Foreign Policy, another pillar of the American journalistic establishment (and another magazine that publishes my work when it can’t find anything better to print) has come out with a substantial piece on-line that places the blame for the meltdown of public confidence in climate science where it belongs: with bad procedures at the IPCC and poor leadership from its embattled chair. The piece, by FP contributing editor Christina Larson, is titled “Inside the Climate Bunker,” and while the piece is by no means a global warming skeptic’s dream come true, it represents yet another stage in the global warming movement’s slow recognition of just how much trouble it’s in — and just how poorly prepared it really is for the big policy leagues in which it has chosen to play.
(In order to save my more conspiratorially-minded readers the trouble of Googling us both to work out the connections, Ms. Larson is a Bernard Schwarz Fellow at the New America Foundation. I am a founding board member of the foundation. I had no role in Ms Larson’s selection as a fellow and the New America board observes a strict hands-off policy about the stands our fellows take on public issues. I disagree with many of the things our fellows say but they are under no pressure to agree with me, or I with them. Nor do I get a commission when their blog hits go up, I am sorry to say.)
Larson’s piece is in no way a take-down of climate science and the hard core AGW skeptic crowd will grind their teeth in frustration at her continuing confidence in the strength of the underlying scientific consensus behind global warming, but that’s not really the point. Larson has written the one thing more damning, more killing than an exposé: a post mortem. As she writes of Pachauri: “Few stars have risen and fallen so quickly as Pachauri’s, who has gone from being an international climate hero to [a] subject of increasing ridicule at home and abroad.”
Larson understands that we are well past the stage of circling the wagons and denying that the movement to stop global warming has hit a big roadblock. The hits have been taken; the damage is real. She’s helping her readers understand how something as “eyepopping” as the glacier blunder could have gotten into a report that supposedly was vetted and proofread to the nth degree.
While very far from a comprehensive account of the whole complicated mess, Larson’s piece provides a useful description about how the notorious ‘glaciergate’ error got into the report and had a very candid interview with Christopher Field, the scientist co-responsible for the section of the report in which the claim appeared. He can give no explanation of how the error crept in, or of why IPCC procedures failed to catch it sooner. As Larson notes: “With all the attention, one might think the IPCC would by now have a precise and consistent explanation — or point to an ongoing investigation — for how this error crept in. Alas.”
It seems overwhelmingly clear at this point that amid all the other problems, the global warming movement utterly failed to grasp the serious nature of the project on which they had embarked. Larson’s account shows an IPCC that is managed in a casual and amateurish way. It lacks even a professional crisis response and PR team — one reason it has behaved so foolishly and self destructively since its problems began to emerge.
I am leaving scientific issues aside; from the standpoint of politics the insouciance and lack of sobriety of this movement boggles the mind. These people believe that the welfare of the human race requires a deep restructuring of the way the economies of all our countries work. They believe that this should be achieved through an unprecedentedly sweeping and intrusive international treaty, and they believe that the problem is so urgent that the treaty needs to be adopted immediately.
Yet they do not bother to ensure that the scientific body that will organize the evidence and represent the facts to world opinion is professionally organized and managed. They do not think they need to develop consistent methods to review their publications. In the case of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, when inconvenient and harassing requests under the freedom of information act make intrusive demands for data, they choose to ignore the law rather than deal with the problem in a serious, professional way. They are then genuinely shocked and surprised to discover that breaking the law to conceal information from skeptics undercuts their credibility with the public at large. “We are good people,” they fatuously whine. “Why can’t people just trust us?”
When errors emerge, they slander their critics rather than checking their work. They assume that skepticism is the result of ignorance and malignity without understanding that the proposals they make are so far reaching and affect so many people that intense controversy and skepticism is part of the natural and inevitable political process that must accompany the global reflection on the changes they propose. And yet they expect the entire human race, most of which lacks the expertise or the resources to comprehend much less to verify their work to take their pronouncements as truth and conclude, essentially on faith, that people who cannot manage a public relations campaign under fire should somehow be entrusted with running the world.
The Greek words ate, blind folly, and hubris, self destructive pride, seem to cover it well.
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at this spectacle. AGW skeptics I suspect are laughing themselves silly; environmentalists will be crying for some time to come. That’s appropriate. If the global warming people are right about the science, what is unfolding around us is tragedy whose consequences will reverberate around the world for a long time to come. If they are wrong, it is a knee slapping comedy of human folly, arrogance and overreaching. Perhaps it’s a bit of both.
Larson’s article is important for two reasons. First, it’s another stage in the decline of denial; before very much longer the American environmental community will start coming to grips with the strategic setback its most vital priority has sustained. Second, the Larson piece illuminates the paradox at the heart of this strange story.
The problem isn’t that the global warming movement took global warming too seriously; it’s that so far they haven’t taken it seriously enough. They believe that the world is threatened by an imminent danger, yet they haven’t bothered to think through a comprehensive political strategy or developed a competent and reliable institution to persuade what must inevitably be a skeptical world opinion that they are right.
The last time the world saw this kind of blind folly was when the Bush administration tried to bring order to post-invasion Iraq. For people who took such risks on the war and who pinned such enormous hopes on it, it’s amazing how lightly they took the task of reconstruction. The whole point of their strategy was to build a New Iraq that would illustrate the wonders of freedom throughout the Middle East; they just didn’t bother to develop a plan that could get there. They formed a closed circle of like minded people who branded dissent as disloyalty and bad morals and charged blindly into a situation that they did not understand.
The global warming people seem to me to be equally careless and thoughtless in how they have gone about organizing to get the human race to make what are unquestionably and by a large measure the biggest, most expensive, most intrusive and most consequential policy changes in world history. And like George Bush, they have found a quagmire where they expected a cakewalk.
Let’s see what happens next.
[...] link: Global Warming Movement Wasn’t Ready For Prime Time – Walter Russell Mead’s Blog ̵… [...]
“These people believe that the welfare of the human race requires a deep restructuring of the way the economies of all our countries work.”
Because that was always the goal; AGW was just the means. In the 1960s the means was Revolution, in the 70s the Long March through Institutions, in the 80s anti-Reaganism and Social Democracy, in the 90s Clintonian Triangulation, but in the 00s, AGW.
Don’t worry, these people will be back, they’ve always been with us and always will be. Just the means will change.
Thank you for the link. It is an excellent post-mortem.
These ingénues never realized that if yer gonna take away a man’s CO2-generating beverages, charcoal, and infernal-combustion engine, you’d best have an ironclad scientific case or more than a boatload of armed men.
I think the lack of attention to detail is one of the critical failures in the AGW movement. A local anecdote illustrates this. Living in Arizona, the hottest temperatures in state during the summer were typically in the towns along the Colorado river thanks to their lower altitude compared to the desert regions further to the east like Phoenix and Tucson. A few years ago, the small town of Casa Grande, midway between Phoenix and Tucson, started to regularly displace the river towns as the hottest spot in Arizona. This change was accompanied by the relocation of the weather station in Casa Grande to a new location that was systematically a few degrees warmer than the old location. Applying Occam’s Razor to the question, it’s clearly a simpler answer that Casa Grande’s sudden warming is weather station artifact instead of some freakish local temperature spike.
One of the challenges that the skeptics pose to the alarmists is data integrity. There are standards on how to build a weather station to cancel out siting factors that distort the data. The skeptics have documented that a lot of US weather stations fail to meet the standards, typically with factors that would boost recorded temperatures. Therefore, the data being used by NOAA and the IPCC to conclude things are really getting hotter is suspect.
Careful climate scientists would want to be sure that they did not incorporate flawed data into their studies. Critics highlighting such flawed data ought to be thanked for auditing the science – genuine review.
A remarkably brilliant piece of writing, sir!
As one who admires the language almost as much as the truth, this is indeed what informed opinion must announce – the extremes laid forth, and the truth – always somewhere in the middle – clearly explained and most wonderfully expressed.
Thank you.
“They believe that the world is threatened by an imminent danger, yet they haven’t bothered to think through a comprehensive political strategy”
There is no evidence to substantiate this speculation.
All the evidence supports the contrary view that none of them ever believed any of it.
Furthermore, the main thrust of the movement is and has always been political. These people have meetings to establish conferences to make roadmaps – they’ve laid the groundwork of this political structure with extreme conscientiousness.
The actual ‘beliefs’ are irrelevant – the point is to find license to demand submission. A population of parasites had been created, funded, expanded and has no concept in its metaphysics for ‘creation of wealth’ beyond printing of paper. They can not survive without cannibalism any longer and there are lots of those mouths to feed.
They recognise each other as a separate species and they all know who is prey.
The debate was always over. They mean to eat.
But what was once accomplished by force is now done by fraud. Your consent is required, for some reason. I guess they aren’t ready to face the pragmatic facts that when the victim begins to feel a lot of pain, he will protest and then the guns will have to come out because re-education has clearly failed.
[...] Global Warming Movement Wasn’t Ready For Prime Time [...]
The FP article’s jargon of “global-warming deniers” is nowhere matched by references to ‘global warming hysterics”–perhaps because the author appears to be one, thus her concluding sentence: “Confusion, not orchestrated bias or, as some have asserted, greed, seems the most likely cause of recent slipups. But with the fate of the planet in the balance…, .”
Of course, “the fate of the planet,” that is why the 2035 ‘slip up’ occurred [not because of bureaucratic bungling as the author suggests]. As has been reported [which shows you how much homework the FP writer did], the 2035 Glacier disaster was included for political, not scientific purposes.
“Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html#ixzz0dUx6pwXe
“Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research….
Dr. Lai has since denied these statements. Described by a colleague as a ‘straight shooter,” makes one wonder. Did somebody ‘get to’ Dr. Lai after his straight shooting talk with the reporter?
It would be a great story if some journalist could follow up on this and see if the reporter recorded the interview..
We also have another source that Dr. Lai claimed this was not a mistake:
Glaciergate – still a long way from the truth
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/glaciergate-still-long-way-from-truth.html
“Prof. Murari Lai…noted that it was wrong to assume, as has been done in sections of the media, that the year 2035 had crept in the report by mistake.”
Walter,
I’m interested that you don’t acknowledge some essential truths about power money and change. It’s as though you think it has been a fair fight & tactics are what is worth examining.
[...] Russell Mead, num longo post, “Global Warming Movement Wasn’t Ready For Prime Time”, responde a Christina [...]
“They believe that the world is threatened by an imminent danger, yet they haven’t bothered to think through a comprehensive political strategy”
Oh, lets do as Mr. Mead suggests and “scientific issues aside” and just concentrate on the political issues.
The warmers have made a bunch of mistakes by not ensuring a correct process, They haven’t been professionally organized and managed. They refused to deal with “inconvenient and harassing” FOI requests.
Oh, yes! That’s the ticket. Let’s blame all on poor marketing and bad customer service. Call the PR department, they can fix this. Perhaps a speech by President Obama.
Oh, yes. Lets ignore the science. Lets ignore whether the AGW hypothesis is right or wrong, after all, a proper “process” is what is needed. If we just had the right process, every one would believe.
It is obvious, and has been from the beginning, that the IPCC is a political body, pushing for a political agenda, making claims for which there is no evidence. But it is the process that is at fault and not the science.
Mr. Mead seems to think that all of the IPCC mistakes just some how, (I’m shocked, shocked!) got included.
No, the science is the beginning, the middle and the end of what is wrong with the IPCC, and the only process that will solve the problem is criminal prosecutions. And an abrupt cessation of funding.
I want my money back.