Once upon a time...

I was Mr. Potato Head.

Yup, I was a climate skeptic.

Actually, that's not quite right.

I certainly did not dispute global warming

But, like the book title says --- unstoppable global warming.... every 1500 years
(aside: haven't read the book yet, and I suspect that it, like Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It, has been widely taken to task --- i.e. we should be skeptical about the skeptics)

In any case, I didn’t deny the planet was getting warmer

But I DID think that it wasn’t all b/c of man-made activity, there were other causative factors involved as well (though, undeniably, human activity is certainly making the problem worse, perhaps an order of magnitude worse --- or perhaps just somewhat worse? A little worse? no counterfactual, so hard to know for sure, but can't deny that historically globe has warmed up in the past (millions of year) as much as it has this century, and without the carbonization of our atmosphere from human activity; but perhaps future warming will be outside of historical precedent?)

And I thought that it was hubris to believe that we'd be able to figure it out enough to fix it (i.e. that any "fixes" we attempted might open a Pandoras Box of unintended consequences)

And I had doubts about how well we could model expected changes in global temperatures 50 or 100 years forward, given the complexities and unknown unknowns involved with intertwined dynamic systems --- and given how meterologists can't even get the weekend forecast right

And I thought that economic development of underdeveloped countries was necessary for an improved standard of living for billions of people and couldn’t be accomplished without contributing further to human-activity-contributions to global warming


But, of course, I'm very deeply concerned about the potential for my kids to inherit a very rough future


But, more than anything, more than just agreeing with Maher about the substance of what he wrote, I like the WAY he wrote it.

So see this:

New Rule: Al Gore must come out with a sequel to his movie about climate change and call it, An Inconvenient Truth 2: What the Fuck Is Wrong with You People? Bill Maher

read the whole thing, but here's how it starts:

A bunch of depressing new surveys reveal that people in droves are starting to believe that global warming is a hoax -- and this time, it's not just us.

People are always accusing me of hating America and calling it stupid, so tonight I'd like to take a few moments to hate England and call it stupid. Because now English people don't believe in global warming either. I thought the English were smarter than that. The home of Newton and Darwin. I can't believe we let these people build our exploding oil platforms.

Even scarier is why people have stopped thinking global warming is real. One major reason pollsters say is we had a very cold, snowy winter. Which is like saying the sun might not be real because last night it got dark. And my car's not real because I can't find my keys.

That's the problem with our obsession with always seeing two sides of every issue equally -- especially when one side has a lot of money. It means we have to pretend there are always two truths, and the side that doesn't know anything has something to say. On this side of the debate: Every scientist in the world. On the other: Mr. Potato Head.

Okay, so being Mr. Potato Head ain't taking the right side of the debate.

But I still have a hard time not agreeing with at least part of what Czech Rep President Vaclav Klaus said 2 years ago:

The basic questions of the current climate change debate are sufficiently known and well structured:
1- Do we live in an era of a statistically significant, nonaccidental and noncyclical climate change?
2- If so, is it dominantly man-made?
3- If so, should such a moderate temperature increase bother us more than many other pressing problems we face and should it receive our extraordinary attention?
4- If we want to change the climate, can it be done? Are current attempts to do so the best allocation of our scare resources?

My answer to all these questions is NO, but with a difference in emphasis. I don't aspire to measure the global temperature, nor to estimate the importance of factors which make it. This is not the area of my comparative advantages. But to argue, as it's done by many contemporary environmentalists, that these questions have already been answered with a consensual "yes" and that there is an unchallenged scientific consensus about this is unjustified. It is also morally and intellectually deceptive.

I think that probably summarizes what I thought then (i.e. a few years ago?). Now, I'd have to answer YES, unequivocally, to 1 and 2, a Maybe to 3 (there are more pressing problems NOW, like clean water and adequate nutrition for billions of people, but its the FUTURE we're concerned about when it comes to climate, and the fat tail risk of not today's warming, but of brutal climate change), and, most crucially, still, I think, a NO for #4.

That is, I agreed then and think I still do now with what Roger Revelle said in 1991 (R.R. was the Harvard prof who inspired Al Gore, and who in the 50s and 60s was researching CO2 in the atmosphere and attributing it to fossil fuel burning, then in the 80s warned of possibility of increased global warming, and thus became first to discuss greenhouse effect) ---- anyway, in '91 R.R. said

"Drastic, precipitous, and especially, unilateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of
global poverty, without being effective."

Has anything really changed?

Just asking.



Anyways, while on the subject, check out this:

Obama And The World: Should America Have A Foreign Policy? Does The World Need It? 3quarksdaily.

Let's start with a smattering of metaphors. The world needs the US like a fish needs a bicycle. Or rather: like a virgin needs a rapist. There was a time, a century ago, when Turkey was known as the sick man of Europe. Today America might be called the psychopath of the planet. We happen to be the dark id of nations, yet we imagine we're the shiny superego. We happen to drop more bombs on people than anyone, yet we believe we're crop-spraying the manna of freedom. We happen to be Darth Vader, but we think we're Luke Skywalker.

thus begins a long but amusingly-written diatribe against U.S. foreign policy.

The section on climate change is, of course, the key section as far as the topic of this post goes, but the whole thing is a good read (for those of you who are jaded souls, like me)


And, for those of you who aren't climate change skeptics and want to make a difference --- best thing you can do: cut your meat consumption back, big-time.

Ten studies on meat and global warming. GreenMuze.