Roger L. Simon: Global Warming: Back to School

The immortal image of Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School - one of the great unsung schlock classics- popped in my head when reading Howard Kurtz's column this morning on NBC's sponsorship of the Live Earth semi-extravaganza:

Wasn't NBC, whose news division covers the debate over climate change, providing a huge platform for advocates on one side of a contentious issue? And isn't the network helping a prominent Democrat -- who granted "Today" an interview last week in which he was asked again about his presidential ambitions -- raise money?

Dan Harrison, an NBC senior vice president, does not back away from the message. He calls the Gore effort "an initiative we believe in," including parent company General Electric. "I really don't think climate change is a political issue," Harrison says.

So now NBC senior vice presidents are "scientists" too. Hello, Rodney Dangerfield. Okay, that's not fair. Maybe Mr. Harrison is Dr. Harrison and has a secret PhD in climatology - or perhaps physics. And in that spirit I checked. Alas, Dan Harrison doesn't have his own Wikipedia entry yet and I didn't see anything else indicating any scientific training. But perhaps I missed something... can you help, dear reader? Or perhaps NBC would provide some indication of Harrison's scientific qualifications. For all we know, they could even be more than Al Gore's.

Comments

Comments require registration through TypeKey. Abusive remarks may be deleted. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Roger Simon.

NBC is the new CNN when it comes to liberal bias. "Countdown" with Keith Oberfuehrer tests any arguable limits of fair comment and unbiased reporting. I watched him the other night for a few minutes at the end; he makes Fox seem tame in its conservative political coverage. His ending of "J'accuse" the president was so arrogant and biased against the President that I thought this is utter political Michael Moore fantasy. His rant ended with Edward R. Murrow sign off "Good night and good luck," just to heighten the "I am righteous because I am fighting Joe McCarthy" comparision.

Don't think for a moment that this bias does
not leach over to the "Nightly News with Brian Williams." It does and Williams' presentation
if there is blood in Baghdad, it leads is so obvious. The press has concluded that it must use all its power against the President and regain that treasured Cronkite moment of opposition to the war.

The fastest way I can think of to kill the movement to re-establish the "Fairness Doctrine", is to demand balance for the likes of Keith Oberfuehrer.

There are, of course, many excellent scientists at NBC's parent, GE (in which I'm a shareholder), although I don't know if many of them specialize in climatology. GE may, however, have a financial interest in anti-global-warming-policies, which would provide it an opportunity to sell lots of turbines, jet engines, locomotives, lighting equipment, etc with higher efficiencies than the stuff that's out there now. (I say "may" because harm to the global economy brought about by excessive regulation would obviously hurt GE too, and it would be difficult to net out the upsides and the downsides)

Even if Jeff Immelt & Co sincerely believe in global warming, based on scientific advice and on their view of their responsibilities as citizens, NBC still shouldn't have sponsored this. First, global warming is of course a political issue; the fact that something has scientific aspects doesn't take it out of the political arena. Second, this extravaganza is tightly linked to left-wing politics and possibly to Mr Gore's personal political ambitions as well.

I read the comment "an initiative we believe in,"
As a profession of faith in the name of our redeemer/intercessor Al Gore.

There is no law barring NBC from making a 501(c)(3) religious contribution.

Science is the word, and the word is anthropogenic doctrine and these two are one.

So guess that you are going to shut about GW until you produce your scientific credentials.

What else is new, these guys understand global warming is a political issue, if anything the more they say it is not a political but a moral issue, the more political they are. On the day of the VA tech shooting BRAVO showed Bowling for Columbine. Its amazing, these guys talk about a elite who dominate the flow of information, they are the elite.

Make sure to get your new translation of anthropogenic doctrinal scriptures (4th) straight from The Holy See. ;)

The only thing Keith Ubermoron, Chrissie Matthews and the rest of those PMSNBC wanks are experts on is extremely low ratings.

Don't forget that GE has a huge position in nuclear energy. I happen to think that nuclear is the right way to go for energy independence and good planetary hygene - regardless of whether anthropogenic global warming is real or not. But, GE is about as biased as you can be on the subject of global warming.

Er,clarktooksberry or whatever your name is.... indeed, you are right. I don't have an opinion of how serious anthropogenic global warming is because, like roughly 99 percent of politicians, I am not scientifically qualified. So, as of now, I am agnostic on the question.

Or perhaps NBC would provide some indication of Harrison's scientific qualifications. For all we know, they could even be more than Al Gore's.

Com'on Roger. That's like shooting fish in a barrel. I have an old pet rock around here somewhere with better scientific credentials than the goremeister.

"Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies," said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist author, president of Waterkeeper Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy's son, who grew hoarse from shouting. "This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors."

So, we march on Washington and hang everybody? Cool! Then what, can we all go to Fiji and spend your grandpappy's money?

It just goes to show that this isn't about policy, it's about power and the ability to manipulate a crowd to one's advantage. It's a tactic effectively used by the Islamic mullahs too. There is no thought out policy or plan. Just emotional ranting. RFK, Jr must have felt great after his therapy session.

It is easy enough for a lay person to read materials from "both sides" that out there for consumption. A couple of simple conclusions (in no particular order) can be drawn from such research.

1) The earth has been warmer and colder prior to the Industrial Age and the significant increase in the human population.

2) CO2 has been both higher and lower than today in both warmer and colder periods.

3) Scientists are divided over CO2 as a cause or a consequence of increases in temperature (i.e. if anyone wants to read the research).

4) Warming and cooling periods are part of natural variability of which the sun is a key factor.

5) It is not possible to quantify the anthropogenic impact on the 0.6 degree increase in temperature over the past 50 years and that change is in fact di minimus if placed in historical context. (That does not mean that we can't calculate how much CO2 we release into the atmosphere. It means we can't quantify the impact of human activity.)

6) The weather can't be accurately predicted over the next 10 days. Anyone who has done any kind of complex modeling of any kind knows there are too many variables to accurately replicate nature. There are too many assumptions and the models (as complex as they are) are too simple. The forecasts and the dire consequences of the global warming contingent are not credible.

These factors lead me to largely discount the position of the global warming crowd and that is even be fore assessing their political and economic interests.

It's hard to believe that taking drastic action to reduce CO2 in a way that would negatively impact both political and economic freedom makes sense. Links in a post a while ago back took me to the President of the Czech Republic who makes the argument well.

Meanwhile, I will conserve and treat the environment responsibly (by my definition) because it makes sense to do so.

Imagine the peace of mind if there was no Left, lying about the jihad, the economy, history, lying about nature itself. I don't think there'd even be an Al Qaeda--at least not rampant, exploiting the west's weakness (AKA the west's left).

They're all in it to make money, Gore, NBC, the celebs, to ride that cash pony until it staggers and drops.

I'd love to help. You see, while Harrison does not hold any advanced degree in the sciences, he can simply do some research and find the positions of the world's premiere scientific bodies:

* NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
* National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
* National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
* State of the Canadian Cryosphere (SOCC)
* Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
* Royal Society of the United Kingdom (RS)
* American Geophysical Union (AGU)
* National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
* American Meteorological Society (AMS)
* Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS)

As for Barret's "3) Scientists are divided over CO2 as a cause or a consequence of increases in temperature (i.e. if anyone wants to read the research)."

He should perhaps read the research before posting. CO2 undeniably causes warming. It is a greenhouse gas. This has been known since 1896. However, CO2 can increase when the Earth warms, primarily by outgassing from the oceans. But the gas that is released causes more warming, hence its role as a feedback to orbital forcings.

Also, this site has four links listed @ bottom (yes, Boris, 'Heartland' is one of them), which help open the door to the world of non-AGW-believer science.

--
I'd love to help. You see, while Harrison does not hold any advanced degree in the sciences, he can simply do some research and find the positions of the world's premiere scientific bodies:

* NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS)
* National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
* National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
--

Boris, next you'll be telling us that are all descended from apes. Hee haw dontcha know that climate change is a liberal scam just like evolution.

We libertarians have a very simple reason for denying climate change in the face of what might seem to some to be overwhelming evidence. Climate change HAS to be a myth, because addressing it requires taxes and regulations. It MUST be a scam because if it isn't then the libertarian free market greedfest will grind to a halt. So we'd rather flush the planet down the crapper.

Can't we go back to talking about all the progress Bush is making in Iraq? I can't wait to hear about the next success story!! Goodie!!

Nick, you shoot yourself in the foot: the instant and total acceptance of a global warming crisis by people like you makes it that much more difficult for your leaders to persuade the rest of us to hate those heretic deniers.

But I'm all for a carbon tax. Let's just net it against the income tax, and get rid of the income tax as needed (progressively of course) until we're at about the same level of the govt's GDP slice. We do need to conserve oil--we got trouble if we don't.

Buddy, Do you have any scientific links? From what I see you have advocacy sites run by a small number of individuals.

Would you go against the recommendations of all medical bodies because you found osmeone who disagrees on the internet?

Boris,
Science doesn't run on consensus, even that of experts (of which there are relatively few on this subject). Science is a process and has a goal of creating and testing hypotheses.

If you look at the "experts," you find them divided, for good reason. Climate modelers are often proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). But climate modelers are using instruments which cannot be well calibrated and certainly not tested. In at least one case, they use exactly the same model that cannot predict the weather very well 5 days out.

Paleo-climatologists are more divided. They see how sparse and shaky the historical data is, and thus how hard it is to make accurate correlations (or test models by predicting the past).

All climatologists have a financial interest in increased funding for global warming research (not that all are biased by that, of course).

Yeah, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. So is methane (which mankind started releasing in much larger than "natural" amounts with the advent of agriculture) and so is water vapor.

The climate system is vastly complex, perhaps literally chaotic (in a mathematical sense). It is far too complex to model well, and the lack of calibration data makes the models even worse. When you add in selection bias caused by cherry picking models whose arbitrarily chosen parameters (there's LOTS of parameterization in these things) match a best guess at history, well... it ain't very convincing.

Hence, if someone claims they can tell you the range of temperatures expected 100 years out, they are simply wrong. It is certainly plausible that significanntly increasing the presence of a trace (.0004 of the atmosphere) grass cause warming or other changes.

How much? More than changing patterns of agriculture? More than urbanization? Enough to compensate for solar variations?

We don't know. Spending trillions at this point based on so-called scientific estimates is foolishness, which is why it is so popular on the left.

Boris, what's wrong with the internet? YOU are on the internet. Your lists of pro-AGW organizations also, right here on the internet.

The way you framed your query is instructive. You have your IPCC Report, it's big and gets big media, so why not exploit the opportunity to frame any oppo as nothing but a bunch of illiterate bloggers stirring up trouble on the internet?

But you know as well as I do that the advocacy is coming not from my side but from yours. The energy, the calls to action, the tax & regulatory proposals, the UN-sponsored reports, the excited pols and breathless celebrities demanding programmatic alterations in the people's lives, all that PR excitation is coming from the AGW side, not the other.

The other side is not advocating anything at all. It is merely rebutting conclusions drawn (and promoted) by your side.

And you already know full well that if you seriously want to expose yourself to scientific rebuttals, you can find them all over the net. Search engines are wonderful. So please, dispense with the disingenuousness.

Anyone else still reading here, just start with the links I gave above (Sen Inhofe's site, perhaps), and actually follow the links into what Boris likes to mischaracterize and trivialize as mere Doofuses & Bozos yakking it up on the internet.

And, you can tell a lot about a person's opinions by the company he keeps, and this issue is so perfectly--and otherwise incongruously--split left/right that it's pretty apparent to even a lay observer that it's far, far more politics than it is science.

Basically, global growth for some years now has been creating so much new private property that the international left is in dire danger of losing its constituency.

It needs something powerful enough to slow this vast expansion of wealth formation, some issue dramatic and ubiquitous enough to control it toward its own ends, as people free from fear & privation are less needful of, and dependent on, the power of big government (which is, of course, the international party of the left).

So pardon me if I don't roll over for the IPCC Report. Any field engineer in any discipline understands well that the measuring is critical, that the measuring is the first order to avoid divergence into conclusions that may be logical to the assumption but wrong everywhere else.

the IPCC temp measuring is being attacked by many, many scientists all over the world--just do a search.

And here, let me make some assertions and ask YOU to disprove them: the IPCC is the UN, the UN is the transnational movement, and AGW panic has been timed to crest with the USA's 2008 election, and the whole thing is aimed directly at retarding the global economic expansion.

That expansion that threatens the entrenched elites from both below and above, because it dilutes its voter base and relatively decreases its economic power.

A side note: since there does exist a real true 'left', the old classic workingman's left of Steinbeck and Dos Passos, and since the same global economic expansion is for the first time in human history lifting the world's poor out of desperation, and since the poor are the natural concern of a real left, the conclusion is inescapable that this movement operating out of the UN and the precincts of the Gores, the Kennedys, the Soros of the world, is not really the 'left' at all, but something else, something concerned with its own power and control.

A real lefty would say, let's burn the shit out of all the carbon we need to feed the hungry, and worry about AGW when we see some.

So in that true-left sense, whatever it is that Al Gore & co is pushing is pretty deeply fraudulent.

But back on topic, given all that, the AGW political front really MUST have the facts on its side whether it actually does or not.

That's why the anti-AGW science is such a spoiler, and that's why the pro-AGW side has to ignore, deride, accuse it of Exxonism, sneer, mock, compare it to religious fundamentalism, et cetera, all the well-known lefty methods of shouting down the opposition.

Because the panic has to take off big and fast or else it'll fall flat on its ass.

It must "do something" NOW so that it can take credit for the coming lack of an Armageddon ten years out.

Otherwise, no catastrophe in ten years, AGW folk gonna have some 'splainin' to do.

But not to its own useful idiots--they won't care one way or the other, they'll be off on something else by then, their leaders will see to it. So, Al & co as usual have little to lose and much to gain.

July 9, 2007: Global Warming: Back to School

Comments

Post a comment

Email This Post