Hot Talk and the Skeptics

The global warming debate continues to heat up, and power politics spills over into the world of scientific research. Houston Chronicle:

"I can understand how a scientist without tenure can feel the community pressures," says environmental scientist Roger Pielke Jr., a colleague of Vranes' at the University of Colorado.

Pielke says he has felt pressure from his peers: A prominent scientist angrily accused him of being a skeptic, and a scientific journal editor asked him to "dampen" the message of a peer-reviewed paper to derail skeptics and business interests.

Scientists can't be skeptical anymore? I thought that the essence of a good scientist?

And interestingly enough, it's some of the younger scientists who are most skeptical. Perhaps that's because they have been force-fed the eco-religion in school from their earliest years and have found reason to question the supposed consensus. Or maybe they're just smarter these days.

Amid all the back and forth on this, I am certainly not opposed to looking at alternative energy sources, assuming the cost-benefit analysis is truly market based. Advances in research and technology may make geothermal, for example, a much more attractive possibility. By the same token, those opposed to nuclear power and oil drilling here in Alaska and offshore should grant that those technologies too are much safer and less intrusive to the environment than earlier iterations. National security considerations make the debate more urgent.

The AEI offers an interesting discussion:

With additional resources, there could also be opportunities for innovative engagement with the private sector. Environmental advocates think of President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon as a model for the sort of federal climate program they would like to see--a well-funded government-led enterprise--but history offers another model worth considering: In 1714, the British government offered a £20,000 prize (a vast fortune at the time) as an inducement for inventors to create a device that would allow ships to accurately determine their longitude, and consequently, to reliably navigate across vast ocean distances. It took John Harrison, a carpenter and amateur clockmaker, almost fifty years to win the prize, having invented the first marine chronometer. This is precisely the sort of long-term research effort that federal climate scientists need to undertake now. While much of that research will be done in federal energy labs, there is no reason why comparable prizes could not be offered to private companies as an inducement for the development of specific clean energy or climate-related technologies.

They also suggest the possibility of a carbon tax (which would exempt clean nuclear power) coupled with a reduction in other taxes.

The Kyoto approach is wrongheaded, exempting some of the worst offenders and would be ruinously expensive with little to show for it, and while there are still major questions on whether global warming is a major or minor problem.

What I am opposed to is politicized science, and the stifling regulation advanced by the greenies who would wreck our economy, impinge on individual property rights and liberty at the drop of a hat, and push ridiculous, posturing, ultimately empty measures at great expense on an unsuspecting public without using any common sense. The greenies should not overplay their hand because it breeds cynicism in the public.

Some of the same people who are pushing hard on global warming were pushing the overpopulation myth in the 70's, and advocating the same kind of draconian measures, based on flawed models they thought could predict the future.

The alarmist gloom and doom of the Leftie 70's enviro-kooks turned me into the skeptic I am today.

UPDATE: Related story in the Tribune on the population BUST in China, due to their draconian one child policy, aborting girls or leaving them to die at birth in dying rooms. And as we know, with the exception of the US, most of the Western developed countries have a population bust as well, with all the implications for the future of their societies and the welfare of their elderly, who may experience dying rooms of their own.

Previous posts: Gore-Invented Polar Bears; Sister Cities, Kyoto-Wilmette