His latest column chides the climate Cassandras
, and makes a really bizarre argument. Did you know that there have been severe disruptions of human activity by non-anthropogenic climate change in the past?
And if climate Cassandras are as conscientious as they claim to be about weighing evidence, how do they accommodate historical evidence of enormously consequential episodes of climate change not produced by human activity?
We accommodate the facts of catastrophic events with no problem at all. Volcanoes have erupted and meteors have smashed into the Earth, all without any triggering or control by human beings — does Will think that the fact that we can acknowledge that humans pump significant quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere imply that we also think every environmental disaster was caused by humans?
So he discusses two books that describe the after-effects of weather perturbations on civilization in the 14th and 17th century. We’ve always been at the mercy of the weather: droughts, storms, severe winters, all cause harm to agriculture and human well-being. He even almost grasps their message.
By documenting the appalling consequences of two climate changes, Rosen and Parker validate wariness about behaviors that might cause changes.
Exactly. We should be worried about climate change because we know from history that we’re sensitive to the disruption it would cause. The authors of these books even know what the take-home message should be.
The last twelve of Parker’s 712 pages of text deliver a scalding exhortation to be alarmed about what he considers preventable global warming.
But what does loony George Will take away from it?
Neither book, however, supports those who believe human behavior is the sovereign or even primary disrupter of climate normality, whatever that might be. With the hands that today’s climate Cassandras are not using to pat themselves on the back for their virtuous empiricism, they should pick up such books.
Uh, what? The concern is that one of the products of the Industrial Revolution is increasing greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, which are accumulating to the point of having serious consequences now. It is not that all climate change was caused by humans. Will’s argument does not make sense. Those books make no statement about the causes of the 14th and 17th century climate changes, but do point out that such changes have cascading and complex effects on society.
But Will reads them and says to himself, “A-ha! Climate disasters that were not caused by humans! Therefore no climate disasters are caused by humans!”
He’s an idiot. And he’s what passes for an intellectual among conservatives? How embarrassing for them.
But… Cassandra was right…
It’s odd that he would use Cassandra as a pejorative in this instance. If I remember correctly, Cassandra’s curse was that her prophecies were correct, but that no one would believe her. This adds a layer of unintentional irony to the article.
Okay, first:
Does this guy know anything about Cassandra? Because his use seems to be an admission that these authors are telling the truth and he is plugging his ears without even deference to Apollo as an excuse…
You beat me to it, Howard Bannister! Damn you! (shakes fist)
Negative averment noted.
George Will needs to brush up on his Greek mythology. Cassandra was blessed with prophetic visions, but cursed with nobody believing her. In other words, “Climate Cassandras” would be completely accurate about the impending disaster.
I’ve never seen so many ninjas in my life. O_O
@doubter, #2:
one wonders if the man simply grabbed a thesaurus and looked up “doomsayer”. Also too, isn’t this guy supposed to be classics-heavy in his education? I, for one, am beginning to believe he’s passed on into incoherence and/or boredom and hired a ghostwriter who has just called the climate consensus true and prophetic. Also too, the writer simply isn’t as good at English composition, however much Will might approve the writer’s politics.
Apparently he has never heard of paleoclimatology. I’d be willing to bet that if he did he would still misrepresent the data to fit his narrative.
I tell climte deniers all the time that by this reasoning, they should never accept the validity of a claim of arson, because we all know lots of forest fires are due to completely natural causes.
The underlying assumption behind Will’s criticism is that climate scientists began their investigation of the issue assuming that human had to be the cause. Will is either ignorant of, or ignoring, all the work scientists did eliminating other potential causes. IOW, he assumes scientists do no more than he does: sit on his ass and ponder reality, rather than actually, you know, getting out into it and collecting evidence for their various hypotheses.
It’s also interesting to note that the same pattern we observe for climate change also occurs in an area where there is almost no denialism: mass extinction events. Several in the past were caused by natural events, whereas the current one is caused by homo sapiens. Yet there is no George Will out there saying “well, if the past extinctions weren’t caused by humans, than neither is this one”. Know why? Because there is no giant profit motivation like fossil fuels in the way of saving species.
So Lee Harvey Oswald had nothing to do with Kennedy’s death, because there have been literally billions of people who died from natural causes. Yes, George, yes. That’s right, George, that’s right.
And if investigators are as conscientious as they claim to be about weighing evidence, how do they accommodate historical evidence of people having been murdered long before I have been born? I’m innocent!
“Also too, isn’t this guy supposed to be classics-heavy in his education?”
Will has a BA in religion, an MA in “philosophy, politics and economics”, and a Ph.D. in politics. It is possible that he never actually read the myth of Cassandra in his education.
@Chris J, 7
Of course not – they’re ninjas! You never see them until it’s too late!
Fortunately for me, they played their hands before I was in place, and I, at least, am safe from them, even if it does mean I don’t get to show off my knowledge of Greek mytholologisms.
My dad, though he isn’t exactly a climate change denier, likes to bring these things up. “Volcanic eruptions have a GWP of #big,*” “cows put a massive amount of methane into the atmosphere,” etc. I mean, sure, it’s true, but it also doesn’t really change matters.
Cows, for one thing, are basically on us. If we didn’t farm them, there wouldn’t be so many, so their love of farting wouldn’t matter quite so much. Volcanoes, on the other hand, are entirely on nature’s ample shoulders… but they also don’t put out consistent amounts – they’re more into lump sum deposits and, while that’ll have an effect in the mean time, the world and its climate have ways of dealing with that. The problem, at least as far as I understand it, is that our production, and release, of substances with high GWP ratings into the atmosphere outstrips the environment’s ability to stick ’em in cupboards and under the carpet.
*paraphrase!
No, I think he just picks them up, perhaps to strengthen his arms.
And what a delight it is to see a commentariat so familiar with Cassandra.
Shorter George Will: Titanic needs no lifeboats, because icebergs are not man-made.
The quality of reasoning that gave us “Past warmings were not initiated by CO2, therefore CO2 cannot cause global warming“.
Nice quote from the linked article:
Also, ancient forest fires were not caused by matches, therefore matches cannot cause forest fires.
Athywren@14,
Actually, volcanoes have a cooling effect. The amounts of greenhouse gases they have put out within historic times is trivial compared to anthropogenic causes, but they do put significant amounts of sulphate aerosols into the stratospere, which has a short-term cooling effect.
Athywren @14:
@Nick Gotts, 18
Well… that’ll teach me to take my dad’s word for it on volcanoes then. Thanks for the correction.
What the heck is a “sovereign” cause of climate change?
re @14:
tackling your father’s argument about cow farts contributing to GWP: I’m sure you know this already: that there is a huge difference between eating grass that absorbed CO2 and farting it back to the atmosphere, from mining oil that archived CO2 for millions of years then dumping it (CO2) so massively into the atmosphere. IE burning wood is far different from burning oil, in the Climate Change sense.
Not to mention, “Clean Coal” is an oxymoron.
Georgie is just the latter half of that portmanteau. *wink*
Re:Cassandra
I mean, I get what he’s going for, here. It has a rhyme (actually an alliteration, but the cognitive bias is titled ‘rhyme as reason,’ so I use the word rhyme), so it has an un-earned sense of truthfulness to it, and that’s more important than the meaning.
Which is to say; his grasp of Cassandra’s story may be negligible, but his propagandizing seems perfect.
@chrislawson:
I think this will help:
@Howard Bannister #23:
Which is to say; his grasp of Cassandra’s story may be negligible, but his propagandizing seems perfect.
And those us who point out his error can be dismissed as left-wing ivory tower elitists.
@Rob Grigjanis, 19
Thank you… that is a very interesting bit of data that I probably should’ve looked up myself. I’ll be sure to pass it along, along with the correction about the cooling effect. And also make a note of it myself so I don’t make the mistake of repeating that claim again.
@twas brillig, 22
Oh hell… technically, yes, I knew that at a certain level, because I know that the CO2 in grass is what it’s getting from the air… but… never actually occurred to me.
And this is why I don’t debate climate change! :P
(Or maybe because? Or a mix of both, I guess…)
I think it’s Terry Dean, Nemmers. No, wait, that’s a sovereign citizen. Never mind.
“Climate Cassandras?” Didn’t Cassandra’s warnings turn out to be true?
The trouble with the cows and methane is that the carbon when it’s part of the methane molecule is about 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than when it’s part of the carbon dioxide molecule.
So while yes, the grass is absorbing the CO2 and if the grass were just burned it would be carbon neutral, converting it to methane has a much stronger effect. Whether that effect is stronger than all the CO2 we’re emitting from fossil fuel powered power plants is another thing altogether and I doubt it.
“sovereign cause” gotta mean “sole cause” ie “the only cause”.
So he is correct about that: Man is not the ONLY cause of Global Warming, but 99% is “close enough”. Got that Georgie? Stick to your politacal commentary and leave thermo to the climatologists.
You’re doin it wrong.
Will has a BA in religion, an MA in “philosophy, politics and economics”, and a Ph.D. in politics.
And he’s no more intelligent in any of those areas then he is about Hellenic mythology. (Also, the idea of an MA in philosophy, politics AND economics sounds incredibly bogus — especially in light of recent libertarian charlatans mixing those three into lumpy purees of utter bullshit.)
What the heck is a “sovereign” cause of climate change?
A government that does everything it can to block any attempts to fix or mitigate climate change?
I see the fundamental fallacy, but I can’t remember which one it is. It seems like a variation on affirming the consequent, but that’s not quite right.
P1: Some climate change was not caused by humans.
C: Therefore, no climate change is caused by humans.
And this is the right-wing “intellectual”? Wow. Just. Wow.
I don’t think Will is at all unique in using the phrase “Climate Cassandras”, I’m sure I’ve seen it elsewhere. Maybe we should embrace it, since it’s surprisingly accurate.
The warming since 2000 is certainly more than 100% anthropogenic. Since 1950, it’s about even odds whether it’s more or less than 100%. So I won’t even give him that Man isn’t the only cause — unless he means to define out women’s contribution to the problem.
George Will is a lot like Milton in Office Space. He’s been irrelevant for decades, but through “some kind of glitch” at the editor’s desk they keep publishing his column.
It’s far from the first time I thought this. In 1997, Will published one of his petty tirades on the occasion of Allen Ginsberg’s death. My first thought was surprise that Will was still alive. Following shortly thereafter was astonishment that Will thought anyone cared about his opinion on one of the 20th century’s major poets.
I suspect that if someone merely walked up to Will and confronted him with the fact that the 1980s have ended and Ronald Reagan is no longer president, his ghost would finally free itself of its earthly bondage and do us all a favor.
Worth a try?
Yes, Kevin, that’s a right-wing intellectual, doing what right-wing intellectuals normally do: take the right’s latest lie and slather a new coat of shiny reasoniness all over it. (And if you press him enough, he’ll fall back on remembering how horrible and scary the 1960s were, when liberalism threatened to destroy Western civilization as he knew it. Sometimes he sounds a bit like HP Lovecraft, with his nightmare vision of “liberalism” taking the place of Chthulu in his worldview.)
Will published one of his petty tirades on the occasion of Allen Ginsberg’s death.
Yeah, I remember him doing something similar whenever the USSR had a state funeral: sneer at the horrible silly commie atheists with their elaborate state funerals, which, in his mind, proved that deep down they needed religion after all.
Also, sometimes he’d write some nonsense about how he has to deal with his teenage daughter and keep her from becoming a slut, therefore sex-ed is a horrible idea and we can never allow abortion.
It isn’t, but it is significant. Cattle produce about 1/4 of the global methane emissions, and methane accounts for maybe 10% of the anthropogenic warming (exact figure depends on the timescale, as it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long as CO2).
I agree with the point about “climate Cassandras”. The salient feature of Cassandra is not that she is wrong, but that nobody believes her. If Will is in fact an “intellectual” it certainly doesn’t show in his use of classical allusions. Or maybe Will is saying that he is fated to ignore all the evidence, so don’t blame him.
The point that not all climate change is anthropogenic fits a common conservative line of argument. E.g., welfare should be abolished because we tried it and there are still poor people. Airbags are a bad idea because in a high speed collision, you’ll die anyway. You could extend this to the notion that arson should not be punished because most fires are not caused by arsonists. If conservatives don’t take it that far, it is mainly due to a preference for policies that result in punishment.
The main thing missing is the understanding that most problems cannot be solved completely, but it is our responsibility to mitigate the worst ones.
Not only was Cassandra right about everything, the consequence for the Trojans for not believing her and acting on her warnings was their city getting sacked.
@Nick Gotts #39:
Methane has a half-life of about 14 years in the upper atmosphere, and it doesn’t help either that it breaks down into carbon dioxide.
Maybe cows, instead of just being milked, should also be farmed for their methane. Stick tubes up their bums and collect the farts. Filter out the carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide, leaving natural gas ready for burning instead of burning natural gas dug out of the ground. Yeah, I’m sure that’d work!
“Climate Cassandras”? Does he not realize that Cassandra was always correct, but people simply refused to believe her? And so everything went to hell? Will is apparently too stupid to metaphor appropriately, let alone grasp something like causes and effects of climate changes on human societies.
Re cattle–
IIRC Part of the problem is that on factory farms, cattle aren’t fed grass. They’re given corn, which is cheaper but harder for them to digest and causes significantly more farting.
The fact that he has a degree in religion does not mean that he has studied Greek mythology.
I’ve argued with so-called well-educated adults who believe that those Greek myths were “borrowed” from the Bible, since of course, everything comes from the Bible.
I’d like to see a discussion that focuses on people’s disagreement with George Wil’s intended points. The Cassandra quibbles are minor. He used Cassandra in the same manner many people have. There are various dictionary definitions. He is at least consistent to evolved usage as shown by #2 in Merriam Webster: “one that predicts misfortune or disaster”. The term Cassandra was embraced by those supporting the unheeded “forecasts” of the Club of Rome. Perhaps that is the allusion/connection Mr. Will is making, which would be apt from his perspective and more poetic than “Chicken Littles”.
I think he is operating from the perspective that the “Cassandras” believe that unusual weather demands a special explanation outside of natural processes and not making a logical fallacy as basic as being harped on by so many here. The dialogue here that abnormal weather could be caused by either natural processes or by man would likely be seen as a point of agreement with George will and his ilk. The interesting dialogue would be around what he is overlooking as regards our certainty that CO2 is a primary driver for climate change. But that discussion is getting preemptively dismissed, by posters with no substantive arguments as to that point but only assertions (#35 saying more than 100% is man made??)
posttheist @46:
What’s to discuss?
George Will is not an authority on climate change and his views are not backed by science.
Turn the tables, and ask GW to show scientific evidence that AGW is not linked to the carbon dioxide levels, given the overwhelming scientific data and models that show the expected rise in global temperatures with rise in carbon dioxide levels. He is the one with the presupposition that man isn’t effecting global temperatures. The burden of evidence is on his claims.
@doubter #25: Ivory tower elitists? We covered that myth in second grade at my public school. It’s an extremely common reference in Western literature, even children’s literature. My experience may not be the norm, but surely most high schools have English literature courses that give one a basic understanding of classical myths that are popular allusions? And in Will’s day, our support for education was better and much more of the focus was on the Western literary canon. It’s not like his high school was some underfunded, understaffed school unable to provide its students with a solid, broad educational foundation.
@46 You are a bit behind, the scientific discussion has been had, where it belongs, in the scientific literature. If you (or Will) bothered to look at it, yo’d find your answers, and have a better understanding of why we who have looked at the work don’t take Will seriously.
You might be right. I just remember this community being very patient and offering clear understandable arguments, references and explanations to those who struggled with evolution. Maybe the conclusion is that those never helped (and of course they did not sway everyone), but I think they did help many people.
I do think our community can do better than saying – forget their enlargements, lets listen to authority and you prove it.
@PaulBC #36
I remember watching a Sunday morning political pundit show back in the early ’90s. Major cities were in budget crisis and needed Federal help. Will argued that we should just let the big cities go to hell–gated communities were the wave of the future.
(Thought of him again when I read Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, a dystopian novel in which the upper classes live in corporate-run gated communities and occasionally visit the decaying cities to enjoy illicit entertainment.)
A comprehensive reply to posttheist.
There’s no point to discussing George Will’s belief about what causes climate change. Climate scientists, people who are well aware of past climate changes and their causes as well as the complex mix of factors currently affecting our climate have evaluated the data and found that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate that cannot be accounted for by natural mechanisms but that is perfectly consistent with the process of human beings digging up huge quantities of carbon that was sequestered millions of years ago and pumping it into the atmosphere. They’ve arrived at this conclusion based on a large body of evidence and corresponding models that all converge on the same main conclusion. Any scientific argument about anthropogenic climate change is the same kind of argument that exists about evolution, not whether it’s happening, but how much, how fast, and what are the nuanced details of the process.
Don’t mistake this for an appeal to authority or an argumentum ad populum. This is the consensus view of experts who’ve evaluated the evidence. Not only that, their data is publicly available and can be evaluated by anyone and basically everyone with any kind of expertise who is not clearly biased agrees.
Will knows this. He’s pretending not to. And he’s using fallacious thinking to try to hide the fact that there’s a very good reason that climate scientists agree that we are causing unprecedented warming. Frankly, this is a standard and idiotic ploy by the right on many issues, but especially climate change. They’re saying, well, I’ve read about this thing, I bet those scientists haven’t considered it. As if those scientists aren’t teaching those things to undergrads every day and haven’t included those mechanism in their models.
posttheist @51:
The community still does that from time to time. Sometimes we expect people to do some of their own legwork on a subject.
I think the word you’re grasping for is “pretentious.” Chicken Little is the more apt reference, and if Will rejected it because it didn’t sound erudite enough, that doesn’t make his misuse of Cassandra any more poetic. I agree he’s not the first to throw around classical allusions in a lazy way. That doesn’t give him a free pass.
PZ already address Will’s argument, but I’ll take a stab.
Because some climate change is caused by humans and some is not. There is strong evidence that most of today’s climate change is caused by humans. This really isn’t any trickier than “How does your claim of arson accommodate the evidence that these other fires were caused by a gas leak?” There is nothing to accommodate, because the two claims are supported independently.
But an even bigger flaw in Will’s case is probably this one:
False dichotomy. Who is wagering wealth and curtailing liberty? Many proposals, like cap and trade are explicitly designed to develop carbon policy consistent with economic growth. Proponents of alternative energy are not trying to curtail growth but make it sustainable. The only “liberty” offered by Will and is ilk is the freedom to stew in our own waste products.
Will is the one “wagering” the future on his belief that the eggheads have just got it all wrong. Or maybe he just doesn’t care.
None of this is new, by the way, so I admit that rather than addressing content, I find it more amusing to draw attention to stylistic clunkers like:
Translation: People who blame global warming on human activity should read these books.
He’s entitled to that opinion, but is his formulation “poetic”? The man is over 70 and he is writing a like a 16 year old who spent too much time with a thesaurus.
posttheist @46
My first reaction to numerobis’ “The warming since 2000 is certainly more than 100% anthropogenic. ” was WTF???. However, if we would otherwise be in a cooling trend, then the anthropogenic contribution could be considered to be more than 100%. It really could go up to 11.
militantagnostic – interesting interpretation but maybe not all numerical operations that can be done, should be done. This one leads to some funny data, such that if man made sources caused an increase of X and that was balanced by a cooling trend of -X, than anthropogenic sources could be credited with an infinite percentage of the warming. If the cooling trend were larger than the man made effects, I suppose you would get a negative percentage and I haven’t been able to figure out what that might mean. In any case it is an example of an assertion that is not helpful to those who have not done the same homework. (But I am getting the understanding that these comments are intended to be helpful for those kinds of people.)
numerobis @ 35:
More than 100%? How is this being measured?
Rich Woods @42:
Or stick rockets on their hindquarters, and use them as self-fuelling missiles. ICBC – Intercontinental Ballistic Cows. The Herd Shot ‘Round The World. Not free range, but long range.
chrismorrow@59,
Since 2000, natural influences (sun, volcanoes) should have slightly cooled the planet. So the actual warming that has taken place over that period (and it has, despite what you might read in denialist screeds – it’s just not quite enough warming to be certain it’s not noise) is somewhat less than the upward anthropogenic influence on temperatures.
the problem with cows as I understand it is that they are eating grass and other crops and produce the methane from digestion. They get this feed from land that has previously been forest and grass lands and were net sequesters of carbon. This is true in places other than Brazil and the third world but also much of the developed world like Europe and North America all those verdant fields of crops would often return to forest if left on their own.
Will’s argument would be appropriate if it was made at the very beginning of the study of global climate change but after so much research has been done many if not most of his questions have been accounted for.
He just sounds like an overly verbose ignorant fool down at the pud trying to sound important.
uncle frogy
Oh, and by the way, 2014 was the hottest year on record. Which by itself would be meaningless, but it’s just another data point in a collection of record hot years in the last two decades.
Even if that’s so – and you provide no evidence it is – all he’s doing is, at best, showing his invincible ignorance. He just needs to consult one of any number of online or written sources to find out why all but a vanishingly small proportion of climate scientists are confident that anthropogenic climate change is real, and an urgent problem; and yes, climate scientists are aware that there are natural causes of climate change. He could, for example, start here
Nick Gotts @ 61: Okay, I think I understand better. Just to be super-clear, what is the numerator and what is the denominator?
chrismorrow: How about
Δanthropogenic/(Δanthropogenic + Δnatural)
where the second value in the denominator is negative.
It’s hard to understand why anyone takes either George Will or David Brooks seriously any more. They have a veneer of politeness and education, but they’ve long since proven how thin both veneers are.
Rob @ 66: Thanks. That helped me re-read the prior comments with a proper understanding.
Rob @66 has it. Normally you’d write the denominator as being delta-observed : we’ve observed X amount of change, humans have done Y, so if Y>X, then humans are responsible for more than all of the change. But natural + anthropogenic is an equally good way to write it.
The point of “what if X is zero” is a good one, if X were zero. But we’ve seen a lot of warming, so X is not zero in this case.
Earlier studies were wondering whether humans had done more than half of the warming, or less than half, with the assumption that natural processes had produced some of the warming. Lately though, natural processes have been cooling. Net since the 1950s it’s not clear whether natural processes have been warming or cooling.
@unclefrogy, #62
Stolen, for those times among friends when one can actually make that joke.
PaulBC
Alternative Medicine advocates and Antivaxxers use the same all or nothing thinking. Science based medicine can’t cure everything therefore use magic water instead. If a vaccine only provides immunity 95% of the time it is useless.
Also, arson is primarily a property crime.
Who is the alarmist here? I am sure reducing CO2 emissions is going to cost a little wealth, at least in the short run and require some minor restrictions on liberty. But, costing vast wealth and requiring a Global Stanilist-Communist dictatorship? I don’t think so. When high tide gets above street level in much of Miami*, much wealth will be lost and flooded streets definitely curtail the liberty of those who were planning to drive home.
*dikes and levees are useless when the bedrock is very permeable limestone.
I think it’s a lovely example of the strawman. I want to frame it and hang it on my wall
Volcanoes have erupted and meteors have smashed into the Earth, all without any triggering or control by human beings …
Hah! I submit that a thorough examination would show that each such time, somewhere, a penis was touching an anus.
Checkmate, a-anthropogenicists!
I am getting tired of this claim that fighting anthropogenic climate change will cause austerity and cost “vast wealth and curtailments of liberty”.
When in fact is is more like the complete opposite, those who do not adopt the new methods and procedures are going to be the ones who fail because of the lack of efficiency. The waste stream is potential profits going down the drain and in the end will probably destroy any chance we may have of a sustainable civilization or economy.
Take the manure “lagoons ” generated by industrial animal producing operations. Most are left to the open air and used to fertilize crops in between pollution episodes that contaminate the ground and surface water and the air. The natural methane that occurs from the natural decomposition just goes directly into the atmosphere.
That manure could be instead be put into digestors to recover the methane which could be used to generate electricity needed for the operation of the system and still produce high quality nitrogen rich fertilizer the feed the crops needed for to feed the animals. The claim is that such a system is against liberty and the freedom of the people makes no sense.
You can take any industry and find unrealized profit going down the drain, into a hole in the ground or up in smoke that could be recovered with just a little imagination.
But since when has the conservative mind set ever come up with anything new?
uncle frogy
Drawing and quartering?
unclefrogy @75: There’s obviously a simple misunderstanding here, due to the arrogant self-naming of our species as Homo sapiens. If you accept that the correct name is Homo myops, everything becomes clear. At short distances, anyway.
Day saved.
n, not -.
Yeah. You know who causes austerity? Angela Merkel.
numberobis – it is nonsense with to say that more than 100% of warming is from man. If warming is defined as the change from time A to time B, you can estimate temperatures at point B with and without man’s impact. To the extent that B is warmer than A, you can apportion the warming between man-made and what it would be otherwise. If the temperature goes down from B to A you can’t what percentage of man’s impacts accounts for warming, because there is none. See my last paragraph for why you can’t say what percent temperature rose. 100% is the maximum that can be estimated for a contribution to warming (or mitigation of cooling).
Saying zero will not occur between time periods is incorrect. If you have a time period that gives you greater than 100% as reported by the poster, there will be at least one sub-period of that time/temperature series where you will get a zero point between two measurement points.
You can’t responsibly define warming (for percentage purposes in any other way). 102% is not 2% hotter than 100% because it is not consistent as you go from Fahrenheit to Centigrade scales (difference between ordinal and ratio measurements). You can only properly define man-made causes as a percentage of warming that has occurred not as a some hybridized numerical invention. A bad argument/presentation does not help a good cause.
Depends on whether you’re looking at long term or short term. I suppose it’s possible to have some doubt about the short term stuff, but there’s absolutely no question about the longer term. On that basis, you can say that humans have been offsetting the current Milankovitch planet scale cooling towards an eventual glaciation since we first began large scale cutting down forests 8000+ years ago.
Watch a geologist/astronomer explain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM&hd=1
No, it is nonsense to say otherwise based on evidence, not opinion, which is all you offer. If the evidence says the Earth should be cooling due to things like volcanic activity, but it is rising due to higher greenhouse gases, as modeled, from human activity sources, then there is a solid case for humans being more than 100% of the temperature rise. You can’t grasp this simple concept.
posttheist
That’s not how attribution is calculated. if you want to work out why your living room has a current temperature of x degrees, you look at whether the doors and windows are letting in cool/warm air, whether the walls and ceiling are insulated enough to keep the temperature as cool/warm as you want, what is the setting on your heater or aircon and how do they all balance out. (It should be warmer if the heater is on … and then you discover that your kids have left the back door open.)
Scientists do a similar calculation for the planet. This tonnage of greenhouse gases warms by x W/m2. That albedo cools by y W/m2. Black soot warms, volcanic eruptions cool, and on and on for a whole suite of natural and man-made influences. The IPCC report WG1 has a whole chapter on attribution. The summary is in this chart.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=57
It is ironic how the denialists will gleefully nitpick every little detail in the climate science to play up their meme of “uncertainty” but they all accept this one particular whopper without asking for a single citation, every single time.
They’re worried about the wealth possibly going somewhere other than their particular pockets.
it is even stupider than that, because capital does not really care how or where the money gets invested as much as it cares about return on investment.
You can bet your very life that some of those who make their money from the energy extractive industries are hedging their bets with investments in other instruments. Or they are fools which some percent must be and will be the losers in this round.
As I have heard some of the fortunes made in whaling went into the railroads which proved a good long term decision.
uncle frogy
posttheist
Actually, I’m willing to bet that they do discuss the possible causes of those changes. Climate doesn’t change without reason, even if the reason is hard to find.
Past climate changes that occurred during historic times tend to be 1) not global in scope, and 2) fairly minor in terms of temperature change. It’s not new for denialists to point to past climate changes in order to deny modern anthropogenic climate change; Will is not being original here at all. Such arguments might have validity if past episodes of climate change were extreme and frequent, but they’re not (we wouldn’t have “climate” if it were all chaos). It’s also richly ironic that they’re so eager to believe in past climate events based on scant historical evidence while refusing to accept anything discovered by paleoclimatology or the modern temperature record.
Every time the primary energy paradigm changed, in the history of human civilization, the net result was economic growth. There’s no reason to think that the transition away from fossil fuels, when it happens, will be any different.
But there’s hundreds of billions (trillions?) of dollars of sunk capital invested in the fossil fuel industry. If we stop using fossil fuels, that capital goes bye-bye along with the dividends.
That’s not our problem of course. But it explains why they’re going to great lengths to keep it from happening.
“Climate Cassandra”
Sometimes Voltaire’s prayer gives us enemies who accidentally sing our praises. See also: “social justice warrior”, “bleeding heart liberal”.
For those who actually care about attributing percentages of change to anthropogenic causes, I remember Real Climate had a nice discussion ages ago. It’s certainly true that more than 100% of the change is caused by humans, in the sense that it’d be cooling without human actions. But they point out some of the subtleties in coming up with an “objective” measure of attribution, the point being it’s more attractive as a concept for lay people than scientists.
@posttheist: For someone who started by complaining about how it doesn’t matter if you say Cassandra when you mean Chicken Little, you are really investing a lot of time trying to call statements “nonsense” based on a semantic quibble. Guess your big problem was whose ox is being gored?
Area Man that’s all part of the game all the major players know that and they know about diversification of that you can be sure. Some have even made open foray’s in alternate energy some say maybe just a to little early. While at the same time they are making great investments in Washington in the quest to insure a good return on the already sunk costs and maintain their already considerable advantages.
George Will is just another of their investments.
uncle frogy
there is a difference between the companies themselves and the CEO’s and other officers and major shareholders there money comes from mostly share price and in the case of the officers their compensation packages which often come with stock options along with cash. and stock is liquid and is traded moving capital around is what capitalism all about these days. Not many care about the actual company nor the employes nor the other share holders it is their return that is paramount. So they pay for all kinds of B.S. from the likes of Will and all the other deniers to keep the thing going a little longer and get the last buck out it is kind of like musical chairs in this case the last one still there will be holding an empty bag and the smart money will have moved on (they all hope that they are the ones who moved in time but not too early)
no one is talking about the long term planing they are actually doing in any case. They are just trying to keep the public ignorant and it seems to be working.
uncle frogy
I stand ready to accept full chastisement, apologize and repent if I can be provided one thing. That would be a reference to an IPCC report that attributes more than 100% of warming to anthropogenic sources. I find a methodology or metric to allow you to have greater than 100% percent contribution to warming from human sources to be highly dubious. However, if an IPCC report has used such a metric and described a contribution from man-made sources as being greater than 100% of observed warming values – I stand corrected and have clearly overstated my case by calling such a practice nonsense. Let me be clear – I have never questioned the idea that the contribution of temperature increase from anthropogenic sources can be greater than the observed warming during any period, because I know that other factors can cause temperature to be lower. So warming over a period might be X, and the Anthropogenic contribution may be greater than X, so net anthropogenic warming is greater than observed warming. However using a metric that can state that such that it is possible for it to exceed a 100% of actual warming seems to me to be a pseudo-statistical metric. As I said before I think it is a sketchy metric, unworthy of including in serious discussions. But I could be wrong and will revise my view if provided examples of its common use among credible scientists.
I was told to look at the IPCC chapter on attribution and provided this link to Skeptical Science: w.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=57
I’ve done a lot of reading from the IPCC on attribution and the references cited in the Skeptical Science piece. I find the IPCC chapter and reference credible and I believe they all use appropriate measures. Perhaps I have overlooked something, but I do not find any of them using a metric which allows anthropogenic sources contribute more than 100% to observed warming. That “massaging” and numerical analysis that points to greater than 100% anthropogenic sources seems to have been a “value-added” feature possibly invented by the blogger at Skeptical Science.
I think the IPCC reports do a good job. I think the IPCC summaries add a little spin. I think the media and blogs such as Skeptical Science embellish things more than warranted at times. If I am wrong and it is shown that IPCC uses such a metric and in their writings references greater than 100% contributions to warming – I have been unfair to Skeptical Science and apologize. If that’s the case, they are reporting the science as it is presented by experts. If however the IPCC and the cited articles do no such thing and this greater than 100% metric is a creation of non-experts – I’d suggest that many here need to re-evaluate the credibility they are giving to this source.
George has a long history of this type of incisive thought: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/12/22/misinformer-of-the-year-george-will/201946
postheist: read this:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/SYR_AR5_LONGERREPORT_Corr2.pdf
Notice that the denominator in their “more than half” is the observed warming, whereas the numerator is the anthropogenic effects. Exactly the ratio that I and others were talking about.
numerobis – I understand there are many credible and appropriate references between 0 and 100%. The issue I bought up is when references are made for more than 100%. That is not the language of responsible science. I think the IPCC in the above quote means to suggest the contribution as being somewhere between 50% and 100%, not 50% and infinity.
Presenting more qualified references to estimates between 0 and 100% will not strengthen your case with me, nor will references to things like Skeptical Science. However, what Skeptical Science showed with numbers above 100% would be sufficient to garner my apology, if they came from an IPCC report. Further, an IPCC statement of this form would convince me I am wrong about responsible scientists not using references above 100% as Skeptical Science does.
“It is extremely likely for the period under study that more than ALL of the observed increase in global average surface was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.”
The “more than all” is the key to serving as an endorsement for the more than 100% language. It might be the case that warming is below what would, without mitigating factors, be attributable to anthropogenic forces. But that should be described in different language than “more than all”. “More than all” is the root of what I call nonsense.
This should be a simple and minor point, but people here are very defensive. If anthropogenic forces cause X warming and non-anthropogenic forces push for a decrease in temperature of Y, a correct thing is to say is “Based solely on anthropogenic factors temperature would have increased by X, however non-anthropogenic factors served to offset their impacts giving us the observed rise of X-Y”. X/(X+Y) makes sense as a percentage when X and Y have the same sign, but not when they have opposite signs. When they have opposite signs the behavior gets weird around where x and Y are equal. Further when you don’t add things going in the same direction it’s not clear what the thing is that you are taking about a percentage of. My challenge remains for some one to show me where the IPCC (or the scholarly works cited by Skeptical Science) reference above 100% contributions to warming.
Think of it this way: ignoring interactive effects, imagine if you exercised enough to loose 4 pounds and you altered your diet so it caused you to lose 6 pounds for a combined loss of 10 pounds. It would make sense to say that exercise was responsible for 40% of your weight loss and diet 60%. They both go in the same direction to aid weight loss and apportioning them on a percentage basis of the total makes sense.
However if you exercised to lose the 4 pounds but changed you diet so that all else equal you would gain 6 pounds, so you net a 2 pound gain, does it really make sense to say that exercise accounted for 200% of your weight loss of -2 lbs? for You can back it out of the formula-but its a pretty meaningless stat.
It’s a small point. I just don’t put much credibility is such pseudo informative numbers and those who promote or parrot them.
posttheist, so what is your POINT? Only to argue about how people misspeak about math equations? If so, that is technically OFF-TOPIC, the discussion is about George Will, and his opinion, that since Nature occasionally rains catastrophes, that man-made catastrophes are impossible and just wimpy “Cassandras” are making a fuss. I apologize. posttheist, if I missed your point, I hope you see MY point.
Just because you miss the point doesn’t mean the scientists are wrong. Just that you don’t grasp what they are telling you, since it appears you have presuppositions blocking your understanding of what they are saying. Give it a rest.
twas brillig @100:
Oooh, pick me. Pick me! I know the answer.
Your point is that off topic discussions should be moved to the Thunderdome or the Lounge.
Can I get a gold star? Or maybe a cronut?
I understand now where I am and who I am among. My apologies for not conforming to the mores and norms of this place.
That was an interesting idea, but apparently it’s not true (and the link in comment 92 doesn’t even mention it); last I’ve read (I’ll look for the paper tomorrow), the beginning of the next ice age is scheduled for 50,000 years in the future, and the next glacial maximum is expected in 100,000 years, except that we’re probably preventing both now.
I believe postheist’s point is that, like George Will, logic is not their strong point.
I just read all your posts. You are an AGW denialist, pretending to have “questions”. That is a concern troll. Yawn, you are both boring, and trite.
briquet @92
I see what you did there.
Has the nit of more than 100% been sufficiently picked yet? Even if the math has a problem around zero temperature change, it is a very useful number to counter the arguments that “it is the sun or volcanoes or whale farts*” by pointing out that the natural effects would be causing cooling.
*I am certain that none of the current climate models consider cetacean flatulence and therefore we should hold off reducing fossil fuel consumption until this uncertainty has been resolved. Where’s my Koch money?
@96 numerobis, your IPCC WG1 AR5 link may very well be the source of the >100% anthropogenic comment. Look at Figure SPM.3. The 1951-2010 “observed warming” is about 0.65 C while the same period’s “combined anthropogenic forcings” is about 0.70 C. So the anthropogenic contribution of the observed warming could be called 0.70/0.65=108%.
The relevant Real Climate discussion of this figure is here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/10/the-ipcc-ar5-attribution-statement/
@ 106 Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
Bingo.
@PaulBC (#56):
Exactly. To me, the more scurrilous claim by Will and his ilk is the claim that action to mitigate the effects of climate change is ruinously expensive. That claim has been made about almost every measure to protect the environment, and subsequently has been found to be vastly overstated.
And economists who have looked at climate change, from Nicholas Stern to William Nordhaus, have concluded that doing nothing about it will be far more costly than doing something.
Area man (#90): But there’s hundreds of billions (trillions?) of dollars of sunk capital invested in the fossil fuel industry. If we stop using fossil fuels, that capital goes bye-bye along with the dividends.
Of course. But who is proposing that we stop using fossil fuels any time soon? No one credible, in my experience. It’s only people such as Will who raise the point at all, and they do so as a distraction.
So, George Will cites two books — neither of which, he claims, “supports those who believe human behavior is the sovereign or even primary disrupter of climate normality, whatever that might be.”
Even if his claim is valid (I haven’t read either of those books), it seems very much like the standard “no consensus” argument that there are still scientists who argue that human behavior isn’t the cause of current warming. Two books don’t support AGW. Many more do.
Also, there’s no mystery about what, for humans, is climate normality: It’s the sort of climate under which we evolved and developed our civilizations.
He quotes William Rosen about a high number of deaths during the 14th century. Hmmm… that was the time of the Black Death. Curious that Will doesn’t mention it.
I don’t want to get into a comprehensive (heh) refutation of Will’s column. But I think these points are worth raising.
You know what’s going to be ruinously expensive? A worldwide shortage of fresh water.
I might be a denialist and an inadvertent (but not deliberate) troll. Depends on the definition of denailist. I don’t think the work denialist belongs to mainstream science, but rather a subgroup and it is their place to define it. It used to be that the IPCC reports were sort of the gold standard for understanding climate. If you accepted the IPCC findings you were not considered to be fringe. Then it was okay to speculate that they might be underestimating risks, but not okay to consider that they may be over-estimating risk. Now it appears that if you believe the IPCC over more sensationalized accounts, you are a denier. I believe the most recent IPCC reports represent our best scientific understandings and that mainstream science should counter over-reach on both sides. My hope was that this site may have some participants sympathetic to such a position. I have since observed you seemingly can make any statement without censure no matter how foolish, as long as it supports the underlying narrative. Similarly any point no matter how minor that seems to conflict with the narrative seems to be out of bounds.
My first pushes to stop believing in religion did not come from rabid anti-religionists, nor did they come from well reasoned and argued positions by atheists. The first pushes for me came from the shrill believers that accepted any argument supporting their cause and shouted down any questions.
We need to transition from fossil fuels. I don’t think you are making any converts, just keeping the already committed insulated and happy. If that’s your purpose you have every right to do that. Good luck with it.
Posttheist #114 –
Firstly, the term denialist is not used as a scientific term of art, although sociologists probably aught to be using it.
Secondly, the IPCC reports are committee’d to hell and as such are still useful enough, but I have yet to see somone call someone else a denier who already accepts the IPCC reports and isn’t trying to subtle argue against them or the actions reccomended by the reports.
You appear to have been here for a discussion about what motivates the likes of Will and why they think what they do; such discussion can sometimes be had, but not usually, because most of us are tired of trying to think like a deliberately ignorant fuckwit.
posttheist:
Posttheist says that at 99, after spilling much ink on the subject and then continuing to handwring over it. After putting in a nice potshot about “seeing what kind of place this is” or something to that effect.
I have since observed someone working themselves up into a lather because of a quibble over how “meaningful” a stat. Not that the stat is wrong, but whether the stat is expressed clearly enough and isn’t confusing.
Real serious business.
You will find extremes on any side and as moderate religionists will persistently tell you, you can’t judge the whole of a group by its fringes. In addition, not everyone thinks or feels the same way as you do and will not have the same experiences. Using your logic, once the “shrill believers” pushed you away from religion, “rabid anti-religionists” should have pushed you away from atheism. This emotional response to “extremes” would push you to take The Golden Mean position on any issue, regardless of where the truth actually lies. So even accepting your comparison, you are just showing yourself to be irrational.
Yes, we are not converting anyone when commenting on Pharyngula. How astute. We are merely discussing issues amongst ourselves, keeping ourselves informed and possibly motivating one another into political action. Oh noes.
I assume that you have a great method of converting people then? Or that you have a list of places where we should go out and proselytize? Maybe some e-mail addresses to spam? Please, what is The One True Way of discussing climate change, such that no time is wasted and the maximum amounts of Converts Per Sentence is achieved? Surely, you must know!
The last three sentences of posttheist’s 114 could be put in a small box accompanying a dictionary definition of ‘concern troll’.
It would also not be misplaced with ‘accommodationist’.
Anteprepo – I read here frequently and usually skip the comments when it comes to the environment. It’s possible that someone to agree with the readership about 100% of social justice issues and not fully be on board with the zeitgeist here on climate. The environmental comments to me usually look like a mix of true believers and trolls. Usually when I read them, I think better and do not comment. I don’t know where on the web you can find good dialogue on climate. I was hoping that I given someone that was neither a troll or a true believer could trigger some worthwhile dialouge. As I said in an early post I remember how good our community was with evolution way back.
I am not practiced commenter or and was somewhat discombobulated by the responses I got. (Just on that last one, I thought my post was clear that I didn’t think denialist was a term that belonged to mainstream science – and the first commentor after guthriestewart is schooling me on what i just said.) What I heard from the board was you are wrong its a good measure, then its’ not important it’s off topic and, than what’s wrong with you for harping on this. Had it started off as a criticism of off topic or minor, I would not have tried to make the point further.
I do think it makes sense to try to figure out where George and others are coming from, rather than hollering at a caricature of their beliefs.
If you don’t ask me questions, I won’t come back here. I have one question for you Antiprepepo. You say this is not about converts, “We are merely discussing issues amongst ourselves”. As noted before this blog covers many topics does the “ourselves” identity (and conformity) extend across all of them?
posttheist:
It’s possible, but I don’t think it is likely. “The zeitgeist here on climate” is pretty damn standard and simple: We agree with the science. Same as with our stance on evolution/creationism. It is a hell of a lot simpler and less controversial, and a hell of a lot more “moderate” and common than the Pharyngulite stance on social justice.
“True believers”, huh? You aren’t trying very hard to convince that you aren’t a denialist.
Only because you agreed with them. I am sure if you didn’t you would have viewed the flood of information as “True Believers”. And god knows that we insult and mock creationists enough that if you were sympathetic to them you would probably deem them “trolls”.
Denialist isn’t a term in science. You are right. What does that matter? It is an accurate label in the political realm. It describes people who deny science, or other kinds of facts, for emotional, personal, financial or political reasons. Or just for the hell of it. What does it matter that it isn’t a science term?
Well bully for you. We’ve tried and can only come up with the conclusion that dishonest right-wing hacks are dishonest right-wing hacks. Get back to us when you have found something deeper.
I don’t know. I think I would need to take a few more tokes before I can make sense of that question and then immediately afterwards get it to blow my mind.
Ah, the “golden mean” fuckwittery, which might work in politics, but not science. The denialists never, ever cite good studies from the peer reviewed literature. They cite denialist web sites, and shoddy studies by people not working in the climate field. There is either acceptance of the work, or you are trying to say the work is bad. Then, its back to the old rubric, science is only refuted by more science. Trying to cast doubt isn’t science, but denialism.
That’s because the right wing politicians are bought and paid for by companies who see no value in alternative fuels. Until they get all the patents.
The dialogue is over. AGW is happening, whether or not you want to acknowledge it. Just look at the hottest few years on record, the ocean warming, the melting of the Arctic ice cap in summer, and the melting of glaciers world wide. Only a denialist would keep talking about dialogue.
imback@108: The error bars from 1950 allow for natural influences to be either positive or negative. Different studies come to different estimates. IIRC from 1990 or from 2000, it’s much more clearly negative: all the significant natural influences are negative (volcanoes, ENSO, sun), none are positive. I haven’t seen a good survey that puts it all together, but I haven’t looked.
As for postheist: You claim to accept that the IPCC defines attribution in the way I quoted. You claim to accept that natural influences have been negative of late, and maybe all the way back to 1950 on average. And yet you are sufficiently anguished about the ratio being bigger than 1 that you wrote 1386 words about it. Or is it just that I wrote the ratio in percentage?
I just realized I’ve been misreading, and consequently miswriting, posttheist’s name. Not after a heist, but after a theist. Sorry!
@numerobis, #123:
Not quite.
“After” is misleading. Properly punctuated the meaning becomes clear: