A preview of Tuesday’s global warming editorial
May 25th, 2008, 1:30 pm · 16 Comments · posted by Mark Landsbaum
Here’s a shamelss plug (but for your own good, of course). Tuesday we’ll have an editorial on the first-in-the-nation fees imposed for CO2 emissions, the first of many to come, no doubt. In part, here’s what we say:
“There is no proven cause-and-effect relationship between increasing CO2 – a natural gas essential to life on Earth and not a pollutant as the U.S. Supreme Court has concluded – and increasing temperatures. Indeed, in the past decade while CO2 levels have greatly increased, global temperatures have declined. Temperatures over next decade are projected to decrease even more, while greenhouse gases are expected to continue increasing in the atmosphere.
“Perhaps this explains the pell-mell rush to pass new laws, impose new regulations and adopt more fees and taxes. The passage of time seems to be working against global warming alarmism, cooling off opinions even as the atmosphere cools.
“Virtually every human activity, from exhaling to laying concrete to generating electricity, emits CO2. The alternatives government would impose either are impractical, exorbitantly costly or simply don’t exist. But in the meantime, a rash of new regulations and taxes can do great economic harm, putting this state and nation at a competitive disadvantage with the booming economies of China and India, where such economy-crippling impediments aren’t about to be imposed.”
May 25th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
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May 26th, 2008 at 8:02 am
Thanks for the warning. We can look forward to an editorial based on old data (2007 was the second warmest year on record, obviously not part of a cooling trend), fringe scientists, and poor journalism.
May 26th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Cutting CO2 won’t change a thing. It’s the sun, stupid http://holycoast.blogspot.com/2007/03/it…).
You might also want to check out the 1 degree drop in global temperatures that wiped out 100 years of “global warming”: http://holycoast.blogspot.com/2008/02/100-years-of-global-warming-erased-in-1.html
Political correctness is not the best approach to climate policy, Professor.
May 26th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Get your heads out of the sand. Just what if they are right and you are wrong?
May 26th, 2008 at 9:14 am
As the Register’s circulation continues it’s precipitous decline (almost 12% of their daily circulation disappeared in 6 months), their editorial team will continue to churn out this stuff.
The anti-science brigade can’t put two and two together, but maybe someone on the business side will figure out that their loss of readership stems directly from the quality of their product.
May 26th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Global warming crusader Al Gore repeatedly claims the climate change “debate’s over.” It isn’t, but the news media clearly agree with him. Global warming skeptics rarely get any say on the networks, and when their opinions are mentioned it is often with barbs like “cynics” or “deniers” thrown in to undermine them.
Consistently viewers are being sent only one message from ABC, CBS and NBC: global warming is an environmental catastrophe and it’s mankind’s fault. Skepticism is all but shut out of reports through several tactics – omission, name-calling, the hype of frightening images like polar bears scavenging for food near towns and a barrage of terrifying predictions.
The Business & Media Institute analyzed 205 network news stories about “global warming” or “climate change” between July 1, 2007, and Dec. 31, 2007. BMI found a meager 20 percent of stories even mentioned there were any alternative opinions to the so-called “consensus” on the issue.
http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2007/globalwarming/ClimateOfBias.asp
May 26th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Since I’m not aware of the nature, extent, or stage of adoption of these fees, I’ll only make a couple of notes here.
1. The notion that since CO2 is a “natural” by product of human activity and existence, that therefore it shouldn’t be regulated, is a classic fake argument. To be blunt, so are feces, but that doesn’t mean we don’t regulate how and where they’re put into the environment, or that we don’t charge money to ensure that they’re disposed of properly and safely in a manner that doesn’t harm the environment. Every poison is “natural,” as people from leading scientists down to George Carlin have noted - they all come from the “natural” environment. To shrug and say that since they’re “natural” we needn’t worry about them is - well, I’l lleave it at that.
2. I doubt that any regulatory scheme would go after emissions of CO2 from humans. That’s again a straw man argument, designed more to invoke fear (”They’re going to tell you how often to BREATHE!!!”) than to start a serious discussion. The question, as always, is one of degree: where and how can the issue of such emissions be efficiently addressed? Some activities will be easier to tackle from a CO2 reduction standpoint than others, and any rational person picks off the easy targets first.
3. I have serious doubt about the efficiency of any CO2 “fee” arrangement, on purely practical grounds. But I think this editorial, like much of Mr. Landsbaum’s outcry on climate change, is itself alarmist - not to mention the questionable ( to say the least) science he cites to support his position, and his endlessly repeated and utterly unsupportable claim that the consensus version of the climate change hypothesis is somehow tottering amid a sea of scepticism (led, of course, by himself). It rather appears to me to be refining itself, integrating its ideas more closely into the complex web of other natural phenomena with which it interacts, and so becoming more precise and coherent. This process will inevitably involve jettisoning some earlier claims and predictions - things Mr. Landsbaum notes with unrestrained glee, but which in fact prove quite the opposite of his intended point. The discussion a couple of weeks ago about a study indicating that warming trends may well up colder ocean water to temporarily ameliorate the trend is a good example - it hardly disproves the climate change hypothesis, as Mr. Landsbaum claimed in trumpeting it, but rather demonstrates how that warming may trigger passing (in the planet’s time frame, of course) counteractivity in the course of overall warming.
As I’ve said, I retain doubt and questions about this whole subject, but Mr. Landsbaum’s implicit premise that the whole theory is about to come crashing down as some sort of intellectual fraud is so much hooey.
May 26th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Professor W.,
Check the graph on the following link. There is no way 2007 was the second warmest year on record.
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
Perhaps you are using GISS data. They’ve already been outed as putting temperature stations near heat sources which when discovered and fixed, changed some of the hottest years from recent to back in the ’30’s. And they use a formula that adjusts temperature data upwards after 1970 and downward before 1970. Why? Dishonesty comes to my mind.
The fact that RSS, HadCrut, and UAH data show the last ten years as more or less the same to slight cooling vs GISS which is going up is confirmation of their ‘error.’
May 26th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
rlh,
CO2 doesn’t compare to feces. Humans emit about 2% of the total CO2 n the atmosphere and the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is less than 1/10th of 1%. It does not need to be regulated.
In the past, CO2 levels were as high as 4000 ppm and there is evidence that CO2 did NOT control temperature.
And what’s the worry? The Sierra Club has a goal of CO2 set to 450 PPM
http://www.sierraclub.org/international/bali.pdf
We are currently at 386 PPM so we have room to grow before hitting the ‘danger point.’
May 27th, 2008 at 7:18 am
Intersting Landsbaum that cites a graph at metoffice.com. Because IF HE ACTUALLY READ the information there, he would have read the following:
“A simple mathematical calculation of the temperature change over the latest decade (1998-2007) alone shows a continued warming of 0.1 °C per decade.”
and
“2005 was also an unusually warm year, the second highest in the global record, but was not associated with El Niño conditions that boosted the warmth of 1998. … 2007 was 0.37 °C above this average, 0.11 °C warmer than 1999.”
You are right dishonesty comes to mind. Except in this case it is you who are the one I have in mind.
May 27th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Just for clarification, the “Mark” above isn’t this one. Good to see you here Mark, whoever you are.
At your service in Christ . . .
Mark Landsbaum
May 27th, 2008 at 10:18 am
My mistake - I confused the Marks.
My apologies.
May 27th, 2008 at 10:41 am
I find it amusing that the bulk of the arguements against global warming “alarmists” focus on the economic impacts of possible regulation, or all I have read in the Register anyway.
May 27th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Dan,
The only reason it shows a 0.1C trend us is due taking the average of those ten years including 1998 (an El-nino year) and 2005 (a partial el-nino year). At the moment, the temperature is trending down while CO2 is at a dangerously alarming and scary level of 386ppm. The downward trend can is shown clearly on the graph I linked to.
I suggest you go back and read my post. I said 2007 was not the second highest year on record, I didn’t say anything about 2005.
And since you are concerned with dishonesty, below is a link that describes how the GISS is massaging their data upwards.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/
Mark
May 27th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Hey Observer,
If you had taken time to research newspaper circulations, you would have seen that many leftist newspapers that believe global warming are also suffering declining circulation.
Below is a link that has the percent losses for major newspapers. Read it and gain a little knowledge so you won’t make the same mistake again.
http://www.iris.org.il/blog/archives/2092-Exclusive-Conservative-Newspaper-Circulations-Surged-As-Liberals-Tanked.html
Mark
May 28th, 2008 at 10:41 am
We don’t know for sure who this Mark above is, but we sure like his newspaper research.
And apologies always are gracious and welcome.
At your service in Christ . . .
Mark Landsbaum