Blog Action Day ‘09: Climate Change

Today, for Blog Action Day 2009, I’d like to appeal to those who may be “on the fence” to get committed and take action.

The Problem, in a nutshell:

The atmosphere is currently about 390 parts per million CO2, and the world’s best climate experts believe we need to get back to 350 ppm. It was around 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution. Our global emissions amount to about 1% of the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, every year. Regardless of all other natural factors, that has to have an effect. CO2 has been known to been a greenhouse gas for 150 years.

The Solution:

The experts recommend a reduction in CO2 emissions of 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. To accomplish this, we need government, business and the public all committed to taking action. We all need to demand that our governments step up to the challenge and become part of the solution not part of the problem.

I have such a bad headache that I’m going to leave it at that for now.

Understand for yourself why CO2 is a problem

Lost in all the talk about global warming, is some simple math that can help you understand the carbon dioxide (CO2) problem more intuitively. The executive summary of this post is as follows:
- Every gallon of gasoline used produces about 20 pounds of CO2.
- A car could produce 20 tonnes or more of CO2 per year.
- The world’s 500,000,000 vehicles could produce about 10,000,000,000 tonnes (10 gigatonnes) of CO2 per year.
- When you factor in all the other uses of fossil fuels, the estimate of global CO2 emissions of 27 gigatonnes per year seems reasonable.
- The entire atmosphere weighs approx 5,000,000 gigatonnes and it is currently about 390 parts per million (ppm) CO2, which would be around 2,000 to 3,000 gigatonnes CO2.
- 27 gigatonnes of human-created CO2 will actually affect the composition of the atmosphere, possibly causing the level to rise by about 1%/year.
- The pre-industrial CO2 concentration is estimated at around 270ppm, we are currently at about 390ppm, almost a 50% increase in 200 years.
- It has been known for 150 years that CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas, in the concentration currently found in the atmosphere. Anyone who says it’s a trace gas or a naturally-occurring by-product of life is misleading you, either deliberately lying or because of their own ignorance.

So far, you don’t need to be a scientist to comprehend the numbers, but the shock comes when you look at the number that scientists are starting to agree on that CO2 needs to stabilize at: 350ppm.

The worst part is that it’s mostly only in the US and Canada that acceptance of these numbers is split largely on political boundaries. Conservative leaders in both countries are absolutely willing to lie to the public to maintain the status quo, and regular people don’t have the ability to do the calculations for themselves. Now ask yourself why they’ve been lying to you – the answer is the same as it was for tobacco: money, politics and “free markets”.

Before the lying, astroturfing trolls get here and accuse me of incorrect science, let me say that I’m just a home dad who put this together in an afternoon of Google research. I’m sure I’ve made mistakes and it’s much more complicated than I’ve shown, but I think you’ll agree that we’re dumping CO2 at a scale that is actually capable of changing the atmosphere. Given that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, even at the current “minute” level, you can see that increasing it without boundaries could have potentially catastrophic consequences.

If you haven’t seen the numbers presented this way, verify them for yourself, learn about the subject and you’ll begin to see how blatantly the misinformation has been propagated. To me, there is no other conclusion but that the people who’ve made this a political issue have miscalculated and our children and grand-children will be paying the price for decades of obstruction. This is not something I’m willing to forgive and I hold you partly responsible (assuming you are what I call a “denier” and I am what you might call an “alarmist”).

I’ll even go so far as to issue a challenge to the despicable, lying, Astroturfing frauds, similar to the one at Greenfyre’s, show me evidence that I’m substantially wrong about any of these basic numbers:
- 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas
- up to 20 tonnes or more of CO2 yearly for a single vehicle, or perhaps 10 gigatonnes for 500,000,000 vehicles.
- total global CO2 emissions of about 27 gigatonnes a year
- total CO2 in the atmosphere about 3,000 gigatonnes
- explain a natural mechanism that accounts for measured increases in atmospheric CO2 since 1959 while somehow excluding the substantial amount of man-made CO2
- provide evidence that CO2 does not act as a greenhouse gas at current levels, and that doubling it (or more) will make no difference to melting ice caps and glaciers, sea level rise, climate patterns, etc.

I don’t want politics (“the lefties just want socialism”), anything about Al Gore (because I hate to tell you this, but regardless of how you feel about his politics, he has the facts on his side and all you have are lies), economics (“it’s too expensive”) or propaganda (“just a bunch of alarmists”), I want evidence, backed by scientific research, not just something that you read on someone’s blog.

However, if you don’t have any evidence, but you still just don’t see the possibility that it’s a problem we’re creating and that we have to get under control, take a stand for your position. Comment below for the rest of us to laugh at your stupidity. Who knows, maybe in 20 years I’ll be eating my words.

“Back of the envelope” calculations:

Generally, the gasoline your car uses is about 90% “octane” (that’s what the octane rating indicates, it’s more complicated than this, but for these calculations, it’s close enough) and 10% “heptane”.

The molecular formula for octane is C8H18, meaning it’s composed of 8 carbon atoms and 18 hydrogen atoms, while heptane is C7H16.

Octane combustion is given by this equation:

2C8H18 + 25O2= 16CO2 + 18H2O

which means that 2 octane molecules and 25 oxygen molecules from the atmosphere combine to produce 16 CO2 molecules and 18 water (H2O) molecules. The result of the reaction is energy released that is used to move the car.

Now, if you look at the “Periodic Table of the Elements“, you can find the atomic weights of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, which I will round off to 1, 12 and 16, respectively. You can use these numbers to compare the relative mass of the inputs and the outputs:

Octane: 8 C atoms x atomic mass of 12 + 18 H atoms x atomic mass of 1 = 8 x 12 + 18 x 1 = 114
O2 (an oxygen molecule in the atmosphere): 2 O atoms x 16 = 32
CO2: 1 C atom x 12 + 2 O atoms x 16 = 44
H2O: 2 H x 1 + 1 O x 16 = 18

You can verify that the equation balances:

2 x 114 + 25 x 32 = 16 x 44 + 18 x 18
1028 = 1028

This is conservation of mass, and this is the key part that doesn’t seem intuitively obvious to us. We tend to think we put gas in, it’s burned up and “disappears” because we don’t realize the mass of the exhaust. In fact, the equation tells us if you burn 228g (2 x 114) of gasoline, you consume 800g (25 x 32) of oxygen and the result is 704g (16 x 44) of CO2 plus 324g (18 x 18) of water. Expressed another way, for every gram of gas, you consume 800 / 228 (about 3.5g) of oxygen from the atmosphere and produce 704 / 228 (about 3.1g) of CO2 and 324 / 228 (about 1.4g) water. A litre of gas weighs approximately 770g and the resultant CO2 would weigh 770 x 3.1 (about 2.4kg).

For comparison, the combustion equation for heptane is:

C7H16+11O2 = 7CO2+8H2O

You can do the calculations yourself if you want to, but the end result for the purpose of this post is that it’s close enough to the octane equation and it’s a relatively small fraction of the gasoline, so it can be ignored.

There’s the bottom line, 1 litre of gasoline in produces about 2.4kg of CO2 out.

In gallons, 1 US gallon of gas produces almost 20 pounds of CO2!!! Here’s a separate citation for this number.

Depending on your vehicle and the number of miles you drive, you can easily produce 20 tonnes of CO2 each year (for example, assuming 15 mpg x 25,000 miles/year). Using fueleconomy.gov, you can estimate your own annual “carbon footprint”.

That’s one vehicle, multiply that by the number of cars on the road in the world, say 500,000,000 (estimates vary, but we’re looking for rough numbers here), you get 10,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2, just from vehicles, i.e. not including heating and generating electricity from fossil fuels or even burning wood. Current estimates of total CO2 emissions from human activity are about 27,000,000,000, or 27 gigatonnes, per year, so you can see that my numbers are close enough.

Now, the weight of Earth’s atmosphere is 5,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes or 5,000,000 gigatonnes, and it is approximately 390ppm CO2, which would translate to 5,000,000 x 390/1,000,000, or about 2,000 gigatonnes CO2. Here, Wikipedia says 3,000 gigatonnes, so I’ll use that number, but again you can see how close my calculations are.

So there’s currently 3,000 gigatonnes CO2 in the atmosphere, and we’re creating about 27 gigatonnes more each and every year. You might notice that’s 0.9% (27/3000), so if CO2 is increasing by that much each year, then it would seem from these calculations that it’s caused by us. In fact, it’s not even that much. In two years, from July 2007 to July 2009, CO2 went from 384.4ppm to 387.8ppm, >1.5ppm per year, but only an increase of 0.8%.

I’m not a climate scientist, but I think my methodology is close enough, and I believe it shows that the amount of CO2 we’re currently dumping into the atmosphere is actually significant enough to change its composition, which is another point that just doesn’t seem intuitive because we tend to think of the atmosphere as basically infinite. Remember that before the Industrial Revolution, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was relatively stable, the natural “sources” and “sinks” more or less balanced each other, the one thing that has changed is us producing almost 30,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.

We’re currently at about 390ppm, and increasing by more than 1ppm each year, imagine where we’ll be in 10, 50 or 100 years.

At around 600ppm, people perceive the air as “stuffy” and CO2 poisoning starts around 1000ppm. We are in fact on a path to extinction. But the problem is not dying of CO2 poisoning, it’s the greenhouse effect, which John Tyndall discovered in 1859, exactly 150 years ago this year. It doesn’t matter whether CO2 is a naturally-occurring by-product of life or how minute the concentration of CO2 is, the point is, it does act as a greenhouse gas at the level currently in the atmosphere.

In 1896, Svante Arrhenius calculated that if CO2 were to double, it would increase the temperature by up to 6C (almost 11 degrees F).

Any talk about “natural cycles” is also invalidated by this one point: The one difference between past climate changes and the current one is the amount of CO2 we’re creating.

The pre-industrial level of CO2 has been estimated at about 270ppm, so it has already increased by almost 50%. Anyone who tells you the CO2 level hasn’t changed since pre-industrial times is assuming you’re not smart enough to follow the basic math above. They would also have to account for how CO2 went from 390ppm down to 315ppm when measurements at Mauna Kea began in 1959, then has gradually increased back to 390.

Bill C-311 – Hopefully it will make the Conservatives permanently un-electable

The funny thing is, up until a few years ago, I was always a small-c conservative, and I’m still generally a fiscal conservative. But the current crop of conservatives in North America have me so enraged with both the Republican Fascist Party (that’s my new name for them) and Canada’s Neo-Con Party (led by George Bush’s lap dog, Stephen Harper) that I hope for the permanent demise of both parties.

It seems inevitable that, at least in some way, my dream is going to come true south of the border. The Republican Party is (probably) smart enough to realize that they’ll never win another election until they distance themselves from the extremist American Taliban and KKKhristian factions. I really do hope the racist, ignorant, homophobic anti-science, apocalyptic theocrats spend the next 40 years “wandering in the desert” without a political voice (or secede and become the Mexican State of “Tay-has”). The “moderate” Republicans will just pin the whole global warming denial thing on the Jesus Freaks, and move on.

Canada’s a completely different story. We have a Conservative government, who seem to have learned all their tricks from Dubya, Darth Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Phil Gramm and friends. They don’t believe in evolution, and they don’t believe in global warming. Their only reading material seems to come from Republican think tanks and they’ve already started their “elitist” attack ads and we aren’t even in an election campaign. Unfortunately, there’s no internal rift to hope will explode.

It’s the climate change issue that I think has the best potential to destroy the party and end neo-conservatism in North America forever. Recently, Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act, passed first reading, since we have a minority government and the majority of our MPs actually have principles. Every single Conservative MP voted against the bill.

But things have changed quickly, I think. The public support for action on global warming has recently become overwhelming. The Conservatives will have to do the biggest flip-flop in history or risk losing support everywhere but our oil-producing areas. It is a given to me that most people in the oil business will continue to deny global warming as long as it is in their narrow short-term self-interest, regardless of future consequences. But the rest of Canada has caught on, and I hope they punish the Conservatives severely for putting short-term financial gain against the future of humanity.

BTW, a word on “flip-flopping”, before I finish. Everyone, including the media, seems to treat changing your mind as one of the worst things a politician can do, even worse than lying. Personally, I respect when someone looks at the situation in depth and says, “I was wrong.” Breaking campaign “promises” is not much different, we all know that party platforms are based on what the party thinks has the best chance of getting them elected. Once they get in power, a good politician will do what he has to do, regardless of his ideology. That’s the problem with the Conservatives, they will never let evidence get in the way of their ideology, and that’s what makes them bad for the country.

Conservatism: Where the rich get a free ride; where programs that I don’t need are wasteful; where regulations that get in the way of me making more money are evil; where liberty means I get to do the torturing to justify illegal wars and where freedom of speech means I get to push my religion in your face but everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi, a socialist, a fascist, a communist or just plain unpatriotic. In other words, it’s all about me.

So, which really is the biggest threat to America?

Republicans: “The biggest threat to America is the gays… and the atheists… The two biggest threats to civilization are the gays and the atheists… and public health care… The three biggest threats to civilization are the gays, the atheists and public health care… and the Employee Free Choice Act. The four biggest threats… Amongst the biggest threats to civilization are the gays, the atheists, public health care and the Employee Free Choice Act.”

(with sincerest apologies to Monty Python)

Not to mention evolution,  climate change (you gotta love this blog’s name, “Axis of Right”, not only identifying themselves as right-wing but also implying “correct” and more patriotic than the left because of the awesomeness of their stars and stripes banner, not to mention putting the word “scientists” in air quotes and accusing the media and the UN of being in on the conspiracy.), NOT torturing, the Fairness Doctrine, pornography, gun control, a black man in the White House and of course not just Islamic terrorism, but Islam itself.

BTW, according to WorldNetDaily, Obama’s economic stimulus package “makes a deliberate – and unconstitutional – attempt to censor religious speech and worship on school campuses across the nation”, purely by prohibiting stimulus money being used to repair religious facilities.

What I’d like to see them say…

The Republican party – We’re sorry we have deliberately engaged in a decades-long anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-truth, anti-democracy campaign which has caused America to lose its status as a world leader, making us into a fascist Third World country. We’re also sorry for using 9/11 ads, homosexuals, fake patriotism, taxes, etc to scare you into voting for us. Terrorism is defined on Wikipedia as the “systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion”. By that definition, the Republicans are the terrorists.

The media – We’re sorry that we allowed so many to be so dishonest for so long without calling them on it. People have mis-used our instinct to provide “balanced” coverage to cause a country which is paralyzed with hatred, ignorance and religious extremism.

The religious right – We’re sorry we have taken advantage of gullible Americans for our own personal power and financial gain, we have lied to you about evolution and made science and expertise into a bad thing. We have promoted “faith healing” over real medicine, and people have died because of it. We have deliberately kept Americans ignorant to advance our own political agendas.

Some stats:

- The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world (over 1 in 100 as of 2008, with 5% of the world’s population, the US has 25% of the world’s inmates) (another source).

- In 2007, only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan carried out more executions, and Iraq trailed close behind. Most civilized countries have abolished the death penalty.

- America is the only industrialized country in the world without universal health care.

- In a 2006 poll of 34 countries, the only country with a higher percentage of the population that reject evolution is Turkey.

- Among 18 countries ranked in the UN Human Poverty Index, the US ranks 3rd from the bottom (and has a policy of “welfare racism”).

- In 2003, Reporters Without Borders ranked the US in a tie for 31st place in press freedom.

Isn’t it ironic, dontcha think?

Just this week, we’ve seen the “collapse” of American and global markets, widely attributed to a failure of deregulation.

Also this week, I’ve launched my own very insignificant attack on systemic conservative lying.

And just today, I saw this video, “American Denial of Global Warming”, where science historian Naomi Oreskes outlines the parts of a few players, including Fred Seitz and Fred Singer of the George Marshall Institute. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, I’ll give you my best summary:

The George Marshall Institute is a conservative think tank established to counter scientific resistance to the Strategic Defense Initiative (Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense plan). Their strategy was simple, confuse the issue by claiming that not all scientists are united in opposition to SDI. They subsequently used the same tactic with the second-hand smoke and global warming issues.

Don’t take my word for it, do your own research, google “marshall seitz singer jastrow nierenberg” and note that Singer’s Science & Environmental Policy Project website is alive and well as of Sept 20, 2008.

Oreskes makes it clear that Seitz, Singer et al were fiercely anti-communist, anti-regulation conservatives, and that there’s nothing inherently wrong with that political view (although this week is a bad week for that point of view). The problem is that they’ve used fake science to promote their political views. And they used the media to do it. This has confused Americans, eroded their faith in science & media, and has delayed meaningful action on global warming.

I say again, reasonable Republicans have a responsibility to reject this type of strategy, which is leading America down the path, not just away from global leadership, but actually to irrelevance.

More on yesterday’s post…

I know this is supposed to be a blog about atheism, but global warming is (obviously!) another of my main concerns. It actually all fits together perfectly: Christians, Republicans, liars, deniers.

Here’s another reference about skeptics being paid to disagree with global warming…

More about Lawrence Solomon, apologizing for falsely calling scientists deniers. His book, “The Deniers”, is promoted as a “must’read” on freedominion.com, with no disclaimers. And he even admits that his subjects aren’t really deniers, from DeSmogBlog,

Solomon even says so. He says that while reflecting on his own research, “I … noticed something striking about my growing cast of deniers. None of them were deniers.”

Nigel Weiss, among others, objected to being used, Solomon and the National Post eventually had to apologize to him. But the series has been publicized on at least one right-wing site, freerepublic.com.

Let’s be clear, many of the deniers are status quo, small-government, right wingers with their own agenda. Many call themselves “Christians”, although there’s nothing Christian about their beliefs. They use the same techniques that Big Tobacco used (Fred Singer attacked a 1993 EPA  report on the dangers of smoking, calling it ‘junk science’) and they have successfully stalled action for over 25 years (if you’re skeptical of this story, here’s a reference to the 1979 report, JSR-78-07). They still have lots of believers, for example, Sarah Palin and junkscience.com. It all goes to reinforce the right’s war on science and the “elite”. They even shamelessly promote “Carbon Belch Day”, while Exxon and Peabody are committing crimes against humanity.

Here’s an excellent series, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.

On the point of lying, conservatives even have their own version of Wikipedia (with charming entries on homosexuality, Creation Science and lots more), here’s just one nice example of right wing hatred. The hard right is in a major battle all over the country to have creationism taught in schools (no reference needed, look it up if you don’t believe me).

I do still think there are reasonable people with legitimate reasons for voting Republican, however, I also think until the lying, hating, ignorant, largely “Christian” extreme right is marginalized to the point of irrelevance, voting Republican is voting to continue America’s loss of international credibility. Hatred and war are not the solution to terrorism, especially when America is mortgaging its future to the Middle East for oil. The US should take a good look at itself, and realize that they have a serious problem with the way they treat their poor and sick, the small-government model of capitalism is in tatters (dragging the rest of the world down with it) and the world needs the US to take a strong position on the environment. Four more years of right-wing hatred and ignorance

We all know America is extremely polarized, I believe that until reasonable Republicans disavow the tactics of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Phil Gramm, Dick Cheney and so many others, they are not acting in the interest of promoting an America that is a leader on the world stage. John McCain is no “maverick” to me and Sarah Palin is part of the scary right wing that should never get close to power.

Why should McCain’s lies surprise anyone?

As far as I’m concerned, that’s what Republicans do, and they do it very well.

They lie about the environment. Look at this story, The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP. Conservatives have a long, glorious tradition of not only denying the global warming problem, but virulently attacking it, here’s just one example, from newsbusters.org, where the writer repeatedly uses emotionally-charged words like ‘disgraceful’, ‘disgusting’, and ‘despicable’ (I hesitate to even link to it, but I hope rational people will see through the lies and distortions).

Or how ’bout this one, where Fred Singer, a prominent denier, is shot down for claims he never worked for Big Tobacco or Big Oil, with plenty of irrefutable evidence that he did. There’s one document on tobaccodocuments.org that I found particularly fascinating.

Of course, we can’t forget James Inhofe’s 400 deniers, thoroughly debunked.

Here’s a scientific study, “The Organization of Denial”, of 141 “environmentally sceptical” books published between 1972 and 2005, finding that over 92% were published in the US by conservative think tanks. And scientists have been offered cash to dissent.

Sometimes they make it too easy to see through, like when the Conservative Book Club features Lawrence Solomon’s The Deniers, or our friend Fred Singer’s Unstoppable Global Warming. I can’t resist quoting from the opening paragraph of each,

Al Gore and the mainstream media tell us constantly that it’s all settled: global warming is an established fact…

and,

To Al Gore and his disciples, global warming is man-made and dangerous…

This is actually one of the problems, part of the reason these people can’t accept the truth is because Al Gore is so visible in the issue. It remains to be seen if Republicans can change their minds, as one did in this story, Generational Test for Republicans.

(The Conservative Book Club doesn’t stop there, it has entire sections on Global Warming, Radical Islam and The Clintons, appealing directly to the haters.)

Here’s a cleverly-disguised one from globalwarming.org, discussing Lawrence Solomon’s above-mentioned book. By the way, it turns out globalwarming.org is sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), whose website actually reveals a lot,

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government. We believe that individuals are best helped not by government intervention, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace.

Translation: they’re a conservative group working for old-fashioned, hands-off government. This week, we all know how well that has worked out!

Here’s a question, Climate change deniers – stupid or just dishonest? DeSmogBlog has a searchable database on global warming deniers, check it out (of course Fred Singer is there). Or see Exxon Secrets, for info on the individuals and organizations working to keep America ignorant, such as CEI and the Heartland Institute. At least the Rockefeller family tried to stand up to Exxon.

They lie about evolution, which is not up for debate. For example, Ben Stein’s “Expelled” (see “Flunked, not expelled, what Ben Stein isn’t telling you about ID”).  Scientists spend so much time and effort fighting back. At least my favourite Young Earth Creationist felon, Kent Hovind, who lied about his taxes is doing time for his crime (Not Safe For Work, but there’s a hilarious video on YouTube). Oh, speaking of YouTube, in 2007, his goons used fraud to remove critical YouTube videos.

We all know they lie about the economy, which McCain says is fundamentally strong. Maybe it is for these 3 Merrill Lynch officials who may get up to $200,000,000, but meanwhile the World Bank is shovelling up to $250,000,000,000 (!!!) into global money markets.

The US is clearly headed in the wrong way, consider these:

The Republican War on Science, Fascist America (where she forgot one, destroy the integrity of the electoral system), Idiot America, The Assault on Reason by Al Gore, a poll of Americans themselves, a poll outside the US, Making America Stupid,

Don’t forget the famous right-wing lying hypocrites Troy King, Mark Foley, Ed Schrock, Larry Craig, Ted Haggard or the haters Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Check out these blogs which largely feature Christians who get caught in their crimes and Republicons.

They even lie to their evangelical Christian base, as evidenced by this 2006 article, Christian Evangelicals: Enablers of the Wayward Republicans, even as the Religious Right is taking over the GOP.

They lie because it’s the only way they think they can beat Obama.

I can’t summarize it any better that the hard-hitting opening line from the “Exact Opposite” by Baron Dave Romm series,

A standard conservative Big Brother technique is to make wild random claims, sling mud and repeat lies until some of the mud sticks or one of the wild claims has a small germ of truth.

So I appeal to all reasonable Americans who are considering voting Republican – If you continue to elect these people, they’ll never learn. I can understand wanting fiscally-responsible spending, but I’m not convinced they’re the ones to do it.

More Lawrence Solomon fabrications…

In his piece, Wikipedia’s zealots, Lawrence Solomon says,

The Wikipedia page is entitled Naomi Oreskes, after a professor of history and science studies at the University of California San Diego, but the page offers only sketchy details about Oreskes. The page is mostly devoted to a notorious 2004 paper that she wrote, and that Science journal published, called “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” This paper analyzed articles in peer-reviewed journals to see if any disagreed with the alarming positions on global warming taken by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position,” Oreskes concluded.

Oreskes’s paper — which claimed to comprehensively examine all articles in a scientific database with the keywords “climate change” — is nonsense. As FP readers know, for the last 18 months I have been profiling scientists who disagree with the UN panel’s position. My Deniers series, which now runs to some 40 columns, describes many of the world’s most prominent scientists. They include authors or reviewers for the UN panel (before they quit in disgust). They even include the scientist known as the father of scientific climatology, who is recognized as being the most cited climatologist in the world. Yet somehow Oreskes missed every last one of these exceptions to the presumed consensus, and somehow so did the peer reviewers that Science chose to evaluate Oreskes’s work.

Ok, so the Oreskes paper is “nonsense” because she didn’t include any of the scientists that he’s featured.

Solomon continues, explaining how Oreskes’ paper was challenged by Benny Peiser of CCNet.

When Oreskes’s paper came out, it was immediately challenged by science writers and scientists alike, one of them being Benny Peiser, a prominent U.K. scientist and publisher of CCNet, an electronic newsletter to which I and thousands of others subscribe. CCNet daily circulates articles disputing the conventional wisdom on climate change. No publication better informs readers about climate-change controversies, and no person is better placed to judge informed dissent on climate change than Benny Peiser.

(In all cases, above and below the emphasis is mine, illustrating Solomon’s habit of creating “credibility” with words). Let’s continue,

For this reason, when visiting Oreskes’s page on Wikipedia several weeks ago, I was surprised to read not only that Oreskes had been vindicated but that Peiser had been discredited. More than that, the page portrayed Peiser himself as having grudgingly conceded Oreskes’s correctness.

Here’s some sources for the Peiser v. Oreskes issue:

Gristmill

DeSmogBlog

MediaWatch

Wikipedia on Bebby Peiser

I think Peiser’s position can fairly be summarized by this quote from his October 2006 email to Media Watch:

“I do not think anyone is questioning that we are in a period of global warming. Neither do I doubt that the overwhelming majority of climatologists is agreed that the current warming period is mostly due to human impact. However, this majority consensus is far from unanimous.”

The rest of Solomon’s article detail his attempts to update the Wikipedia entry on Oreskes, only to be continually thwarted by someone named “TableTop”,

By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda, its source is not self-evident.

and concluding,

Wikipedia is in the hands of the zealots.

Okay, Solomon says  (see above) “… no person is better placed to judge informed dissent on climate change than Benny Peiser.” Let’s see, his Wikipedia entry says,

Benny Peiser is a member of the Faculty of Science at Liverpool’s John Moores University. He was born in Israel and educated in West Germany and previously was an historian of ancient sport at the University of Frankfort/M. He is a social anthropologist with particular research interest in human and cultural evolution. His research focuses on the effects of environmental change and catastrophic events on contemporary thought and societal evolution.

Peiser is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a member of Spaceguard UK. He has written extensively on neo-catastrophism and the potential risk posed by near-Earth objects. He is the editor of CCNet, an electronic science and science policy network with more than 3,000 subscribers from around the world. It is in this capacity that a 10km-wide asteroid, Minor Planet (7107) Peiser, was named in his honour by the International Astronomical Union.

Peiser is a member of the editorial board of Energy and Environment and a scientific advisor to the Lifeboat Foundation.

all of which gives him zero credibility for addressing climate change. What else can we find?

DeSmogBlog says he is

an advising member of the “Scientific Alliance,” an organization formed by a UK businessman who was fed up with “all this environmental stuff.”

and surprise, surprise:

In December 2004, the Scientific Alliance teamed up with ExxonMobil funded George C. Marshall Institute to produce a paper titled “Climate Issues and Questions.”

In January 2005, the Scientific Alliance held a half-day seminar on the “alarmism” around the issue of climate change. Speakers included Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen.

So, Peiser is a social anthropologist in a “denier” organization, who in short, believes in anthropogenic global warming.

The fact that Lawrence Solomon can’t get his version of the truth into Wikipedia speaks more for the credibility of Wikipedia than it being controlled by zealots.

The fact that the National Post continues to allow Solomon to spout his crap speaks volumes for the credibility of that newspaper.

Lawrence Solomon is at it again…

First, here’s a science story from June 2003 that seems to conclude that increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are allowing plants to grow faster. I’m not a scientist, I haven’t read the full study, I don’t know where the authors stand on global warming, but I do know that it’s only one study and it certainly doesn’t lead me to the conclusion that global warming is a good thing. That’s all I’m going to say about this study.

Except to point out that Lawrence Solomon, noted climate skeptic and liar, uses it “and other more recent ones” to conclude that higher levels of CO2 are beneficial to the Earth, in his column “In Praise Of CO2″.

But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to reference a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2. Easy enough to find his original story, where he poses the question

How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming?

then mentioning the original Oregon Petition’s 17,800 signatures

Then came the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s Petition Project of 2001, which far surpassed all previous efforts and by all rights should have settled the issue of whether the science was settled on climate change. To establish that the effort was bona fide, and not spawned by kooks on the fringes of science, as global warming advocates often label the skeptics, the effort was spearheaded by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and as reputable as they come.

The Oregon petition garnered an astounding 17,800 signatures, a number all the more astounding because of the unequivocal stance that these scientists took: Not only did they dispute that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because “increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

(the emphasis is mine, showing how he confers credibility just by his use of words)

What he didn’t mention is that Frederick Seitz, “as reputable as they come”,

has admitted to helping tobacco giant RJ Reynolds spread out million of dollars in health research grants during the 1970’s and 80’s. Seitz’s role was to assist Big Tobacco in creating the illusion that there was still some debate over whether tobacco was a proven danger to health.

(from DeSmogBlog). According to Wikipedia, Seitz has also published reports for the George C. Marshall Institute, and was chair of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, founded by none other than Fred Singer.

Solomon then mentions a renewed Oregon Petition, whose 32,000 signatories were “outraged at the way Al Gore and company were abusing the science to their own ends.” and concludes with,

At one level, Robinson, a PhD scientist himself, recoils at his petition. Science shouldn’t be done by poll, he explains. “The numbers shouldn’t matter. But if they want warm bodies, we have them.”

Some 32,000 scientists is more than the number of environmentalists that descended on Rio in 1992. Is this enough to establish that the science is not settled on global warming? The press conference releasing these names occurs on Monday at the National Press Club in Washington.

Apparently, the debate is over because, even if science shouldn’t be done by poll, the deniers got more signatures… I also find it interesting that Solomon is reporting on this before the press conference even occurred, is it possible that there’s some sort of network of these people?

The new Oregon petition has been thoroughly discredited. In short, it’s based on an article published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (what credibility do physicians and surgeons have in issues of climatology?), which is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, who among lots of other things, claims that HIV does not cause AIDS. Quackwatch lists the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons as “fundamentally flawed”.

Another attempt to distort the picture tries to compare celebrities with the 32,000 scientists, but leads to an entire website of disinformation, typical of this type of site.

American Thinker Blog, overtly Republican, praises Solomon’s “great piece”, then sums it all up quite revealingly:

Will today’s official announcement of 32,000 men and women of science who, by their physical signature, reject mankind’s guilt capture any media attention at all?

Or, for that matter, that of climate experts Gore, Boxer, Lieberman, Warner, Clinton, Obama, or, most despicably — McCain?

As the science no longer appears to concern any of them — don’t hold your CO2 polluted breath.

Yet their denials change nothing – the wheels continue to fall off the warmist dungwagon.

This is about old-style politics, Republican v. Democrat, and McCain is the most despicable of all, because he’s a Republican who claims to be concerned, but I’m not fooled.

Congratulations to the climate delayers, for 16 years of inaction

Here’s a video from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, June 3-14 1992. It’s David Suzuki’s daughter, Severn, pleading for urgent action.

It’s now 16 years since that conference, and nothing much has really changed…

WSJ editorial stupidity

Where to start flaming yesterday’s op-ed, The Science of Gore’s Nobel, by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.? Here’s how I read it, paragraph by paragraph [Note, I'd like to include his actual words for comparison, but I think it's long enough as it is.]:

I’m a Republican, my job as an objective journalist is to mock Gore because he lost an election and now he’s turned his sights to educating the public on climate change.

Gore’s Nobel isn’t for science, though the Liberal media will portray it that way [BS, the media will portray it as "for popularizing the idea that climate change is an imminent global crisis."], in fact no one has ever won a Nobel for science [bold-faced lie, the IPCC shared the award, for the science]. Scientists have been studying global warming for over a century, and here I am, still trying to deny it.

To confuse the issue, let’s bring up other science that’s completely irrelevant to this issue. And, for good measure, more mockery with my witty, “how this honor has befallen the former Veep”. [He just can't stand to see Gore win a Nobel Peace Prize, can he?]

People form opinions based on what the media and other people tell us. I’m going to use perfectly valid science to imply that even though the Liberal media and the public are finally on side with the climate change issue, that they’re wrong.

Gore is single-handedly manipulating the global media to provide a barrage of scientific data, but believing it is just as silly as believing that we really landed on the moon.

The scientists who claim a consensus exists only asked themselves, they didn’t ask any of the denialist kooks.

Scientists are non-scientific, they don’t look for proof, they just make up a hypothesis and then stick with it regardless of the evidence, especially hypotheses like global warming, which is just a scientific conspiracy to get funding for their research projects.

The Liberal media jumped right on the bandwagon, blindly toeing the line. [Do you realize the IPCC was established in 1988, and it took 19 years to get to the current level of public acceptance of the issue?]

Republican politicians and Big Energy lobby groups, on the other hand, are “sophisticated” and “on a higher intellectual level”, because they’re used to pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Congressman John Dingell (D – MI) said, “The world is great at agreeing on things that are wrong,” [Look at him, all objective, quoting a Democrat. See the Gristmill interview to see how Jenkins is blatantly mis-characterizing what was said.] and by that, he must have been talking about the scientific consensus on global warming, but then, he confronts Congress with “a rational approach to climate change” which doesn’t make sense if he really doesn’t believe the consensus.

Dingell is a cynical, manipulative politician [because he's a Democrat] who wants to “embarrass those who offer fake cures for climate change”, but I know that the ultimate goal of global warming conspirators is to destroy the North American car manufacturers and send the world into a crippling global depression.

To prove my point, I will mis-quote a colleague of Al Gore’s, who therefore must be disreputable, to imply that he still has doubts about the whole thing, yet still wants legislation to destroy the US. [Read this article to see where he stands, in his own words.]

Mr. Khosla is manipulating politicians into believing the firehose of non-scientific scientific data and ill-informed public opinion to advance his personal agenda.

In the remote chance that the government decided to take action, the “green energy lobby” would pocket $400,000,000,000 a year, but don’t ask where that number came from. And the impact on global emissions would only be 4%, but don’t ask where that number came from. So, because the US can’t save the world single-handedly, we should do nothing at all.

The only reason Al Gore doesn’t run for president is 1) that he couldn’t win and 2) he would ruin the economy by imposing the costs “supposedly” necessary. Instead, he can just be the angry lunatic ranting about something that my extensive scientific training tells me will turn out to be fraudulent.

Just you wait until the world goes into the next ice age, you’ll see. How do I know this is gonna happen? Because it’s happened before, before industrial civilization. It just seems to me like the Earth is too big for us little humans to have any impact. [It's not.]

My own gut feel is much more valid than reams of scientific evidence. The Earth has gone through warmer and cooler periods in the past, so even though this one coincides with our industrialization and is proceeding far faster than ever before, I’ll be vindicated when the doom-sayers are proven wrong. Then they’ll have to shut-up and stop trying to save the world.

And I won’t have to be ashamed of myself every single day because a Democrat won the Nobel Peace Prize working for something that I’m actively working against.

In all, it’s a shameful piece of lies, distortions, mis-information and partisan politics.

But don’t take my word for it, here’s another analysis.

It’s been quite a week in the atheosphere…

First, we have Pope Benedict XVI criticizing atheism (did you know that he was a member of the Hitler Youth? I didn’t. You may also remember when he expressed “sadness and repentance” for the Catholic Church’s insufficient resistance to Nazi ideology, meanwhile, wartime Pope Pius XII is on the path to sainthood.) I could go on and on and on about the Catholic Church, their pedophile priests and genocidal stance on condoms, but Greta Christina does a good job addressing this one.

Then irreligion.org found an old article about the Vatican astronomer who dismisses Creationism as “a form of superstitious paganism”.

The New York Times spoke out strongly against the Texas Education Agency , but who will ever forget how Barbara Forrest pwned them?

These are just 3 stories from the week, but I got particular pleasure in reading each of them, given that two of my biggest reasons for blogging are the absurd theist claim of morality, and the willful ignorance that is creationism/ID.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

With the current climate change meetings in Bali getting so much well-deserved (and much-delayed) attention, I was looking in Wikipedia, and a surprising fact hit me – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created in 1988! So it’s taken 19 years to get the current level of public acceptance of the issue! The first Assessment Report in 1990 was pretty clear on the issue, and the 3 subsequent reports have been more & more specific.

BTW, I find it a little off the mark to see the following in the Criticism section of the Wikipedia entry on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change: “In November of 2007, it was estimated that that year’s conference would release the equivalent of 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide”? (that’s what it said as of 2007-12-04, anyway). Yes, many human activities create CO2 — the average person creates almost 1kg of CO2 every day, just by being alive. The point is, how are we going to solve the problem without having the meeting? If you think along the lines of carbon credits, of those 100,000 tonnes of CO2, how many would’ve been released anyway? The planes were probably already scheduled, the people would’ve been going about their lives at home, so the overall CO2 equation isn’t as bad as it might seem. Anyway, we’re talking about a once-a-year meeting, dealing with countries producing thousands of megatonnes of CO2 worldwide annually. You can criticize the various countries for acting out of narrow, short-term self-interest or criticize the enemies of the process for standing in the way of meaningful action, but this criticism suggests you’re still part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It’s like something I read this week, where the suggestion was that it’s better to drive to the store because your car would create less CO2 than the production of the food energy needed to walk there. First of all, the writer looked at the entire  production chain of the food, but not that of the gasoline, so the comparison is wrong and misleading. Second, if you take the argument to its next logical step, if that person just stayed home and starved to death, he or she would produce even less CO2. I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that taking the car is better for the environment than walking. Again, part of the problem, not yet part of the solution.

To show how easy it is to be part of the solution, when it was time to replace my wife’s Camry Solara, we bought a Camry Hybrid, and according to fueleconomy.gov, we should save about 3 tonnes of CO2 a year (they’re both Camry’s, so we didn’t give up anything, and the Hybrid is cheaper in every way than the Solara). Add to that 6 tonnes saved by me buying a Prius, and we’ve cut our emissions by 9 tonnes (while saving over $3,000 a year in gas, even at today’s price). This represents a real cut of 50% without changing our lifestyle at all, so I don’t understand why everyone thinks this is gonna be such a painful process.

I know hybrid cars aren’t the ultimate solution, but it’s a first step in the journey of 1,000 steps.

I wish I’d seen this before my post of about 5 minutes ago…

From Newsweek, global warming deniers are well-funded and not going away…

Sometimes when you’re stumbling, you step in a pile of crap

Here’s a site I just StumbledUpon, Long Range Weather by Harris-Mann Climatology, another attempt to delude people about human-induced global warming.

First, let me introduce “climatologist” Cliff Harris. According to SpokesmanReview.com, “Harris is not a trained scientist – he studied insurance law in college…” and from TribTalk.com,

Harris is also a devout Christian and believes the Bible is loaded with clues on predicting the weather. “I do believe in a period of extreme global warming. That will be in the tribulation period. That’s when the real global warming will come in,” he said. “Those of us who are believers, we’re looking forward to it.”

Harris acknowledges that people are playing a role in polluting the atmosphere, but he thinks society would be better off devoting its limited resources on ending poverty, curing diseases or providing universal health care, rather than investing in costly forms of clean energy or curtailing business to reduce carbon dioxide. “I believe this planet is a breathing entity, made by God, to clean itself, adjust itself,” Harris said.

And his colleague, Randy Mann, a TV meteorologist. Again quoting from SpokesmanReview.com,

Mann also has doubts about the severity and cause of the earth’s changing climate…. “I’m not saying we’re right. We’re just trying to say there are other possibilities here,” said Mann, who holds a degree in geography. Mann said he believes humans are likely playing a role in the changing climate, but that it’s an exaggerated one.

Next, let’s look at their data. If you go to their page, you’ll see a graph (which I won’t reproduce here) which shows several ups and downs in global temperature during the past 4500 years. One question comes to mind immediately, where did they get their data? No hints about that, and this doesn’t look like any graph I’ve seen. The most scientific this graph gets is where they try to correlate the cold periods with volcanic eruptions, but their bias comes through when they chart the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt and the birth of Christ.

Ok, so we have two people with little qualifying expertise, providing a made-up chart as evidence suggesting that volcanic activity and solar “irradiation” are responsible for past climate changes.

To paraphrase Randy Mann, I am saying they’re wrong. Their qualifications are weak, their data appears made-up, and they’ve completely missed the crux of the problem: No one denies that past climate changes were the result of natural processes. The problem is that the current change is happening faster than ever before, and it’s caused by human activity. See gristmill, New Scientist or Lighter Footstep for more information.

What is it about climate change deniers, that so many seem to be Christians? Why are they so incapable of understanding  this issue? What arrogance makes them think they’re right and the vast majority of scientific experts are wrong? More importantly, why are so many of them taking this position? What do they gain by misleading Americans into believing there’s no problem?

To any global warming deniers, Christian or otherwise, who happen to read this, I challenge you to go read some real information about the issue, not the mis-information you’ve been reading so far. Learn about climate change and accept it for what it really is: the biggest challenge mankind has ever faced. Become a positive force, not a negative one. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Reality Check

The universe functions according to the laws of nature. There’s no evidence for any supernatural phenomena, nor any need for supernatural phenomena to explain how the universe works.

Science can’t completely explain how the universe works, and maybe never will. But it’s only through science that we will get the real answers.

Earth is a small planet orbiting a typical star in an immensely large galaxy, which is part of an unimaginably huge universe. There are likely millions or billions of planets in the universe, the vast majority of which are completely incapable of supporting life. That still leaves an unknown, possibly huge number of planets capable of sustaining life. There is nothing special about Earth, besides having the perfect conditions for life to evolve (and of course, being where we live).

The only reason we exist at all is that we were extremely lucky to have evolved here.

Evolution is science, creationism is myth. There’s no real debate among scientists about the validity of evolution, only the details of how it works. The only ones who reject evolution are the creationists, and only because it conflicts with their religion. Just because you don’t understand science doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Creationism is willful ignorance. When you argue for teaching creationism in school, you are actively perpetuating your ignorance and misunderstanding of science on the next generation. (Denying the Holocaust or global warming, and 9/11 conspiracy theories are also willful ignorance.)

There’s nothing special about humans compared to other animals.

Humans have a built-in capacity for faith and morality. The fact that our brains can have religious experiences does not make them real.

We tend to believe what we’re taught by our parents, teachers, religious leaders and community. It becomes part of our world-view, and it’s difficult to change these beliefs. But that doesn’t mean these beliefs are true.

Most people belong to the religion they were raised in.

If you were born in a different place or time, it’s quite likely that you would believe in a different religion and god(s).

Most, if not all, cultures have had their own religion and god(s). In general, they are mutually exclusive, as in, they can’t all be right.

You may be totally convinced that your religion is the true one, but everyone else is just as convinced that theirs is true.

The majority of people alive today believe completely that your religion is false, whichever religion that may be.

There’s no supernatural credibility in ancient religions, which we now call “mythology”.

You may also agree with me that there’s no supernatural credibility in other world religions, or in their holy texts.

The Old Testament is nothing but a 2,000-year-old book of campfire stories from a bronze-age tribe of nomads living in the desert.

The New Testament is marketing material promoting a new leader (who may or may not have existed), plagiarized from many earlier deities.

The Bible reflects the culture and superstitions of the people who wrote it. They had no understanding of how the universe works, hence any science that they actually got right is purely coincidental.

There is some positive morality in the Bible, the rest of it is an abomination.

Like all other holy texts, the Bible has no credibility in any of its supernatural claims, including God, Jesus, heaven, angels, hell and Satan.

You can’t use the Bible to prove anything about the existence of supernatural phenomena.

There is no more supernatural credibility in Christianity than any other religion.

Religion was created by man to help answer “the big questions”. It’s a human institution, and as such, is capable of both good and evil.

Religion is tribal. If the Israelites had lost just one of the many genocidal battles documented in the Old Testament, their particular god would have perished with them and we would be worshipping an entirely different god (or gods).

Being tribal, religion is divisive and perpetuates an “us-versus-them” mentality. It helps you believe that everyone who doesn’t believe exactly as you do is going to hell.

Hell is an entirely unacceptable concept. It’s an invention of cruel, primitive, vindictive minds to enforce “correct” behaviour by fear and guilt.

If hell is the only thing keeping you from sinning, that makes you a morally weak person.

It’s absurd and insulting (to you) to claim that the Bible is the only source of morality.

The “ethic of reciprocity” (known in Christianity as the Golden Rule) can be considered the modern basis for right and wrong, especially when slightly re-phrased, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, if you were in their situation“. It’s found in most world religions.

You don’t need to be a member of any religion to live your life according to the Golden Rule.

Your particular “morality” is a combination of nature and nurture, just like everyone else who has ever lived. The fact that you can quote scripture to back up your opinion means nothing as the Bible is so famously ambiguous that you can use it to validate any position.

On the other hand, your religious beliefs and rituals basically amount to “culture”. They’re a product of your environment, they’re self-perpetuating when you pass them on to the next generation and they don’t rely on the actual existence of God, since faith is a virtue in itself.

Looking at religion as “culture” actually helps make some sense of the insanity. All the rules, superstitions, rituals, taboos, bigotry, hatred, closed-mindedness, oppression, genocide and anything else that you want to attribute to religion is really just part of being a member of a tribe in a competitive, brutal world.Like it or not, I think this is a pretty good summary of reality. I’m sure you’ll be tempted to turn it around and give me “your version of reality”, but remember it’s based on superstition, ignorance and a 2,000-year-old book of campfire stories.

Evolution is Not “Just a Theory”

You’ve been told that “evolution is just a theory”, a guess, a hunch, and not a fact, not proven. You’ve been misled. Keep reading, and in less than two minutes from now you’ll know that you’ve been misinformed. We’re not going to try and change your mind about evolution. We just want to point out that “it’s just a theory” is not a valid argument.

Read the full story at http://www.notjustatheory.com/index.html.