Eco-Becky

Beck dismisses environmental problems out of hand, which is ostrich-holed. While what he calls “progressives” do often reach too much for the government lever in addressing real environmental issues, and overlook simpler and more market based solutions, that doesn’t wave away environmental reality.

And Beck’s condemnation of TR locking away federal public lands from business and individual private interests’ “rights” to them: what is it exactly that Beck is arguing here? That there is no collective good? That private interests have an inalienable right to exploit public lands?

Beck’s assertion (69) that car companies have been “seriously” experimenting with hydrogen-based fuels since the 1970s? Whatever data he has for that, it is not supplied, and would in any case disagree with all independent researcher data I am aware of.

Beck says that jobs are sacrificed and factories closed for the greater good of stopping pollution, which he intimates is a bad thing, but says little about when jobs are sacrificed and factories closed merely because corporations want more profit. He’s also incensed at being told that “we can’t drill for oil, develop nuclear power, or burn clean coal because of the environmental impacts.” 70. All three of those—drilling, nuclear power, and “clean” coal—are phantoms conjured up to inflame the status quo faithful. Most drilling IS allowed, but even if ALL drilling were allowed, America doesn’t have the oil reserves to satisfy anywhere near its demand—it has maybe 3% of the world’s total reserves. For a nation that consumes 25% of the world’s supply. Nuclear power, even if considerable challenges of design, cost, and shortages of specialized technicians and workers could be overcome, would still be fraught with so many perils of safety and vulnerability to terrorists, not to mention the presently unsolvable radioactive disposal problem, that it is merely another vehicle to distract us and make certain companies rich in the process. “Clean” coal doesn’t really exist in anything practical, its design prospects are highly dubious to say the least, and it is so costly in comparison to alternatives that one can easily see the strands of the coal industry behind the false “push” behind it.

Beck either doesn’t do his research, or does just enough slim canvassing to find something to confirm some inherent bias he has.

For instance, Beck blasts certain environmental “knowledge.” Some of that knowledge does deserve criticism. But criticism with a laser, not a shotgun. Here’s an example of the laser: Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario has said: "The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”

Yep, the IPCC got egg on its face for some citation screw-ups and other things, and its fixing of a year turned out to be off by a wide margin (that’s science checking itself). Yet hacked emails taken out of context turned out to be much ado about little. And all of that did not change the fact, recognized by nearly all geologists and climatologists, that the Himalayan glaciers are melting, at a geologically enormously fast rate. In fact, most glacier packs are melting. Some may halt or even reverse for a few years, but the overall trend is one of retreat. This has been a pattern for a fairly long period of time, although the Tibetan plateau has been hard to pin down because of its variance, which in some respects means that much of the retreat of glaciers there has long been a mostly natural phenomenon . What has alarmed scientists are the rates of change globally relatively recently. What is even more disturbing is the cracking and melting inside some of the glaciers. The world has been focused on the glacier snouts without much attention to the inside, which tells a more complete story than just the tip. Total mass gain or loss is more relevant—a glacier can appear to stand still for long periods of time when it is actually sublimating (melting inside). The “don’t believe in global warming” crowd made inaccurate statements and inferences from the IPCC’s inaccurate statements and inferences (inaccuracies that did not refute overall trends). To what purpose? To sew enough confusion that people stop being concerned? Who does that serve?

We insure our lives, our homes, and our national defense against much less likely threats, and against threats which are much less catastrophic in their consequences. Yet we don’t want to insure for the possibility, let alone any probability. We want to court catastrophic risk. The problem with that is that if you are wrong, it is too late to correct. Even damage control might be out of the question by then.

How insane would one say we would be to wait 3 centuries to say with no qualifiers: “We now have long-term data proving global warming started 300 years ago.”

Because our data and our understanding are both incomplete does not give us license to blithely dismiss man-made effects. Peel back the emotions and the preferences for not having to change. Peel back the agendas that some in the man-made changes community have. Look at what is best, what we really want. Don’t we want clean air, water, food? Don’t we want a nature that doesn’t have to adapt so rapidly? Don’t we prefer forests to erosion, loss of agricultural soil, mudslides, choking fires, and the violent desperation that comes from poverty and scarcity of ecological resources?

Beck makes blanket statements of “increased ice formations at the southern polar cap.” Yep, the eastern polar cap has been relatively stable and may even have increased a slight bit. The western polar cap has been the opposite. Does he not see that or is there something else to all his selectivity? It is this inability or unwillingness to recognize complexity that is so disturbing.

Beck is right to point out the hypocrisy of others, and they deserve a lot of the lambasting he gives them, with their championing of energy efficient things that in turn pollute (a nasty and frequent occurrence in far too many trumpeted “solutions”). And the infuriating, half-blind nanny state, itself propelled along by utterly self-serving special interests and their pet congressmen, deserves his scathing wrath. But this is one of the frustrating things about Beck: he recognizes hypocrisy in others but not in himself. He decries “smart-growth” as a supply and demand contravention, when in fact the system itself is a narrow and artificial one, where ecological, societal, and hidden economic costs do not make it into individual decision making, let alone communal.

Beck speaks out against Michael Moore’s mandate-granting hyperbole, but is silent about (and was silent) when George Bush uttered similar words in 2004.

Beck also conflates individual responsibility and communal responsibility. The one rarely can impact ecology in general; the other can immensely. Comparing the two has some usefulness, but Beck has bent it to serve his own purpose.

Weather and short-term trends are not what point to or away from climate (long-term) changes. Beck cites WEATHER data about some temporary halt in arctic ice cap melting, and yet can’t get his stats right: “In September of 2007, there was a 25 percent reduction in the usual minimum arctic ice cover…In the two years since, nearly all the ice has returned.” In fact, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Arctic sea ice to be 39 percent below the long-term average for September 2007, and September is when the area of ice is lowest each year. In September 2009, the ice was 24 percent below the long-term average. His figures don’t hold up, and because they are about complex things, most people don’t check his facts. Indeed, he sounds more like one of Exxon-Mobil’s previously clandestinely (but now exposed) funded climate change “contrarians.”

The earth has all sorts of built-in correctives. It will likely eventually adjust and correct itself to whatever happens. The question then becomes, does human civilization survive in any presently recognizable form?

As for the global cooling speculation in the 70s that Michael Crichton (and Beck, among others) have lambasted so severely recently: much of the hype came from a media that understood little and misinterpreted much. The rest came from wholly inadequate climate models and very primitive understandings of climate. Scientists had poor data, and did not know what to make of what they had. When geologists said that an ice age (whether major or minor) is coming “soon,” geologists, who think in long periods of time, mean centuries at a minimum, and millennia in probability, but journalists did not seek to clarify. And that slow pull toward an ice age IS almost certainly the long-term trend. Most recent global cooling data turned out to be wrong or misinterpreted, but some was correct, and indeed, while the rest of the planet heats up, there are pockets that do not. This is a phenomenon that has occurred throughout history, and is still partially unexplained.

Yet what do we do then about things which are unmistakably apparent to those who have actually been there? Do we ignore like past failed civilizations? Ah, well, they had somewhere to go when they failed. We…don’t. In Lester Brown’s words:

“The signs that our civilization is in trouble are multiplying. During most of the 6,000 years since civilization began we lived on the sustainable yield of the earth’s natural systems. But in recent decades humanity has overshot the level that those systems can sustain.

We are liquidating the earth’s natural assets to fuel our consumption. Half of us live in countries where water tables are falling and wells are going dry. Soil erosion exceeds soil formation on one third of the world’s cropland, draining the land of its fertility. The world’s ever-growing herds of cattle, sheep, and goats are converting vast stretches of grassland to desert. Forests are shrinking by 13 million acres per year as we clear land for agriculture and cut trees for lumber and paper. Four fifths of oceanic fisheries are being fished at capacity or overfished and headed for collapse. In system after system, demand is overshooting supply.

Meanwhile, with our massive burning of fossil fuels, what if we are overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide (CO2), pushing the earth’s temperature ever higher, as it certainly appears? This in turn could likely be what is generating the more frequent and more extreme climatic events, including crop-withering heat waves, more intense droughts, more severe floods, and more destructive storms.”

That is the MILD, carefully toned down version, folks. Time for Homo Sapiens Sapiens to live up to its species title.