Scientific Republican

Arms And The Weatherman

Hard cases make bad law ,  but worse science policy can arise when commanders in the Climate Wars deploy the mode of ideological rhetoric Paul Weyrich and Michael Lind style"armed cant." It's hardly new -- in 1990 I noted that  "In the name of the greenhouse effect,some environmentalists are demanding a 30 percent rollback in C02 emissions by the year 2000." Today that green fire blazes in Al Gore's belly.Wielding  rhetoric inflammatory as William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech, he seeks a " 90%  or greater " cut in CO2 by 2050.

In 2000, the Former Next President's campaign economists dismissed Green proposals to knock America's energy economy back into the 1960's . Now their man demands we  crucify coal , starving the national economy down to  CO2 emission levels last seen in the 1880's . If he reaches any farther back into the future , he may pull a Constitutional amendment to abolish fire out of his stovepipe hat.

An old school political Neanderthal like Bryan could only applaud Al's road show. With the same didactic preachyness as Jurassic Park , An Inconvenient Truth deprives viewers of polemically inconvenient scientific facts by design.

But that's show business--the Alley Oop constituencies on both sides of the aisle haven't cracked a science textbook since the late neolithic . They don't give a whoop if debate still rages in scientific journals nobody reads.They'd much rather see the climate change controversy downshift into the more popular--and political-- media staffers can handle without recourse to a technical dictionary. If the Supreme Court of the United States can exhale a condemnation of CO2 without troubling itself over terms like " troposphere " and "radiative forcing" why should the Senate loose sleep over them ?

Tabloid climate science makes better bedside reading. One side's depiction of  any human impact as tantamount to Weather of Mass Destruction has become a soporifically predictable feature of late night television. The other evening, Al Gore calmed the excitable Conan O'Brien by assuring "We don't know enough not to make a catastrophic mistake in dealing with the world's climate". before expounding a half century's worth of policy plans founded on climate modeling art that , while it has improved as much as microwave cooking in a generation, still has far to go before achieving the satisfying crunch of hard science.

Lacking  media traction, the Green climate warriors Red State counterparts base their anodyne opposition less on scientific evidence than political intuition, trusting in the authority of scientific bedtime stories that  wouldn't trouble a ten year old expecting the tooth fairy. Yet as the Climate Wars enter their second century, the atmosphere remains the Earth's most complex dynamic system.

If you think it will grow simpler in time for the election, dream on. Those unwilling to heft the heavy scientific chronicles of climate change research risk falling  prey to views by turns parochial , tendentious, or just plain daft. Conservative scientists find themselves in a waking nightmare, as scanning from Fox TV to the Washington Times, they see right wing journalism  devolving into a 21st century scientific eyesore. Some raise a disturbing question : is a sensible Conservative consensus on climate change even possible?

Both sides talking heads seem more interested in trading truth for influence than speaking truth to power. Those on the right, though well , lawyerly , lack a first-rate scientific constituency to back them. behind their  stalwart front , there's little stomach for seriously debating the scientific  facts  Ditto  Al Gore, who his 1001th performance of  The Speech to an audience of 12,000 earth scientists in San Francisco last month, but wisely skedaddled before they could ask too many questions.

Only one skeptic on climate change counts as a real player in the fast moving scientific game underlying the debate. Richard Lindzen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a prolific and respected author of peer-reviewed papers on the atmospheric sciences explaining  climate's 'Quasi-Biennial Oscillation'  and the role of tides and gravity wave drag in the circulation of the upper atmosphere.His sheer creativity sets the  MIT professor of atmospheric sciences  conspicuously apart from a cohort largely comprised of  politically appointed TV weathermen and researchers with careers at best tangential to state of the art climate studies.

Lindzen is no stranger to technical controversy. He has over the years posed  several novel and  scientifically interesting objections to the common wisdom  in the climate change debate, focusing on how rising amounts of atmospheric water vapor could curb the rate of man made temperature rise. But each of his serial objections has been coherently replied to in the peer reviewed science literature. So good scientist that he is , Lindzen has accepted as valid many quantitative objections to his theoretical views, and altered his stance accordingly.{ THIS JUST IN }

That's how science works. Senator Inhofe's words notwithstanding , the iconoclast celebrated in Michael Crichton's 'State of Fear ' no longer defends some talking points yack TV pundits refuse to relinquish. To their dismay , he has committed the unpardonable political sin of allowing scientific facts to change his mind. What he chose not to say about the state of the science in seconding Crichton and British geographer George Stott in a recent debate in New York  speaks even more loudly than his vigorous denunciation of hype in the service of politics.

This may never register with  some , for the ditto head common wisdom on climate has been projected into the halls of congress-- before Pelosi and Waxman returned to the center ring, the Congressional  climate policy circus was presided over by  Rush's Limbaugh's scientific casting director Marc Morano. Al Gore steers clear of MIT, but what about Lindzen's impact on his colleagues there ?  Lindzen has had twenty years to persuade The National Academy's thousand-plus members that man-made warming remains too uncertain to be a serious issue. Like most respectable skeptics, he began by questioning warnings detectable existence , and  pointing out that negative feedbacks could curb  it in models and reality alike.

Ask around the  Academy as to how many  have been won over to these views ,and you will discover that the answer is closer to none than a dozen This is just as true on Lindzen's home turf.Other MIT professors share the view that the Climate Wars have become egregiously politicized , and that climate models are sorely constrained as predictive tools. Yet in a quarter century of almost daily interaction Lindzen has failed to persuade  such colleagues as MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel or oceanographer  Carl Wunsch that global warming is" not a big deal." Wunsch agreed to appear alongside Lindzen in the recent  British TV program , 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' but has ended up accusing the producers of swindling him -and their audience by playing fast and loose with scientific truth.

Emanuel is a far cry from a liberal icon; MIT is not Harvard, and like Lindzen ,he harshly criticized Carl Sagan's attempt to use a primitive climate model as a policy lever during the Cold War, calling ' nuclear winter '  studies "notorious for their lack of scientific integrity "  They may disagree as to both the nature of solutions and the immanent need for them , but it is worth noting where their views coincide-  a bipartisan commitment to the integrity of science makes Emmanuel's take on what the climate wars have come to 'Phaetons' Reins'  a necessary  compliment  to Lindzen's. Both agree that whatever is happening is happening slowly - policy maters may lack the energy ,but they do not lack the time  confront the full spectrum of facts that define a debate that defies both sides attempts to reduce it to sound bites. One that emerges from such study is an economic  analogy -- their are parallels between the  problems posed by climate change and gradual inflation.

As long as CO2 is rising by a few parts per million per year , radiative forcing of warming is growing   by microwatts  per square meter per day. It does not sound like much, , given the kilowatt per square meter power sunlight already deposits , but the microwatts have been adding up since  The Wealth Of Nations  manuscript first lay on Adam Smith's desktop, and some hundreds of thousands of days , and a lot of Mr.Watt's steam engines later, CO2 bracket creep has given rise to unavoidable debate as to the present and future costs of ignoring climatic  inflation.

If any species of Palaeoconservative principle is at once worth conserving , and profoundly endangered , it is that the political neutrality of scientific institutions must first exist in order to be respected. That sentiment may not be ready for prime time today. The disdain shown science by erstwhile conservatives and intransigent liberals waging the Climate War on TV too much recalls Thucydides view of an earlier conflict :

"The state which separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools"

At present, none speak for science in a warming debate caught in the crossfire between vying political agendas. That may be the way Washington works , but while Republicans and Democrats clearly have different  metaphysical views of the world, its atmosphere neither knows nor cares.  There can be no scientific  armistice in the Climate Wars until both sides acknowledge that  there can be , at most , one kind of physics.  --Russell Seitz C.2007

 

Cool Heads At A Hot Concert

Denialists may reckon the risk on a par with the displacement of water by Cleopatra's barge , but Cris Horner, the incumbent climate wizard of Planet Gore , fears sea level may rise to inundate DC if ravers at Al's Live Earth concert exhale too much CO2. Yet it is only natural that Democrats with carbon neutral yachts should agonize over the Precautionary Principle ashore. To spare Washington from a watery grave  when the Great Green Rave breaks over the nation's capital , perhaps they should  advise Al to follow Venice's saving example.

The party animals of the Serene Republic devised a sartorial solution to the party's air quality problem centuries ago. Threatened with an outbreak of the Black Death , cool  Venetians packed their Carnivale mask schnozolli with spices to soak up the deathly Miasma , and bravely boogied on. The imposition of the germ theory of disease on innocent Venetians by AIDS activists has since cooled Carnivale somewhat.  So today ratty plague masks can be picked up for a song in better Adriatic flea markets.

Exported to Green ateliers , the masks can be recycled as Carbon Dioxide capture systems by repacking their beaks with SodaSorb to keep the satanic gas from escaping into the pristine Foggy Bottom air. Al is on the Congressional Record as demanding  society suck in its CO2 production 90%  by 2050 ,but don't hold your breath about the crowd at the 2007 event- EcoRock concerts entail heavy breathing.So how can the mask's sustainiably absorb the revelers CO2 as the bands play on ? And on-- Snoop Dogg, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Black Eyed Peas, Fall Out Boy, The Foo Fighters......

Using coal -fired power to tame such an electric guitar Gotterdammerung could raise sea level enough to turn the Supreme Court porte cochere into a Gondola stand. So though Vanity Fair subscribers may enjoy being leashed with electric cords, using renewable energy is the only democratic way to keep the revels green.  Conspicuous consumption of corny old gasohol could trigger a tortilla inflation riot--it's better conserved for washing down Ecstasy tabs in case Al whips out his Inconvenient Truth slides. So what's to empower the party people?

Once again, it's Venetian fashion sense to the rescue ! No respectable palazzo dweller appears masked in public without a hat , and the solar micro turbine baseball cap answers to that description. Apart from generating power to sell to Al's minigrid , their sweatbands can feed molten salt fuel cells , furnishing ecsydiasts with streams of absorbent lye to cleanse the good green air. The dusk to dawn blast from the departing rockers Gulfstream V's will disperse any attendant chlorine , and provide  wind-power enough to propel the party into a proper rave. before dismissing such high-tech haberdashery as outlandish , consider the glad rags our Former Next Doge last wore to a masked ball of Venetian proportions--

Survivors of Al's bash can judge if LiveEarth has tamed the hot air of the Capitoline fever swamps by using the internet's coolest online CO2 viewing tool. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's CarbonTracker website. If all goes well, DC won't appear as a Red State on its Global Greenhouse map. This Fourth Of July 2005 CO2 snapshot shows seasonal CO2 sources, like the Amazon Rain Forest , shaded red and sinks, like the thawing Arctic shaded blue. Somebody had better show this to Al before he forgets he invented it.

Full Disclosure : Russell Seitz has been known to coauthor David Jones' Daedalus column in Nature

The Day After Earth Day

After decades of cheerfully submitting to Greenmail , some of Europe's more literate magazines are having second thoughts about  putting over-the-top Apocalypse spin on their Earth Day covers. German weekly Der Spiegel  has instead paid Retro-Pop homage to Claes Oldenburg  with this wind-down from the ritual hysteria of past decades.

It's no coincidence that Greatest Living Horror Film Producer Roland Emmerich , the destroyer of worlds who directed The Day After Tomorrow after blowing up the White House in Independence Day , started getting  good tables at Planet Hollywood after he launched The Noah's Ark Principle at Berlin's Green Film Festival 25 years ago.

Very Interesting, its script is--an oil war in Iraq changes the Earth's climate, you see, so only the UN's weather satellites can save us from....