Oh great. Now what are we to believe? First there’s this list of 450 peer-reviewed papers authored by alleged climate deniers, and then this denial of denialism by policy science whipping-boy Roger Pielke Jr.
This leads me to introduce my new variation on an old logic puzzle, the Denier’s Paradox: “I hereby deny everything about my next sentence. I thereby affirm the previous sentence.” Ahh, a performative conundrum only a philosopher could love.
The great, great grandfather of the theory that offers an eensy-weensy glimpse into the convoluted politics that characterizes common pool resource problems, and ultimately, tragedies of the commons, has now had the latter portion of his influential manuscript translated into Hebrew. This may not be particularly scintillating news until you note that it “instantly became one of the 10 best-selling books in the country.”
Come again?
Don’t get me wrong, I love the book, but apparently there aren’t many books translated into Hebrew.
All the exceptionally well-qualified amateur dendrochronologists who regularly visit this site will no doubt have heard that a bunch of old trees have been given a shot of climatic growth hormone. Turns out, they’ve grown faster in the past 50 years than they have in 3.7 millenia. Hear that? Millenia!
“This is a cautionary tale,” says Michael Mann, who uses tree rings to gain insights into past climates at Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center, most famously to create the “hockey stick” graph showing an increase in temperature. “Only the human impact of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations can explain that warming.”
Oh. No. You. Di’int.
Judging from past controversy, thems fightin’ words. (I anticipate a McIntyre response in less than 12 parsecs.)
On another front, this anti-millenarian discovery looks to be a sure sign that higher concentrations of CO2 are good for old-growth forest health. Yippie! An upside to coal. Looks like we can relax. Indeed, according to some ways of viewing things, maybe the correct environmental position is the position that pumps tons of sweet carbon liquor into the puckering stomata of our dear Gaia.
At a three-day summit in Rome, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon apparently took the position that the we need a climate deal in order to fight hunger:
“There can be no food security without climate security,” he said. “Next month in Copenhagen, we need a comprehensive agreement that will provide a firm foundation for a legally binding treaty on climate change,” he added.
This isn’t a particularly remarkable position. Hunger and the negative human impacts of climate change have been environmental justice questions for a while now. For me, at least, it does mark a risky rhetorical gambit. Most of the time, it seems to me, climate mitigation arguments are made by appeal to our own enlightened self-interest: it’s bad for us in the long run, over the long haul. But that’s not the appeal here. In this case, it’s an appeal to other obligations, like an obligation to feed the hungry.
While I agree that we do have a moral obligation to feed the hungry, many people are not settled on the reasons that we ought to do so. Some people think it is because it is selfish not to; some think it is because we are obligated to reduce misery where we encounter it; some think it is a matter of respect for humanity; some think it is politically expedient; yet still others think it is because this is what God would tell us to do. What is perplexing about the Secretary-General’s argumentative strategy is that certainly some people think that we ought not to feed the hungry precisely because doing so raises additional resource pressures on already strained systems and may further exacerbate climate change. So one must ask a question about the logic of suggesting that we ought to reach a climate deal in order to ensure that the hungry be fed.
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