Some Dare Call it Reason

About twenty years ago, Fred Smith , generalissimo of the Competitive Enterprise institute summoned me  from Harvard to his Washington office and offered me the world : "How would you like to be the next Carl Sagan?"

No , thanks, I replied-- one  was too many.

"Do you believe in global warming ?" Fred continued.

Of course , said I. Having spent several years getting up to speed on the fundamentals of the physics on which the  climate modeling racket depends, how could I possibly deny that  carbon dioxide bracket creep was raising radiant heat retention by the earth's atmosphere?

That was pretty much  the end of the interview .
The Sagan to whom  Smith referred had championed a bad climate model, styled "nuclear winter." which the late Cornell astronomer and  media maven aspired to use as a policy lever to save the world , incidentally collecting the Nobel Peace Prize in the process.

It didn't happen , in part because science worked , and the original  model's many shortcomings failed to survive the extended rigors of peer review , and critiques in science journals like  Nature. But CEI is not exactly famed for its science library- or top heavy with staff scientists publishing up a storm.  What evidently impressed  Smith was my ventilation of 'nuclear winter's egregious political intent in Foreign Affairs and  The Wall Street Journal.  Disappointed by my unwillingness to get with the program of saying global warming wasn't so,  CEI instead signed on Ron Bailey , who duly satisfied Smith by producing such books as "Global Warming and other Eco-Myths."

Ron moved on to become Reason magazine's science correspondent  , persevering in his staunch resistance to the notion that  global warming existed well into the 21st century. But unlike most of his cohort,  he continued to read the science literature and  eventually changed his mind-- in public, globally  . On the BBC in fact - and he invites us to listen to his change of view.

Though Ron has very successfully reinvented himself as a first-rate writer on biotechnology , back in chilly Canada , Ottawa journalist David Warren  drones on under the rubric " Sensationalism in the Service of Scientism " : "The more I think about "global warming", in light of the most recent United Nations report, the more confident I become in averring that it is a fraud, a political stunt, a criminal imposture, that every intelligent journalist should be helping to expose. "

Now former next President Al Gore is running for the Nobel Peace prize. He makes much of having scored a  gentleman's C in a Harvard gut course in ecology ,but his peculiar scientific hyperbole  more reflects his taking homiletics in divinity school. Gore at least has tutors force feeding him freshman texts in atmospheric science. Not Warren.  His climate views reflect a charmingly candid  CV that  notes he has a  tenth grade education and scored "37 out of 100 " in a ninth grade math exam. Still, it says he's a great fan of Aristotle , so should he get around to reading the master's  'Meteorology' , he may yet see the error of his ways and apply himself to more recent scientific developments,like caloric and phlogiston.

Comments

[Eli Rabett]

So, as I recall, nuclear winter became nuclear fall the consequences of which were failed crops world wide, a much more serious issue today when reserves are low. That, of course, in addition to immediate deaths.

What might be truly amusing would be to rerun scenerios inside a modern GCM at 300, 400, 500 and 600 ppm CO2 equivalent to see what the long term consequences would be.

[David Moelling]

The nuclear winter escapade is still the perfect example of the political problems around climate change. Here was a horrific scenario with a full exchange of all nuclear weapons and we were supposed to be most concerned with a nuclear winter?

Twenty years ago I did a lot of modeling work in nuclear power and know every trick used at the nation labs to create projects. The short time scales for massive climate change in the popular and eco-green press are surely a result of this type of budget chasing. Not only is transparency needed but also some honesty about the scale of combustion reduction required to achieve some of the more dramatic CO2 reductions.

[Rod Montgomery]

Don't be too sure that Nuclear Winter is dead.

See for example http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/SciencePolicyForumNW.pdf

On the other hand, perhaps this is just another case in which multiple problems can solve each other. Perhaps the Solution to Global Warming is simply to *give* Iran nukes, and incite them to have a nuclear war with -- say -- China? [just kidding]

[Russell Seitz]

If Mr. Montgomery looks at the Before and After versions of 'nuclear winter' at:http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post?__mode=edit_entry&id=14781128&blog_id=506039

before he will discover that the End of the World isn't what it used to be. Despite its surviving authors denial of scientific progress on the subject, it has melted down from twenty below zero , to a frost free single degree of cooling .