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Sunday, July 09, 2006

Setting Goldberg and Sullivan Straight on Global Warming

More on global warming and pundits from SciAm Observations:

Two More Pundits Whistle Past the Graveyard, SciAm Observations: Robert J. Samuelson's daft column about global warming last week (which I addressed previously) elicited some like-minded punditry from Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online and Andrew Sullivan of Time, so I might as well comment on those, too. Goldberg wonders:

What if science could prove 100% that the earth was warming dangerously but that this was 100% natural...? I suspect this would scatter the current environmental coalitions and antagonists... To be sure, many environmentalists would still be concerned. But, I think, a large amount of the passion would be gone in certain quarters once the fun of blaming capitalism and mankind was out of the equation. I think the reluctance on the part of some on the right to fix the problem would evaporate while the reluctance to "tamper" with nature would cause at least some environmentalists to second-guess global warming science.

He's using this thought experiment in part to try to start an argument about whether environmentalists are hypocritical about global warming. I'll leave it to others to take that bait. What he doesn't seem to recognize is that his "what if" as phrased is so vague that it's almost meaningless, because he's wishing away much of what climate science knows to be true. And in the process, he distorts what the reasonable responses to global warming could be.

Specifically...

Unfortunately, ... we have already been blindly driving climate change for decades (at least), and our future economic development guarantees that we will continue to have our foot on the accelerator for a long time to come. Not adjusting climate isn't really an option for us anymore; we're stuck with trying to moderate our influence and hope for the best.

Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, wrote this:

It occurs to me that the global warming debate is not unlike the WMD-terrorist debate, except the sides are reversed. Accrding to Ron Suskind, Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine" means that if there's a one percent chance that a terrorist could have access to a WMD, we must act as if it were a certainty - because the outcome, however unlikely, would be too disastrous to risk. On global warming, Gore expresses a not-too-dissimilar equation: if there's a small chance that human behavior could lead to environmental catastrophe, we should act as if it were a certainty - because waiting too long is too big a risk to take.

[...]

In both cases, however, the evidence is complicated and hard to pin down with absolute certainty. We know we are at much greater risk now from Islamist terror than we were a decade ago - but measuring how much, and where from specifically, is very hard. Equally, we know that global warming is real, but whether it has reached or will soon reach a dangerous tipping point is not a given. And in both cases, the entire argument rests a great deal on what we do not and cannot know. It seems to me prudent to take both risks seriously, but not so seriously that we abandon objective, empirical judgment.

What is there to say any more about smart people like Sullivan who maintain their agnosticism on global warming by shrugging that "the evidence is complicated and hard to pin down with absolute certainty"? That there is a difference between reasonable uncertainty and a willful refusal to draw an unwelcome conclusion?

Sullivan rushes for comfort into the arms of scientist skeptics like Richard Lindzen when he knows that Lindzen's position is very much at odds with the climatological consensus--the "objective, empirical judgment" he says we should heed. The irony of Sullivan stretching for scientific justification is that he himself draws a parallel with the the Iran "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco but doesn't take the lesson. Matt Stoller has had the pithiest response to that:

This is rich. The rush to war was premised on the assumption that the judgment of the Bush administration (and Sullivan) was superior to that of professional weapons inspectors like Hans Blix. This turned out to be false. Now, the foot-dragging on global warming is premised on the assumption that the judgment of the Bush administration (and Sullivan) is superior to that of the global scientific community.

Sullivan writes:

On global warming, Gore expresses a not-too-dissimilar equation: if there's a small chance that human behavior could lead to environmental catastrophe, we should act as if it were a certainty - because waiting too long is too big a risk to take.

But there isn't a "small chance" that human activity could cause catastrophic climate changes. There's a very large chance based on the extrapolation of what continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere will do--it's like Sullivan is saying there's a small chance a car will crash when it is racing toward a brick wall. Maybe Sullivan is playing games with words by reserving "environmental catastrophe" for the worst-case scenarios of ice-cap melting and so on; but 13 million Bangladeshis who stand to lose their homes if sea levels rise just one meter, for example, might disagree.

    Posted by on Sunday, July 9, 2006 at 09:36 AM in Economics, Environment, Policy, Science | Permalink  TrackBack (1)  Comments (32)

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