We humans are a funny lot.
We like to think that we’ve evolved beyond the animals around us – and in
large part, we have. However, it never
ceases to amuse me how we can all be so quick to fall back into tribalist mindsets
and start flinging poo at each other over things in which we disagree. It is even funnier when you consider that
half the time, we are arguing past each other, and aren't even bothering to understand what the guy we're arguing with is actually trying to say..
One of the more polarized poo-flinging contests of late has
been the debate over global warming.
This one, too, causes me to laugh quite often. These are the 5 reasons that we will never be
able to have a constructive discussion about global warming.
#1: We don’t actually have a good way of measuring what the
climate was beyond about 75 years ago, and the ways that we have to measure now
aren’t that good
The data that we have available shows that it is very
slightly warming, and has been for about 150 years.
Some folks have questioned that data, showing
that the measurement data is being collected from sites that would give results
that are biased towards warming, such as being strategically located in the
middle of a black asphalt parking lot, or right next to the
hot air exhaust ofan air conditioning unit. They argue
that the people who installed these weather stations 30 years ago weren’t total
fucking idiots (and in most cases, they weren’t) and installed the station
somewhere where these biases would not effect the station. It’s just that 30 years can change a lot of
things, and the stations stay in the same spot and get built around, leading to
that station showing a net warming effect that may be exaggerated or not
actually there at all because it was created by heat islands or outside
sources.
The other thing that is happening is that the global network
of temperature measurement sites sucks.
80 some percent are in the northern hemisphere. Most of those are in the western part of the
northern hemisphere. There are places in
the world where the distance between two sites is greater than the distance
between New York City and Los Angeles, and because there is a lack of data, the
scientists are just making the assumption that the data is uniform between
those sites, and that the temperatures average between them. Imagine the temps in New York and LA on any
given winter day. It’s going to be colder
in New York than LA, right? So, in this
situation, the scientists would assume that as you leave New York, it starts
getting warmer, and continues to get incrementally warmer as you head towards
LA.
Of course we know that this is almost certainly not
true. In the winter time, it is almost
certainly colder in Iowa than New York, not warmer! How about the Rocky Mountains?
Rocky Mountains:
Generally colder than New York City
#2: They actually agree on more things than either side
would care to admit.
Want to know something that I’ll bet you didn’t know? This may come as a shock, but most people who
have been branded “global warming skeptics” actually agree with the global warming
consensus that the world’s climate is warming.
How about another one?
Most folks who are riding the global warming consensus train agree that
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, by itself, is getting very close to doing
just about as much damage as it is going to be able to do.
Wait, what?
Reasonable global warming skeptics are not arguing that the
world isn’t warming up. As described
above, they may be saying that the sites are biased and so forth, but nearly
all of them agree that we are going through a period of warming. The disagreement hinges on their contention
on a couple points that the consensus crowd uses to forward their argument:
The first point that the consensus crowd believes that the
skeptics refute is that the warming will be a runaway event that cannot be
stopped. You’ve probably heard Al Gore
talk about the “tipping point” after which nothing we do will stop the run-away
freight train of global warming. This
belief hinges on something called the “feedback effect” and whether it even
exists. You see, the consensus crowd and
the skeptic crowd actually agree on something here, as mentioned above, and
that is that carbon dioxide, by itself, has done about as much damage as it can
possibly do.
I agree with
everything you’re saying!
Think of it this way.
There is a window in an otherwise unlit room, allowing sunlight to come
in. You put a mini blind over the
window. It stops some of the light, but
not all of it. So you add another mini
blind, which stops more light, but some still gets through. So you keep adding mini blinds until you get
to a point where no light at all is getting in, and the room is totally
dark. At this point, you can add as many more mini blinds as you
want and it will make no further difference because no light is getting through
anymore. That is more or less like
carbon dioxide’s greenhouse effect. You
see, carbon dioxide can only slow down energy within a certain bandwidth. That bandwidth is almost maxed out by what CO2
is already in the atmosphere, and other greenhouse gasses there that occur
naturally. So the heat that CO2 can stop
is already all being stopped now, anyway.
Add more CO2, and all you get is another mini blind trying to stop light
that has already been stopped.
The point of contention is the above mentioned tipping
point. You see, another powerful
greenhouse gas is water vapor. The
slight warming caused by CO2, they argue, will allow more water vapor into the
air, increasing the warming, which will allow more water vapor into the air,
increasing the warming even more, and so forth in an endless cycle. This will then warm the earth enough that
permafrost will start to melt, which releases methane, which is – you guessed
it – another very powerful greenhouse gas, which will make the problem even
worse, and the whole mess will spiral out of control and we will all die
horrible, super-heated deaths.
Like this. Just exactly like this.
The skeptics say that there is no recorded evidence of this
ever having happened before, and that the earth’s climate has to be
self-regulating enough to stop this sort of feedback effect or else we’d be
constantly seeing unanticipated massive, drastic climate shifts all the damn
time in the climate record. They say
that there is no evidence of these unanticipated shifts, and that all the
climate shifts that we’ve seen in history and pre-history have been routine,
normal, and a result of rotational axis changes and earth’s orbit, and that any
effort we expend trying to solve this problem will be wasted – and that the
effort we’re talking about is not a small undertaking to be considered lightly.
The consensus is not so sure, and thinks that we should err
on the side of caution.
The second point is that the consensus crowd believes that
global warming will be catastrophic to humans and life on Earth, in
general. Global warming skeptics are not
convinced by this, and in fact, there is a lot of data that shows that the most
prosperous periods for humanity have occurred during times when it was actually
a
bit warmer than it is today.
Skeptics, in the other hand, tend to concentrate on the negatives that
will surely come with that change. An
increased hydrologic cycle will surely lead to increased rainfall and flooding
in some areas, while in others, the increased heat could lead to
desertification. Some say that the
warming could result in more and stronger storms in some areas, while others
say that they will be reduced in other areas.
The net effect of reading all of this is that
there will be change. Some of it for the better, some of it for the
worse.
There are actually three sides to this debate:
- Those who
think that the worse will offset the better;
- Those who think the better will
offset the worse;
- And those who don’t know, and don’t put much thought to it
because they think there isn’t much we can do about it anyway, so why worry?
So why do we only hear about the bad? I must admit that articles talking about the
effects of global warming tend to be a little biased. Here is a link to an article that sprang from
the fact that a warmer Earth with more CO2 in the air (read, gaseous fertilizer)
will result in longer, more productive growing seasons for plant life. Reading the results of that study, the people
who wrote this article said “Wait a goddamned minute, we can’t write an article
about a positive effect of global warming, or we’ll be branded “deniers” and
marginalized as being non-scientific douche-nozzles!” so they worked long and
hard to find a way to make longer, more productive growing seasons for plants a
bad thing. The result? An article about how
global warming will result in more poison ivy .
Truth – not
necessarily the result of politicizing science
The second point that the participants disagree on is that
humans are causing the warming (or enough warming to be statistically
significant). Again, this all hinges on
the feedback effect of CO2 in the atmosphere, because the CO2, itself, isn’t
causing all of the problems that the consensus is warning us about. Yes, we are adding CO2 to the
atmosphere. Yes, that is not
natural. The question is, what will that
do? Many argue that the warming that is
occurring was happening before mankind started contributing meaningfully to the
CO2 level in the air. Many argue that
the speed of the warming ramped up after we did start contributing. Both have valid arguments, but those
arguments will never be debated, because:
#3: They are talking past each other, and exaggerating the
other side’s actual position.
Simple human nature does not deal well with understanding
that that other guy who you disagree with might have a valid point that needs
to be discussed further. It all boils
down to the fact that we are, at our very core and nature, simple poo-flinging
monkeys.
"This offends
me!"
So the skeptics don’t want to discuss the changes caused by
global warming from the viewpoint that we should maybe do something about it,
like cut back on using so much coal and replace it with something more
sustainable, without accusing the consensus folks of wanting to return us to a
Hobbesian, hand-to-mouth existence where we live in caves, which isn’t what
they are advocating at all. The
consensus don’t want to discuss the fact that the skeptics might have a valid
point about the warming being natural, because there really is very little
science that has been (or even can be) done to show what is causing the
warming, leaving them in a more difficult to defend position. Therefore, they just accuse them of denying
the warming altogether (which they don’t), brand them deniers, and refuse to
talk about it any further, which is a lot easier position to defend, and is
easier than debating reasonably from even starting points.
You’ll see this all the time anytime these debates
happen. The discussion eventually
degrades into the skeptics being branded a “denier” that doesn’t think the
world is warming, and that wants to watch the world burn so the oil companies
can make a profit. The consensus will typically then be accused of wanting to
turn back the clock on hundreds of years of human innovation and make children
starve because they are scaredy-pants.
Neither one of these arguments is true or valid, and neither one springs
from the actual stance that most of the participants on either side are taking
in the debate. It is just too damned satisfying
to fling poo when things like this get politicized.
Although, I
do find myself in agreement with that final statement
#4: The effects of trying to stop global warming could suck just as much as the warming, itself.
Much like the more hardcore people in the Society for
Creative Anachronism who actually go around telling people that they’d rather
live in the medieval times than today, the consensus folks have no idea what it
is that they are actually asking for.
Seriously, I
would be so much more successful if I lived in a time where hard, physical
labor, rampant disease, imminent starvation, and widespread physical violence
were more common!
Some of them actually do advocate returning to a more
pastoral, localized life less dependent on energy, sort of like the Amish. Being an outdoorsman, I’ve lived like that
before for short periods of time, and while it isn’t a big deal and can
actually be enjoyable and novel for a week or two, if you were asked to do it
for longer, or, say, for an entire winter, it would suck. A lot.
Even most of the dedicated Amish cheat a little here and there.
But even those that say that we can cut greenhouse emissions
without cutting back on our lifestyle at all don’t understand what they are
really asking for. The reason for this
is technology. Currently, there is only
one way for us to provide all of the energy that we need and use on a daily
basis without using CO2 emitting fossil fuels: Nuclear fission. If you’re even vaguely familiar with nuclear
power, you’ll know without following this link that it has its own set of
serious downsides and side-effects.
Other types of energy that are emission free, like
hydroelectric and wind power, also have their downsides. Both of them are ecologically devastating to
the areas in which they are employed.
This, coupled with the fact that using current technology, there is no
way in hell we could ever even get close to making enough energy using both of
them combined to feed our need means that anyone saying that these are the
answer is either anticipating some huge technological breakthrough or they are
an uniformed idiot. Also, I might note
that removing fossil fuels from the repertoire of energy sources would leave us
all driving electric vehicles, the very best of which can go a jaw-dropping 40
miles before needing to be charged for 5 to 6 hours at a special charging
station. So, yeah, really, really shitty.
It is for these reasons that most skeptics demand a bit more
proof before we take drastic steps to fundamentally change the way we live to
avoid this looming calamity, because taking these steps will be a calamity in
and of themselves.
#5 Efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions might be a good
idea even if we find that global warming is not caused by humans
Some of the more reasoned consensus crowd know that removing
fossil fuels altogether is not an option, but want to reduce the amount that we
use by implementing as much alternative energy as possible. This, in and of itself, is not a bad idea,
and is really something we should all get behind, for one reason: no matter which side of the debate you take,
you have to admit that we don’t really know what all this CO2 is going to do
when we put it into our atmosphere.
Since it is our only atmosphere, it may be a good idea to take steps to
maybe stop fucking with it until we know what is going to happen when we’re
through fucking with it.
Also, the fuels that we burn that release CO2 also release
other nasty shit into our air (which, I might add, is all the air we have) so
cutting back on CO2 also cuts back on the release of these other types of
pollution. So I think we’ve found some
more honest middle-ground here, which is to say that we should probably try to
cut back a little and replace as much fossil-fuel energy with other types of
non-pollution and CO2 creating energy as possible. And yes, this probably means that nuclear
energy is in all of our futures.
