HOW BOILED FROGS HIJACKED THE CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE

By Jeffrey Berger

When writing about climate change, the boiled frog analogy serves a useful purpose, and it goes like this: If you place a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out. However, if you place the same frog in slowly heated water, it will adjust to gradually rising temperatures and stay put until it boils to death. No frogs were harmed in the writing of this post. Nevertheless, the boiled frog analogy explains a quirk of human nature: How some people ignore a looming threat that unfolds gradually over time.

Climate change cannot be watched on cable TV with the immediate impact of a tsunami. Climate change may not be felt this year, next year, or for several years. Yet, climate scientists predict a grim future of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, coastal flooding, drought, crop failures, disruptions in global food supplies, famine, refugee crises, and wars. In short, climate change represents an existential threat to future generations. Despite these warnings, there are skeptics, doubters, and boiled frogs.

We understand why the concept of climate change provokes anger among people. The economic, political, and moral implications are troubling; and there are deeply rooted historical and cultural impediments to overcome. Yet, we can no longer afford to dither. The climate bomb is ticking, and time is running out.

Climate change scientists study greenhouse gas emissions, heat retention models, and the complex relationship between variables on a global scale. Decades of careful observations lead to an irrefutable conclusion: Human impacts - especially greenhouse gas emissions - are the leading cause of rising global temperatures.

As we burn energy in our cars, homes, and factories, we release greenhouses gases into the atmosphere. “So what,” croaks the frog. “Everything in nature is flatulent.” Yet, when we examine sources of atmospheric greenhouse gases from natural to manmade, fossil fuels are literally the smoking gun. How do we know? Manmade pollutants have a unique molecular signature, unlike natural emissions.

Imagine two world maps, one superimposed over another. One map shows distributions of human population; another map shows sources of greenhouse gas emissions. These maps overlap with uncanny precision. Satellite data confirm the relationship between human activity and greenhouse gas emissions. How extensive, we ask? An increase of 78% since 1970, and 96% since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Hence, the term ‘anthropogenic,’ meaning ‘caused by human beings.’

Boiled frogs often cite geological history to disprove the anthropogenic cause of climate change. “So what,” croaks the frog. “Everyone knows Mother Earth has mood swings.” Yet, the boiled frog version of earth history omits one all important detail: How the biosphere influences climate.

Before the Carboniferous period, 400 million years ago, earth was uniformly hot and humid due to high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Plants consume carbon dioxide, and herbivores consume plants. Fossil fuels are the carbon remnants of ancient plants and animals that lived and died millions years ago and became buried underground.

Eons later, an upstart biped learned how to unearth and burn these fossil fuels. Within 12 generations, human beings released thousands of giga-tonnes of long buried carbon into the atmosphere — reversing a four-hundred million year old process in less than 250 years.

Despite decades of record high global temperatures, cold spells bring out the boiled frogs among us. Here is a statistical concept to keep in mind. All data sets — no matter how conclusive — contain some degree of random noise known as ‘statistical outliers.’ Climate change deniers build deceptions and errors of omission on foundations of random noise. In other words, statistical outliers turn boiled frogs into consummate liars.

The definitive scam came to light last year when InsideClimate News interviewed former scientists of Exxon Corporation and released hundreds of pages of internal documents. Decades ago, Exxon’s own research confirmed the consensus of climate scientists. In 1978, Exxon Senior Scientist James Black wrote: "Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions … become critical.”

In the 1980s, Exxon suspended publication of its findings and embarked upon a campaign to mislead the public. Exxon Mobil is currently under investigation in California and New York for fraud and alleged violations of environmental, public health, and shareholder protection laws. Rivaling the fraudulent practices of asbestos and tobacco producers, Exxon Mobil used deceptive tactics to protect its horde of filthy lucre.

Admittedly, the boiling frog story employs a fanciful metaphor. The definitive experiment was performed in 1869 by Friedrich Goltz, a German physiologist who searched for the location of the soul. His experiment confirmed a fundamental truth: Frogs whose brains have been removed will remain in slowly heated water until they boil to death. Thus, I end my commentary on this note. Unlike their intact amphibian counterparts, the hardboiled frogs of climate change denial and depraved indifference have neither brains nor souls.

(c) 2016

Math is hard, Barbie!

The Trophy Wife asked me a question, which turned out to have a slightly different answer than she thought. Her question was "When was the last hurricane to hit New York?"

Because Irene got more media attention than normal, she figured it had been a while.

As it turns out, there have been 84 "tropical or subtropical cyclones that have affected the state of New York since the 17th century." About one a year, recently.

However, looking over the list, I noticed something. The groups seemed roughly the same size, but the last one, up to modern day, was a decade. The groups preceding it were quarter centuries. Then a half century. Then a century.

So I charted it (thank you, Excel). Filtering out Irene (to keep it in even decades), the X Axis (that's the horizontal line, for those of you with a standard American education) is decades. The Y Axis (that's the other one) is the number of storms. (Feel free to do the math yourself.)



I'm not saying it means anything. Because we all know that climate change (a.k.a. "global warming") is a myth, right? Just because there have been increasing numbers of storms hitting New York since the Industrial Era? Coincidence, right?

Banking On The Widow's Mite

Get ready to chew gravel in the parking lot in sheer fury: an investigation of several large national insurance corporations has been launched by NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for what, in my opinion, amounts to the most cynical sort of war profiteering I can imagine. Eight insurers are suspected of managing the insurance payouts to military widows in such a way that the insurers continue to make a profit on benefits that belong to the deceased serviceman's family.


According to CNN,

The attorney general's office said it appears some insurers tell families of fallen military personnel that policy payouts will be placed in an interest-bearing account. But the bulk of the interest benefits the insurers, and the cash is not placed in banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Cuomo's office said.

His office said insurers place cash in their corporate accounts, reportedly earning up to 4.8 percent interest while paying families as little as 0.5 percent interest.

 Eight insurance companies have been subpoenaed, including Prudential and MetLife. Prudential's practices are offered as an example of the way this scam feature works: the beneficiary receives what appears to be a checkbook from JP Morgan Chase to access their benefits; however, according to Cuomo's office,

"Instead, Prudential must send money to JPMorgan Chase before the checks can clear," the attorney general's office said. "Prudential beneficiaries are also not informed that, under a 2008 law, they have one year to place the death benefits in a Roth IRA and earn tax-free investment gains for the rest of their lives. Thus, real financial harm is suffered by Prudential's lack of disclosure."

 So, to break it down, they keep the death benefit and earn corporate interest on it, pay a lower interest rate to the beneficiary (who believes the money is earning a "competitive interest rate"), pocket the difference, and control the gate through which the money flows (possibly slowing that flow if it benefits the corporation?). Scummy. Slime. Bags.


Both the Veteran's Administration and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' office are looking into the investigation. And, of course, we're taking all this with a grain of gravel, since Cuomo is running for the governor's office in New York.

Add-On:

Considering the Source

As you may have noticed, I'm ambivalent about global warming and reluctant to argue for or against it. Whether or not it's an ongoing process subject to random variations lasting a decade or a century or many, many centuries; whether burning fossil fuels and deforestation are a major factor in any trend or whether or not much can be done about it are moot questions once one realizes that the human race won't do any more about its behavior and its environment than yeast fermenting in a vat will do to prevent the alcohol it excretes from poisoning it. We won't do a damned thing until we have massive famine and drought and huge uncontrollable migrations and bloody wars to stop it. Even then we will not spend any money on change because there will be " a war on" and we won't allow ourselves to afford it.

If, in 200 years, we're all baking and the tundra is a rain forest and Kansas covered with sand dunes, the "conservatives" will find or invent some scapegoat, invoke some hoax or alternative explanation. On the other hand, if things haven't changed much, change, like Armageddon will still be a dire threat, just around the corner, lurking in new technology and demanding that we go back to riding horses, living in the dark and taking cold showers once a week.

Face it, not only are we thoroughly irrational, self centered and dishonest apes who love our opinions above all else; not only are we not very smart, but we simply can't deal with the immensity of time and the transience of our species. We've all got to go sometime and we all will -- and if you're one of those people who likes to talk about our planet as a living entity that needs to be saved, perhaps the sooner, the better.

I have too much respect for science to indulge in the certainties and partisan bravado both sides have barricaded themselves behind. Nobody is completely right and all projections become blurry as they are extrapolated or trimmed to fit the opinion and it's all very obvious that the certainties seem to swarm most heavily around those with no background whatever in atmospheric or Earth sciences. Why this should be such a political dispute, I do not know. I remember well the Geological dispute between Static isostasy and plate tectonics but I doubt it ever came up on the Senate floor or that Joe the anything had any awareness much less a militantly expressed opinion -- even though it was heavily disputed and careers began and ended over it. It was settled, in the end, by irrefutable data, not by politics or by gyrating TV pundits bellowing like blue-assed baboons about conspiracies.

My inner suspicion is that the apparent lack of facts, the apparent contradictions and the apparent conspiracies appear sharpest through the glass called "I don't want it to be true" but I know full well that cataclysmic predictions have had a very, very poor record of accuracy.

While other popular disputes can be better understood by looking at the demographics; the viral etiology of AIDS, for instance. The origin of species through natural selection, the great age of the Earth: these things after all are threatening to some religious certainties. Climate change may be more independent and may even fit into apocalyptic molds. I'd venture to speculate however, that those who become most irate at the suggestion that the post industrial revolution climate has been altered by that human factor are those who fear government itself -- and that those who feel an imminent threat and want something done right now are those whose fear of industry and the political power of industry feeds an opposite attraction to government action.

None of us can really handle the truth, nor do we want to. What we do instead is to vilify, to deny, to attack. Is Christopher Monckton, one of the loudest UK naysayers indulging in neurotic denialism or are his opinions driven by rigorous scientific investigation? Does the fact that he also thinks we should round up all HIV positive people and imprison them for life argue for his intellligence? Does his comparison of those who find evidence of man-made climate change to Nazis really inspire confidence in his objectivity? Then again do the kids carrying signs and painting themselves green really have any background making their opinions worth listening to -- or do they just believe what is fun to believe, what people of their social class believe and is useful for picking up girls of like opinions?

One thing that I'm pretty certain of and the evidence supports, is that environmental change drives biological evolution. It also drives cultural evolution and technological evolution. If anything now alive has massive potential for opportunism, for adaptability, for evolution, it's us -- some of us.

The climate is going to change over time -- a very big change. Something will fall on us from space, vulcanism will come and go, the Earth's magnetic field absolutely will fail and then slowly reverse with potentially dire but unknown consequences, a gamma ray pulse may blow away the ionosphere, the continental ice sheets will eat up most of North America and Europe once again. None of these things depend on our politics and prejudices or prayers. Our adaptability and survival however does depend on abandoning the ape-like tribalism, the ape-like confidence in things we have no business being confident in and the ape-like resort to chest thumping, shit flinging and hooting that are more likely to accompany the end of the world than any whimper.

Some like it hot

Others not.

So have the figures that show a tight linkage between human lifestyles and changes in climate and atmosphere been tuned up for purposes of "clarity?" sure looks like it. Is this going to legitimize other hypotheses? Could be -- and if one cares about science, should be. It's certainly not the first time that academic politics went to war with science and if the reality turns out to differ from the current consensus in one way or another, I certainly won't be surprised. Science is supposed to follow the data while opinion usually follows authority which follows the money.

Don't be downhearted, unplugging your cell phone charger or even driving a Prius wasn't going to change anything anyway, much less "save the planet" and I suspect you're only "going green" because it's a new way to buy into hipness.

While I do believe that science is the best possible route to truth, I don't automatically believe in the intrinsic honesty of those who practice it. If global warming does not have human activity as the predominant factor, that doesn't mean the people who lobby for the oil companies are honest and face it, they're spending huge amounts to influence scientific opinion as well as public opinion to support doing absolutely nothing that might cost them anything. Perhaps the Industrial Revolution / global warming link is true and perhaps the decrease in solar activity since the late 1950's has masked or counteracted it. The Maunder minimum does correlate strongly to a long period of solar quiesence after all. There's evidence for several schools of thought, but I just don't know and so I'm not going to be like the trolls, many of whom have jumped on a competing bandwagon hoping to ride it to where the Wizard will give them a brain and resort to mockery -- nor am I going to be a counter-troll and fling dung on anyone with other data that might be ignored at present. After all, this "climategate" thing may prove to mean nothing in the long run.

I am however, going to mention that even if we have caused atmospheric CO2 to rise and average temperatures to follow, particularly at the high latitudes, the Earth's climate is too complex and dynamic a system not to call into question simplistic long term predictions. What if the obvious warming at the polls does precipitate a sudden and catastrophic drop in temperatures as some have been arguing rather than the boiling hell of the planet Venus as others like to predict? Evidence grows that this is what happened with the Younger Dryas freeze some 12,800 years ago. Global warming could lead to global cooling and no fooling. This planet has been in a relatively long period of climate stability and change is always coming -- don't count on any change making you happy.

Odds are that I won't live long enough to see any of the hypothetical scenarios play out and I'm certainly not going to sell my coastal home or put it up on stilts. Who knows but that my Great Grandchildren won't desperately be dogsledding down here to Florida 50 years from now anyway and some future Palin won't be crossing the frozen Rio Grande heading for refuge in Mexico.

Does any possibility make alternative energy a bad idea? I don't think so. We are going to run out of things to burn eventually and the little bit of oil we might get out of the Gulf or in any Alaskan wildlife reserve won't matter one way or another - indeed arctic oil may be covered under miles of ice if that scenario proves real. We're always going to need more energy if we're to remain a civilized species -- or become a civilized species, that is.

AN INK-THE-AQUARIUM SPECIAL EDITION: WHAT MAKES (O)CT(O)PUS LIVID !!!

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