Mead On Gore (with Hobnailed Boots)

Let the recrimination season begin--Walter Russell Mead lands with both feet on Al Gore for having (Mead's words) "wrecked planet earth."

Frankly, I blame Al Gore. Unlike naive scientists who know little about life beyond the lab, or eco-activists whose concepts of the international political system come from writing direct-mail solicitations to true believers in rich countries, the former vice-president had decades of experience with high politics. It was his job to provide the leadership that could channel the energy and concern of this movement into an effective political program.

This may or may not be overkill, but Mead does draw one unsettling analogy from the abundance of his experience in foreign affairs: the peace movement of the 1920s, and ultimately, the Kellog-Briand Pact which, as we all know, ended war forever.

ClimateGate SwiftHack

The go-to guy is Josh. H/T DeLong.

Something Else I Ought to Learn About

Cass Sunstein has worried that the internet will turn into "the daily me"--a little exercise in narcissistic self-reflection.* Obviously, I need to clean up my aggregator:

"Climategate is the greatest scientific scandal of our generation." (Link)

"As near as I can tell, ClimateGate is almost entirely a tempest in a teacup. " (Link)

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*Disclaimer: note that the link goes back a while. Whether he is still worried, I don't know.

Climate Change and "Aha!"

The often-truculent and always-interesting Carpe Diem has a link up re climate change and the tone, I think, is jubilant. "Climate warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence," reports Professor Perry, the proprietor, summarizing a new study (link). "A Very Inconvenient Peer-Reviewed Climate Study," he declares.

I admit I am not a very good a very good team player on climate change. I tend to find Al Gore's emissions exhausting, and I thought Scientific American way out of line when it refused to let Bjørn Lomborg (link) use its copy on his website as a rebuttal to charges against him ; (details here). I suspect that climate change is (the last refuge of a cowardly liberal) "a complicated issue."

Yet on the whole, I think the general proposition that we experience human-caused global warming must surely be right; it beggars all expectation that we could plunk six billion people onto this rock without some external effects. In context, therefore, Professor Perry's "aha!" attititude strikes me as at least surprising, not a little implausible. Which prompts two thoughts.

One, does Professor Perry really believe that we can plunk six billion people onto this rock without some external effect? He says he is an economist; has he no sense of limits, of choice under constraint?

Second, a more general question: has Professor Perry ever carried out a piece of research whose conclusions countered his expectations? The question is not rhetorical; I have no idea what his answer might be. But it might be a good general test for any researcher (particularly in economics). Has s/he ever had occasion to write "the results of this inquiry suprised us..."