Carl Zimmer discovers that George Will is still lying about global warming.
Also, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Carl Zimmer discovers that George Will is still lying about global warming.
Also, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Don’t tell Jerry, but aren’t pictures of baby kitties a cheap way to get some eyeballs? At least it’s a nice story about a few animals coming back to the wilderness.
Yesterday was my last day in Lindau, I’m sorry to say — it was also the day of the closing ceremonies on the island of Mainau, in case you were wondering why it was so quiet on the blog. I decided to leave all my electronical gear behind at the hotel and venture out for the last session with a stark naked brain.
The day began with a walk down to the harbor to board the Sonnenkönigin, a very impressive ship that can only be inadequately be called a ferry. We were welcomed aboard with a glass of wine or a glass of juice if you felt 8 am was a little early to begin, and tables heaped with food. One thing I’m going to miss a great deal when I get back to Minnesota is good bread — the stuff that is chewy and substantial and has all this flavor. Bread back home is a kind of glorified aerogel, a pale and puffy spongy substance.
We also got some musical entertainment, and a lot of hard sell for the German province of Baden-Württemburg. They can do everything, except speak proper German (really, it’s their motto: “Wir können alles. Außer Hoch-Deutsch.”) They put on a good show with lots of exhibits touting their support for basic research and industry — if nothing else, I’m convinced they value the practical benefits of science enough to heavily recruit mobs of graduate students.
Mainau is a lovely island in Lake Constance, topped with an old baroque Schloss and filled with gardens and walking paths. We were there for a final panel on sustainability. The panel consisted of four nobelists, Pachauri, Molina, Schrock, and Stocker, one government minister, whose name I’ve probably misspelled since her tag was turned away from me — Quellen-Thielen, I believe — and one annoying crackpot, Bjorn Lomborg, who really didn’t belong up on the stage. Even as insubstantial as he was, though, Lomborg did agree, along with every one else, that climate change and global warming are real phenomena. Here’s a short summary of what they said.
Pachauri: Our big problem is unsustainable growth. It’s inevitable and desirable that third-world economies expand, but the old strategies of exploiting fossil fuels aren’t going to work.
Lomborg: While global warming is real, it’s not a crucial problem, since it will only cost 0.5% of world GDP to cope with it. He’s pro-development, and thinks, for example, that while global warming may increase the incidence of malaria by 3% more, we ought to be focusing on the 100% of malaria cases occurring now rather than trying to reduce the 3%. We need to invest in better technology, but imposing limitations on CO2 emissions now is fruitless.
Molina: We aren’t taking the right path in growing economies — we need to convince the world that building sustainable energy supplies and limiting environmental damage now is the best viable long-term strategy. He had to take a poke at Lomborg, too: putting a dollar value on irreversible changes is inappropriate and misleading. Focusing on one aspect of the problem and calling the cost increases and human losses manageable hides the risks of passing a tipping point. He favors, as an important early step, incorporating the costs of externalities such as CO2 emission into the economy.
Quellen-Thielen (sp?): Germany takes climate change seriously, and the government sets policies and targets for emissions. They also materially support new technologies, like photovoltaics. These actions have not harmed the economy but instead have created new jobs and positioned Germany as a global leader.
This prompted one of the more obnoxious jabs from Lomborg, who literally sneered at German environmental efforts, pointing out that all the photocells Germany has built are already obsolete, and that it was just money thrown down the drain. Throughout, Lomborg took the attitude that direct action now is inefficient, and that we’re better off waiting for new technologies to emerge, at which time the magic of the market will kick in and our problems will go away. Quellen-Thielen reasonably pointed out that their development now means they’ve got a leg up, that they’re obtaining a reasonable fraction of their energy directly from the sun right now, and they are also building the industrial infrastructure to build on new ideas quickly.
Schrock: He was a bit out of place here; I think the presence of Lomborg effectively derailed the whole panel away from a discussion of a diversity of solutions to the global warming and into a wasted defense of the rightness of taking any policy action at all. Schrock clearly wanted to talk about catalysis and the importance of chemistry in generating technical solutions, and advocated more investment in basic as well as applied research — he fears that we could lose the potential for long-term improvements in a frantic search for solutions we can implement right now.
Stocker: he also spoke against the bean-counter on the panel, pointing out that the 2003 heat wave killed thousands, and within 30 years, that kind of event will likely have a frequency of every other year. He thinks global warming is a misnomer: it’s more than just a temperature shift, but it’s going to lead to a sea level rise, changes in the availability of water resources in some of the most heavily populated areas of the world, and is going to trigger resource wars that will be devastating. He pointed out that this really is an anomalous event in our history, that CO2 is 29% higher than at any time in the last 850,000 years. He believes we need a globally binding emissions target set right away.
So it was a mildly interesting discussion, but it could have been so much better — I suspect someone noticed it was hard to find a strong contrarian among Nobel prize winners, and decided to bring in a last-minute alternative view. Unfortunately, Lomborg’s basically an advocate for do-nothingness and did nothing but distract the others from wrestling with more substantial ideas.
After sitting in the sun for this outdoor panel, I got a sunburn and a strong desire to escape, so I spent the time afterwards wandering about in the gardens. Then the best part, getting back on the Sonnenkönigin and being handed a big mug of cold beer as I boarded. I’m beginning to get the impression that all bier in Deutschland ist frei. That can’t be true, but empirically it seems to be the case. Or maybe it’s just Baden-Württemburg’s cunning plan to persuade us that southwestern Germany is paradise.
We had more entertainment on the trip back — Stuart Pivar was aboard, doing tricks with balloons! No, actually it was some other guy who made balloon molecules, as well as strange hats. I guess the guy just looked at me and decided I needed more tentacles.
He also made a buckyball out of balloons, and guess who ended up wearing that on his head?
And that’s all there was. A great meeting overall, lots of fun, and lots of networking. The majority of the attendees are graduate students who are brought over to hob-nob with the biggest of the big-wigs of science, and most importantly, make international connections with their peers. Any graduate student readers of this post: ask around in your department if anyone knows about nominations for the Lindau meetings. They are definitely worth attending for young people wanting to get involved in this global enterprise called science.
One evening after the talks, when we were hanging about in a gasthof enjoying some good food and beer, the Countess Bettina Bernadotte stopped by our table (Yes! You also get to meet European nobility!), and we all talked a bit about the meetings. She’s the president of the council for the meetings, and puts a tremendous amount of effort and fund-raising to get them off the ground. When asked why she was doing it, the answer was simple: that while she gets no direct personal or material gain from the meetings, as a citizen of the world she feels an obligation to make a contribution to bettering the world’s knowledge, and this is an opportunity to foster a positive benefit to science. The whole meeting is built around giving young investigators connections.
Now I’m on my long, slow way home. It was worth it, and hope I can go again.
Tonight I’m in the city of Friedrichshafen, home of the zeppelin (I asked if there were any connecting flights by zeppelin, but I’m out of luck and will have to take an Airbus tomorrow, instead.) Then I’m off to Frankfurt, Philadelphia, and finally, Minneapolis. All should be smooth this time — I don’t have any too-short layovers on this trip.
Now I’m going to stroll about and use the Fourth of July to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the first transatlantic zeppelin flight — I noticed that there was a big brass band down by the harbor, with fellows in bright green uniforms and tall hats with tassels. It should be fun!
I am in awe — they did it without anyone noticing. They just infiltrated nations all around the planet, smuggling in individuals to form vast new colonies of billions, all loyal to the overlords back home. Of course, these are very, very short Argentinians, which made them harder to notice: they’re all ants.
In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the ‘Californian large’, extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.
While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.
But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.
You better start practicing your tango is you hope to get along with our new arthropod overlords.
This morning was a long session broken into two big chunks, and I’m afraid it was too much for me — my recent weird sleep patterns are catching up with me, which didn’t help at all in staying alert.
Robert Huber: Intracellular protein degradation and its control
This talk was a disaster. Not because it wasn’t good, because it was; lots of fine, detailed science on the regulation of proteases by various mechanisms, with a discussion of the structure and function of proteasomes, accompanied by beautiful mandalas of protein structure. No, the problem was that this listener’s jet lag has been causing some wild precession of my internal clocks, and a quarter of the way through this talk all systems were shutting down while announcing that it was the middle of the night, and I really couldn’t cope. I’m going to have to look up some of his papers when I get home, though.
Walter Kohn: An Earth Powered Predominantly by Solar and Wind Energy
Kohn has made a documentary to illustrate the power of solar energy. It was very basic, a bit silly — John Cleese narrates it — but might be useful in educating the pubic. He showed excerpts from it, and while it was nice, it didn’t fire me up.
Peter Agre: Canoeing in the Arctic, a Scientist´s Perspective
This was a bit strange. We’ve had all these science talks on global warming, so Agre decided to just show us what we stand to lose, and showed us photos of his vacations on canoeing trips in Canada and Alaska. They were gorgeous photos, but please don’t show me your photo album when I’m crashing hard.
I think my new and revised plan is to take a nap this afternoon and try to recharge a bit. I really must be alert for tomorrow’s session with Shimomura, Chalfie, and Tsien, which are the talks I was most anticipating. There’s also a curious talk by Werner Arber on something called Molecular Darwinism which has my skeptical genes tingling; I’ve got to see what kinds of evidence he provides for that. So brain must not melt down now.
There are a few people who will now appear on the blog who will be extremely peevish about Molina’s talk, because he simply clearly stated the scientific consensus. We are now living in the anthropocene, when so many people exist that that we are affecting the planet’s functions. CO2 and CH4 concentrations have been changing rapidly in recent decades, along with changes in temperature, and the fact of the matter is that the changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere are causally connected to changes in temperature.
He showed long term records of 450,000 years of temperature and chemistry, which show regular changes in temperature and chemical composition, even of regular cycles of change. But recent changes are much larger, and the changes in the last century were not expected from known natural causes — they don’t fit the prior pattern. Only pseudoscientific (he was not at all mealy-mouthed: yes, he called the people who question anthropogenic change to be pseudoscientific) papers currently question the causal relationship of human activities to climate change.
There are some events that should give us pause. The glaciers feeding China’s rivers are shrinking, and the Tibetan plateau has important role in climate of China — what happens when China’s huge population faces major droughts? He mentioned specific events like Katrina, the exreme weather events. We can’t tell for certain that an individual event is climate change related, but statistics show a pattern of increasing events, such as wildfires and droughts. 400 million people are living under extreme drought conditions, and very dry land has increased worldwide in a short period of time: 15% of land was so classified in 1970, but it’s now up to 30% in 2002.
Trends show that greenhouse gases are increasing. What needs to be done? We need a revolution in the way society functions to prevent CO2 from rising abouve 350-450 ppm. Can it be done?
Molina is generally optimistic. He thinks that we can limit CO2 with existing technologies. His recipe is improved fuel economy, more efficient builidongs, improved power plant efficiency, substituting natural gas for coal, using carbon capture and storage, developing alternative power sources (nuclear, wind, solar, biofuels), and forest management. We need to do ALL, there will not be a single magic bullet that solves the problem.
He argues that we are not running out of fossil fuels (there is lots of coal), but we are running out of oil. However, we will run out of atmospheric capacity to cope with emissions before we run out of oil.
We are playing a game, like roulette. We are gambling: to win, a policy should result in a temp increase of less than 2° C. What policy does is shift the probabilities of winning — we are paying to move from one roulette wheel with bad odds to another with lower risk. We want to buy stabilization of probabilities and reduce uncertainty, and it’s not that expensive. An investment of a few percent of GDP produces a big improvement of our odds. He compared it to a hypothetical airplane trip. If you were told you could board a plane right now that has a 10% chance of both engines failing, or you could wait a few hours to take a different plane that cost 10% more but had a negligible chance of engine failure, which would you do? For most of us, the choice is simple, since the first plane has a good chance of catastrophic failure, and we’d rather avoid that sort of thing.
Less optimistically, he brought up the possibility of tipping points and the instability of the system. It is a big worry that we have a risk of entering practically irreversible modes: he gave the example of melting of arctic summer ice, since once the ice cap is gone, it is not trivial to restore it. Some tipping points may occur relatively soon. We are at risk of catastrophic climate change.
He ended with simple actions we should take now:
Put a price on carbon emissions.
Increase investment in energy tech research
Expand international cooperation
Emphasize win-win solutions
The big problem is that right now 3/4ths of the planet is striving to reach the ecoonomic standards of the developed countries — they should, and they have every right to aspire to it, but it is physically impossible for them to do it with the same wasteful strategies of the developed nations.
Check out Chris Clarke’s latest effort, The Clade.
Scienceblogs has a new addition to the stable, and appropriately enough, it’s an environmental science blog: say howdy to Guilty Planet.
One of the peculiarities of our media right now is that, as everyone knows, the best political reporting is being done by a couple of comedy shows on cable. Another source that has been surprising me is Rolling Stone, which has unshackled a couple of wild men, Tim Dickinson and Matt Taibbi, to go after the corruption and insanity of American politics — one of those things we once upon a time expected our newspaper journalists to do. I guess the powers-that-be think it’s safe to let the drug-addled hippies and punks (and college professors) who read Rolling Stone to know about the failures of our government, but the bourgeoisie must not be perturbed.
If you care about the environment, you must read Dickinson’s Obama’s Sheriff. It’s nominally about our new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, but without saying much about him, it instead dives into the seedy, greedy world of the Interior Department of the past 8 years. Under Bush, we basically gave away our natural resources to anyone willing to chew them up and turn them into a pile of poisonous rubble and decaying trash.
Here’s a sample.
LESS WILDLIFE Julie MacDonald, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior, routinely overruled the department’s biologists, limiting the amount of “critical habitat” protected from drilling and other development. Federal judges overturned several of her decisions as “arbitrary and capricious,” and among federal scientists her name became synonymous with political interference. “It became a verb for us: getting MacDonalded,” said one staffer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When the inspector general reviewed 20 listings for endangered species in which MacDonald played a role, he found that she had “potentially jeopardized” 13 of them — a track record that “cast doubt on nearly every [endangered species] decision issued during her tenure.” Her decisions frequently benefited private interests, including her own: Her ruling that the Sacramento splittail fish is not an endangered species protected her family farm in California — an operation that clears as much as $1 million a year.
DECAYING PARKS By the time Bush left office, the National Park Service was stuck with a backlog of up to $14 billion in deferred maintenance. The marquee attraction at Dinosaur National Monument — a rock face of exposed Jurassic fossils — remains off-limits because the visitor center is unsafe, and inadequate storage facilities threaten to damage artifacts from the Battle of Little Big Horn. Because of the lack of funds, the government was unable to buy land surrounding Valley Forge and Zion National Park, putting the property at risk for “detrimental development.” Worst of all, the administration’s failure to create a grazing plan at Yellowstone Park to accommodate the plains buffalo — the animal that graces the Interior Department’s seal — contributed to the deaths of more than 1,100 bison last year. It was the greatest buffalo slaughter since the species was driven to near extinction by hunters in the late 1800s.
Keep in mind that this is only a taste — it goes on for page after depressing page. We’ve been robbed.
And what about Salazar? He gets a couple of paragraphs at the end, giving him props for being willing to go in and shake up the tradition of corruption…but also points out that he’s from the conservative rancher tradition, and is going to continue the policies of free give-aways of our resources. So, I guess we can expect less snow-bunny sex with mining representatives and less cocaine-snorting ministers, but the destruction will continue.
You have to watch this loon making his case for how harmless global warming is in testimony with Lord Christopher Monckton (thanks, England…really, we have enough wacky ideologues without you sending yours over here). Monckton dismisses the problem of CO2 by claiming that CO2 levels were much higher in the pre-Cambrian, and that the stuff is just “plant food”.
It’s plant food … So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere? … So all our good intentions could be for naught. In fact, we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.
Yes, it is the material plants take up from the atmosphere to make sugar. It’s also a greenhouse gas. So? And what is this stuff about “saving the world”? It’s like the two of them are babbling about problems and arguments that no one is making — and we get more when Shimkus explain how he knows CO2 is not a problem. It’s because the Bible is the inerrant word of his god, and he knows god isn’t going to end the world with global warming.
The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.
Could one of you voters out there in Illinois take Shimkus aside and explain to him with short, simple words and short, simple sentences that global warming isn’t going to destroy the world? It’s not an argument anyone is making. It could very well make the world more tropical, and it could be of some advantage to certain kinds of plants.
However, please note: human beings aren’t plants (well, most of us, anyway — John Shimkus does seem to share some similarities with root vegetables). The concern with global warming is change that will cause economic disruption and environmental disturbances and damage to places we like…like cities. Honestly, if nations collapse, we know that algae will still thrive. We just happen to generally take the side of humanity.
Oh, and you might let him know that the Bible is mostly wrong.
