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Perfesser John Quiggin rails against global warming heretics:
A wary reader might note that few of the authors of these pieces have any relevant qualifications, while nearly all have an ideological or financial axe to grind ... One might well ask how these writers came to be experts on abstruse scientific issues.
Quiggin is a mere economist.
For anyone who cares to spend a few hours with Google and Wikipedia it rapidly becomes apparent that most of the material used by these writers can be traced to an array of right-wing think tanks, mostly, but not exclusively based in the United States (an important Australian example is the Lavoisier Group).
Oh, goody, the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy’s role in glerbil warmening skepticism is brought forth again. By an economist.
Uh huh. I’m convinced.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 12 01 at 11:21 PM • permalinkThe first paragraph, alone, just makes me laugh and laugh.
“The discovery of global warming is an impressive example of science working at its best.” Yes, just like the discovery of the four humors and spontaneous generation.
“Although the basic idea of the greenhouse effect was developed by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1896 . . .”
After a two-day orgy with buxom Viking bar maids steamed up the windows . . .“little attention was paid to it until the 1950s when the first accurate measurements of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide were made at Mauna Loa in Hawaii . . . by Claude Poindexter, a third-grade student who had just received a Junior Climatology Set for Christmas.
Anyhow, John “Auuuggghh!-I Spilled-Rogaine-On-My-Face” Quiggin ties all the anti-gormless warm-mongering to right-wing think tanks, and ultimately, to the tobacco lobby. If this guy’s brain is good for anything besides fertilizing his hair, I’d be surprised.
Economist! Pshw! I only listen to downhill skiers, the real experts on
climate changeglobal warming.(Nothing about his opinions, oddly enough considering that he’s Canadian, on the size of polar bears’ testicles.)
Posted by andycanuck on 2006 12 01 at 11:54 PM • permalinkWell said Tim. For a badly dressed academic with a suspect looking bit of minge hanging around his gob, he has more front than Myers.
He lectures on Economics, presumably teaching the theories of others, ie, real thinkers and has now become an expert on climate change for fuck sakes? I’m wracking my brains to think of how his studies prepared him for his present guise. Malthusian Meteorology? Ricardian rainfall theory? Oligopolistic carbon emissions?
From andycanuck’s link:
The International Ski Federation has called the situation “critical,” while American ski star Ted Ligety voiced fears this week that greenhouse gas emissions will eventually wipe out skiing.
Works for me. Alpine skiing is the one part of the winter sports season I absolutely don’t give a shit about. The Nordic skiers can just retreat further towards the Arctic circle if need be.
Also from andycanuck‘s link, acclaimed global warming scientific expert Sara Renner succinctly states what is at stake:
It’s the air that everyone breathes. It’s the water everyone drinks.
That’s right, kids! Gorrific Warbleizing will DESTROY AIR and ELIMINATE WATER. You like breathing, don’t you? DON’T YOU? Well then, buy some carbon credits. We’ll all be skiing and breathing again before you know it.
Posted by Crispytoast on 2006 12 02 at 12:46 AM • permalinkHmm, and upon re-reading I realize that Andy and I were burying the lede (and no, I’m not talking about the fact that Algore’s propaganda works on
dumbimpressionable alpine skiers):[Thomas] Grandi shares those concerns on global warming. He and wife Sara Renner, an Olympic cross-country skiing silver medalist, will team up next week in Calgary with David Suzuki to launch a public-awareness campaign.
I thought Suzuki was retiring from public life? Musta been an awfully boring retirement, so completely cut off from all media attention, that he’s back barely a month later.
Man, that article is like shooting fish in barrel, it’s hard to stop:
More and more ski resorts are using wind-generated electricity as their power source as part of an effort to become more green. In order to combat its rapid melting, the Gurschen Glacier in Andermatt, Switzerland, was wrapped in a huge plastic sheet, or “fleece,” last summer.
Which took how much energy and how much oil to make, pray tell?
Remind me again. What, exactly, are Algore’s qualifications for being an expert on Gerbil Worming? Does he have a degree in economics?
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2006 12 02 at 01:39 AM • permalinkThe good perfesser is impervious to irony, eh?
As with Chomsky, a left-wing academic decides that being an “expert” at one thing makes hims an expert at all things. Especially if politics are involved.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 12 02 at 01:43 AM • permalinkhims?
Hey! Is someone leaving stray “esses” lying about?
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 12 02 at 01:45 AM • permalinkThere is no other field of academic professorship than economics that proves the old adage that those who can do and those who can’t teach.
And at the helm of the good ship SS Out Of Touch we find Captain John Quiggan, pontificating on the high seas to anyone that will listen.
Posted by Jack Lacton on 2006 12 02 at 01:51 AM • permalink#16 - As a bonding exercise for postgrads and staff (ie excuse for a funded piss-up) of the theoretical physicist department at a London Uni, we would head out once a year to a lovely manor in the English countryside for a weekend. Each year we invited a couple of heads of other departments as well and invited them to talk on their fields of research.
One year, 1981 I recall, two Economics professors attended and gave presentations. One was a “Friedmanian” and the other a “Galbraithian”. They hated each other, interjected during each others talk, got thoroughly pissed afterwards and ended up throwing wild and woolly haymakers at each other in the bar.
“Not a very exact science is it?”, commented one of our professors.
Posted by Whale Spinor on 2006 12 02 at 02:19 AM • permalinkIf there is one thing that we can learn from Economics, it’s that theories and models are being developed and discredited all the time. Anyone remember the “J curve” that was all the rage when Keating was Treasurer?
Does anyone seriously believe in “mercantalism” as a theory these days? What about the theory put about by that Marx fellow? Whatever happened to that? It was very popular for a hundred years or so. Don’t hear much about it anymore.
If I wanted to give Guterall Worrying any credibility, I would not compare any of it to economics.
Posted by mr creosote on 2006 12 02 at 02:53 AM • permalink“Not a very exact science is it?”, commented one of our professors.
ROTFL! That’s goddamn funny, Whale Spinor.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 12 02 at 02:53 AM • permalinkI suppose he means people - 16,000 actually, most of them top scientists - who signed The Petition Project.
Listen John, of course there will be people from the energy business lobbying against global warming, but you might as well criticize aboriginals for lobbying for their land rights. Have a little look at that petition, John, and what the organisers have to say about it, and for science’s sake, contest their argument. We might even pay more attention to your “reasoning”.
Umm, silly me, I thought the solution to global stuff, like warming & cooling & variation, you know, was to plant more trees and stop people driving SUVs. Silly me! Memo to pension fund: invest in carbon credits NOW. This will halt global warming, cooling, climate variation etc and make me very wealthy. My greenbacks wil make the world greener.
it rapidly becomes apparent that most of the material used by these writers can be traced to an array of right-wing think tanks…
Who needs think tanks? We use only the finest homemade Gorebull Bloviating around here!*
*Although I did hear that Purely Adverserial Curmudgeonly Orations was running a 2-for-1 sale on the stuff if anyone is a bit short…
#24, Dminor,
Thousands of scientists? OK. And what proportion of them were climatologists? If you can figure out how many are climatologists then find out what proportion of those are people who actually study climate, or climate proxies, as opposed to those who play computer modelling games with climate data, then please let us all know.
I’ve looked at the Petition Project list and it’s just a lot of names. Many names have PhD after them, but so what? Their PhDs could be in anything; librarianship, sports medicine, surfing kinaesthetics, whatever. That is, this dumbo Petition Project offers no reason why anyone should not dismiss it as a mere argument from fallacious authority. The fact that the fields of study aren’t specified makes me even more suspicious that it’s nothing more than a propaganda exercise.
Whoever on that list is not a climatologist is speaking outside their field of expertise. Their views are of no more evidential value than those of the person who empties your garbage bin or cuts your hair.
Geeze, I learned about logical fallacies in my high school English classes. Of course high school education appears to have been dumbed down considerably since then.
Janice, The climate is both warming and cooling. It depends on your baseline. We have definely cooled from the medieval warm period and we have definitely warmed sinced the little ice age.
I’ll let you into a big secret. At any point in time over the last 4 billion years the Earth’s climate has been both warming and cooling.
The issue is whether we will have runaway warming with catastrophic effects or even mildy inconvenient effects. The evidence just doesn’t support this hypothesis.
Saying the climate is changing is like saying the weather is changing. True, but self-evidently so what?
And ignoring the bizzarely ludicrous notion we can stop ‘climate change’.
You’re on shaky ground there, Janice. There sure are a lot of PhD’s on that petition.
But point taken - the petition is a work in progress and no, I haven’t gone through it to pick out the climatologists. They’ll be in there, though.
Patrick Michaels and Richard Lindzen are probably two of the most outspoken climatologists who are also climate skeptics. But really, this insistence that only climatologists are qualified to comment is rubbish. Climate science is highly theoretical and borrows from many related scientific fields. Experts in those fields are perfectly entitled to comment on problems with current global warming theory as they see it. For instance, you don’t have to be a climatologist to know that the greenhouse effect of added CO2 is logarithmic, ie: the effect gets less and less the more you add, so that a doubling, or even a quadrupling is of little concern (about 0.1 degrees). This is just one of the key arguments put forward by skeptics and I’ve yet to see it challenged on scientific grounds (unless you accept hypothetical, “estimated” unproven and unreliable positive feedback mechanisms).
Some more stuff for you, janice. Talks a bit about that oil-industry funding you guys love going on about, as if that discredits facts. I can’t quite work out what is so heinous about oil companies researching and promoting data that casts doubt on global warming mythology. What do you expect them to do?
My previous post, however, is still the most relevant: this is not the exclusive domain of climatologists.
We’ve read and listened to what the IPCC and its ilk have had to say, and we’ve weighed it against what the skeptics say. Have you done the same, or are you happy to simply keep attacking the man rather than his argument?
#35 Janice. And here I was thinking you were trolling.
Shrug. My area of study is more biological, and I’ll admit that some of the maths spouted by both sides is stretching my understanding. I’ll post a correction if I come across a convincing, specific rebuttal to the arguments I’ve seen on sites such as Junkscience. It’s been about a year since I read through the pro-warming stuff. Time, perhaps, to revisit them. Feel free to post links to anything you’ve found that discredits this.
American Association of State Climatologists.
It’s 11.30pm. Good night. Sorry about the multi-posts. You know how it is when you’re also doing other things.
#39 Dminor
Is it naive to think some of those scientists might be physicists, mathematicians, geologists or meteoroligists and that they are in a position to analyse many of the claims made by warmists?
My thinking on experts in other fields being able to “analyse many of the claims made by warmist” is this: they are only analyzing someone else’s data, not their own. They are assuming the data is accurate, just because the presenter says it is, and not because they themselves have verified it’s accuracy.
But really, this insistence that only climatologists are qualified to comment is rubbish.
Doesn’t that work both ways? If another economics professor says global warming is not happening, do you value his opinion the same as you do Quiggins’ opinion? Or, do you, like most people, only value expert opinions that agree with yours?
Got into a nasty go-round with a friend a while back on this subject. I started listing the “We’re going to die because of global cooling!” I first heard when I was about 14, and pointed out that a lot of the ‘proof’ was the same crap being used now to ‘prove’ global warmering, and she proceeded to throw in the usual: all ‘responsible’ or ‘real’ scientists agree, etc. It was like speaking to a religeous fanatic who hears their belief in their god questioned.
“Quiggin is a mere economist.”
No, my grandfather (a stockbroker) was an economist. He performed a useful service by making himself and a whole lot of other people rich.
Quiggin is a professional academic, and professional academics fall somewhere between drug dealer and child molester when it comes to being useful.
Posted by Dave Surls on 2006 12 02 at 01:49 PM • permalink“John Quiggin is a Federation Fellow in Economics and Political Science”
Why all this attention to Economics? His real expertise is in Polly Sy, the Queen of Sciences.
Posted by Harry Bergeron on 2006 12 02 at 02:38 PM • permalink“Polly Sy, the Queen of Sciences.”
About as much of a science as climatology, economics…or astrology.
Posted by Dave Surls on 2006 12 02 at 02:52 PM • permalinkrhinardman,
Kind of depends what they’ve got to say. If they’re talking verifiable facts I’ll listen, at least. Eg: if a geologist says the ice core sample record from these regions suggests these past temperatures, he might not be talking out of his hat. If a mathematician analyses the Mann hockey stick and points out the flaws, I’ll listen. Stern can wax lyrical about the economic impact (but that doesn’t mean someone else, who isn’t an economist, can’t pick holes in some of his logic or assumptions). Quiggan, an economist, tends to cite the official line. That’s OK. I’ve read a lot of it and it ain’t all rubbish. It’s just that I’ve read a lot of good counter-argument, too.
Or are we all not qualified enough to form a working opinion on this admittedly complex subject? In which case, why are we venturing one at all? Might as well go over to Quiggy’s blog and support him, as many climatologists - perhaps the majority - agree with him.
I prefer to follow the Rumsfeldian philosophy when it comes to global somethingorother:
We don’t know what’s happening now, we don’t know why it’s happening, and we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. We don’t know what we can do about it, and we don’t know what would happen if we did try to do something. But we can make educated guesses and work with what we do know.
Which, in simple terms, means not running around screaming “Do something! Anything!” and tearing one’s hair out, and signing useless treaties in a panic.
“Or are we all not qualified enough to form a working opinion on this admittedly complex subject?”
No.
Insufficient data.
Posted by Dave Surls on 2006 12 02 at 04:31 PM • permalinkActually, Dave, I completely agree. Various scientists, many of them not climatologists, have raised legitimate enough questions to doubt the dogma. In some cases the evidence is fairly good (on both sides!), in other cases not. As I said, it’s a working opinion, not a rock solid one, and it varies a bit depending upon what aspect of climate change evidence you’re talking about, eg: has there been a little warming? Yessir. How much is due to man-made greenhouse gas and how much will the temp go up? That’s different. I apologize if I came across horribly dogmatic in my skepticism, don’t want to do that. In an earlier thread I went on about a list of serious questions and doubts about CC. I’m not trying to provide all the answers (although I do like to challenge some of those assertions with alternatives, based on what I’ve come across). We know enough to know that some things we think we know we don’t!
Doesn’t a proper proof for an economist begin with the phrase “Let us assume that ...”?
Cheers
Posted by J.M. Heinrichs on 2006 12 02 at 08:51 PM • permalinkOn the topic of Gluteal Warmenation, Cate Blanchett describes how she Walked Against Warming with her husband and kids. She describes the whole experience as “heart warming”. How about stomach churning?
As many commenters here have noted, economics is too imprecise to be called a science. Most economists would acknowledge that the discipline is more of an art since you must convince others that your view is the correct one through argument and debate. Modelling and statistics are mainly used to buttress these arguments.
However, a lot of economists study statistics, maths, cost-benefit analysis and modelling which enable us to comment on broader issues such as global warming. Indeed, many economists have been the fiercest critics of climate change, discovering huge problems in the Cultists’ modelling and statistics (eg, the Hockey Stick and the IPCC’s modelling). Economists also have a role to play when it comes to the debate over economic solutions to the so-called problem.
Only the more arrogant economists (typically left wing and European-trained) think of themselves as scientists.
Given Stern’s background in the World Bank and the IPCC (which say a lot about his political leanings as well as his competence with statistics and modelling), his solutions to global warming were always going to be rather dramatic and favour large scale intervention.
As for Quiggin, Harry (#45) hit the nail on the head when he noted that Quiggin is more of a politcal scientist than economist. He relies on bluster and ad hominin attacks far more than most in the economic community.
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2006 12 03 at 12:02 AM • permalinkHmmm.
What I find amusing in many arguments about human generated Global Warming is the comparison of the supposed effects of Global Warming with the actual effects of the change in the Earth’s axial tilt. Each year the Earth “wobbles” from one position to another with a shifting of about 22 degrees from point to point.
What this does is give the northern and southern lattitudes our seasons and makes it possible to inhabit far more land area than we could otherwise. But what it also does is illustrate the power of either a stronger sun or slightly more sunlight on local climate.
So why is it that all of humanity working as hard as hell for over 200+ years of industrialization to put pollutants into the atmosphere can’t even measure up to the effects of an extra half-hour of sunlight.
Posted by memomachine on 2006 12 03 at 01:08 AM • permalink“By the way, he doesn’t lecture.”
Yet more proof that there is a merciful God.
Posted by Dave Surls on 2006 12 03 at 01:50 AM • permalinkErr, which university-employed professor doesn’t lecture? Unless they’re a member of a pure research-based institute (and employed specifically in that capacity), I’ve never seen that.
Okay, Quiggin appears to be part of something called the “Risk and Sustainable Management Group”, but that appears to be a organization of one, as Quiggin is the only professorial member.
Sure sounds to me like the Quigster has been put out to pasture by UQ. No wonder he has so much time to blog; all of my econ professors in two universities seemed a lot more busy. BTW, his picture at uq.edu.au looks like it was taken the first time he came across a climate change skeptic.
From the Dept of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up:
In 1975 as a means to improve California air quality, the Air Resources Board began to require that all vehicles registered in the state be equipped with 2-Way Catalytic Converters (and, in time, 3-Way Catalytic Converters—Lord those early models were a horror). As I’m sure you all know, the catalytic converter works to remove harmful emissions from the engine’s exhaust by first reducing nitrogen oxides and then oxidizing the carbon monoxide and unburnt hydrocarbons. But, what exactly does a catalytic converter convert those harmful gases to? Well, in addition to some water, they are converted to the relatively benign gas known as carbon dioxide. Yes, California has been manufacturing CO2 on its highways for the last 30 years. By design. On purpose. With forethought. Whaddaya say to that, FOA (Friends of Algore)?
(Because I was traveling and then bedeviled by worms, spy ware and viruses, I’ve been out of the loop for some time. Anything happen while I was gone?)
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 12 03 at 02:09 PM • permalinkJohn “Auuuggghh!-I Spilled-Rogaine-On-My-Face” Quiggin
Do not mock the Rogaine Danger! It’s being kept under wraps, but the recent California brushfires have been traced back to a tragic interaction between Rogaine and Grecian Formula gone horribly wrong.
And no, I won’t take off my hat.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 12 03 at 05:53 PM • permalink
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Well, I certainly do agree with him that glowball warmining is an “abstruse scientific issue”.
As for his own supposed lack of relevant qualifications, don’t you know that we people who hold an econ degree are qualified to opine on everything?