Archive for April 9, 2009

Ugh! Global Warming Seriously Precludes Funny Post Titles, But Read This Anyway

If you follow our Twitter feed (and why on earth wouldn’t you?!), you checked out James Hrynyshyn’s post at his blog The Island of Doubt, where he exposes some of the tricks played by the Cato Institute in its recent open letter to Obama. The Cato Institute is challenging Obama’s focus on climate change as a national priority and as part of this effort, flouted the “signatures” of over 100 scientists and academics (many non-climatologists) purportedly questioning the science behind climate change and global warming.

The ad’s text is brief (gotta preserve enough space for all the signatures, after all), but it provides four footnotes, and it is these Hrynyshyn investigates, going to the source material to check Cato’s claims.

Cato claim (1). Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now.

Hrynyshyn’s conclusion from source material. There has been temperature change since the 1950s exeeding that expected from statistical variability. Also, Cato’s choice of “a decade” is not a long enough period of time “to come to any conclusions about long-term climate changes” and even one of the sources for Cato’s claim provides a serious caveat to their analysis:

… [W]e caution that the shifts described here are presumably superimposed upon a long term warming trend due to anthropogenic forcing. … If the role of internal variability in the climate system is as large as this analysis would seem to suggest, warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models, given the propensity of those models to underestimate climate internal variability.

Cato claim (2). After controlling for population growth and property values, there has been no increase in damages from severe weather-related events.

Hrynyshyn’s conclusion from source material. Per-capita damage costs (increasing or decreasing) have nothing to do with “abrupt climate change, human caused or not.”

Cato claim (3). The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior.

Hrynyshyn’s conclusion from source material. Cato cites one paper that seeks to refute “an enormous volume of literature based on computer models that actually do explain recent climate behavior,” using data from the tropical troposphere, a pesky region where modeled and actual “temperature trends” do not jibe. Nonetheless, ”climatologists have been remarkably accurate for decades now when it comes to anticipating global average temperature rise” (his emphasis), referencing a 1983 NYT article about “how little the science has had to change despite a quarter century of observations.”

Hynyshyn’s summation of the Cato ad?

Just a list of more than 100 non-climatologists who think that several thousand climatologists are wrong, based on three research papers and one commentary that do absolutely nothing to undermine the consensus of the genuine experts.

And what does that tell you about those who signed on to the letter?

The Los Angeles Times featured a story today that doevetails quite snugly with Hrynyshyn’s skewering of Cato’s climate project. It tells of the climate chaos engulfing Australia: decade-long drought, unprecedented in severity, in the south; monsoon-like flooding in the north; massive agricultural devastation; 110-degree heatwaves; the world’s highest rate of skin cancer; and –sadly — predictions “the Great Barrier Reef will be ‘functionally extinct’ by 2050.”

Many scientists are looking at Australia as a test case of what we might expect on a global scale from the current rate of climate change.

I am not doing either article justice, so please take the opportunity to read each. Neither Hrynshyn’s post nor the L.A. Times article is a polemic. Both are quite cool in their exposition. The facts require little embellishment.

Rewriting the “Faith” in Faith-Based Initiatives

If you’re like me, you weren’t too excited when candidate Obama announced his plans to continue the Bush-era “White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.” After all, it’s hard to get too jazzed about needlessly blurring the line between church and state, and frankly disappointing to watch a Democratic President bless what was, at the time, a sweeping overreach of the executive’s power to legislate. Repeat after me: in domestic affairs, executive orders aren’t a substitute for congressional debate & approval.

Thankfully, like many of Obama’s rightward moves, this one is proving more complex, interesting, and favorable than first expected: Obama’s Christian appointee to the faith-based “advisory council” is none other than Harry Knox, the progressive gay-rights activist who prominently criticized Obama for inviting anti-gay right-winger Rick Warren to speak at inauguration. Judging by the degree to which right-wing sites are flipping out, Knox is a good pick. Aside from being politically left of center, Knox actively questions the authenticity and moral authority of Pauline notions of “the family” – one guy, one gal, no exceptions – bringing a modern, realistic outlook on faith to the table.

This is overdue. Surely “the word of the Lord endureth forever,” but in what manner it endures, and through which documents, remains a judgment of fallible, historical Man. If Obama can use the right’s own institutions to push Americans on the question of religion and its role in public policymaking, more power to him. For the sake of this poetic justice alone, Obama’s decision to preserve WHOFBI is well taken.