Articles by David Roberts

Zombie lies

Yesterday, Naomi Oreskes -- whose study on the scientific consensus around global warming is cited thither and yon, including in An Inconvenient Truth -- had an op-ed in the L.A. Times saying that, contra Richard Lindzen's recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, there is too consensus on global warming science.

Good lord this faux debate is tiring.

Why is Inhofe so virulent about global warming?

Much has been made in recent weeks of Sen. James Inhofe's increasingly unhinged statements on global warming. He's hired a long-time movement hack, Marc Morano, to attack journalists and scientists that attempt to tell the truth about global warming (without falsehoods as "balance"). Now Inhofe's out calling Al Gore "full of crap," claiming the IPCC was based on "one scientist," and saying recent science has shown global warming to be a "hoax."

Why would a prominent U.S. Senator be out telling such flagrant lies -- lies even the White House and most far-right commentators have distanced themselves from?

Is he just a loon?

No, Inhofe's affliction is much more pedestrian. Here's all you need to know about why he says what he says:

Talking point: Fossil fuel morality

Arguments over energy tend to get technical, quickly: EROI, dollars per kilowatt, reserve estimates, capital costs, carbon lifecycles, ad infinitum.

Take a step back.

The argument against cutting fossil-fuel use is that it will cost too much. The economy couldn't take it. It's too hard.

It brings to mind something I read in Jeff Goodell's Big Coal -- a quote from an interview with author Ian Frazier, about Lincoln and slavery:

The arguments against slavery were always bumping up against this: "But it's an institution that's been around forever! What would happen if we got rid of it? How would you pay the people who lost their slaves, their valuable property? How would we harvest? It's not practical. What would we do?"

Lincoln's great moment was saying, "I don't care if it's destructive. Slavery is wrong."

You start with, "Is it right or wrong?" Then you act on that judgment. You don't say, "I'm not going to say it's wrong because it would be too impractical to undo."

Enriching despotic regimes, ravaging our landscapes, sickening the most vulnerable among us, and destabilizing our atmosphere are wrong.

So we should stop.

Period.

I’m goin’ back to Noonan, Noonan, Noonan

I am drawn, like a dazed witness to a bloody car wreck, back to Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal last week. If you haven't read it, you really, really should. It is a marvel.

(As an aside: Noonan is a fixture of the Romantic wing of the conservative movement. She feels conservatism deeply. How deeply? She once said, "Bush the Younger would breastfeed the military if he could." She said the great truth of 9/11 "is not only that God is back, but that men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country ..." That's how deeply she feels conservatism.)

Noonan's short snippet on global warming contains a superabundance of dimwittery. There is dimwittery in every paragraph, every line, virtually every word. The syllables, the phonemes ... there is cluelessness at the molecular level.

Let us begin.

She laments ...

... how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers?

Peggy, welcome to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an extensively peer-reviewed report from hundreds of scientists in over 120 nations. When you're done browsing there, please visit the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. EPA ... oops, Bush got to that one.

Is it possible that Peggy's simply not aware of the IPCC, probably the most cited scientific body in the history of scientific bodies? That she lives in an ideological world so hermetically sealed she never stumbled across so much as a mention of any of the major scientific reports on global warming? If that is the case, the WSJ seems almost cruel for broadcasting her cry for help. Were she capable of embarrassment ...

Then, as so often, Noonan veers from plaintive to addlepated: