Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank thinks it’s pretty silly for Republicans and climate change deniers to say that the recent snowstorms mean that climate change is phony.
BUT…. don’t think for a second that Milbank’s going to let “greens” off the hook that easy. No way. As he put it on Sunday (2/14/10): “There’s some rough justice in the conservatives’ cheap shots. In Washington’s blizzards, the greens were hoist by their own petard.”
How so? Climate activists “have argued by anecdote to make their case,” especially Al Gore, who has warned of a whole menu of negative consequences from climate change. Milbank writes: “It’s not that Gore is wrong about these things. The problem is that his storm stories have conditioned people to expect an endless worldwide heatwave, when in fact the changes so far are subtle.”
Milbank has more:
Scientific arguments, too, are problematic. In a conference call arranged Thursday by the liberal Center for American Progress to refute the snow antics of Inhofe et al., the center’s Joe Romm made the well-worn statements that “the overwhelming weight of the scientific literature” points to human-caused warming and that doubters “don’t understand the science.”
The science is overwhelming—but not definitive. Romm’s claim was inadvertently shot down by his partner on the call, the Weather Underground‘s Jeff Masters, who confessed that “there’s a huge amount of natural variability in the climate system,” and not enough years of measurements to know exactly what’s going on. “Unfortunately we don’t have that data, so we are forced to make decisions based on inadequate data.”
Aside from lamenting Romm’s comments for being so “well-worn,” did Jeff Masters really “shoot down” climate analyst Romm? That’s not what Masters says happened; he has a response on his site, where he writes, “I agree with Dr. Romm’s statement.” Milbank’s storyline—both sides are exaggerating—is a familiar one, but it’s also entirely misleading. As is his drive-by summary of the whole “Climategate” scandal:
The scientific case has been further undermined by high-profile screw-ups. First there were the hacked e-mails of a British research center that suggested the scientists were stacking the deck to overstate the threat. Now comes word of numerous errors in a 2007 report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including the bogus claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear in 25 years.
There is no credible evidence that climate scientists were “stacking the deck.”It is hard to figure out what he means by”numerous” errors in the 2007 report; there are two prominent allegations, including the aforementioned glaciers error. The New York Times determined that the complaints have amounted to “half-truths.” Milbank’s assertion, then, that the “scientific case has been further undermined” is specious. But the point of climate change denial is to manufacture a political scandal—which is what journalism like this does well.
Can’t you just envision the self-satisfied smile on Milbank’s face when he finished this piece? To his mind, he upheld the highest standards of journalistic “balance” and “independent-mindedness”, don’t you think?
But don’t you imagine that somewhere in the back of that self-deluded mind he knows it’s all a crock? That is, if he’s not totally divorced from reality.
This is all supposition, of course, because I don’t know how the minds of people like Milbank work.
I just know they don’t work for us, do they?
“not enough years of measurements to know exactly what’s going on…”
we live in the neogene era. this is the last 23 million years. the concentration of co2 in the atmosphere for the past 23 million years which life has evolved to has been 280 parts per million. since the industrial revolution we have increased it to 390ppm. we have increased the amount of co2, a greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere by 40%
dana is an idiot.
Not to bash the sacred cow of co2, but isn’t methane also a greenhouse gas? How does increase of methane gas affect the atmosphere? Is methane gas released as temperatures rise?
John: Yes, methane is also a greenhouse gas. It is a stronger one than CO2, but much less methane is currently being released into that atmosphere than CO2. And yes, more methane gas is released as temperatures rise, from melting permafrost and from the ocean floor. This is one of the positive feedbacks that scientists are most worried about. It is happening now, but so far it does not seem to have spiraled out of control.
The problem is that there will be a long lag time between the time we finally cut greenhouse gas emissions drastically and when the temperature will stop rising. Meanwhile, more and more methane will be released, making the temperature even hotter. At some point it will spiral out of control, and we don’t know when that will be. If that happens, it would be devastating for life on earth. Shouldn’t we drastically reduce our emissions now? If we wait, we could discover later on that we waited too long.
We are being given a golden opportunity here. We might not have discovered this problem until it was too late to fix it. But we did discover it, so we should act. Otherwise we are wasting our opportunity to prevent the next mass extinction and the suffering and death of billions of humans.