Lee's Blog

On many of the websites that I normally read, anyone who expresses the slightest hesitation about accepting apocalyptic anthropogenic global warming as an established fact is instantly condemned as a vile denialist, a heretic, really. No argument, no explanation, no discussion is allowed.

This upsets me, but it also makes me think long and hard about why I find it difficult to accept apocalyptic anthropogenic global warming as an established fact.

The first reason that I find this hard to accept is that, long before I ever even heard of anthropogenic global warming, I knew about the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. I knew about the grapes that grew in Britain in the MWP and died in the LIA, about the Viking colony in Greenland that was planted during the MWP and disappeared in the LIA, about the villagers praying to God to stop the glaciers from destroying their villages, about the starvation that followed the repeated crop failures due to cold weather, about trees breaking apart when their sap froze. A claim that the Earth’s temperature had been absolutely rock steady (varying no more than 0.1 degree), and colder than today for a millennium was quite incredible.

Yet the claim continues to be made. I can see, I guess, how the average temperature of the entire planet could be fairly stable even if the land in the Northern hemisphere was experiencing severe cold weather.

One way would be if severe cold weather in the winter were offset by severe hot weather in the summer. This is not the explanation, however, because the eyewitnesses did not report unusually hot summers and, in any case, the glaciers were advancing. Glaciers advance because the snow that falls in the winter fails to melt in the summer. Severe hot weather in the summer would melt them back. In fact, both summers and winters were colder than normal.

Another way would be if the temperature of the rest of the world were absolutely steady. In that case, the Little Ice Age would be sort of like my holding a handful of ice cubes: the average temperature of my surface overall probably changes very little, but the hand that’s holding the ice definitely feels the cold. I think that’s what the climate alarmists contend.

I haven’t found any real explanation of how climate alarmists wave away the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, other than the claim by the IPCC that the Northern hemisphere (including both the land and the oceans, I presume) at the depth of LIA was a mere degree cooler, on average, than it is today. But then, my google-fu is weak.

However, there’s another problem with the claim that the world temperature was rock-steady for a millennium, despite trivial variation in the land areas of the Northern hemisphere, and that is the Maunder Minimum. This spanned the period from 1645 to 1715, and was a period when the Sun was very quiet, had few to no sunspots, and was thus cooler than normal. It seems … odd … that no part of the Earth except land areas of the Northern hemisphere would suffer any discernable decline in temperature during a seventy year period of less solar radiation.

To be continued…

As I was heading home a few weeks ago, one of my co-workers was headed the same way and we got to talking. He was going to pick up boxes of Girl Scout cookies for his daughter, who was of course the Girl Scout in question. I observed that there is a particular type of cookie that I especially love, and I described it although I could not remember the name.

The next day, as I was cleaning out my desk, he brought me a box of Samoas. Yes, that was exactly the type I like, so I immediately bought the box. I shared out my cookies with my neighbors, who asked suspiciously if I had found them in the back of my desk. I assured them that, no, the cookies were completely fresh, and pointed out that I had gotten them from Steve.

They immediately called Steve over and wanted to order cookies from him. He was totally unprepared — he had no catalog and no order forms — but we’re computer people, so someone googled up the Girl Scout cookie website so everyone could see what was available, and he wrote the orders on a piece of scrap paper.

Having escaped from that group, he bowed to the inevitable and sent out an email offering cookies to everyone in the office. He told me later that in an hour and a half, he had orders for 130 boxes.

He had not been prepared to take orders because he had thought it an imposition on his co-workers to expect them to help out his daughter. But free enterprise will out …

The IPCC report was supposedly the work of a group of scientists, conscientiously reporting the state of scientific knowledge. It was not supposed to be political hackwork, cherry-picking or making up supposed evidence in order to deceive readers into taking the desired action. Yet there are numerous cases now where it has indeed been shown to be hackwork. One of its sources was a boot cleaning guide, for crying out loud!

Various people online have objected that, oh, well, the report is hundreds of pages long and only about four fraudulent statements have been publicized so far. I mentioned before one of my favorite lines from Alas, Babylon: if you shake a haystack and four needles fall out, chances are that haystack is just thick with needles.

My first question is, “Is global warming occurring at all?” Suppose the answer to that is, “Yes.”

Second question: Is global warming harmful? The usual answer is, yes, of course, what kind of denialist are you that would question that?

But really, as the saying goes, ’tis an ill wind that blows no one good. Global warming could hurt some people and help others. If the harm affects only a small group (people who live in areas that are already almost awash) and the benefit accrues to billions, the moral calculus is quite different than if the harm affects billions and the benefit accrues only to a few. That is an issue that should be considered and studied instead of assumed.

Of course, one must also consider the animals. I certainly am not one to say, let our animal cousins die so long as we’re okay. However, an awful lot of our animal cousins are endangered right now because of us. If, for instance, global warming improved growing conditions in the temperate zones that are already farmed, it might be possible to feed the existing human population with less impact on animal species. Again, it’s possible that some few will be more endangered but many more will be less endangered, or vice versa. But, again, that is an issue that should be considered and studied instead of assumed.

Moreover, with respect to animals, there seems to be quite good evidence that glaciers have advanced and retreated quite dramatically even in historical times, implying that the Little Ice Age and recovery therefrom are by no means unique. Yet cold-climate animals continue to exist.

Again, I am not callously indifferent to the harms that could come from global warming, but I recognize that there might be benefits too which should not be summarily dismissed.

One thing that has always bothered me about the global warming dispute is that so many people seem to be asking the wrong question. The question is usually, “Can Western civilization be forced to do something about the global warming that it has caused?” But that’s like “Have you stopped beating your wife?” There are other questions to be asked first.

First question: Is global warming occurring at all? The problem with this is that the answer is Yes, No, or Maybe, depending on the time-scale.

• Yes. On a scale of thousands of years, the Earth is warming up. Fifteen thousand years ago, the spot where I am sitting was under a mile of ice. It’s warmed up substantially since then.
• No. On a scale of millions of years, the Earth is cooling down. For most of the Earth’s history, there were no continental glaciers anywhere, not even at the Poles. Our current climate, with an ice cap on Antarctica and another on Greenland, with occasional excursions on the continents of the Northern Hemisphere, is quite unusual. Any warming we may see is quite trivial compared to that huge decline.
• Maybe. On a scale of decades and centuries … I don’t know. The part of the Earth for which we have the best, most complete, and longest records, underwent the Little Ice Age not so long ago. According to Wikipedia, there is evidence that the Little Ice Age was world-wide, though of course the IPCC denied this and further claimed that “[Viewed] hemispherically, the ‘Little Ice Age’ can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C relative to late 20th century levels.”

I find it extremely hard to believe that a “modest cooling”, a decrease in average temperature of just 1°C, produced winters so cold that trees broke apart when their sap froze solid, that it was possible to have “Ice Fairs” on the Thames River, and that whole villages were destroyed by advancing glaciers. The claim comes from the IPCC, of course, so they probably got it off the back of a cereal box.

It’s possible that the Little Ice Age was a blip and the Earth is now recovering back to the same levels as the Medieval Warm Period (though it isn’t there yet). Glaciers that destroyed medieval villages have melted back (I don’t know where I read this, but I remember a sad description of villagers going up to the glaciers and praying to God to stop their advance — it didn’t work). Grapes grew in Britain during the Medieval Warm Period, but the Little Ice Age was too much for them and they essentially disappeared. Apparently it is now possible to grow grapes in Britain again, though not as well as during the Medieval Warm Period.

So the Earth may be warming up, or it may have warmed up since the Little Ice Age but has now reached a plateau, or it may even have started to cool again, maybe because of the low number of sunspots recently.* And it is really maddening that the principal climate scientists have made it impossible to know what the answer really is.

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* Or, if the IPCC is correct, the Little Ice Age affected only the well-instrumented parts of the Earth, and all other parts were much warmer than today, so as to offset the documented temperature drop. In that case, most of the Earth is cooler than it was 150 years ago.

One of the questions I have about the climate scandal that I don’t think has been answered is, why were FOIA requests required in the first place?

I mean, if I were a scientist, and my painstaking research revealed an existential danger to life on Earth, I’d want to get the word out any way I could. I’d want other scientists to have full access to my data. I’d want them to replicate my results and confirm my conclusions.

Sure, there’d be those skeptics who couldn’t be convinced no matter what (see previous post about birthers and mention of the TANG memos), but if everyone who looked at my mountain of evidence without too much bias reached the same conclusion, that conclusion could be considered pretty sound.

If I really thought I’d found a serious threat that required immediate action, the one thing I definitely would not do is hang onto the data and dole it in minimum publishable units, for the sake of my career. And yet, that’s what it seems that the “scientists” at the University of East Anglia have been doing. In between destroying the data so there’s nothing left but their “corrected” version, of course.

It would have been a whole lot simpler and more convenient if, when FOIA requests came in, the “scientists” (who would have deserved that name) could have just pointed to their freely available repository of files and said, help yourself.

Another question I have is why those “scientists” were even allowed to hang onto that data. Did they personally buy it out of their own pockets? If so, then, yes, I suppose they owned it and could legally refuse to hand it over to anyone. But I don’t think they did.

So why didn’t the UEA simply order their employees to make the data freely available? Sure, that would have cost money to put the files in shape for release, but there are billions sloshing around in the global warming biz. They could have asked the UN for a grant. They could have asked the World Wildlife Fund. They could have asked Al Gore. They could have asked Parliament, or the U.S. Congress. They could have simply put an appeal on the Internet. They didn’t do any of that. Why not?

Why didn’t Parliament simply order the records released? If uncontrolled global warming occurs, it could harm Britain along with the rest of the world. If the major economies of the world are destroyed in an effort to stop global warming, it most certainly will harm Britain along with the rest of the world. Wouldn’t it make sense for the British government to compel its employees to reveal the data and allow a thorough review of the matter?

I really wish the birthers would just shut up. Every interesting comment thread on political sites gets interrupted by some birther referring to the Usurper, the Kenyan-in-Chief, or the like. It gets really annoying.

It’s true, the President has not produced his original birth certificate, and it’s possible that he can’t. Big deal. Neither can I. All those records were computerized over the years, and who knows what became of the originals? They may have been destroyed. They may be sitting in some “Raiders of the Lost Ark” warehouse somewhere being eaten by rats and silverfish. Who knows?

And anyway, let’s suppose that the President of the United States made a personal appeal to the Hawaiian government to find his birth certificate, and they actually did. Would the birthers accept it? Of course not. They’d be demanding proof that it’s the real thing and not a forgery. And how do you prove that? It is sometimes possible to prove conclusively that something is a forgery — like the TANG memos — and still there may be people who deny it is forged.

You can’t prove a negative beyond any conceivable doubt; you can’t prove that this document is not a forgery. The best you can do is produce credible people who will give their expert opinion that the document is not detectably forged according to the following tests, blah blah blah. Who are the birthers going to consider credible? It’s a safe bet that anyone who says the document is not forged will be, ipso facto, not credible in their eyes.

Let’s say, though, that you somehow managed to convince some birthers that the birth certificate is authentic. Their next fall-back, I can say with assurance, is to demand proof that the person in the White House actually is the baby whose birth was reported. I mean, that baby might have died, and this person might have taken his identity.

Can you prove that is not the case? Oh, sure, the birth certificate may have a footprint on it (or it may not, I don’t know how common that was), and perhaps the claim is that the President’s footprint has whorls and loops that match, but then you have yet more fights over the authenticity of the President’s footprint (was there a little sleight of hand whereby the real footprint was switched for a matching fake?), the authenticity of the footprint on the birth certificate (was that altered?), and whether it is or is not possible to change a footprint via plastic surgery.

The birthers’ position is unassailable. That doesn’t mean it’s right; Last Thursdayism is unassailable too. But I’d get awfully annoyed if every scientific discussion were interrupted by a spiel for Last Thursdayism.

Birthers need to face it: not one of us can prove beyond any conceivable doubt that we are who we say we are. The President has produced more evidence of his birth in the United States than I had to produce to get a passport (I produced a computer-generated certificate of live birth, but I didn’t produce a newspaper announcement), and it is unreasonable to keep demanding more.