As may be seen from the seven year hiatus between this post and the next, Scientific Republican has been proceeding as slowly as the convergence of CO2 doubling sensitivity on a single uncontroversial value . The title phrase stated as a joke in the days when republicans, myself included , still looked forward to the next refreshing issue of Scientific American, and the title now redeployed in cyberspace first saw the light of day on a one page hard-copy parody of a Sci Am cover produced for a birthday party honoring its book editor, late MIT physics professor Phillip Morrison.
I added it to my Typepad bloglist in 2007, but concentrated instead on Adamant , until the demands of my latest Harvard research appointment led me to put both aside in 2009. As few pieces were posted on Sci. Rep 1.0 , I will as time permits simply repost them here.
May 09, 2007
Arms And The Weatherman
Hard cases make bad law , but worse science policy can arise when commanders in the Climate Wars deploy the mode of ideological rhetoric Paul Weyrich and Michael Lind style"armed cant." It's hardly new -- in 1990 I noted that "In the name of the greenhouse effect,some environmentalists are demanding a 30 percent rollback in C02 emissions by the year 2000." Today that green fire blazes in Al Gore's belly.Wielding rhetoric inflammatory as William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech, he seeks a " 90% or greater " cut in CO2 by 2050.
In 2000, the Former Next President's campaign economists dismissed Green proposals to knock America's energy economy back into the 1960's . Now their man demands we crucify coal , starving the national economy down to CO2 emission levels last seen in the 1880's . If he reaches any farther back into the future , he may pull a Constitutional amendment to abolish fire out of his stovepipe hat.
An old school political Neanderthal like Bryan could only applaud Al's road show. With the same didactic preachyness as Jurassic Park , An Inconvenient Truth deprives viewers of polemically inconvenient scientific facts by design.
But that's show business--the Alley Oop constituencies on both sides of the aisle haven't cracked a science textbook since the late neolithic . They don't give a whoop if debate still rages in scientific journals nobody reads.They'd much rather see the climate change controversy downshift into the more popular--and political-- media staffers can handle without recourse to a technical dictionary. If the Supreme Court of the United States can exhale a condemnation of CO2 without troubling itself over terms like " troposphere " and "radiative forcing" why should the Senate loose sleep over them ?
Tabloid climate science makes better bedside reading. One side's depiction of any human impact as tantamount to Weather of Mass Destruction has become a soporifically predictable feature of late night television. The other evening, Al Gore calmed the excitable Conan O'Brien by assuring "We don't know enough not to make a catastrophic mistake in dealing with the world's climate". before expounding a half century's worth of policy plans founded on climate modeling art that , while it has improved as much as microwave cooking in a generation, still has far to go before achieving the satisfying crunch of hard science.
Lacking media traction, the Green climate warriors Red State counterparts base their anodyne opposition less on scientific evidence than political intuition, trusting in the authority of scientific bedtime stories that wouldn't trouble a ten year old expecting the tooth fairy. Yet as the Climate Wars enter their second century, the atmosphere remains the Earth's most complex dynamic system.
If you think it will grow simpler in time for the election, dream on. Those unwilling to heft the heavy scientific chronicles of climate change research risk falling prey to views by turns parochial , tendentious, or just plain daft. Conservative scientists find themselves in a waking nightmare, as scanning from Fox TV to the Washington Times, they see right wing journalism devolving into a 21st century scientific eyesore. Some raise a disturbing question : is a sensible Conservative consensus on climate change even possible?
Both sides talking heads seem more interested in trading truth for influence than speaking truth to power. Those on the right, though well , lawyerly , lack a first-rate scientific constituency to back them. behind their stalwart front , there's little stomach for seriously debating the scientific facts Ditto Al Gore, who his 1001th performance of The Speech to an audience of 12,000 earth scientists in San Francisco last month, but wisely skedaddled before they could ask too many questions.
Only one skeptic on climate change counts as a real player in the fast moving scientific game underlying the debate. Richard Lindzen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a prolific and respected author of peer-reviewed papers on the atmospheric sciences explaining climate's 'Quasi-Biennial Oscillation' and the role of tides and gravity wave drag in the circulation of the upper atmosphere.His sheer creativity sets the MIT professor of atmospheric sciences conspicuously apart from a cohort largely comprised of politically appointed TV weathermen and researchers with careers at best tangential to state of the art climate studies.
Only one skeptic on climate change counts as a real player in the fast moving scientific game underlying the debate. Richard Lindzen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a prolific and respected author of peer-reviewed papers on the atmospheric sciences explaining climate's 'Quasi-Biennial Oscillation' and the role of tides and gravity wave drag in the circulation of the upper atmosphere.His sheer creativity sets the MIT professor of atmospheric sciences conspicuously apart from a cohort largely comprised of politically appointed TV weathermen and researchers with careers at best tangential to state of the art climate studies.
Lindzen is no stranger to technical controversy. He has over the years posed several novel and scientifically interesting objections to the common wisdom in the climate change debate, focusing on how rising amounts of atmospheric water vapor could curb the rate of man made temperature rise. But each of his serial objections has been coherently replied to in the peer reviewed science literature. So good scientist that he is , Lindzen has accepted as valid many quantitative objections to his theoretical views, and altered his stance accordingly.{ THIS JUST IN }
That's how science works. Senator Inhofe's words notwithstanding , the iconoclast celebrated in Michael Crichton's 'State of Fear ' no longer defends some talking points yack TV pundits refuse to relinquish. To their dismay , he has committed the unpardonable political sin of allowing scientific facts to change his mind. What he chose not to say about the state of the science in seconding Crichton and British geographer George Stott in a recent debate in New York speaks even more loudly than his vigorous denunciation of hype in the service of politics.
This may never register with some , for the ditto head common wisdom on climate has been projected into the halls of congress-- before Pelosi and Waxman returned to the center ring, the Congressional climate policy circus was presided over by Rush's Limbaugh's scientific casting director Marc Morano. Al Gore steers clear of MIT, but what about Lindzen's impact on his colleagues there ? Lindzen has had twenty years to persuade The National Academy's thousand-plus members that man-made warming remains too uncertain to be a serious issue. Like most respectable skeptics, he began by questioning warnings detectable existence , and pointing out that negative feedbacks could curb it in models and reality alike.
Ask around the Academy as to how many have been won over to these views ,and you will discover that the answer is closer to none than a dozen This is just as true on Lindzen's home turf.Other MIT professors share the view that the Climate Wars have become egregiously politicized , and that climate models are sorely constrained as predictive tools. Yet in a quarter century of almost daily interaction Lindzen has failed to persuade such colleagues as MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel or oceanographer Carl Wunsch that global warming is" not a big deal." Wunsch agreed to appear alongside Lindzen in the recent British TV program , 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' but has ended up accusing the producers of swindling him -and their audience by playing fast and loose with scientific truth.
Emanuel is a far cry from a liberal icon; MIT is not Harvard, and like Lindzen ,he harshly criticized Carl Sagan's attempt to use a primitive climate model as a policy lever during the Cold War, calling ' nuclear winter ' studies "notorious for their lack of scientific integrity " They may disagree as to both the nature of solutions and the immanent need for them , but it is worth noting where their views coincide- a bipartisan commitment to the integrity of science makes Emmanuel's take on what the climate wars have come to 'Phaetons' Reins' a necessary compliment to Lindzen's. Both agree that whatever is happening is happening slowly - policy maters may lack the energy ,but they do not lack the time confront the full spectrum of facts that define a debate that defies both sides attempts to reduce it to sound bites. One that emerges from such study is an economic analogy -- their are parallels between the problems posed by climate change and gradual inflation.
As long as CO2 is rising by a few parts per million per year , radiative forcing of warming is growing by microwatts per square meter per day. It does not sound like much, , given the kilowatt per square meter power sunlight already deposits , but the microwatts have been adding up since The Wealth Of Nations manuscript first lay on Adam Smith's desktop, and some hundreds of thousands of days , and a lot of Mr.Watt's steam engines later, CO2 bracket creep has given rise to unavoidable debate as to the present and future costs of ignoring climatic inflation.
If any species of Palaeoconservative principle is at once worth conserving , and profoundly endangered , it is that the political neutrality of scientific institutions must first exist in order to be respected. That sentiment may not be ready for prime time today. The disdain shown science by erstwhile conservatives and intransigent liberals waging the Climate War on TV too much recalls Thucydides view of an earlier conflict :
"The state which separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools"
At present, none speak for science in a warming debate caught in the crossfire between vying political agendas. That may be the way Washington works , but while Republicans and Democrats clearly have different metaphysical views of the world, its atmosphere neither knows nor cares. There can be no scientific armistice in the Climate Wars until both sides acknowledge that there can be , at most , one kind of physics. --Russell Seitz C.2007
That's how science works. Senator Inhofe's words notwithstanding , the iconoclast celebrated in Michael Crichton's 'State of Fear ' no longer defends some talking points yack TV pundits refuse to relinquish. To their dismay , he has committed the unpardonable political sin of allowing scientific facts to change his mind. What he chose not to say about the state of the science in seconding Crichton and British geographer George Stott in a recent debate in New York speaks even more loudly than his vigorous denunciation of hype in the service of politics.
This may never register with some , for the ditto head common wisdom on climate has been projected into the halls of congress-- before Pelosi and Waxman returned to the center ring, the Congressional climate policy circus was presided over by Rush's Limbaugh's scientific casting director Marc Morano. Al Gore steers clear of MIT, but what about Lindzen's impact on his colleagues there ? Lindzen has had twenty years to persuade The National Academy's thousand-plus members that man-made warming remains too uncertain to be a serious issue. Like most respectable skeptics, he began by questioning warnings detectable existence , and pointing out that negative feedbacks could curb it in models and reality alike.
Ask around the Academy as to how many have been won over to these views ,and you will discover that the answer is closer to none than a dozen This is just as true on Lindzen's home turf.Other MIT professors share the view that the Climate Wars have become egregiously politicized , and that climate models are sorely constrained as predictive tools. Yet in a quarter century of almost daily interaction Lindzen has failed to persuade such colleagues as MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel or oceanographer Carl Wunsch that global warming is" not a big deal." Wunsch agreed to appear alongside Lindzen in the recent British TV program , 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' but has ended up accusing the producers of swindling him -and their audience by playing fast and loose with scientific truth.
Emanuel is a far cry from a liberal icon; MIT is not Harvard, and like Lindzen ,he harshly criticized Carl Sagan's attempt to use a primitive climate model as a policy lever during the Cold War, calling ' nuclear winter ' studies "notorious for their lack of scientific integrity " They may disagree as to both the nature of solutions and the immanent need for them , but it is worth noting where their views coincide- a bipartisan commitment to the integrity of science makes Emmanuel's take on what the climate wars have come to 'Phaetons' Reins' a necessary compliment to Lindzen's. Both agree that whatever is happening is happening slowly - policy maters may lack the energy ,but they do not lack the time confront the full spectrum of facts that define a debate that defies both sides attempts to reduce it to sound bites. One that emerges from such study is an economic analogy -- their are parallels between the problems posed by climate change and gradual inflation.
As long as CO2 is rising by a few parts per million per year , radiative forcing of warming is growing by microwatts per square meter per day. It does not sound like much, , given the kilowatt per square meter power sunlight already deposits , but the microwatts have been adding up since The Wealth Of Nations manuscript first lay on Adam Smith's desktop, and some hundreds of thousands of days , and a lot of Mr.Watt's steam engines later, CO2 bracket creep has given rise to unavoidable debate as to the present and future costs of ignoring climatic inflation.
If any species of Palaeoconservative principle is at once worth conserving , and profoundly endangered , it is that the political neutrality of scientific institutions must first exist in order to be respected. That sentiment may not be ready for prime time today. The disdain shown science by erstwhile conservatives and intransigent liberals waging the Climate War on TV too much recalls Thucydides view of an earlier conflict :
"The state which separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools"
At present, none speak for science in a warming debate caught in the crossfire between vying political agendas. That may be the way Washington works , but while Republicans and Democrats clearly have different metaphysical views of the world, its atmosphere neither knows nor cares. There can be no scientific armistice in the Climate Wars until both sides acknowledge that there can be , at most , one kind of physics. --Russell Seitz C.2007
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