those extravagances, and instead live in igloos and subsist on sour herring and seals' eyes, or Wotan will strike us down!"
Similarly, the equivalent of the drakkar, timber and wine importers' lobby would say that this whole Fimbula Winter threat was a ploy to increase the Midwinterblot sacrifices, and we know who's eating all that bacon that Wotan doesn't take with him to Valhalla, eh?
It's a shame that such a complex and important question cannot be discussed without that kind of fiery polemics. Recently, I noticed that the Skeptical Environmentalist was on the economic shelf (Qade) of the Stockholm's Library, when they have a whole sub-section with at least a dozen meter of booksheves devoted to the environment (Uh, 'Miljölära'); talk about beeing reminded of CP Snow's The Two Cultures, or rather the n cultures...
Firstly, the Earth climate is not simple at all, and even if its general principles are on the whole grasped by scientists (I highly recommend James Lovelock's Gaïa to get the basics), details and predictions is about as good as guessing. Which doesn't make anybody's opinion on the problems as good as everybody else's, but many seem to think so.
Furthermore, it is highly controversial politicaly as well. We're talking about at minimum hundreds of billions of dollars affected by which policies are chosen, and that kind of money talks very loud indeed.
And in America, there is the "sound science" lobby, which wants to discredit evolution, smoke-induced cancer as so-called "bad science", climate change, on behalf of ideological and/or commercial interests.
On the other hand, the Kyoto Protocol is a at best a mixed (in disfavour of the) blessings. I support it, but I don't want to see it implemented. That sounds like heresy is some ears, where the thinking between those auditory appendices is that ideas are either Good or Evil; chant with us: "Kyoto Good, Exxon Evil".
Emission reduction are probably a very bad way of fighting climate change, even if the mechanism is based on a good princple, tradable emmission permits (and even that is in practice not so good as the Protocol does not implement it fully)
Technology development, specifically development of better and new energy sources, will have a much more effective impact, by order of magnitudes, compared to emission reduction, beside beeing a benefit in itself instead of a cost. That's exactly what the Climate Change Partnership sez it's all about, but I suspect that like Bush's state of the union hydrogen proposal some years sgo, it is just that, hot air for the proclimatomutationist orthodoxy.
Which is why I want the Climate Change Partnership implemented, but I don't support it.
But maybe I should beware of orthodoxs, considering how the other side's zealots have treated Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore as an apostate after he commited nuclear heresy in a WaPo editorial a little over a week ago.
So, what to do? Like most other such grand questions, the best thing is to increase one's knowledge, in a skeptical and open-minded manner, not because you will find a solution, you won't ,(unless you're Nobel stuff), but because increasing the global degree of cumulative knowledge will cool heads.
So, you can chill out by checking, besides all the links above, cool places like for instance the Ergosphere and Real Climate.