///Rational or irrational?///

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Chief Seattle, redux:
http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1985/spring/chief-seattle.html

Never let the truth get in the way of the message.
Gabriel 12:38 AM

Friday, December 03, 2004

Well, the friggin' party is over for the climate doomsters. Someone had to say it. I knew they were in deep yogurt when I read Richard Muller's article in Technology Review:
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/03/12/wo_muller121703.asp?p=0
But now, even Dr. Dewpoint has climbed on the bandwagon:
http://www.intellicast.com/DrDewpoint/Library/1254/
Who is Dr. Dewpoint? Why none other than the official meteorologist for WSI (www.wsi.com). OK, so maybe Dr. Dewpoint is basically a TV weatherman. The global warming controversy is being brought to the masses. Besides, he is no slouch: a Fellow of the AMS.

It is time for people to get used to the idea that the climate has fluctuations, lasting for years, decades, centuries, or millennia. The temperature record might even be fractal. Beyond that it is time for people to get used to the idea that science has uncertainties, and complicated things like the Earth's climate are not going to yield their mysteries to the kinds of numerical tools that we have at our disposal. Given that a CFD model of an airplane wing is a challenge for the most powerful computers in the world, it is hard to imagine that we have the capacity to model the entire planet with anything approaching certainty.

This reminds me of something a colleague working on climate science wrote to me a while back:
"Climate models are in miserable shape, as demonstrated by comparison of any of a number of erudite government committee evaluations. Arrhenius (or however he spelled his name) in 1870, or 1930, whenever, wrote a paper predicting global climate change as a consequence of the industrial revolution adding CO2 and other crap to the atmosphere. Using the equivalent of an envelope and a pencil stub, he predicted a global average temperature increase of about 5-degrees C for a doubling of CO2. Today's committees estimate the corresponding change, based on beaucoup supercomputer calculations with beaucoup Global Circulation Models, to be between 1.4-degrees C and 7-or 8-degrees C."
I am not going to give his name because I did not secure his permission to post this. If and when I do, you'll find out who it is.

More Dr. Dewpoint articles on global warming here:
http://www.intellicast.com/Local/GetDrDewCategory.asp?Category=Global%20Warming
Gabriel 1:34 PM

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

"The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil."
-Sheikh Yamani, Saudi oil minister
Gabriel 12:09 AM

Monday, November 22, 2004

As usual, Spiked-online cuts right to the chase in an article on eco-economics:
"Environmentalism can be seen as a counterattack against a key premise of the Enlightenment: that a central part of progress consists of increasing human control over nature. Instead, environmentalists argue that humans should accept their place as a mere subsidiary of the natural world. In practice this means reconciling humanity to poverty, disease and natural disasters."
Wow!

People are afraid to say it out loud, but the environmental movement is fundamentally Luddite. This has not gone unnoticed in the Third World, where many have the suspicion that the limits-to-growth ideas promulgated in the developed world are a sneaky way to keep the Third World down. Though not a fan of conspiracy theories, I can see how they might feel that way in the developing world. After all, we already have the goodies. Limits to growth means they get to remain in poverty. For us, it just means fewer toys and a slightly less convenient life. For them, it means death and misery.

Why is it that economists get it, while others do not? The irony of this is that Malthusian predictions turned out to be wrong, but, as the article notes, resulted in economics becoming the dismal science. Why these disproven ideas have been exhumed by the Greens is incomprehsible. Actually, what is incomprehensible is why they caught on. All the empircal evidence points in the opposite direction: that resources become less scarce with time, not more.

http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CA750.htm
Gabriel 9:05 AM

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Just a random, clever quote:

"With or without religion, good people will do good things and bad people will do evil things; but for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
-Steve Weinberg
Gabriel 5:54 PM

Friday, August 29, 2003

"The success of environmentalist initiatives hinges not on some highly developed technology or some arcane new science, but on a state of mind which is bound to be influenced as much or more by the power of images, narratives, metaphors, and by appeals to feeling…[than by] appeals to data, statistics, expertise, and formal reasoning."
- Ulrich Beck

This quote really sums it up for me: environmentalism is not really about an objective problem to be understood through rational thought, informed by data. What really counts is how we feel about the environment. Don't confuse the issue with facts! As I have long contended, most environmentalists care about nature with their hearts instead of with their brains. The heart has a lousy track record in the field of public policy. I think nature will be better served if we use our brains.

You might wonder, who is this Ulrich Beck? Some lightweight enviro-extremist wacko? Well, not quite. He's a professor of sociology at University of Munich (Ludwig Maximilians-Universitat Munchen, LMU) and a pretty big wheel in European intellectual circles, particularly the postmodernist ones. You can read more about him in this article. I heard Beck quoted by a Harvard English professor (Lawrence Buell), who referred to Beck as "the Rachel Carson of contemporary sociology," a comparison bizarre enough to merit a separate post.

Environmentalism has become a religion. To quote an opinion piece in the London Times, "Facts are not always the strong point of true believers, and global warming has morphed into an ancient-style religion, demanding sacrifice to the Earth, especially, it would seem, by the poor of the developing world."
Gabriel 11:29 PM

Sunday, July 20, 2003

Yet another study that suggests that human activity may not have anything to do with climate change:
A claim of nonhuman-induced global warming sparks debate
As usual, the critics are outraged, sputtering that "... [the] paper is so fundamentally misconceived and contains so many egregious errors that it would take weeks to list and explain them all." Quite a strident criticism that fails to list even one such error, which should be particularly easy to find since there are so many. This is a common response to heretical statements in the enviro wars: extreme outrage and remonstration, but no hard data to back it up.

I suppose the Spanish Inquisition is next. Of course, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Gabriel 1:07 PM