lundi, avril 09, 2007

Review: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism)

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) by Christopher C. Horner is worth reading. There are lots of unprofessional tactics this author employs to get his point across, such as he keeps referring to "The Green Agenda" and "The Greens" as if they were one organized body with one voice and one agenda — which is obviously not the case. The first quarter of the book also keeps calling them communists and implies that their agenda is more about energy control than environmentalism — which again is ridiculous.

What he does do however is provide counter arguments for all the typical environmentalists complaints, like ocean level rising, polar bears drowning, etc.

I've always tried to be environmentally conscious and responsible, and as such I read everything I can that's related to environmental pollutants and global warming, and usually these sources are all exaggerated claims of what could happen, this book was the first thing I've ever read from the opposing view. Opposing view does not mean that he was saying anything like "Coal is great! Coal doesn't contribute to GHG emissions", nothing of the sort. This book followed more closely to the lines of taking a claim, and then studying the research that went into those claims.

Reading these, I'm sure the authors employing a bias, but he still provides so much highly detailed information that unless he is making things up (which he wasn't in all the facts I looked up), there has to be some truth to it. These truths are surprising, not because they are complicated or anything, but more because they make you question a lot of other asusmptions you've made. Such as, when people discuss a rise in X (say floods), does that mean X actually rose? Or does it mean X is being measured a lot more (a flood is only a flood when it damages someones property.. So the water wasn't considered a flood before someone moved there)

Questions

After this book, and then sitting through an Al Gore'ish Global Warming presentation presented by the Delphi Group, I had the following questions for the presentor. All of these questions were inspired by the book, but you'll notice I all my references are ones I found my self.

  • Are polar bear populations really at risk?

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/09/wpolar09.xml
    http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2005/07/15/polar-bears050715.html#skip300x250


    And a few other sources I've found say for the most part that though we have to be weary of global warming, Polar Bear populations are for the most part thieving.

    There are of course articles supporting the ideas that there is global warming that is negatively affecting polar bears:
    Polar bears deserting unstable ice to give birth

  • Is the disappearing ice on Mount Kilimanjaro really a consequence of global warming?

    I've heard in a few sources that the snow melting on Mount Kilimanjaro is a result of lower humidity (which is a result of de-forestation), and was taking place even in the 1850s, before man had any real global foot print on the planet (well, coal was getting bad then, but, wasn't nearly as big as today).

    According to Hardy, forest reduction in the areas surrounding Kilimanjaro, and not global warming, might be the strongest human influence on glacial recession. "lClearing for agriculture and forest fires—often caused by honey collectors trying to smoke bees out of their hives—have greatly reduced the surrounding forests," he says. The loss of foliage causes less moisture to be pumped into the atmosphere, leading to reduced cloud cover and precipitation and increased solar radiation and glacial evaporation.

    Evidence of glacial recession on Kilimanjaro is often dated from 1912, but most scientists believe tropical glaciers began receding as early as the 1850s. Stefan L. Hastenrath, a professor of atmospheric studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has found clues in local reports of a dramatic drop in East African lake levels after 1880. Lake evaporation indicates a decrease in precipitation and cloudiness around Kilimanjaro.

    http://www.camp4.com/news/index.php?newsid=504

    In fact – though I don't have a scientific source on this right now - I heard the the air and surface temperatures are actually colder on Kilimanjaro than now then they have been in the past.

  • Ocean levels rising 20 feet

    Your slide show showed ocean levels rising 20 feet or something, similar to Gore's predictions. To the best of my research, this could only happen if all of Greenland were to melt. Even the IPCC's generous estimate has a max of 37" ( http://science.howstuffworks.com/question473.htm ) by 2100. Some sources I find say ocean levels have been steady for a long time and bare no relation to man made GHGs, other's say global warming has doubled the rate of ocean rising ( http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-11/rtsu-gwd112105.php ), but it is still a very slow rate.

    About Greenland's ice melting though, one rumor I've heard, but have no source for, suggests Greenland's Geography is similar to a valley, such that melting ice would create a lake instead of contributing to ocean level rises. Also, didn't the Vikings used to live there and practice Agriculture? Suggesting that it was at one point warming with less ice, and that they only left when the ice became a bigger problem again?

  • Ethanol

    Is this really an option? I've read several articles about ethanol in the past, and non seem to convince me that it is a real option. Cars sometimes run better with ethanol, sometimes worse though ( http://www.ethanol.org/documents/ACEFuelEconomyStudy_000.pdf )

    And according to New Scientist

    Likewise, Tiffany Groode, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US recently showed that biofuel and gasoline production have a very similar footprint, with a slight advantage for gasoline. Groode notes that the difference between the two is so slim that it would only take a few small changes for bioethanol producers to gain the advantage.

    http://environment.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11325&feedId=online-news_rss20
  • Antarctica, Is it getting warmer?

    Every report about it essentially has the message "it's too early to tell", the west has parts melting as you showed in your presentation, but isn't the East getting colder? Parts of Antarctica's ice is getting thicker, etc..


    But these studies have huge uncertainty's relative to their results, and their links to global warming and potential consequences seem to just be theories, not likelihoods (as I interpret them at least)

  • Are the 1990's really the hottest years on record?

    Ross McKitrick, the same Canadian economist who disputes Mann's "Hockey Stick", claims that this is a result of poor data. That in the 1990s, when communism collapsed, a lot of temperature recording stations shut down (I think something like this happened in the 30s too? not sure)

    This source is disputing McKitrick's claims, fortunately there is a correspondence with McKitrick included in a link at the bottom of the article.

    http://timlambert.org/category/science/mckitrick/

After this book I am now skeptical of everything I hear and read. In fact I now don't know where I stand on a lot of issues. Issues like Kyoto and C02. Is C02 a problem? There is no causation between C02 and global warming [1] (according to this book, global warming isn't even global, it mainly occurs in the nothern hemisphere), but there's a clear corrilation, kind of... And Kyoto, I still have to research more, but from what I've learned in this book, and learned from other sources, it seems like Kyoto would do too much economic damage to justify any barely notible positive environmental impact it may have.

Now, I'm not saying Kyoto's too small so we shouldn't do it, I'm saying Kyoto seems like it was just written up poorly, for example, according to this book, Nations cannot count lowered emissions due to new nuclear plants towards Kyoto. Nuclear is highly debatable (I know because I'm listening to a debate on Nuclear power right now: Nuclear Energy Must Power Our Future, Intelligence Squared Limited) but still, to put such a provision doesn't make sense to me.

References

  1. Michael B. McElroy, The Modern Scholar: Global Warming, Global Threat, 2003 Recorded Books, LLC

All other references are littered in the form of links through the entry

posted by Matt @ 2:15 p.m.   2 comments