August 10, 2005
Liberal Heretics, Part II
Karlo, of Swerve Left has some complaints about my article from yesterday titled, "Liberal Heretics." Well, let's see what he has to say (note to Karlo: install the trackback feature on your blog -- it's pretty cool and a good way to track who's posting about your posts).
I'm sorry, Karlo, you have just disqualified yourself from being a card-carrying member of the leftist environmental loony organization. Please turn in your membership card (after paying your back dues, of course). The top article "issue" on Greenpeace's (terrorist organization) web site says:
They continue:
There's tons more, but you get the idea. Greenpeace, titular head of the left's environmental movement, claims that global warming can only be blamed on man, since it cannot be explained by natural mechanisms.
If you would cheer, you'd be the only lefty. The environmental lefties do not want to hear that automobile emissions are not harming the environment. The emissions have been reduced so much in the last decade that there is LESS pollution in the air from automobiles today -- but the left still wants automobile use reduced or destroyed. Heck, remember that ozone layer hole that was all the rage and blamed on cars and freon? Oops -- the hole disappeared!
Ah, the mysterious "everyone in the scientific community." That's the same scientific community that agreed the world was flat, right? The unfaltering scientific community that keeps discovering more and more species of animals in various places like the rain forest, right? That same community that's declared certain animals extinct, only to find them in existence again, right?
I haven't read that book, but I did manage to find some excepts from it online. Wow. What a crackpot. The logic used by this fellow makes no sense. He claims that humans have been causing extinction for 10,000 years. At the same time, 5 other extinction periods are mentioned, and every single one of them points to global climate change as a cause. So somehow, this major earth event, a mass extinction, is caused 5 times, completely changing the entire structure of the earth, by climate change, but the sixth time it isn't?
You've left out one option -- what if there are causes, and the causes are not man and are completely out of man's control? If that's the case, the left is way off base -- the environmental left primarily blames man for global warming. The right primarily says that we can't control it.
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I'm going to place most of the response in the extended entry, because I think this is going to be quite a long post...
Karlo:
Of course, ice-ages are caused by a number of factors that are difficult to completely account for and predict, things like reductions in the heat of the sun and so on. I've never heard any environmentalist anywhere say that the only factor associated with ice-ages or global warming is SUV emissions.
I'm sorry, Karlo, you have just disqualified yourself from being a card-carrying member of the leftist environmental loony organization. Please turn in your membership card (after paying your back dues, of course). The top article "issue" on Greenpeace's (terrorist organization) web site says:
Human caused climate change is a reality.
They continue:
...the warmth is global and cannot be explained by the natural mechanisms that explain previous warm periods. There is a broad scientific consensus that humanity is in large part responsible for this change.
There's tons more, but you get the idea. Greenpeace, titular head of the left's environmental movement, claims that global warming can only be blamed on man, since it cannot be explained by natural mechanisms.
Karlo:
If it turns out that automobile emissions don't affect the environment and are actually beneficial, or that fossil fuels last forever, or that believing in things makes them true, this lefty will be the first one cheering.
If you would cheer, you'd be the only lefty. The environmental lefties do not want to hear that automobile emissions are not harming the environment. The emissions have been reduced so much in the last decade that there is LESS pollution in the air from automobiles today -- but the left still wants automobile use reduced or destroyed. Heck, remember that ozone layer hole that was all the rage and blamed on cars and freon? Oops -- the hole disappeared!
As for the fossil fuels lasting forever, I guess you didn't live through the 70s. Back in the 70s when there was the gas crisis, environmentalists were already screaming that there would be not enough oil to last the decade! They kept screaming that it was not a renewable resource, and if we didn't reduce our usage NOW that we would run out before 1980.
It's 2005 and the story hasn't changed. We just keep finding more and more and more of the black gooey stuff. And heck, you don't want to use that, let us rely more upon nuclear power. Oh, right, the left doesn't like that either. Well sorry, I'm not going back to living in grass huts so you can be happy.
Karlo:
Most species on the planets thin exterior, on the other hand, have been destroyed. This isn't some left wing fringe lunatic conjecture. This is solid fact agreed upon by everyone in the scientific community.
Ah, the mysterious "everyone in the scientific community." That's the same scientific community that agreed the world was flat, right? The unfaltering scientific community that keeps discovering more and more species of animals in various places like the rain forest, right? That same community that's declared certain animals extinct, only to find them in existence again, right?
The idea that you have to put "scientific" and "fact" together shows that it is not actually true. Science can postulate, they can theorize, but there are many, many things that they cannot possibly know.
Karlo:
As Leakey points out in his book The Sixth Extinction, we're currently right smack in the middle of one of the biggest and quickest mass extinctions this planet has ever seen.
I haven't read that book, but I did manage to find some excepts from it online. Wow. What a crackpot. The logic used by this fellow makes no sense. He claims that humans have been causing extinction for 10,000 years. At the same time, 5 other extinction periods are mentioned, and every single one of them points to global climate change as a cause. So somehow, this major earth event, a mass extinction, is caused 5 times, completely changing the entire structure of the earth, by climate change, but the sixth time it isn't?
To continue the absurd logic, this is based on evolution. All species evolve, according to this author, but apparently humans are not only incapable of evolving, but are also capable of stopping all evolution of all other species on the planet, making them extinct. But wait -- the whole theory of evolution is that the strongest survive -- so if humans are causing the extinction, they are only doing so to survive. Based on that logic, if we stop causing extinction, we will become extinct ourselves!
Karlo:
If global warming, like everything else, has causes and scientists can discover these causes and rationally discuss their implications, then the left (or to be more exact, the liberal environmental movement) is right on track. If global warming is to be attributed to the divine will or some other unknowable factor and if we're better off just ignoring it until our SUVs run out of gas, then the rightwing has hit on the ideal approach to large-scale problems that affect all of humanity.
You've left out one option -- what if there are causes, and the causes are not man and are completely out of man's control? If that's the case, the left is way off base -- the environmental left primarily blames man for global warming. The right primarily says that we can't control it.
Well, it appears more and more that the right is correct on this one. The previous article that started this discussion pointed out that perhaps things like global warming and ice ages are completely beyond the comprehension and ability to control of man.
If global warming's primary cause is billion-mile-across galaxies of dust and stars traversing through various solar systems across the universe, all the moronic, expensive, wasteful gas mix standards in the world won't help us.
Thanks for the conversation so far, Karlo!
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1
Great Rebuttal!!
Posted by: oddybobo at August 10, 2005 12:22 PM (6Gm0j)
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And entertaining, too, I hope! 
Posted by: Ogre at August 10, 2005 12:44 PM (/k+l4)
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Great fisking.
Well thought out, and well said!
Keep it up.
Posted by: jimmyb at August 10, 2005 08:18 PM (3Eck1)
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Thanks for the kind words, Jimmy!
Posted by: Ogre at August 10, 2005 09:04 PM (L0IGK)
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The initial part of your rebuttal isn't logical. There's no inconsistency involved with saying that there are multiple causes of "A" and that humans are a necessary cause of "A." This isn't an either/or situation. And it isn't just Greenpeace saying that global warming has been caused by humans. The entire scientific community (except for a couple corporate-sponsored crackpots) agrees on this one.
As for the lefty environmentalists getting it all wrong in the 70s, this is partially true. In the 1970s, the science of predicting oil reserves was in its infancy. Even so, scientific consensus is that U.S. oil production did in fact peak in the 1970s and that wordwide production is peaking right now. Several areas of the globe may be at peak or close to it (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc.) and several haven't reached it yet due to failure to fully exploit resources (e.g., Russia) but I haven't read anything that says that some yet-to-be discovered oil field is going to dramatically change the equation. (The much touted Alaskan fields give us oil for 3 or 4 weeks or something like that.)
As for auto-emissions being reduced, the number of deaths and illnesses caused by auto-pollution is staggering. People pine about the 9/11 deaths, but we could save far more people in a single year simply by tightening pollution standards in a single U.S. city such as L.A. (Although tightening regulations is much less manly than bombing people.)
As for Leakey being a crackpot, in his book he refers to studies done all over the planet and concludes that: (1) as you mention, we only know of a small fraction of living species, and (2) wherever detailed surveys have been done in the same place at different times, they inevitably show a dramatic loss of species. As for your wonder that the 6th extinction would be caused by different factors than the first 5, I don't see why this is an issue. I don't think man was even around for the first five.
In the end, your conclusion is based on a single highly speculative article. Mine is based on the consensus of 99.9999% of the scientific community. Of course, I might be wrong. And the Earth may in fact be flat.
Posted by: Karlo at August 10, 2005 11:34 PM (r65rq)
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You cannot keep using the mystical "entire scientific community," or "99.99%," because that is simply not true. The only way you can legitimately claim that is to have a survey of thousands of scientists that have studied the climate and get all of them to agree with you. That's not the case, as there are large numbers of scientists that do NOT agree about global warming. In fact, as more data that was used to support global warming is revealed (it was hidden for years), more and more scientists are questioning that it even exists.
As for the oil reserves, the problem is NO ONE can know how much there is. It's impossible to know. If we cannot know how much there is, we cannot say we're running out of it.
The auto-emissions statement is simply not supportable. Do you have a study to back that up? I'd like to see the numbers, along with the raw data, that show the number of non-self-inflicted (suicide) deaths that are directly caused by auto emissions.
It's interesting that you mention how Leakey refutes his own theory! He's not the first in the scientific community to do that, and I'm sure he won't be the last.
Again, examine your conclusion and the support for it. There are not the facts, nor the agreement in the "scientific community" that you might think. What about the 19,000+ scientists that have signed the petition that argues there is no man-made global warming (http://www.oism.org/pproject/)? Do you really believe that we could melt the arctic icecaps if we even wanted to? If we put all our efforts into melting the North Pole, do you think we could even make a dent in it? I think you attribute WAY too much power to man, and a significantly large number of PhD scientists who have studied the climate and the earth agree with me.
Posted by: Ogre at August 11, 2005 05:50 AM (L0IGK)
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You're confusing "lack of knowledge" with "lack of complete knowledge." Scientists can now estimate with a great deal of accuracy the amount of oil that will be commercially available. (That's what oil geologists get paid for, after all.) There will always be some oil somewhere but peak oil isn't concerned with this. At some point, the energy used in oil extraction exceeds that gain through oil combustion and at that point (actually, long before that point), oil drilling and so on are no longer viable options.
The same goes for your comment on deaths due to auto exhaust. We're not talking about obscure scientific studies speculating on string theory or the 13th dimension. Scientists can simply compare population A that lives in a smog-filled city with a similar population B that doesn't and can then track the types of diseases and deaths that occur with greater frequency in populated areas. A zillion such studies have been done. I don't have any dates and names at my fingertips, but if you simply look at any major paper consistently for 3 or 4 weeks, your bound to see yet another study reaching those same common-sense conclusions.
As for the discovery of before unknown species "refuting Leakey's theory," this is complete nonsense. We will never know most of the species on the planet as no one has the time to go through every spade of dirt in order to list the microbes found there. But manageable surveys done throughout the planet have all shown a dramatic decrease in species. The most obvious sign of this trend is the reduction in large species during the last 50,000 years throughout the globe. The decimation of species that we know about far exceeds evolutions capacity to create new ones. (Of course, if you don't believe in evolution, then the reduction of a single species over short periods of time should reduce the eco-sphere to nothing but mold, cockroaches, and some dessicated human corpses.) But then again, I might be wrong. In so, on your next hike, take care not to awaken that dormant giant beaver, giant sloth, sabertooth cat, or mammoth. I hear these beast are quite ferocious after a long sleep.
Posted by: Karlo at August 11, 2005 12:41 PM (HoLw7)
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Ok, so scientists can estimate how much oil there is...until they discover more. How is that useful?
You're making logical leaps here that don't make sense. Studying people who die in one area with people who die in another area and then determining that one item caused it is just silly. With that reasoning, I can effectively claim that povery causes crime. There are way too many factors involved with why people die to ever put the blame on one factor. Heck, we can't even get scientists to agree about secondhand smoke, something really directly measurable!
Same with the unknown species -- if we watch 10 species "disappear" from a known region, but at the same time 5,000 other species are discovered in another region, we cannot claim anything. The 10 species might have just disappeared from sight or moved, while the other 5,000 may have already existed.
Or, if you accept evoluton, perhaps the 10 species who became extinct allowed 5,000 other new species to be created. You simply cannot do a controlled study on the entire planet and claim any results with any degree of accuracy -- if we don't know if there's 10,000 or 100 billion species, how can we possibly claim to be adding or removing species to the planet at ANY rate?
It seems to me in all these cases, you're accepting the results without looking at the data. Using the actual data in these cases, the best you can do is imply that there might be a relationship between the two things (like auto exhaust and death) -- but no genuine, supported causal relationship can be drawn.
Seriously, if you see any specific data, not just reports of conclusions, but actual data, point it my way, as I love numbers.
Posted by: Ogre at August 11, 2005 02:51 PM (L0IGK)
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Oh, I see. In order to say anything definitive about anything it isn't enough to employ widely accepted statistical methods in rigorous ways, we have to find every possible case and count them up until we reach 100% (There's a drunk positivist lurking somewhere around here...) So in order for us to know that objects fall, we'll have to fly to the furthest star and toss that final rock on the final moon of the final planet--just to make sure. You need to find the nearest Community College and take a course in statistics, my friend. And then another course in the scientific method.
Posted by: Karlo at August 11, 2005 03:02 PM (HoLw7)
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That's my point -- you're missing the scientific method -- you're applying a statistically insignificant sampling to a gigantic population!
How many things could possibly cause a human to die? It's in the billions. To say that one type of element introduced in unmeasurable amounts, subject to wind, with neglibile measureable effects on the human body, and then to claim that that element was responsible for death is just silly.
Using that reasoning, I can light up a cigarette in a room and if 4 people die of heart attacks in the room, the cigarette caused them to die. The fact that their drinks were poisoned would never get mentioned.
I'm not looking for 100% certainty, I'm looking for valid, duplcatable, studies that show results. That's why I want to see the data of such studies -- I've not seen one. If the data shows that 10 people who died of heart attacks blame those attacks on CO2, that's questionable. That's like when deaths in a storm are attributed to the storm, when it may have been from something that had nothing to do with the storm.
All I want is data. Is that too much to ask?
Posted by: Ogre at August 11, 2005 03:09 PM (L0IGK)
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Hi Ogre,
I don't usually get into this kind of political debate - I'm just not interested in arguing with people whose minds are already made up.
But I did want to point out two things: Greenpeace is not the titular head of environmentalism. I know little about them other than their name. I'm sure they do good work, though. You make a lot of broad statements about Democrats and liberals that are simply untrue. I try to keep in mind that a lot of conservatives that don't fit the stereotype, and I wish you would try a little harder not to group all liberals together. But I realize that's the nature of your blog, and environmentalism is the nature of mine.
The folks I listen to are the Union of Concerned Scientists. Politics aside, when it comes between trusting scientists who have been paid off by industries who stand to profit from their findings, or scientists whose jobs have been threatened unless they come up with findings that support the current administration's policies, I believe that I'll choose the other guys. It puzzles me that anyone, Democrat or Republican, would choose otherwise, considering the clear evidence about this. And many conservatives agree with mainstream scientific findings on global warming.
I'm a liberal arts major--I don't pretend to know enough about statistics and data to argue about scientific theory. But it's common sense not to trust the fox who guards the henhouse. And you should remember that the Theory of Gravity is a scientific theory, but few of us doubt that it's a fact.
Thanks for reading an opposing point of view,
Laurie
Posted by: Laurie at August 11, 2005 06:28 PM (CggWK)
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The American Lung Association (http://www.lungusa.org/site/pp.asp?c=dvLUK9O0E&b=50324) says that:
"Tens of thousands of premature deaths each year are attributed to fine particle air pollution."
From http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4419
"A 1994 report on the adverse effects of particulate air pollution, published in the Annual Reviews of Public Health, noted a 1 percent increase in total mortality for each 10 mg/m3 increase in particulate matter. Respiratory mortality increased 3.4 percent and cardiovascular mortality increased 1.4 percent. More recent research suggests that one possible link between acute exposure to particulate matter and sudden death may be related to sudden increases in heart rate or changes in heart rate variability."
I'm not going to read 100s of pages of studies to refute your point, but my guess is the pool of people the data are derived from are is actually exponentially larger than needed since the data already exists (in hospital reports and so on) and such data's extensive.
At http://www.columbia-stmarys.org/14294.cfm,
an American Medical Journal study says that "Air pollution has been linked to a variety of diseases, including lung cancer, other lung diseases, and heart disease." This led to a change in EPA standards (all pretty mainsteam stuff).
So tens of thousands of deaths each year and perhaps hundreds of thousands health problems. And this is all EACH YEAR.
Posted by: Karlo at August 11, 2005 06:31 PM (r65rq)
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Laurie, thanks for stopping by, and for your comments, they are appreciated.
As for Greenpeace, they do certainly think they are the ones who are most concerned with the environment, and they believe they are the primary protectors of the environment. I do not like them because they use terrorist tactics -- I have seen them up close.
As for the scientists, I'd love to hear from a completely unbiased scientist -- however such a create simply does not exist. As you point out, many are paid by corporations. However, all of them get paid by someone for their research -- no one does the research on their own (I guess when they become independently wealth, they don't do research or something).
I looked over the group you linked to -- they claim 52% of their $11 million income comes from "contributions," and 40% comes from "foundations." If a large portion of that comes from someone with an agenda, or with a political goal, then their results are just as in question as any corporation-sponsored scientist.
That's why I ask for facts and details, so I can make decisions myself, rather than relying upon scientists who have a goal, often before their research is even done.
As for gravity -- it can be tested and duplicated over and over again, unlike global warming and automobile emission deaths.
Posted by: Ogre at August 11, 2005 06:59 PM (L0IGK)
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Thanks for the links, Karlo, I'll go and check them out and see what I can find!
Posted by: Ogre at August 11, 2005 07:00 PM (L0IGK)
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Of course we always need to be concerned about bias. Although I have a hard time seeing who has money to make if pollution causes deaths. All the big money is made by causing pollution. My guess is that the harmful effects are vastly understated.
Posted by: Karlo at August 11, 2005 08:07 PM (r65rq)
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"entire scientific community" used to believe that the sun and planets revolved around the earth too.
Posted by: tony at August 16, 2005 04:10 PM (eHsXE)
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Bingo, Tony.
Karlo, if you're still around, I am researching those reports and do plan on making another post about them, after I've digested them.
Posted by: Ogre at August 16, 2005 05:41 PM (L0IGK)
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