In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm

[weflyhigh]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01...1tier.html?ref=science

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: January 1, 2008

I?d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I?m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You?re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change ? and that these images are a mere preview of what?s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can?t be more specific. I don?t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there?s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn?t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah?s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today?s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year?s end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record ? it was actually lower than any year since 2001 ? the BBC confidently proclaimed, ?2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.?

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm ? by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades ? the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).

The most charitable excuse for this bias in weather divination is that the entrepreneurs are trying to offset another bias. The planet has indeed gotten warmer, and it is projected to keep warming because of greenhouse emissions, but this process is too slow to make much impact on the public.

When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what?s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we?ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don?t have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn?t make for memorable images on television or in people?s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an ?availability cascade,? a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and ?The China Syndrome,? minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

?Many people concerned about climate change,? Dr. Sunstein says, ?want to create an availability cascade by fixing an incident in people?s minds. Hurricane Katrina is just an early example; there will be others. I don?t doubt that climate change is real and that it presents a serious threat, but there?s a danger that any ?consensus? on particular events or specific findings is, in part, a cascade.?

Once a cascade is under way, it becomes tough to sort out risks because experts become reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom, and are ignored if they do. Now that the melting Arctic has become the symbol of global warming, there?s not much interest in hearing other explanations of why the ice is melting ? or why the globe?s other pole isn?t melting, too.

Global warming has an impact on both polar regions, but they?re also strongly influenced by regional weather patterns and ocean currents. Two studies by NASA and university scientists last year concluded that much of the recent melting of Arctic sea ice was related to a cyclical change in ocean currents and winds, but those studies got relatively little attention ? and were certainly no match for the images of struggling polar bears so popular with availability entrepreneurs.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, recently noted the very different reception received last year by two conflicting papers on the link between hurricanes and global warming. He counted 79 news articles about a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and only 3 news articles about one in a far more prestigious journal, Nature.

Guess which paper jibed with the theory ? and image of Katrina ? presented by Al Gore?s ?Inconvenient Truth??

It was, of course, the paper in the more obscure journal, which suggested that global warming is creating more hurricanes. The paper in Nature concluded that global warming has a minimal effect on hurricanes. It was published in December ? by coincidence, the same week that Mr. Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn?t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to ?stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,? and focused on other kinds of disasters, like ?massive droughts? and ?massive flooding.?

?In the last few months,? Mr. Gore said, ?it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.? But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.

 

[Farang]

I don't care I have air conditioning.

 

[Taejin]

<=== PN

 

[FoBoT]

manbearpig!!!

 

[Pabster]

Yep. The Global Warming scam is going to go full-steam in 2008.

Don't be sucked in.

 

[warmodder]

Everyone's got their heads up their asses when it comes to global warming. It's like they wish a major natural disaster would come just so they could say I told you so.

 

[Drako]

Originally posted by: warmodder
Everyone's got their heads up their asses when it comes to global warming. It's like they wish a major natural disaster would come just so they could say I told you so.

Uh - oh, sounds like you've partaken of the Kool-Aide.

 

[lokiju]

I refer you to my previous thread on this topic...

http://forums.anandtech.com/me..._key=y&keyword1=lokiju

 

[EGGO]

I did it....I saved the world from manbearpig.

 

[warmodder]

Originally posted by: Drako

Originally posted by: warmodder
Everyone's got their heads up their asses when it comes to global warming. It's like they wish a major natural disaster would come just so they could say I told you so.

Uh - oh, sounds like you've partaken of the Kool-Aide.

It could be bad, and it could be beneficial, we don't really know. I think it's probably better to err on the side of caution, but we don't need all the doomsday scenarios to scare people into reform. It seems like just another case of the evidence adapting for the theory as opposed to the theory adapting for the evidence.

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

It's one thing to make simple changes to your lifestyle to help curb greenhouse gases and their ilk. Switching to flourescent bulbs, don't buy Hummer H3's just because they are a status symbol, recycle, use renewable resources when possible, etc.

But they have blown this "global warming" crap out of proportion, are we warming the planet? Yes. Is it going to cause the Apocalypse next year? Not likely, and if it does happen next year it most likely won't be from nature. Global warming is used as a fear tatic to get the general population to buy more expensive products because if they don't then you had better expect the grim reaper to show up en masse to your quaint little town in the form of a natural disaster.

We do need to take steps to stop being such a gluttonous nation (for those of us in the States), it will only benefit us in the future. Take drastic measures like selling our cars and buying a hybrid, installing solar panels on our property, only buying food from so called "green retailers", ad nauseum is way extreme. Think PETA to animal rights, there's being reasonable and then there's just plain effed up thinking. We as "intelligent lifeforms" need to take more responsibility then we currently are to help curb our affect on the ecosystem; however we do not need to do bend our lives to fit into the "green" lifestyle. In Nature no species is "green", every species leaves its own footprint. There are other species that take the leftovers/waste of the first species for their own uses. On top of that there are not enough of a sole species to affect the planet on a global scale, which is the sole reason humanity is able to affect the global temperature (which I still have yet to see evidence that shows that we are actually affecting the global climate, and it is not part of a cycle).

We can offset our imprint on Nature, and we should where we can and it makes sense. That being said we are not affecting the planet the way these fear mongering climatologists would have you believe.

 

[Beev]

Someone needs to go to his house, punch him the stomach, and tell him to STFU.

 

[destrekor]

Gore has a very close friend at NYT.

me, I refuse to change any ways of life. If I had a Hummer, I'd keep it, well, unless gas costs forced me at some point to switch vehicles. But not out of an eco-friendly mindset, that's for damn sure. Why? Because I don't give a shit about the human race.
I'm probably one of the biggest hypocrites when it comes to the human race and my personal beliefs alongside my actions.
To make it short and sweet: we are a plague (paging Agent Smith), and are far from intelligent enough to deserve life on this world. But the intriguing thought, is that we once were, but in the process of becoming 'intelligent', we lost touch with nature and are dooming ourselves. If we can't figure a way out to live peacefully in this world (essentially drop religion and drop modern life, no more buildings, no more mines, no more world communication). However, here comes hypocrisy: hell no I ain't dropping the comforts of modern life that all of us in the 1st world nations were enjoying. Thus, let's just go out with a bang, drop the religion (a necessary step toward a comfortable, peaceful life wherever you are: although religion promises peace and calm, for as long as religion as graced the minds of man, we were plagued with struggle after struggle), and take other steps towards living in a way where everyone can enjoy themselves, and await the destruction of man. No more man, no more worries, and maybe a better creature can step up to the plate as top of the food chain and have room to grow in intelligence, or size. I say bring the damn dinosaurs back. They were able to keep themselves alive for well... ever? Hell, even with the different ice ages, a few creatures survived, adapted, evolved, etc etc etc. Humans, well.. we don't do that so well. Maybe an ice age would force further evolution of our race, into a better adapted race and one that may yet again deserve to live?

/spiel

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

I won't drastically change anything I do. I enjoy my 8800 GTX, my 2 systems constantly running, driving a fast as balls car that gets 8 MPG but can hit 150 mph+, and every other enjoyable thing. If you thought my post was saying you shouldn't I am sorry as I would never say that . I do believe that we can take steps to reduce our effect on the climate without drastically changing our lifestyle (or even at all for that matter). For example just switching to a flourescent bulb you save yourself money, they last longer, and are imo a bit brighter. Doesn't change your QoL (and would actually improve it by saving you money, true its not much but its still there) but it does help reduce your footprint on the planet.

Hummer's are just crap anyways and I see no use for them. There are many other things I would rather use that gas money for .

 

[xanis]

Originally posted by: DisgruntledVirus
Hummer's are just crap anyways and I see no use for them. There are many other things I would rather use that gas money for .

Actually I think the H3 gets more than the 8mpg like your car does.

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

Originally posted by: Xanis

Originally posted by: DisgruntledVirus
Hummer's are just crap anyways and I see no use for them. There are many other things I would rather use that gas money for .

Actually I think the H3 gets more than the 8mpg like your car does.

One gets 23 the other gets 25 city, both are 30+ hwy.

I have no issues with driving a fast car that gets low mpg, just don't own one myself .

 

[Colt45]

wrong forum