Presented for your consideration: Ian Katz’s column in The Guardian, in which he begins the process that climate change advocates which read their paper as devoutly as a hymnal must now endure. Namely, strike the colours:
What went wrong? How long have you got:
- the leak of the “climategate” emails that showed scientists behaving just as tribally as their detractors,
- the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s great glacier meltdown (enough “gates” for now),
- the abject failure of Copenhagen,
- Obama’s Massachusetts disaster
- and a bitterly cold winter in much of Europe and the US.
If you doubt the effect of the last of these, take a look at stories like “The mini-ice age starts here” in the Daily Mail, or the website entitled If Global Warming Is Real Then Why Is It Cold? Add to that lot a mildly hysterical binary culture in which the case for action on climate change is either unanswerable or in tatters, and the perfect storm is complete.
There are some desultory phrases to keep the eco-mentalists happy (Katz suggests that no evidence was found of scientists fiddling their results, even though he acknowledges the IPCC bad behaviour in a previous paragraph), but on the whole his judgment is that the climate changers have utterly failed in making their case.
(Incidentally, if you’re wondering what the election of a Republican senator in Massachusetts has to do with climate change, Katz seems to be operating under the impression that President Obama needed a solid Democratic majority in the Senate to ram through “proper” eco-laws. Which doesn’t exactly say much for his understanding of U.S. federal government relations.)
His particular recommendations: that climate change science needs to practice more openness (i.e. don’t be afraid to put your years of research out into public, where it could get savaged by a science-illiterate public; if they’re not educated, then educate them!), a more “neutral” peer review process, with less reliance on “grey” literature; restore the credibility of the IPCC (he doesn’t say anything about firing the present members, but in the real world it’s hard to imagine how the current lot could be put back on their pedestals after their reputations have been shattered so finely), and more importantly:
The case for action must be remade from the ground up. It’s no good politicians and scientists going on TV and insisting that the overwhelming body of climate science has not been touched by the scandals. They need to go back to first principles and explain how we know that CO2 causes warming, how we know CO2 levels are rising, how we know it’s our fault, and how we can predict what is likely to happen if we don’t act.
In other words, scientists are no longer Moses coming off the mountaintop; they’re Sisyphus, rolling the boulder up it. It’s harder work, less glamourous, less grabbing of the headlines, but in terms of changing the planet, it makes for a better chance than the current PR mess they’re in now.
Katz mentions one final item: it’s going to have to be the People, not governments, who will have to drive climate change. So it’s the “hearts and minds” phase for the eco-mentalists, the sort of work that takes years, even decades, to come to fruition. Not the sort of thing you want to hear if you’re a scientist more interested in power and influence than The Work itself, but if the case is to be made at all, the People (and not just the urbanites, but farmers, developers, blue-collar folks, and other nine-to-fivers) are where it has to be done.
Victor, I’m not quite sure what this means. My own understanding of US federal government isn’t what it should be, but James Taranto wrote yesterday that the Scott Brown seat, taken together with a few other happenings, could deprive Obama of his majority in the House of Representatives. His control of the Senate is also in jeopardy. I know that usually there are some Republicans who vote with the Democrats (and vice versa), but it seems that nowadays things are coming down to things resembling party votes more often–in both chambers. If the Democrats lose control of the House, that will certainly change the balance of government.
In any case–and now I’m not really referring to you, but to the trends on the Right–I never understand how the default C/conservative position on climate change came to be one of denial; Mulroney, after all, is our “greenest PM” in history, and in theory “conservatives” should be trying to conserve the environment so that it’s there for the long term. I would love to see Harper pushing a green agenda.
Apologies Victor–my wires got crossed as I’m sleep deprived. Of course, Scott Brown ran for the Senate–and so he isn’t in the House at all. Still, with him in the Senate, the Republicans now have the ability to filibuster legislation. Anyway, I will now go and eat my humble pie.
Dude, haven’t you seen The Day After Tomorrow? You should really watch that documentary infomercial before writing posts like this…. :)
Why bother? Hollywood doesn’t understand climate change science either. ;)
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I think they’d surprise you, Phantom. After Malthus, “the Population Bomb” et al the AGW crowd are finally moving their projections out far enough that they won’t live to see the end state. Instead they get the benefits of being the elites that can save us from ourselves without any of that pesky “you said XYZ was happening”. Hollywood just loves being elitist, especially when they’re told that they’re the elite.
As the AGW models that are compared against give the odds of temperatures being reached but don’t actually contain falsification criteria, there’s no way to “dis-prove” them (the onus, by scientific method, is on them of course, but good luck getting them to acknowledge that). Indeed, in real and online discussions, I have yet to meet a warmer who will set falsification criteria for their theory even though they always insist that I come up with what it would take to “prove” AGW to me. I always start with a year-round northern passage so I figure I’m safe for many decades.
Yeah, Victor, I’ve got to disagree. Without 60 votes in the Senate, the Democrats can’t break cloture. Unless there’s someway for the President to accomplish his goals without passing the bill through Congress, then I’d say the most contentious parts of his agenda are dead (Cap ‘n Trade, Health Care reform top the list).
The landscape has shifted since Feb 2009. The economy is now his mess, due to the fact that he’s now been in office for a year and it still hasn’t improved, and shows no signs of improving. His poll numbers are down. He spent an enormous amount of capital trying to ram through his health care reforms, and they failed. There are numerous Democrat House members and Senators who are vulnerable to defeat this November. He’s not going to be able to count on any of them now. Especially after what happened in Mass.
Given this situation, I’m not betting on PM Harper moving on Cap and Trade either, since he’s said repeatedly that it depends what happens in the United States.
For the record, I never liked cap and trade, but I do like the idea of making progress on the environment, something Mulroney did and Harper has not.