Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question

[GliderGuider]

Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question

Myth #1: Liberals Are Not In Denial

“We will not apologize for our way of life” –Barack Obama

The conservative denial of the very fact of climate change looms large in the minds of many liberals. How, we ask, could people ignore so much solid and unrefuted evidence? Will they deny the existence of fire as Rome burns once again? With so much at stake, this denial is maddening, indeed. But almost never discussed is an unfortunate side-effect of this denial: it has all but insured that any national debate in America will occur in a place where most liberals are not required to challenge any of their own beliefs. The question has been reduced to a two-sided affair—is it happening or is it not—and liberals are obviously on the right side of that.

If we broadened the debate just a little bit, however, we would see that most liberals have just moved a giant boat-load of denial down-stream, and that this denial is as harmful as that of conservatives. While the various aspects of liberal denial are my main overall topic, here, and will be addressed in our following five sections, they add up to the belief that we can avoid the most catastrophic levels of climate disruption without changing our fundamental way of life. This is myth is based on errors that are as profound and basic as the conservative denial of climate change itself.

But before moving on, one more point about liberal and conservative denial: Naomi Klein has suggested that conservative denial may have its roots, it will surprise many liberals, in some pretty clear thinking. At some level, she has observed, conservatives climate deniers understand that addressing climate change will, in fact, change our way of life, a way of life which conservatives often view as sacred. This sort of change is so terrifying and unthinkable to them, she argues, that they cut the very possibility of climate change off at its knees: fighting climate change would force us to change our way of life; our way of life is sacred and cannot be questioned; ergo, climate change cannot be happening.

We have a situation, then, where one half of the population says it is not happening, and the other half says it is happening but fighting it doesn’t have to change our way of life. Like a dysfunctional and enabling married couple, the bickering and finger-pointing, and anger ensures that nothing has to change and that no one has to actually look deeply at themselves, even as the wheels are falling off the family-life they have co-created. And so do Democrats and Republicans stay together in this unhappy and unproductive place of emotional self-protection and planetary ruin.

Myth #2: Republicans are Still More to Blame

Myth #3: Renewable Energy Can Replace Fossil Fuels

Myth 4: The Coming “Knowledge Economy” Will be a Low-Energy Economy

Myth 5: We can Reverse Global Warming Without Changing our Current Lifestyles

Myth 6: There is Nothing I Can Do.

The problem is daunting; making changes can be difficult. But not only can you do something, you can’t not do anything. Either you will continue to buy, use, and consume as if there is no tomorrow; or you will make substantial changes to the way you live. Both choices are “doing something.” Either you will emit far more CO2 than people in most parts of the globe; or you will bring your carbon footprint to an equitable level. Either you will turn away, ignore the warnings, bury your head in the sand; or you will begin to take a strong stance on perhaps the most significant moral challenge in the history of humanity. Either you will be a willing party to the most destructive thing humans have ever done; or you will resist the wants, the beliefs, and the expectations that are as important to a consumption-based global economy as the fossil fuels that power it. As Americans we have already done just about everything possible to bring the planet to the brink of what scientists are now calling “the sixth great extinction.” We can either keep on doing more of the same; or we can work to undo the damage we have done and from which we have most benefitted.

I have recently been clinging to Myth #6 like a drowning man clutching his last rock. But my grip seems to be weakening at last. I'm still trying to figure out which those gazillion services I've been called to. But sometimes my figurer-outer hears a small voice saying something like, "Chill, baby grasshopper. You're already doing it. Don't figure. Just live."

[kristopher]

1. Not going to argue the values but the "facts" re energy are pure idiocy or...

pure defeatist propaganda.

Not surprised you posted it.

[GliderGuider]

3. And I'm not surprised you objected. nt

[hunter]

2. Myth: We are on the brink of what scientists are now calling “the sixth great extinction"

No, we are already past the brink and accelerating down the greased rails to hell. Many humans and other sentient species are already burning in the flames.

This thing we call "economic productivity" is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.

Yet, as they say in triage, one way or another the bleeding always stops.

This earth has seen many innovative species experience exponential growth and then crash. We are not the first, and we won't be the last. In the geologic record our world civilization is little more than a curious layer of sedimentary rock marking the beginning of a new epoch.

I've never felt this a reason for despair. The fact that we humans are an insignificant flash in the pan on geologic time scales, and even less significant on the scale of the galaxy or the universe itself, that is plenty good reason to take care of one another and the other species we share this planet with.

[NNadir]

4. Well, it appears the "myths," while generally reasonable, contain their own myths.

This particular bit of nonsense, from point #2 is rather annoying:

The truth is far more inconvenient than this: it will be all but impossible for our current level of consumption to be powered by anything but fossil fuels.

It's a nonsense statement. The issue is energy density. Dangerous fossil fuels are hardly the most energy dense materials available.

Dangerous fossil fuels have a very high energy density in comparison to the failed and expensive solar and wind industries; this is true.

However, a while back I calculated, using figures from the IEA, that average American family (of four) uses about 29 tons oil equivalent each year. This is a prodigious figure, to be sure, but the plutonium equivalent for the consumption of an average human being on this planet today is less than a gram per year.

If one looks, one can calculate that if we raised the average continuous power consumption of an average human being from 2500 watts (about 1/4 of what an American uses) to 5000 watts, (one half of what an average American uses) - in an effort to eliminate human poverty - we would need about 13,000 metric tons per year of that element. This is a trivial amount of plutonium, easily accessible in a rational world, but not, regrettably in an irrational world.

My calculations, with references supporting them, are described here:

Current World Energy Demand, Ethical World Energy Demand, Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come

In this case, it's easy to figure out that the uranium already mined is sufficient to meet all of the world's energy demand for centuries, not even counting the thorium dumped by the wind industry in its quixotic effort, through lanthanide mining, to squander the world's resources for no return.

In the United States alone, we have more than one million tons of depleted uranium, and it is easy to show that the planetary uranium resources are, in fact, inexhaustible, particularly in light of uranium's enormous energy density..

It is true that many political liberals are scientifically illiterate, and we certainly see it here. But there are many political liberals who are in fact, scientists, and who know better. Jim Hansen, for one example, is such a scientist. He's hardly into climate denial, but he's hardly going to buy into any idiot thinking put out by the likes of Joe Romm or Mark Z. Jacobson or Benjamin Sovacool.

Frankly, statements that we all have to live in sackclothes or burn fossil fuels are nothing short of illiterate.

[GliderGuider]

5. And I’m not surprised you objected either. nt

[NNadir]

6. And I'm not surprised that you came back from the dead to tell us that we all have to die.

I disagree, of course, that we have to die as a society or else, but see the matter more along the lines that Jared Diamond suggested societies do, that some societies choose to die.

I have a deeper understanding of technology and less of a jaundiced view of it.

Have a nice day.

[GliderGuider]

7. I'm here to tell you there is indeed life after death.

Even after the death of DU. Or of societies. Or of "the world".

[NNadir]

8. Glad to hear it.

Welcome back from the dead.

Personally, I'm more concerned with the living; and hold the perhaps naive view that whatever exists might be saved.

But again, being familiar with your spiritual view, welcome back from the dead.

[GliderGuider]

9. Oh, I'm just a shade now.

I'll haunt the place from time to time, but aside from table-knocking and some ghostly, derisive laughter my presence will not be much felt in this realm.

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. The figure for renewables is a bit pesimistic (but, then, it was written in 2014)

… Currently only about a half of a percent of the total energy used in the United States is generated by wind, solar, biofuels, or geothermal heat. …

Looking at the recent LLNL estimates, solar alone contributed a little more than one half a percent of energy production in the US in 2015. If we’re looking at actual energy use, it’s well over one percent.


The IEA is not exactly a liberal bastion, but, in their estimation:
https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/KeyRenewablesTrends.pdf

…

In OECD countries, total primary energy supply (TPES) from renewable sources increased from 271 Mtoe to 510 Mtoe between 1990 and 2015, an average annual growth rate of 2.6%. By comparison, the growth of TPES from non-renewable energy sources (including coal, oil, gas and nuclear) is 0.4%. Over this time period, renewables contribution to total OECD primary energy supply grew from 6.0% to 9.7%.

The largest portion of renewable primary energy supply in the OECD comes from biofuels and waste, which accounts for 55.1% of the renewable supply (Figure 9). Of these biofuels, solid biofuels, including wood, wood wastes, other solid wastes and charcoal, constitutes the largest share, 37.4% of the supply. The second largest renewable energy source is hydro-electric power, providing 23.2% of renewable primary energy.

These two renewable energy sources constituted 60.6% of the total OECD primary renewable energy in 2015. The average annual growth rate of solid biofuels between 1990 and 2015 is 1.4% and 0.6% for hydro. These are lower than the average annual growth rate of all renewable energies, 2.6%, over the same time period. Because hydroelectric capacity is mature in most OECD member states, it is increasingly difficult to locate suitable environmentally acceptable sites to expand this energy form.

The majority of the growth of renewable energy has taken place in the final consumption sectors, such as the residential, commercial, industry, and most significantly, transport sectors. In 2014, half of renewable primary energy was used in places other than electricity plants. The most significant trend is the growth of biofuels used for transport. In 2014, liquid biofuels and biogases used for transport constituted 10.2% of the consumption of renewables, compared to a negligible what in 1990.

…

This is not to say that renewables are necessarily a panacea, only that things may not be quite as bleak as the author claims.

[NNadir]

11. "Not exactly a panacea..." "not quite as bleak..." It's um, 2016. Half a century of...

...unremitting cheering for it, trillions of dollars thrown at it...and 1% for the solar scam isn't bleak?

Actually, if the people cheering for the solar scam were interested in the atmosphere's contents, in which they apparently have no interest whatsoever, they would immediately understand that the situation is extremely bleak.

Renewable energy is a tremendous failure, expensive, useless and an avenue of preventing real progress on climate change, since it's supporters spend most of their time crying and whining over Fukushima even as 7 million people die each year from air pollution.

Probably the characterization of the clear results that the LLNL graphic above shows and the interpretation that it is "not quite as bleak" is a firm demonstration of how much denial is involved in the bizarre and useless fascination with so called "renewable energy"

Have a nice day.

[LouisvilleDem]

12. The two sided debate

The question has been reduced to a two-sided affair—is it happening or is it not—and liberals are obviously on the right side of that.

While I agree with the notion that the debate has unfortunately been reduced to a two-sided affair, I believe that the more pessimistic element of the environmental movement does itself and science a disservice when they routinely dismiss any report or studies that suggest the current consensus on global warming might be too dire. Even more damning, when their own predictions of doom and gloom fail to come to pass, they simply push the dates of their predictions back a few years and act like being wrong doesn't matter.

In science, making a prediction that fails to come true should have consequences. It should result in people becoming more skeptical of the theory that produced those claims. Unfortunately, we rarely see this happen in the study of climate change. A classic example is the idea of a "methane catastrophe" causing a rapid increase in sea ice melt in the Arctic. Despite that fact that most mainstream climate scientists dismiss the theory (Tim Lenton, Gavin Schmidt), and despite the fact that the predictions of people backing this idea have failed to materialize (2014: Arctic Ice free in two years), pessimists continue to believe that doom is 'imminent'.

[NNadir]

13. Your argument about what "mainstream scientists" dismiss - and I'm not certain they don't -

would be stronger if you referred to mainstream science itself, the primary scientific literature, rather than blog posts.

While I am hardly an expert on the release of geologically constrained methane, I can see from the abstracts alone that there is a lot of discussions of the topic - Google Scholar gives more than 100,000 hits when search terms are (methane release climate change.)

Here are some arbitrarily linked hits:

Nature 437, 396-399 (15 September 2005)

BioScience (2008) 58 (8): 701-714.

Nature 443, 71-75 (7 September 2006)

If one limits the search to those produced since 2015, one still gets more than 17,000 hits.

Nature Geoscience 9, 99–105 (2016)

I think it's a little glib to announce what "scientific consensus" is in a blog post when the discussion involves tens of thousands of papers, including more than 17,000 published in the last two years.

A link to The Guardian is particularly weak. It may be one of the most scientifically illiterate newspapers on the planet.

I would doubt that there were very many scientific papers published stating that methane releases will become problematic on May 23, 2013, for example, and thus so stating that the predictions were wrong because they didn't come true is a little problematic, I think.

As for the blog post asserting that methane would oxidize to CO2 we should note that metastable methane does exist in the atmosphere and is measurable. So does, um, wood, and it is also thermodynamically metastable in an oxygenated atmosphere.

Nature Geoscience 9, 346 (2016)

This said, to beat my own dead horse, even if the horse isn't really dead, the remark you made

"making a prediction that fails to come true should have consequences..."

would suggest that the so called "renewable energy" should be abandoned. It has catastrophically failed to address climate change, and is catastrophically failing to climate change, and, I will offer a prediction based on observable trends, irrespective of the (small) risk of being called on it, will continue to fail catastrophically.

One only need twenty or thirty year old nonsense from, say, Amory Lovins, a famous, or rather infamous shill who has consistently predicted "renewable energy" nirvanas to recognize how incredibly stupid everything he has ever said about anything is.

Nuclear Power and Nuclear Bombs

This shithead, who largely makes his living today greenwashing oil companies and other mega corporations like, um, say, Walmart, never gave a shit about oil based bombs, which have, in fact, proved to have killed millions of more people than nuclear bombs ever did in the single instance of nuclear war. In fact, since his prediction linked above that nuclear power would lead to nuclear war, the nuclear industry has expanded its output enormously, with the result that zero nuclear wars have resulted. Like many - in fact almost entirely all - critics of nuclear energy, he knows zero about the subject.

The greatest source of disaster from the political left is that many of us, hardly me, but many of us, have demonized nuclear energy with selective attention, over weighting the intellectual power of people with demonstrably small minds and political sloganeering and cant.

The inventors of nuclear energy - by and large, but not entirely, men and women with a left leaning political outlook - constituted some of the finest minds of the 20th century, and the people on the left who attacked their work out of mindless dogmatism, repeated cant, fear and ignorance have done a great disservice to the future of humanity, and in fact, much of life on this planet.

If one compares the mind of Glenn Seaborg with the mind of Amory Lovins, any person with a shred of scientific credibility would easily distinguish which was greater.

Have a nice evening.

[LouisvilleDem]

16. None of the studies you linked to support Wadham

Peter Wadham is/was claiming that we could see a release of 50 Gt of methane in a single year. That number is about 100 times what is estimated by other peer reviewed studies. You can see a list of those here:

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch7s7-4-1.html

The closest any of the studies you linked to come to supporting Wadham is this one:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7107/abs/nature05040.html

This study claims that it is possible that actual methane releases may be five times higher that previous esitmates--for the two Siberian lakes addressed by the study. Even if you expand that finding to cover the entire globe, it is still a far cry from what Wadham is claiming.

However, the most important thing to consider has nothing to do with what mainstream scientists think on the subject. The most important consideration one can make in evaluating Wadham's theoriy is the simple observation that he was wrong. In 2013 he predicted that the Arctic would be ice free within "two or three years". He was wrong, period. The Arctic sea-ice minimum in 2016 was 4.14 million square kilometers, not even beating the record low of 3.41 million square kilometers set back in 2012.

BTW, I agree with you on nuclear power and renewable energy. How many years have to go by where the number of deaths caused by people falling off roofs while installing solar panels exceeds the number of deaths caused by nuclear power by one or two orders of magnitude before people will admit that nuclear is the better solution?

[NNadir]

17. The links were arbitrary, produced from a list of tens of thousands was not meant to prove or...

...disprove anything at all about Peter Wadham's study or theory or whatever, with which I am not familiar, and about which I couldn't care less.

My point is that your case would be better if your references were not to blog posts, but rather to the primary scientific literature. That was the point.

I neither read nor even downloaded the papers; it happened when I wrote the post I was not in the library, and I don't have access to the full text of papers at home; well I do, but I need to use my son's account, and he's not crazy about me doing that, particularly because a lot of the papers I read involve plutonium.

My rant on renewable energy was about Amory Lovins, who has consistently been wrong about everything he predicts, no matter when he predicts it and how he predicts it.

The great thinker on the topic of energy, Vaclav Smil, has made a point of calling Lovins out for being a complete and total idiot in amusing and witty ways, but the result of Lovins complete ignorance is not amusing.

Regrettably, if you look at international climate policy, you will see that it is based around his consistently wrong opinions, with the result that the increases in carbon dioxide are accelerating, not decelerating. The world needs to wake up and stop handing out this tiresome horseshit, and worse, funding it at a scale of trillions of dollars, expenditures with no result other than making things worse, not better.

And if you look around here you will loads of mindless people spewing the same crap Lovins has spewed at the cost of millions of lives lost to air pollution, tens of millions of lives, since so called "renewable energy" has not worked, is not working, and will not work.

These people are incredibly stupid, and no amount of information will cause them to change their minds. This actually, whether they know it or not, means that they are conservatives, since a conservative is by definition is a person who does not believe in changing his or her position on anything for any reason. On DU, one has the option to put these blockhead conservatives on "ignore," but it is impossible to ignore what this kind of thinking, the thinking they merely chant, is doing to all future generations.

This, in my view, is criminal.

Now, some of the disaster now underway as a result of this internationally sanctioned bad thinking is partially attributable to the recent El Nino event, however there have been lots of El Ninos over many years, and we have never seen anything like 2016. It's totally and completely mind blowing, terrifying actually.

The main danger associated with solar cells, by the way, will not involve them falling off roofs, although one was ripped off a telephone poll on my block during Hurricane Sandy and in theory could have hit someone or have gone through a window at least, though in the actual event, it just laid beside the street for five or six months until finally someone took it to a landfill, where it will now leach metals into the water table for a few centuries, probably with its sisters in twenty years or so, when they all become landfill.

The main dangers with solar cells is (1) that they rely on very toxic materials and very toxic processing, that there is no plan whatsoever to deal with these issues and any effort that is made to deal with them will be problematic since they are distributed, and not concentrated and thus will require energy to collect, and (2) they generate more complacency than energy.

Thanks for explaining who Peter Waldham is, but I must say that I don't know many people who have inflexibly defended his ideas, since I don't even know who he is.

I am, I will confess, concerned with trace gases in the atmosphere, in particular, the inorganics, the most dangerous of which, I suspect is nitrous oxide, which is seldom discussed, and which is the result of a requirement that 7 billion people have something to eat. It has always been present, but its main sink is radiation, and the equilibrium has shifted and it is measurably rising at an alarming rate since the invention of the Haber Process. Smil has written a whole book on this subject, the Haber process, an excellent book. Nitrous oxide is both an ozone depleting agent and a greenhouse gas, and I don't hear many people discussing it in the popular press, though if one looks, one can find discussions of it in the scientific literature.

I also don't think that because someone predicted that there would be a huge outgassing of methane in two or three years and it didn't happen that we are entirely off the methane hook. Methane is a serious GHG in its own right and I don't think there's much debate about that. Other gases of significant concern, at least to me if no one else, are sulfur hexafluoride, nitrogen trifluoride (this one concerned with the semiconductor industry, including in some cases, the solar cell industry), selenium trifluoride, perfluoroalkanes, fluorohydrocarbons, and of course, in its own place, ozone. The chlorofluorocarbons are still here, although in a rare victory for environmental treaties, they are likely to decrease in the next century or so.

As for how serious bourgeois liberals take these issues is not for me to say, but I'd rather we be more concerned than less concerned about the issue of our atmosphere. We need to look at these issues in terms of expectation value, the product of the probability of an event and the scale of its impact. On a geological time scale, what is going on right now is roughly the equivalent of being struck by an asteroid; that's my opinion in any case. In less than a century we have seriously destabilized the planetary atmosphere, seriously...

On the planetary time scale, one hundred years is uncomfortably close to zero, and yet, in that small of a flash, we have done this.

Call me a doomsayer, but I am concerned, very concerned.

[OKIsItJustMe]

14. Well, yes, “doomers” like to paint extreme scenarios

However, I believe a very good case can easily be made that the IPCC assessments (which some portray as extreme) have, to date, been too optimistic, leading to a steady stream of stories using some variation of the phrase “faster than predicted.”

This can be attributed to political influence on science.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/06/AR2007040600291.html

[font face=Serif][font size=5]U.S., China Got Climate Warnings Toned Down[/font]

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 7, 2007

[font size=3] Some sections of a grim scientific assessment of the impact of global warming on human, animal and plant life issued in Brussels yesterday were softened at the insistence of officials from China and the United States, participants in the negotiations said.

In particular, U.S. negotiators managed to eliminate language in one section that called for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, said Patricia Romero Lankao, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., who was one of the report's lead authors.

In the course of negotiations over the report by the second working group of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, U.S. officials challenged the wording of a section suggesting that policymakers need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because countries will not be able to respond to climate change simply by using adaptive measures such as levees and dikes.

In that instance, the original draft read: "However, adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change, and especially not over the long run as most impacts increase in magnitude. Mitigation measures will therefore also be required." That second sentence does not appear in the final version of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.

…[/font][/font]

[hr]
Examples of political meddling in science are disgustingly common:
http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/abuses-science-case-studies

[LouisvilleDem]

15. Can you give me some examples?

Examples of where the IPCC was too optimistic?

[OKIsItJustMe]

18. Sure!

Start here:
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/ipcc-predictions-then-versus-now-15340
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/report-ipcc-underestimate-assessing-climate-risks-15338
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/science/a-climate-alarm-too-muted-for-some.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-predictions-prove-too-conservative/
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/rising_waters_how_fast_and_how_far_will_sea_levels_rise/2702/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/30/climate-scientists-arent-too-alarmist-theyre-too-conservative/
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00115.1