environmentalism — VOICES for REASON

Following the Climategate scandal, I commented that on the climate issue “there has been a consistent pattern of exaggeration and deception, of context-dropping claims, and of distortion of the facts and the scientific process”—and that this has been driven by “a widespread commitment to environmentalist ideology.”

Well since Climategate, there have been so many other scientific scandals that have emerged it’s hard to keep up with them all. As the Wall Street Journal put it:

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the “settled science” of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Here’s a round-up of the growing list of scientific distortions from the Orange County Register’s Mark Landsbaum.  So much for “The debate is over.”

Photo credit: flickr/azrainman

Did you see the “Green Police” Super Bowl ad? There’s some debate about whether the commercial is mocking the green movement, but I think blogger David Roberts makes a pretty good case that it isn’t:

[The ad is aimed] at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police–people who may find those obligations tiresome and constraining on occasion, who only fitfully meet them, who may be annoyed by sticklers and naggers, but who recognize that living more sustainably is in fact the moral thing to do. This basically describes every guy I know.

Of course, it’s not exactly reassuring that so many Americans don’t mind being bossed around in the name of environmentalism. Have Americans gone from the Revolutionary-era ethos of “Don’t tread on me” to “Only tread on me if it’s for a good cause”?

Here’s ARC’s Keith Lockitch on why we should not acknowledge the moral authority of the green police.

image: stock.xchng/Plusverde

In October, I posted on the opposition by environmentalists to solar energy projects in California’s Mojave Desert. I mentioned that California Senator Dianne Feinstein was planning to bolster that opposition with legislation.

Well, just before Christmas the New York Times reported that Feinstein introduced a bill “to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region.”

What I found most striking in the article was this (emphasis added):

But before the bill to create two new Mojave national monuments has even had its first hearing, the California Democrat has largely achieved her aim. Regardless of the legislation’s fate, her opposition means that few if any power plants are likely to be built in the monument area, a complication in California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy.

Developers of the projects have already postponed several proposals or abandoned them entirely. The California agency charged with planning a renewable energy transmission grid has rerouted proposed power lines to avoid the monument.

“The very existence of the monument proposal has certainly chilled development within its boundaries,” said Karen Douglas, chairwoman of the California Energy Commission.

So even if the bill fails in Congress, the environmentalist anti-development agenda wins.

The irony is that these scuttled energy projects are creatures of green government intervention in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

The Climategate documents—the hundreds of emails and other data hacked from the Climatic Research Unit of England’s East Anglia University—have exposed serious breaches of scientific integrity. They contain evidence of collusion among a small but highly influential group of climate researchers to suppress and even delete key data, to manipulate the scientific peer-review process, to exclude the work of dissenting scientists, and allegedly to evade Freedom of Information requests by destroying requested materials.

Climate alarmists have responded by trying desperately to make the issue go away. They argue that the bad behavior of a few individuals doesn’t invalidate the entire edifice of global warming science. Surely, they ask, you’re not suggesting that the whole theory is just one big massive fraud, are you?

Some are even trying to ridicule the legitimate concerns the documents raise by invoking the specter of some sort of nefarious global conspiracy. At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) sarcastically put the question to a number of testifying scientists:

“I just wanted to ask you if you’re part of that massive international conspiracy,” he said to the witnesses, adding with a note of sarcasm, “Are either one of you members of the Trilateral Commission, SPECTRE or KAOS? I just need an answer.”

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I sometimes receive questions from readers such as the following:

Q: I consider myself a strong free-market advocate and a fan of Ayn Rand’s writings. However, I find your denial of rising global temperatures to be contradictory to Rand’s view that we should follow the facts of reality based on reason and objective knowledge. You are not a climate scientist (your bio says “PhD in theoretical physics”), so how are you qualified to draw conclusions about global warming? If the only fact we have on which to base a conclusion is that many experts support the existence of global warming, then isn’t it only rational, under Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, to conclude that global warming is, in fact, a problem?

Here’s my answer:

A: First of all, let me clarify that I am not in “denial of rising global temperatures.” There is no question that the earth is warmer today than it has been since the start of systematic thermometer records. But it is also true that the start of that record happens to coincide with the end of a relatively cold period in recent climate history—one characterized by a little ice age. The issue is not whether temperatures are warmer today than they were a century ago, but whether the increase in global temperature can be solidly attributed to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re used to environmentalists telling us that we need to “save the planet” for our children. Now, they’re saying we shouldn’t be allowed to have them.

Echoing the sentiments of Paul Ehrlich’s environmentalist manifesto, the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, British columnist Alex Renton of The Guardian writes, “the worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO2 every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess.”

Mr. Renton’s opinion is shared by the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin. At a recent panel discussion titled “Covering Climate: What’s Population Got To Do With It?,” Mr. Revkin argued that “probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower their carbon footprint is not turning off the light or driving a Prius, it’s having fewer kids, having fewer children.”

Environmentalists have always urged us towards a more ascetic existence, and population control is a logical progression within the framework of the environmentalist ideology, which views “the planet” as an inherent good that must be “saved” from the plague of man. Thus neither Mr. Renton nor Mr. Revkin is at all shy in advocating their position, nor does either skip a beat in suggesting that government force is necessary to achieve it.

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A number of developments on the climate front suggest that the tide has turned somewhat for promoters of green climate policy:

• Although Congress has been working for months on a climate change bill that would impose a carbon rationing scheme (cap and trade) on the U.S. economy, and although the House version passed by a narrow margin in June—the Senate version is struggling badly.

• The world is gearing up for a major climate conference in Copenhagen (Dec. 7-18)—which has long been anticipated by climate activists as the chance to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol before it expires in 2012. But it’s looking less and less likely that the conference will produce any sort of strong, binding agreement.

• A recent Pew poll suggests that fewer Americans see global warming as a “very serious” problem, and the more people hear about cap and trade, the less they support it. (Those who describe themselves as having “heard a lot” about cap and trade tend to oppose it by two-to-one.)

Does this mean that those of us who oppose green climate policies are winning? Is the battle over this issue almost over? Far from it.

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Environmentalists claim, with ever-increasing hysteria, that our consumption of carbon-based energy in pursuit of prosperity and economic growth is altering the earth’s climate. Human survival, they insist, requires the immediate abandonment of fossil fuels, which provide more than 80 percent of the world’s energy, in favor of carbon-free sources.

Yet, at the same time, environmentalist groups have vehemently opposed, as unacceptable intrusions on nature, projects involving every alternative form of energy ever proposed to replace fossil fuels—including such supposedly green ventures as wind farms and solar power plants. Here’s the latest example:

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The Wall Street Journal recently reported on “small hydro” projects—hydroelectric power plants involving small dams on streams and tributaries, as opposed to giant dams on major rivers. Because hydro produces zero greenhouse gas emissions, these projects are being promoted by power companies hoping to avoid the fierce green opposition to carbon-based energy.

But environmentalists have also fiercely opposed hydro for decades, because massive dams flood large areas and dramatically alter waterways. (This list of Sierra Club “accomplishments” boasts of killing dam projects as far back as 1923.) The Journal story suggests that with small hydro, electricity producers are hoping to fly under the green radar by building smaller dams in remote locations.

The problem is that these hydro plants have a tiny generating capacity: Read the rest of this entry »

I promised I would report back from the Heartland Institute’s Third International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC.

The highlight of the conference, for me, was the keynote address by Dr. Richard Lindzen, a leading M.I.T. climate scientist who has long been the most prominent scientific critic of global warming alarmism. (The full text of his talk is available here, along with the rest of the conference proceedings.)

At one point, Lindzen dissected the central argument that the proponents of climate alarm use in attributing the global temperature changes over the past few decades to human activities:

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