Posted by
KWG on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 4:48:01 PM
Memorial Day is always the unofficial start of summer. Public swimming pools open, water parks open, families break out the grills, and ski resorts change over to summer hours. It also, of course, gets much warmer out. This is the question I'd like to address in a multi-part series on global warming.
I’d like to lay out the conservative case against the disastrous policies that many would like our nation (and, indeed, the rest of the world) to undertake. Admittedly, there are many different proposals out there, and it seems that each one bodes more bleakly than the last for both America and the rest of the world. However, drastic action against CO2 emissions requires climbing up an increasingly rickety scientific and economic ladder in addition to faith in the efficiency of solutions to global warming.
Supporters of drastic action often prop up what they claim to be a scientific consensus on our changing climate. This consensus looks shakier when prodded. There may be a majority of climatologists that agree on the most general of climate questions, but the inaccuracy of predictive indicators combined with the harm that many global warming policies would do to our world means that more research should be devoted to the matter, and drastic action would certainly be ill-advised.
Indeed, it is disingenuous to simply claim that there’s a consensus. Most consensus claims come from circumstantial and anecdotal evidence without a real survey of scientists. The most famous and relevant actual survey comes courtesy of Dr. Naomi Oreskes, whose survey Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change concluded that 75% of peer-reviewed climate literature either explicitly or implicitly endorsed the anthropogenic global warming. The survey has been scrutinized and become the subject of intense controversy. Attempts to replicate her survey have yielded substantially different results than those that Dr. Oreskes found. Putting aside the subjectivity of judging an “implicit” endorsement, the study’s methodology and detailed results have never been made available. Additionally, there have been new studies that put the number of recently-published peer-reviewed abstracts that contain “explicit or implicit” support for human-induced global warming at below 50%. And this isn’t even addressing whether or not even the 75% number can be called a consensus, enough to declare “the debate is over.”
Is human interference causing warming? This is one of the most important questions. The so-called consensus gets even fuzzier here: the IPCC is widely recognized as the largest group of scientists writing literature on the subject in the world. Be not mistaken, however: the summaries and policy proposals that are offered on behalf of the 2,500 or so people are written by political actors, not scientists. The IPCC as a greater body has also been plagued by controversy. It seems as though every time the IPCC makes a definitive statement on a previously disputed issue, some of its members resign in disgust. Many decry the politicization of the entire panel and process.
"The debate is over," Al Gore famously said. The world's foremost environmental crusader also refuses to have any kind of intellectual conversation on the subject due to his closed-minded thinking. If he was either a little more honest with the public or a little more educated himself, he'd see that there's widespread disagreement on the issue of global warming. Stay tuned as next time we'll get to a little more scientific red meat.