Big Sky Cairn

If you’ve been reading over the past week, I am confident that you’ve been waiting with baited breath to learn the sources and origins of the Name The Decade trivia quotes from last Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

As the clever among you may have guessed, each and every one of the quotes provided was from an article published in the 1970s - when the climatic disaster was the pending global ice age and the havoc it would wreak on global food production. Each of the quotes comes from one of the following stories:

“The Enigma of Climate.” USA Today Magazine. March 1979.

“There’s a Big Glacier Coming.” Boston Magazine. February 1976.

“A Mini Ice Age Could Begin in Decade.” Boston Globe. November 2, 1975.

“The Threat of a New Ice Age and Some Possible Defenses.” Science Forum. April 1975.

“The Cooling World.” Newsweek. April 28, 1975.

“Another Ice Age?” Time. June 24, 1974.

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This be the last day.  Full reveal tomorrow.  So… 1970s or 2000s?

____ “‘A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,’ warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

____ “Perhaps 10 or 20 per cent of the world’s land surface would remain within the agriculturally productive zone.”

____ “The first casualties would be populations of animals, wild and domestic, since the competition for productive land surface would be quickly felt by mankind.  The raising of food animals would be too inefficient in an era of land scarcity, and humanity would have to exist on a vegetarian and synthetic diet.”

____ “The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.”

____  “Even if temerature and rainfall patterns change only slightly in the near future in one or more of the three major grain-exporting countries - the U.S., Canada, Australia - global food shores would be sharply reduced.  University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen.  Warns Hare: “I don’t believe that the world’s present population is sustainable”

Almost there. 1970’s or 2000’s? Can you tell?

____ “Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been enduring more serious and probably more significant changes.  The African drought, threatening to turn a wide swath of sub-Saharan Africa into an extended desert, has caused thousands of deaths by famine and related diseases, while millions are kept alive by emergency food alone.  Similar dry weather patterns have been observed in a heavily populated “drought belt,” extending through the Middle East to India, South Asia, and Northern China.”

____ “Without disciplined world-wide planning, half of the world’s population could die through war, fighting on smaller scale, starvation or cold.”

____ “The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.”

____ “If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.”

____ “But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies.”

Hump day.  How do you think you’re doing?  Remember, each quote is from the decade between 1970 and 1979 or from 2000 to present. Keep guessing.  Answers will come.

____ “Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars worth of damage in thirteen U.S. states.”

____ “But they are almost unanimous in teh view that the trends will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

____ “By blocking moisture-bearing equatorial winds and preventing them from bringing rainfall to the parched sub-Sahara region, as well as other drought-ridden areas stretching all the way from Central America to the Middle East and India, the polar winds have in effect caused the Sahara and other deserts to reach farther to the south.  Paradoxically, the same vortex has created quite different weather quirks in the U.S. and other temperate zones.”

____ “The probability of climatic change makes the concern for energy much greater than the ‘energy crisis’ has implied.”

____ “Consider the fact that the last 40 years have seen a rapid growth in world populations with a corresponding rise in the ability of farmers to feed the great mass of people.  Although relying heavily upon inputs of fertilizer, the highly productive food-producing areas are delicately adjusted to the prevailing climatic conditions.  The difference between a bumper crop and a meager one often rests on minimal weather differences.”

____ “Man, too, may be somewhat responsible.”

By now, you should get the gist. Some of these quotes were published in the decade between 1970 and 1979, while others are more contemporary ranging from 2000 to present. Test your knowledge of scientific discourse in the realm of politics:

____ “Given the amound of literature available concerning climates of the past, it is really quite startling to realize that it has been only a little more than 100 years since the enormity of climatic changes was first realized.”

____ “The relationship between food production and changing climates has recently been examined by a number of climatologists. Generally, they all reach the same conclusion - namely, that we should prepare now for the possible contingencies of climatic change and resulting food shortages.”

____ “In the past few years, odd and unpleasant weather has plagued New England and the world, as droughts, floods, heat waves, and bitter cold have hit unexpectedly with surprising power. Locally, weather-watchers have observed four unusually mild winters in a row, including last year’s, the warmest since 1948.”

____ “If the world populations of men and animals were large, a large proportion would have to die even if they were mobile. This is dictated by geography and climatic phenomena.”

____ “To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading.”

Each of the following quotes is taken from a popular news source. Some were published in the decade between 1970 and 1979, while others are more contemporary ranging from 2000 to present. This is quiz number two.  See if you can identify which decade gave birth to what rhetoric:

____ “To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advancd signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather.”

____ “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.”

____ “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”

____ “Some observers have tried to connect the eleven-year sunspot cycle with climate patterns, but have so far been unable to provide a satisfactory explanation of how the cycle might be involved.”

____ “Whereas ocean and land surfaces reflect 5-25 per cent of the incident solar energy back into space, snow and ice reflect 80 per cent of solar energy back into space.”

____ “We can also think about the problem from the points of view of the safety engineer and the politician. To each of these the probabilities and the costly demonstration of natural forces in the last three years offers a significant threat.”

____ “It is based on the conjunction of several natural phenomena. The phenomena will occur. The expected consequences may not, but there is strong circumstantial evidence that suggests it is more likely they may.”

____ “The cod off the Cape aren’t coming as close to the land as they used to, says Joseph C. Allen, who has been covering fishing for The Vineyard Gazette for 50 years, and the fishermen believe that the reason si the unusually warm winter water.”

____ “Interest and concern in such events has thrust climatologists into the limelight and brought forth a number of popular books dealing with the general topic of climate change.”

Each of the following quotes is taken from a popular news source. Some were published in the decade between 1970 and 1979, while others are more contemporary ranging from 2000 to present. I’ll post a list of quotes each day this week, and next weekend I’ll post the answers.

See if you can identify which decade gave birth to these arguments:

____ “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patters have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth.”

____ “If the frequency of mention in newspaper headlines is a guide to popular concern with a given subject, then climate and weather must rate highly on any scale.”

____ “Despite the various relationships of sunspot cycles (11-year cycles) to climatic features, no one, including Dr. Hurd C. Willett, professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and perhaps the leading authority on sunspots and weather, has been able to demonstrate conclusively what cause-effect might be involved.”

____ “Measurements since the late 1800s show that the volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about 15 per cent, probably as a result of increased burning of fuels.”

____ “Such probabilities are well within the range that requires that even the costliest precautions be taken if we value life and our civilization.”

____ “How much money is half the world’s population worth, or large geographic areas of civilization? This problem is a moral one and science is not capable of providing an answer.”

____ “As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.”

____ “The collision of air masses of widely differing temperatures and humidity can create violent storms - the Midwest’s recent rash of disastrous tornadoes, for example.”

____ “The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten years from now.”

I’ve discussed the orthodoxy of science - the fall-in or get out mentality that political advocacy has created in the scientific community. I’m not personally sold on Intelligent Design. I’m not a fan of Christian Apologetics. But the way science acts to protect the status quo is similar to our discussion on Global Climate Change.

Obviously, I haven’t seen the movie. I’ll probably end up getting the DVD on Netflix. Whether or not you agree with Intelligent Design doesn’t seem to matter. From what I’ve seen, the movie is less about the nuance of origins and more about the way the debate is waged.I was going to write more, but Montana Headlines beat me to the punch, and did it with much more eloquence than I would be able to muster.  Go read.

In my Global Warming Axioms, I stated that the the choices that scientists (people) have made with regard to pseudo-scientific issues like catastrophic man-made global warming runs the serious risk of undermining science (method) in the long run. My concern is that by politicizing something that should be apolitical, scientists undermine the credibility of science. The flaw is human; it always is.

And so when I read that large segments of the public have grown skeptical of science itself, I am not surprised. The left has commandeered the scientific throne for political exploitation. The Nobel Prize was awarded to a politician for his advocacy of public policy. This misuse has dulled the tool for its intended purpose - observation of the natural order of things.

And the scientific community (the people) seem intent on dulling the tool of their trade even further by increasing its political involvement. Great Nobel laureates - once recognized for their accomplishments in scientific method - recently invited McCain, Obama and Clinton to a great science debate, and then mourned their refusal. Unless science has become as much about politics as about scientific method, what business do three politicians have in debating science? Shouldn’t that be the providence of scientists?

Sadly, I find myself more skeptical of all science because I no longer trust the scientists who report it, and I think the damage may not be undone in my lifetime.

Perhaps more sadly is the fact that the real culprits may not be the scientists, but the media who seek out the most extreme positions and then portray it as the consensus.  This not only drives scientists to the fringes for recognition and federal support, but it feeds the monster with more and more attention.

Jeff over at Speedkill has responded to my Global Warming Axioms. His contribution is constructive and well-articulated - although I do disagree with some of his points. I appreciate the opportunity to engage him in such a debate - since it is actually the debate itself that my axioms are concerned with. Note that none of my axioms make a declarative statement that global warming is false. While I am a skeptic, my skepticism is not held in those axioms. What my axioms serve to do is make discursive room for my skepticism in the face of suggestions that there is no room for debate - that the question is answered. I intend to challenge the way the left carries out the debate on catastrophic man-made climate change. And to illustrate my point, let me skip to the last sentences of Jeff’s post:

Stop debating what’s already been debated and start talking about policy. Start promoting solutions.

One of the rhetorical foundations espoused by proponents of debate is that all meaningful argument must derive from common ground. This is why discussion between pro-life and pro-choice, evolution and creation are so pointless. The sides are coming to the debate with a completely different set of assumptions that shape their beliefs. Those differences alter how they view the same set of facts and even the very rules for how the argument should be waged. Without a nugget of common ground, their ability to persuade each other dissolves and the point of argument - beyond intellectual masturbation - is nullified.

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