Thu, September 22, 2005
I would've voted for this guy—12:08 PM
Okay, technically I voted for Kerry anyway, but I would've meant it if he'd been saying things like this at the time (from a Kerry speech at Brown University – which I cut-n-pasted verbatim from The Man Who Would Be Tidball, who should also get credit for believing in Kerry even before he lost).
Katrina is a symbol of all this administration does and doesn't do. Michael Brown – or Brownie as the President so famously thanked him for doing a heck of a job – Brownie is to Katrina what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq; what George Tenet is to slam dunk intelligence; what Paul Wolfowitz is to parades paved with flowers in Baghdad; what Dick Cheney is to visionary energy policy; what Donald Rumsfeld is to basic war planning; what Tom Delay is to ethics; and what George Bush is to "Mission Accomplished" and "Wanted Dead or Alive."
[The administration] has consistently squandered time, tax dollars, political capital, and even risked American lives on sideshow adventures: A war of choice in Iraq against someone who had nothing to do with 9/11; a full scale presidential assault on Social Security when everyone knows the real crisis is in health care – Medicare and Medicaid. And that's before you get to willful denial on global warming; avoidance on competitiveness; complicity in the loss and refusal of health care to millions.
Where was that guy this time last year? Granted he couldn't have said the Katrina part, but everything else in his example was fully known a year ago (or more). The electable Kerry would have been the Kerry who was unafraid to say this stuff as often and as loud as possible.
Joe Mulder — Thu, 9/22/05 12:45pm
Ah, yes. Global warming. The left's "intelligent design." (I just got done reading the latest Michael Crichton book, and if nothing else it certainly inspires one to want to read more on the topic).
Bee Boy — Thu, 9/22/05 12:59pm
Yeah, I read the same book, and I was going to say I kind of don't know what to think about that part. (And, seriously, Lefties? There are so many other things to criticize Bush over – there's no need to camp out on something as rickety as global warming, at least not right now.) But the Kerry quote is pretty good even with that minor blemish (or maybe not blemish – I too should read more on the topic).
I guess I'd give Bush more of a pass on it if his response to the global warming controversy were something reasoned and erudite like Crichton's, instead of just saying, "We may as well roll back environmental regulations on power plants. Catch you on the back nine!" Pollution is still an issue, even if the effect isn't a greenhouse one.
Joe Mulder — Thu, 9/22/05 1:26pm
Agreed, and as someone who would readily drive a Prius if they were affordable and available, I think that holding onto the global warming scare when there's not really any evidence that there's anything to it makes environmentalists look every bit as bad religious people who insist that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
To be entirely honest with you, I don't know a damn thing about Bush's environmental policies; they may be abysmal. But that having been said, I think it's important not to forecast insane, hysterical scenarios passed off as genuine science (apparently, global warming will create mini-Hitlers all along the Pacific Rim), because then people just stop listening to you and give up as far as the environment is concerned (much like the religious crazies may cause the under-informed to assume that any person of faith is similarly unbalanced).
The danger of going off the deep end with the doomsday scenarios is that people will stop listening when you want to do something about real environmental problems that might have immediate negative consequences.
Anway. I think Kerry and Bob Dole should just go have a couple beers together and have an entire conversation consisting only of the phrase, "why wasn't I like that before the election?"
"Holly" — Thu, 9/22/05 10:20pm
Since I am still completely mystified that provable environmental concerns (diminishing oil, environmentally-caused cancer, etc.) aren't terrifying the hell out of us and prompting us to drastic action, I'm all in favor of global warming whether it turns out to be a mistaken theory or not. After all, "Saddam has WMDs" turned out to be a mistaken theory, too, and we got plenty of good ol' American whoop-ass unleashed because of that.
If "the monster storms are attacking because our carbon emissions have truly injured the Earth" spurs us to finally take some action, so be it. "Our kids might suffer through a massive first-world economic collapse if we don't start transitioning to non-fossil fuels" hasn't seemed to stir anyone's hearts, so we might as well try something more immediate.
Does the Crichton book answer the question I posed on my weblog, about what environmentalists have to gain by scaring people with global warming? Again, I'm not arguing at this moment whether global warming is a real phenomenon or not, but I always wonder why scientists and environmentalists would continue asking questions about it if they weren't honestly concerned that it MIGHT be a problem worth investigating. So what's their secret, conspiratorial agenda? Why are they REALLY harping on this? (This seems right up Crichton's alley, which is why I'm asking.)
"Holly" — Thu, 9/22/05 11:12pm
On a less facetious note, a Google search for more info on Crichton's thesis turned up this fascinating site: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74.
It's a blog entry written by a climatologist discussing the science in the book, and the discussion that follows includes a lot of over-my-head scientific debate, comments by reasonable laypeople, and comments by people who apparently believe either that Bush is a humanitarian genius or that Clinton is a chaste feminist. i.e., people who treat politics like sports, and never admit their team could commit a penalty. Anyway, I spent WAY too long reading all that; now it's bedtime.
Joe Mulder — Fri, 9/23/05 9:41am
Money, power and chicks; same reasons anybody does anything. [well, the book only brings up money and power, but I think chicks is obviously implied]
Anyway, it's just a book; and from what I've always heard, scientists think that Crichton is a pretty good writer, and writers think he's a pretty good scientist. The "global warming isn't really happening" message, while meticulously documented, is hammered home exhaustively to the detriment of the flow of the plot, but I didn't really care because it was all interesting stuff. It spurred an interest in the subject, and anyway, I'll always get a kick out of stuff like Crichton stating, in the bibliography, that the precautionary principle actually precludes the precautionary principle, and, in a summation of his feelings on the issue at the end of the book, that "everyone has an agenda except me."
Good stuff.
Off to check out the realclimate.org business...
Bee Boy — Fri, 9/23/05 10:54am
In January, Crichton spoke about the book and about the concept of bias in science at the American Enterprise Institute (Boo! Hiss!), and I managed to catch it on C-SPAN. Pretty interesting stuff – arguably, the better forum for it rather than that huge chunk of charts around 3/4 of the way through State of Fear – but yeah, I think his point is that certain ideas are so deeply ingrained that they become unconscious biases and even the most rigorous scientists forget to take them into account when parsing their data. So, it's not what they have to gain, it's what they have to lose; it's difficult to get a few decades into a career in global warming research and then have to scrap everything and start over. (Plus, the money, power, and chicks.)
In the book, of course, what they have to gain is more concrete and sinister; I don't think anyone in real life is subverting science policy for such selfish ends (except, of course, the Bush Administration).
I know very little about the history of climatology, but one thing that has always frustrated me in Crichton's charts is that his demonstration of temperatures regressing to the mean is built on temperature charts that go back many hundreds of years. (I.e., if you look at temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, they seem to be rising, but if you look at temperatures since the Crusades, they're actually down a little.) How much can we trust records and measurements from that long ago? For one thing, there are a lot fewer data points, so you're interpolating a lot more. Also, can we be absolutely positive that a temperature measurement from Detroit circa 1210 is actually positioned close enough to where Detroit is today to be an accurate comparison? And if we're getting those measurements not from men of that era with thermometers and record books, but rather from looking at tree rings or something, how sure are we that those methods are bulletproof? Might other environmental factors have affected the tree rings and skewed the data?
Like I said, I don't know. I'm too busy watching TV and then making smug observations about it to read more on it now (although realclimate.org and many of the references in Crichton's bibliography seem fascinating). But that's what it makes me think about. I'm not really committed either way on global warming, but I think there are plenty of reasons to hate the H2 even if it turns out the polar ice caps are doing okay. Fortunately, I'm not in any position to make big, important decisions on the matter, so it's fine if I watch Ghost Whisperer instead.