The Inconvenient Truth: Inconvenient!

Warned by Kevin Drum to expect the worst, I wound up needing to read Emily Yoffe's op-ed on global warming three times to try to figure out what she's saying. In essence, it seems that she doesn't want to dispute the fact that carbon emissions are contributing to climate change in a problematic way or that this provides us with a reason to hope for changes in our policies. Nevertheless, she wishes that Al Gore and other warmingmongers would just keep quiet about it because, well, all this talk of catastrophe is a downer.

So here's a deal. All Yoffe needs to do is convince politicians from oil, coal, gas, and automobile manufacturing states, plus conservative politicians generally, plus the leaders of large countries in the developing world like China and India, that global warming is really bad and that hearing about it is a drag. Then, with all those guys on board, we'll lick the problem super-fast and everyone can stop talking about it.

Comments

Yoffe:
"And I think it's wrong to let our children believe they'll be swept away before they get a chance to fret about college admissions."

But what will happen to the children if Yoffe isn't around to shoot the messenger.

Posted by ChrisB | June 25, 2007 9:17 AM

From the article: In his new book, "The Assault on Reason," Gore denounces what he sees as today's politics of fear. Yet his own campaign of mass persuasion -- any such campaign -- is not amenable to contradiction and uncertainty. It's about fright and absolutes. But just because something can be plotted on an X and Y axis does not make it the whole truth.

What does the last sentence mean?

Posted by stm177 | June 25, 2007 9:18 AM

You know, I was really sure that nothing would touch that Norman Podhoretz disaster on bombing Iran as the Worst Column of 2007. I figured he ended the debate right early. But at least he was trying to make a point with that one, however bad that point might be.

This one is stupefying on a whole other level. It's the strongest illustration so far of the Slate desire to be contrarian for contrarianism's sake. She doesn't actually disagree with warming "alarmists," but she's going to disagree with them anyway. Just too bizarre.

On the other hand, the first comment at Kevin's place is brilliant.

Posted by jhupp | June 25, 2007 9:22 AM

Tiny -- infinitesimal, actually -- almost necessary additions of CO2 which are scheduled to have their worst impacts 20-100 years in the future? Anyone who wrings their hands over this issue is going to seem perverse. Or worse: pathetic. My recent thought on the matter is that there are too many interests pitted against even simple mitigation -- don't even talk about avoidance -- to avoid a disaster. We ARE going down the road of Rapa Nui. We ARE going to cut down all our trees, so to speak. We ARE going to experience the worst of whatever the consequence of Global Warming will be. It will be a 100 year hiatus from beneficent Mother Nature replaced with Mother Nature's evil twin.

I despise fatalism, but I really don't see reason for hope on this. That plodding numbness in The Children of Men? 50 years from now that will seem chipper.

But, hey, how was your weekend?

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 9:24 AM

That article is extremely surprising. It was written by a newspaper reporter and though it could be 'smarter', it's not stupid!

The basic fact is that right now there is no evidence, none whatsoever, that can be called 'empirical' for anthropogenic global warming, man caused rather than 'natural', or at least can be called empirical without someone who knows what the word means getting the urge burst out in a howl of derisive laughter.

I forgot! There is one piece of empirically found evidence about all this. The 'hockey stick' stuff from tree rings, the study that says the the global temps were constant until recently is so flawed that though it is plausible that the guy that did it was stupid enough to believe it sound, it is wildly implausible that something that foolish gets through 'peer review' unscathed. But it did! It has been empirically established that an intelligent person would demand that any evidence climatologists might claim to be empirical cannot be believed until an 'outside audit' is done.

The basic fact of the matter is the whole 'anthropogenic global warming' thing is at the same state as someone getting up on a soapbox and claiming that a large asteroid is going to hit the earth in 2015 so we should devote lots of resources to digging and stockpiling caves to ride out the long and bitter cold winter the dust the asteroid impact will kick up into the atmosphere will cause. Maybe Al Gore should start getting into that too.

Posted by j mct | June 25, 2007 9:45 AM

Shorter Yoffe: Won't someone please think of the children?!?!!?!?!!?!?

Feh.

Posted by AJ | June 25, 2007 9:45 AM

the first comment at Kevin's place is brilliant.

So is the second.

Posted by Matt Weiner | June 25, 2007 10:25 AM

...it is wildly implausible that something that foolish gets through 'peer review' unscathed. But it did!

Whew! I was worried about all this climate change stuff, but j mct has helped me realize that it's not global warming, but the peer review process that I need to worry about. Hell, it's clear to me now that even random comments on blogs are more reliable than the peer review process! I'm gonna go cancel my subscription to scientific american now...I can't believe they've been duping me for so long!!

Posted by DMonteith | June 25, 2007 10:42 AM

Although I too was expecting worse after reading Kevin's warning, it's worth pointing out that Yoffe's column is far from benign on the actual science of global warming. She dredges up the incredibly musty canard about the Medieval Warm Period. She implies that uncertainty over the effect of global warming on hurricanes reflects general scientific uncertainty over anthropogenic global warming. And -- perhaps most painfully -- she elides the difference between weather and climate with a truly vapid statement about how we can't trust predictions for 2080 if we don't even know whether it's going to rain in August.

In short, she pays lip service to accepting the scientific consensus, and then repeats a variety of common denialist arguments under the guise of criticizing fearmongering. It's an odd and poorly reasoned piece.

Posted by Adam | June 25, 2007 10:50 AM

There was an 'outside audit' done on the 'hockey stick' study done, it was commissioned by Congress no less, and the audit did demonstrate that the claims made by the hockey stick study vis a vis the 'Little Ice Age', i.e. the time when during a normal winter a Manhattanite could walk to Brooklyn over the frozen East River, were pure crap. Per the hockey stick , that was 'local'.

They were a bit more agnostic about the Medevial Warm Period, not saying with certitude that the claims of the study were obviously wrong, but just that the hockey stick stuff, being obvious crap, was irrelevant to the truth of the matter since the temps of the period, where supposedly there were vineyards in England, were less exhaustically documented.

As I said before, I was talking about an 'intelligent' person. One can decide about Scientific American using that criteria and get what ever answer one wishes, I suppose.

Posted by j mct | June 25, 2007 11:17 AM

Don't forget that Yoffe is an advice columnist for Slate. And she isn't even a very good one: she is no where near as good as the columnist she replaced, Margo Howard.

However, I find it amazing that when we get record high temperatures we all figure it must be global warming while we don't repond at all to record low temperatures.

As best as I can figure out, CO2 caused global warming in the US MIGHT be responsible for an increase in temperature of less .5 degrees. In 100 years, it could easily by 5 or 10 degrees but right now it is not possible to feel the change.

Posted by neil wilson | June 25, 2007 11:36 AM

Stop spinning:

Overall, the panel agreed that the warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years, though relatively warm conditions persisted around the year 1000, followed by a "Little Ice Age" from about 1500 to 1850.

You can't cite this audit and also claim that there is no evidence for AGW.

Posted by Matt Weiner | June 25, 2007 11:38 AM

I think Yoffe's main point was that movements that rely almost exlusively on language that is loud, incessant, and strident are almost certain to see an eventual message tune-out on the part of much of the public.

I don't have any direct evidence for this, but it's my feeling that the global warming message is running into three specific roadblocks: 1) people lead harried lives and have a ton of competing demands for their time and attention. They simply can't afford to spend much of either worrying about global warming, much less doing anything about it; 2) people are being bombarded by so many "crises", both real and phony (the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Smoking, stagnant wages, the obesity "epidemic", antibiotic resistant diseases, the state of public education, cock fighting, etc.), that phenomenon #1 is even more pronounced; and 3) it truly is a global problem, which dilutes the "blame America and Americans for their gluttonous ways" subtext of much of the Gore gospel. When people read that China will surpass the U.S. in CO2 emissions this year and think "I'll give up my second car and turn off my AC when they clean up their act", that's an understandable, if not productive, attitude.

Posted by Claudius | June 25, 2007 11:40 AM

Accepting the existence of global warming and signing the Kyoto Accords will lead to a massive increase in federal government regulation of industry in the US. One side of the political spectrum in the US is very much against federal government regulation of US industry. Of course that doesn't matter because it snowed in Cleveland in early april. Sure didn't see that coming.

Posted by jg | June 25, 2007 11:41 AM

"There was an 'outside audit' done on the 'hockey stick' study done, it was commissioned by Congress no less, and the audit did demonstrate that the claims made by the hockey stick study vis a vis the 'Little Ice Age', i.e. the time when during a normal winter a Manhattanite could walk to Brooklyn over the frozen East River, were pure crap. Per the hockey stick , that was 'local'."

A fantastically link-free comment, with a rather difficult-to-parse block of text.

Posted by Barry | June 25, 2007 11:57 AM

j mct,

I suspect that you are confusing (perhaps deliberately) signal and noise here. One or even ten studies claiming global warming is crap constitutes noise when stacked against hundreds and hundreds of studies pointing the other way. In fact, contradictory studies are virtually guaranteed when confronting large data sets such as this, simply due to sampling variation and error. Cherry picking is bad form in this context.

I also suspect that you have never read (or failed to understand if you did read it) Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It speaks powerfully to questions concerning how science "knows" what it knows, and provides an important context for understanding concepts such as "scientific consensus". Had you read and understood it, you would not claim that your 'outside audit' constitutes a paradigm challenging anomaly (quotation marks notwithstanding).

Finally, I suspect that the set of "itelligent people" is not merely a subset of "people who agree with j mct", but, of course, your mileage may vary.

Posted by DMonteith | June 25, 2007 12:05 PM

Read the article. Yes, it's warmer now that it has been in the last 400 years. Everybody already knew that anyway. There is a letter of Thomas Jefferson's written when he was an old man remarking on how much less snow fell in Virginia in 1820 versus when he was a kid. Per the 'hockey stick' this was either local or wrong. So much for the hockey stick.

The whole 'its warmer now than in the last few thousand years is a statement that relies on all the evidence available for what the temp was 1000 years ago to be faulty given it's extreme anecdotalness. But it's the only evidence there is and if one makes do with what one has, the earth was warmer 1000 years ago than it is now.

As far the rapidity of the rise being the highest in the 'last 1000 years', so what if true, unless one is a young earth creationist type.

They don't have any evidence that can be called 'empirical' about anthropogenic global warming and that's basically that. It doesn't mean that won't change in the future, and obviously one should continue doing it and if they do come up with something that can be called empirical in the future then one should take them seriously. I also think we should be sweeping the skies for asteroids too.

Posted by j mct | June 25, 2007 12:17 PM

"I also suspect that you have never read (or failed to understand if you did read it) Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

You seem to have failed to understand the book. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions dealt with radical changes in the theoretical explanations for observable phenomena; much of the dispute about global warming centers on the accuracy of alleged measurements of observable phenomena. There is also an enormous political component to the global warming issue, which makes it different from examples given in Kuhn's book.

Posted by Harry | June 25, 2007 12:25 PM

Really, after someone says that we should ignore everything climatologists say about global warming, I don't see why we bother.

Posted by Matt Weiner | June 25, 2007 12:26 PM

Message to the scientists of the world:

All papers must henceforth be submitted to j mct who will check them for "anecdotal-osity" and verify that their empirical-ness meets his standards before they are published. Any claptrap about tree-rings, ice cores, deep sea sediments or "chemistry" is too anecdotal-y, so don't even try it.

Alternate message to j mct:

Your saying that "They don't have any evidence that can be called 'empirical' about anthropogenic global warming and that's basically that..." doesn't make it so. Your ignorance is making me embarrassed for you. Please stop.

Posted by DMonteith | June 25, 2007 12:39 PM

I don't see what the problem is. She says that the incessant hysterical hype over Global Warming is going to prove counter-productive in the long run. I would have thought that was obvious. Even if the IPCC is right we are not talking about the imminent extinction of the human races or even any sizeable number of other species. We have been here before. Telling children lies about the evils of drugs did and does not work. Marijuana is not going to turn you into a mass murderer in five minutes nor make you hang out on street corners selling your body. When you tell children that they pretty soon find out it is not true. I have no doubt that one day soon you'll find Gore's film alongside "Reefer Madness". That doesn't mean marijuana is good for you, by the way.

Posted by HeiGou | June 25, 2007 12:42 PM

Re: We ARE going down the road of Rapa Nui.

Hmm, I guess that means we'll be invaded by space aliens who will haul most of us off to slavery on a distant planet and leave behind some nasty alien germs which will kill off the rest of us. That is what really destroyed Rapa Nui's civilization (OK, not space aliens, just slavers from South America). That its collapse was due to some sort of ecological trouble is a myth that has been debunked by careful histiorians (though alas, the otherwise brilliant Jared Diamond either failed to review their works or deliberately discounted them.)

Posted by JonF | June 25, 2007 12:44 PM

Harry,

I agree with you concerning the measurment controversies concerning global warning. I would argue, though, that the emergence of the scientific consensus concerning the reality of global warming has taken a very Kuhnian path. I would also argue that the cultural/political components and implications of the global warming issue are not significantly different than many of those surrounding heliocentricity or evolution.

We, however, are splitting hairs, whereas what I was doing when I first mentioned Kuhn was more analogous to chopping wood. My apologies for any liberties you feel I may have taken in the interests of expediency.

Posted by DMonteith | June 25, 2007 12:59 PM

An Inconvenient Truth equates to Reefer Madness? Boy you people are desperate. The global warming recognition movement isn't trying to scare anyone into doing anything. It seems that way but when you're trying to convince people there is an issue that needs to be addressed you sometimes have to highlight the worst case scenerio to get attention. Especially when dealing with opposition like the right wing. The fact that the right represents the industries that will be hardest hit by Kyoto is significant and says a lot about their denials.

Posted by jg | June 25, 2007 1:05 PM

HeiGou, first off, that's not what she says. what she says is "don't scare the children or me, because after all, hurricane activity is hard to predict, as is the weather next week." Indeed, she doesn't appear to be concerned about "counter-productive" in the long run; she is saying that just cause you can plot it on an x/y axis, it ain't necessarily so.

second off, if we were facing incessant hysterical hype about global warming comparable to incessant hysterical hype about drugs, then your analogy would make sense. but we are not: if the total sum and substance of drug hysteria were reefer madness, then there might be something analogous at hand.

when i was 9, we practiced for atomic bomb attacks in school; some kids were scared. yoffe would have us believe that we should never have mentioned the potential for nuclear armaggedon....

Posted by howard | June 25, 2007 1:13 PM

anent Rapa Nui's demise:

Rats that came w/ the initial colonization > South American slavers.

Theorizers > careful historians

alternate theory > debunked

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 1:13 PM

Posted by jg | June 25, 2007 1:05 PM:"An Inconvenient Truth equates to Reefer Madness? Boy you people are desperate. The global warming recognition movement isn't trying to scare anyone into doing anything."

You must be listening to a different Global Warming industry to me then because last I checked they were trying to reduce CO2 emissions by 60 percent - which means a return to the 18th century.

Posted by jg | June 25, 2007 1:05 PM:"It seems that way but when you're trying to convince people there is an issue that needs to be addressed you sometimes have to highlight the worst case scenerio to get attention."

Indeed. As with Reefer Madness.

Posted by jg | June 25, 2007 1:05 PM:"Especially when dealing with opposition like the right wing. The fact that the right represents the industries that will be hardest hit by Kyoto is significant and says a lot about their denials."

Yeah yeah yeah. If you have a case argue the law, if you don't argue the man.

Posted by howard | June 25, 2007 1:13 PM :"first off, that's not what she says. what she says is "don't scare the children or me, because after all, hurricane activity is hard to predict, as is the weather next week." Indeed, she doesn't appear to be concerned about "counter-productive" in the long run"

Well maybe she is not concerned it is counter productive, but she is realistic. All life is not about to end. We all know that. Claims to the contrary are counter productive even if she is only interested in accuracy.

Posted by howard | June 25, 2007 1:13 PM:"second off, if we were facing incessant hysterical hype about global warming comparable to incessant hysterical hype about drugs, then your analogy would make sense. but we are not"

You may not, but some of us sure are.

Posted by howard | June 25, 2007 1:13 PM:"When i was 9, we practiced for atomic bomb attacks in school; some kids were scared. yoffe would have us believe that we should never have mentioned the potential for nuclear armaggedon...."

Duck and Cover should be a text book case for bad campaigns. It is not that they should not have mentioned it at all, it is just that they should not have used fear to terrorise children and push a Cold War paranoia. Duck and Cover is just like Gore's film.

Posted by HeiGou | June 25, 2007 1:25 PM

You must be listening to a different Global Warming industry to me then because last I checked they were trying to reduce CO2 emissions by 60 percent - which means a return to the 18th century.

No. By definition. To return to pre-industrial 18th Century would be 100%. Half of all CO2 has been put into the atmosphere since 1970.

Nasty wicked rhetoric: "Global Warming industry.

Shame, shame.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 1:39 PM

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 1:39 PM:"No. By definition. To return to pre-industrial 18th Century would be 100%. Half of all CO2 has been put into the atmosphere since 1970."

That is an interesting definition. Last I checked the 18th century involved a lot of tree felling and forest removal (as well as the invention of the steam engine and other uses for coal).

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 1:39 PM:"Nasty wicked rhetoric: "Global Warming industry.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 1:39 PM:"Shame, shame."

Why should you all have all the fun?

Posted by HeiGou | June 25, 2007 1:57 PM

Do right-wingers not have to take basic science and history of science? Considering that Charlemagne did not require the type of record-keeping that we would need to make global warming research 99.999999% accurate and the fact that current technology is perfect when measuring these things, there is going to be some uncertainty and fuzziness, but that doesn't change the fact the data in general tends to all point the same way. It's like these guys looked up "post-modernism" on dictionary.com and just ran with it. I'm predicting that soon we'll see a post like "Well, you have facts and data, but can we ever trust facts and data? Facts and data are made by men and men are infallible, so facts and data are therefore infallible and can be ignored in favor of logic games in our head. Aristotle thus concluded that women have fewer teeth then men. Women, in my experience, eat less meat and more soft fruit than men and thus have less need of many teeth, so this must be true. Anyway, you data of the number of teeth men and women have only go back 1,000 years and leave out data from the southern tip of East Timor and the Muslim minorities among the Yugurs of Ningxia. How can we trust such data? You must be a racist to overlook them."

Posted by Reality Man | June 25, 2007 2:27 PM

"lots of tree felling"

People have been felling trees in huge numbers since they could. Several thousands of years. (And it has been suggested that slash-and-burn etc DID change the climate.)

The number of steam engines in the 18th century is very small.

Don't try to let rhetoric do the work of facts.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 3:19 PM

Posted by Reality Man | June 25, 2007 2:27 PM:"Do right-wingers not have to take basic science and history of science?"

Naaah, we're too busy out holding secret Zionist Occupation Government meetings. Those evil plots don't hatch on their own you know.

Posted by Reality Man | June 25, 2007 2:27 PM:"Considering that Charlemagne did not require the type of record-keeping that we would need to make global warming research 99.999999% accurate and the fact that current technology is perfect when measuring these things, there is going to be some uncertainty and fuzziness, but that doesn't change the fact the data in general tends to all point the same way."

Sorry but what? Charlemange might not have, but tree rings reflect temperature. Ice traps gas. The Japanese kept very nice records of cherry blossom times. We can have some idea of past temperature. The current technology is not perfect as many weather stations suffer heat island effects (you know, they are next to air ports and the like). There is going to be a lot of fuzziness, but the general trends do not all point the same way. The last few years the planet has been getting cooler. MMGW is based on models. Models are next to useless.

Posted by Reality Man | June 25, 2007 2:27 PM:"the Muslim minorities among the Yugurs of Ningxia."

The Yugurs are surely all Buddhists or they would not be Yugurs?

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 3:19 PM:"People have been felling trees in huge numbers since they could. Several thousands of years. (And it has been suggested that slash-and-burn etc DID change the climate.)"

And your point about the tree felling would be?

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 3:19 PM:"The number of steam engines in the 18th century is very small."

Although the number of coal burning fires was probably larger. Your point is?

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 3:19 PM:"Don't try to let rhetoric do the work of facts."

And the fact remains that the Greens want to end modern industrial society as we know it.

Posted by HeiGou | June 25, 2007 3:35 PM

"Your point is?"

That your point was bogus.

"As we know it"

Void for vagueness.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2007 3:43 PM

As if the basic modus operandi of Slate and its writers isn't to peddle asinine contrarianism, a certain amount of center-left conventional wisdom, and a certain amount of backlash liberalism mixed in for good measure (with all of these designed not to offend Slate's corporate sponsors)?

It could be a genuine hard hitting internet journal of investigative reporting, first rate reviews of movies, music, and books, and truly provocative opinion (I imagine I'll drop dead before I read someone in Slate suggest that there's no empirical basis for makingsex between adults and adolescents illegal, or for that matter that you shouldn't invade foreign countries because killing people is bad), but alas. The fact that there is virtually no audience for middlebrow center-left cw and a huge audience for Deaniac populism apparently doesn't matter.

Posted by Linus | June 25, 2007 9:37 PM

The thing that interests me about these times is that unlike previous times when you could only understand the demented people in charge of the country and in the media about as well as you understand your parents, you actually *know* the people about to be in charge of the country and the media when they inhabited sad little boxes of shame.

You may suspect that Diane Feinstein - before she was busy shuttling bankruptcy bills out of committee - was the kind of girl who went to stag parties on Nob Hill with the nudie flicks projected on the wall, and everyone popping bennies.

But you can know for certain that Emily Yoffee was the kind of girl who - because she listened to the right bands, carried the cool British lunchbox (which she kept on carrying until she was like 30), and on occasion made some witty, clever remark - got herself invited to your friend's party (this was the friend whose mother [the sole parent] was in Japan for like 10 months out of the year) but nevertheless could not get herself laid (despite the fact that literally the dumbest, most lecherous, and totally wasted boys in school are present).

And despite the fact that you're thirteen (and there with several of your thirteen year old friends who are willing to endure several hours of boredom on a Saturday night just to see those girls do their lingerie dance to "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights") and will have to skateboard several miles with all the booze you've stolen from the high school kids in your backpacks (which you will consume later that night at one of your houses while watching Hellraiser, and possibly playing with each other for no special reason), you refuse a ride from her in her Jetta because you know she will be annoying and morose.

Posted by Linus | June 25, 2007 11:24 PM

Okay that was mean about Ms. Yoffe not being able to get laid. I think the truth was probably more grim. Somewhere deep down you know she was one of those girls who was saving herself for the one boy in school (her best friend) who everyone but her could tell was completely gay.

But after he invites her to the prom (this is the night she thinks), she ends up spending the after hours with Bill (the gay guy who works downtown at the record store) sitting in the Jetta on one of those turnoffs on Kanan Road (on the way to the beach) unseriously contemplating aloud that they could become just like Chad Lowe in that made for tv teen suicide flick (the one where he drives his Camaro over the cliff).

Linus doesn't like Bill. He was always taking the CDs out of your hands and putting them back in the rows as if to say buy something or take your little friends with you kid, and if you steal anything I'm sending you all to juvie.

Posted by Linus | June 26, 2007 11:43 AM

With all due respect, this is the sort of thing (high school as destiny overruling policy) that makes American politics so silly. Sure Gore was right and Bush was wrong at the debates, but Bush was a fun guy who staggered back home from high school half-drunk on booze stolen from high school kids, while Gore sat home with the character sheet for his half-elven wizard wedged into his geology book...

Posted by SFG | June 26, 2007 11:57 AM