What's really scary about global warming?

I feel very conflicted about the "global warming" meme being shoved down our collective throats. On the one hand, I'm convinced that this is a gigantic hoax driven in part by well-meaning people, but largely by anti-Western, anti-capitalist ideologies I'm extremely wary of. On the other hand, won't the good that may come out of that, like alternative energy and cleaner environment, outweigh the bad? Well, that's exactly what I'm afraid of - that it will not. For one thing, the benefits are yet to be realized, but there are already plenty of very troubling signs that evoke terrible associations for me. After all, wasn't the premise of communism a benevolent one? To distribute wealth more equally, to stop exploitation of one person by another, to introduce rational planning into the volatile nature of capitalist economy... And look what we ended up with.

I'm not saying that the global warming hysteria will lead to a revolution, a world socialist government, or gulags.  (I'm also not saying that it won't.) However, the attempts to silence and vilify the skeptics are extremely troubling. As is the politicization of science, the involvement of government bureaucracies, the enormous amounts of money that will be extracted from societies for all kinds of hare-brained ideas that, in the best of circumstances, will have very little effect, and in the worst, will cause irreparable damage.

Yes, I always hated the SUVs, considering them an idiotic fad that refused to go away. I don't think of myself as a tree-hugger (although I was one in my teenage years and early adulthood), but at the same time I don't like cars very much, and the notion that a single person could be burning so much gas moving his/her ass in a humongous car from one place to another was making me genuinely angry. Especially after 9/11, when it became painfully clear what our gas money had been paying for...

I would really welcome a much better public transit system in the US, and much smaller cars. I think I wrote about this before, but George W. Bush wasted a tremendous opportunity by not rallying the country around the idea of energy conservation and independence in response to the 9/11 carnage. Previous attempts by Presidents Ford and Carter to lower our dependence on foreign oil failed, because the OPEC countries responded by pumping more oil and lowering its price, thus making alternative energy sources badly uneconomical. Tying this to national security in the wake of the terrorist attack would have insulated this project - at least to some extent - from such economic pressures. The Americans would have swallowed $2 or $3 per gallon, if they knew that the revenue would go toward building energy independence. Now our only hope is that the price will stay high long enough for alternative energy to take hold, and that OPEC will not be able to increase production to kill it. (At the same time, it would be even worse if the price of oil got much higher, forcing the world's economy into a nosedive... It is a tough balancing act and we will need all the luck we can get.)

I cringe imagining government bureaucrats all over the world rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the windfall the global warming scare will produce. They will be relevant again! The public is virtually begging for more onerous regulations,  bigger taxes, more intrusions into their personal choices - let's give it to them! Governments are like those gigantic steam engines of the past: hard to get them going, but once they are in motion you have to keep feeding them, and it's awfully hard to make them stop or turn around. Remember these three idiotic questions the airline agents were required to ask years and years after the "Lockerbie bombing"?  "Who packed your bags?", "Have these bags been under your complete control since the time you packed them?", "Has anyone given you anything to bring on board?". It mast have been pretty evident to anybody with half a brain how ridiculously ineffective was this method of thwarting terrorism (was even a single bombing prevented because of this measure??) and yet it took 15 (or more?) years until finally the US government decided to let go of it. (Imagine my shock when I heard those questions last November, before boarding a plane at Schiphol in Amsterdam... They are still doing it. How sad and annoying.)

Another example: the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which is doing grave damage to American competitiveness, yet nobody has the guts to pull the plug on it. My point is that once you open the door for the government to regulate, you will have to live with the consequences for many, many years, even if it turns out that these regulations were ill-advised to begin with. This scares me much more than a change of a couple of degrees in average temperatures.

Vaclav Klaus on the myth of global warming

Being from Eastern Europe it is impossible not to feel a sense of pride when hearing leaders like Vaclav Klaus bluntly say things that no politician in the West would dare to say. Here is Klaus in a recent interview, speaking about "global warming":

Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses. This is clearly such an incredible failure of so many people, from journalists to politicians. If the European Commission is instantly going to buy such a trick, we have another very good reason to think that the countries themselves, not the Commission, should be deciding about similar issues.

One can only hope that a decade in the EU will not turn all of of them into spineless worms like so many of their Western counterparts.

Evolution of stupidity

A friend sent me a link to a lecture by the geneticist Roman Giertych, a well known (at least in Poland, if not in Europe) critic of evolutionism. (Un?)fortunately, this lecture is in Polish, and so unless you speak the language, you're out of luck. Or, rather, a lucky bastard, as Prof. Giertych is a living proof that you can amass a bunch of Ph.D.s and still be an idiot. Listening to him was a mild perhaps, but nevertheless a torture. Painful as it is for me to admit, after this experience I now understand the anger and hostility of people like Richard Dawkins much better. This doesn't make Dawkins less of an arrogant asshole, but at least I can see why he is so pissed off - it truly is a travesty that people like Giertych are allowed to call themselves "scientists" and thus gain instant credibility with their audiences, which they then proceed to bullshit with religious mumbo-jumbo.

As the imaginary god is my witness, I did genuinely try to approach this with an open mind. I've been very disilussioned with the politicization and dogmatization of science, where voices straying from the currently reigning dogma - whether it is "global warming" or "educational benefits of diversity" or evolutionism - are viciously attacked, ridiculed, supressed. And yet, listening to Mr. Giertych I found myself longing for a sort of credentialing body for scientists, which would have the authority to ban a person whose conduct or pronouncements are damaging to science, from calling himself a "scientist".

It isn't to say that the entire lecture was nonsense. In fact, Giertych has brought up some interesting points, including examples of sloppy, tendentious science. At the same time, it quickly became pretty clear that he was making these points not to lead his audience to truth, but to confuse and twist the truth in order to cast doubt on science and present it as just a system of belief, not much different from religion. He was shockingly disingenuous and manipulative. For example, he talked at length about the eruption of Mount St. Helen in Washington State and how geologists were supposedly stunned after discovering that this catasprophe had produced, in a matter of days, such ordering of geological materials that until then had been widely believed to require centuries. His conclusion? Well, maybe the Great Canyon was formed in the matter of months and not millienia, as claimed?

Even assuming that the geological "surprise" of Mount St. Helen was indeed such a huge surprise for geologists, I seriously doubt that it invalidated all the previous research and methods of geological dating, as Giertych seems to be suggesting. He jumps to a conclusion (or at least wants his audience to do that) that this one event and the anomaly it produced is not an anomaly, but evidence of how this must have happend in all the other cases of stratification. His purpose is clear: the Bible says that the Earth was created a few thousand years ago, so let's cast doubt on the evidence that it took much, much longer. Never mind that the evidence is ovewhelming - we'll just show one hole and the gullible and the biased will just see that hole and nothing else.

What about carbon dating? Oh, this is just a minor dissonance that Giertych just glides through, mumbling about "known problems with carbon dating". An example of these problems? The Turin Shroud. Now, what about this shroud, Professor? Wasn't it examined by two independent research labs, both of whom concluded that this was a medieval forgery? So wherein lies the "problem" with carbon dating, Professor? Oh, the Church says that the shroud has the image of Christ imprinted on it, and that doesn't square with the lab results, so these results must clearly be off... We just can't trust carbon dating, can we?

And so it goes. Perhaps the most revealing example of Giertych's illogic came in his answer to a question from the audience, when he contrasted science and the Church: it is science that keeps changing and whose theories are being proven wrong time and again; the Church's teachings stay the same. Hard as it is to fathom, Giertych actually believes that this makes science inferior! Science is only searching for the truth; religion already knows the truth - so there you go. You can ridicule the evolutionists, who still haven't found the "missing link", but the talking bush and the immaculate conception are not subject to scrutiny - these are facts. The Bible says so.

One thing I would like to give Giertych credit for is that he at least didn't seem to be especially concerned about sticking to the Intelligent-Designs-is-not-Creationism line. At least that's a sliver of intellectual honesty. On the other hand, he gave his talk at the catholic Stefan Wyszynski University, to an audience probably more sympathetic to creationism than evolutionism, so he could afford to be less careful.

Science as religion

I've been watching the recorded sessions of the conference Beyond Belief with very mixed emotions. This conference, organized by the Science Network and held November 5-7 at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, gathered together scientists and philosophers, ostensibly to try to answer questions such as, "Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? Can we be good without God? And if not God, then what?", but mostly to bash religion, Intelligent Design, and... George W. Bush.

Now, bashing religions, if done well, is music to my ears, if only because religions have enjoyed the status of holy cows in our society way too long. However, seeing this being done by arrogant assholes like Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Kraus makes me cringe at calling myself an atheist (I so do not want to be like them!) I actually have more respect for the compassionate, soft-spoken Joan Roughgarden, who actually defended religion, that for the condescending, haughty atheists like Dawkins, regardless how many books the latter wrote.

As much as I despair over the resurgence of religious fanaticism in the world, currently unleashing mayhem and threatening to destroy our civilization, I do not see science offering a better alternative to religion as the ultimate guide for our actions. Anybody who believes science to be free of ideology and dogma obviously hasn't been paying attention. One only needs to recall the treatment given by fellow scientists to Bjorn Lomborg for his book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" to know that the price for challenging the currently dominant and politically-correct dogma is steep indeed. While "heretics" who dare to cast doubt on the junk science presented in support of "global warming" as man-made phenomenon do not face being burned at the stake, they do it at a tremendous risk to their careers - a modern day equivalent of being driven out of a medieval village, covered in tar and feathers.

And what's with this visceral hatred of George W. Bush? The cheap, gratuitous jokes would have been embarassing at a divorce lawyers convention, let alone a gathering of people who undoubtedly think of themselves as "luminaries of science". ("Our current president's support of Intelligent Design is surprising, considering that his very existence disproves it." - is just one example. One has to give a bit of credit to the audience, which, although almost certainly not sympathetic to GWB, responded with few laughs.) These people are supposed o be role models??