Five Truths About Climate Change
I’m going to start by quoting the conclusion
It’s time to move the debate past the dogmatic view that carbon dioxide is evil and toward a world view that accepts the need for energy that is cheap, abundant and reliable.
There are two possible lines of argument in the discussion: science and policy. The best science establishes that anthropogenic global warming is true, and from that you decide what, if anything, you do about it.
The first point is about political reality
The result? Nothing, aside from promises by various countries to get serious—really serious—about carbon emissions sometime soon.
Here’s a reality check: During the same decade that Mr. Gore and the IPCC dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.
i.e. the politicians of the world couldn’t get their act together and actually do anything. Somehow, that must falsify anthropogenic global warming. In the real world, though, nature doesn’t take its cue from politics. Some legislature could declare a gravity-free day, but you aren’t going to float off into space as a result. So really this is just a celebration of the fact that the denialists in the government have been successful. It doesn’t mean they were right.
2) Regardless of whether it’s getting hotter or colder—or both—we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.
That’s a non-sequitur. The need for energy has absolutely no effect on the correctness of the science. It’s also not true that we need a lot more energy — our energy use growth has been a meager 0.4% a year the last decade — and it also doesn’t mean that added capacity can’t be “green”.
3) The carbon-dioxide issue is not about the United States anymore.
It never was. The author plays some games with statistics, but we’re still the biggest producer of CO2 per capita of the regions mentioned. So, whoop-de-doo that we’ve lowered our emissions 1.7%, when they are twice as much per person than in European countries or three times as much as in China. While the author is happy to pass the buck and complain that what others are doing isn’t working, we in the US can only be responsible for what happens in the US. We’re not in a position to try an influence anyone else if our own house isn’t in order.
Nearly all of the things we use on a daily basis—light bulbs, computers, automobiles—are vastly more efficient than they were just a few years ago. And over the coming years those devices will get even better at turning energy into useful lighting, computing and motive power.
This is despite the GOP trying to kill the measure that increases lighting efficiency, and that the improvements in things like computers, appliances and cars are driven by government regulation (energy star and cafe standards).
The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Seriously? Neutrinos were measured (probably incorrectly) to be FTL, and that means global warming is wrong? The weasel is strong in this one. This is a standard denialist tactic — science has been wrong in the past, therefore we can’t trust science. Which seems terribly hypocritical when presented by someone using the advances of science, probably on a daily basis. I’m just guessing, but I’d wager that the author doesn’t think his computer or car run because of magic.