Re: [asa] Creation Care

At 09:55 PM 1/28/2007, David Opderbeck wrote:
>Randy, the worn-out feeling is getting to be
>mutual, but just a few key things:
>
>As to "no competing models," you miss the
>point. When you say a critic must present a
>model that is superior to the existing model,
>that may be true for the scientific community,
>but it is not true for public policy. Here is
>what you dont' seem to understand: government
>regulation has costs in terms of human
>flourishing. There actually is a susbstantial
>law and economics literature that calculates the
>costs of government regulation in human
>lives. Literally, regulation kills. This isn't
>some kind of conservative knee-jerk position --
>it's a "scientific" conclusion of many law and
>economics scholars of various political
>persuasions. So, from a policy perspective, it
>is valid to criticize a model on which costly
>regulation will be based even in the absence of
>a competing scientific model. Such criticism
>may simply reveal that regulatory action is
>unwise. That in itself is a valuable exercise,
>even if it isn't specifically itself a scientific one.
>
>As to "let's be moderate," again, you continue
>to miss the point. The point isn't that we
>should select the middle range of the warming
>estimates as the most likely correct
>scenario. The point is that we should consider
>moderate policy options given the range of
>possible scenarios reflected in the consensus
>science. One can take this stance without in
>any way rejecting the consensus reflected in the
>IPCC reports. We can acknowledge that the upper
>range scenarios are real possibilities but still
>select a "moderate" regulatory option for the present.
>
>And this is why I started a thread about the
>precautionary principle and the ethical basis
>for regulation in this area. Only a very strong
>reading of the precautionary principle would
>justify the severe costs -- remember, costs in
>human lives -- of massive regulatory action
>given that the consensus presents a range of
>scenarios over a long (in regulatory terms) time
>horizon without any ability to give realistic
>probabilities about where in the range things will fall.
>
>For all the continued argument about the
>authority of science and whatnot, you still
>haven't explained what policy action you favor,
>what the economic consequences are of your
>favored policy, and on what ethical basis you are making your decision.
>
>As to this being an issue important to the
>ongoing controversy regarding science and
>Christian faith, yes, I agree that it is. I
>agree that the evangelicals who drafted the
>"Interfaith Alliance" document did an abysmal
>job addressing the science. But, I fear that
>the approach you seem to advocate is swinging
>way too far in the other direction. This seems
>to come from the "wall of separation," to borrow
>an oft-misued metaphor, that you want to draw
>between the science and the policy in this
>instance. That wall is a fiction. Advocating
>that we should trust the scientific experts in
>this instance is the same as advocating that we
>should allow those scientists to dictate policy
>because all of the thought leaders -- Jim Hansen
>in particular -- are also advocating policy. If
>you doubt this, read the materials on Hansen's
>personal website
>(<http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/>http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/
>). It is not "pure" science, it is a mixture of
>science and policy. That's not a knock on
>Hansen, it's just the reality of this issue.

@ "The mean estimate of the total cost for the
entire world of doing nothing about global
warming is around $5 trillion over the next
century. In other words, if humanity simply
allowed the pace of global warming to proceed,
the median estimate is that it would cost $5
trillion to adapt to it. Estimates for different
proposed cuts in fossil fuel use aimed at
stabilizing the atmosphere at various average
temperatures run between $8 trillion and $38
trillion over the next 100 years. Assuming the
lower cost, this means it would cost the world $8
trillion to avoid $5 trillion in costs due to global warming."

  I have to laugh when I hear people saying
things like this today: "We just want to raise
awareness about environmental issues and global
warming based on human behavior. We just want to
start a dialogue and we're looking to the government to get us going."

"You cannot go to any corner of the globe and not
find some degree of environmental awareness and
some amount of environmental politics," declared
__Christopher Flavin__, now head of the
Worldwatch Institute, at the Earth Summit in Rio
de Janeiro 10 years ago. Environmentalism, Flavin
concluded, is the "most powerful political ideal
today." Since that Earth Summit, Flavin's brand
of environmentalism has indeed grown more powerful. .."

This [below] is just the tip of the iceberg of
what they'd do if they had the opportunity. ~
Janice ... (who notices that many of these
"scientists" are just ideologues with a microphone.)

"Specifically, Lomborg cites Paul Ehrlich and
E.O. Wilson as supporting something called the
Wildlands Project, which would reserve 50 percent
of the North American continent as uninhabited wildlands."

Green with Ideology
http://www.reason.com/news/show/28411.html

The hidden agenda behind the "scientific" attacks
on Bjørn Lomborg's controversial book, The
Skeptical Environmentalist. ......The bitter
anti-Lomborg campaign reveals the hidden crisis
of what we might call ideological environmentalism.

Ideological environmentalism goes far beyond
sensible efforts to reduce pollution or protect
wilderness. It argues that the modern world
fosters institutions and ideas that exploit and
oppress people and degrade and destroy the
environment. According to this view, the only
solution to the supposedly looming ecological
crisis is the sweeping, global transformation of
the world's economies and political systems. The
notion is neatly captured in former VP AG's
demand that humanity "make the effort to save the
global environment the central organizing principle of our civilization."

..The Skeptical Environmentalist, .. questions
the very foundations of ideological
environmentalism. Rather than refute its author,
the environmentalist movement has attempted to ruin him.

Lomborg wrote his book after reading about the
economist Julian Simon, who argued that many
environmental trends were in fact positive.
....This conclusion is, of course, anathema to
the environmental ideologues, especially those
whose organizations use scare campaigns to raise
money. Thus it is not surprising that the World
Wildlife Fund and the World Resources Institute
would send out a Lomborg-bashing press release.
The release, signed by WRI President Jonathan
Lash, claims Lomborg's book is "riddled with
misleading arguments and factual errors." It is
accompanied by a document titled "Nine Things
That Journalists Should Know About The Skeptical Environmentalist."

One of those things is that Lomborg allegedly
engages in "pseudo-scholarship." As evidence, the
document claims the book cites "articles that
have not undergone scientific peer review."

....[but] The Population Bomb was sourced with 49
endnotes, only five of which were from
peer-reviewed scientific journals. Of the 55
endnotes in The Limits to Growth, only three
refer to peer-reviewed journals. More recently,
in the Worldwatch Institute's State of the World
2002, the vast majority of endnotes are from
newspapers, magazines, non-peer-reviewed books,
government reports, and even activist pamphlets.

....The book is essentially a response to such
popular environmentalist tracts as the State of
the World report and the reams of misinformation
disseminated by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth,
the Union of Concerned Scientists, The Ecologist,
the Turning Point Project, Grist, Wild Earth, and
the rest of the sprawling eco-media propaganda complex.

In his endnotes, Lomborg cites the numerous
non-peer-reviewed exaggerations, misleading
statements, and outright falsehoods offered up by
environmental activists and gullible reporters,
then refutes them using peer-reviewed scientific
studies. Furthermore, the book broadly surveys a
series of ecological, economic, and demographic
trends. When Lomborg compiles and summarizes the
relevant information from scientific reports and
papers and from government agencies, he is
obviously using the same sources and information
that are generally relied on by all participants in environmental debates.

One example the press release cites of a
supposedly nonauthoritative source is work
published recently by MIT climatologist Richard
Lindzen's team suggesting that clouds in the
tropics operate as an "iris." (Warmer sea
temperatures in the tropics cause changes in the
relative distribution of cumulus and cirrus cloud
cover which allows heat to escape, helping to
cool the planet.) The press release claims
Lindzen's work didn't undergo peer review and
belittles it by hinting that it was published in
a mere "meteorological bulletin" instead of any "leading scientific journals."

The disparaged "meteorological bulletin" is the
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Lindzen was astonished when I told him that the
World Wildlife Fund and the World Resources
Institute were claiming his work had not been peer-reviewed.

The press release also initially claimed the
article "had been rejected by at least one such
[leading] journal." (This false claim later
disappeared from the WWF/WRI anti-Lomborg Web
site without acknowledgment.) Lindzen says his
team submitted the article only to the Bulletin.
New research reported in the February 1, 2002,
issue of Science, while not confirming Lindzen's
proposed iris effect, does find that the tropics
are cooling the earth by expelling more heat than
is being trapped by the greenhouse effect. ..

Well, that was just a press release. Surely
scientific publications are safe from this sort
of intellectual corruption -- or are they? Sadly,
the journals Nature and Science both selected
reviewers who, their scientific credentials
notwithstanding, are committed ideological environmentalists.

The Nature reviewers, Stuart Pimm and Jeff
Harvey, begin their November 8, 2001, piece by
attacking me, asserting that Lomborg "rehashes
books like Ronald Bailey's The True State of the
Planet." Next, they slap Lomborg with the
secondary-source red herring. "Like bad term
papers," they write, "Lomborg's text relies
heavily on secondary sources. Out of around 2,000
references, about 5% come from news sources and
30% from web downloads -- readily accessible,
therefore, but frequently not peer reviewed."
According to the Nature reviewers, "This bias
towards non-peer-reviewed material over
internationally reputable journals is sometimes incredible."

This charge is, again, misleading, irrelevant,
and hypocritical. Pimm, for instance, has just
published The World According to Pimm, an
ideologically orthodox work, and a quick look at
its 244 endnotes finds that at least half of his
sources are from non-peer-reviewed material.
There are reports from environmentalist groups
such as WRI and the Audubon Society, and from
international and government agencies; there are
non-peer-reviewed books, such as Cadillac Desert
and Guns, Germs and Steel; there are many
secondary sources, including reports from The New
York Times, Barron's, The Economist, Vanity Fair,
and even the Encyclopedia Britannica. As for the
"web downloads" Pimm disparages, most of
Lomborg's Web references are reports by
international and government organizations that
collect and publish the environmental statistics that alarmists like Pimm use.

Nature's reviewers also try to refute Lomborg's
claims by calling up people he cites and asking
them if Lomborg is accurate. Specifically,
Lomborg cites Paul Ehrlich and E.O. Wilson as
supporting something called the Wildlands
Project, which would reserve 50 percent of the
North American continent as uninhabited
wildlands. Pimm and Harvey asked Ehrlich if he
supported such a plan. "I know of no such plan,"
replied Ehrlich. "If there were one, I wouldn't support it." Q.E.D.

Where could Lomborg have gotten such an idea?
 From the June 25, 1993, issue of Science. "The
principles behind the Wildlands Project have
garnered endorsements from such scientific
luminaries as Edward O. Wilson of Harvard [and]
Paul Ehrlich of Stanford (who describes himself
as an 'enthusiastic supporter')," reported an
article titled "The High Cost of Biodiversity." ...

Perhaps the most disturbing attack on Lomborg
appeared in the popular journal Scientific
American in its January 2002 issue. The subhead
of the review section, "Science defends itself
against The Skeptical Environmentalist," gives
the show away: Religious and political views need
to defend themselves against criticism, but
science is supposed to be a process for
determining the facts. Scientific American
selected four of Lomborg's chapters -- on global
warming, energy, population, and biodiversity --
for separate, detailed review. The package was
clearly intended to demolish Lomborg's credibility comprehensively.

Stephen Schneider critiqued Lomborg's treatment
of global warming. Schneider is a distinguished
climate scientist at Stanford University; he is
also a fierce environmental ideologue. His first
book, The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global
Survival (1976), offered a sweeping plan to
reorganize global governance and the world's
economy to meet the purported threats of
catastrophic climate change and overpopulation.

Schneider's piece is remarkable for its
dishonesty. He first deploys the familiar red
herring that "most of his nearly 3,000 citations
are to secondary literature and media articles."
Lomborg's chapter on global warming features more
than 600 endnotes. Nearly half refer to
publications from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and most of the
rest refer to studies from such agencies as the
World Meteorological Organization and the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development and to peer-reviewed articles from
Science, Nature, the Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society, and the like.

True, IPCC publications are "secondary
literature," but Schneider himself calls the IPCC
"the most credible international assessment body"
dealing with climate change. (Needless to say,
Schneider has not followed his own stringent rule
about citing only peer-reviewed articles when
discussing scientific issues and public policy.
In The Genesis Strategy, 80 percent of the
endnotes refer to newspaper and magazine
articles, government reports, and other secondary sources.)

Schneider makes some more substantive claims. For
brevity, let's deal with three of them: that
Lomborg gets the basic climate science wrong,
that he botches global warming cost-benefit
analyses, and that he misrepresents the Kyoto Protocol.

Interestingly, Schneider admits his own
"lingering frustration" over the scientific
"uncertainties" that surround projections of
future global temperatures. In any case, Lomborg
does not deny global climate change. As he puts
it, he "accepts the reality of man-made global
warming" but questions claims such as
Greenpeace's assertion that it is "one of the
greatest threats to the planet." To support his
skepticism, Lomborg analyzes a lot of
controversial scientific information and
concludes that future global warming is likely to
be at the low end of the projections made by the IPCC for the next century.

  Lomborg agrees with those climatologists who
think the earth is more likely to warm only 1.4
degrees Celsius during the next century rather
than the 5.8 degrees predicted by the highest
projections. He points to research suggesting
that computer models that project high
temperatures by 2100 do not take proper account
of a number of negative feedbacks, such as clouds that tend to cool climate.

Lomborg also makes a persuasive case that due to
technological improvements, the amount of
greenhouse gases humanity will add to the
atmosphere will likely be at the low end of the
emissions scenarios put forward by the IPCC. Less
greenhouse gases means lower future temperatures.

Schneider demonstrates his misunderstanding of
research that contradicts his views when he
dismisses Richard Lindzen's work on the iris
effect by calling it a mere extrapolation from "a
few years of data from a small part of one
ocean." In a letter to Scientific American,
Lindzen points out that the findings are
applicable to the entire tropics. Lindzen also
notes that, far from relying excessively on his
findings, Lomborg devoted only a quarter of a
page to his iris effect paper. "As our paper
amply stresses (and as Lomborg acknowledges),
there remain uncertainties in our work," he
writes. Lindzen concludes that Schneider's
critique of Lomborg "misrepresents both the book
he is attacking and the science he is allegedly representing."

Schneider makes a number of surprising errors. He
attacks Lomborg's analysis of the costs and
benefits of trying to slow global warming by
limiting the emissions of greenhouse gases,
particularly the carbon dioxide produced by
burning fossil fuels. Schneider claims that
forcing industries to cut back on fossil fuels
"could actually reduce some emissions at
below-zero costs." He bases this suggestion on
engineering estimates that are notoriously
overoptimistic. For example, in a 1995 study
published in Into the 21st Century: Harmonizing
Energy Policy, Environment, and Sustainable
Economic Growth, 37 companies agreed to
participate in a comprehensive energy audit that
the engineers predicted would increase their
electricity efficiency by 11.2 percent. A year
later, the companies had realized only a 3.1
percent increase in electricity efficiency.
Lomborg accepts that energy efficiency can be
tightened up marginally, but he is correct that
no one seriously believes that efficiency alone
can replace the services provided by the energy
that would be lost in cutting fossil fuel use by as much as 60 percent.

Perhaps even more misleading is Schneider's
discussion of the Kyoto Protocol. Schneider
dismisses Lomborg's analysis as a straw man argument. You decide.

Lomborg suggests this thought experiment: Extend
to the end of the century Kyoto's provisions for
cutting carbon dioxide emissions to around 5
percent below 1990 levels. Then examine the
costs. Lomborg knows global warming activists
actually intend to force the world to cut back
global fossil fuel use by at least 50 percent
below model projections. But by looking at what
it would cost to implement the comparatively mild
Kyoto, one gets a good sense of the magnitude of the problem.

Climatologists widely agree that implementing the
Kyoto cuts would reduce the globe's average
temperature by an undetectable 0.15 degree
Celsius by 2100. Achieving that minimal
climatological result could, according to some
econometric models, cost as much as $1 trillion.
As mentioned earlier, had the United States
joined the Kyoto Protocol, overall costs would
have been even higher, costing the U.S. $2.5 trillion over 10 years.

The mean estimate of the total cost for the
entire world of doing nothing about global
warming is around $5 trillion over the next
century. In other words, if humanity simply
allowed the pace of global warming to proceed,
the median estimate is that it would cost $5
trillion to adapt to it. Estimates for different
proposed cuts in fossil fuel use aimed at
stabilizing the atmosphere at various average
temperatures run between $8 trillion and $38
trillion over the next 100 years. Assuming the
lower cost, this means it would cost the world $8
trillion to avoid $5 trillion in costs due to global warming.

...Scientific American's second review is by John
P. Holdren, a longtime collaborator with Paul
Ehrlich who teaches environmental policy at
Harvard. His review boils down to a
bait-and-switch strategy: He answers a question
that has not been asked. [snip] ....

The third attack reviewer is John Bongaarts, a
vice president at the Population Council. Like
Holdren, Bongaarts essentially concedes that
Lomborg is right. ....Yet Bongaarts makes the
unsupported claim that future increases in food
supplies will cost more, even though food prices
have been declining steadily for two centuries.
The fact is that all leading agencies, such as
the International Food Policy Research Institute,
project lower food prices. Sadly, Bongaarts
cannot resist deploying the inflammatory
accusation from Paul and Anne Ehrlich that ....

Finally, Thomas Lovejoy critiqued Lomborg's
biodiversity chapter. Lovejoy was U.S. director
of the World Wildlife Fund for more than a decade
and is now the chief biodiversity adviser to the
World Bank; he's been a biodiversity alarmist for
a long time. At a 1979 symposium ...In his
review, Lovejoy simply ignores the many overblown
assertions (including his own) during the past
two decades ......Lovejoy is essentially
commending Myers for making up a number to get
public attention. .....Given Lovejoy's easy
acceptance of Myers' alarmist claims two decades
ago, he should know cynicism when he sees it. ...

In a final nasty twist, Scientific American
threatened to sue Lomborg for copyright
infringement if he did not take down from his Web
site, http://www.lomborg.com/ , his discussion of
its critiques, in which, for easy reference, he
interpolated his responses in the text of the
reviews. Evidently, Scientific American is not
interested in ___dialogue and peer review ___of its own work.

Tottering Greens

Ideological environmentalists have
simple-mindedly applied concepts from zoology and
biology to human societies to create a kind of theory of political ecology.

But this theory has failed. Not one of its major
predictions has come true: There have been no
global famines, no cancer epidemics, no massive
resource depletion. The ideologues have been
proven wrong because they fail to understand that
the economic processes in which human beings
engage are radically different from the
ecological processes that govern other creatures.

Human beings not only consume resources but make
new resources with their fertile minds. People do
not simply use up resources the way a herd of
zebra would; they create new recipes to use
resources in ever more effective ways. Coal, tin,
fresh water, forests, and so forth may all be
limited, but the ideas for extending and improving their uses are not.

"You cannot go to any corner of the globe and not
find some degree of environmental awareness and
some amount of environmental politics," declared
__Christopher Flavin__, now head of the
Worldwatch Institute, at the Earth Summit in Rio
de Janeiro 10 years ago. Environmentalism, Flavin
concluded, is the "most powerful political ideal today."

Since that Earth Summit, Flavin's brand of
environmentalism has indeed grown more powerful.
... Sweeping plans to reorganize the world's
economy along environmentalist lines are being developed and actively pursued.

But at the moment of its political ascendancy, it
is environmentalism, not modern civilization,
that is tottering. As more critics --
demographers, epidemiologists, toxicologists,
climatologists, economists, and, yes,
statisticians -- point ever more insistently at
the yawning gap between the doomsayers' claims
and scientific and economic reality, the
ideologues are becoming ever more frantic to deny the growing contradictions.

Their variety of environmentalism is merely the
latest totalizing ideology to arise in the West
over the past two centuries. Like communism
before it, it wants to claim the mantle of
objective science to justify its political
programs, because in the post-Enlightenment world
science is the final arbiter of what is true. But
as all totalists eventually discover, an
ideology's failure to correspond to reality is ultimately fatal.

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Received on Sun Jan 28 23:01:50 2007