D'oh! We Meant Global WARMING! No Really!

Ah, there's nothing like having a harebrained notion from days of yore dredged up and thrown in your face, especially if "it seemed like a good idea at the time."
Consider the cringe-worthy tableaux of public figures dancing around revelations of what they now try to blithely dismiss as "youthful indiscretions?"
Fun. But not as exquisite as today's spectacle of self righteous puffery from major news organizations being called to account because their hysterical pontifications of the past inconveniently contradict their hysterical pontifications of today.
In the ongoing debate over global warming, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe has been most rudely reminding Americans that, not too long ago, the media's purveyors of wisdom were sounding the alarm over the danger of global cooling.
Yes, in the mid '70s, we were told the world was in danger of plunging into a new Ice Age.
The venerable Time and Newsweek were once avid passengers on the global freeze bandsleigh.
Now that all have subscribed to the notion that we're doomed to burn, not freeze, they're lashing out at those rude enough to remember the last time they told us the sky was falling.
Two weeks ago, the New York Times blasted Inhofe in an editorial. Titled "Doubting Inhofe," it was long on ad hominem attacks and name calling and short on scientific refutation of Inhofe's skepticism that the Earth is cooking and Man is responsible.
This week, it's Newsweek magazine eating its words, pretending they're a fluffy little frozen trifle of no consequence.
Senior editor Jerry Adler tries an amusing ice dance of both backtrack and attack in his screed "Remember Global Cooling? Why scientists find climate change so hard to predict."
On the one hand he acknowledges that the magazine's 1975 prediction that the Earth was headed for the deep freeze was "spectacularly wrong about the near term future."
On the other hand, he proclaims that "predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today."
Yes, he says "scientists find climate change so hard to predict," but now they're sure.
It's for real.
Really.
Victims of the real estate and technology bubbles will recognize that classic qualifier of the once-burned: But it's really different this time!
Adler then rails on Senator Inhofe for pointing out the media's now-dented credibility on the issue.

"The implication (Inhofe) draws is that if you're not worried about being trampled by a stampede of woolly mammoths through downtown Chicago, you don't have to believe what the media is (sic) saying about global warming, either."

Ha ha. I get it. Reductio ad absurdum. People skeptical about hysterical global warming predictions are so dismissive, they'd just as soon think wooly mammoths are about to start stampeding through glaciers in downtown Chicago. What silly, closed-minded, people they must be. Ha ha. But then comes this delightful bit of equivocation:

"In fact, the story wasn't 'wrong' in the journalistic sense of 'inaccurate.' Some scientists indeed thought the Earth might be cooling in the 1970s"

(Oh, but of course now they're really, positively, sure it's the other way around.)
"Wasn't 'wrong' in the journalistic sense of 'inaccurate.'" Is that beautiful or what?
Why no, it wasn't inaccurate in the most rigidly defined journalistically technical definition of "inaccurate." Just throw the words "scientists say..." in front of anything and, if you can find a few scientists somewhere who'll say it, you're in the clear.
Doubtless one could indeed round up a gaggle of experts willing to tell the most alarming scare stories, quote them accurately and then have a story that was, technically speaking "accurate." I've also seen several esteemed scholars explaining how September 11th had to have been a government conspiracy. Perhaps Newsweek would like to hang its worldview on a few quotes from them.
Adler then goes into full defensive mode by trotting out a doomsday scenario Newsweek has embraced but isn't now contradicting.

"Astronomers have been warning for decades that life on Earth could be wiped out by a collision with a giant meteorite; it hasn't happened yet, but that doesn't mean that journalists have been dupes or alarmists for reporting this news."

On the contrary. That is precisely what it means.
In reporting complex issues, especially scientific and medical ones which can both confuse and concern readers, many journalists routinely act as both alarmists and all-too-willing dupes of the scientists (or politicians) willing to tell the most overblown scare story. That's how the scientists seek more attention and funding; that's how the politicians get more attention and votes; and that's how their accomplices in the media try to sell more magazines or get bigger broadcast audiences.
Now that they've been taken to task for their hysteria, these media outlets fall back on what the New York Times editorial calls a "consensus among mainstream scientists and the governments of nearly every industrialized nation concerning manmade climate change."
This "consensus," the Times implies, is quite infallible and anyone who questions it is guilty of a "hysteria of doubt," and Inhofe is therefore the "master" of such "hysteria."
How dare he stray from the revealed wisdom of climate change!
Well... from this year's revealed wisdom.
Are we paying attention class? Today's lesson is that if enough people believe something to be true, it's just true.
Period.
No, we will not entertain any questions.
That is a logic more worthy of Goebbels than Galileo.
In reality, despite Al Gore's fervent attempt to persuade us otherwise, there is plenty of dissent in the grand "consensus" on climate change, from many widely respected sources.
This "consensus" is so self evident and obvious only to those who fervently wish to see one.
Is man made global warming a real possibility?
Of course.
And if it can truly, reliably, be established as a threat, it's a terrifying one indeed.
If.
The stakes could be astronomical for the entire world. Shrinking polar ice caps, rising sea levels, droughts, flooding, even a possible shutdown of the Gulf Stream would be catastrophic.
An intelligent, reasoned, scientific discussion is definitely in order.
Unfortunately, the hyperbolic scientific "consensus," as well as the new and ever more breathless media consensus, are bolstered, and almost hopelessly contaminated, by three additional factors that have no place in a serious discussion of what could indeed be a major scientific and environmental issue.
Politics.
Politics.
Politics.
As it has heated up -no pun intended- the debate over climate change has become almost inextricably intertwined with anti-American, anti-business, anti-industrial extremist ideology and rhetoric. The prospect that the issue could be a new weapon to advance a malign political agenda has made the global warming clarion call irresistible for biased ostensible journalists more interested in advancing their favorite political causes than in responsibly informing the public.
When yesterday's quirky tale about how we're all about to freeze turned into today's scare story of a melting world, it also became precious opportunity to bash a list of boogeymen long despised by America's domestic enemies. The oil industry, the power industry, the automotive industry... hell, all industry can now be condemned as global warming criminals.
(Amusingly enough, one of the nut cases' greatest bettes noir of all, nuclear power, does not produce greenhouse gases and, if the "consensus" truly is correct, may be the one way to reliably meet America's growing energy needs without contributing to global warming.)
This new jihad against America's economy even has its own Holy Koran, the Kyoto Protocol climate change treaty.
Utterly devoid of real-world context, the Kyoto Protocol mandates limits in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by major industrial countries like the United States, but not by major industrial players, and carbon dioxide emitters, like China and India. The treaty proposes to cripple America's industrial capacity while, at the same time, leaving two of its biggest up-and-coming international economic competitors unfettered. ...and, not incidentally, still emitting huge amounts of suspected greenhouse gases.
When U.S. industrial leaders and politicians point out that this makes no sense, they are immediately pilloried for "not caring" about the environment or being concerned about "profits," heaven forbid.
Should there be international limits on carbon dioxide? Perhaps. But a lopsided treaty, that disproportionately attacks the economic and industrial system best suited to produce the kind of future innovations which might actually help, is simply insane.
No matter.
In many of today's newsrooms, the meme has become a mantra: Global warming is incontrovertibly real and incontrovertibly man made. Kyoto is indisputibly the only way to stop global warming. America must sacrifice its economy and industrial capacity to stop global warming. It's all true and proven, 100%, and there is no other truth. Amen.
No wonder they get a little touchy when reminded that, not so long ago, they were chanting something very different.
While far from a mea culpa, Adler's piece does indulge in at least a little self deprecation in his attempt to diminish the telling significance of Newsweek's Ice Age doomsaying.
"All in all," he observes as if with a wink, "it's probably just as well that society elected not to follow one of the possible solutions mentioned in the NEWSWEEK article: to pour soot over the Arctic ice cap, to help it melt."
Probably just as well indeed. Now let's talk about the pending proposals to destroy the economies of the civilized world for the sake of the latest theory.

October 24, 2006