Let Cooler Heads Prevail

Read the column, take a deep breath and marvel at the utter dishonesty. George Will is supposedly one of the less extreme conservative columnists out there. But I guess when it comes to this issue, he has no qualms about misleading, setting up strawmen, and actually lying. I don’t think I can add any to the rebuttal from Progress Report…

On Sunday, conservative pundit George Will used prime space in the Washington Post and other major papers to suggest that not only is global warming not the result of human activity, but that global warming may not exist at all. There is no evidence to support Will’s claim, so he resorted to distortion.

WILL SUGGESTS GLOBAL WARMING MIGHT NOT EXIST: George Will notes that global temperatures have risen about one degree over the last 100 years, but that “might be the margin of error when measuring the planet’s temperature.” Embarrassingly, the only support Will provides for this statement is a crude analogy. (“To take a person’s temperature, you put a thermometer in an orifice or under an arm. Taking the temperature of our churning planet, with its tectonic plates sliding around over a molten core, involves limited precision.”) There is not a shred of scientific evidence to support Will’s position that the earth is not warming. Science Magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus that the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity.

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND GEORGE WILL’S CITATIONS: The highlight of Will’s column is a list of citations from the 1970s of publications that purportedly warn of “global cooling.” (Nevermind that, even if it were all true, it does not function as an analytic rebuttal to scientific evidence of global warming caused by human activity.) The first such citation is from a December 1976 edition of Science Magazine which warned of “extensive Northern Hemispheric glaciation.” The use of this quote is outrageously dishonest. First, the article in question deals with variations in the earth’s climate based on variations in the earth’s orbit over periods of 20,000 years or longer. Second, the article explicitly excludes the effect of humans on the climate. (The article states its predictions apply “only to the natural component of future climatic trends — and not to such anthropogenic effects as those due to the burning of fossil fuels.) George Will is clearly counting on the fact that most of his readers will not have access to a 1976 edition of Science Magazine.

And it goes on to rebut every one of his bromides. Read it! Here’s a media issue that Will brings up:

About the mystery that vexes ABC — Why have Americans been slow to get in lock step concerning global warming? — perhaps the “problem” is not big oil or big coal, both of which have discovered there is big money to be made from tax breaks and other subsidies justified in the name of combating carbon.

Perhaps the problem is big crusading journalism.

Perhaps the problem is utter lack of federal leadership on this issue. To use my favorite “If they can put a man on the moon” line of reasoning, Armstrong did not make it to the moon because a bunch of Americans on the street were “quick to get in lock step concerning the Moon program” (ah, to use Will’s own words). It took a coordinated effort on the part of government to establish clear targets, pump in a lot of money, and marshall the scientific resources towards achieving the target. And this was an engineering problem with a specific target and solution. Deal with the complex, only partly characterized beast that is global climate and even an idiot would conclude that no amount of individual awareness, innovation or market effort is going to be sufficient.

Dealing with climate change requires a lot of effort on the part of a lot of people, it will require individual ingenuity, sacrifice and market forces, but it starts with the will to do it (and the George Will to not stand in the way!), and the will, as has been the case with many projects in the country starts with federal leadership and the injection of the federal dollar.

If the president stood up every day and beat the drum about climate change at half the intensity with which he talks about “Exporting Democracy”, most people would listen and get in “lock step”. In this respect I guess we live in an idea monarchy! It has everything to do with who’s doing the convincing!

Update

 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=90

The folks at RealClimate rebutted this very same comment from Will in December 2004, so this is an old, recycled lie. When will these pundits realize that in this day and age of a million fact checkers and gotcha people, you can’t really get way with this kind of BS. On the other hand, I guess he does not care.

More from the global warming drumbeat, which has by now reached tipping point proportions. I was trying a few months back to predict when global warming would become a “story” in this country, something to be reported on, rather than a “debate”, I guessed middle of the year, well, I think it arrived in March with Time and Newsweek covers, and personally with at least two friends asking me about it. News coverage of climate change has changed completely in the last few months as observations catch up with the modeling, as they do most of the time. But  people like to see proof, not model simulations which can always be explained away, well, here’s more proof…

CNN.com – Caribbean coral suffers record die-off – Mar 31, 2006
The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and Pacific ocean where mortality rates — mostly from warming waters — have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance. Goreau called what’s happening worldwide “an underwater holocaust.”

And with global warming, scientists are pessimistic about the future of coral reefs.

“The prognosis is not good,” said biochemistry professor M. James Crabbe of the University of Luton near London. In early April, he will investigate coral reef mortality in Jamaica. “If you want to see a coral reef, go now, because they just won’t survive in their current state.”

For the Caribbean, it all started with hot sea temperatures, first in Panama in the spring and early summer, and it got worse from there.

New NOAA sea surface temperature figures show the sustained heating in the Caribbean last summer and fall was by far the worst in 21 years of satellite monitoring, Eakin said.

“The 2005 event is bigger than all the previous 20 years combined,” he said.

What happened in the Caribbean would be the equivalent of every city in the United States recording a record high temperature at the same time, Eakin said. And it remained hot for weeks, even months, stressing the coral.

Study Says U.S. Companies Lag on Global Warming – New York Times

European and Asian companies are paying more attention to global warming than their American counterparts. And chemical companies are more focused on the issue than oil companies.

Those are two conclusions from “Corporate Governance and Climate Change: Making the Connection,” a report that Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmentalists, expects will influence investment decisions.

The report, released yesterday, scored 100 global corporations — 74 of them based in the United States — on their strategies for curbing greenhouse gases. It covered 10 industries — oil and gas, chemicals, metals, electric power, automotive, forest products, coal, food, industrial equipment and airlines — whose activities were most likely to emit greenhouse gases. It evaluated companies on their board oversight, management performance, public disclosure, greenhouse gas emissions, accounting and strategic planning.

The report gave the chemical industry the highest overall marks, with a score of 51.9 out of a possible 100; DuPont, with 85 points, was the highest-ranking American company in any of the industries. Airlines, in contrast, ranked lowest, with a score of 16.6; UAL, the parent of United Airlines, received just 3 points.

Well, clearly government policy and media attitudes have more to do with market behavior and regulation than the “free market fundamentalists” would care to accept.

Cleaner Air Brings Drop in Death Rate – New York Times

When air pollution in a city declines, the city benefits with a directly proportional drop in death rates, a new study has found.

In other news, Dog bites man (I have never typed “dog bites man” into google news before – shocking…)

Well, the Dockery and company published a seminal set of articles on the 6 city study back in the 90s that are the gold standard of air pollution epidemiology. It takes large long-term studies like these to establish even tenuous correlations, and their graphs connecting particle concentrations and mortality were beautiful straight lines.

This follow up is pretty cool because the cities had made most of the reductions in the 70s and 80s after the passage of the Clean Air Act and this study clearly demonstrates that the bar for lowering mortality/cancer rates by lowering fine particle levels has not been reached yet. The abstract of the paper is below the fold.

Read More “Cleaner Air Brings Drop in Death Rate – New York Times”

This is the NY Times headline, not mine!

Judges Overturn Bush Bid to Ease Pollution Rules – New York Times

But on Friday, the court said the agency went too far in 2003 when it issued a separate new rule that opponents said would exempt most equipment changes from environmental reviews — even changes that would result in higher emissions.

With a wry footnote to Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” the court said that “only in a Humpty-Dumpty world” could the law be read otherwise.

“We decline such a world view,” said their unanimous decision, written by Judge Judith W. Rogers, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Judges David Tatel, another Clinton appointee, and Janice Rogers Brown, a recent Bush appointee, joined her.

The winners this time —more than a dozen states, including New York and California and a large group of environmental organizations — hailed the decision as one of their most important gains in years of litigation, regulation and legal challenges under the Clean Air Act.

The provision of the law at issue, the “new source review” section, governs the permits required at more than 1,300 coal-fueled power plants around the country and 17,000 factories, refineries and chemical plants that spew millions of tons of pollution into the air each year.

The proposed rule would have allowed powerplants to avoid putting new controls in as long as the cost of equipment did not exceed 20% of the replacement cost of the plant. Fuzzy math, anyone! This would have let to major incentives to not build new plants using cleaner technology, but keep the “grandfathers” running. A lot of the old plants were exempted from some of the strict controls by being grandfathered into the act. Well, call me cruel, but grandfathers eventually die! I thought of this proposed rule as the “Bionic Grandpa” provision! Glad that the courts did not like it.

Priority and Toxic Chemical Reduction | Resource Conservation Challenge | US EPA

Priority and toxic chemicals make up a fairly limited volume, yet potentially hazardous portion of the nation’s waste stream. We are working to eliminate or reduce priority chemicals and other chemicals of national concern from commercial products, waste streams, and industrial releases through pollution prevention, waste minimization, and recycling/reuse.The 31 priority chemicals are federal priorities because they are persistent, bioaccumulative, and highly toxic. We’re focusing on reducing priority and toxic chemicals to better protect human health and the environment.

By substituting or eliminating certain chemicals in their manufacturing processes, companies produce less waste and thus lower their waste disposal costs. Our goal is to substantially reduce the volume and toxicity of priority chemicals in waste by asking companies to voluntarily:

• Substitute safer alternatives when they can;
• Minimize the amount of priority chemicals they use, if they can’t substitute for them;
• Maximize their recycling efforts;
• Practice cradle-to-cradle chemical management; and
• Design products to minimize exposure to, and release of, priority chemicals during manufacturing and use.

Sounds good, and Worldchanging has more:

But nowhere near the progress some companies are making on their own in cleaning up toxic emissions — not simply to be good guys, but to reduce their costs, liabilities, and exposure to activist and shareholder pressures. And, in some cases, to meet their customers’ growing demands for less-toxic or nontoxic alternatives to business as usual.

Read the whole post, which sounds ambivalent about the scheme. The idea is Environmental Good Sense 101, use less, or none at all, practice cradle to grave economics and minimize exposure. Simple stuff, huh. The biggest problem, however, is that by setting limits on a voluntary basis, you always run the risk of setting the bar too low, and then indulging in relentless and pointless self congratulation about how the “market” solved everything, and how rules are so, well, 1970s?

you need a good mix of

1. Regulation, which sets a minimum, health based bar
2. Flexibility to the business on how to achieve their targets
3. Market systems to trade emission credits, etc
4. Voluntary industry-government initiatives like the one above
5. Relentless citizen activism that forces governments/business to act
6. Community outreach and education so consumers can make informed choices
7. Costing mechanisms that actually reflect free market efficiencies (no stupid subsidies, accurate costing of “externalities”, etc. )

Yeah, this does not fit neatly into the Mano a Mano, you’re with us/you’re against us false dichotomy of choice that seems to beset almost every policy debate (environmental or otherwise). It seems that you never have to do one or the other, but a bit of both, or all of them at the same time.

In the meanwhile, the voluntary program will work, but only in areas in specific instances where it is to a company’s advantage.

BTW, I think that good old fashioned regulation in Europe – See Reach and many many more existing regulations, such as this one for PCBs and Dioxins which I know a little too much about, have a little more to do with American companies reducing POP levels that they care to admit!

From the annals of the utterly insane, it’s about 3 weeks early for April Fools pranks…

Stealth sharks to patrol the high seas

More controversially, the Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks’ natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails. By remotely guiding the sharks’ movements, they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted. The project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington, Virginia, was presented at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, last week

Read the Tom’s Dispatch article for a bigger picture look, excellent paragraph here, one can’t help but wonder…

To support letting inventive minds roam free outside normal frameworks is in itself an inspired idea. But I bet there’s no DARPA-like agency elsewhere in the government funding the equivalent for education 2025 or health 2025 or even energy independence 2025. To have this happen, I’m afraid, you would have to transform them into Northcom war games.

I do not believe that throwing money into research solves all problems, but I wonder what would happen if the US of A did not spend all its spare cash and (up to the eyeballs) in debt on defense. The incredible amounts of money spent on defense makes many people rich, keeps many companies afloat, creates many jobs, etc. But so would massive amounts of government funding on pretty much any other, more worthwhile venture.

From the annals of “Make them Laugh”

newsobserver.com | Local & State

North Carolina has spent six years searching for systems to replace hog lagoons — the open air ponds used to treat waste at hog farms. But according a $17.3-million study’s final results, released today, researchers haven’t found workable alternatives. Mike Williams, a N.C. State University professor and the lead researcher, told legislators today that he has found at least five hog waste systems that are dramatically better for the environment. But they are all too expensive for use on existing hog farms.

There better be more to this report that what’s in this article. I need to get my hands on the actual report. But this is ridiculous, those hog factories they very thoughtfully call farms are very lightly regulated. Read here for more information on the hog industry in NC, but  “they are all too expensive for use on existing hog farms” is, well, HOGWASH, and a little bit of a waste of 17 million bucks!