Rhinocrisy

This story documents some interesting research — turns out that rather than dedicate vast tracts of land to fueling cars, it would make more sense from a carbon point of view to let the farms revert to forest and continue using fossil fuels for cars.

Sorry I haven’t been writing much lately, folks. I got a paper back from review and have been busting my ass to turn it around and get it out the door again.

In the meanwhile, I was going to entertain you by writing about an incident wherein Steve McIntyre (of McIntyre & McKitrick fame) was crowing about having found an error in NASA’s GISS mean temperature records for the US; following his correction (which NASA acknowledged), 1998 is no longer the hottest year in history for the US - 1934 is. Many right-wing blogs are also crowing over this, and asking climate scientists to EAT crow over this, but it turns out to be all hat and no cattle crow.

Anyway, I was GOING to entertain you by writing about this, but Tim Lambert already did it very nicely. Read it!

The IPCC released its third working-group report on climate change Friday, on “Mitigation of Climate Change”. You can read it here.

A number of people quoted the White House response on the subject, as voiced by James Connaughton, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Quoth Connaughton:

And so you see ranges - you know, GDP ranges as high as 3 percent to achieve certain scenarios - well, that would, of course, cause a global recession, so that is something that we probably want to avoid.

Connaughton, here, is referring to the strongest stabilization scenario, of 445-535 ppm CO₂ equivalent. In this scenario, the projected reduction in GDP by 2030 from the expected baseline is 3%. That is, if GDP grows X between now and 2030, in the mitigation scenario it would only grow by 0.97X. That’s not so bad, and it’s certainly not a recession. The per-annum reduction in growth rates is 0.12%. Small beans. So what is Connaughton talking about? One suspects he (or whoever summarized it for him) simply misread the document and interpreted it as a nightmare scenario, 3% total decrease in GDP, which, of course, would be a recession.

His strange interpretation seems to have confused others as well. A reporter follows up:

Q So to follow up, you’re saying that the 445 to 535, which specifically mentions a range of GDP reduction greater than 3 percent [wrong, actually, it’s less than 3 percent - ed] - that is what you’re saying is something that it would cause a global recession and something we’d probably avoid - that scenario with the 445 to 535 stabilization level?

CHAIRMAN CONNAUGHTON: That’s an accurate description of that scenario. Again, I want to differentiate between what is happening, what will happen and these various scenarios for what might happen. And certainly there is no leader in the world that is going to be pursuing a strategy that would drive their economies into a deep recession. I think the leaders of the world are focused on strategies that grow economies, that pay for these technologies that make the solution possible.

Q I guess I’m just trying to translate that. In other words, you’re not aiming for that 445 level there - you’re more aiming toward the other level?

MODERATOR: We’ll take another question at this point. Thank you so much. Next question, please.

This seems a bad way to formulate policy.

Other good jokes include this bit taken from the summary:

Improved vehicle efficiency measures, leading to fuel savings, in many cases have net benefits (at least for light-duty vehicles), but the market potential is much lower than the economic potential due to the influence of other consumer considerations,
such as performance and size. There is not enough information to assess the mitigation potential for heavy-duty vehicles. Market forces alone, including rising fuel costs, are therefore not expected to lead to significant emission reductions.

It seems probable that previous editions of this sentence read “due to the fucking Americans” instead.

Previously we lamented the ease with which scientific theories on the subject of evolution can be smudged in the public eye, and how simple it is for a disingenuous party to skew the proportions of a “debate”, especially given an ideologically-predisposed audience. Fortunately, other domains of science are vulnerable to the same tactics, so we biologists are not alone.

A case in point: the recently-released documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, aired on the UK’s Channel 4, is earning wild praise all over the [expletive deleted] for finally debunking that pesky global warming myth once and for all. Thanks to the miracle of science, you can actually view this documentary in full. Which I did!^*

The piece is full of errors (and also full of infuriatingly snide and self-satisfied men). I was forced to flip my LCD monitor the bird a couple of times. The most egregious, in my estimation, was a little segment talking about how carbon dioxide makes up only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere (including the good old bit about how water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas, so why should we pay CO₂ so much attention?), and anyway anthropogenic carbon dioxide is only a tiny fraction of the total CO₂ released into the atmosphere every year, swamped by the amount released by volcanoes and decaying plant matter. This is hopelessly insulting if you even know how to spell “science”. Real Climate has a decent thrashing, plus more in comments.

Then it gets weird: the documentary concludes by positing that this is all an effort on the part of the first world to keep the Third World down. Say what? The environmental movement is fighting against big business and First World governments to keep the Third World down?

The producer of the piece is a guy named Martin Durkin, whose inglorious production history is apparently firmly wedded to controversy. Curiously enough, it turns out that he’s closely associated with a band currently called “Spiked” (their hagiographic piece on the documentary is here), previously known as “LM”. A.k.a. “Living Marxism”. George Monbiot reveals that this is apparently the product of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist unit you might be familiar with. Apparently the RCP feels that the environmental movement is the spearhead of the Western effort to crush Third World development, and is doing what it can to stymie this evil green tide (though evidently the news has not reached all quarters).

Loopy Maoists aside, it’s astonishing how easy it is to make and distribute a documentary like this these days. (You may have noted the similarly-styled documentary “Loose Change“.) The Internet is much better at transmitting than at producing novel ideas (cf. this post), meaning that the veneer of intelligence is often enough to allow something to go skating for miles and miles further than it otherwise might have. Note that the obverse is not necessarily better; the majority of global warming believers likely take it on faith, having received the gospel from Al Gore or some other cherished apostle.

This doesn’t speak well for contemporary discourse. But we shouldn’t be surprised by this state of affairs. Modern questions are often highly technical, and it’s really unremarkable that most people are unequipped with the means to parse them correctly. All of us defer to others in their areas of expertise, and in areas of contention it’s appealing to attend to the words of those experts that scratch our confirmation bias. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect people to be able to reach the right conclusions under those circumstances.

Daylight savings time starts tonight in the United States, 5 weeks earlier than it has in prior years. The theory behind the change was that it would save energy. The theory, from what I can tell, was based on studies that dated to the Nixon Administration. Like so much in the Bush Administration, it was a “no-brainer” fix, a painless step that seemed like a win-win. I bet you $1 that it turns out to be lose-lose.

The win-win idea was that it would cost little to implement the change, consumers would save money, and the U.S. would become more energy-independent. All of these are likely to turn out false.
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I’ve spent the morning getting mad about Al Gore.

It seems that soon after Al received his Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research released a report about his profligate consumption:

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

Now, this is an absurd amount of power. Reportedly Al Gore’s house is 10,000 square feet (data not shown), which is maybe twice or three times the size of my house, depending on how you reckon things. I live in a northern clime, so presumably our consumption in this eight-person household should be much greater than in Tennessee. So I’m not clear what, exactly, Gore might be doing to burn so much power, and that makes me suspect there’s a little more to this story. But, be that as it may…

This story was widely reported with great glee across the blogospore, with many pointing out that since Mr. Gore was such an unmitigated tool, he was in no position to tell them what to do.

[Pause for dramatic sigh.]

This blog is called “Rhinocrisy”, for reasons of fancy more than anything else. But it behooves us to reflect for a moment on our sister-word, hypocrisy. The moment will be brief, and we will use it to say only this: hypocrisy is not important.

We’ve had precious little reflection on hypocrisy, here. I have always firmly believed that one bears responsibility for one’s own behavior. I attribute this to my Hindu upbringing, which inculcated in me the idea of “dharma”, which Spike Lee translated quite well: do the right thing. That’s all. So it doesn’t matter whether someone else says one thing and does another, or whether you yourself can’t reconcile your speech and actions. The balance of your sins is determined simply by whether you did the right thing, plain and simple. Whether or not Al Gore is a sinner has no bearing on your own sin, or on your right to sin. The Dude said it clearly two thousand years ago:

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)

So, when we speak of “rhinocrisy”, we mean to say: failure to do the right thing.

This project is brilliant. We’re already putting the tape up all around our burrow. An art installation about it is in the window of Artists Television Access in San Francisco and it looks like S.F. Critical Mass might try and follow a future waterline route this month. I can’t think of a better way to commemorate Hurricane Katrina — except, maybe, for listening to Fats Domino and eating a plate of my extra-savory vegan jambalaya.