Kolbert, Bailey & Easterbrook: global warming - debate over

All in agreement, now, "we're all global warmers now."

Aired August 4, 2006
Interview: News Hour with Jim Lehrer
Host Jeffrey Brown

See original transcript and You Tube video

Elizabeth Kolbert
Greg Easterbrook
Ronald Bailey (We're all global warmers now)

RONALD BAILEY, Reason Magazine: I'm delighted that the television goblins let me get to you finally.

JEFFREY BROWN: OK. We were just talking about the political conversation, where it stands now. We had mentioned earlier that there was this meeting in California between Governor Schwarzenegger and Tony Blair, a conversation in the public, in the media, a conversation in the business world. Where do you see things? Where do you see things shifting and how?

RONALD BAILEY: Well, basically I think that we're all global warmers now, that it's essentially going to be that we've all agreed that there is a trend toward a warmer planet and that humanity is, in fact, contributing to that trend.

The extent of that contribution is, I'm not quite nearly as sure of it as Ms. Kolbert is, but I think that where we stand is we all now agree that the temperature is increasing and that we probably need to do something about it.

Some of the proposals that are coming out, the symbolic stuff, the political theater that Tony Blair and Schwarzenegger engaged in, are not simply -- they're just political theater. They're not at all solutions to the problem.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why do you call it political theater, and why do you think they're motivated to do it?

RONALD BAILEY: Well, Schwarzenegger's clearly motivated to do it because he's trying to differentiate himself from President Bush. He's up for re-election, and he's got a real problem in a state that is predominantly Democratic, so he's basically selecting global warming and stem-cell research and that kind of thing as a way of differentiating himself from an unpopular president.

But one of the things that -- I did happen to overhear some of the conversation, and I have to agree with Gregg Easterbrook that very likely is the fact, if we set up this situation so that scientists and entrepreneurs can come up with these new technologies, then we should be able to solve the problem. We're not nearly in as desperate a situation as I believe some people argue that we are

...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weather/july-dec06/climate_08-04.html

http://youtube.com/watch?v=44bmzqYM1HUPart 1

http://youtube.com/watch?v=s5yr6DFRNSk&mode=related&search=Part 2

Later find comments to Hit and Run column notifying readers of Bailey's (we're all global warmers now) appearance on News Hour, transcript link...

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/115007.html

Uh, not everybody agrees with Bailey...

August 18, 2006 Sunstein on Global Warming

Anonymous said...
I wouldn't know a Coasian deal from a Corsican. I can direct you to http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Paleoclimatology_Evidence/index.html site which clearly states that there have been hundreds of ice ages followed by (you guessed it) Global Warming Events over the last 2.5 million years. Now I don't know about you, but an event that happened hundreds of times kind of looses it's special identity as a 'unique' event that can be pinned on our long suffering species Homo Sapien...

CONTINUED

matthew said...
Everybody should read this speech by Michael Crichton.

http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/index.html

Click on "Aliens cause global warming." Its not hyperbole to say most scientists' very livelihood depends on outside funding and outside funding has always followed who has the most alarmist conclusions. As this speech shows, this cycle has happened so many times with alarmist theories such as Nuclear Winter.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/08/sunstein-on-global-warming.html


Reading Professor's recommended reading for students two sides of global warming note date April 4, 2005 was a mere month before the time of Ronald Bailey's announcement We're all global warmers now...

mentioned in class today (4/4/05) that it can be hard to sort through contradictory claims made by opposing sides in environmental debates. Some websites I have found helpful myself are the following. Click here for a website on "anti-environmental myths." For a contrasting perspective, critical of much of the environmental movement, click here to see the columns by Reason magazine's science correspondent. (Reason is a libertarian magazine.) I can't vouch for Bailey's reliability (or for the reliability of the anti-environmental myths website, for that matter). But Bailey has broken ranks with many environmental skeptics and conceded that DDT does thin the eggs of some bird species, which shows some commitment on his part to respect scientific evidence.

http://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/cduncan/250/250.htm

Don't forget the refrain now. We're all global warmers now.

We're All Global Warmers Now, Ronald Bailey, August 11, 2005

http://www.reason.com/news/show/34079.html

More here to compare

Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Island on global warming theory list; Bush Admin. points to climate change phenomenon

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/island-on-global-warming-theory-list.html

Tuesday, December 19, 2006
52 new species found bolster Crichton State of Fear

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/52-new-species-found-bolster-crichton.html

Monday, December 18, 2006
State of Fear Exposes Truth of Deception
The post includes material from those who have critiqued Crichton's book

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/state-of-fear-exposes-truth-of.html

Monday, December 11, 2006
global warming gaining skeptics ? or !

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/global-warming-gaining-skeptics.html

Ronald Bailey (August 11, 2005) We're all global warmers now...

for some reason, I just can't get that phrase out of my head.

Ronald Bailey Admits He's Wrong About Global Warming
Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine fame admits he'd been wrong about global warming.

(Has Bailey been brainwashed at one of the United Nation's Climate Change Conferences?)

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/ronald-bailey-admits-hes-wrong-about.html

Thursday, December 28, 2006
Net the Truth Online: A destiny

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/net-truth-online-destiny.html

Michael Crichton's State of Fear messageboard (back to the reality of non-fiction/fiction/faction)


http://www.crichton-official.com/messageboard.html

For more information on this issue use the search feature on this site located at the top left corner

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/search?q=global+warming

52 new species found bolster Crichton State of Fear

Senator Inofe's December 6, 2006 Senate hearing Full committee hearing on Climate Change and the media. Archived here: http://epw.senate.gov/epwmultimedia/epwmultimedia.htm

Also see previous posts

Monday, December 18, 2006
State of Fear Exposes Truth of Deception
The post includes material from those who have critiqued Crichton's book

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/state-of-fear-exposes-truth-of.html

Monday, December 11, 2006
global warming gaining skeptics ? or !

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/global-warming-gaining-skeptics.html

You don't have to read the entire State of Fear novel. Just read these pages (somebody who did read the entire book nicely tagged the pertinent pages). Forever grateful, so much more to do... one day, I'll return, maybe in the e-book form. Or audio-tape recording.

Pertinent sections:

Vanufu litigation case research team p. 76-96 (20 pages)
Discussion about Vanufu case reasearch p. 99 (1 page)
Antartica p. 191
Antartica melting? p. 192-196 (5 pages)
Media conferences p. 244-249 96 pages)
Net War and Computer Recognition p. 251-255 plus 256
Global warming doesn't raise money - NERF p. 295-6 (2 pages)
Privately taped conversation inside NERF p. 314-316
News p. 362-3
Vanutu case research again p. 366-388 (22 pages)
Historical data Vanutu case research closed p. 392-4 (2 pages)
Common knowledge p. 421-427 (7 pages)
Climate change p. 444
Professor Norman Hoffman ecology of thought led to state of fear p. 445-50
Kyoto (the prize) p. 477-489
Where we live p. 562-63
Simulations not real world data p. 464-67
Author's Message analysis 5 pages
appendix I Why Political science is Dangerous

You'll have to read State of Fear to discover the arguments Crichton uses.

http://www.crichton-official.com/fear/index.html

Message board archived

http://www.crichton-official.com/messageboard.html

Net the Truth Online publisher's favorite section:

Excerpt:

p. 315

Drake paced. He looked unhappy. "But it just doesn't make sense," he said. "it's not logical to say that freezing weather is caused by global warming."

"What's logic got to do with it?" Henley said. "All we need is for the media to report it. After all, most Americans believe that crime in their country is increasing, when it has actually been declining for twelve years. The US murder rate is as low as it was in the early 1970s, but Americans are more frightened than ever, because so much more airtime is devoted to crime, they naturally assume there is more in real life, too." Henley sat up in his chair. "Think about what I am saying to you, Nicholas. A twelve-year trend, and they still don't believe it. There is no greater proof that all reality is media reality."

"The Europeans are more sophisticated--"

"Trust me-- it'll be even easier to sell abrupt climate change in Europe than in the US. You just do it out of Brussels. Because bureaucrats get it, Nicholas. They'll see the advantages of this shift in emphasis."

Drake did not reply. He walked back and forth, hands in his pockets, staring at the floor.

"Just think how far we have come!" Henley said. "Back in the 1970s, all the climate scientists believed an ice age was coming. They thought the world was getting colder. But once the notion of global warming was raised, they immediately recognized the advantages. Global warming

p. 216

creates a crisis, a call to action. A crisis needs to be studied, it needs to be funded, it needs political and bureaucratic structures around the world. And in no time at all, a huge number of meteorologists, geologists, oceanographers, suddenly become 'climate scientists' engaged in the management of this crisis. This will be the same, Nicholas."

"Abrupt climate change has been discussed before, and it hasn't caught on."

"That's why you are holding a conference," Henley said patiently. "You hold a well-publicized conference and it happens to coincide with some dramatic evidence for the dangers of abrupt climate. And by the end of the conference you will have established abrupt climate change as a genuine problem."

"I don't know..."

end excerpt State of Fear

Now onto the debate...

Disappearing World: Global Warming Claims Tropical Island by Geoffrey Lean The Independent UK Sunday 24 December 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2099971.ece

Global warming science faces State of Fear
New Crichton book has temperature rising on climate change debate
Monday, May 16, 2005 by CFACT

http://www.cfact.org/site/view_article.asp?idCategory=21&idarticle=756

Here is an analysis which can be downloaded, with links added all the time on the heartland.org site

Michael Crichton Is Right! Written By: Joseph L. Bast
Published In: Publication Date: January 11, 2005
Publisher: The Heartland Institute

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16260

Crichton's State of Fear Lauded in Congress
Written By: James M. Taylor
Published In: Environment News Publication Date: May 1, 2005
Publisher: The Heartland Institute

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16898

via State of Fear Message Board

...Congrats! You have hit on the crux of the matter...terminology as a means of influence and control.

The issue is NOT about global warming, CO2, this study or that study. The issue is about ideology versus reality.

John Ralston Saul, PhD, the husband of Canada's former Governor General (The Queen's Representative) has analyzed the truth of the real issue driving the entire GW/CC debate, i.e., economic theory.

Lecture content © 1999 John Ralston Saul

http://www.abc.net.au/specials/saul/default.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/specials/saul/fulltext.htm

Dec. 18, 2006, 8:29PM
WWF: 52 new species discovered on Borneo by ELIANE ENGELER Associated Press Writer
© 2006 The Associated Press

GENEVA —

Scientists have discovered at least 52 new species of animals and plants on the southeast Asian island of Borneo since 2005, including a catfish with protruding teeth and suction cups on its belly to help it stick to rocks, WWF International said Tuesday.

"The more we look the more we find," said Stuart Chapman, WWF International coordinator for the study of the "Heart of Borneo," a 85,000-square-mile rain forest in the center of the island where several of the new species were found. "These discoveries reaffirm Borneo's position as one of the most important centers of biodiversity in the world."

Much of Borneo, which is shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and the sultanate of Brunei, is covered by one of the world's last remaining rain forests.

The discoveries bring the total number of species newly identified on the island to more than 400 since 1996, according to WWF, known in North America as the World Wildlife Fund.

Other creatures discovered between July 2005 and September 2006 were six Siamese fighting fish, whose unique colors and markings distinguish them from close relatives, and a tree frog with bright green eyes...

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/4411444.html


The real climate change catastrophe

CSR must recognize how misguided energy policies will affect the world's poor Friday, October 27, 2006
by Paul Driessen

Every snowstorm, hurricane, deluge or drought generates headlines, horror movies and television specials, demanding action to avoid imminent climate catastrophe. Skeptics are pilloried, labeled "climate criminals," and threatened with "Nuremberg-style war crimes trials."

Britain's Royal Society has demanded that ExxonMobil stop funding researchers who say global warming is primarily the result of natural forces. Meanwhile, scientist James Hansen received $250,000 from Teresa Heinz-Kerry for insisting that warming is due to humans, and "socially responsible" investor services refuse to list or recommend corporations they deem insufficiently sensitive on the subject.

Not surprisingly, companies from Wal-Mart to BP, GE and JP Morgan have brought climate activists into their board rooms, lobbied Congress for climate and ethanol legislation, and retooled to produce new product lines intended to boost tax subsidies, favorable PR and profits.

But are these actions socially responsible or in the best interests of society as a whole?

Asserting "the science is settled" ignores the debate that still rages. Proclaiming that "climate change is real" ignores Earth's constant, natural warming and cooling

...

http://www.cfact.org/site/view_article.asp?idCategory=10&idarticle=1115


What do you think it will take to reverse the effects of global climate change?
How serious do you think this problem is and what should we do to get the word out?

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AqWe36vA8Ugpl6dZlIXSQcKL1KIX?qid=20060629201333AAu7EXE

For more information on this issue use the search feature on this site located at the top left corner

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/search?q=global+warming

State of Fear Exposes Truth of Deception

Will post my comments tomorrow, after sleeping on the Crichton thought-provoking novel, State of Fear, and dreaming of a world where everybody backed up their opinions so meticulously.

Meantime

Ron Bailey's review in the Wall Street Journal:

A Chilling Tale

By RONALD BAILEY
December 10, 2004; Page W1

We

know that nature can kill. What most people don't know is that stupid ideas about nature can kill, too.

In "State of Fear" (HarperCollins, 603 pages, $27.95), Michael Crichton delivers a lightning-paced technopolitical thriller that turns on a controversial notion: All that talk we've been hearing about global warming -- you know, polar ice caps melting, weather systems sent into calamitous confusion, beach weather lingering well into January -- might be at best misguided, at worst dead wrong. Think "The Da Vinci Code" with real facts, violent storms and a different kind of faith altogether...

Twists and Turns

"State of Fear" is, in a sense, the novelization of a speech that Mr. Crichton delivered in September 2003 at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club. He argued there that environmentalism is essentially a religion, a belief-system based on faith, not fact. To make this point, the novel weaves real scientific data and all too real political machinations into the twists and turns of its gripping story.

For example, the climate computer models relied upon by global-warming proponents like Drake -- or, in real life, by John Adams (NRDC), Carl Pope (Sierra Club), Kevin Knobloch (Union of Concerned Scientists) and John Passacantando (Greenpeace USA) -- predict that such warming will be strongest at the earth's poles, turning glaciers into floods and raising sea levels. In "State of Fear," Drake warns that Greenland's ice cap is melting and will push the sea level up by 20 feet. (As it happens, on Wednesday of this week Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, testified with similar alarm before a British legislative committee, saying: "If the ice-sheets in Greenland melt, sea levels would rise 6.5 metres and London would be underwater.")

Yet as Mr. Crichton has his scientist Kenner correctly note, Greenland's ice cap is in no imminent danger of melting away. It is well established scientifically that average temperatures in Greenland and Iceland have been falling at the rather steep rate of 2.2 degrees Celsius per decade since 1987. As for temperatures in most of Antarctica, they have been falling for nearly 50 years, and ice there has been accumulating rather than melting. And those sea levels? Nils-Axel Mörner, a professor of geodynamics at Stockholm University, has been studying the low-lying atolls of the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean. He has found "a total absence of any recent sea level rise" and has instead found evidence of a fall in sea level in the past 20 years -- a fact that Mr. Crichton has the good instinct to report in the course of pushing his plot forward.

And what about the trend in actual global average temperatures, a question central to the debate in "State of Fear"? According to satellite data, since 1978 the planet has been warming up at a rate, per decade, of 0.08 degrees Celsius. Simple arithmetic reveals that, if the rate continues, the planet will warm by 0.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. That compares with an increase of 0.6 degrees Celsius during the 20th century. No catastrophe there. Indeed, Mr. Crichton has one of his characters note the costly uselessness of the supposedly heat-reducing Kyoto Protocols...

http://commonsblog.org/archives/000246.php

Crichton's State of Fear Book exposes faulty climate change arguments
January 19, 2005 | Tech Central Station By Kenneth Green, Reason

http://www.reason.org/airquality/

http://www.reason.org/commentaries/green_20050119.shtml

"Aliens Cause Global Warming"

A lecture by Michael Crichton California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA January 17, 2003

http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html


Michael Crichton’s State of Confusion II: Return of the Science
December 15, 2004

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=76

http://www.friesian.com/crichton.htm


NIST tackles State of Fear, for real...

http://math.nist.gov/~BRust/pubs/Interface2005/PrePrint.pdf

Separating Fact from Fiction in Crichton's 'State of Fear'
Posted on: 03/21/2005

http://www.environmentaldefense.org/article.cfm?contentid=4371

Distort Reform
A review of the distorted science in Michael Crichton's State of Fear
By Gavin Schmidt
01 Feb 2005

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2005/02/01/schmidt-fear/

Crichton Mad
A review of the distorted plot and politics in Michael Crichton's State of Fear
By David Roberts
01 Feb 2005

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2005/02/01/roberts-fear/

Michael Crichton's "State of Fear"
Posted by David Roberts at 4:27 PM on 01 Feb 2005

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/2/1/162744/5081?source=daily

"Environmentalism as Religion"

by Michael Crichton
Commonwealth Club San Francisco, CA
September 15, 2003

http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speeches/speeches_quote05.html

Remember fiction is fiction, faction is faction, non-fiction is non-fiction... James Frey's memoir, isn't...

Monday, December 11, 2006
global warming gaining skeptics ? or !
http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/global-warming-gaining-skeptics.html

For more information on this issue use the search feature on this site located at the top left corner

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/search?q=global+warming