Monday, August 06, 2007

Climate Change Again

Newsweek has a handy guide to the way the oil industry has corrupted the science of global warming. This campaign has been remarkably effective. Otherwise intelligent commenters on Thought Experiments routinely pour scorn on my view that climate change is happening, using precisely the arguments and 'evidence'  advanced by ExxonMobil's tame hacks - solar variation, natural cycle, satellite monitoring etc. As the Newsweek article makes clear, there is, in fact, no question that the climate is changing and virtually no question that we are the cause, though, as I have said before, even if we aren't the only cause, we have a problem that has to be addressed. Happily, the denial campaign now seems to be foundering and the bone-headed right seems to be learning to live with the fact that the equally bone-headed left has been right all along - though why it should be a left-right issue remains a mystery. 

11 comments:

  1. are you left or right, Bryan? I ask myself this question and I'm not sure. (one day you will have to explain it to me.)

    the real question with global warming is can we do anything about it?! I'm no expert but I can read and it seems, on balance, there's nothing that can be done.

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  2. I don't really know, Ian. Culturally conservative but, politically, neutral.

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  3. It's obvious why it has become a left-right issue.

    The fact of climate change isn't (or shouldn't be), but what to do about it certainly is.

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  4. Not obvious to me, Brit. The American right should have been pro-global warming s it offered a way to get them off the Saudi hook, for example.

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  5. True, but once the left has established that the Great Satan and Dubya and Capitalism and Globalisation are after all the cause of THE DOOM OF THE PLANET they naturally get a bit defensive.

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  6. Is the left/right thing a mystery? Action on climate change implies stronger controls on business, even if they take the form of taxes on consumers. Just a guess. The American lobby system seems a gigantic machine for handing out bribes to all-comers, and especially to politicians. Thank god I don't live there.

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  7. Funny how the global warming scientists are honest, disinterested and incorruptible to a man, but every one of the dissenters has secretly sold his soul for filthy multinational lucre. C.S. Lewis could have written this script.

    How are those sea levels doing, Bryan? Is London still open?

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  8. I would suggest that it is worth looking at this. Note than neither of the authors received funding and the paper has been posted for peer review.
    It is also worth noting that climate is continuously changing. The controversy is over predictions regarding such change.

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  9. Well said Frank - and a v interesting paper. It seems to me that what's blindingly obvious (i.e. so obvious as to have become invisible) about 'climate change' is that it's become a matter of fervent evangelical faith rather than rational sceptical scrutiny. These are matters of which it is absurdly arrogant - and unscientific - to presume that we can know, still less predict, very much - they are just too big. Here, surely, is one of the new pseudo-religions filling the vacuum left by the withdrawing sea of faith and offering similar consolations and emotional satisfactions. The quasi-political 'Rightness' of scepticism about climate change is, I think, a more fundamental scepticism about how much we can ever know, or affect anything fundamental - about, in the end, how important we are. The new religion elevates humanity in the very act of lambasting it and blaming it for everything - the satisfactions of that are all too obvious, which is why the whole thing is best treated with due scepticism.

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  10. Yes, Nige, it has always struck me as odd that the same people who tell us we are just another product of blind pitiless evolution then turn around and place the entire burden of saving the planet upon us - having first blamed us for being the cause of every bad thing in the world.

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  11. Thanks for the kind words and the plug. Much appreciated.

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