Open Mind

37 responses so far ↓

• John Mashey // Oct 12th 2007 at 5:29 pm

  But let us not forget that they recognized the IPCC and Al Gore together, so I’d be happier if the headline said that, because this is astonishingly rare:

  When was the last time a scientist or scientific organization got a Nobel *Peace* prize for doing science (i.e., not counting Linus Pauling for example, whose Peace prize wasn’t for his science.)?

  Here’s the list:
  http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/

  Unless I’ve missed something, the last time (and maybe the only time) was:
  1970 Norman Borlaug

  Hence, the Nobel committee:
  1) First recognizes the IPCC, as the most convenient proxy for a large number of climate scientists, and thus the science generated over the last few decades.
  2) Then recognizes Gore for really helping publicize that real science.

• nanny_govt_sucks // Oct 12th 2007 at 7:12 pm

  I think the link between “saving the climate” and “peace” is flimsy at best. Over the last 100 years or so we’ve supposedly had “unprecedented” global warming, yet I’m not aware of any wars that were started because of it. Isn’t neo-conservative warfare foreign policy a much bigger threat to peace around the world?

• 

  tamino // Oct 12th 2007 at 7:26 pm

  When food is scarce, grainbelts turn to desert, and tens or even hundreds of millions of people become environmental refugees, the link between climate change and peace will be obvious.

  I’ve noticed that the blogosphere is flooded with two kinds of comments related to Al Gore’s sharing the Nobel prize with IPCC: congratulations from one side, “sour grapes” from the other.

• nanny_govt_sucks // Oct 12th 2007 at 7:32 pm

  Tamino, where were the environmental refugees (due to climate change) from last century?

• nanny_govt_sucks // Oct 12th 2007 at 7:58 pm

  Actually, what I meant to ask was: Where was the environmental refugee crisis (due to climate change) from last century that led to warfare?

• elspi // Oct 12th 2007 at 8:05 pm

  ngs
  100 or so = 30 NOT.
  Given the fact that much of the warming and most of the damage is still in the pipeline, we see you are yet again blowing smoke.

• Alexander Ac // Oct 12th 2007 at 8:10 pm

  True!

• Aaron Lewis // Oct 12th 2007 at 8:16 pm

  nanny_govt_sucks, I would encourage you to do some on-the-ground-reasearch in Darfur. Maybe , not a “war” per se, but it is certainly a conflict with desertification as one of its roots.

  Most guys with guns wave flags, rather than IPCC reports. The journalists take a picture of the raiders, and when the picture is published, we see the flag, but not the global warming.

• nanny_govt_sucks // Oct 12th 2007 at 8:56 pm

  Darfur

  http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/6ed11d1edbf6b097d7f32940ae1a5126.htm

  “In its 50 years of independence, Africa’s largest country has been plagued by conflicts rooted, many historians say, in the economic, political, social and military domination of the country by a narrow elite within northern Sudan.”

  “Understanding all the causes of the Darfur crisis may need a more nuanced approach. Julie Flint, who with Alex de Waal, wrote the book Darfur: The Short History of a Long War, told IRIN, “There is some truth in this [the link between conflict and the demand for natural resources]. The great drought and famine of 1984-85 led to localised conflicts that generally pitted pastoralists against farmers in a struggle for diminishing resources, culminating in the Fur-Arab war of 1987-89.”

  But attempts to paint the Darfur conflict as simply resource-based “whitewashes the Sudan government”, claimed Flint. The “full-fledged tragedy” starting in 2003, was caused by the government’s response to the rebellion, “for which two people have already been indicted for war crimes by the ICC [International Criminal Court] - not by resource conflict”.

  The ODI’s O’Callaghan listed a range of causes for the conflict, none of which a sole or primary cause: “Historical grievances, local perceptions of race, demands for a fair sharing of power between different groups, the inequitable distribution of economic resources and benefits, disputes over access to and control over increasingly scarce natural resources (land, livestock and water), the proliferation of arms and the militarisation of young people, the absence of a democratic process and other governance issues … Local issues have been politicised and militarised, and drawn into the wider political dynamics of Sudan,” she commented.”

  [Response: It’s downright disingenuous for you to try to persuade us that the conflict in Darfur is unrelated to climate change, or that climate change is an insignificant part of the cause. As the Wikipedia article on the Darfur crisis states:

  The combination of decades of drought, desertification, and overpopulation are among the causes of the Darfur conflict, because the Baggara nomads searching for water have to take their livestock further south, to land mainly occupied by non-Arab farming communities

  ]

• Marion Delgado // Oct 12th 2007 at 10:21 pm

  
FLOWCHART FOR CONSERVATIVE SCIENCE

  START
CAN WE BLAME DEMOCRATS AND REGULATION?
Y ————-> OUTPUT BLAME
N
|
v
CAN WE BLAME ARABS? [DARFUR: HIT]
Y—————> SCAPEGOAT
N
|
v
MOSLEMS?
Y—————> GENERALIZE
N
|
v
EVOLUTION-BASED GODLESSNESS?
Y—————-> FULMINATE
N
|
v
HAS A REPUBLICAN THINK TANK SAID ANYTHING?
Y—————-> PHOTOCOPY
N
|
v
THE RNC?
Y——————> REPHRASE
N
|
v
BILL OR RUSH?
Y ——————> OUTPUT: “DITTO”
N
|
v
EXAMINE SCIENCE
LOOK FOR QUESTIONABLE
ASSOCIATIONS OR TRAITS
IN ENEMY SCIENTISTS.
WAIT 2 DAYS
|
v
GO BACK TO START


• cce // Oct 12th 2007 at 10:49 pm

  Water and food supply depend on the climate. If climate change is irrelevent to war, then water and food are also irrelevent.

• nanny_govt_sucks // Oct 12th 2007 at 11:05 pm

  Wikipedia is your source?

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRlXZ5W8lTs

• CraigM // Oct 13th 2007 at 1:39 am

  ngs

  I think the link between “saving the climate” and “peace” is flimsy at best. Over the last 100 years or so we’ve supposedly had “unprecedented” global warming, yet I’m not aware of any wars that were started because of it. Isn’t neo-conservative warfare foreign policy a much bigger threat to peace around the world?

  I’ve heard it said over at Realclimate that the 0.7 C rise in temperature is the firealarm, not the fire.

  Anything over 3 C is generally considered dangerous climate change. Which i believe is the figure often quoted for a doubling of c02.

  Worst case scenario for the next 100 years give around a 5 oC warming. Which is very quick it seems (have things ever warmed or cooled that quick before? What happened when it did?). All this means we have a really limited time to adapt new climate conditions, or change ours ways, or both. Maybe if it all happened over a few thousand years it would be so much a problem?

  I’ve heard Tim Flannery say that climate change has the potential to increase global conflict. According to him its the most worrying aspect of climate change itself. Man has adapted to a specific climate. But we live in regions that are likely to suffer adverse affects. Could we be seeing wars over water in the future, rather than over oil? hmmm…

  Greenland probably seems the place to live. Dont know if they’ll be happy to take to many immigrants though?

  Thats my 2c

• Anna Haynes // Oct 13th 2007 at 2:00 am

  Nanny, why do you lack the courage to use your name?

  [Response: I too post anonymously. I don’t think it’s a matter of courage.]

• 

  yojoe // Oct 13th 2007 at 2:56 am

  He is now in the company of Yasser Arafat.

  [Response: And Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, the 14th Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Mother Theresa, Albert Schweitzer … care to make sniping comments about them too?]

• Marko // Oct 13th 2007 at 4:01 am

  Al Gore presents inaccuracies and exaggerations in his movie, as indicated by a recent high court ruling in Britain. Gore is also a hypocrite because he expects others to reduce their carbon footprint but he himself does not. These facts are a turn off. A Rasmussen poll from March bears this out. The poll showed only 36% of Americans believe Gore knows what he is talking about with regards to the environment and global warming.

  There are many recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize that are shining examples to mankind. For the above reasons, Gore is not.

  [Response: I think you’re one of those who only sees what he wants to see. Justice Burton agreed that “Al Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate.” In no case did the judge rule that Gore was wrong, simply that on 9 points there is disagreement with IPCC concensus. There’s a good post on the topic on Deltoid.]

• Chris O'Neill // Oct 13th 2007 at 4:19 am

  GraigM: “Worst case scenario for the next 100 years give around a 5 oC warming. Which is very quick it seems (have things ever warmed or cooled that quick before?”

  The end of the last ice age, which involved a global average temperature rise of 5-6 oC, took about 6,000 years (from the Vostok ice-core).

  “What happened when it did?). All this means we have a really limited time to adapt new climate conditions, or change ours ways, or both. Maybe if it all happened over a few thousand years it would(n’t) be so much a problem?”

  Could be, but happening in 100 years rather than 6,000 is what we actually face. Obviously, by geological standards, it will be FAST.

• EliRabett // Oct 13th 2007 at 4:23 am

  One answer to Nannies whine is California (see Steinbeck, John - Grapes of Wrath it comes in DVD now so you don’t have to read).

• Julian Flood // Oct 13th 2007 at 5:50 am

  quote CraigM // Oct 13th 2007 at 1:39 am
  Worst case scenario for the next 100 years give around a 5 oC warming. Which is very quick it seems (have things ever warmed or cooled that quick before? What happened when it did?).endquote

  Please see the graph from the paper on bucket corrections:
  Original Caption: Folland and Parker [1995] Figure 3.

  Some background: I do not agree with F&P’s bucket correction to SSTs, not for any deep scientific or philosophical reasons but because it was produced to make models fit better. (You may argue, with some justice, that my doubts are also because of the suppression in the corrected data of the big spike I’m interested in.)

  On the NH graph, looking at the uncorrected data, you will see a spike of .5 deg in five years, twice the rate you mention.

  Do you have any theory as to why this spike is there? F&P’s theory is that it is caused by measurement error. Mine is that it is the kriegesmarine effect. (or, my spelling being what it is, it’s all over Google as the Kreigesmarine effect… oh, well.)

  Re the topic: if this award gives credence to some of the more hair-raising schemes for CO2 sequestration then it will prove to have been in error: I think in particular of direct CO2 storage systems. Gaia can cope with slow or even moderately fast pulses of CO2, but I’m not sure she’ll manage a leaking gigatonne. Before we commit, I’d need to see some proper cloud models and some models which take into account the changing surface of the oceans. If Mr Gore were to use some of his money to fund that research then he would truly be worthy of it. Better still, he could buy us all time by supporting Latham and Salter’s cloud-producing catamarans.

  Here’s what GISS models E says about its surface routine:

  SUBROUTINE SURFCE 1,30
  !@sum SURFCE calculates the surface fluxes which include
  !@+ sensible heat, evaporation*, thermal radiation*, and momentum
  !@+ drag*. It also calculates instantaneous surface temperature,
  !@+ surface specific humidity*, and surface wind components*.
  !@auth Nobody will claim responsibility

  I worry about that last line.

  *all these are altered by surface pollution. More significantly, it does not mention the production of cloud condensation nuclei at all. I hope _that_ subroutine has a parent somewhere.

  JF

• Anna // Oct 13th 2007 at 5:51 am

  BTW I forget how I got there - maybe it’s old news to y’all - but if you haven’t seen John Doerr’s TED talk on the climate crisis/opportunity (”the best way to predict the future is to invent it; the second best way is to finance it”; beginning and ending with his responsibility to his daughter) it’s good - a refreshing counterpoint to the “let’s live in grass huts and drink mead” approach to fighting global warming.
  Although come to think of it, that doesn’t sound so bad, if it comes with DSL.

• nanny_govt_sucks // Oct 13th 2007 at 6:10 am

  One answer to Nannies whine is California (see Steinbeck, John - Grapes of Wrath it comes in DVD now so you don’t have to read).

  I don’t think that war broke out in California in the 1930’s.

• anon // Oct 13th 2007 at 9:37 am

  There is no reason why a warmer climate would lead to greater desertification. What will lead to it is poor land use on marginal terrain (as in the US in the thirties). In fact, global warming will lead to lower desertification because there will be more atmospheric water and thus more rain…

  Dafur is no more the result of climate change than the Holocaust was. It is the continuation of a 1500 year tradition of Muslim and Arab racism, genoicide and slave trading applied to an African population. Look up the scale of this thing - the Arab African slave trade, the death rates on the trade routes, the mutilations in order to obtain a supply of eunuchs. It dwarfs the Holocaust in timescale, and probably in numbers too.

  We should be ashamed, but at least we stopped it, and ours was at its worst never the equal of theirs in horror. They never have stopped.

• Eric // Oct 13th 2007 at 9:42 am

  I have no wish whatsoever to be seen to be agreeing with ngs, but the truth is that Gore is literally a warmonger and thus in no way deserves a ‘peace’ prize:

  http://www.counterpunch.org/oberg10122007.html

  He is now _also_ in the esteemed company of people such as Kissinger. Ha ha.

  (Where, in fact, he actually deserves to be.)

  [Response: Warmonger? You and your link are obviously biased. Readers can judge for themselves who are the American warmongers of the last 100 years.]

• Barton Paul Levenson // Oct 13th 2007 at 12:39 pm

  Wasn’t one of the causes of World War II Hitler’s desire for “lebensraum” — living space — for Germany’s expanding population? Nazi plans for eastern Europe apparently included plans to turn it into a vast farmland to be worked by slavic slaves and presided over by German colonists. That’s a conflice over resources, surely.

• Marko // Oct 13th 2007 at 2:02 pm

  “I think you’re one of those who only sees what he wants to see”

  Are you resorting to the ad hominem because you cannot refute the accuracy of my statements?

  Gore has made questionable claims in his movie, and it is telling that you cannot admit that Gore has done so.

  “In no case did the judge rule that Gore was wrong,”

  That is incorrect. For example, Gore was wrong about the Kilimanjaro claim, and your Deltoid link confirms it. I’m not sure how you missed this.

  [Response: What a load of bull. Deltoid quotes the Judge as saying “the scientific consensus is that it cannot be established.” That’s not the same as “it’s wrong” or even “the scientific concensus is that it’s wrong.” The Deltoid blog post says that it “may or may not be,” but you maintain that it claims he’s wrong. Ohio State’s Lonnie Thompson (certainly one of the world’s leading experts in this field) states (2002, Science, 298, 589)

  The disappearance of Kilimanjaro’s ice fields, expected between 2015 and 2020, will be unprecedented for the Holocene. This will be even more remarkable given that the NIF persisted through a severe 300-year drought that so disrupted the course of human endeavors that it is detectable from the historical and archaeological records throughout many areas of the world. A comparison of the chemical and physical properties preserved in the NIF with those in the watersaturated, rapidly shrinking FWG (36), coupled with the lack of melt features in the NIF and SIF cores, confirms that conditions similar to those of today have not existed in the past 11 millennia. The loss of Kilimanjaro’s permanent ice fields will have both climatological and hydrological implications for local populations, who depend on the water generated from the ice fields during the dry seasons and monsoon failures.

  I think I know *exactly* how you missed this.]

• george // Oct 13th 2007 at 5:17 pm

  Some of the comments I have read (here and elsewhere) comparing Gore to Arafat and the like are so far over the top as to be beyond the pale.

  What is it about Gore that makes these commenters despise him so much?

  He does come across as arrogant sometimes (eg, in the debates with Bush), but it’s hard to believe that could inspire such rabid animosity.

• vixt // Oct 13th 2007 at 5:59 pm

  Response: Warmonger?

  I think what he meant was warm-monger

• anon // Oct 13th 2007 at 8:45 pm

  Al Gore needs the money to pay his fossil fueled energy bills.

  Apparently you can have a carbon footprint as large as you want so long as you ‘raise awareness’.

  That’s why I continue to raise awareness among my friends and family.

• NeuvoLiberal // Oct 14th 2007 at 12:28 am

  “george // Oct 13th 2007 at 5:17 pm” writes:

  “What is it about Gore that makes these commenters despise him so much?”

  Because he stands in their faces and exposes truth much more often than just about any other major politician (Dean is another example).

  “He does come across as arrogant sometimes (eg, in the debates with Bush), but it’s hard to believe that could inspire such rabid animosity.”

  Unless they smear and lie about him, he is the biggest threat to the continuation of their power. If you think about it, he is the highest stature Democrat today, and was second only to Bill Clinton (the President, not the womanizer) in 2000.

  If Gore didn’t have to carry Clinton’s scandal around his neck, or if the media (and the rightwing noise machine) hadn’t smeared him, or if Nader hadn’t run; under any one of those case, Gore would have bagged a sizeable electoral college victory. Under a normal landscape, Gore would’ve won a landslide victory.

  Some of the “hate” they shower on Gore, I think is pretend-hate. A sort a sport of a tribal triumphalism kind.

  Not all rightwing stuff is bad, of course. Some of Steve McIntyre’s work is legit, in my view. I am not an expert on everything he does and writes, but the portions I have seen do show a degree of intellectual honesty and curiosity. He even linked to Tamino’s blog, the last time I visited his site, Climate Audit. Healthy skepticism should not only be welcome, but is in fact necessary in any rigorous debate, scientific and otherwise. But outright lies and outrageous smears corrupt the debate and hence harm the society.

  Tamino, I have a suggestion which I hope you will consider. Would you be able to cross-post your blog posts as diaries at Daily Kos? Your expertise and acumen would be very helpful there I think, and you’d get a very large community audience and input. Hopefully the honchos there may make you a front-pager on global warming matters after you’ve posted some diaries and people get to know you well (I’d recommend them to do so).

  Thanks for your outstanding efforts on both scientific and debate levels.
  -NL

• Heretic // Oct 14th 2007 at 12:30 am

  Anon 10/13 @ 09.37. I disagree with you. There is NOTHING in human history that compares with the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, a rationalized, thought out decision of completely eradicating people on the basis of a fuzzily defined notion of race was taken. From there, a state run industry was started from the ground up, including the specific engineering of technological solutions to achieve the goal of killing as many people per hour as possible. Those solutions were then implemented in industrial plants.
  It was accompanied by a specific bureaucracy of murder extending from gathering the victims to the printing of operation manuals for trucks specially designed to transport future victims. These manuals, for instance, encompassed all aspects of the task, up to the management of human wastes or the transfer of mass due to the fact that the “load” (sic) was standing up with no restraining devices (an inconvenience during braking and turns).

  I am well aware of the slave-trade related abuses that arabs have for so long perpetrated against African people, it does not compare to an industrial undertaking.

• Eli Rabett // Oct 14th 2007 at 5:06 am

  Nannie dearest, you asked:

  Tamino, where were the environmental refugees (due to climate change) from last century?

  and Eli pointed to the Okies (btw, there were periodic attempts to close the California border to them. Your question has been answered

  There have been major migrations in Africa driven by drought in the 20th century, and a significant driver for the recebt unpleasantnesses in the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritria) has been drought.

• John Mashey // Oct 14th 2007 at 8:56 pm

  And going further back, I recommend:
  Brain Fagan, “Floads Famine and Emperors” - El Nino and the fate of Civilizations.” which examines various climate-related effects on civilizations around the world.

• David B. Benson // Oct 15th 2007 at 12:50 am

  Also at least two of the chapters in Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”: Mayans and Akkadians.

• Anna // Oct 15th 2007 at 1:02 am

  Re “Gore as warmonger” - you might want to read his Sept 2002 speech warning against war with Iraq -
  “…I am deeply concerned that the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.”

• luminous beauty // Oct 15th 2007 at 1:50 am

  Eli,

  Speaking as one who grew up in California in the fifties, there was considerable low-level, informal warfare between Okies and vigilantes, which Steinbeck documented quite well.

  In the late 60’s the vigilante groups turned their efforts against hippies. Which goes to show, that when one starts down a path of hostility towards the bogeyman Other, it is very difficult to stop.

  As Poor Richard said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

• Dano // Oct 16th 2007 at 12:58 am

  I’d also point out about the virnmintul refugees that anyone who has fled historical topsoil erosion and poor soils due to deforestation is a refugee. That would be many of the folk in the eastern Meditteranean, Aral Sea, Dust Bowl, Sahel, Sahara regions, to start. The Anasazi in the American Southwest.

  So many examples, so little time.

  Best,

  D

• Dano // Oct 16th 2007 at 12:59 am

  Too fast on the ’submit’ hence unclarity.

  Not all of the regions above deforested, but many de-topsoiled and some de-watered or de-forested and de-watered. Etc.

  Best,

  D

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