The American Spectator

Martin| 12.20.08 @ 1:05PM

Yes, but Ehrlich was right about population. The natural level of world population is about 1 billion, and we all made a horrible mistake letting it take off after the Industrial Revolution. If we got down to 1 billion again all our problems would go away and we'd all live like 18th C. oligarchs once robot tech was perfected. If Steyn gets his way we'll be rats in too small a maze (warmer or not, who cares?). Italy and Japan are the future!

Robert Stacy McCain| 12.20.08 @ 2:00PM

Martin, the "natural level of world population" is whatever it is. Indeed, one might say that the "natural" population level has been suppressed by compulsory population-control regimes (e.g., China) and the massive efforts of "family planning" NGOs.

Eutychus| 12.20.08 @ 4:26PM

You're right Robert. In fact, many of the nations of Europe face the prospect of not being able to replace their dying populations. The exception to this being the muslim populations which seem to be reproducing fast enough for some to refer to the continent as Eurabia.

Bob| 12.20.08 @ 7:09PM

RSM, have you ever actually read the research on global warming? I challenge you to do so. All of the crackpots who claim global warming does not exist come back to a couple of older scientists, one an "expert" on sea levels and one tied to the Cato Institute (a well know scientific group????). It is interesting to note that their bosses did not agree with their research because rather than using objective measures, they propounded theories why the data was wrong. NONE OF THE MEASUREMENTS BACKED THESE PEOPLE UP.

The arguments about the polar ice cap not melting are also spurious if you read the research. There are indeed places where the ice cap is thicker, but this is far offset by the loss in area of the ice cap. I've taken enough advanced mathematics to understand this principle.

There are certainly arguments that speak to cyclical nature of temperature cycles over long periods of time and imbeciles like Rush Limbaugh, who doesn't understand the science, look at the information on its face and come to uninformed conclusions. However, each of the previous cycles were explained by geological or planetary/gravitational events. The global warming we see now has no such explanation.

There is significant debate on how much global warming we are seeing and the effect it will have in the future, but on the existence of it and the fact that humans affect it, there is no scientific debate except by crackpots and politicians.

All of the world's major scientific groups, including countries that have something to lose, have agreed on this.

If conservatives were not so "anti-intellectual" they would have taken the time to read the science on both sides. You've got to stop substituting belief for reason.

That said, with the variance we see in the extent of the problem, I would be hard pressed to support an all out war against global warming. I would like to see more research done to verify the facts and determine which elements might be most effective by policy initiatives. That is a lot less costly than going overboard when we have a significant financial crisis.

Brooks| 12.21.08 @ 8:43AM

As I sit here in St. Paul, it is -9 deg. F. and I walked out to get my Sunday paper through 4" of new snow.
This is a climate change all right. We shouldn't have this weather except for a few days in late January.

erkgj| 12.21.08 @ 9:59AM

mccain i think youve been had by martin

PNMNM| 12.21.08 @ 2:56PM

Bob, have you ever been able to find out how accurate the climate models are that have been used to predict climate, to tell us that human activity is the culprit that has caused the warming during the past 20 or 30 years? Or have you ever thought of looking? The IPCC and the modelers do not advertise the warts. By not doing so, they appear to be reliable. Some warming is expected based on increased levels of CO2 and methane, this direct warming is minor compared to what the models predict because they include feedbacks that cause most of the "dire" warming used to scare policy makers to seek changes in emissions. These feedbacks mostly involve increased water vapor and changes in clouds. The water vapor and cloud feedbacks have never been proven. The search is still on. The models are so bad, they cannot even reproduce the distribution of clouds, especially those that are most likely to mitigate CO2-driven warming. This cloud business is just the tip of the climate model wartberg.
The confidence given to climate models arose after the modelers predicted in the late 1980's and early 90's that temperatures would keep rising and rising. They were able to account for prior dips in the temperature curves by assuming that aerosols were blocking the sun and keeping the Earth cooler than predicted. So, they added enough aerosols to the models get the model and observed temperatures to match prior to the 1980's. So, global temperatures shot up during the 90's and continued to rise until about 2000, when they leveled off and recently started dropping. The prediction was fine as long as temperatures rose, but now, if the models are properly accounting for all forcings, why has the warming stopped? Some will say it is noise in the system. Others will say it is a La Nina. Who knows what else? The point is that the models did not get it right. Arctic ice coverage came back with a vengeance in 2008. Suddenly we don't hear anything about the Arctic ice. (Oh, and by the way, ice coverage over the Antarctic has been balancing out the previous losses in the Arctic. We only hear about the Antarctic when a honker iceberg breaks off. Never mind that that is and has been de rigueur since summertime frist started visiting the southern pole.)
There are quite a few climate scientists who are not convinced that human activity is responsible for the recent warming, not just the anonymous two you cited. A lot of them may be older, and, perhaps, wise enough to know that there is a lot more scientific work to be done before we can rush to the conclusion that we know enough about all of the factors affecting climate changes to conclude that humans have caused all of the warming over the last century.
Oh, what cyclical phenomenon caused the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age?
The current "climate" in climate science is an ice age. A set of flawed models, short-term global observations, and politics have frozen the science in a glacier of unproven opinion. Skepticism, which is critical to extracting truth in any scientific endeavor, should be welcomed to make sure that the science is correct. Shut it down and it is no longer science, but intellectual totalitarianism. That is the kind of effect to be feared from the appointment Ehrlich types to high places.

stmichrick| 12.21.08 @ 8:59PM

Thank you PNMNM. I had been wondering 'what about Bob?' on global warming. Bob specializes in throwing out a few factoids which make him sound authoritative to the simple among us. His statement about ' no geological or planetary/gravitational events' is just a lie.

Agenda- driven science and climate propaganda is the societal illness that threatens us all economically in the next administration. Once again, by re-defining terms and demonizing challengers, the left tries to construct arguments that have no response. Who can be for global catastrophe and against PAYING for its mitigation?

Get some perspective, Bob. You (and we) are occupying a speck of geologic time on a constantly changing earth shaped by truly cosmic forces. Your SUV is meaningless. Grow up.

Jim| 12.21.08 @ 10:46PM

There are certainly arguments that speak to cyclical nature of temperature cycles over long periods of time and imbeciles like Algore, Barack Obama, who doesn't understand the science, look at the information on its face and come to uninformed conclusions and use such conclusions to line their pockets by scamming an uniformed public. However Algore tells us, each of the previous cycles were explained by geological or planetary/gravitational events. The global warming we see now has no such explanation.

John| 12.21.08 @ 11:05PM

There is no such thing as "human induced global warming"... zero.. zip... nadda... We are an arrogant hubris ridden bunch of fleas on the hind quarters of an elephant in the herd. Just because we can see the elephant, and the other elephants... we think of ourselves as equals.

The truth is that there is no "science" proving anything about anything in respect to global warming, cooling, or stasis (which is absolutely a fruity idea to begin with). There is no established "ideal" temperature, just what certain people want it to be with all of their teeny tiny hearts, and eenie weenie brains.

A generation from now as we have sort of realized that there is a tad more snow on the ground, and the temperatures at the airport are 2 degrees cooler when taken next to the exhaust vent of the air conditioning chiller, will enough people wake up to the fraud currently being perpetrated.

Earth is quite beyond our climatic control. The effects of solar radiation, sunspot cycles, proximity to the sun, wobble in the Earth's axis have the largest effects.

Then there is that odd little thing about the Earth's magnetic field, which is generated by that magnetic spinning ball of iron and other heavy elements at the core of the planet. It shifts, gaps, dances, and sways like any unstable magnetic field does. It is a known phenomenon in any spinning spheroid object with a magnetic field.

Once you get past the external radiation, and the internal electromagnetism, then you get to those blasted unpredictable and forever erupting volcanoes, magma chambers, heat sinks, and subduction zones that change currents in the oceans by warming or cooling amounts of water in days on a scale that we could not even hope to approach since the dawn of the industrial age.

Global Warming re-written as Climate Change is a political ruse for the purpose of panicking the herd into paying ever more money into the pockets of those conducting the fraud. We are forever falling for con artists... even when the con is a blatant.

The climate is going to do what the climate is going to do. We are along for the ride. If it gets warmer... wear shorts... drink gin and tonics... If it gets colder, break out the parkas and hot toddies...

The Earth and its ever changing, every shifting climate will be here tomorrow, a week from now, and beyond. Real science figures that the Sun in its average yellow dwarfish sort of existence has made it through about half its life. Our puny existence in a relative 1 ten thousandth of a nano-second of time will be of no consequence.

I keep thinking that some people have a whole lot of nerve accusing us religious folks of believing in "oogiddy boogiddy" things.

Peace in this Christmas Week. Love and Joy to all of you.

John

PNMNM| 12.22.08 @ 9:48AM

Oogiddy boogiddy. Well said, John!

Indiana Alex| 12.22.08 @ 10:01AM

Bob knows that I'm just a small town rube without the capacity to call myself an intellectual, but sometimes I wonder about the retreating ice sheets of Greenland. My simplicity is a bit perplexed wondering, why is it called Greenland if it's covered with ice? Is it some ironic twist of a name, or is it possible that it was, at one time, not covered with ice, but actually a green land? And would this then mean that at this time, not too long ago the earth was much warmer than it is now? This would of course be well before I bought my wife a Chevy Avalanche.

But of course I don't commit myself to the itellect of Bob, so I must plead ignorance on this issue and defer to his brilliant analyis.

Peace and joy to all this Christmas, and happy Hannukah too.

Russell Seitz| 12.22.08 @ 10:27AM

Can't seem to find the Journal of Oogiddy Boogiddy in Science Citation Indices.

Is it Pat Michael's latest start-up ?

Holdren should have stuck to betting that no living Planet Gore contributer has read the whole IPCC report- certainly none of your readers, or they wouldn't dismiss the heroic and successful efforts of the US team to get the whole process on the record, especially the warts.

How very strange you lot don't seem disposed to duke it up with the principals over at real climate.

Marc Jeric| 12.22.08 @ 11:13AM

This guy above named Bob is really something. He should know that the globaloney cooling scam of the 1970's did not "work"; so it was replaced by the globaloney warming hoax in the 1990's; and now, after 11 years of extraordinary cooling that hoax was replaced by the "climate change" flim-flam. All of that "scientific" reasearch is being done by government-paid scientists who are 99% rejects of private enterprise but very socialistic in their political leanings.
In the meantime our friend Bob should read the names of over 31,000 real scientists (including over 9,000 of them with PhD's) who signed the "Global Warming Petition Project" and the "Manhattan Declaration" (see Internet) to the effect of denying any anthropogenic influence on earth's climate.

Mary| 12.22.08 @ 12:52PM

The right gets tagged for being anti-science because of religion. And I'm not sure how fair a criticism it is, but if you've ever stumbled upon a debate between evolutionists and creationists and/or intelligent design people, you can see where the bad rap comes from.

That said, the Genome Project was headed by an Evangelical recently. And at this site: http://tinyurl.com/g9fk4, you can read the thoughts of a Christian who is a nuclear physicist and an eirenic fellow.

I always liked science, but just didn't have the acumen for it. I loved physics, but once it got beyond by ability to visualize the concept taught I couldn't assimilate and integrate the knowledge.

In order for me to be able to judge if evolution is true I'd have to be able to understand and critique the work of its scientists. Since I can't do that I have to offer them an act of faith. So, I'm agnostic but interested. All people who don't understand global warming well enough to understand and critique its scientists offer an act of faith to them as well.

Recently, at Pajamas Media there was a piece on how to get the young back on board the Republican ship. The piece was okay, but nothing special. But, as is often the case, some who comment can bring life where there isn't much. To wit:

***Three Simple Steps –

1. It was investment into defense related industries that gave today’s youth the miracle electronics that they assume belongs top their generation. Computers were developed to solve artillery ballistics problems. Semiconductors (chips) were needed to steer ballistic missiles. The internet was the way to preserve communications if all hell broke loose. And so on. Republican effort was at the forefront of these and any number of technologies (e.g. SDI etc.)

Take NASA, for example. Democrats are forever threatening to cut budgets because of “all the problems we need to solve right here on earth.” It’s republicans who keep NASA afloat, especially manned missions.

2. Get rid of the social conservatives. All of them. These are the people who are anti-stem cells, anti-evolution, and so on. They are solely responsible for the galactically STUPID image that republicans suffer with today as being anti-science. This must come to a halt. In the world of engineering and such most of the tech class are republicans. Not democrats. It is the republican voters who are the unseen faces making all of the present day magic work. Social conservatives paint the wrong picture, and one that is laughably inaccurate. This must stop.

3. Solve the global warming problem (it’s not really a problem, but the youth have been told that it is) right here right now and forevermore — easily. How? By advocating a program to put spaceborne solar power in business. Beam power all day long via microwaves to earth. No coal. We have known how to do this since the 70’s. We have a space station. We need to keep this. Why? It teaches us how to build big stuff in space… like space power satellite systems. Let the democrats natter about their luddite approaches to solving absolutely nothing and doing little more than restricting and regulating. Democrats don’t know how to create. They don’t know anything about technology. They are afraid of it. The distinction will be clear.

SUMMARY: Winning the youth vote is as simple as making sure that younger voters know who was and remains responsible for the wonders that they take for granted. Democrats are luddites who want to regulate and stifle innovation. Republicans reward innovation. Republicans are the party of science, innovation, and investment into America and future jobs.

[...]

Re auto bailouts it’s rather telling that the democrats are once again grandstanding and adding strings. The auto makers can’t get a bailout unless they promise to use the money for the global warming green boondoggle. You see, democrats are technology creationsists who seem to think they can mandate a technology into existence. Poof! It’s here! What a crock. You can’t mandate innovation. And democrats laugh at religious people. The irony amuses me to no end. [Emphasis mine] [Author: G Alston]***

I'm a social conservative so the 2nd point I take in a spirit of possible just rebuke. Don't know about "beaming power," just think the whole comment is interesting, and I wonder how accurate it is?

pigment Red| 4.4.10 @ 5:38AM

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