Tilting at warming

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Tilting at warming

That's right, Seattle's Discovery Institute, the folks who helped deliver unto us Intelligent Design, is hosting a talk tonight featuring global warming naysayers. Across town will be a discussion about the causes and effects of climate change anchored by Elizabeth Kolbert, reporter for The New Yorker.

The Discovery Institute talk features agricultural economist Dennis T. Avery, co-author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years. The book was coauthored with Fred Singer, a controversial climate change critic and climate physicist. Avery is a fellow with the Hudson Institute, whose "about" page on its founder is topped by an endorsement by Donald Rumsfeld. The institute held its own talk about the book last month and has this transcript online.

Contained within it is this observation about climate change from Singer:

In other words, we cannot deny the greenhouse effect, that's real, but it's small. It's a lot smaller than calculated from the models. The second point I'd like to make in answering your question is you implicitly assume � and I get it from your question � that warming is bad. I would question that. I would ask � you think a colder climate would be better than the present one? No one would say that. So what � how can you say � how can you argue logically that a warmer climate is worse? Or would you say that the present climate just happens to be the optimum climate? That would seem to be very unlikely...

I give The Stranger's blog the Slog credit for bringing this Discovery Institute event to my attention (weird, I wasn't on its press release list).

Posted by at December 5, 2006 10:00 a.m.

Comments

#18091

Posted by unregistered user at 12/5/06 12:51 p.m.

Denial industry - read all about it!

environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange
/story/0,,1875762,00.html

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#18131

Posted by Patrick Mazza at 12/5/06 4:43 p.m.

Amazing sophistry of Avery and Singer - Now that global warming can no longer be denied, deny the importance of it. They ask the wrong question, framing it around the misleading concept of optimum climate. Points the wrong way. We should instead ask what climate change means to our civilization as it has developed in the current climate regime. We've built cities on sea coasts, assumed a certain range of water supply would be available most years (eg., from snowpack), developed farming regions around crops suited to the climate. The real question is - what happens when the climate changes? And can we do something about it? Like burn less fossil fuels.

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#18169

Posted by unregistered user at 12/5/06 7:35 p.m.

The skeptics look set to increasingly flail in desperation.

A couple of days ago, I came across piece by Patrick Michaels, founded on the ridiculous notion:
Every time some "new" information is added to a weather forecast, it should have an equal chance of making it warmer or colder. In global warming, which is really just a super-long-range forecast, every new finding should also have an equal chance of making it warmer or cooler, or "worse than we thought" or "not as bad as we thought."
No Virginia the sky is not falling

I've posted about this and other daft skepticism on blog-cum-forum on my DocMartin site.

Martin Williams

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#18213

Posted by unregistered user at 12/6/06 6:04 a.m.

This global warming hysteria smacks of Stone Age religion complete with its high priests, appeasement toward the capricious nature gods, self flagellating sacrifices and woe to those who will not believe the prophet.

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#18226

Posted by unregistered user at 12/6/06 8:16 a.m.

"The skeptics look set to increasingly flail in desperation."

They're not skeptics, they're deniers of fact. Skepticism is a perfectly healthy attitude.

"This global warming hysteria"

Beg the question much?

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