Krugman on the Climate

In his latest NY Times op-ed, Paul Krugman waxes fanatic on the climate wars:

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

I have a problem with this zeal on this topic.

1. I'm not sure the science is as rock solid as Krugman believes it to be. There is evidence of fanatics tampering with the underlying data. There is even more evidence gathered by Anthony Watts and documented on his Watts Up With That? website that slipshod data collection has allowed surface temperatures to soar because weather stations are sited without due regard to rules for proper siting (this on top of "heat island" effects as cities have grown around long standing weather data collection sites).


2. My knowledge of computer modeling and the results produced so far tells me that it is very unlikely that the models tell us much real information about the future (here and here and here and here and here and here and here).


3. You can go look at the temperature data for yourself on a NASA web page. Despite the problems with data tampering raised under the first point above, you can see for yourself that the "runaway" heating or the "hockey stick" rise just aren't all that obvious in the data. My favourite graph is "Annual Mean Temperature Change in the United States" towards the bottom of the page that shows that anomaly -- variance from the long term average -- is less than half a degree centigrade and that recent temperatures have moved back toward average.


4. I believe that there are a lot of things that aren't well understood: cloud formation (and albedo), carbon source/sinks, solar variance, etc. What I find odd is that everybody is jumping on CO2 as the vilain but methane gas (and others) are stronger greenhouse gases (but less common). Shall we kill all the cattle to reduce methane? Drain all the swamps? Put concrete over the Arctic to prevent the release of methane there?


5. I'm with Bjorn Lomborg in thinking that if you really care about planet earth and humanity, you would do a cost-benefit analysis and rationally attack the problem. Running off and wanting to shut down our petroleum & coal based energy and throwing us into a Dark Age is not my idea of rationally attacking a potential problem.


6. I believe that technology change will move us to a post-carbon energy system. The run-up of oil to $160/barrel in 2008 is a hint of things to come. The pressure to move to more sustainable energy is growing and will shift us away from oil & coal. But if we handcuff ourselves by depressing the economy based on hysteria about "global warming" then we may in fact postpone the beneficial changeover by reducing wealth. (Think of environmental clean-up. No poor nation has ever really gotten serious about environmental contaminants. Only when you wealth rises to a level of abundance with secure food, housing, etc. does a population start demanding cleaner environments. The same will be true of greenhouse gases.)

I think Paul Krugman is a very bright person. But I think this is an area where we have to agree to part company. He and I do not see the facts the same way. I think he has been duped about "global warming". He probably would think that I don't understand "the science". This is an experiment that will take another 30 years to really decide. He doesn't think we have time to "play with our fates" and I think he has been stampeded by doomsayers and end-of-the-world fanatics (just the latest in a long line of sellers of gloom-and-doom).

The very over-the-top rhetoric that Krugman is using (irresponsibility, immorality, treason against the planet) says to me that the doomster meme has seized his brain and closed him off to rational discussion.

Neither Krugman nor I are expert in climatology. His ad hominem attack carries no weight. He has his experts (MIT with a recent report) and I have "my experts" in Lawrence Solomon's book The Deniers,world class scientists who are brave enough to go against popular sentiment as documented in this book.