Real Contributions from the Blogosphere

I’ve been pretty uncreative lately but, fortunately, that hasn’t been the case for everybody. Bloggers are making serious contributions to our understanding of all sorts of subjects.

U. S. Official Temps Reduced Downwards

The big blogospheric news, of course, is the contribution of Anthony Watts and over weather bloggers to revising the official records of U. S. temperatures in the 1990’s.

I would hope we won’t get ahead of ourselves here. IMO reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses and reducing energy consumption are largely matters of good engineering and everybody should be in favor of them.

The question is not whether human activity causes heat or produces heat-trapping greenhouse gasses. Those are both, clearly, facts. The questions are whether human activity is overwhelmed by other causes in producing climate change, whether it’s cost effective to oppose climate change, and whether the measures on the table will actually produce the results their proponents claim. Kyoto won’t (especially since the fastest-growing offenders are exempted). Its primary effect is slowing economic growth, anyway, and I think it’s far from clear that slowing economic growth will reduce global warming or increase it.

The European experience with “cap and trade” hasn’t been particularly enthralling, either.

We’d get far more bang for the buck simply by ending our subsidies on gas consumption.

War of Words

Take a look at SWJ Blog’s post, &147;Attacking the al-Qaeda ‘Narrative’”. The post is a scouting analysis in the war of words and ideas against terrorism. This is the battlefield on which the blogosphere operates so I think the post deserves some serious attention.

Digging Up the Facts

Confederate Yankee has made a substantive contribution to the discussion of the creative fiction published as fact at The New Republic. I’ve been inclined to stay out of this food fight but CF has consistently been one of the best bloggers at going to solid sources and digging up some facts.

Interviews

The Talking Dog has probably conducted more interviews than anyone (other than professional journalists) in the blogosphere. His most recent is with Marshall Onellion and Steve Fortney, authors of Seeking Truth: Living With Doubt which TD describes as

a variation on those ambitious books seeking to constitute a brief history, or a unified field theory, of everything.

5 comments… add one
  • IMO reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses and reducing energy consumption are largely matters of good engineering and everybody should be in favor of them.

    Dave, energy consumption goes up with time. I think you’re just calling for more efficiency so that we can get more bang for the buck, correct?

    We’d get far more bang for the buck simply by ending our subsidies on gas consumption.

    What subsidies are there? I always here about this, but I don’t know what it means. Are these subsidies covered by the taxes the gocernment collects on gasoline?

  • Dave, energy consumption goes up with time. I think you’re just calling for more efficiency so that we can get more bang for the buck, correct?

    Exactly. It’s just good engineering.

    There are hundreds of different indirect and direct subsidies on gasoline consumption including exemption of farmers from gasoline taxes, the Interstate Highway System, exemptions of light trucks from certain federal taxes and so on.

  • Dave,

    If you’re going to post statements like this

    The questions are whether human activity is overwhelmed by other causes in producing climate change, whether it’s cost effective to oppose climate change, and whether the measures on the table will actually produce the results their proponents claim.

    shouldn’t you at least posit which natural causes you think the experts are missing? The reasons for climate variations in the past are well known (axial tilt, orbital variation, solar output, volcanic activity, etc.) and none of them are at a point now where they could be contributing more than mankind’s contribution according to the experts in the field. So I would seriously like to ask for less vague “It might be natural.” statements and some serious facts that have stood up to examination to support that statement.

  • No, I don’t, Jim and I’ll briefly explain why. I’m not a climatologist and I don’t plan on becoming one. I have no interest in debating the merits of the various arguments at all because I think it’s a lot more important to debate the merits of the proposals that are on the floor.

    I generally avoid posting on this subject at all and the few times I have I’ve just said that whether we’re generating heat and waste is, basically, simple physics and obvious. Now let’s get down to brass tacks: policies.

    In my view the very first, most important thing we need to do is to start dismantling the maze of subsidies we have on energy consumption, many of which date from a time in which automobile manufacturing was a lot more important to the economy than it is now. There are dozens or hundreds of such subsidies, some of which I’ve listed above.

    That’s the first, most necessary thing because as long as we’re distorting the market as much as we are now it’s going to be darned hard to predict what the impact of any given reform will be. Also, the Europeans are in a completely differently place than we are on this—we’re nearly 30 years behind them. The very first thing we need to do is get our market house in order, not put in place a bunch of subsidies or additional incentive programs of which nobody is really sure what the effects might be. We’re on the downhill, lower cost, easier to do end of this process so why get a lot more ambitious?

    That’s about all I have to say on this subject.

  • Chris Link

    The very first thing we need to do is get our market house in order, not put in place a bunch of subsidies or additional incentive programs of which nobody is really sure what the effects might be. We’re on the downhill, lower cost, easier to do end of this process so why get a lot more ambitious?

    Well, because the degree to which we need to get a lot more ambitious depends on how bad the situation actually is, and to answer that we need to have some kind of broad agreement as to what the underlying science is. If you take the position – as you’re effectively doing – that it’s a complex question that we don’t know the answer to, so we should tread with caution and see what happens after each step, then yes, the end-subsidies argument is fine and sufficient.

    If, on the other hand, you’re in agreement with the vast majority of climate researchers (and it’s worth pointing out that even those who aren’t in agreement aren’t making arguments in peer-reviewed journals and the like – they’re making their critiques outside the scientific process) that major change is occuring right now because of our own actions, and the results could be hugely catastrophic, then the need to do stuff sooner rather than later goes up significantly, and just saying, “well, at least we’re not promoting bad policies anymore” isn’t sufficient.

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