Beware Yale Economics Professors Bearing 'Global Warming' Facts...
Did you see that piece by William D. Nordhaus in the New York Review of Books the other day, explaining - against all evidence - Why Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong?
If you didn't, not to worry: you weren't missing much. There was a time, maybe ten years ago, when Nordhaus's pronouncements might have been taken seriously. He is, after all, an economics professor at Yale. But where the issue of climate change is concerned, at least, the "appeal to authority" is no longer enough. If some high-level academic wants to demonstrate why man-made global warming is still a major threat then he needs to show us, not merely tell us. Otherwise we might well be inclined to pooh pooh the guy's supposed expertise and decide that he's talking out of his hat.
As I argue here in The Commentator something very dramatic has happened in the Great Climate Change wars. The enemy is on the run. This doesn't mean that our side - the realists - has won yet. We're not even close: so many and diverse are the vested interests in the great global warming boondoggle that this Ponzi scheme is going to take a lifetime to dismantle. But what has changed is that we no longer take the High Priests of Global Warming seriously any more.
The man who saw all this coming was a Frenchman named Gustave Le Bon whose seminal 1895 work The Crowd (an influence on everyone from Freud to Hitler and Mussolini) analysed the mechanics of mass hysteria.
Le Bon argued that the secret of demagoguery was to repeat an idea over and over again in order to create a "contagion" which would infect the popular mind and hold the culture in its grip. This is what, until very recently, happened with the global warming religion.
But this contagion can only keep going, Le Bon argues, so long as those spreading it possess "prestige" in the eyes of the mob. Once that "prestige" is lost, the crowd turns brutally against those seers and experts and leaders in whom it once had such faith. Suddenly it sees them for the liars and cheats and manipulators they really are.
This is what is happening now in the great climate debate. Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann's new book is not selling; George Monbiot is mocked as a conspiracy theorist; the Royal Society's Sir Paul Nurse climate science ignorance is eviscerated in a report by the Global Warming Policy Foundation; Yale economics professor William D Nordhaus publishes an essay in the New York Review of Books called Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong - and is almost instantaneously and comprehensively rebutted at Watts Up With That?
Oh, and did I mention there's lots more fascinating stuff where this came from in Watermelons: the Green Movement's True Colors?
Modesty forbids me from naming the author...
(Oh, PS: DO read that George Monbiot/conspiracy theorist article. It's hilarious!)
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Mar '11
Re: Beware Yale Economics Professors Bearing 'Global Warming' Facts...
From the appreciation of the titan of modern thought that is George Monbiot:
Well, for one thing, they aren't all that intelligent. Dennis Kucinich lost his seat last night, so now they are down to Cynthia McKinney and Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the House of Representatives.
Feb '11
Re: Beware Yale Economics Professors Bearing 'Global Warming' Facts...
Nordhaus's article can be circular filed merely on the knowledge that he is an economics professor. Economists and meteorologists ( climatologists are essentially a subset of the latter, their disclaimers not withstanding) have at least one thing in common. They work in a field where you can be wrong 90% of the time and get away with it.
Mar '11
Re: Beware Yale Economics Professors Bearing 'Global Warming' Facts...
As we see with the contraception debate, the Left never give up, and they will eventually win - the Global Warming debate will still be going on when we enter the next Ice Age in a few thousand years time.
Mar '11
Re: Beware Yale Economics Professors Bearing 'Global Warming' Facts...
The original model, if I recall correctly, had it that the increase in CO2 would increase the temperature a little bit, and that would cause an increase in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Water vapor is a BIG greenhouse gas. The problem with that is that we have been measuring the humidity regularly and at altitude for about 100 years now, and it doesn't seem to be changing, even though the temperature has increased slightly over the same period of time. What is dampening the water vapor level?
They don't know. They know they don't know. Therefore they don't really understand what it is they are talking about.
Edited on March 7, 2012 at 6:14pmFeb '11
Re: Beware Yale Economics Professors Bearing 'Global Warming' Facts...
James,
I have that Nordhaus article in front of me right now. In there is this wonderful quote:
"While some claim that skeptics cannot get their papers published, working papers and the Internet are open to all."
Nordhaus slips by the FACT that "working papers" and stuff posted on the Internet do not count toward Tenure for a professor, and can be dismissed by true believers simply because they are not published in a refereed journal.
Nordhaus is ... Well, fill that in yourselves.
May '11
Re: Beware Yale Economics Professors Bearing 'Global Warming' Facts...
But, what about the economics of it?
Feb '12
Re: Beware Yale Economics Professors Bearing 'Global Warming' Facts...
Nordhaus's article is disappointing. He was my first econ prof, and is a good economist. He vigorously attacked the bad econ in the Stern Report. Most of this article, however, is not about economics, but science and academic politics, and there he seems oddly naive. He says natural forcings can't explain enough temperature changes, while showing us a graph with the temperature rising well before C02 could have anything to do with it. He says scientists have no monetary incentives when research grants are the lifeblood of climate scientists, and that nobody is scared to speak out using the evidence that nobody who has *already* achieved prominence has been expelled from scholarly organizations. He says that corporations have incentive to falsely deny global warming, which is true, but he fails to mention that other corporations have even greater incentive to falsely promote global warming (alternative energy companies' very survival is at stake).