Jim Manzi is one of the best conservative critics of global warming solutions. This is typical of his work. He argues that carbon capping is such a massive all-encompassing and expensive “solution” that it would leave us helpless if a more pressing crisis erupted like an asteroid strike or an epidemic.

Yesterday, he wrote a nice post on the epistemic closure on the Right — what I call the Right Wing Echosphere. It’s the tendency of conservatives to only listen to each other. In particular, he talks about the chapter on global warming from Mark Levin’s book in which he: cites global cooling; cites the bogus “30,000 scientist” petition and cites three people who do not work in climatology as a springboard to saying it’s a all Left Wing Plot.

On one side of the scale of Levin’s argument from authority, then, we have three scientists speaking outside their areas of central expertise, plus a dodgy petition. What’s on the other side of the scale that Levin doesn’t mention to his readers?

Among the organizations that don’t reject the notion of man-made global warming are: the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; The Royal Society; the national science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand. Russia, South Africa, and Sweden; the U.S. National Research Council; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the American Chemical Society; the American Physical Society; the American Geophysical Union; and the World Meteorological Organization. That is, Levin’s argument from authority is empty.

Of course, this roll call could be arbitrarily long and illustrious, and that does not make them right. Groupthink or corruption is always possible, and maybe the entire global scientific establishment is wrong. Does he think that these various scientists are somehow unaware that Newsweek had an article on global cooling in the 1970s? Or are they aware of the evidence in his book, but are too trapped by their assumptions to be able to incorporate this data rationally? Or does he believe that the whole thing is a con in which thousands of scientists have colluded across decades and continents to fool such gullible naifs as the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, numerous White House science advisors, Margaret Thatcher, and so on? Are the Queen of England and the Trilateral Commission in on it too?

Levin doesn’t answer this question. Manzi, however, could. He would point out that all of these societies are accepting the results of an IPCC report that is, at the very least, poorly sourced. He would point out that there are only four direct temperature lines, at least one of which is suspect. He would point out that the models predicting doom and gloom are sketchy to say the least.

But that would be Good Skepticism. Levin is peddling Bad Skepticism. And his fellow conservatives have predictably circled the wagons.

Update: I would be remiss if I failed to note that the Left has a lot of epistemic closure, particularly on the issue of the climate.

Criticism of climate policy, including legitimate criticism, is frequently blasted as denial. Good Skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and Ron Bailey are unfairly blasted as “tools of industry”. Algore has been saying “the debate is over” for twenty years, including on issues like overpopulation that turned out to be overblown. And the response to Climategate on the Left has been to dismiss it as though, at the very least, failure to comply with FOI requests and poorly written and documented climate code are acceptable scientific practices. And we are told that doomsday AGW scenarios are the most likely and should be the basis of policy.

It doesn’t help the epistemic closure on the Right when the response of the Left to any criticism is to circle their own wagons.

Update: Levin responds by calling Manzi a liberal and a “global warming zealout”, which is both ridiculous and totally expected.

Spiegel has one of the fairest and most complete analyses of Climategate I’ve seen out there. It’s a long article but worth the read because it details exactly what has happened, what is going on and what the status of the science is.

As usual, I find myself between warring camps. I think AGW is real and a problem but I’m concerned about the quality of the science going into it and am extremely skeptical of the proposed solutions. I think much of the climate controversy of the last few months is overblown and over hyped by people who have a religious/political belief that AGW is a myth. At the same time, I think AGW supporters are far too glib in dismissing the controversy.

So whenever the subject comes out, I get bashed on one side by “It’s a conspiracy” bad skeptics and bashed on the other by “you’re a tool of industry” believers. But if I wanted everyone to agree with me, why would I bother with blogging?

Yet another subject for the We Hate It When Things Get Better file.

Whenever anyone tells me that things are getting worse in the world, that we’ve fallen away from some great glorious golden age, I have many responses. But one of those has to be “childbirth”. In the natural unsullied state, one in fifty women dies giving birth. And it’s not a fun way to go. Were it not for modern medicine, I might very well have lost both my wife and daughter that way.

Thanks to modern technology, that rate has plunged to less than one in ten thousand in the industrialized world. And rates are plunging in the undeveloped world.

But advocates for better maternity care are unhappy about this, or at least unhappy about letting people know about it. They fear that the issue will lose its urgency (which, if it’s getting better, it sort of should, no?)

The observatory at my old graduate school stomping grounds turned 125 yesterday. The 26″ refractor is a fantastic telescope and I have many great memories of night spent up at McCormick.

Here’s to another 125 years!

In the middle of an article defending the child-free lifestyle, Lisa Hymas notes:

If you consider not just the carbon impact of your own kids but of your kids’ kids and so on, the numbers get even starker. According to a 2009 study in Global Environmental Change [PDF] that took into account the long-term impact of Americans’ descendants, each child adds an estimated 9,441 metric tons of CO2 to a parent’s carbon legacy—that’s about 5.7 times his or her direct lifetime emissions.

I don’t begrudge anyone the child-free lifestyle. I like the kid thing but it’s not for everyone.

But this particular child-free argument falls flat for me. I’ve pointed out before that we need future generations of smart people to solve our ecological problems. And smart people, while not guaranteed to have smart kids, are more likely to.

But what brought this post up was that ridiculously precise figure on how much CO2 your kids are going to produce. It’s utterly ridiculous to speculate on things that will not happen for many decades. If nuclear fusion becomes viable by 2050, the carbon footprint of my kids and grandkids will be far lower than mine. It’s the return of he Fallacy of the Unbroken Trend. Since carbon emissions per capita have followed trend X, we can extrapolate trend X a century into the future and draw conclusions appropriately.

Garbage.