Anthony’s and Rick’s posts on the now interrupted effort to recreate the Big Bang reminded me immediately of two things: Dr. Strangelove, and recent developments in climate science. Anthony’s “Dr. [THREE NAMES]” sounds, for one thing, eerily like Peter Sellers’s turn as Dr. Strangelove in the eponymous 1964 movie. For another, Rick’s quotation from the Lederman and Teresi book evokes — inevitably, once Dr. Strangelove is in view — the mushroom clouds with which the movie concludes, and the voice of Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again.”
These images, with their overtones of surreal Cold War irony, are a reminder that politics is incapable of infinite sweet sadness. Politics is all about definite and identifiable causes, and effects crying out for “management.” That’s why politics can’t be entrusted with speculative cosmology — or with speculative climatology.
It now turns out that there is some French bread gumming up our effort to understand, and attach cosmological import to, the behavior of our climate. What we might call the “butter” on the French bread is this eye-opening conclusion, from a 2009 study of 15 years’ worth of satellite data by MIT scientists: that the “greenhouse effect” does not behave as predicted by climatology models. When carbon and temperatures increase, the earth releases more heat energy as opposed to trapping more of it.
Now that’s a big pat of butter. But the “French bread” itself is more informative still: an acknowledgment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that when it comes to the actual processes of climate feedback — the processes that create (or mitigate) the greenhouse effect — we have no accepted way to measure or directly analyze them. Climate scientist Roy W. Spencer calls this admission “amazing.” Citing the relevant passage in the IPCC report, he puts the inconvenient truth as follows:
Despite the fact that the magnitude of anthropogenic global warming depends mostly upon the strengths of feedbacks in the climate system, there is no known way to actually measure those feedbacks from observational data.
I’d agree that that’s amazing, particularly in light of the certainty with which global-warming proponents assert that we can not only understand but also predict those feedbacks.
It’s good to be reminded at such a time that even supercollider scientists can come off, in expressing the idea of there being a parsable algorithm at work in the universe, just like ancient Greeks explaining their cosmos through Promethean myth. Faith that there are systemic explanations for big things, if we can only demonstrate them, is a key element of scientific inquiry. We shouldn’t disdain such lines of thought.
But it’s also a relief to know about the French bread. Until the proposition of the “God particle attacking us” can be measured and tested, the “French bread in the collider” explanation will do, for the human purposes that matter. When it comes to the politics of climate science, we should keep our eyes on the French bread as well.
I think that your body of work speaks most loudly on your behalf.
Michael: I am writing as a 3-time embedded reporter including one stint with the 3/8 Marines in Fallujah just two months after the conclusion Al-Fajr. I was on Humvee patrols in and out of the city, and the claim of “70%” destruction is bogus. Moreover, it is a claim that has steadily grown since the conclusion of that battle. Particularly from war opponents, an assertion of 1/3 destruction was the first “percentage” I heard; next it was 50%; about one year ago, I read that 75% was the actual number. It’s good to know that there has been some “decline” however marginal—must be the result of the Surge!
Seriously, between these claims (which I found bogus and which may be investigated by a close viewing of satellite photos) and the (usually) allied assertion that the destruction was attributable to the indiscriminate use of WP, I had first-time experience with the famous comment (of uncertain parentage) that truth is the first casualty of war.
The claim that embed equals “in-bed” is usually raised in direct proportion to how well the subject reporting comports with the political views of those making the comment. For example, when Kevin Sites took his famous footage inside a Fallujah mosque, that purported to show a US Marine executing a wounded insurgent (the Marine was later cleared) no one claimed that Sites was “in bed” with his PAO. Unfortunately, for honest reporters, their work is evaluated by how useful it is to the media’s, politician’s or blogger’s agenda. Just remember, in a hyper-partisan world, there is always room for more agreement!
Michael,
you give the thoroughly unprincipled Greenwald too much credit by calling him a colleague. Sadly though, he is a typical example of journalists today.
He’s the guy who doctored a letter from the director of the military’s Combined Press Information Center, Colonel Steve Boylan, in an attempt to discredit him. After he pawned it off as being genuine, he was promptly caught by those pajama wearing bloggers we’ve been warned about. He has engaged in sock-puppetry (using aliases that have been tracked to his IP address,) to defend his own fraudulent stories and subsequently denies it when he’s caught. To this day, he defends every journalistic hoax to come out of Iraq that he’s “reported” on, and has never retracted a single lie as far as I could find. He’s defended the hoaxes about Shiites being burned alive, mass beheadings, mass rapes and massacres by US forces, terorist victories, doctored photos, and stories written by fictional Iraqi police captains, just to name a few.
Incidentally, he supports the efforts of terrorist embeds such as Bilal Hussein, while disparaging your own. You should wear his calumny as a badge of honor.
Maybe an offer of sweet mint teas by poolside could entice him to travel to Iraq.
“I’ll still help Glenn get to Iraq if he wants…”
I am cynically tempted to suggest that Glenn Greenwald is sent a one way ticket to Iraq. He is a dishonest pacifist who will not allow facts to get in the way of his ideological inclinations. At the end of the day, Greenwald subscribes to the dogma that the United States is responsible for much of the evil in the world. Our racist imperialism enrages the victims of the Third World. Violence supposedly only makes things worse. Greenwald is easily comparable to those who ridiculed Winston Churchill for warning about the threat of Adolph Hitler during the early and mid 1930s.