The Long View 2007-03-15: Global Warming and Conversation Stoppers
The conversation
This bit is particularly funny now that “conversation” has started to have the meaning “I talk and you listen” in politics.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton officially rescinded her bid for president at an Iowa campaign appearance Saturday..."America, you spoke clearly and with conviction—and I listened. And so I say to you today: Let the conversation end."
Global Warming and Conversation Stoppers
I quote this item from The Onion not because I have strong feelings about Senator Clinton, but because it expresses my wish for so many issues in our public life:
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton officially rescinded her bid for president at an Iowa campaign appearance Saturday..."America, you spoke clearly and with conviction—and I listened. And so I say to you today: Let the conversation end."
More argument; less chatter.
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Some plans for subverting the Islamic Republic of Iran are better than others. Consider this comment from Joseph Puder:
It was flattering to read Edward Luttwak’s piece in the Wall Street Journal (February 27, 2007) titled Persian Shrug. In the opinion piece Luttwak repeated this writer’s argument, expressed a year ago on the pages of the Philadelphia Bulletin that U.S. strategy with regard to Iran must involve the various ethnic minorities in Iran that account for almost 50 percent of the population.
The Kurds in northwestern Iran adjacent to Iraqi Kurdistan comprise 7 percent of the Iranian population....Based in the oil rich province of Khuzestan in the Gulf region of Iran, the Arabs account for 3 percent of the population...The Baluch (2 percent of Iran’s population) in Iranian Baluchistan ...Turkman Sunni Muslims (2 percent of the population)...And then of course there are the Azeris who count for 24 percent of Iran’s people.
That piece also talks about encouraging reformist groups in Iran who seek to return to the original draft for the constitution of the Islamic Republic, which would have created a state much less clerical than the existing one. That's a good idea. The same is not self-evidently the case with promoting ethnic secessionist groups in Iran. Such a policy would also strike at the integrity of Pakistan, Turkey, and Iraq, all of which share borders and minorities with Iran.
Then there is also this: the door swings both ways. The danger that irredentist or secessionist movements could threaten the integrity of the United States is actually what the immigration issue is about. The US should think twice about promoting such movements abroad, for the same reason that it should think twice about launching a war of assassins. In either kind of conflict, the United States has no special advantages.
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With enemies like these, who needs friends?
Despite McCain’s recent appeals to the GOP’s conservative base and a positive military image as a former prisoner of war, his record is drawing the ire of economic conservatives and some of the same veterans who worked to tar Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) 2004 presidential campaign.
The anti-tax group Club for Growth yesterday released a review of McCain’s record on its top priorities and cautioned against electing him president. Meanwhile, a new “527” advocacy group, similar to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, has pledged to expose McCain as a communist apologist who turned his back on prisoners of war.
The attacks in 2004 on John Kerry's war record were, some of them, distasteful, too. They caused his campaign to implode, however, because for some unfathomable reason he had chosen to run as a war veteran.
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The learned and ingenious Jerry Pournelle has provided this YouTube link to the complete broadcast of The Great Global Warming Swindle, first aired on BBC Channel 4 on March 8. The documentary's website is here.
The documentary is the best kind of polemic, in this case against the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. The documentary's chief thesis is that global warming and cooling are caused, indirectly, by changes in solar activity. Cosmic rays, we are told, are an important factor in cloud formation, and cloud cover promotes cooling. Some fraction of these cosmic rays are kept away from the Earth's atmosphere by the sun's magnetic field. That field expands and contracts in a not wholly predictable fashion; the variation is evidenced by the increase in sunspots when the sun is more active and the sun's magnetic field is expanding.
The documentary makes much of duelling graphs: we are shown that historical reconstructions of CO2 levels in the atmosphere fit only very loosely with estimated temperatures of the Earth's atmosphere, while those temperatures fit very well with graphs of sunspots and cosmic rays.
We also get a great deal of politics. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is credited with introducing global warming to the arena of high policy. She did not trust the the strike-prone miners to produce coal, and she did not trust the nations of the Middle East to produce oil without political conditions. She favored nuclear power as the alternative. Therefore, she funded the development of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis in order to provide a pro-nuclear argument that was not economic or political.
Since the Thatcher government, global warming has become the centerpiece of an international, neo-Marxist, anticapitalist, anti-American ideology. Indeed, we are given to understand that global warming consoles the Left for the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The Great Global Warming Swindle is very persuasive, but it is a polemic: we don't get to hear any experts from the other side. This detracts from the force of the argument. If the documentary is right, then the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is not just wrong, but trivially wrong. Would it have been so difficult to trap a pro-global-warming climatologist in an elevator and confront him with the evidence of his folly?
If you are looking for a response to the program, you might start with that of John Houghton, President of the John Ray Initiative, who answers the documentary's central argument thus:
Changes in solar output together with the absence of large volcanoes (that tend to cool the climate) are likely to have been causes for the rise in temperature between 1900 and 1940. However, the much more complete observations of the sun from space instruments over the past 40 years demonstrate that such influences cannot have contributed significantly to the temperature increase over this period. Other possibilities such as cosmic rays affecting cloud formation have been very carefully considered by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] (see the 3rd Assessment Report on www.ipcc.ch) and there is no evidence that they are significant compared with the much larger and well understood effects of increased greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.
When we go to the IPCC's 3rd Assessment Report, we find: section 6.11.2.2 Cosmic rays and clouds. There we are told that there is no proven mechanism whereby cosmic rays produce clouds, and that the relationship of cloud cover to atmospheric temperature is also problematical.
This is all fair enough. However, though I may be missing something (if I am, please tell me), but I don't think that the report quite addresses the strong correlation that the documentary claims to exist between the incidence of sunspots and the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere. As we all know, correlation is not causation, but a strong correlation is a sign that says: dig here!
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Finally, if you have not noticed already, my long review of Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home is now online.
Copyright © 2007 by John J. Reilly
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