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June 7, 2002
Non-ideological takes on global warming
For un-partisan, non-ideological interpretations of the current state of scientific thinking about climate change, I recommend this (slightly old article) from The New York Review of Books.
More controversially, Scientific American rebutted the science of the statistician Bjorn Lomborg (who has criticized the case for global warming) very effectively here. He replied to Scientific American here.
And I myself wrote about the subject for The Red Herring.
Read together, these sober accounts of the scientific evidence for global warming, and its causation by CO2 emissions, are convincing. They also present an urgent case for slowing CO2 emissions--although, as I have written, elsewhere on r21, men and women of good conscience can disagree about the best means of doing so.
Even the Bush adminstration now accepts that global warming is a near certainty, and that its effects will be calamitous for human society. Why conservaive commentators like Thomas Sowell (see this earlier posting from Chris Alden) are so bitterly hostile to accpepting the case for global warming, its human agency, and the urgent need to do something about it can only be explained by ideology: their critique (which draws heavily on the "uncertainty" of models for climate change) is really very flimsy, and is not much respected by real enviromental scientists. They dislike the anti-business rhetoric and economic ignorance of the environmental movement, and they think that emissions regulation would begin a slippery slope to broader, regulatory constraints of business.
Your description of these accounts as "non-ideological" is comical. Apparently anyone who disagrees with you is "ideological" and anyone who agrees with you is "un-partisan." The first piece you reference starts with a cartoon of George Bush in a drop of oil--no bias there!
The Scientific American critique was written by Stephen Schneider, professor of biological sciences at Stanford, who I quoted earlier as saying: "[We] are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place. . . . To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. . . . Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." Gee, not ulterior motives there.
And your column displays a clear reflexive anti-Bush sentiment, as you describe his energy policy as "characterized by a ferocious, unbalanced hatred of environmentalism as a kind of leftist conspiracy against the free market."
There is ideology all around here, and to deny it exists in the environmental camp can be nothing more and ideologically induced denial.
And now, since we have said it again and again, I am using my editorial discretion and prohibiting any more posts on global warming from either you or me for 1 week.