[DEBATE] : Is Global Warming a Sin?

Tue May 1 09:08:07 BST 2007

"contrarianism in defense of nonsense is no virtue"... I love that, can I
keep it?
The fight has moved on, and only a very few continue to deny (largely
abandoned by the corporates who funded the dissenters for so long)... now
it's about whether we should just give in and adapt as much as we can as we
go, accepting immense loss of biodiversity, water crises, shifting
agribusiness around in vast chunks; vs trying our best right now to fend off
most of the awful consequences. The business interests appear to me to be
influencing talk in favour of adaptation (our own Kortbroek has evidently
decided in favour of adaptation).
Mandi
----- Original Message -----
From: <mfleshman at aol.com>
To: <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 9:25 PM
Subject: Re: [DEBATE] : Is Global Warming a Sin?


> Well, its 2500 reviewing scientists and more than 800 contributing
scientific authors in 130 countries involved with the IPCC report versus 1
Martin Hertzberg on the cause of global warming. I suppose none of the
others made it to the Nation cruise that year, and, having the answer he
likes, Cockburn finds no reason to jump that lonely ship.  There will always
be a few climate denialists, and some fewer of these will be sincere -- not
industry hirelings saying what they're paid to. Hertzberg may be among this
select group for all I know.  But Counterpunch, and of course, Grinker's
precious Spiked, are likely to be among the few places to pay them much
mind.  The verdict on climate change is in.  The struggle now is what to do
about it.
>
> And while Cockburn is among my favorite writers I have have always found,
to paraphrase the famous Cold War defense of McCarthyism, that contrarianism
in defense of nonsense is no virtue.  I think Cockburn has a rather romantic
image of himself as Don Quixote tilting against that clean energy source,
windmills. I think he's just blowing greenhouse-gas smoke.
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: hein at marais.as
> To: debate at lists.kabissa.org
> Sent: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 3:54 AM
> Subject: RE: [DEBATE] : Is Global Warming a Sin?
>
>
> Points taken. Which is why I chose not to leave the word "contrarianism"
all
> lonesome, but attached the adjective "doltish". BTW, the contrarian
impulse
> swings both ways, in a manner of speaking, toward reaction or toward
> progress, as you'll admit; its application is not to be embraced simply
> because some alt-thought or alt.sentiment is on parade. Here Cockburn is
> willfully silly,  a ham really, the grizzled old-timer doing what he does
so
> well, which is to upset the rhythms of polite orthodoxy. The gesture I
> appreciate, it's content I dismiss. On current evidence, the weight of
> scientific evidence tilts overwhelming against such otherwise entertaining
> flippancy.
>
> Hein
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org
> [mailto:debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org] On Behalf Of Peter Waterman
> Sent: April 30, 2007 9:36 AM
> To: debate: SA discussion list
> Subject: Re: [DEBATE] : Is Global Warming a Sin?
>
> Hein:
>
> I was just thinking about the power of Contrarianism - whoever it is we
> cover with this pejorative. I would myself, for example, possibly want to
> include those who consider that capitalism is still 'fundamentally' as
Marx
> described, analysed and theorised it.
>
> Whatever.
>
> It occurred to me that such Contrarians keep us on our theoretical,
> analytical and even descriptive toes. And that the Contrarian impulses of
> our otherwise respected thinkers remind us of the difference between the
> Guru (single, infallible) and Comrades (plural, fallible).
>
> Today, fortunately, unlike even 1968, the means of communication on the
Left
>
> are so many and so productive that the damage done by a single Contrarian,
> or Contrarianism on a World Scale, is proportionately reduced.
>
> Also, it seems to me, that it is more or less in the nature of
Contrarianism
>
> to be in competition with Others (whether these Others be Contrarian or
> Whateverarians).
>
> The threat of a Contrarian International seems therefore likewise reduced.
> The slogan, 'Contrarians of All Countries Unite! You have Nothing to Lose
> but your Moral and Intellectual Superiority!' seems unlikely to be heard
> this Mayday.
>
> Something else to celebrate in what otherwise seems to me a somewhat grim
> world situation?
>
> P
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Hein Marais" <hein at marais.as>
> To: "'debate: SA discussion list '" <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
> Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 9:17 AM
> Subject: RE: [DEBATE] : Is Global Warming a Sin?
>
>
> Much as I enjoy Cockburn, and have done for many years, this belongs in
the
> Michael Crichton school of doltish contrarianism.
>
> Hein
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org
> [mailto:debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org] On Behalf Of Russell Grinker
> Sent: April 30, 2007 8:06 AM
> To: 'debate: SA discussion list '
> Subject: [DEBATE] : Is Global Warming a Sin?
>
> >From Papal Indulgences to Carbon Credits
> Is Global Warming a Sin?
>
>
> By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
>
> In a couple of hundred years, historians will be comparing the frenzies
over
> our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the
> latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached.
> Then, as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive
> factor in the planet's rapid downward slide.
>
> Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church
was
> a bank whose capital was secured by the infinite mercy of Christ, Mary and
> the Saints, and so the Pope could sell indulgences, like checks. The
sinners
> established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning.
> Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose
> "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to
others,
> less virtuous than themselves.
>
> The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still
zero
> empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any
> measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The
greenhouse
> fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer
> models to finger mankind's sinful contribution. Devoid of any sustaining
> scientific basis, carbon trafficking is powered by guilt, credulity,
> cynicism and greed, just like the old indulgences, though at least the
> latter produced beautiful monuments. By the sixteenth century, long after
> the world had sailed safely through the end of the first millennium, Pope
> Leo X financed the reconstruction of St. Peter's Basilica by offering a
> "plenary" indulgence, guaranteed to release a soul from purgatory.
>
> Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a
crest,
> then slopes sharply down, then levels off and rises slowly once more. The
> other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slowly increasing arc. The
> first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning
> coal, oil and natural gas. On this graph it starts in 1928, at 1.1
gigatons
> (i.e. 1.1 billion metric tons). It peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The
> world, led by its mightiest power, the USA, plummets into the Great
> Depression, and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a
> year, a 30 per cent drop. Hard times drove a tougher bargain than all the
> counsels of Al Gore or the jeremiads of the IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel
> on Climate Change). Then, in 1933 it began to climb slowly again, up to
0.9
> gigatons.
>
> And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That's the concentration
of
> CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928
> from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, to 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom
and
> bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it's at 380.There are, to be
> sure, seasonal variations in CO2, as measured since 1958 by the
instruments
> on Mauna Loa, Hawai'i. (Pre-1958 measurements are of air bubbles trapped
in
> glacial ice.) Summer and winter vary steadily by about 5 ppm, reflecting
> photosynthesis cycles. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a
whopping
> 30 per cent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn't even cause a 1 ppm drop
in
> the atmosphere's CO2. Thus it is impossible to assert that the increase in
> atmospheric CO2 stems from human burning of fossil fuels.
>
> I met Dr. Martin Hertzberg, the man who drew that graph and those
> conclusions, on a Nation cruise back in 2001. He remarked that while he
> shared many of the Nation's editorial positions, he approved of my
> reservations on the issue of supposed human contributions to global
warming,
> as outlined in columns I wrote at that time. Hertzberg was a meteorologist
> for three years in the U.S. Navy, an occupation which gave him a lifelong
> mistrust of climate modeling. Trained in chemistry and physics, a
combustion
> research scientist for most of his career, he's retired now in Copper
> Mountain, Colorado, still consulting from time to time.
>
> Not so long ago, Hertzberg sent me some of his recent papers on the global
> warming hypothesis, a construct now accepted by many progressives as
> infallible as Papal dogma on matters of faith or doctrine. Among them was
> the graph described above so devastating to the hypothesis.
>
> As Hertzberg readily acknowledges, the carbon dioxide content of the
> atmosphere has increased about 21 per cent in the past century. The world
> has also been getting just a little bit warmer. The not very reliable data
> on the world's average temperature (which omit most of the world's oceans
> and remote regions, while over-representing urban areas) show about a
0.5Co
> increase in average temperature between 1880 and 1980, and it's still
> rising, more sharply in the polar regions than elsewhere. But is CO2, at
380
> parts per million in the atmosphere, playing a significant role in
retaining
> the 94 per cent of solar radiation that's absorbed in the atmosphere, as
> against water vapor, also a powerful heat absorber, whose content in humid
> tropical atmosphere, can be as high as 2 per cent, the equivalent of
20,000
> ppm. As Hertzberg says, water in the form of oceans, clouds, snow, ice
cover
> and vapor "is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the
> earth and the sun Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by
> comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane." And water is
> exactly that component of the earth's heat balance that the global warming
> computer models fail to account for.
>
> It's a notorious inconvenience for the Greenhousers that data also show
> carbon dioxide concentrations from the Eocene period, 20 million years
> before Henry Ford trundled his first model T out of the shop, 300-400 per
> cent higher than current concentrations. The Greenhousers deal with other
> difficulties like the medieval warming period's higher-than-today's
> temperatures by straightforward chicanery, misrepresenting tree-ring data
> (themselves an unreliable guide) and claiming the warming was a local,
> insignificant European affair.
>
> We're warmer now, because today's world is in the thaw following the last
> Ice Age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive, all
> due to predictable changes in the earth's elliptic orbit round the sun,
and
> in the earth's tilt. As Hertzberg explains, the cyclical heat effect of
all
> of these variables was worked out in great detail between 1915 and 1940 by
> the Serbian physicist, Milutin Milankovitch, one of the giants of
> 20th-century astrophysics. In past postglacial cycles, as now, the earth's
> orbit and tilt gives us more and longer summer days between the equinoxes.
>
> Water covers 71 per cent of the surface of the planet. As compared to the
> atmosphere, there's at least a hundred times more CO2 in the oceans,
> dissolved as carbonate. As the postglacial thaw progresses the oceans warm
> up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, just like
> fizz in soda water taken out of the fridge. "So the greenhouse global
> warming theory has it ass backwards," Hertzberg concludes. "It is the
> warming of the earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and
not
> the reverse." He has recently had vivid confirmation of that conclusion.
> Several new papers show that for the last three quarter million years CO2
> changes always lag global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.
>
> It looks like Poseidon should go hunting for carbon credits. Trouble is,
the
> human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces and
> volumes, and that's not even to mention the role of the giant reactor
> beneath our feet: the earth's increasingly hot molten core.
>
> From: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn04282007.html
>
> 1273 words
>
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