The Inconvenient Truth About Kyoto

George Will has an excellent column about the hype surrounding global warming and argues that Bush should reintroduce the Kyoto Protocols onto the Senate floor. Kyoto was shot down by the Senate in 1997 on a 95-0 vote, and for good reason. It’s a worthless, pointless, and destructive treaty that penalizes productive nations while giving serial polluters like China a free pass. It won’t do anything to mitigate climate change, but it would destroy the US economy — which is precisely why the Senate Democrats would never actually sign the thing. It’s one thing to sit around and carp about how not signing Kyoto has made the US an “international pariah” in the shameful words of Sen. Kerry, but it’s another thing to actually sign the thing and have to live with the consequences.

Even if one accepts that the Earth is warming (which is undeniable) and that human CO2 emissions are to blame (which is hardly the slam-dunk case that the global warming faithful make it out to be) and that there’s any action we can do to mitigate it (which is even more doubtful), Kyoto still isn’t the right response. The pace of technological change will eventually drive further and further increases in energy efficiency — inefficiency is economically wasteful, and free markets seek to reduce external costs like inefficiency. Indeed, already there have been some interesting experiments with emissions-trading markets that may provide a better allocation of resources.

A better solution would be a program to develop environmentally sustainable nuclear energy production which would have a profound effect on carbon emissions — but anti-nuclear hysteria remains an seemingly intractable barrier to that.

The Democrats want to use global warming as an excuse to advance their policy agenda of higher taxes and more government control — not to actually do anything to reduce carbon emissions. They wouldn’t ratify Kyoto now just as they didn’t in 1997. All they’re doing by trying to beat this particular dead horse is increasing global warming by spewing massive amounts of hot air.

20 thoughts on “The Inconvenient Truth About Kyoto

  1. Perhaps you have difficulty reading graphs due to a lack of science in your background. But Jay, just because YOU don’t understand the science doesn’t mean that NOBODY understands the science. Your “global warming faithful” are scientists who have been working on this for decades. But when have conservatives ever acknowledged the expertise of scientists? I’m not going to hold my breath for that moment. That’s why the majority of scientists in this country (and the rest of the world, probably) dislike conservatives.

  2. I’m always so very impressed with people, who, having scientific backgrounds, are so accomplished in their field that they are willing to eschew scientific study and methodology completely to instead embrace the last 15 years of popular opinion. So advanced are these people with their scientific backgrounds, that they are able to dispense entirely with the scientific approach to critical analysis, to forego any attempt at definitive scientific proof, and so enthusiastically are ready, willing, and able to replace the discipline of science by simply forming a “majority of scientists” consensus.

    Thirty years ago, the “majority of scientists” consensus was “global cooling.” Long before that the “majority of scientists” believed there was only one planet and the entire universe revolved around it. Before that, the “majority of scientists” believed the Earth was flat. And it really wasn’t all that long ago that the “majority of scientists” believed that if you bled the patient a pint or two a day, scalded him with hot irons, or drilled a hole in his head to let the demons out, the patient would recover and live a long and happy life. Then of course there were the “majority of scientists” who figured out who all the witches were……

    That there is such reliance on a “majority of scientists” consensus is a repudiation of all science itself. For in real science, by definition, there can be no “consensus.” A hypothesis is either true or it is not true. Einstein’s theory of relativity is not a matter of opinion, whereas “global warming” most certainly is.

    Even if a billion people believe a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing.

  3. Do you take your car to a mechanic? If so, why? If not, why not?

    Your ignorance is showing, but don’t worry. It’s a very commin misconception that many people have about the way science works. The thing you have you understand about science is that it is a process. There aren’t actually facts or proofs in science – while we do employ math, science isn’t math – there is only evidence. So yes, there can be a consensus. Using the tools at our disposal we collect evidence. So, while you may scoff at the primitives who thought there were demons in the brain, they were simply doing the best they could given the evidence and tools at their dispoal. Simply because they were wrong doesn’t mean that the entire body of scientific evidence ever collected to date is somehow useless or wrong or bad. But like the primitive doctors, we have a choice: we can either let the problem go unsolved, or we can attempt to solve it using the evidence and tools at our disposal.

  4. You are prosyletizing a religion, Erica, (and poorly) not discussing scientific inquiry. You would not know the difference, of course, because in your religious zealotry, “there aren’t actually facts or proofs in science,” but instead only popular consensus. One wonders what color the sky might be in such a world…

    But not to worry. You have plenty of company in this latest cult of Mother Earth idolatry. Those “primitives” you suggest were doing the best they could with the evidence and tools at their disposal were not conducting scientific inquiry either. They were practicing their religion, just as you are today, with the end result for the patient, like the religion, invariably the same.

    It is only people who imagine themselves the center of the universe who believe they have a “choice” of whether or not to solve the “problem” of global warming. The truth of the matter is they are more likely just people who are so self-absorbed and self-centered that they have nothing left to obscess about other than changes in the weather. Considering the Earth has been warming for the last 650,000 years or so, don’t you find it interesting it’s only became a problem once the people who unquestionably believe “there aren’t actually facts or proofs in science” came of age to vote? Or is that just another inconvenient truth your religion compels you to disregard?

  5. That you are here reduced to citing a couple of pre-paid hack journalists in the liberal hymnal of the Church of Mother Earth, dear Nicholas, only more illustrates my point.

    In your religion, logic and science are individual, separate, and unrelated, which allows your congregation to worship whatever fantasy produces a popular consensus. Having disallowed logic and its discipline in science to ever undermine the chosen self-centered, self-absorbed, and self-serving popular consensus, to merely state the obvious there can be no science without logic is, of course, blasphemy, for which I am certain to be sacrificed upon the Organic Altar of yet another Inconvenient Truth. Yours is still, nonetheless, a supremely ignorant and stupid assertion.

    For what “evidence” was it that led Einstein to his theory of relativity and its corollaries? I mean, since there were not then and are not now any facts or proofs in science to rely upon? Please describe it and the location where he found it. Or did it just somehow magically pop into his head like the last newspaper article you read? Or was it more like Erica’s assertion that scientific discovery is mostly just the product of a consensus by a majority of other scientists? How can anyone be so impossibly naive?

    Just why do you suppose it is exactly, Nicholas, that in your religion 30 years ago the popular consensus of a majority of scientists was global cooling? That Mother Earth would freeze into a solid ball of ice if we all didn’t start riding our bikes to work, using more 40-watt lightbulbs, and voting for the Democrat Party? How come now — if it’s science — all that turns out to have been wrong, that we are not going to freeze afterall, but instead we’re now all going to burn up in a great big ball of fire if we don’t start riding our bikes to work, using more 40-watt lightbulbs, and voting for the Democrat Party?

    Why is it that after some 600 billion years of planetary evolution, it’s only in this lifetime that the end is near?

    http://www.fcpp.org/main/publication_detail.php?PubID=864

  6. There are only two kinds of “scientists” still in denial about the existence of global warming. Those currently on the payroll of the oil companies….and those previously on the payroll of the oil companies.

    I’m not sold on the cost-effectiveness of signing onto the Kyoto Protocols, and George Will is certainly doing a service to all of us with his thoughtful contribution to a serious debate. Thankfully, the dissenting opinion on global warming activism is coming more from people like Will than from the furthest reaches of flat-earth wingnuttia so eloquently represented by Eracus. Those crying that global warming is a science fiction foisted upon us by “the liberal cabal” are being taken seriously by fewer and fewer people. Perhaps its because the same conspiracy theorists denying global warming, all scientific evidence to the contrary be damned, are also the kind who claim that DFLers on the Beltrami County board are burning down their ice houses.

  7. There are only two kinds of “scientists” still in denial about the existence of global warming. Those currently on the payroll of the oil companies….and those previously on the payroll of the oil companies.

    The old smear. And how many environmentalist groups are paying for studies that confirm their biases? Is anyone really dumb enough to buy the argument that only the oil companies have a vested interest in results which play to their political view?

    If we’re going to reject science based on who pays for it, then 99% of climatological research has to be thrown out, including the IPCC. Climate studies are not conducted in a double-blind fashion, and that’s why the vast majority of climate science isn’t hard science at all — the players all have vested interest in massaging the data to manipulate the outcome or at least have a level of unacceptable interpretive bias.

    Most climate “science” is based on computer modeling, and computer modeling is based on the data that it’s fed in. Getting two computer models producing the same outputs based on the same inputs isn’t confirming global warming — it’s confirming the congruency of the models. Those models may or may not have anything to do with the actual path of the Earth’s climate — and anyone who argues that we have a sufficient understanding of the planetary climate to properly weigh every factor is a snake oil salesman.

    We know the Earth’s climate is warming, and we suspect that human activity could be a factor. But then again, Mars is warming too, and we sure as hell know that humans aren’t a factor there. It’s quite possible than in another 30 years, we’ll all be talking about another ice age again because some volcano spewed more particulate matter into the upper atmosphere than all of human existence.

    Making public policy decisions based on incomplete data that can’t possibly take in all the relevant factors is not sound, no matter how many computer models ostensibly “confirm” it.

  8. Personal insult is the last refuge of an exhausted mind, Mark. You can’t answer the question because you can’t think critically about your own argument. You don’t have the knowledge. You, like Erica, are instead practicing a typically liberal, secular humanist, atheistic religion and any fact, argument, or idea contrary to your self-serving beliefs is blasphemy and so must be shouted down in true close-minded, ignorant liberal fashion. That you can’t see the forest for the trees only more proves my point that you are incapable of thinking for yourselves. You just regurgitate the usual liberal cant.

    Accordingly, your arguments are not persuasive because they have no basis in logic or fact, let alone science. You just believe something someone else made up for your consumption, having never investigated the record for yourself, because all you care about is feeling better about your own inadequacy and inability to keep up in an ever more competitive world. For you, the glass is always half-empty and the sky is really falling. It’s why you work for the State, are committed to the State, and tirelessly serve the State’s expansion to reduce individual freedom until everyone is as miserable as you are. If the fabricated “threat” of global warming will help you do that, then you are all for blaming conservatives and America first. Like the Islamofascists, all you have to offer is just more hate and anger. Alahu Akbar!! It’s certainly alot easier than learning to think for yourself…

    For the record, nowhere have I or any other reputable scientist ever disputed the fact the Earth is some 1 degree Celsius warmer than it was 100 years ago. It is probably several degrees warmer than it was 100,000 years ago. And hotter still than it was 1 million years ago. If the Earth were not warming, we’d all be living on a glacier if we were alive at all. The issue before us is whether mankind is causing the climate changes on a couple hundred billion-year-old planet, which is a political construct having no basis in logic or fact. It is also wholly inconsistent with the historical record, which is itself considerably limited given the age of the Earth.

    Your theory is based on computer models designed to predict the future that have routinely been exposed and discredited for their fraudulent assumptions and unscientific methodology. Even the latest, vaunted, but much-maligned UN report on global warming has backed off its initial claims. But then, to follow this link and perhaps re-examine your reflexive, reactionary, and conspiratorial point-of-view would be blasphemy, wouldn’t it? You’d be unclean, unpure in your self-righteous indignation that we Americans are destroying the world and so must be destroyed ourselves. You might begin to realize the extent to which you’ve been had. Again.

    “U.N. scientists have relied heavily on computer models to predict future climate change, and these crystal balls are notoriously inaccurate. According to the models, for instance, global temperatures were supposed to have risen in recent years. Yet according to the U.S. National Climate Data Center, the world in 2006 was only 0.03 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in 2001–in the range of measurement error and thus not statistically significant.

    The models also predicted that sea levels would rise much faster than they actually have. The models didn’t predict the significant cooling the oceans have undergone since 2003–which is the opposite of what you’d expect with global warming. Cooler oceans have also put a damper on claims that global warming is the cause of more frequent or intense hurricanes. The models also failed to predict falling concentrations of methane in the atmosphere, another surprise.

    Meanwhile, new scientific evidence keeps challenging previous assumptions. The latest report, for instance, takes greater note of the role of pollutant particles, which are thought to reflect sunlight back to space, supplying a cooling effect. More scientists are also studying the effect of solar activity on climate, and some believe it alone is responsible for recent warming.”

    http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009625

  9. “That you are here reduced to citing a couple of pre-paid hack journalists in the liberal hymnal of the Church of Mother Earth, dear Nicholas, only more illustrates my point.”

    Yes, Alan Sokal, a respected professor of physics and one of the foremost opponents of the postmodernist invasion of the sciences in recent years is no more than a liberal hack. I don’t buy it for a second.

    “In your religion, logic and science are individual, separate, and unrelated, which allows your congregation to worship whatever fantasy produces a popular consensus. Having disallowed logic and its discipline in science to ever undermine the chosen self-centered, self-absorbed, and self-serving popular consensus, to merely state the obvious there can be no science without logic is, of course, blasphemy, for which I am certain to be sacrificed upon the Organic Altar of yet another Inconvenient Truth. Yours is still, nonetheless, a supremely ignorant and stupid assertion.”

    You’re certainly jumping to some unwarranted conclusions. Especially given I’m not entirely sold on the idea of global warming myself.

    “For what ‘evidence’ was it that led Einstein to his theory of relativity and its corollaries? I mean, since there were not then and are not now any facts or proofs in science to rely upon? Please describe it and the location where he found it. Or did it just somehow magically pop into his head like the last newspaper article you read? Or was it more like Erica’s assertion that scientific discovery is mostly just the product of a consensus by a majority of other scientists? How can anyone be so impossibly naive?”

    Evidence in the physical world explained through the language of mathematics; in any event, relativity is based upon a foundation of physical evidence. Evidence is contingent; it is not fact. And yes, consensus, based upon cross-analysis of data by thousands of professionals in the field, is the closest thing to “fact” that we have to work with. I don’t really see where our disagreement lies.

    “Just why do you suppose it is exactly, Nicholas, that in your religion 30 years ago the popular consensus of a majority of scientists was global cooling? That Mother Earth would freeze into a solid ball of ice if we all didn’t start riding our bikes to work, using more 40-watt lightbulbs, and voting for the Democrat Party? How come now — if it’s science — all that turns out to have been wrong, that we are not going to freeze afterall, but instead we’re now all going to burn up in a great big ball of fire if we don’t start riding our bikes to work, using more 40-watt lightbulbs, and voting for the Democrat Party?”

    Well, I wasn’t alive 30 years ago, so I’m afraid I can’t comment. And I guess I don’t subscribe to this religion of yours, given that I tend to prefer 60 watt bulbs, drive a sportscar to work, and voted for more people with R’s by their names than D’s in the last election.

    Please, Derridicus, try something better than this “religion” argument next time. 😉

    “Why is it that after some 600 billion years of planetary evolution, it’s only in this lifetime that the end is near?”

    Well, the creeping cement covering over the planet and the expulsion of massive quantities of greenhouse gases could have something to do with it. Or it could just be a secularized awareness of the impending death of Western/Faustian civilization being interpreted through ecological eyes, which would lend some creedence to your idea of “global warming as religion”.

    Either way, there’s probably not a whole hell of a lot we can do about it.

  10. “re·li·gion – A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.” Under this definition, Nicholas, I think the global warming cult certainly qualifies as a religious form, don’t you. You know, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck….

    And Alan Sokal? Respected professor? By whom? He’s just another nut, a prankster. Publishes in Linqua Franca. He’s a dedicated Marxist-Leninist and just another Ward Churchill kind of guy. In other words, he’s a hack!!

    “relativity is based upon a foundation of physical evidence. Evidence is contingent; it is not fact. And yes, consensus, based upon cross-analysis of data by thousands of professionals in the field, is the closest thing to “fact” that we have to work with…”

    Nicholas, you are one very, very confused young man. You cannot possibly actually believe this. What is the “physical evidence” of an electron? And if that evidence is “contingent” on some one thing or another, how can it then be evidence of anything in particular? You’re just talking through your hat here, kid, and apparently have no idea what you are saying.

    And as for that “creeping cement covering the planet and the expulsion of massive quantities of greenhouse gases…” Oh, please. You’ve obviously been indoctrinated, brainwashed actually, with the nonsensical groupthink being practiced in our public schools today. What a pity. You do realize, Nicholas, that about 70% of the Earth is under water, yes? And of the remaining land mass, less than 5% is urban development, with about as much being farmed. The rest is wilderness.

    So given the fact that we several billion human beings are only using about 10-12% of the Earth’s available accommodations, it’s pretty ridiculous to suggest we are somehow interfering with the weather, or producing climate change, or melting the Earth, and all the other stupid Chicken Little canards that have become the foundation of liberal orthodoxy these days. It just ain’t true. And even if a billion brainwashed people believe it nonetheless, it STILL won’t be true.

  11. Eracus:

    The minute you start talking down to me, the conversation is over. “I am one very, very confused young man”? While you don’t give away your own biases, you’ve obviously been tremendously indoctrinated yourself, to the point that you’re not even willing to consider what’s in front of your own face. Please. And quit calling me kid. For all I know, you’re just an excessively erudite 18 year old. Let’s see some CV.

    (And, as for Sokal’s political biases, keep in mind that your previous example, Einstein, was a hardcore leftist as well. Are we just going to write him off as well, since he wrote for a few leftist political journals, hmm?)

  12. The many contradictory statements in your posts, Nicholas, are what indicate to your readership that you are a confused young man. If, for instance, I do not give away my biases, then how can you conclude I’ve “obviously been tremendously indoctrinated?” Indoctrinated into what? And how does one become “excessively” erudite? Like I said, you’re just talking through your hat and not thinking a wit about what you’re saying.

    Take Einstein, for example. He was not a “leftist” in any sense of the word, at least not as it’s used today. That’s just another liberal canard you apparently believe that simply isn’t true. If anything, he was politically agnostic and might be better characterized as a pacifist and humanitarian in the same way Gandhi or Martin Luther King would be.

    But Einstein is also the guy who urged FDR to build the atomic bomb, afterall, and while not at all religious, he did believe in God. Not exactly a “leftist” position by any standard. Clearly, some of his associations may have been “leftist” by today’s definition, but you have to put him in the social and cultural context in which he lived a very celebrated life, and all of it without the benefit of the hindsight we have today.

    Not to put too fine a point on it, Nicholas, but to imply Alan Sokal is by any measure even remotely approaching the stature of Albert Einstein only more emphasizes my point that you are quite confused. You seem to believe a great many things that simply are not true because you clearly have not done your homework.

  13. Am I mad? Or did it appear that Erica just claimed to be a scientist? Granted, there is the inclusive ‘we’, but, in context, this did not appear to be it.

    Watching the faithful expound on the dangers of Global Warming has been amusing. Particularly Nicholas avowed lack of awareness that Global Warming was, mere decades ago, Global Cooling–with as Eracus points out–identical solutions being offered.

    It is to that I speak.

    If you are so incredibly thick as to be unable to see that ‘solving’ warming and cooling would not have identical processes, then you are also far too thick to hold any valid opinion on the topic–a state that dissuades few of the faithful from voicing their idiocy as if it is wisdom.

  14. Here is something that you should find interesting. All this BS about how scientists were predicting global cooling is actually taken out of context from a couple papers in the 1970s. Now, reading the primary literature, it would seem that they were just beginning to really understand the earth’s climate. Here is the paper (JD Hays, J Imbrie and NJ Shackleton, Science, v194, #4270, p1121, 1976/12/10) and the actual quote:

    “Future climate. Having presented evidence that major changes in past climate were associated with variations in the geometry of the earth’s orbit, we should be able to predict the trend of future climate. Such forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends – and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted.

    One approach to forecasting the natural long-term climate trend is to estimate the time constants of response necessary to explain the observed phase relationships between orbital variation and climatic change, and then to use those time constants in the exponential-response model. When such a model is applied to Vernekar’s (39) astronomical projections, the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate (80).”

    This paper is actually fairly important in terms of climate research, but it doesn’t say that there is going to be an ice age, like omg right now! There wasn’t actually a call for action in the 1970s as the previous poster would have us believe. There was, however, a call for more research in the 1975 NAS/NRC report. Another paper cited may be the Rasool and Schneider paper from Science 1971, p 138, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate”. This paper however, underestimates CO2 sensitivity. That’s ok, though – it was from 30 years ago and we’ve learned a lot since then. There is nothing wrong with scientists making mistakes.

    Primary literature searches are a wonderful thing. You should all try it sometime before you just start making things up.

    Just kidding, I’m not a scientist. I’m a baby factory and sock-picker-upper, just like God intended.

  15. “There wasn’t actually a call for action in the 1970s as the previous poster would have us believe.”

    Perhaps you are too young to remember, Erica, but the hysteria then was just as bad if not worse than the hysteria now. Jimmah Carter was president. He was hysterical, and not in a good way. His policies produced gas lines and heating oil shortages, but the universal message was global cooling and the coming Ice Age. His solution was for everyone to follow his example and put on a sweater and change the lightbulbs because the world was coming to an end and it was all America’s fault. Sound familiar? It should. That was all the Democrat Party had to offer then and that is all the Democrat Party has to offer now. Like a broken record, it’s all fear and loathing all the time. Hate and anger, and then still more hate and anger. Class warfare. Blame America first, never defend her. Just like it is now. Sick.

  16. So that was an inclusive ‘we’.

    But you must be quite mad to deny that Global Cooling generated the same hysteria that Global Warming generates now. I lived through it. Talk of the coming Ice Age was everywhere–why, it even made it into the popular literature of the day.

  17. So, because science journalists (not scientists themselves, mind you) were irresponsible back in the 1970s you refuse to believe anything any scientist might possibly have to say at any point after that?

  18. Erica, the point is no science is involved, it’s just politics. You might be interested to learn that one of the reasons the strategy of alarm was switched from “global cooling” to “global warming,” believe it or not, was because the marketing research that was being developed at the time showed the color red had a distinctive advantage in magazine sales and commerical advertising, but was inconsistent with the color scheme of “global cooling,” which was blue. People did not respond positively to blue images and nobody wanted to read about being cold, so “the message” wasn’t reaching the target audience as was demonstrated when Jimmah Carter was handed his hat and sweater by Ronald Reagan in the greatest landslide victory in American history. So….no more global cooling.

    Today’s “global warming” alarmism is just the product of better market research underlying the advancement of a political agenda designed to scare us into electing more people (Democrats mostly) who will take away our freedom and our way of life to “save” us from ourselves. When did all this global warming hysteria start? With Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, that’s when. It was supposed to be one of the foundations of a Gore presidency, which is of course why he and the rest of the liberal elite are now following Plan B with the propaganda flick, “An Inconvenient Truth,” hyped-up with all of the usual Hollywood sham awards, bombarding cable news talk shows, and splattering “the message” everywhere in print and on the internet. It’s a marketing campaign. It’s big business.

    The only “science” going on is Pavlovian. They have your number. The same people who know where you buy your groceries and what TV shows you watch and whether you like Revlon or Max Factor know exactly how to sell you the idea the Earth is melting and we only have so much time left to “fix” it. How do we know this is true? Why, because “scientists” tell us it’s true, that’s how. “Experts” say it’s true. Hollywood movie stars say it’s true. Politicians say it’s true. A “majority” believes it’s true. So it must be true then, right?

    You’re not going to buck the trend now, are you? You’re not stupid, are you? You want to be on the same side as the majority of scientists, experts, Hollywood movie stars, and national politicians, don’t you? You want to be acceptable and accepted, right?? Of course you do! Now there’s a good girl. Don’t you feel better now? Of course you do.

    Global warming, see? It’s what’s for dinner!! Got milk?

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