These are all very interesting points. One of the things that stood out to me is the same thing that I so often encounter when I tell people I’m doing an art project about climate chage–that there is a lot of continued fascination with the exceptions to the perceived climate change rule, a lot of desire to focus on the failures of a coherent future model. This makes a lot of sense on one hand–the news uses these theories as just simply new things to talk about in an old and complicated topic, and maybe the general public wants to make sure they aren’t hoodwinked again. But there is also a lot of money and power still being thrown at the skeptics position. Not good science, such as the glaciologists studying the few glaciers that are advancing instead of receding, but just money to fabricate confusion. Check out www.exonsecrets.org for an incisive damning look at one power monger in this scheme.

Jane,

I would agree with you, and there are many charlatans in this game, but unless you can show me that D’Aleo is a front, I recommend that you check out his slides. As for Dr. Joe D’Aleo he is the former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on weather Analysis and Forecasting and a co-founder of The weather Channel.

So far, I am unable to find connective link between D’Aleo and Exxon.

D’Aleo’s slides raise the question of “juking the stats”, as they say on “The Wire”, to avoid inconvenient data sets.

What I am sure we agree we want to do is to develop better tools and models, even if it is sometimes uncomfortable.

The question is simply this: Can D’Aleo’s data, and the assertions made based upon them, be demonstrated to be false?

For example, was the loss of the Larsen ice Sheet in the summer of 2002 the result of increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere or more simply explained by a peak in solar flux? See D’Aleo Antarctica slides #48 - #54

Curious.

PRESENTER’S BIO

Joe D’Aleo is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin BS, MS and was in the doctoral program at NYU. He has over 30 years experience in professional meteorology.

He is a former college professor of Meteorology at Lyndon State College. Joe was the first Director of Meteorology at the cable TV weather Channel. Mr. D’Aleo was Chief Meteorologist at WSI Corporation and Senior Editor and “Dr. Dewpoint” for WSI’s popular Intellicast.com web site. Mr. D’Aleo is a Certified Consultant Meteorologist and was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). He has served as member and then chairman of the American Meteorological Society’ Committee on weather Analysis and Forecasting, and has co-chaired national conferences for both the American Meteorological Society and he National weather Association. Mr. D’Aleo is a Councilor for the AMS.

He is on the science Roundtable of the TCS Daily web site (along with Dr Gray and others). He is a partner in a Hudson Seven LTD, a hedge fund that uses weather to trade in the commodity markets. The fund returned over 32% per year after fees to investors the first two years.

[Note: The TCS Daily web site is hardly a bastion of Liberal politics. Mr. D’Aleo is also used as an expert witness by Senator Inhofe, who is well known for his opposition to the concept of Global Warming. D’Aleo’s hedge fund success implies someting about his predicting skills.]

There seem to be two questions presented here: Can individual change make a difference and is a change needed in the first place? I don’t have the background to mount a credible argument one way or the other as to whether there is in fact deterioration of our planet’s climate. However, I do wonder whether it is worth debating the risk versus the benefit to society of trying to modify individual and corporate behaviors to reduce a “possible” impact to the plant. Notwithstanding the attention climate change has received in the media, the issue seems to glide above the public consciousness. We are aware of the potential problems, but cannot commit in any significant way to solutions. The monetary cost of changing the behavior of corporations and individuals is significant and, in the short term certainly, it is likely to be a cost borne by the most developed nations. Therefore, to motivate people to undertake change, it is certainly tempting to focus on the data that supports the view that change is necessary and important. However, an argument can certainly be made that this is short-sighted, alarmist, and ultimately costly to our society. Nevertheless, in my opinion, given that the weight of scientific opinion concludes that it is more likely than not that our behavior is damaging our planet, it seems to me that it is worth taking the risk and supporting a message of change.

Kennedy, this seems to get to a deep routed problem in our country to plan for the long term and accept short term costs for greater long term gains. You can look at the results of hurricane Katrina to see how we deal with the complexities of nature in general, without even getting into climate change. Compare our lack of action on this long-acknowledged problem to the ongoing planning, development, and public dialog that the Dutch have been engaged in since the 50s.

I totally agree (and, by the way, bet the Venetians will outdo the Dutch someday in dam engineering). I just wonder whether people need to really feel the impact of global warming for themselves to really get motivated to make changes. In some ways, this is exactly what happened with Hurricane Katrina. Only now will the levees be made stronger.

Matt & Kennedy,

Thank you for your comments.

Change is really hard as we can see from so many businesses and politicians fighting retro battles to cling to their out of date business models. My view is that all of the opportunity is created by change, and that there is no opportunity in stasis.

One of the hardest things we in the West have to come to grips with is an economic value system that has been built on the bed rock premise that the environment is an externality that can be ignored. Worse, that there are no consequences for ignoring the limits on supplies and the capacities of sinks. I suspect that one of the reasons the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” project was received with such hostility is that it challenged this bedrock assumption of Western Free Market Capitalism. If the environment is NOT an externality, then much of current Western economic theory will have to be re-thought. A challenge that many find to be too unsettling. Yet another reason why our current Main Stream Media so badly under-reports “reality”.