Collide-a-scape

Your humble host is attending the World Science Festival today (it’s running all week). I’ll be a bystander to some of the events, hoping that all the brilliant minds gathered together will stimulate my feeble brain. Probably not. But it should be fun.

I noticed at their blog that boingboing’s Maggie Koerth-Baker has a real interesting essay, called “A Twist on Climate Change, Risk, and Uncertainty.”

Here’s an excerpt that I think captures her argument (my emphasis):

The trouble with looking at disasters this way is that tornadoes do not fit neatly into little, politically polarized ticky boxes. Science, in general, seldom works like that. In a May 23rd editorial for the Washington Post, environmentalist Bill McKibben took Americans to task for refusing to make a connection between environmental disasters—including the 2011 tornadoes—and climate change. His basic message: All these disasters must be connected and only willful ignorance allows us to ignore that.

I have a slightly different perspective. What we have here is not a failure to communicate and accept the obvious effects of climate change. Instead, it’s a failure to communicate and accept a critical point of how science works, without which scientific literacy is reduced to mere talking points. This is about nuance and uncertainty, and if the American public doesn’t get those things, then we’ll never get climate change.

This is quite relevant to some of the recent discussions (here and here) at this site last week. Is Maggie right? Is intelligent debate on climate change hopeless until more people gain an understanding of “nuance and uncertainty”?

Some regular readers of Collide-a-Scape  are often critical of Judith Curry, but isn’t much of what she’s doing over at Climate Etc geared to making just these elements–nuance and uncertainty–a more integral (and better understood) part of the climate debate?

Like most bullies, partisan bloggers that use intimidation tactics don’t like it when they get called out. The latest instance is Marc Morano, who, in response to a post I put up this morning, has already countered at Climate Depot:

Warmist Kloor: ‘The Morano Gauntlet’: ‘GOP contenders for Pres. will be forced to run the Morano gauntlet if they don’t march in lockstep with the newly hardened GOP orthodoxy on global warming’

Kloor Makes Mafia Reference: [Morano's warning] ‘spoken like a true climate capo’ — Capo defnintion: ‘A caporegime or capodecina, usually shortened to just a capo, is a term used in Mafia for a high ranking made member of a crime family who heads a ‘crew’ of soldiers and has major social status and influence in the organization’

Now there’s one thing about that Capo reference Marc should know. I have used it previously at this site to describe the thuggish behavior of a certain climate blogger who also growls when getting a taste of his own medicine. For example, here’s an opening line to a post I wrote two years ago:

This is rich, coming from the Global Warming capo on the left, he who relishes rhetorical knee-capping.

More recently, I also invoked the term here:

But there’s too much of an echo chamber–especially in the climate blogopshere– and anyone who steps even a teensy out of line risks getting worked over by the climate capo and his band of loyalists.

So Marc, consider yourself in good company. And remember: A hit job is a hit job, no matter what the politics of the assassin.

That’s the million dollar question Yale Environment 360 put to a nice cross-section of climate experts. The roster includes Kevin Trenberth, Judith Curry,  Kerry Emanuel, and Roger Pielke, Jr., among others.

To my mind, there are no surprising statements from any of the aforementioned contributors, if you are familiar with their previously stated positions. (Somebody should correct me if I’m wrong.) Still, it’s good to have these views collected in one place and in sum, they should be helpful to those trying to make sense of this complicated issue.

Michael Levi at his Council on Foreign Relations blog has an interesting take on a recent decision by New Jersey’s Governor:

People who care about climate change are understandably upset with Chris Christie’s announcement that he’s pulling New Jersey out of the Regional Greeenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the first-of-a-kind cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide emissions in the northeast. Indeed Governor Christie’s justification for withdrawing is pretty much nonsense: he claims that RGGI was an unacceptable tax on electricity – yet the cost of RGGI permits was far too low to have any meaningful impact on ratepayers.

So why one cheer? Because in the course of rejecting RGGI, Christie embraced the reality of the climate problem. Last fall, he said he was skeptical that human-caused climate change was a real problem. In his withdrawal announcement, though, he made it pretty clear that he thought climate change was a serious matter. This is no small thing for a rising star in a party that has increasingly made climate denial a litmus test for its leadership.

Levi’s point in that last sentence is reinforced by Marc Morano’s reaction, who is now trying to dim that star or force it closer to the Inhofe/Morano orbit.

What’s interesting is Levi’s glass half full perspective on Christie’s announcement (my emphasis):

Indeed I’d argue that given a choice between having Christie participate in RGGI but deny climate change, or reject RGGI but accept climate change, people who care about climate change should prefer the latter. RGGI is a weak cap-and-trade program that currently has minimal direct impact on emissions. Someone who denies climate change is not going to strengthen the program, or support stronger alternatives at the federal level. In contrast, someone who accepts that climate change is real has at least left the door open to supporting serious policies that might combat it down the road.

And that is why Morano will be giving Christie the Gingrich treatment for the foreseeable future. The message should be clear by now: any Republican contenders for President will be forced to run the Morano gauntlet if they don’t march in lockstep with the newly hardened GOP orthodoxy on global warming. Or they could take Morano’s advice, which he delivered in this recent AP article:

Republican presidential hopefuls can believe in man-made global warming as long as they never talk about it, and oppose all the so-called solutions.

Spoken like a true climate capo.

UPDATE: Morano takes offense. Readers coming here from Climate Depot should check out my response.