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Several previous posts have discussed the falseness of the environmental movement and its harmful effects on the environment and society. There is no concern about the damage to the environment or society since those in the movement merely use it as a wedge issue to advance their steam age political ideas and would gladly burn the world down to spite their opponents even if they never gain power.
It has also been noted that those in the environment business are similarly deceitful though their motivations are personal gain - donations, payments and grants as reward for providing the politicians with talking points.
A recent example of the worst aspects of this behavior is on display in the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), a report that claims to document dire and unprecedented changes in the arctic. The findings are precise but inaccurate because it was carefully constructed to deceive. The warming trend in the arctic over the past forty years is real and precisely documented, but is a fiction of selective use of data that begins at the lowest temperatures recorded for the past century and ends in the present. Prior to that low beginning point the trend had been going down from a high point even higher than today in the 1930s.
Politicized poseurs such as Alex Steffen are in full shriek mode crowing about a law suit against the Bush administration for failing to halt the trend. Note that it isn't against the US or any previous administrations that did the same, it's just against Bush. Note also that no other country is doing diddly to halt the trend except trying to talk it down, and most are avid contributors to the trend.
This hasn't gone unnoticed by the public and the stock of environmental groups continues in free fall, losing the support of funding organizations and in the most recent US elections were avoided like lepers by all political parties. The importance of this isn't the venality and ineffectiveness of these groups and poseurs like Steffen, it is the negative effects their behaviors have on the social mind, poisoning the issues of environmental preservation and remediation. Nobody even wants to hear about this stuff now and view the ravings of alarmists much the same as they do those of religious extremists - like an environmental Taliban.
There does seem to be a warming trend in the arctic. It's not just the brief upswing in cyclical variation reported by ACIA, it a longer trend of much slower rise that we don't know is going to reverse on its own. Current conditions are well within the bounds of historic variability for the past 1,000 years but there is no guarantee that they will stay within those bounds.
Though the political shenanigans of the nutters are destructive there are reasons to focus on climate change as something we can and should take an active part in managing. Atmospheric composition has changed and we have great confidence in theories about the role of atmosphere in keeping the earth warm enough for life even though it is too far from the sun to otherwise be warm enough. If it can keep us nicely warm then the possibility exists that it can make us too warm though the details of that scenario are not yet understood. We're still beginners in this.
Even if we discount the climate change scenario as being too dimly illuminated and too distant for immediate concern we can easily grasp other atmospheric gunk issues. Dirty air is destructive in many ways that aren't speculative, they are demonstrated. The past several decades of work to clean up the air have been successful, the air is cleaner, but we can and should continue to do ever better.
The trick is to say sensible things, to denounce the wackos that turn the public off to the issues but also to point out that there are real concerns and things that we can do to improve our lot without the political and economic repression that is the true goal of the wackos. The previous post Works A Treat discusses one example of sensible steps that can be taken for environmental remediation. The treaty provisions will reduce the most potent GHGs, for the least cost and even has a net energy yield to developing countries. It was promoted by the US, by the Bush administration, a fact ignored by the nutters who bring law suits and make wild accusations. As noted in an earlier post:
It seems ironic, poignantly contrary to what was expected, that the policies of the current US administration may be environmentally superior to those of competing political groups that claim environmental concern as a core principle. Those out of power groups may be sincerely distressed by environmental change (though in many cases this is just a convenient pose), but they don't have good ideas about how to improve the situation. They are crippled by their authoritarian world view, their distrust and dislike of humans and their institutions, and their anti-humanist aesthetics.If we contrast this new treaty with Kyoto the reasons for cautious optimism become clearer. Kyoto will have little to no effect on climate change though it will cost hugely and install a massive bureaucratic regulatory regime that will stifle the developed world for the foreseeable future. It has no provisions for the developing world though that is where the increases in GHG emissions will occur. Kyoto is intentionally skewed to favor some nations above others for political and economic gain for the favored few. When all things are considered Kyoto is what venal politicians do instead of facing the climate change threat, seizing climate change as an opportunity to prosecute their petty games of international domination for fun and profit.
One good treaty isn't enough but it is a step in a useful direction. It's not only good for the environment it's good for society, a first step in rehabilitating the concept of environmental preservation, one that demonstrates to those who have grown skeptical that there are ways to do good works that aren't just pork and bureaucratic nonsense. As the environment degrades in future, as seems very likely due to population growth, the threat of authoritarian oppression increases too. When people are worried they are more likely to sell their liberty cheaply for promises, however empty, of security. We need to find ways to avoid throwing the baby out with the dirty bath water, ways to manage our environment, including climate, without sinking into totalitarian misery and enduring both loss of liberty and degraded environments since the totalitarians always makes things worse despite their empty promises of improvement.
Happily, we know how to do some of this now and have processes to generate ever better methods. If we do what we can do now, such as the good treaty, while continuing to develop ever better methodologies, there is no reason why we can't deal with expected threats successfully. We can do this even though there are loose cannons rolling around below decks holing us with regularity. There are not only more of us, we are more capable. Some of those cannons will fall overboard through their own punched holes and sink, others will be rolled back into useful locations. It's more work but that's just how it is, bad apples in every barrel.
UPDATE: What Defines The Arctic? Looking even more closely at the data on which the sweeping advocacy claims are made reveals an unhelpful agenda.
The recent warming of the Arctic and its cause remains a matter of scientific speculation. The temperature trend found in the ACIA Overview Report (Figure 1) is high compared to other estimates. The warming trend over the 1980-2002 interval by ACIA's Chapter 2 authors shown in Figure 3, especially when compared to the warming occurred during 1920s and 1930s, is higher still. But these results hinge on scientific questions -- how is the Arctic defined, and which land- and marine-based temperature records should be included. There are large and dramatic changes observed[3] in the complex and highly variable Arctic atmosphere-ice-ocean system, but exaggerated presentations distract from the serious need for comprehensive scientific studies on what is really happening in the Arctic.
I've really enjoyed assembling this week's COTV. I received many submissions from blogs I read regularly, as well as from sites that were new to me and which I look forward to visiting again. Herewith, now… the 116th CARNIVAL OF THE...
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