To paraphrase the conservative columnist's favorite president, "There you go again, George."
George Will has been one of my favorite intellectual sparring partners for a long time, a favorite more recently because he had the guts to publicly recognize the disaster that was George W. Bush's presidency.
But in his latest Washington Post column, George and I have a pretty big loud disagreement.
Don't get me wrong. I'm happy to see Will embracing the idea of recycling, but I'm very troubled that he is recycling errors of fact to challenge the science on global warming.
I'm even more troubled that Will used his February 15th column not only to cast doubt on sound science, but also to denigrate the work of two fine scientists.
Let's be very clear: Stephen Chu does not make predictions to further an agenda. He does so to inform the public. He is no Cassandra. If his predictions about the effects of our climate crisis are scary, it's because our climate is scary.
Likewise, John Holdren is a friend of mine and one of the best scientific minds we have in our country. Pulling out one minor prediction that he had some unknown role in formulating nearly three decades ago, as Will did in his February 15th column, and then using that to try to undo his credibility as a scientist may be a fancy debating trick, but it's just plain wrong when it comes to a debate we can't afford to see dissolve into reductio ad absurdum hijinx. (A side note: The incident in question occurred in 1980, which, as I recall, was just about the time Ronald Reagan made the claim that approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation and that, consequently, we should "not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions standards from man-made sources.")
Dragging up long-discredited myths about some non-existent scientific consensus about global cooling from the 1970s does no one any good. Except perhaps a bankrupt flat earth crowd. I hate to review the record and see that someone as smart as George Will has been doing exactly that as far back as 1992. And it's especially troubling when the very sources that Will cites in his February 15th column draw the exact opposite conclusions and paint very different pictures than Will provides, as the good folks at ThinkProgress and Media Matters for America have demonstrated so thoroughly.
This has to stop. A highly organized, well-funded movement to deny the reality of global climate change has been up and running for a long time, but it doesn't change the verdict: the problem is real, it's accelerating, and we have to act. Now. Not years from now.
No matter how the evidence has mounted over two decades -- the melting of the arctic ice cap, rising sea levels, extreme weather -- the flat earth caucus can't even see what is on the horizon. In the old Republican Congress they even trotted out the author of Jurassic Park as an expert witness to argue that climate change is fiction. This is Stone Age science, and now that we have the White House and the Congress real science must prevail. It is time to stop debating fiction writers, oil executives and flat-earth politicians, and actually find the way forward on climate change.
This is a fight we can win, a problem we can overcome, but time is not on our side. We can't waste another second arguing about whether the problem exists when we need to be debating everything from how to deal with the dirtiest forms of coal as the major provider of power in China to how to vastly increase green energy right here at home.
"Facts are stupid things," Ronald Reagan once said. He was, of course, paraphrasing John Adams, who could have been talking about the science on global change when he said, "Facts are stubborn things."
Stubborn or stupid -- lets have a real debate and lets have it now.
I know George Will well, I respect his intellect and his powers of persuasion -- but I'd happily debate him any day on this question so critical to our survival.
Follow John Kerry on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnKerry
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/05/al-gore-turns-down-debate_n_172371.html
The public "global warming debates" that we have been having have all been matters of flagrant, industry-sponsored, industrial-scale lying flung cynically against centuries of painstaking research by thousands of scientists, who are each higher-rate minds, more deserving of your recognition, than Mr. Will's.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/15/climate-change-models-pre_n_167045.html The fact that some atmospheric substances retain more heat than others was PROVEN almost 200 years ago by Joseph Fourier, and the implications were further explored by John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius; the phenomenon's existence and its cause are not subject to debate.
What the honest people of the United States need are global warming trials and Congressional hearings, not debates. As a Senator, that is your responsibility to me and the rest of the electorate, not this toothless op-ed writing, which is the extent of my power but not of yours. As the underlying problem is allowed to fester longer, the stakes of such hearings and trials increase from fraud to mass murder.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/21/lord-nicholas-stern-paint_n_168865.html
Like the global warming theory itself, the only doubt is in the timing and exact locations of the consequences, not in their general quality. We need you to be as stubborn as the facts.
quote:
Tyndall set out to find whether there was in fact any gas in the atmosphere that could trap heat rays. In 1859, his careful laboratory work identified several gases that did just that. The most important was simple water vapor (H2O). Also effective was carbon dioxide (CO2), although in the atmosphere the gas is only a few parts in ten thousand..
Arrhenius made a calculation for doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere, and estimated it would raise the Earth's temperature some 5-6°C.(3) .
Arrhenius brought up the possibility of future warming in an impressive scientific article and a widely read book. By the time the book was published, 1908, the rate of coal burning was already much higher than in 1896, and Arrhenius suggested warming might appear within a few centuries rather than millennia.
/quote
In the ensuing century, the rate of CO2 emission has continued to increase, far beyond what the oceans can absorb. What Arrhenius would have thought inconceivable is now common knowledge. Treating it as a matter of legitimate difference of opinion concede FACTS which scientists have proven; frankly, sir, these are not your concede, even in the interest of being "conciliatory" or "bipartisan" to voters you don't need anyway. Trust me, you don't need the illiterate 15% that still support Cheney, Tillerson, et al. The rest of us know the truth, and we vote.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1176967,00.html
P.S We would all just love to see that debate!
www.transplantedamerican.com
change that very few people understand or are talking about, but may
well do us in if we don't do something NOW. Please take a moment (eleven minutes) to
watch it, and zing this link around to all your friends & especially any teachers who want to liven up a class debate.
http://vimeo.com/1709110?pg=embed&sec=1709110
Persons interested in the current raw Arctic Sea Ice data, to judge for themselves, can go to: www.nsioc.org/arcticicenews/
The 2009 sea ice appears to exceed that of 2007.
The trend is clear, liar. Comparisons to two years ago, absent the past two centuries for context, are worse than meaningless or disingenuous, they are lies posted for the exact purpose of leading people to false conclusions.
I see what is on the horizon very well, Senator. Every living thing on the face of the earth will die from acid raid caused by air pollution and NASA poking holes in the ozone layer with their space shots. I predict we have less than a hundred years.
Thank you for this blog, Senator. It's good to hear from you.
looky here: http://gizmodo.com/5055160/24-hour-air-traffic-around-the-world-blows-minds-eyeballs?autoplay=true
so... who has a link?
I saw nothing on snopes.com either, so maybe it isn't even a widely spread claim
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_trans.shtml
When the planes were grounded, there was a one-day global JUMP of 1 deg C. Because planes and their contrails cause a phenomenon known as "dimming" which, like clouds, reduces temperatures on the ground.,
Some are using this fact to speculate that but for dimming from aircraft, global warming at ground level would be even greater than we see now. Of course in that case, we woudn't have the emissions from airplanes, which are MASSIVE - so I don't know which effect would be stronger.
There are some anecdotes on the web ("In Huntsville, temps dropped 22 deg on Sep 12!") trying to make the case that lack of plane exhaust immediately cooled the atmosphere - but these are just anecdotes.
There are just two things I'd like to point out:
1. This planet we all ride on doesn't have a vested interest in keeping us around. If we disappear tomorrow, I'm pretty sure the sun will still rise in the East.
2. Who really cares if climate change is making the earth warmer, colder or alternating every other Wednesday? Green Tech is a new-ish sector and will create new jobs in the construction industry. Considering how hard construction was hit, I'd think people would be happy there is a way to put (at least some) of these people back to work. Last I heard, every economist agreed that jobs were a good thing for an economy.
Let's look at it another way: What are we looking at giving up? Are we really that attached to coal-fired power plants? Anybody gonna miss smokestacks? I don't need to be threatened with my existence to embrace green power; I just prefer it.
How about a more stable supply of energy? Hmm? How about not being forced to climb in bed with dictators to keep the petrol flowing?
As you rightly argue, energy diversity also means jobs. What's bad about that?
Even if global warming does Not turn out to be the huge and immediate threat most scientists claim, even if there really IS nothing we can do to stop it, why wouldn't you want to improve our energy situation? Solve a few problems?
Why would you argue for the status quo when it is clear the status is Not Quo?
Couldn't resist.
Is there such a thing? Isn't the debate over human produced C02 levels and "it's" effect on Global Warming? Or, that C02 drives global warming? I thought that was what the debate was.
Maybe it's time for people to stop paying attention to this debate. We have the means to end pollution. It is available today. I'm certain that no sane person would argue in favor of pollution. We will have to end the monetary system. That is what is creating pollution, war and suffering. Look at the Venus project and worldshiftnetwork.org. There are many more good ideas...
Yes there is. Exxon Mobil alone spent over $11M on seeking and publishing anti-warming literature
There is no debate over human-poduced CO2 levels. The are quite well measured - both at the source, and in the atmosphere.
There is no debate that co2 warms the atmoshpere - there is "debate" over "how much."
Money does not create pollution, though monetization of societies does help to create pockets of intustry and agrigulture, which are more polluting than a subsistence economy.
Good luck with that Venus Project thing. Unless it alters human nature, it will not reach its goals.
The facts regarding the signs of global warming are not being disputed. What those facts mean is what is being debated.
There are only two reasons to deny factual evidence: you are not participating in shared reality because of mental illness, or you are promoting an agenda that the facts interfere with.
Your partisan bias is obvious and you resort to the argumentative equivalent of "I know you are, but what am I." Juvenile and petty. Grow up.
Are you assuming you will be Raptured away by then?
To these folks, I would suggest that you spend less time listening to the oil industry's talking points, and more doing a bit of independent research on the increase in burning of carbon-based fuels and the RATE of temperature increase since 1900. Has the planet warmed before? Yes. Has the planet ever warmed at the accelerated rate that it has in the last 100 years? No. It's unprecedented. And the big deal is, what are we going to do when all of our coastal cities are submerged?
Maybe our best efforts will not reduce global warming. But look at what those efforts will entail: a move to sustainable fuels, sustainable farming practices that reduce carbon emissions and produce safer more nutritious food, preservation of wilderness/wildlife, cleaner air for all to breathe, cheaper energy, fewer pollution-related illnesses, economic independence from countries that produce fossil fuels... I'm sorry, but what is WRONG with these kinds of outcomes? Take global warming off the table entirely, and then explain to me why we would NOT want to pursue these sorts of results for the future wellbeing of our nation, our planet and the human race.
Man has a nearly perfect record of falling in love with some technological advancement, only to later find it is killing him, or the planet, or other species.
In this category we find the "get your feet x-rayed" fad that swept shoe stores, PCBs to insulate transformers, DDT, asbestos as fireproofing and insulation, etc., etc.
In the instant case, I worry about the known and possible unknown pollutive effects of the manufacturing processes and materials that go into alternative energy. Already, problems with high tech tevices in landfills are being found, which we did foresee.
One can HOPE that the developers and manufacturers of these technologies will think just one step farther - "OK, this device has exceeded its useful life. What substances does it contain, and how will the retirement of it from active use impact the environment?