Fellow Travellers In Illusion--Al Gore And The Pope

This is a highly personal sort of rant so anyone who expects the usual cooly reasoned, tightly argued piece of analysis won't find it here today. No. This time its personal.

Al Gore has long sojourned in the land of illusion. His travelogues based on his ventures in the horror filled territory of global warming replete with dead lands and brackish water, littered with the corpses of polar bears and assorted amphibians have brought him fame, fortune and the cachet of a Nobel Prize.

Apparently the global crusader for greener living feels overlooked of late as the US economy sputters, in part because of escalating food prices--prices driven to some unquantifiable extent by the Gore promoted fad for biofuels. But, you can't keep a good mouth down for long.

He's back with a headline grabbing call for the US to replace all fossil fuel electrical generation by earth-friendly technologies such as solar, wind and (unspecified) other forms of production within ten years. Notably, Gore did not mention nuclear power as an alternative.

Get a grip, Mr Gore!

The Geek knows a thing or two about alternative energy production. He has been living off the grid for ten years now. All his electricity comes from the sun--when there is sun.

Aye, that's one of the rubs. Solar power works when there is sun. Wind power works when there is wind. At night, those of us who use the sun must depend upon batteries. The few folks who live somewhere near the Geek who use the wind as their main energy prime mover must rely upon either a backup system or batteries.

The batteries are the weak point in the system. Until there is a new form of battery technology which insures longer life and greater storage capacity per pound of battery weight, there will be significant built-in limits to solar energy in particular.

Then there are the greens, particularly the deep greens who should be the loudest singers in the pro-Gore choir. Where are they?

After being significant players in the counter productive campaign for biofuels which not only hike the price of food, lower the energy potential of vehicle fuel and wreak environmental havoc in their own right, the Deep Greens, the True Believers of the environmental movement have been part of the problem. They should like solar-thermal electrical generation, right?

Wrong!

Even though the vast watelands which constitute large portions of southeastern California, southern Arizona and Nevada seem ideal for the construction of large solar powered generation facilities, the DGs are against them. The huge arrays of either mirrors or photovoltaic panels might somehow interfere with desert dwelling lizards and small mammals. Can't let that happen in the rampant human quest for energy, can we?

Wind power. The DGs ought to like that too. They don't. Spinning blades might interfere with the birdies. That's a Greeno No-No. (There's actually a practical objection to wind farms at sea as has been proposed by the New Jersey Governor among others--the radar systems used by ships can't see through the chaff-type interference caused by the blades as they revolve.)

Gore overlooked the first two sets of problems. He overlooked a third set as well. Planning, gaining approval for and constructing a large, base-load plant takes longer than ten years even with well-established, well-proven fossil fuel technology. How much longer will it take to design, gain all the legally required stamps of approval and build a base-load replacement plant using an emerging technology?

Then, what does the country do for electricity while the inevitable bugs are beaten out of the new systems?

Gore uses the analogy of the man-to-the-moon program of the Sixties. It is a totally specious analogy in both method and scope. The space program was a single thrust effort. Replacing coal and oil fired base load generation plants would be a multi-thrust effort requiring the development, integration and construction of diverse technologies welded into a single system.

In short, Gore is retailing another illusion hoping to hook his cause onto the myth of the Sixties. Get over it, Mr Gore. The Geek is also a product of the Sixties. He knows that myths and happy dreams don't buy a cup of coffee in the real world. Don't you, Al?

Now for Pope Benedict, the other person who has shown himself over the past twenty-four hours to have little or any connection to the real world.

The Pope is in Australia for World Youth Day or some such affair. Sidney is flat full of young and enthusiastic sorts. Just awaiting for the Pope to give them, not hell, but heaven.

Of course the road to heaven is paved with strict abjurations. His Popeness is willing to lay them out. It seems that Benedict thinks that the human race is ruining the globe by virtue of its collective "insatiable consumption."

It is fashionable to bash "consumption" and "consumerism." The Geek would like to join in on the fun, but his sense of intellectual integrity to say nothing of his keen appreciation of reality prevents him from so doing.

In any event the Pope has it wrong. The problem is not consumption, "insatiable" or otherwise.

No. The problem is simply that there are too many people alive and consuming. Too many people needing everything from the most basic of necessities to the most useless and frivolous of luxuries.

Consider the US. The population of the US has slightly more than doubled during the Geek's lifetime (or Al Gore's for that matter.) That's an increase from slightly less than one hundred fifty million people to some 305 million.

The US has been an also-ran in the Great Global Baby Race compared to dozens of other countries. From relatively prosperous "emerging" societies such as those in the PRC or India to countries at the bottom of the survival list, more than doubling the population in slightly more than fifty years has been the norm.

Now, Pope Benedict, that is the real problem. The questions for you and the global enterprise of which you are CEO are these: what have you done about it? What will you do about it?

The answers to both are simple. Nothing. And nothing. The response of your institution has been and, in greatest probability, will continue to be: level down the global standard of living. Take away from those who have and give to those who have not until everybody has nearly nothing.

This is the sort of human destroying logic that is expectable from a theoretically responsible adult occupying a leadership role in a very large, politically potent organisation that calls upon people to put "religion" first in their public and private lives.

That is the sort of logic that gave Europe the deepest gloom of the Dark Ages as the early Medieval Period has been correctly dubbed. That is the kind of logic that your institution showed centuries ago when it insisted on repressing thought, inquiry and expression--to say nothing of torturing and killing those who dared to question.

Your logic is the functional and ethical equivalent of the logic employed by the death oriented mullahs who issue fatwas calling for mass killing.

Pope Benedict, when you make a false parsing between "subjective" feelings and faith as you did in your speech today in Sidney, not only do you show a disastrous misunderstanding of faith which must be inherently subjective, but you substitute obedience to a specific religious dogma for faith. That, in the Geek's reading of the Message of Jesus, runs antipodal to the teachings of that wandering sage and healer.

Get a grip, Pope Benedict. It is not the secular thinkers who fail to appreciate either the nature of the problems that confront the world and its people today as well as the necessary and necessarily painful and unfair solutions to them.

It is you.

The Geek Takes On A Challenge

A few days ago, a reader left a comment directly challenging the Geek to consider the matter of anthropogenic climate change (aka global warming). The commentator added a pair of escape hatches for the Geek. One was that the Geek might not consider the subject to fall in the foreign policy domain. The other was that the Geek might view Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore "too big" a target to take on.

Like any combat infantryman, the Geek prefers large, highly visible targets. The reason for that is self-evident. So, escape hatch number two is closed.

As for the first way out, the Geek has to reject that as well since the weather is global as would be any significant human impact upon it. The Geek has to admit it: He's trapped. Bushwhacked.

Now for some obligatory disclaimers. The Geek is not a science wonk. Neither is he a politician. Nor a journalist. Thus, he is obviously unqualified to put his oar in the global warming swamp.

However, the Geek is a historian. That might be at least as good a qualification as having been Vice President of the United States.

It is important that we get a historical grip on the realities of climate change. At the least we have to recognise that right now, today, is not the first time the human race has experienced an alteration in the base annual temperature of, if not the entire globe, the Northern Hemisphere.

Take a brief look at a couple of well-documented historical examples.

During the Roman occupation of Britain, vineyards were planted with success throughout the southern portion of what is now England. For this to have happened, the average annual temperature would have had to be greater than it is even today. Unless one wants to posit that the hard marching legions exhaled truly awesome amounts of carbon dioxide, the cause had to rest with some component of nature other than human activity.

Later, the climate cycled again. There was the famed "Little Ice Age" of the Middle Ages. This was followed by a period when Greenland merited the name. As archaeological explorations have confirmed, Leif Erickson was not a progenitor of real estate promoter hyperbole when he named the place "green." For several generations, the Norse outposts on the southern portions of the enormous island flourished.

Then the climate cycled again. Green was defeated by white. The white of snow and ice. Cut off from resupply or trade with Norway or even the badly misnamed Iceland, the settlements withered and died.

Paleobotantical research in the northwestern United States indicates that the climate of the Cascade mountain region was formerly much warmer than it is currently. Species of vegetation which now grow only at low altitudes used to be present near the summits of peaks now crowned by rock or very sparse, cold adapted growth.

In a similar way, there is evidence that the southwestern US enjoyed a wetter and slightly warmer climate a few hundred years ago (roughly contemporaneous with the green in Greenland.) Then, the conditions changed in a short period of time becoming dryer and slightly cooler. The dryer part of the statement is the more important as it indicates a shift in the moisture carrying winds from the Pacific Ocean which would track with a larger scale cooling trend.

Clearly, there is historical evidence for the contention that the atmosphere, weather, the earth itself, constitutes a dynamic system that shifts and changes without respect for either the desires or the actions of humans. None of this is meant to imply that humans cannot or have not had at least a marginal impact on the weather. It is meant to show that the current fixation on anthropogenic climate change is overstated.

We have been going through a period of history marked by exceptionally rapid technological, economic, social, and cultural change. The past thirty or forty years in particular have been a time of extreme turbulence in all these areas. To say that it has been disquieting is to engage in understatement.

To many in the United States (and the West generally) many, if not all, of the anchor points of life have been torn loose. The downsides of science and technology, particularly the latter, have been exposed. Economic growth has been shown to not be the unmixed blessing it was supposed to be in former years. The increase in the human cargo of the planet has been demonstrated to be less than desirable, not to say an out-and-out curse.

Old beliefs, old ideologies, time hallowed values have been challenged and in some cases dethroned. In what can one rest faith has been asked by quite a few quite often.

In this context, it becomes easy to see how early, imprecise, and to some extent speculative data regarding global warming could be picked up and run with not only by media outlets in never ending pursuit of a flashy, splashy story, but by individuals in search of an agenda. An agenda not perhaps seeking power, but one where control might be asserted.

Control. That's the key word.

Control carries with it the chance of reintroducing certainty in an inherently uncertain world. Control brings with it the chance of gaining political status, authority, power.

Everyone seeks to establish as much control in and over their lives and the lives of those around them as possible and allowable. Institutions are simply individuals writ large. Scientific, journalistic, political institutions are certainly not immune to the drive for control and the goodies it brings in its wake.

Viewing with alarm is a fine way to gain control. Nothing is more alarming (with the possible exceptions of nuclear war, bioterror attacks, economic catastrophe) then the idea that the weather is changing around us. Changing for the worse.

Viewing with alarm is the journalists' stock in trade. From the if-it-bleeds-it-leads philosophy of television news to the portentous analyses of the print media, the worse life now and in the future can be portrayed--the better.

Viewing with alarm competes in the politicians' lexicon with pointing with pride. Given the choice, most pols will stick with producing fear. Grave warnings or shrill cries of peril are the best ways of securing and maintaining control.

Scientists, perhaps beset with some unsettling residual sense of guilt over the promises which past science has either failed to deliver or which have been undercut by real world demands, have not been slow to realise that viewing with alarm results in larger grants and greater respect in political circles. Contrary to a pervasive belief, scientists are human. They scramble for money, status, and power just as fast as businessmen or politicians. Scientists are as fast to run for the protective cover of group-think as journalists or academics.

Scientists are as willing to put aside objectivity when it conflicts with prejudice, predilection, or political correctness as are members of any other occupation. When the group mind changes or the winds of social-political emphasis shift, scientists are willing and eager to follow suit.

This gives rise to "junk science," which has been seen time and time again in the past century or so. It ranges from the ill-founded basis of eugenics in the early Twentieth Century to the equally dismal misuse of statistics and biology to support the anti-smoking campaigns of recent years.

The same dynamic can be seen with respect to anthropogenic climate change. A cursory look at the literature shows the oft-proclaimed scientific consensus on the matter is far less real than alleged.

Journalism plays a critical role in the exploitation and magnification of less-than-totally-credible scientific research and the tentative conclusions that careful scientists achieve. The great amplifier cranks up repeated and increasingly shrill cries of impending doom. We all know the result. We've all experienced it. Time after time.

The synergy between politicians and journalists further magnifies the findings of "science" until the cry of "something must be done!" resounds everywhere. And, dissenters are banished from the public square.

Anthropogenic climate change is the perfect issue for politicians (and others) with an agenda which includes internationalism, anti-corporate beliefs, and some sort of abstract love of the environment. It is also a made-to-order base for leaders of lesser developed countries and international organisations seeking another reason to insist upon wealth transfer at the expense of more developed nation-states.

A consensus on anthropogenic climate change has been formed. It is not comprised of scientists ranging from biologists to climatologists to atmospheric physicists. It is instead a consensus of internationalists, greens, politicians, the chattering class members who extol political correctness over mundane reality, and those who wish Marxism really, really worked in practice.

The foregoing helps explain why the Geek is not surprised by the action of the Norwegian Storting in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the UN Panel on Climate Change. (Although the Geek doubts that many of those voting on the prize even read so much of the dense pack climate change report as the Executive Summary.)

It also helps explain why the UN has established yet another international commission, this time to address the humanitarian needs of Third World countries brought about by climate change. Is there an issue more suited for any latent (or not so latent) ambitions for power in the UN Secretariat than anthropogenic climate change?

For now, the Geek is an agnostic on the actual effects of human activity on the climate. As a historian specializing in the arcana of the power seeking process of governments, he has to cast a jaundiced eye on the credibility of the viewing-with-alarm posture adopted by so many so recently. At the same time the Geek has the sneaking suspicion that so much that we humans do is not in our best long term interest.

(That's it for now. Winter is coming. The Geek has to go cut firewood. As he cuts, he will be thinking that he could use some of Al Gore's global warming in the next few months.)