The recent Climate Change debate at Servite School was
almost certainly a first for Anaheim, if not for all of Orange County. Sponsored by Anaheim’s economic watchdog group, CATER*, the stage line-up gave
those who attended an opportunity to hear from divergent views about the
significance of global warming and whether it’s affected by human activity, or
could be arrested by human intervention.
The headliner was billed as Dr. Patrick Michaels, a senior
fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute.
A quick preliminary internet search for Dr. Michaels soon
indicated he is a climate change “skeptic” meaning, presumably, that he would
be in that small percentage of scientists who are not fazed by the more
alarmist concerns of the remaining 95% of scientists engaged in the study of
global warming. But this would be a premature and prejudicial judgment, for
everyone should be allowed to speak for themselves rather than be labeled by
one-line sound-bites.
In this tightly time-controlled debate, introduced by his sister-in-law
Victoria Michaels - an Anaheim resident - Dr. “Pat” pitched in with his 15 minute
presentation.
He was followed by rebuttal speakers, Mark Tabbert and Dr. John Hoaglund III, after which
CATER attorney, Greg Diamond, engaged him in informal conversation before the
final Q&A wrap-up. So much for the outline of the 2-hour event.
In many respects the evening was a conglomeration of
enlightening snippets and lengthy missed opportunities. That was largely due to
three factors: presentation of material
that was too complicated for a mixed grass roots audience (which includes me);
a misunderstanding of the word “rebuttal”; and inability to stick to the point.
Dr. Patrick Michaels
Dr. Michaels began his segment with a clear, simple slide: Global warming is real and it is affected by human activity. There was no
doubting the mastery of his subject, and he surely made every effort to pitch
his message at a level we could understand. I think it came to this:
·
The planet has warmed and cooled on many
previous occasions over millions of years for reasons completely unconnected
with human activity. Humans were not even there! The temperature variations
have been far more extreme than anything we are seeing now, and the Earth
survived.
·
Since global temperature measurements have been
recorded we have become more and more sophisticated at making those
measurements, many of them by satellites.
·
Graphs charting the uptick of global warming
over the last 80 years (or so), while not all identical, are clear about one
thing – the trend upwards is a straight line NOT a progressively upwards curve.
Michaels’ red laser pointer flitted erratically over a chart showing two straight
upwards trend lines, then in the space above these, an upward curving red line (purportedly
Government data and projections) with NO data points, clearly wildly different
from the scientific measurements. His point was that official government
warming projections are demonstrably false and tending to alarmism.
·
We are in a natural swing period of global
warming that fundamentally has nothing to do with the huge amounts of carbon
dioxide we are spewing into the atmosphere.
·
This is not to discount that some warming is due
to excessive CO2 production by human agencies, but that its influence on the
overall warming trend is minimal and that even if the carbon producers of the
world tightly reined in their excesses this would make very little difference
to the overall (straight line) rise in global temperatures.
·
Dr. Michaels touched on the economic
implications of attempting to combat global warming much as if to say we are
largely wasting our money on the effort. At least, I think that’s what he was saying. Doubtless I could clarify his
message by resorting to articles and videos all available on the internet. But
our job is to stay on task and cover this debate.
·
In a Pew Research survey of national priorities,
terrorism ranked at the top with climate change right near the bottom. He should have been
challenged on his interpretation of the chart, but this never happened.
As
with the Pew Research chart, his presentation begged several very important
questions which may or may not have derailed Michaels’ apparent theses. But
these challenges were not taken up in the so-called rebuttals, and only one of
them in the closing minutes of the Q&A.
These areas were missed opportunities.
Comment
I
said so-called rebuttals. A rebuttal
is not simply any alternative viewpoint. Rebuttals cannot be written in
advance, unless one has the text of the proponent’s presentation or speech. A
rebuttal is an argumentative device in which the opponent takes various
statements or theses from the main proposition and attempts to refute them on
the facts, showing why the conclusions were wrong. With the possible exception
of a quick flash of argument between John Hoaglund and Patrick Michaels in
later discussion there was no rebuttal. This was a huge missed opportunity.
Mr. Mark Tabbert
So
we come to the first rebuttal, as
indicated in the program, by Mr. Mark Tabbert. The unfortunate man took the
stage in some discomfort, has arm in a sling, telling us he had just fallen off
his bicycle and broken his arm (or was it shoulder?) and two ribs. He also
declared “I am not a scientist!” As from this moment I immediately knew it would be
impossible for him to say a single word that in any way whatsoever would find
holes in Patrick Michael’s arguments and leave him gasping further to explain
himself.
Of
course, I have also Googled Mark Tabbert so now I know more about him than I
did when he spoke for himself. He is a lobbyist/presenter for the Citizens Climate Lobby with a mission to
educate members of Congress on the dangers of global warming and persuade them
to adopt policies to stringently reduce the impact of CO2 emissions, and so
forth. Well and good. But all he did was fill his time with a somewhat
unprepared assortment of excessively long anecdotes - what he does, who he has met,
names of Congress people who support his lobby group. It would have been to his
benefit to make an impassioned appeal to us all to read up on the details of the
Citizens Climate Lobby and join the fight. But he didn’t even do that. This was
a completely wasted opportunity and most certainly not a rebuttal.
Dr. John Hoaglund III
John Hoaglund III is a specialist in groundwater modeling,
hydrology and environmental forensics. If you can unpack the implications of
these areas of expertise you will see John Hoaglund takes the view that it’s worthwhile to aim for
achievable goals for sustainable groundwater usage and the management of CO2 emissions.
Once again, his presentation was not so much a rebuttal as
an alternative view of aspects of Patrick’s presentation. I got the distinct
feeling that when the time-keeper cut him off after 15 minutes, he had not
managed to summarize his main points and clinch his argument. Others will have
taken away differing memories but I think John was saying this:
·
With the ability of geo-physicists to drill to
huge depths to extract ice cores from both the Arctic and Antarctic we have
been able to construct pictures of global climate that go back millions of
years. These, as we now know, clearly show the ice-ages with which we are all
familiar, and suggest reasons for the vast swings in past global climate. To
this extent Michaels and Hoaglund were on the same page. But as the latter
observed, every little wiggle on this graph of climate variations over the
millennia, represents dozens of PhDs! There is so much science underlining an
apparently simple graph that no one person can know it all. Most scientists are
obliged to respond to many questions with an honest “I don’t know.”
·
Many factors influence global warming and
cooling, not least of which are luminosity –
or the strength of energy pumped into Earth’s energy system from the sun. The
sun does not emit energy at a constant rate; Earth’s orbit and tilt are sufficiently eccentric not only to produce our familiar seasons, but over
longer periods, other oscillations.
(The Milankovitch cycle, I subsequently found out). Albedo, or the reflectivity
of the Earth’s surface, also affects warming when snow covered areas, the ice
caps and other glaciers, diminish.
·
Impact from asteroids, volcanic eruptions,
tectonic movements, all affect climate, sometimes very radically.
·
The most dramatic recent changes to earth
environment have been from human causality.
·
Contrary to the first speaker’s assertions we
can and should attempt to reduce human impact of the current climate swing. The
more that industrial agencies can be persuaded to work together rather than
each pursue their own agendas, the better.
·
I think John had us at a disadvantage with the
use of terms with which many of us would not be familiar. He needed to explain
them. It only takes 15 seconds to tell us that Holocene
is the last 11,700 years of Earth’s history – since the last ice age. But maybe
I missed that, just as I had to look up Milankovich and distinguish that from
John Malkovitch. Hey, it takes time for ordinary people to grasp this words and
treat them like bread and butter. And much of this section of John’s
presentation was based on a chart so complicated, with the laser flickering
around, that it was hard to know what to take away.
·
Lastly Dr. Hoaglund took us to the amazing
Nebraska Sand Hills – which form a massive soak area into the Ogallala Aquifer,
the largest ground water supply in the United States. The point was? – the
time-keeper ended his 15 minutes!
What about rebuttal? There were a number of issues raised by
Patrick which he jokingly said he had lived through in spite of the “Chicken
Little” scares at the time. These included the population bomb, global cooling,
acid rain, ozone depletion, etc. John later admitted he would have like
to taken up these issues to show that human intervention CAN in fact change
environmental conditions. But at the time, the opportunity went begging.
Conversation
The Conversation
with Greg Diamond and Patrick Michaels was most interesting not so much for
good conversation but for observing body language and quantifying the volume of
words Greg can utter before he actually gets to the point, if he ever gets
there at all. I’m not suggesting that Greg does not have great contributions to
make but marshaling his thoughts in order to present clear, succinct argument,
is a communication problem that we cannot overlook. He has the stage, and the
opportunities mostly wandered off into fogginess.
It soon proved prudent to call Dr. Hoaglund to the stage to
join the discussion. And we see this: Greg sits upright in his chair, head
inclined upwards towards a microphone which was clearly too high, and which he
could have lowered and thereby looked more comfortable. He is on edge, trying to
man-up to his task. Patrick takes the microphone off its stand, moves his chair
way from Greg and sits back with the mic cradled
in his chest. He is a man at ease. Confident against all comers, ready to
dismiss their arguments as one would swat a mosquito. John then takes the
center chair over to the left lectern, sits with elbows on knees supporting his
head. It is the position of undue deference, even irritation at the superior
attitude of the main speaker.
The conversation revealed one crucial plank in the Michaels’
argument; that whatever we try to do to mitigate global warming it is largely
useless. And he pulled intellectual rank with a lofty putdown of Greg by citing
atmospheric rates of methane absorption in the upper atmosphere, inviting Greg
to show how that might be changed by reducing vehicle emissions (or something
like that).
Questions
We had to wait until the end of the public questions to
rattle Dr. Michaels’ cage. Did he know about the effect of global warming on the melting the ice caps and the break up of ice sheets? To which he tartly
replied, “Of course I do!”
And that was one of the potentially most important issues of
the evening – gone in a second. (See below. )
Summary
Although (as John Hoagland said) 50% of the audience would
probably not agree with him or Patrick Michaels about the age of the Earth
because they were evangelical Christians,
much of what came from the platform was still more than most of us could
follow! The ability to take complex
matters and reduce them to understandable form without undue sacrifice of
technical or philosophical content is a great communication skill. At least -
thank you speakers - you did not insult us with shallow rhetoric. You made us
think!
The CATER organizers did a great job to organize and control
this event and can only learn the lessons and build on this to go ahead and
arrange yet more debates on matters of great public interest. I am not sure, apart from higher educational
institutions, who else would do this.
The audience was clearly pleased to have been there. They
have plenty to mull over.
ADDENDUM
Thoughts from the writer.
The matter of melting ice is very important. Michaels showed
us that atmospheric warming is more straight line than the Al Gore hockey stick.
There is a huge difference between the amount of heat energy
in a system as compared with the temperature of a system. Remember those schooldays
experiments on melting ice and boiling water? Does the term latent heat come back to mind?
When ice melts at zero degrees Centigrade it turns into
water at the same temperature. So what? It takes a large amount of heat energy
to loosen up the “frozen” molecules into the more mobile “liquid” state. And
even more to induce liquid water to evaporate into gaseous form. The heat that
effects these transformations is called latent heat – and it has to come from
somewhere. In simple terms it comes from the air – which for a while reduces
air temperature.
Translate this to melting glaciers: what would otherwise be
increasingly hot air in the atmosphere is cooled down by the heat transfer into
the ice to melt it. Increasingly warmed air therefore remains at a more
constant temperature. The implications of this are HUGH! It raises so many
questions that should have been aimed at Dr. Michaels (even if he came back with
replies that would have left us speechless.)
Michaels focused mainly on atmospheric temperatures, and did not get to the impact of warming on our oceans.
Sure, the ocean and atmospheric system of our planet may
easily be able to respond and cope with increased greenhouse gases in its own
way. It has in the past. But this time we - the over–populated human race - are
also here, making matters worse through
industrial greed and political indifference.
This time, we stand to be the major losers as nature readjusts itself to absorb
the abuse we have thrown at it. Greg’s
plea, joined with John’s argument, that we should at least do something rather
than nothing should not easily be ignored.
Mark Tabbert would tell us that his Citizens Climate Lobby
is working on it, along with many others.
· The debate took place in the Anaheim Performing Arts
Center at Servite, Thursday 20th August at 7pm. CATER is Anaheim’s
economic watchdog: the Coalition of Anaheim Taxpayers for Economic
Responsibility.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
From the web…
Dr. Patrick Michaels:
http://www.cato.org/people/patrick-michaels
Mr. Mark Tabbert: http://presenters.climaterealityproject.org/presenter/mark-tabbert_5181
Dr. John Hoaglund III:
https://www.blogger.com/profile/05447931743991013379
Mr. Greg Diamond: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/greg-diamond/5/724/9b1
