This article is in answer to Ross Douthat’s, a.k.a. Lt Keefer’s, column “Neither Hot Nor Cold on Climate” in which he impugned as “anti-intellectual” those who are reflexively against the journalist-politician-activist-bien-pensant (but unfortunately not a scientist) “Consensus” that the world is doomed because of global warming.
Douthat, a “lukewarmer,” confesses an increasing fear about global warming (or what he mistakenly calls “climate change,” a curious error to make while lecturing on the subject. The climate is and has and will always change.)
Second, he says that “in actual right-wing politics no serious assessment of the science and the risks is taking place, to begin with. Instead, there’s just a mix of business-class and blue-collar self-interest and a trollish, ‘If liberals are for it, we’re against it’ anti-intellectualism. So while lukewarmers may fancy us serious interlocutors for liberals, we’re actually just running interference on behalf of know-nothing and do-nothingism, attacking flawed policies on behalf of a Republican Party that will never, ever advance any policies of its own.”
But it’s false that there are no serious assessments of climate science from non-progressives. And far from being anti-intellectual, doing nothing is a reasonable response when the threat is small.
A Climate Warning
To prove both of these contentions, let me tell you a story. Couple years back in a well-regarded, peer-reviewed journal1 some colleagues and I argued that a doubling of pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide would result in about one degree Celsius of temperature increase (about 2 degrees F).
We also estimated that “combustion of all recoverable fossil fuels” would cause less than 2.2 degrees Celsius warming (about 4 degrees F).
The first estimate is about half of what the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change guessed, and our second estimate is well under their worst-case predictions.
It should be but was not and probably still is not, obvious that our statements are premised on admitting that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will cause measurable warming. This is or was the “lukewarmer” position.
I say it wasn’t obvious because when we published the paper, among environmental activists there arose a surge of apoplexy that would not be achieved until the election of Donald Trump. We were called “deniers.” Members of Congress snapped into action. We were vilified in the press. We were accused of taking thirty pieces of silver — in spite of our plenteous, insistent public statements that we did the work on our own time, and paid for it out of our own pockets. (A claim few to no professional environmentalists can make.)
As a result of the publicity, my site was hacked. My colleague Willie Soon was raked over the coals in our nation’s most recognizable scandal sheet. Greenpeace went after another colleague’s employer with FOIA requests (these were denied). Our lead writer, Christopher Monckton, was subjected to the best insults the great brains of our attackers could muster (he survived). (A series of articles on the flap can be found here.)
We thought the screeching would never stop.
No Good News, Please
And yet it’s puzzling. Here we were offering the world what was potentially great news. The world would not warm dangerously! Temperature increases would max out. That’s something to celebrate!
Isn’t it?
Only our message wasn’t taken that way. It was as if we were betrayers, traitors, scalawags. Used car salesmen — lawyers, even! — were held in higher esteem.
Why?
Well, it’s logically true that we might be wrong and the IPCC right. The world could grow much warmer than we guessed. Yet that mere logical possibility can’t have been enough to incense so many, could it? Because it’s also logically possible that the IPCC is wrong and we are correct. Or — and I ask you to stretch your mind here — it’s also so that none of us are right and that the climate system is more unpredictable than anybody has yet figured.
(Plus, in our favor, the observations so far are more in line with what we rather than the IPCC predicted. That counts for something, but not for everything.)
Anyway, it can’t be because we might be wrong that we made so many enemies.
It had to be because we might be right.
Read more at The Stream
We just get a bunch of useful idiots being dragged into this whole these proponents of Big Goverment who should go live a life without fossil fuels like living in a cold,drafty,dank cave surrounded by bats and creepy crawly bugs
Party poopers! Why let the facts and the observations get in the way of the agenda?
The notion that the climate may be only warming getting such as hostile response reminds me of another item that wasn’t well received. There was a suggestion by people who fully believed in disastrous warming that it could be headed off by releasing sulfur aerosols in the upper atmosphere. This would have the same impact as one of the ways that volcanoes cool the earth. This was idea was quickly shut down by a very hostile response. The claim was we didn’t know the impact. The same people who claimed that we were headed for certain for a world wide disaster rejected an idea because the sulfur results were not certain.
The real problem with using sulfur was it wouldn’t force the drastic reduction in fossil fuel use that so many hidden political objectives are counting on. These include everything thing from more taxes to transferring wealth to undeveloped countries. The same is true of the “good new” about the planet only warming. That means we don’t have to cut back on fossil fuel use so the hidden political objectives won’t have a means to be implemented.
With 58 scientific papers published this year saying ‘Global Warming’ is a myth, this article is dead wrong when it said the right wing has made no serious assessment.
I should note that the earth has been getting warmer since the end of the mini ice age. However, this warming has a very poor correlation with the build up of carbon dioxide. About 40% of the warming blamed on man occurred between 1910 and 1941 when CO2 was much lower and not rapidly increasing.