The year 2011 is now forty-four days old. That doesn't mean much, fully expectable and all that. What is important is today is the very first of those forty-four days where the temperature has actually reached a normal high value. All the other days, each miserable bloody cold one of them was below normal--as much as thirty-seven degrees.
In this pattern the Geek's canyon has mirrored the experience of much of the US in this, an alleged La Nina winter. Record cold, snowfall from some Norse hell, frozen pipes, never ending chilblains, teeth chattering without letup. And, according to the advocates of anthropogenic climate change, all the result of global warming.
The Geek has been following the We-Are-All-Going-To-Fry campaign since its opening days back in 1997. That was the year he first saw the (in)famous "hockey stick" graph resulting from the statistical prestidigitation and mathematical thaumaturgy of "climate scientist" Michael Mann. The graph purports to demonstrate that all manner of global warming had occurred during the years following World War II and thus resulted from the increased use of fossil fuels.
Being a historian the Geek couldn't help but notice that the flat part of the stick--the handle covering the past several centuries did not show the signs of the Late Roman Warming period or the Medieval Warming or the Little Ice Age from which clutches the world escaped in fits and starts in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The Geek was sore amazed. These events were all well known. They are in all the history books--even Western Civ texts such as may have been used when Dr Mann was an undergrad. He might even have seen references, but, apparently the magic of statistics was capable of removing even the most well documented, long duration experiences from the human record--if a compelling reason to do such exists.
Of course, compelling reasons to send centuries down the memory hole exist for Dr Mann and others of his persuasion. These include professional status, research money, the gaining of influence on the movers and shakers of the planet. Scientists are no more immune to the appeals of money, power, and status than members of other occupations.
The Geek's suspicions regarding the agenda driven nature of "climate science" were solidified in recent years by a recurrent trope--The Science is settled! Now, there is one thing which separates true scientific inquiry from all other forms of human investigation. That thing is simple. It is that nothing is ever "settled" in science. Even long standing theories with a repeatedly demonstrated capacity for robust descriptions and predictions is open to challenge. Indeed, one suspects there are eager young guns out there in scienceland hoping to find a fatal flaw with Newtonian mechanics, or quantum realities of "spooky action at a distance."
In religion any matter can be settled. It takes only a central authority with the power to bind, the authority to investigate, the ability to punish, to read out of good standing any who proclaim heterodox beliefs. The same applies to politics. Or social and fraternal groups. It does not apply to science.
We know from the emails of "Climategate" notoriety that Dr Mann and his fellows such as those at East Anglia University did attempt to bar the heterodox from publication or attendance at international conferences. We know as well that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did constitute a small group empowered with the ability to define the acceptable. The IPCC might have concealed its actual small size ( a couple of dozen main authors at most) behind an impressive wall of apparent mass mob size, but the insiders, the climate vatican as it were, was smaller by far than the College of Cardinals. Smaller and far more potent in terms of defining dogma, ruling dissent out of bounds, and limiting the nature of the debate.
The IPCC was not alone in its hijacking of science. It had any number of very potent facilitators most of which can be found littering the corridors of power in assorted national governments to say nothing of the ever ambitious United Nations bureaucracy. For assorted reasons including ideology, personal needs, money, the list goes on, politicians and bureaucrats signed on to the IPCC headed crusade to limit human freedom, redistribute wealth, accretate power to central governments or international organizations and generally muck up the global economic dynamics.
Fast, rash actions were justified by the cry, "The science is settled!" As the sounding of alarms, the pointing at clear and present danger is great for circulation and ratings, there is no surprise that the global media joined in the crowd sourced hysteria. Scientifically illiterate or dishonest journalists assisted the process, giving a high platform for the approved gloom and doom bunch while marginalizing any with the wit and courage to dissent.
Never did the media ask even the most basic questions regarding the allegedly settled science. In the ready acceptance of the basic contention of the global warming cabal, no one from the media, for example, inquired why the designated bad guy was carbon dioxide. It is a matter of the most elementary sort that water vapor is a far more potent "greenhouse gas" than is carbon dioxide. Water vapor is responsible for roughly seventy-five percent of the heat retention and downward reflection effects collectively described by the term "greenhouse" while carbon dioxide causes scarcely three percent of the effect. Even methane whether from natural organic decay or the flatulence of cows and other large herbivores causes a greater impact--some twenty percent of the total.
Why did not one MSM inquire into this? Even now when the EPA is seeking to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and accusing the Republicans in the House of promoting public health threats by seeking to defund the regulatory effort has not one MSM bothered to investigate just how little impact on global warming the much maligned but central to all vegetable life little molecule actually has.
Nor has the scientific press been any better. One might expect that journals purporting to present science to the informed layperson might have done more to underscore just how little is known about the mechanisms which drive climate.
No work has been focused on, for example, what is known and unknown about the irregularities in solar radiation and how they affect climate. The sun is a slightly variable star--kind of a small scale, slow action pulsar with regular fluctuations in its radiation budget which are overlain by the waxing and waning of sunspots and solar flares. All directly and substantially impact both daily weather and long term climate.
It is known that extra-solar ionizing radiation is related directly to the causation of low and mid-level clouds which in turn directly affect weather and climate. But, the devil is in the details and the details are not well known or understood.
The same applies to the large scale non-explosive volcanic activity occurring in the shallow water of the Western Pacific Ocean. The heat load directly modifies oceanic currents with consequences which may involve the long cycle oscillations of that ocean or may render the periodic oscillations less important. We know very little about this critical aspect of climate and weather making. Indeed, we know remarkably little as yet regarding the overall meshing of the oceans with atmosphere, which meshing is central to all weather, all climate whether routine or extreme.
While we are at it--where are the guardians of the public's sacred right to know when it comes to past climate cycles? If carbon dioxide drives temperature increases then why have any number of previous periods of global cold, global glaciation been marked by carbon dioxide levels much higher than today's? Or, why were carbon dioxide levels so much lower back during both the Roman and Medieval Warm periods if it takes increased carbon dioxide to drive higher temperatures?
There are other equally salient matters, bucko, but you get the point. The deal is simple: There is no settled science.
This is not to say there is no global warming. There has been. Ever since the end of the Little Ice Age a century and a half back we have been on a slow warming trend. The bad news is this trend apparently ended in 1998 (a date accepted even by Dr Mann and Dr Jones of East Anglia.)
A little more global warming would be good for life generally and human life in particular. The historical record is clear on that. So also are the data from the historical sciences such as all of those with the prefix "paleo" in their name.
So, a demand to the MSM, politicians, bureaucrats and others of an agenda driven, ideological nature, give us--and science--a break. Stop insulting intelligence and the truth with assertions regarding "settled science." And, stop trying to make cold a symptom of excess heat.
Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Monday, July 20, 2009
The Carbon Game--Global Affirmative Action
Back in the mid-Sixties the US government had a very good idea. Given both the vast and pervasive nature of racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination in American schools, businesses, residential housing patterns and the like as well as wide-spread public support for a change in this pernicious state of affairs, congress and executive worked together to enact a series of laws addressing the need for real equality of opportunity in all these areas.
In employment and education the key aspect of the legislation was the requirement for equal opportunity regarding both admission to educational facilities and employment. It was almost impossible for anyone with the slightest orientation as to time and place and an ethical sensibility transcending that of a tapeworm to dissent. Who could be against a level playing field in which both the advantages and disadvantages of race, ethnic origin, or gender would be absent?
Success would be on the basis of merit alone. No unearned assistance from (some) accidents of birth. No penalties either.
But in almost no time at all the original good idea was morphed by courts and congress into a far more ambitious and sinister creature. Equal opportunity became affirmative action. No matter what legal gloss or linguistic varnish might be applied, affirmative action brought race, ethnic background, and sex back onto the playing field.
It was not only legal but praiseworthy to practice some sort of reverse discrimination. A guilt perverted logic held that it was a good thing to discriminate against a present day white guy in order to teach his (dead) ancestors the evil of having discriminated in one way or another in the past. Judges, pundits, politicians, and professors told the white guy who was, in effect, to go sit at the back of the bus, that he had nothing to complain about since his "privileged" position in society had been purchased in the past by the exploitative and discriminating behavior of his forebearers.
The primary motivator in the transmogrification of equal opportunity into affirmative action was a sense of guilt which mainly afflicted those Americans of a liberal bent, a solid middle or upper class background, a comprehensive education to the level of a terminal degree, and an overall sense of security which afforded them the luxury of having others pay the price for their personal sense of sin. Guilt is wonderful. Provided you don't have to bear its burden.
So it is with global warming today.
We must leave aside the question of whether or not there is any truth behind the prognostications of prompt climatic catastrophe due to anthropogenic climate change unless drastic actions are taken instantly. The reason for this is simply that the global warming crowd has won the field. The decision has been made. We must kill the weather or the weather will kill us.
The sovereign remedy for ending the thermal menace (literally) hovering over us is the prompt and dramatic reduction in the levels of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere by human activities. It goes without saying (or, at least should) that any significant reduction in this class of emissions will have immense economic, social, and personal consequences.
The heart of any global approach to the spectre of looming planetary incineration is the mechanism by which the efforts and attendant consequences will be spread and shared. There are two models: equal opportunity and affirmative action.
In an ideal world, a perfect humanity, the choice would be plain: equal opportunity, or, to err on the side of accuracy, equal pain, sacrifice, and loss.
We do live in an imperfect world, and humanity generally has not achieved any significant level of ethical purity. And, (here comes the most important consideration) the elites of the West, of Europe and, even more to the point, the United States, are afflicted by a level of guilt over our success that they are eager to prance to the gallows, fix the noose of penance around their (and our) necks, and spring the trap below their feet.
The much maligned George W. Bush refused to put the halter of the Kyoto Accords around the collective necks of Americans as it would harm national interests without any need for corresponding sacrifices on the part of, among others, India and China. For his refusal to acknowledge American guilt in exploiting the plentiful energy resources of the US during the period of industrial development (roughly 1850-2000) and meekly accept the necessary condign punishment, George W. Bush was (and is) pilloried as an example of greedy, selfish, piggy Americans who consume energy in the trillions of kilowatt hours and spew carbon dioxide with the barbaric abandon of a redneck heaving empty Coors cans at Old Faithful.
The other day Secretary of State Clinton went to India in part to join in an anticipated session of multi-national, cross-cultural celebration of the "greening" of the globe by joint efforts to defeat the Great Thermal Monster. Presumably she came believing that she could talk with her Indian counterparts on the level of elite-to-elite. As a result there would be quick agreement that India would take mandatory limits on carbon emissions on a par with those proposed for the US under the recent legislation providing for a carbon roll-back through cap-and-trade as well as other mechanisms.
The Indians wasted no time disabusing her of these illusions. She found out in double quick time that the Indian government's position was simple and clear cut. Stripped of the customary diplomatic ruffles and flourishes, it runs rather like this--
You Americans became the economic and political power you are by spewing carbon by the gigaton back before anyone knew that doing such might hypothetically cause any harm. Your collective wealth and enviable standard of living is the result. Now, we will do the same until our wealth and standard of living equals (or surpasses) yours. It's only fair.
Having been sharply put in her place over her undue demand for "equal opportunity," the SecState resorted to the American guilty liberal default position. On behalf of the US and all Americans, living and dead, Secretary Clinton admitted our guilt.
With this mea culpa the Secretary of State abandoned equal sacrifice in the face of a supposedly global threat and embraced the punishment of "affirmative action." We acknowledge – now with President Obama – that we have made mistakes in the United States, and we along with other developed countries have contributed most significantly to the problem that we face with climate change.
The record shows that this occasion was simply the most recent time for the Obama administration to acknowledge American "guilt" for the present state of carbon affairs and commit the Americans, each and every one of us, to make the necessary penitential sacrifices. Ms Clinton averred this position last April. President Obama did the same at the recent G-8 meeting in Italy.
An ancient joke from the days of vaudeville has a convict quipping to the judge who had just sentenced him, "You're awfully free with another man's time." So it is with Ms Clinton, President Obama, and all the others of the American elite who have convinced themselves (for reasons which may well be far less altruistic and non-self-interested than represented) that global warming is real and only by drastic "affirmative action" can the US lead the change by making proper amends for its past behavior.
Any way the assorted plans for addressing global climate change are parsed, there will be severe, dramatic, and potentially dislocative changes forced upon the American worker, the American consumer. The espousal of an "affirmative action" approach will magnify all of these negative ramifications as they will all narrow rather than broaden the base supporting the impact of the necessary sacrifices.
The world's largest (by volume) carbon emitter, China, is and will continue to take the same stance as India. The Chinese government, again like the Indian one, is strongly nationalistic in its priorities. Contrary to the stance taken by the American elite with its fixation on the fantasy of fellow-passengers-on-spaceship-Earth, these governments carefully calculate the best ways to advance the interests of their country and people, if necessary, at the expense of all others.
The Obama-Clinton elite cannot and will not understand this driving motivation any more than they can or will understand how the white guy fails to see why he should lose the job or promotion because past generations were discriminatory and prejudiced in their actions.
Governments outside the narrow confines of Western Europe and North America will pursue subjectively defined national interests above any sort of concern for planetary well-being. They will seek to offload as much of the burden onto the Americans and Western Europeans as possible. They will play the American liberal guilt card just as hard as they can.
That is no surprise. The first job of a government is the protection and advancement of the interests and well-being of their country and its people. Period.
The Obama administration and its supporters, particularly those who think of themselves as "progressive," will cooperate wholeheartedly in the displacement of shared responsibility onto the workers and consumers of the US. Being members of the elite they are more insulated from the inevitable and harsh consequences of the US taking an inordinate percentage of the task of limiting carbon dioxide and related emissions.
Just as they were insulated from the down-and-dirty street realities of affirmative action replacing equal opportunity as the touchstone of ending discrimination in the workplace, the elite can ride comfortably above the results of economic and social dislocations resulting in the years ahead from thoughtless, guilt driven decisions taken today. Once again the elite can be comfortable in admitting guilt and singing mea culpa since they will not have to bare their backs to the whip, their legs will not feel the tug of the iron fetters.
Equal opportunity was an excellent idea. Affirmative action replaced excellence with a foul travesty whose full, pernicious effects remain conveniently unplumbed. Equal sacrifice in the face of a (presumably) global threat is a fine and noble concept. The equivalent of affirmative action would transform the game to one of defeat and deride America for both fun and profit.
Sounds great, heah, bucko?
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
May You Live In Interesting Times
In case you are not familiar with the title, it is a deliciously ambiguous old Chinese toast--or curse. At the moment the words are relevant to China, or at least its government.
The Mandarinate has been successfully riding the tiger for some years now, balancing the change from a disastrously mismanaged command economy to one with all the hallmarks of a somewhat free market with the necessity of maintaining tight, centralised control over all social, political, and intellectual matters. To date the Men of the Forbidden City have been successful in their application of coercion--including naked force--and the inducements of capitalism.
Below the well groomed surface so perfectly displayed during the Olympic "coming out party," China and the majority of its population have been seething. It must be recalled that the overwhelming majority of the Chinese population are still rural dwellers. That is, they are peasants, the ruthlessly exploited mass upon whose backs the entire edifice of Chinese prosperity rests.
Ground down by both official taxes and the less formal exactions of local Party goons, many peasants have to have second jobs. As a result, many work in the other pillar supporting the Chinese "economic miracle." That second pillar is the coal mines.
China has the largest coal reserves in the world surpassing even those of the US, which was long thought to be the Saudi Arabia of coal. Coal is China's energy prime mover. Tons beyond count (unless you are so foolish as to trust the official figures) churn from mines owned by the state, mines owned by the private sector, and mines "owned" unofficially by individuals and syndicates who do not bother to register, preferring to pay bribes to easily found compliant officials.
To say the mines are unsafe is make the understatement of the millennium. Ignoring the "official" body count which is gruesome enough, a conservative estimate of forty thousand fatalities in China's mines can be offered. This means that at least five people--men, women and children as young as five--die for every million tons mined. By comparison the death per million tons in the US is approximately 0.05.
Rural deaths, rural poverty, rural exploitation do not and never have bothered the Chinese central government. It didn't bother Mao when during the Great Leap Forward of 1957 to 1961 as many as thirty million peasants died in the famine. The famine, after all, was created and maintained by government efforts.
What matters to the government is the urban population. It is in the cities that enough people to achieve a critical mass for street demonstrations or worse occurs. While you won't read about it in any Chinese media, the rate and size of protests in urban China has been escalating.
It is difficult to the point of impossibility to get a firm handle on the prevalence of demos in China given the tight censorship imposed by the central regime on all methods of communication, but it seems fair given data available from Chinese citizens willing to run the risks and post, that at least ten thousand street protests occur every year over the past five years. From the available data the rate seems to be increasing.
The current global recession has hurt the Chinese economy. The pain of layoffs and factory closings is bound to increase. While the Mandarinate will keep the lid on the actual figures, the likelihood that urban unemployment will reach or exceed ten percent in the next six months is very high.
While the regime will further increase its domestic stimulus efforts as well as social welfare expenditures, the past record of the government in actually, meaningfully addressing the needs of the lowest strata of urban society is very poor. (Just take a look at how Beijing handled the "privatization" of the rust belt factories of northeastern China and its human consequences and you get the idea.)
Unemployed urbanites are the Mandarinate's worst nightmare. Even the old men of the regime who look back for guidance to the successful repression of the Pro-Democracy Movement in 1989 including the remarkable removal of it from the public memory realise that it ain't 1989 anymore. Changes in technology coupled with the very success of the last decade of progress along the "capitalist road" have made any repetition unlikely.
The Geek is not given to predicting the collapse of the authoritarian rule in China. Neither is he persuaded by history that the Men of the Forbidden City are lacking in creativity as well as remorseless resolve.
Even if the collapse of the Mandarinate is not in the fortune cookie, the interesting times which confront China and its rulers constitute advantageous times for the United States. The Chinese need us far more than we need them. At least in the economic realm.
Yes, we need Chinese diplomatic efforts to assist in dealing with North Korea, Iran, and Sudan. There are other areas where a lessening of Chinese created speed bumps in the diplomatic road would be nice, even useful.
But, get a grip on this: Without our trade and custom, the Chinese economy sinks faster than the Titanic. Without Wal-Mart and its ilk, China is one hurting puppy.
The new administration should--must--take advantage of this perhaps transient reality. Without so doing we will lose the opportunity to bring critical matters such as North Korea to a successful conclusion. Without taking a tougher approach and grabbing Beijing by its economic testicles, we will not be able to do such good deeds as ending the bloodletting in Darfur.
Now, for the Greens out there, without taking advantage of the present state of Chinese distress and exploiting it to the fullest, there will be no chance at all of Beijing agreeing to realistic limits on its carbon footprint production. (Just keep thinking about all those Chinese coal mines and the power plants, cement factories, steel mills and so on that the coal powers. Then remember that most Chinese coal is "dirty" in its chemical composition.)
Further contraction of the Chinese economy will mean not only does Beijing have to spend more of its semi-stolen foreign currency reserves on welfare and internal stimulus programs, it means as well that the Men of the Mandarinate need to have more and more sleepless nights wondering about the next round of street demonstrations. The next pro-democracy movement. And, the reliability of their mostly peasant origin troops.
May they live in interesting times.
The Mandarinate has been successfully riding the tiger for some years now, balancing the change from a disastrously mismanaged command economy to one with all the hallmarks of a somewhat free market with the necessity of maintaining tight, centralised control over all social, political, and intellectual matters. To date the Men of the Forbidden City have been successful in their application of coercion--including naked force--and the inducements of capitalism.
Below the well groomed surface so perfectly displayed during the Olympic "coming out party," China and the majority of its population have been seething. It must be recalled that the overwhelming majority of the Chinese population are still rural dwellers. That is, they are peasants, the ruthlessly exploited mass upon whose backs the entire edifice of Chinese prosperity rests.
Ground down by both official taxes and the less formal exactions of local Party goons, many peasants have to have second jobs. As a result, many work in the other pillar supporting the Chinese "economic miracle." That second pillar is the coal mines.
China has the largest coal reserves in the world surpassing even those of the US, which was long thought to be the Saudi Arabia of coal. Coal is China's energy prime mover. Tons beyond count (unless you are so foolish as to trust the official figures) churn from mines owned by the state, mines owned by the private sector, and mines "owned" unofficially by individuals and syndicates who do not bother to register, preferring to pay bribes to easily found compliant officials.
To say the mines are unsafe is make the understatement of the millennium. Ignoring the "official" body count which is gruesome enough, a conservative estimate of forty thousand fatalities in China's mines can be offered. This means that at least five people--men, women and children as young as five--die for every million tons mined. By comparison the death per million tons in the US is approximately 0.05.
Rural deaths, rural poverty, rural exploitation do not and never have bothered the Chinese central government. It didn't bother Mao when during the Great Leap Forward of 1957 to 1961 as many as thirty million peasants died in the famine. The famine, after all, was created and maintained by government efforts.
What matters to the government is the urban population. It is in the cities that enough people to achieve a critical mass for street demonstrations or worse occurs. While you won't read about it in any Chinese media, the rate and size of protests in urban China has been escalating.
It is difficult to the point of impossibility to get a firm handle on the prevalence of demos in China given the tight censorship imposed by the central regime on all methods of communication, but it seems fair given data available from Chinese citizens willing to run the risks and post, that at least ten thousand street protests occur every year over the past five years. From the available data the rate seems to be increasing.
The current global recession has hurt the Chinese economy. The pain of layoffs and factory closings is bound to increase. While the Mandarinate will keep the lid on the actual figures, the likelihood that urban unemployment will reach or exceed ten percent in the next six months is very high.
While the regime will further increase its domestic stimulus efforts as well as social welfare expenditures, the past record of the government in actually, meaningfully addressing the needs of the lowest strata of urban society is very poor. (Just take a look at how Beijing handled the "privatization" of the rust belt factories of northeastern China and its human consequences and you get the idea.)
Unemployed urbanites are the Mandarinate's worst nightmare. Even the old men of the regime who look back for guidance to the successful repression of the Pro-Democracy Movement in 1989 including the remarkable removal of it from the public memory realise that it ain't 1989 anymore. Changes in technology coupled with the very success of the last decade of progress along the "capitalist road" have made any repetition unlikely.
The Geek is not given to predicting the collapse of the authoritarian rule in China. Neither is he persuaded by history that the Men of the Forbidden City are lacking in creativity as well as remorseless resolve.
Even if the collapse of the Mandarinate is not in the fortune cookie, the interesting times which confront China and its rulers constitute advantageous times for the United States. The Chinese need us far more than we need them. At least in the economic realm.
Yes, we need Chinese diplomatic efforts to assist in dealing with North Korea, Iran, and Sudan. There are other areas where a lessening of Chinese created speed bumps in the diplomatic road would be nice, even useful.
But, get a grip on this: Without our trade and custom, the Chinese economy sinks faster than the Titanic. Without Wal-Mart and its ilk, China is one hurting puppy.
The new administration should--must--take advantage of this perhaps transient reality. Without so doing we will lose the opportunity to bring critical matters such as North Korea to a successful conclusion. Without taking a tougher approach and grabbing Beijing by its economic testicles, we will not be able to do such good deeds as ending the bloodletting in Darfur.
Now, for the Greens out there, without taking advantage of the present state of Chinese distress and exploiting it to the fullest, there will be no chance at all of Beijing agreeing to realistic limits on its carbon footprint production. (Just keep thinking about all those Chinese coal mines and the power plants, cement factories, steel mills and so on that the coal powers. Then remember that most Chinese coal is "dirty" in its chemical composition.)
Further contraction of the Chinese economy will mean not only does Beijing have to spend more of its semi-stolen foreign currency reserves on welfare and internal stimulus programs, it means as well that the Men of the Mandarinate need to have more and more sleepless nights wondering about the next round of street demonstrations. The next pro-democracy movement. And, the reliability of their mostly peasant origin troops.
May they live in interesting times.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
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.)
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.)
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