Al Gore's made some headlines by starring in his own movie. I honestly don't know if he's simply posturing as the hipper Al Gore for another run at the Presidency, or if he's finally put politics out of his mind and he's doing personal projects to keep himself busy. As long as there's a chance he's still a politician, people will read politics into anything he does. So, while An Inconvenient Truth is supposedly about putting politics behind us and finding common ground based on science, having Gore appear as the spokesman does more to say "this is a political movie" than anything else he could have done.
Especially when, after the movie's debut, a scientific convention tries to distance itself from Gore's starring "hockey stick" graph because of faulty statistical reasoning (more technical info here).
Additionally, a Nobel Laureate's attempt to suggest a cure for global warming that doesn't involve Kyoto ran into significant scientific political pressure. Yes, I'm worried, but not how you'd think.
posted by Max Lybbert at 2:23 PM
3 Comments:
It's pretty amazing. You'd think scientific and credentialed data would have some kind of impact.
It looks like Al Gore is taking on a series of projects more than anything else.
Credentialed and scientific data does have something of an impact on me. It is credentialed and scientific, after all.
However, it's not a trump card. When you have a group of scientists asking a Nobel laureate to tone down his credentialed (as in Nobel laureate) and scientific (as in Nobel laureate) paper, there's something wrong.
When mathemeticians (credentialed) look into the numbers used by credentialed scientists to justify a hockey stick graph, and determine that the math is terribly wrong, amature, and "terribly mistaken"; and to prove the point, the mathemeticians put random data through the equations, and get a hockey stick graph 99% of the time, well, the scientists credentials don't save the day. Especially when the hockey stick occurs at the point in the graph where Mann stops using tree ring data and uses actual temperature measurements, which is a terrible statistical no-no.
So, yes, I give credentials and scientific methods weight, but I don't stop thinking when I see the letters "Ph.D." Not to really push the point, but the more college professors I meet, the less impressed I am with doctorate degrees.
I don't want to push things down on the front page, so let me get into some detail here.
It's true that the world is getting warmer. It really doesn't make sense to try to argue this point. Scientists recently stated that the world is the warmest it's been in 1,000 years. But the world is more than 1,000 years old; in fact the Crusades were 1,000 years ago. And that 1,000 year figure is somewhat misleading, because it includes the "Little Ice Age" that occurred 400 years ago, and the lower-than-average temperatures just before and after the Little Ice Age.
It's clear that the world heats up and cools down naturally. It's also clear that polar bears haven't gone extinct, even though the world has been hotter than it is today (the claim that we are on new ground is laughable).
However, even if there were no natural warming, scientists believe that "if current trends continue for 100 years, then we may see global temperatures rise about .5 degrees Celsius (1 degree Farhenheit)." What's the chance that current trends will continue for 100 years?
Michael Crichton really pegs this one:
"To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd.
"Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam?
"Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?"
This comment is too long already. But, two posts that round out my reasoning can be found at Coyote Blog. One is about wealth creation, but it also discusses what makes a natural resource a resource (hint, creative people who come up with a use for it), and the other covers how we stopped using one very valuable resource when a better one came around.
Will current trends continue for 100 years? I seriously doubt it. Current trends haven't continued for thirty years when it comes to overpopulation (you'll need to scroll down to the Simon/Ehrlich bet), and I haven't seen any reason to believe this is different.
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