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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (91317)	12/8/2006 7:14:24 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 360972

Inhofe’s last stand Filed under: Climate Science Reporting on climate— gavin @ 2:52 pm Part of me felt a little nostalgic yesterday watching the last Senate hearing on climate change that will be chaired by Sen. James Inhofe. It all felt very familiar and comforting in some strange way. There was the well-spoken 'expert' flown in from Australia (no-one available a little closer to home?), the media 'expert' from the think tank (plenty of those about) and a rather out-of-place geologist. There were the same talking points (CO2 leads the warming during the ice ages! the Medieval Warm Period was warm! it's all a hoax!) that are always brought up. These easy certainties and predictable responses are so well worn that they feel like a pair of old slippers. Of course, my bout of nostalgia has nothing to do with whether this was a useful thing for the Senate to be doing (it wasn't), and whether it just provided distracting political theatre (yup) in lieu of serious discussion about effective policy response, but even we should sometimes admit that it is easier to debunk this kind of schoolyard rhetoric than it is to deal with the complexities that actually matter. The supposed subject of discussion was 'Climate Change in the Media' though no-one thought to question why the Senate was so concerned with the media representations (Andy Revkin makes some good points about it though here). Senators have much more effective means of getting relevant information (knowledgable staffers, National Academy of Science reports, the presidential office of Science and Technology etc.) and so this concern was concievably related to their concern with public understanding of science..... or not. Naomi Oreskes did a good job on the context and provided useful rebuttal to a frankly ridiculous claim that contrarians were not getting any air time on the networks. One point she could have raised was that when Patrick Michaels made the same complaint to CNN - that their climate news stories weren't 'balanced' - a quick scan of their interviewee lists revealed that the scientist most frequently on CNN .... was none other than Michaels himself. A result somewhat at odds with his standing in the community or expertise, but ample evidence for the 'false balance' often decried here. As for the scientific content, with the sole exception of Dan Schrag's statements, it was a textbook example of abuse of science. Two exchanges summed it up for me. In the first, Bob Carter insisted that CO2 always follows temperature for the ice age cycles (which are paced by the variations in the Earth's orbit and for which CO2 is a necessary feedback) and seasonal cycle (related mainly to Northern hemisphere deciduous trees) . Both statements are true as far as they go - but they don't go very far. Was Carter suggesting that the 30% increase in CO2 decreased after 1940? or that it has stopped increasing in recent years (since he appears to also believe that global warming stopped in 1998?). As an aside by his criteria it also stopped in 1973, 1983 and 1990.... only it didn't. Of course, if this wasn't what he meant to imply (because it's demonstrably false), why did he bring the whole subject up at all? Surely not simply to muddy the waters.... The second great example was Carter making an appeal to authority (using NASA and the Russian Academy of Science) for his contention that world is likely to cool in coming decades. Of course scientists at NASA are at the forefront of studies of anthropogenic climate change so a similar authority would presumably apply to them, and the Russian Academy was one of 11 that called on the G8 to take climate change seriously, but let's gloss over that inconsistency. The nuggets of science Carter was referring to are predictions for the next couple of solar cycles - a tricky business in fact, and one in which there is a substantial uncertainty. However, regardless of that uncertainty, NASA scientists have definitively not predicted that this will cause an absolute cooling - at best, it might reduce the ongoing global warming slightly (which would be good) (though see here for what they actually said). Two Russians scientists have indeed made such a 'cooling' prediction though, but curiously only in a press report rather than in any peer-reviewed paper, and clearly did not speak for the Academy in doing so, but never mind that. Of course, if Carter seriously thought that global cooling was likely, he should be keen to take up some of James Annan's or Brian Schmidt's attractive offers - but like the vast majority of 'global coolers', his money does not appear to be where his mouth is. It's all classic contrarian stuff. With the new Senate coming in January, it seems likely that this kind of disinformational hearing will become less common and more climate policy-related hearings will occur instead. These won't provide as much fodder for us to debunk, but they might serve the much more useful function of actually helping craft appropriate policy responses. Ah... truly the end of an age. If needed, the easy rebuttals to these talking points are available here, here and here realclimate.org