Skeptical Environmentalist Saga Continues 683
"The Ministry critique holds that the Committee's procedure was unfair. It does not address the scientific issues. Lomborg's book caused outrage among many environmentalists and scientists, while right-wing organizations such as the Cato Institute have defended Lomborg. Scientific American devoted eleven pages of its January 2002 issue to a critique of Lomborg. Lomborg was only allowed to publish a one-page rebuttal, to which Scientific American replied here. When Lomborg defended himself by posting the Scientific American critique on his web site and that of Greenspirit with his commentary [PDF file] interspersed, Scientific American threatened to sue and both sites took it down. It is, however, still available at the iGreens web site."
(Slashdot ran a review of Lomborg's book early last year.)
That reminds me (Score:5, Interesting)
Aliens Cause Global Warming [sepp.org]
By Michael Crichton
It is a very good read. Crichton claims that the public believes in things like Global Warming and Nuclear Winter for the same reasons that it believes in little green men. He says that science has failed to act as "a candle in the dark."
Shhhh! (Score:5, Interesting)
That teaches him for questioning orthodoxy.
Lomborg's book has 2 930 footnotes which allows you to fact check every single assertion that he makes. I've never seen that level of detail from the environmentalist movement and I speak as someone who has read more than just their pamphlets.
It should be noted that the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation published its own response to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty:
"[T]he DCSD has not documented where [Dr Lomborg] has allegedly been biased in his choice of data and in his argumentation, and...the ruling is completely void of argumentation for why the DCSD find that the complainants are right in their criticisms of [his] working methods. It is not sufficient that the criticisms of a researcher's working methods exist; the DCSD must consider the criticisms and take a position on whether or not the criticisms are justified, and why."
Oh, you mean the DCSD has done what they are accusing of Lomborg on? Right then...carry on!
Re:Skeptical smokers too (Score:4, Interesting)
This story reminds me of what I hear many smokers say when they're challenged over smoking. They say that there has never been any proof that smoking causes lung cancer, just that it's circumstantial. When A happens, then B happens, this doesn't mean that A caused B. If B happens after A in 95% of cases, that's not proof, and merely circumstantial (although compelling).
Disregarding the carcinogen tests on mice, a pure statistical approach should at least tell you if there is some kind of correlation.
If the probability of getting lung cancer for smokers differs statistically significantly (there are tests for this) from the same probability for non-smokers, then you can say with a certain margin of error (say 99% certainty) that smoking and lung cancer are not independent variables but that they are correlated. Yes, correlation does not equal causality, but if the odds of getting lung cancer are less for non-smokers then I certainly know how not to spend my spare change. Others are free to auto-darwinize themselves with tobacco products.
The problem with fighting a theory backed by overwhelming evidence is that you'd really have to come up with your own bulletproof theory that explains all the results as well as predicts something previously unknown. This is where all the crackpot theories usually fail. They attack existing theories and ridicule their shortcomings then introduce new models which explain all the data adequately but do not accurately predict anything new. Worse, they usually introduce new assumptions and special conditions that the old theories didn't need in order to work.
Re:Shhhh! (Score:5, Interesting)
Are they disputing the individual facts or the conclusions drawn from those facts? Is it possible that the facts he footnoted have been found to be questionable upon further review?
I remember reading that many of the facts he talked about were from flawed studies, maybe that's the problem. Did he knowingly choose the studies that advanced his pet theory while ignoring studies that might raise doubt? If so then he deserves to be rebuked don't you think?
Re:Skeptical smokers too (Score:3, Interesting)
I am an environmentalist, in that it seems obvious to me that we are destroying much natural beauty and causing damage to human health with pollution. I also suspect (although I am just a layman) that we are causing global warming, and that we should avoid changing the climate until we are more capable of understanding what impact this will have. To me, "first doing no harm" is the truly conservative approach to the environment, not the "we'll do nothing until the proof is overwhelming" argument that some so-called conservatives make.
I do not drive an SUV. In fact, I do not own a car at all, and I take public transportation or walk everywhere.
BUT...I am becoming more and more skeptical of the environmental movement. Too much of it seems to be pushing an anti-capitalist morality with which I do not agree (e.g., I have a friend who once argued that subcontinent Indians are better off in abject poverty than as computer programmers in air conditioned offices). I don't want people to have less goods - I just want to make sure that we all have iPods in such a way that we don't destroy the earth in the process.
More importantly, I am seeing cases where the environmental movement is wilfully exaggerating how bad things are, and is arguing that no matter what the choice, the environment is both the first and the only thing.
Well, I obviously want a clean, healthy environment. But it must be balanced against other needs. And to make the correct decisions, we must have accurate, not exaggerated, accounts of the situation.
That is why I appreciate people like Dr. Lomborg (or Gregg Easterbrook at the New Republic), who bring some balance to the debate between environmentalists and oil-company-sponsored "non-profits."
Global warming? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not saying that humankind has no impact on Earth's climate, but that maybe blaming us for global warming is just another Chicken Little espousing that the sky is falling. We'll likely know better, in a few million years or so. Till then, I'm not holding my breath.
Does it matter? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:capitalism? (Score:3, Interesting)
"it's that capitalism assumes scarce resources with imperfect but real fungibility (and inevitable but minimizable tradeoffs) which makes money-based exchanges the least friction-bound way to allocate them."
Not quite true. Capitalism measures the rate at which natural materials are extracted but not the rate at which they are restored. In other words capitalism has no way of measuring sustainibility until it's too late. Let me illustrate with an example.
Let's say that G.W decided that trees cause pollution and ordered all forests logged. The market would be flooded with wood and the price of wood would drop down to nothing. At that point a capitalism would say "the price of wood keeps decreasing so that must mean there are more trees in the world, in fact I predict that in 6 months there will be infinate amount of trees in the world". You see these kinds of arguments all the time "the price of such and such is going down so there must not be a shortage". They are measuring the rate of extraction not long term sustainability.
I once saw Milton Friedman talking about pollution with Charlie Rose and he said "if my shirt gets dirty from pollution then I can sue the factory" (something to that effect). It never occured to him that pollution might cause a deformed baby or cancer. To him pollution means getting his brooks brothers suit cleaned more often.
Skeptical astrophysicists will rush to correct you (Score:3, Interesting)
The first page states a claim that is very difficult for the global-warming denialists: "...since 1980, the solar constant has steadily decreased by 0.02 percent per year."
Environmentalist Wackos Strike Again (Score:1, Interesting)
You say you've toured the Diablo Canyon facility, and that's how you know it was built right? If you know that's the case, why aren't you in the business of nuclear reactor design? Or do you think that simply touring the facility gives you all the knowledge you need to verify its soundness and robustness?
You sound exactly like the people Bjorn Lomborg looks at. Why not take a look at how much you really don't know, before you make such an ignorant conclusion.
Re:Shhhh! (Score:2, Interesting)
his choice of data
So he "chose" data? Did this person perform any experiments or observations of his own, or is this more crack armchair science from a person who did all their research from the first 2930 hits on google?
This exact same thing came up when someone presented "research" to the us government showing that nanoscale particles were harmful when inhaled (something that I suspect has been somewhat common knowledge since coal miners started getting black lung). The whole "research" was assembled from other people's research with very little in the way of original work, for which the US government paid a pretty penny in a grant.
Mankind currently lacks the instrumentation, knowledge, and experience to Prove most complex phenomenon. We still have no working Proof of how gravity actually works, we just know that it does empirically.
Global warming? Who knows? All I know is that my freshman year of college, the university opened late due to snow, and it has not snowed here since then. There is no Proof that the cows farting, the cars driving, the factories belching, the volcanoes erupting, and whatever other factors people say take part cause global warming. But theres no Proof the other way either.
Lets take the ozone hole. Nobody has ever traced the path from individual CFCs in an old refrigerator in the US to the antartic circle, so CFCs were not Proven to cause the hole. However, shortly after CFCs (which are proven to destroy ozone through a well understood chemical process) were banned in industrialized nations, the ozone hole began to shrink (compare 2001 [epa.gov] to this page which details a decade of loss [cam.ac.uk]. Note that the color scales are different, the EPA defines the ozone hole as less than 220 Dobson Units which is the small blob in the middle of Antartica in 2001, while the 220 Dobson Unit level marks most of the antartic circle in blue and purple in 1991. You can also see on the EPA picture that ozone depletion is also taking place over countries in southern Asia and Africa where CFCs were not banned, but very little is taking place over South America. Thus there is very strong empirical evidence for a link between CFC release and ozone depletion.
Dear Environmentalist Wackos, (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:That reminds me (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's a great item from the Salinas exam, almost written for slashdotters:
Ha! Had there been a slashdot back then the exam would no doubt have included "lose" and "loose."
Giggle!
Heat islands aren't it, but would you understand? (Score:5, Interesting)
What? You don't know? I'm not surprised.
Heat islands have been the subject of intense discussion and research in this area for as long as I've been following it, and a quick search immediately turns up refutations of that claim. From physicist Martin I. Hoffert [commonwealthclub.org] (who is certainly more qualified to expound on the issue than Lomborg): Here's another take on the issue [whyfiles.org]: and another independent measurement [nap.edu]: (I can't believe the things that get modded up. Okay, given the lack of research obvious in what gets posted, maybe I can believe the credulousness obvious in what gets modded up. But it's still dismaying.)Re:That reminds me (Score:1, Interesting)
He(she) can't because there isn't any.
On a related topic, here is a site that describes the world's oldest known benchmark of Mean Sea Level (MSL):
It also debunks the recent politically correct publications by Pugh & Hunter that ignore the evidence and conclude that the MSL has risen. In doing so it gives an eye-opening perspective on how facts and history are manipulated to produce the desired politically correct results.
Re:Dreaming on a Wet Christmas (Score:3, Interesting)
Not saying if humans are/aren't making an impact, and certainly not the magnitude of any influence we might have, but using one anecdotal data point doesn't really help your argument.
But even if we're not really destroying the environment as much as everyone fears, I do agree that less pollution is a Good Thing(tm).
=Smidge=
Re:That reminds me (Score:2, Interesting)
Your view of science seems a little warped to me. A lot of science isn't based on empirical proof but on observations and careful deductions. You cannot measure and quantify everything. Luckilly scientists are smarter than that.
You could maybe, say, look at a planet with a co2 atmosphere and see that is a lot warmer than it should be.
Then you could do some experiments with co2 to see how it behaves and figure that it's probably the cause.
Then maybe other scientists are looking at the cause for global warming and deduce that co2 might be the culprit.
Not science? It is absolutely science.
Debateble? Maybe.
A reason to keep driving obscenely big suv's? A definite no!
Re:Scientific American. (Score:5, Interesting)
A climatologist researcher friend of mine was going along with the global warming consensus while he was running Global Circulation Models. Then he got deep into paleoclimatology and changed his position, because he saw first hand how terribly bad the historical climate record was, and what large, important conclusions were drawn from inadequate data coupled to very suspect indirect causation chains.
Other acuaintances of mine in the field, at least during the Clinton administration, would not publish their skepticisms and didn't want to be quoted by name because being a GW skeptic meant not getting research grants!
Another acquaintance doing research on increased CO2 on plant growth had trouble getting grants once he started showing very positive results.
Global Warming "science" is already highly politicized. And I put "science" in quotes because forecasting something 100 years in advance is not particularly scientific, given the lack of testability in reasonable time frames. Furthermore, there is a sampling bias in the models... huge amounts of assumptions go into models, many in what is called "paramterization" - which means literally sticking in fudge factors to account for many phenomenon either too fine grained, too poorly understood or just too hard to model to put into the program. Naturally, those models which can "forecast" the historical record tend to be considered the best ones. However, given the level of tweaking the models require, this is more likely to be a matter of chance than to indicate that the model is really correct.
Finally, what BL says about the Kyoto accords is true. Put in different terms, the change in temperature as a result of Kyoto would not be measurable (separable from noise) in 100 years. In other words, Kyoto does nothing to help the environment (the other formulation is to say it delays warming 6 years out of 100). If one pins down a knowledgable Kyoto proponent, they will admit that Kyoto doesn't achieve anything of significance with regard to the climate, but rather gives a start to what is really required, which (if you believe the IPCC models) is a reduction in CO2 emissions so great that with current technology it would destroy the economies of the world and result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 3rd and 4th world.
In other words, Kyoto was meant as a trojan horse (with goodies in there to make the US economy less competitive with Europe, and a complete lack of regulation of the largest and fastest growing countries). Its purpose was to get people used to suffering to reduce CO2, and to get agreements in place that could be used to tighten the CO2 rules over time.
Finally, many environmentalists believe in the "precautionary principle" which in effect says that if we suspect something might be harmful, but can't prove it, we should stop it anyway.
This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that it is applied to restrict CO2 emitting activity, but is not applied to the potential social impacts of those restrictions. In other words, precautionaryism (to coin a term) is okay for the environment, but potential harm to man does not receive the same level of caution. Furthermore, it is easy to extend the precautionary principle to end all progress. For example, the precautionary principle, applied to genetic engineering, would cause us to shut down all efforts in the area, because it is likely (yes, likely) that the technology will be used by terrorists to create dangerous pathogens.
On another topic, I read the Scientific American criticism of The Skeptical Environmentalist. It almost caused me to cancel my subscription after forty years. It was an poor excuse for a rebuttal - it was an attack on the person, BL, more than on what he had to say. It ignored most of his main points and where it found specific fault (and there was almost none pointed out), it was on trivial details. And yet, they only gave him one page to respond. Furthermore, the threatened him with copyr
Re:That reminds me (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no question that human activity effects the atmosphere.
If global warming is happening and it's bad then we should change our behavior to minimize or reverse the effect even if we are not the cause of it.
Re:Shhhh! (Score:2, Interesting)
Recycling uses huge amounts of energy, water, chemicals, and causes a great deal of pollution, mostly through shipping materials around to various processing centers. The chemicals used in cleaning recyclable bottles etc also cause pollution. The answer is actually quite simple. Landfills are still the most environmentally friendly method of disposing of most forms of waste. But it doesnt create as many jobs, and it doesnt require as much government control. Of course lower levels of consumerism and materialism, and a general distaste of excessive packaging on the part of the average human being would be even better, better for the environment at least, not so good for government jobs and big businesses. And lets face it, people seem addicted to brightly colored packaging.
Greenpeace also plays these games. The fact is the environment is in no where near as much danger as Greenpeace and other companys and governments claim, but it serves their financial interests to claim otherwise. Dont be tricked. This danish outfit is simply patting their sponsers on the back and spreading some "thanks for the cash" FUD. You only have to look where the money is coming from, if an outfit is sponsored by a government or a big business, they simply dont have credibility. If they are normal uni professor doing independant research, or a self employed scientist, or a hobbyist, then they have credibility. Simple formula really. So dont be tricked by the environmentalist wankers. Its all just FUD, a religion basically, for the 21st century. Preying on ignorance, spreading fear, and collecting the profits.
Re:Shhhh! (Score:3, Interesting)
There have been many cases of bad science in history. Polywater and Cold Fusion being the most recent. The scientific process is not perfect - it is loaded with politics and factions in practice, as anyone familiar with science is aware. In the long run, on those subjects where its process can be applied, it provides the best truths we can have. But along the way, it can be far off. Furthermore, it does not approach the truth asymptotically, but sometimes with sudden paradigm shifts.
And quite contrary to your beliefs, many leaders of environmentalist organizations indeed act just like other special interest groups, putting out intentionally deceitful propaganda in order to increase their income. Notice I said "leaders." I am not imputing the motives of environmentalists in general.
However, since you bring the subject up, environmentalists can broadly be divided into two types. One type wants to preserve the environment for our use and the future use of humanity. This is simply conservationism by another name.
Another type, which is distressingly common, uses environmentalism as a substitute for religion. Where else can one derive the basis that we should preserve the earth for its own sake, or that we don't have the "right" to change it? Anyone making that argument is putting "the earth" above mankind. Only a religion gives a basis for such a set of ethics.
As it happens, although I am not in the field, I am well acquainted with some people in the global warming field. I also have enough scientific background to not be a typical ideologically driven opponent to the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. And I know the level of politics in global warming "science" and the poor quality of much of the work.
The issue with BL is how such a huge portion of the scientific community (most of whom are NOT earth scientists) have joined to attack him. He did NOT publish a flawed scientific work. He published a compendium of references and his interpretations. Furthermore, as a PhD statistician, he does indeed have a background to judge many of the environmental studies as far as their methodology is concerned - better qualified than many of the researchers.
But as far as I can tell, the theory of anthropogenic global warming has reached the point of being doctrine among many who have not studied it, because it fits THEIR political or ideological agenda. Hence the reaction to someone like BL is hysterical and overblown.
If his appointment was political, then so was the attack on him by the commission. In that sense, he is a pawn between powerful forces.
Finally, I have yet to meet an environmentalist who can justify Kyoto even using the global warming projections that it is based on, projections which are not the result of solid science, but rather highly speculative science.
Consider other areas of science where the strong consensus model was wrong:
Causes of peptic ulcers.. stress, eating wrong foods, etc. Then one day a doctor discovers that treating ulcers with antibiotics is very effective, leading to the discovery that Helicobacter Pylori is the cause of most ulcers. Oops!
Plate tectonics. Because the theory of continental drift was first proposed by an astrophysicist, and because it was at strong variance with prevailing theories, it took many years before geologists were willing to accept the already very strong evidence.
These are just recent reversals. The scientific method works, but you have to give it enough time. If you watch the flip/flops of major pieces of the CO2 debate, you realize that the science in that area is far from mature. If you understand the mechanisms of the models, and realize how parameterization works, then you know that the models are not strong science, but rather just a best guess.
Re:That reminds me (Score:3, Interesting)
Science requires faith: particularly, faith in the scientific method, which is founded on a completely unjustifiable belief in inductive reasoning - that is, "if one thing causes another thing a lot, it'll probably cause that same thing in the future too". Inductive reasoning is why we require experiments to be repeatable. Once they're repeatable, then we can assume they apply to the real world.
But why do you believe in induction? It can't be derived from deductive logic (that's why it's not called deduction). Your reason for believing in induction is probably that it's always worked before. But then you're using induction to justify induction!
Really, the reason to believe in induction (and therefore the scientific method) is because it creates results that are useful to the progress of society, not because it is more justifiable.
A rational person, generally, is someone who chooses that induction is a basis for believing in things.