By Kennedy Maize
Washington, D.C., June 11. 2010 — Their lips say “yes”, but their eyes say “no”. That’s my take on the offer of “practical” energy legislation this week by Senate Republicans. Yes, I’m cynical about the strategy and tactics of the GOP embodied in this legislative proposal (as far as I know, it doesn’t yet exist in bill language, so it’s hard to deconstruct it very concretely).
Thursday’s 53-47 rejection of Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s attempt to derail the Obama administration’s regulatory approach to carbon dioxide regulation makes my point more sharply. The Senate rejection of the Murkowski legislation is not significant. That was a foregone conclusion. The central insight is the number of votes Murkowski got; a week ago, Democrats were worried that she might get 40 votes. Her 47 votes included six Democrats: Indiana’s outgoing Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, West Virginia’s Jay Rockefeller, and Blanche Lincoln and Mark Prior of Arkansas.
Supporters of comprehensive greenhouse gas legislation — specifically the Obama administration’s cap-and-trade approach — adopted the characteristic response of whistling past the graveyard. “Well,” they were saying after the vote, “this isn’t the whole story. We can still pull off some Republicans who have said there is a climate problem.”
Nonsense. The vote is the Hammer of Doom for the warmers. So, too, is the GOP legislation, proffered by the respected Richard Lugar of Indiana. There is no notion of any kind of explicit carbon dioxide control in the Lugar legislation. It is the same-old same-old: energy efficiency and promises to shut down old, inefficient coal-fired power plants sometime in the future. As J. Wellington Wimpy told Popeye the Sailor Man, “I will gladly pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today.”
The Lugar energy legislation gives allegedly “moderate” Republicans insurance against claims they are complicit with Dr. No (Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky). Folks such as Maine Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins can tell their constituents that they share the fears about climate change, and supported the Lugar bill in response. (I confess I no longer have any clear idea how to distinguish moderate from liberal from conservative, even among my own views.)
All of this comes as the also-alleged “consensus” on the science of global warming is unravelling faster than a used sweater from Goodwill. I commend to your attention a recent “cross-examination,” which admittedly takes place only on paper, by University of Pennsylvania law professor Jason Scott Johnston.
Johnston compares the scientific claims in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and public statements by advocates of rapid climate action against published, peer-reviewed studies. Johnston concludes that “establishment climate science” has engaged in hyperbole, deliberate over-simplification, and “a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change.”
Even some previous advocates of congressional action are abandoning ship. Mother Jones, hardly an oil industry rag, reported this week that South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham — one the great warmer hopes for bipartisan Senate legislation — has recanted his climate views, expressed when he was working with Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts and Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut on climate legislation.
The lefty mag reported that at a Tuesday press conference, Graham said, “The science about global warming has changed. I think they’ve oversold this stuff, quite frankly. I think they’ve been alarmist and the science is in question. The whole movement has taken a giant step backward.”
Regarding the “consensus” supposed “unravelling” : what is really unravelling is the reputation of Power magazine.
Promotion of anti-science in an engineering publication? Abandonment of fact checking; repeated praise of denialist statements regardless of source or validity.
For one : You’ve gone on and on about Will Happer. He says the world isn’t warming ( or that it is cooling, depending on his mood, apparently ). But every measure, including satellites, shows a continued warming trend and recent record highs. It’s not enough that he is clearly wrong about the most basic points?
And the “cross-examination” — a legal argument against science? Wouldn’t a “cross-examination” require the participation of more than one side? But if you had any real perspective on the issue you would recognize the pattern. This is highly reminiscent of the path of anti-evolutionism. Having long lost the battle of science and evidence they move on to any other field that will accept their position.
Don,
Deal with the issues before you, not with hand-waving, vaporous attacks. Every measure does not show warming. As you must know, there are disputes about what measures are most realistic and dependable.
To drag in the red herring of anti-evolutionism (implying creationism) is simply a sign of intellectual despair. I am a strong supporter of evolution and evolution science (I’ve even read Darwin) and that is the case with every skeptic I know, including Will Happer, who has forgotten more about atmospheric physics than you will ever know.
Once upon a time, warming extremists tried to portray skeptics as akin to “holocaust deniers,” hence the term, still in use. Now the rap is that those of us who question the conventional wisdom are somehow allied with creationists.
For shame!
So, to sum up, you have no real answer to any of the questions I raised.
Your response to the ‘anti-evolutionism’ comment is particularly humourous. You think that the denialist’s retreat into non-scientific fields just happened by chance? Anti-science ends up being ‘debated’ only where no knowledgeable opposition exists.
Happer’s call for a “Team B” to review climate science is nothing new, and again is paralleled throughout anti-science / reality denier movements of all kinds. Richard Gage, of Architechs and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, makes the same demands ( of course, to get to the ‘truth’ of 9/11, in his case ) . In fact their statements are often eerily similar.
But of course there have already been many reviews of climate science. Bush Jr. played this card when he pulled out of Kyoto, setting up a blue ribbon panel of scientists to review the IPCC findings, and they came back very strongly supportive of the IPCC and even more ‘alarmist’ than the IPCC’s position. In the ’90s many large US corporations funded the “Global Climate Coalition”; they hired their own scientific panel to review the science, and once again the IPCC was supported ( and incidentally they also shot down common denialist arguments of the sort you still support here ).
I expect that Happer’s “Team B” will never materialize, not because of evil ‘warmists’ preventing it, but because Happer already knows where it will lead. It’s a good talking point for these little conferences of believers, it’s something that certain journalists will lap up uncritically and promote, but he doesn’t want it to actually happen.
Points? Points? I didn’t find no stinkin’ points.
And watch who you are calling “anti-science,” Bub. That’s more of your typical trash talk.
As for facts, there is no such person as “Bush Jr.” nor did George W. Bush (whom I loathed as president) “pull out” of Kyoto. The U.S. was never in, as neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations chose to submit the treaty for Senate ratification. For good reason. It would have won Senate rejection.
I find it intriguing that you can read Will Happer’s mind. Is that based on science, or voodoo?
“The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for May 2010 was 0.69°C (1.24°F) above the 20th century average of 14.8°C (58.6°F). This is the warmest such value on record since 1880.”
“The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for January–May 2010 was the warmest on record. The year-to-date period was 0.68°C (1.22°F) warmer than the 20th century average.”