Science vs. Dogma
By Monica @ 9:15 AM   
You’ve heard me say I don’t have any firm beliefs about climate change, though I’ve blogged a tad on the issue from time to time when it relates to evolutionary biology. I’ve learned firsthand the dangers of trusting conventional wisdom on matters of much import. (I’m speaking chiefly of nutrition where the conventional wisdom is mostly wrong and a lack of objectivity among researchers seems to abound.) I’ll make a brief but somewhat rambling foray into “climate change” in this post. This is due to current events (Cap and Trade bill passing the House yesterday) and the fact that the USDA has already admitted that EPA regulation of CO2 would radically impact how agriculture would be conducted in the United States (see pages 67 and 68). While I’m a big fan of pasture-based animal agriculture and think it’s a win-win-win-win situation for human health, animal welfare, pollution (not CO2), and economic benefits to farmers (Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed!), I’m not naïve enough to think that these are the types of changes the USDA would attempt to make in order to stem “climate change”. This is wholly apart from the question of whether that change is occurring, what its causes are if that is the case, and whether the USDA’s attempts at central planning would actually work (and I suspect they would not). This is simply not going to happen in the current political climate in the US, when politically connected Monsanto al. preen about "sustainability", the farmers who grow Monsanto’s crops receive literally billions in corporate welfare yearly, and environmental do-gooders everywhere exalt the benefits of a plant-based diet to reduce environmental impact and feed more people. Monsanto also gloats over a 10% reduction of methane by using rBST (a product it has now sold to another company) in feedlot cows when a 50% reduction is reported using pasture and the milk from pastured cows is more nutritious. There’s sustainability and there’s sustainability*. Interestingly, New Zealand has a huge animal products market for the size of its country, and has pasture-based animal husbandry with very low costs of production. Guess what else New Zealand did last year? They halted their new climate change program. Of course, that’s not a scientific point and doesn’t prove anything about climate change either way. However, it’s worth considering that New Zealand is a pretty “green” country. The fact that they can step back and re-assess the value of a cap and trade scheme is worth noticing. The fact that New Zealand, and now Australia, are questioning the wisdom of cap and trade schemes, has not been lost on the climate change alarmists, whose message gets shriller and shriller by the day -- nay, the hour. Practically 50% or more of the articles coming in through my Scientific American feed are about climate change. Some of the titles are truly absurd.
Then there’s this post from realclimate.org popped up in my Google Reader yesterday. It’s basically an attempt to dismiss an EPA document that raises the idea that the EPA’s position on climate science might be wrong. Click on over and check it out. (You might want to have a paper bag handy, though. It’s that nauseating.) So I got curious and clicked on Alan Carlin’s EPA document, which is linked in the realclimate.org post, to see whether Gavin Schmidt’s (of realclimate.org fame) allegations were true.
Besides the fact that I think Carlin makes some good points (I only skimmed this), the review of Carlin’s document at realclimate.org is very lacking in substance. Gavin Schmidt minimizes the impact that bloggers can have (one wonders if this also includes him?) and attempts to detract from the opinions of anyone who disagrees with him when they are not climate scientists. He also under-reports the amount of peer-reviewed research Carlin cites. While peer review does not necessarily mean anything important scientifically, Carlin cites at least 30 peer-reviewed papers, a heft minority of them published in Science. Did Schmidt think no one would click the link to Carlin's document and read? But here’s the main problem with Schmidt’s line of argumentation (besides the fact that it’s rude and condescending, which is an immediate turn-off). Generally, he mentions someone’s lack of climate science credentials as often as he possibly can. Interestingly, Gavin Schmidt leaves out the point that although Carlin is an economist, he is an environmental economist and has a degree in physics. Claiming that someone is unqualified to comment on climate science because he is a physicist is a bit like saying that someone is unqualified to comment on nutrition because he’s a biochemist. It’s ridiculous. I don’t like the tactics of the APGW community. Argument from authority and ad hominem argumentation are simply not arguments. I’ve seen such comments all too many times in the field of nutrition. The comments line to this post is a good example. If a person can’t debate a matter by referring to the facts of reality, cannot admit errors, and/or must instead defensively sling insults to persuade others, then I can come to no other conclusion than that person is intellectually dishonest. (Or they could just be ignorant – but this doesn’t apply when the person has staked their entire career on a particular stance.) Ordinarily, none of this would matter much, but as fellow ecologist and evolutionary biologist Elisheva Levin explains, in this case the government is on the side of the global warming alarmists that think regulation and taxes are the answers to all of our problems: These people in Congress are not benevolent. They live for a momentary gain, and do not consider the future of tax slavery and misery to which they condemn their own posterity. They are like lemmings running blindly over a cliff.
And it will not matter one iota in the vast reaches of planetary time. The climate cycles of the planet will continue to wax and wane in great temporal cycles. Species will come, and species will go. Earth abides.
sustainability*
The Feasibility of a Pastured Animal Production Model
Diet for an UNhealthy Planet
The Cow Tax and PeTA’s Dishonesty
More on Meat and Sustainability — and a Challenge to Environmentalists
Thoughts on the Environmental Effects of Carnivory and Veganism Labels: Global Warming, Government Idiocy
| 
3 Comments:
I'm a meteorologist and I was initially duped by all of the global warming anti-CO2 propaganda. However, Barry Groves sent me an e-mail over a year ago suggesting that I look a little deeper. I took his advice and delved into the internet and sure enough, the issues regarding CO2 are no where near as certain as anti-CO2 advocates would have us believe.
First of all, the primary greenhouse gas is not CO2, but water vapor ... by far! Water vapor accounts for about 70-80% of the greenhouse effect and is highly sensitive to particles in the atmosphere and to slight variations in insolation. Saying that CO2 is driving global warming is like saying the tail is wagging the dog. It is quite possible that CO2 is a symptom of global warming rather than a cause. The main evidence for effects from CO2 is from climate modeling. But these models are relatively crude and unvalidated.
Historical evidence suggests that CO2 increases lag warming trends rather than preceding them as would be expected if they were driving the warming. In fact, the evidence of the lag is suggestive that CO2 increase is a symptom and not a cause.
Personally, I'm not at all confident that measures to reduce CO2 would have any significant effect, other than to waste a lot of time and effort that could be expended on more useful things.
As you mentioned, I've also read that ruminants eating their natural diet on pasture emit much less methane than grain fed animals. From my own experience, I have a lot more gas when I eat too many carbs. Maybe we need to push for a low-carb diet for humans to reduce greenhouse gas :)
Yup. Thanks for chiming in. I agree with you. I pretty much knew about the 800 year rise of CO2 after warming, etc. at least a year ago. I still hold out on having a firm opinion only because I've found evidence of dishonesty on either side of this argument. That's not evidence for or against, in my opinion. However, I've seen much more hostility and virulence toward skeptics than I have toward APGW proponents on skeptic sites.
"Personally, I'm not at all confident that measures to reduce CO2 would have any significant effect, other than to waste a lot of time and effort that could be expended on more useful things."
Me neither. Hopefully we can turn around a massive government effort to reduce CO2 through dubious means. Otherwise, I fear in 40-50 years we're going to be in a far worse situation with regard to our health than the lowfat, low cholesterol advocates have put us in.
I agree on the gas emission. It sounds ridiculous to be talking about human farts, but seriously -- there really are way too many variables that are not being factored into these analyses. The rBST paper published by Monsanto funded academics in PNAS is a prime example of this.
The leaders of both of these movements -- the lowfatters and the virulent APGW advocates -- are True Believers. Nothing can shake their faith, especially since it would undermine their credibility at this point. But there ARE rational people among the ranks, i.e. the followers who haven't really investigated the science -- as you and I used to be (I too used to pretty much believe CO2 hypothesis. Now I'm just agnostic.). It's those people that we need to reach. The rest are hopeless. No amount of facts are going to sway their beliefs. It's a religion.
I'm not a scientist, so take this with a grain of salt, but my take on it is that we're adding carbon to the carbon cycle (something I learned about in eighth grade earth science class, of all things), and possibly that is going to have a serious effect.
That said, even some global warming "alarmists," as you put it, acknowledge that IF we are accelerating global warming, there isn't anything we can do about it at this point. We would have to stop industrial production dead and reduce our population by at least five-sixths and even then it might not work.
You know, say what you will about industry (by which I mean factories and that sort of thing), it's a two-way street. For factories to make stuff, people have to buy it. People had to buy into the culture as it is, people had to prioritize nifty gadgets and disposable everything and abused food animals (I'm not a vegetarian) over the well-being of themselves and their families. They'll keep on doing it right up til the end, if an end does come. I don't believe the planet would die; probably the biosphere wouldn't even die. We could all die, though.
All it would have taken was for us to never forget THE trait that sets us apart from other animals: our ability to adapt. What made indigenous people indigenous over millenia was their adaptation to local climes. If we would learn to do that again, even IF we're causing climate change to any degree, we could still survive it somehow. People don't want to adapt anymore, except in adapting to new product introductions and fashion changes. As far as taking on an entirely new lifestyle, forget it--most people dig in their heels and hang on for dear life no matter how much their present reality is destroying them.
My stance at this point is regardless of whether it's happening, I can't save anyone else but me and mine. That's exactly what I'm going to try to do. What I don't need will be s?!tcanned if it impedes my surviving and thriving. What I do need I will obtain and guard zealously and the government can kiss my butt if it doesn't like it.
The sad part about what the government's doing, making each of us feel personally responsible for global warming, is that if you tallied up all the damage individual people were doing just in the United States, it's a drop in the bucket, even if we drive gas-guzzlers. What's doing the real damage, if any? Power plants and factories. What is being pushed on us to assist in curbing climate change? Industrial products, made in factories. That alone is enough to make me question. I like those products only if they make reasonable use and re-use of resources and minimize waste--and if they work well. But their larger unintended message disturbs me.
Post a Comment
<< Home