I like Treehugger alot, because I'm a solar guy and I like gadgets.
Still, the blog occasionally toes* the party line with bits like this, which can best be summarized as "Ha! Look! Global warming non - believers miscalculated."
The good folks at TH picked up on this NYT article outlining the errors made by John R. Christy and Roy W. Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who
... conceded yesterday that they had made a mistake but said that their revised calculations still produced a warming rate too small to be a concern.
The assumption underlying the NYT article and the Treehugger bit is that 20 years' worth of data can be a predictor of complex atmospheric behavioral with cycles that span millennia, not decades.
The concluding remark by Yale scientist Steven Sherwood ("Nobody is debating any more that significant climate changes are coming") is misleading at best. Plenty of people debate the fact of climate change; still more grant the fact, but debate the cause of that change.
Take just one example. From the 10th to the 14th centuries, temperatures were 1 to 3 degrees higher than they are now. It's called the Medieval Warm Period or Medieval Climate Optimum, and whether or not it was a global phenomenon is still open to debate. This was followed up by the "Little Ice Age" from about 1300 - 1900. This entire warming and cooling cycle happened in the absence of significant human industrial development.
It is prudence that should inform the technological and economic changes required to live more lightly on the planet, not "science." I use quotes because what passes for science on either side of this debate at the policy - making level is alarmist at best, and fraudulent at worst.
We are seeking answers to questions for which we simply do not have sufficient data. Trying to claim a political imperative based on conclusions drawn from this flawed and incomplete data and then presented as fact is actually counterproductive to any green goal, because it provides those opposed to change with so much ammunition that inaction is inevitable.
As a case in point, Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the free - market environmental think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, had this to say about the 2003 Medieval Warming Period study:
"This new study merely affirms the obvious: climate alarmism based on a few years' or even a century's data is sheer folly, reminding us again that geological cycles spanning millennia do not share the rush of agenda - driven scientists or activists."
I agree with him... but his rhetoric is lousy: "affirm the obvious" and "sheer folly" aren't really terms that I'd choose to emply in a search for truth. I would, however, use them in a political debate.
This is, at its core, a philosophical issue. Science has become a schismatic religion which issues regular pronouncements with near - clerical authority. Using the authority of science in this way will never sway the electorate, which instinctively recognizes the authoritarian nature hiding beneath the "scientific" trappings. It's why Bill Clinton - - consummate politican that he is - - never submitted the Kyoto treaty to Congress for ratification, and why the Byrd - Hagel Resolution came into being.
What is needed is, I think, exactly what is often found on Treehugger: incremental technological improvements that introduce the ideas of environmental stewardship to the populace by harnessing the forces of the marketplace and making them work to the Earth's advantage.
I believe that alot of the alarmism and cries for instant action stem from the same thing that drove Leftist concepts of revolution: a mistaken conflation of the increasingly fast, technologically - enhanced pace of individual life in the West with the evolution of cultures and society. Societies have an inertia that individuals do not. Similarly, Central Park is not going to be beachfront property tomorrow, this decade, or even this century.
- - -
Of course, it might be... it doesn't make much sense for me to make such declarations of certainty, either.
One of the most succinct takes on all of this came from the now - retired Captain of the USS Clueless, who asks: why should we base extremely expensive public policy on science which is so tentative?
