Confession Makes a Comeback
Confession Makes a Comeback
Churches are encouraging sinners to repent by modernizing an ancient rite. Alexandra Alter reports.
By ALEXANDRA ALTER
September 21, 2007; Page W1
Sin never goes out of style, but confession is undergoing a revival.
This February at the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI instructed priests to make confession a top priority. U.S. bishops have begun promoting it in diocesan newspapers, mass mailings and even billboard ads. And in a dramatic turnaround, some Protestant churches are following suit. This summer, the second-largest North American branch of the Lutheran Church passed a resolution supporting the rite, which it had all but ignored for more than 100 years.
To make confession less intimidating, Protestant churches have urged believers to shred their sins in paper shredders or write them on rocks and cast them into a "desert" symbolized by a giant sand pile in the sanctuary. Three Catholic priests from the Capuchin order now hear confessions at a mall in Colorado Springs., Colo.
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Earvin "Magic" Johnson used the press conference platform to announce to the world on Nov. 7, 1991, that he was HIV positive. See a slideshow of celebrity revelations and confessions.
Worshippers are answering the call. During a "Reconciliation Weekend" at churches in the diocese of Orlando, Fla., this March, more than 5,000 people turned out to confess. When five parishes in Chicago joined forces last year for "24 Hours of Grace," where priests welcomed penitents from 9 a.m. on a Friday to 9 a.m. the next morning, about 2,500 people showed up.
Several factors are feeding the resurgence. Aggressive marketing by churches has helped reinvent confession as a form of self-improvement rather than a punitive rite. Technology is also creating new avenues for redemption. Some Protestants now air their sins on videos that are shared on YouTube and iTunes or are played to entire congregations. And the appetite for introspection has been buoyed by the broad acceptance of psychotherapy and the emphasis on self-analysis typified by daytime talk television.
"Every day on Jerry Springer we see people confessing their sins in public, and certainly the confessional is a lot healthier than Jerry Springer," says Orlando Bishop Thomas Wenski, who last March sent out 190,000 pamphlets calling on Catholics to confess.
Scholars also say the return to confession is part of a larger theological shift in which some Catholics, mainline Protestants and evangelicals are returning to a traditional view of churches as moral enforcers. Catholic leaders have sought to make the tradition less onerous to keep it from dying, while Protestants are embracing it as a way to offer discipline to their flocks. Several Protestant pastors said they felt their churches had become too soft on sinners, citing the rise of suburban megachurches that seek converts with feel-good sermons, Starbucks coffee and rock-concert-like services, but rarely issue calls to repent.
"I never want to be accused of the namby-pamby, milquetoast, 'Jesus is my boyfriend' kind of worship," says John Voelz, a pastor at Westwinds Community Church in Jackson, Mich. "People want to come face to face with what's going on inside them."
Redemption Online
Confession is no longer strictly a private matter between a sinner, a priest and God. More than 7,700 people have posted their sins on ivescrewedup.com, a confession Web site launched by Flamingo Road Church, an evangelical congregation in Cooper City, Fla. Last year, several members of Life Church in Edmond, Okla., appeared in a video sermon titled "My Secret," in which they spoke openly about having an abortion or taking methamphetamine. The video was shown to about 21,000 people. The XXX Church, a Christian antipornography ministry, has videotaped people confessing their addictions to X-rated material and posted the video on YouTube, where it has been viewed nearly 15,000 times. "There's a reason why they talk about confession in the Bible -- you're not supposed to keep it inside you," says Jordy Acklin, 21, an Oklahoma college student who appeared in the video. "The weight just goes off your shoulders."
[photo]
Father Matthew Gross hears confession at an office at Citadel mall in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Confession has been in steep decline for several decades. In 2005, just 26% of American Catholics said they went to confession at least once a year, down from 74% in the early 1980s, according to researchers at two Catholic universities. After the Vatican softened some of its doctrine on sin in the 1960s, the rite "went into a tailspin," says Prof. William D'Antonio, a sociologist at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
There is only so far the Vatican will go to revive confession -- the church has taken a hard stance against technology, declaring in 2002 that "there are no sacraments on the Internet." Some conservative Protestants have also criticized public forms of atonement, arguing they owe more to exhibitionism than contrition.
Confession hasn't always been a forgiving ritual. In Christianity's early centuries, worshippers confessed publicly before the priest and the entire congregation. Penalties were severe. Sinners had to prostrate themselves, fast and wear sackcloths and ashes. Adulterers were sentenced to a lifetime of celibacy and thieves were ordered to give their belongings to the poor. Repeat offenders were banished, says Notre Dame theology professor Randall Zachman.
Private confession, which arose in monasteries in the seventh century, became mandatory for Christians in 1215. Centuries later during the Reformation, theologian Martin Luther took issue with the "acts of satisfaction" that priests required of sinners, arguing that faith alone absolved them. Luther was especially critical of the practice of selling indulgences, which allowed people to pay to limit their time in purgatory. Following the split, most Protestant churches instructed followers to confess to God directly or simply to each other.
In their attempt to revive the rite, Catholic leaders have portrayed it as a healing sacrament. In February, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., bought ads on radio stations, buses, subway cars and a billboard inviting Catholics to come to confession during Lent. The response was strong enough that 10 parishes decided to extend the hours for confession.
Amanda Fangmeyer, 39, a stay-at-home mother, attends St. Patrick's in Rockville, Md., one of the parishes that took part in the campaign. She says she was stunned to see more than 100 people lined up for confession two weeks before Easter. "Sometimes when you go for penance the church is just dark and quiet," she says.
[photo]
Father Matthew Gross walks through the Citadel mall in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Kathleen Taylor, 43, a substitute teacher in Daytona Beach, Fla., hadn't been to confession in some time when she received a mailer from her bishop this March urging Catholics to atone for their sins. She packed her husband and two sons, then 9 and 16, into the car and drove to a nearby church where a priest was waiting in the confessional booth.
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been two years since my last confession," she said. Mrs. Taylor confessed to impatience and anger with her sons. She talked about her marriage. She expressed feelings of guilt over fighting with her first husband, who died two years ago of a failed organ transplant. "It was hard at first. It was scary, the room gets kind of hot. But once you open up it's better."
People are confessing in unlikely places. On a recent Saturday morning in Colorado Springs, seven people lined up outside an office next to a Burlington Coat Factory at the Citadel mall. At the appointed hour, Father Matthew Gross, 72, strode up wearing his brown friar's habit. "Three minutes each, that's all you get," he joked to two women waiting in line.
Since 2001, the Rev. Gross and two other Capuchin friars have come to the mall to hear confessions 11 hours a day, six days a week in a small office with a box of Kleenex and a laminated copy of the Ten Commandments. They now hear about 8,000 confessions a year.
[photo]
Christians gather for group confession in California.
Protestant theologians are also rethinking the rite. This past summer, the Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod, a 2.5 million-member branch whose members are spread across North America, voted to revive private confession with a priest. Some theologians have pointed to the writings of Martin Luther and argued that the Protestant reformer, while criticizing the way the rite was administered, never advocated abolishing it. "Some of us were saying, 'Why in the world did we let that die out?'" says the Rev. Bruce Keseman, a Lutheran pastor in Freeburg, Ill.
The Rev. Keseman has sought to revive confession in his congregation by bringing it into pastoral counseling, giving demonstrations to youth groups and preaching about its benefits. Leslie Sramek, 48, a lifelong Lutheran and financial manager who lives near St. Louis, says she never heard about private confession and absolution in church when she was growing up. But two years ago, when the Rev. Keseman announced he would be taking confession privately, she decided to give it a try. At these sessions, the pastor wears vestments and stands near the altar while she kneels and recounts her sins. "I won't say that looking at my sins is pleasant, but they have to be dealt with," says Mrs. Sramek.
Peace Is Restored
Some evangelicals don't need any prompting. Joshua Wilshusen, 29, a respiratory care student from Lomita, Calif., started meeting two other Christian men for a weekly group confession two years ago. They gather at a park or coffee shop to ask questions such as "Have you coveted this week?" "Have you been sexually pure?" "Have you just lied to me?" Confessing helps him resist temptations. "There've been times when a sin has hurt me all week, when I've lusted after a woman or lost my temper at work, and then I confess it and the peace is restored."
Restoring confession to its heyday won't be easy. Most Catholic parishes set aside one hour or less on Saturdays for the rite. And while the U.S. Catholic population has grown by 20 million in the last 40 years, the number of priests has fallen to 41,000, a 29% decline over the same period. Group absolution, while allowed in some circumstances, is discouraged, and bishops have banned Internet and text-message confessions, which had been popular in the Philippines. Says Monsignor Kevin Irwin, dean of the school of theology at Catholic University, "We don't do drive-by confessions."
Write to Alexandra Alter at alexandra.alter@wsj.com
posted by On the other hand at 9:29 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
The U.N. vs. Science
Political Science
By PHILIP STOTT
February 3, 2007; Page A11
I confess I was afflicted by a profound world-weariness following the release yesterday of the latest gloomy machinations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The U.N.'s global-warming caravanserai, founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, had this time pitched camp in Paris, in order to issue the "Summary for Policy Makers" relating to Working Group One of its "Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007." This is the group that focuses on "The Physical Science Basis" of climate change, and its summary was greeted with the usual razzmatazz, the Eiffel Tower's 20,000 flashing bulbs being symbolically blacked out on the evening before. Further IPCC reports are due this year, one in April from Working Group Two, on the impacts of, and adaptation to, climate change, and another in May, from Working Group Three on climate-change mitigation.
But it is the science summary that always gives rise to the jamboree -- with journalists, politicians and eager environmentalists desperate to claim that this particular report is the last word on climate change, that it represents a true consensus, that the world is doomed, and that we must recant our fossil-fuel ways. Moreover, as in 2001 with the Third Assessment Report, Friday's release was preceded by speculative leaks, the political shenanigans and spinning beginning even before the final text had been haggled over and agreed upon.
Unfortunately, the IPCC represents science by supercommittee, as rule 10 of its procedures states: "In taking decisions, and approving, adopting and accepting reports, the Panel, its Working Groups and any Task Forces shall use all best endeavors to reach consensus." I bet Galileo would have had a rough time with that.
In this context, it is vital to remember that science progresses by skepticism and by paradigm shifts: A consensus early last century would have given us eugenics. Moreover, the IPCC does no original research, nor does it monitor climate-related data; its evidence is instead from selected secondary sources. But, above all, this supercommittee is more political than is often recognized, rule three firmly reminding delegates that: "documents should involve both peer review by experts and review by governments."
Friday's summary and "best estimates" of temperature-rise by 2100 (as compared to preindustrial times) are thus little more than a committee compromise chewed over by governments with different agendas: an average potential rise of three degrees Celsius (up from 2.5 degrees in 2001); a probable rise of between 1.8 to 4 degrees; a possible rise of between 1.1 to 6.4 degrees. So you can take your pick, also bearing in mind that there are groups outside the IPCC predicting cooling by one or two degrees Celsius. Moreover, the conclusion that climate changes seen around the world are "very likely" to have a human cause is wonderful Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass talk.
Unsurprisingly, the report will please neither a Humeian skeptic nor a rabid apocalyptic. Indeed, even before it appeared, environmentalists were incensed that predictions for the rise in sea levels this century have been lowered to between 28 and 43 cm (11 to 17 inches). They want the polar bears to be drowning now!
For the skeptic, however, the problem remains, as ever, water vapor and clouds. Enormous uncertainties persist with respect to the role of clouds in climate change. Moreover, models that strive to incorporate everything, from aerosols to vegetation and volcanoes to ocean currents, may look convincing, but the error range associated with each additional factor results in near-total uncertainty. Yet, there is a greater concern. Throughout the history of science, monocausal explanations that overemphasize the dominance of one factor in immensely complex processes (in this case, the human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases) have been inevitably replaced by more powerful theories.
Worryingly for the IPCC's "consensus," there is a counterparadigm, relating to the serious uncertainties of water vapor and clouds, now waiting in the wings. In the words of Dr. Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center: "The greenhouse effect must play some role. But those who are absolutely certain that the rise in temperatures is due solely to carbon dioxide have no scientific justification. It's pure guesswork." A key piece of research in this emerging new paradigm was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A (October 2006): "Do electrons help to make the clouds?"
Using a box of air in a Copenhagen lab, physicists managed to trace the growth of clusters of molecules of the kind that build cloud condensation nuclei. These are specks of sulfuric acid on which cloud droplets form. High-energy particles driven through the laboratory ceiling by exploded stars far away in the galaxy -- cosmic rays -- liberated electrons in the air, which helped the molecular clusters to form much faster than atmospheric scientists have predicted. This process could well explain a long-touted link between cosmic rays, cloudiness and climate change.
The implications for climate physics, solar-terrestrial physics and terrestrial-galactic physics are enormous. This experiment ties in elegantly with the work of certain geochemists and astronomers, who for some time have been implicating cosmic rays and water vapor, rather than carbon dioxide, as the main drivers of climate change. Indeed, they have put down up to 75% of all change to these drivers.
Cosmic rays are known to boost cloud formation -- and, in turn, reduce earth temperatures -- by creating ions that cause water droplets to condense. Calculating temperature changes at the earth's surface -- by studying oxygen isotopes trapped in rocks formed by ancient marine fossils -- scientists then compared these with variations in cosmic-ray activity, determined by looking at how cosmic rays have affected iron isotopes in meteorites. Their results suggest that temperature fluctuations are more likely to relate to cosmic-ray activity than to carbon dioxide. By contrast, they found no correlation between temperature variation and the changing patterns of CO2 in the atmosphere. But the mechanism remained far from understood -- until last October, that is, when the team in the Copenhagen lab may have discovered it.
Who knows where this exciting research will lead? What it unquestionably shows, however, is that the science of climate change is far from settled, and most certainly not by a government-vetted committee policy "summary" from a U.N. supercommittee.
The inconvenient truth remains that climate is the most complex, coupled, nonlinear, chaotic system known. In such a system, both "doing something" (emitting human-induced gases) and "not doing something" (not emitting) at the margins are equally unpredictable. What climate will we produce? Will it be better? And, if we get there, won't it, too, change?
This is the fatal flaw at the heart of the whole global-warming debacle. Climate change must be accepted as the norm, not as an exception, and it must be seen primarily as a political and economic issue, focusing on how best humanity can continue to adapt to constant change, hot, wet, cold or dry. The concept of achieving a "stable climate" is a dangerous oxymoron.
We must hope that IPCC Working Group Two on adaptation will set a wiser agenda in their April report.
=============================================================
Mr. Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, is co-editor of "Political Ecology: Science, Myth and Power" (Oxford University Press, 2000).
posted by On the other hand at 6:51 PM 0 comments
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Ethanol: Big Corn vs. Big Oil
January 27, 2007; Page A8
President Bush made a big push for alternative fuels in his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, calling on Americans to reduce gasoline consumption by 20% over 10 years. And as soon as the sun rose on Wednesday, he set out to tour a DuPont facility in Delaware to tout the virtues of "cellulosic ethanol" and propose $2 billion in loans to promote the stuff. For a man who famously hasn't taken a drink for 20 years, that's a considerable intake of alcohol.
A bit of sobriety would go a long way in discussing this moonshine of the energy world, however. Cellulosic ethanol -- which is derived from plants like switchgrass -- will require a big technological breakthrough to have any impact on the fuel supply. That leaves corn- and sugar-based ethanol, which have been around long enough to understand their significant limitations. What we have here is a classic political stampede rooted more in hope and self-interest than science or logic.
* * *
Ostensibly, the great virtue of ethanol is that it represents a "sustainable," environmentally friendly source of energy -- a source that is literally homegrown rather than imported from such unstable places as Nigeria or Iran.
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That's one reason why, as Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren note in the Milken Institute Review, federal and state subsidies for ethanol ran to about $6 billion last year, equivalent to roughly half its wholesale market price. Ethanol gets a 51-cent a gallon domestic subsidy, and there's another 54-cent a gallon tariff applied at the border against imported ethanol. Without those subsidies, hardly anyone would make the stuff, much less buy it -- despite recent high oil prices.
That's also why the percentage of the U.S. corn crop devoted to ethanol has risen to 20% from 3% in just five years, or about 8.6 million acres of farmland. Reaching the President's target of 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels by 2017 would, at present corn yields, require the entire U.S. corn harvest.
No wonder, then, that the price of corn rose nearly 80% in 2006 alone. (See the chart nearby.) Corn growers and their Congressmen love this, and naturally they are planting as much as they can. Look for a cornfield in your neighborhood soon. Yet for those of us who like our corn flakes in the morning, the higher price isn't such good news. It's even worse for cattle, poultry and hog farmers trying to adjust to suddenly exorbitant prices for feed corn -- to pick just one industry example. The price of corn is making America's meat-packing industries, which are major exporters, less competitive.
[Chart]
In Mexico, the price of corn tortillas -- the dietary staple of the country's poorest -- has risen by about 30% in recent months, leading to widespread protests and price controls. In China, the government has put a halt to ethanol-plant construction for the threat it poses to the country's food security. Thus is a Beltway fad translated into Third World woes.
As for the environmental impact, well, where do we begin? As an oxygenate, ethanol increases the level of nitrous oxides in the atmosphere and thus causes smog. The scientific literature is also divided about whether the energy inputs required to produce ethanol actually exceed its energy output. It takes fertilizer to grow the corn, and fuel to ship and process it, and so forth. Even the most optimistic estimate says ethanol's net energy output is a marginal improvement of only 1.3 to one. For purposes of comparison, energy outputs from gasoline exceed inputs by an estimated 10 to one.
And because corn-based ethanol is less efficient than ordinary gasoline, using it to fuel cars means you need more gas to drive the same number of miles. This is not exactly a route to "independence" from Mideast, Venezuelan or any other tainted source of oil. Ethanol also cannot be shipped using existing pipelines (being alcohol, it eats the seals), so it must be trucked or sent by barge or train to its thousand-and-one destinations, at least until separate pipelines are built.
Even some environmentalists cry foul. Steve Sanderson, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, tells us that intensive, subsidized sugar farming in Brazil -- where the use of ethanol is most widespread -- has displaced small tenant farmers, many of whom have taken to cutting down and farming land in the Amazon rain forest.
In the U.S., there is now talk of taking the roughly 40 million acres currently tied up in the Agriculture Department's conservation reserve and security programs and putting them into production for ethanol-related plants. "The land at risk under this ethanol program is land that's shown by the USDA to have had great results for the restoration of wildlife," Mr. Sanderson says, pointing especially to the grasslands of eastern Montana and the Dakotas. Hello ethanol, goodbye bison.
But what about global warming, where ethanol, as a non-fossil fuel, is supposed to make a positive contribution? Actually, it barely makes a dent. Australian researcher Robert Niven finds that the use of ethanol in gasoline -- the standard way in which ethanol is currently used -- reduces greenhouse gas emissions by no more than 5%. As Messrs. Taylor and Van Doren observe, "employing ethanol to reduce greenhouse gases is fantastically inefficient," costing as much as 16 times the optimal abatement cost for removing a ton of carbon from the atmosphere.
* * *
It's true that scientific advances will probably improve and perhaps even transform the utility of ethanol. Genetic modification will likely improve corn yields. And the President insists we are on the verge of breakthroughs in cellulosic technology, though experts tell us the technical hurdles are still huge. We'd be as happy as anyone if DuPont researchers finally discover the enzyme that can efficiently break down plants into starch, but betting billions of tax dollars and millions of acres of farmland on this hope strikes us as bad policy. If cellulose is going to be an energy miracle -- an agricultural cold fusion -- far better to let the market figure that out.
Not that any of these facts are likely to make much difference in the current Washington debate. The corn and sugar lobbies have their roots deep in both parties, and now they have the mantra of "energy independence" to invoke, however illusory it is. If anything, Congress may add to Mr. Bush's ethanol mandate requests.
So here comes Big Corn. Make that Very, Very Big Corn. Sooner or later, our experience with this huge public gamble may make us yearn for the efficiency, capacity, lower cost and -- yes -- superior environmental record of "Big Oil."
posted by On the other hand at 4:23 PM 0 comments
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Al Gore vs. science
Will Al Gore Melt?
By FLEMMING ROSE and BJORN LOMBORG
January 18, 2007; Page A16
Al Gore is traveling around the world telling us how we must fundamentally change our civilization due to the threat of global warming. Today he is in Denmark to disseminate this message. But if we are to embark on the costliest political project ever, maybe we should make sure it rests on solid ground. It should be based on the best facts, not just the convenient ones. This was the background for the biggest Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, to set up an investigative interview with Mr. Gore. And for this, the paper thought it would be obvious to team up with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist," who has provided one of the clearest counterpoints to Mr. Gore's tune.
The interview had been scheduled for months. Mr. Gore's agent yesterday thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he's been very critical of Mr. Gore's message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore's evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled. What happened?
One can only speculate. But if we are to follow Mr. Gore's suggestions of radically changing our way of life, the costs are not trivial. If we slowly change our greenhouse gas emissions over the coming century, the U.N. actually estimates that we will live in a warmer but immensely richer world. However, the U.N. Climate Panel suggests that if we follow Al Gore's path down toward an environmentally obsessed society, it will have big consequences for the world, not least its poor. In the year 2100, Mr. Gore will have left the average person 30% poorer, and thus less able to handle many of the problems we will face, climate change or no climate change.
Clearly we need to ask hard questions. Is Mr. Gore's world a worthwhile sacrifice? But it seems that critical questions are out of the question. It would have been great to ask him why he only talks about a sea-level rise of 20 feet. In his movie he shows scary sequences of 20-feet flooding Florida, San Francisco, New York, Holland, Calcutta, Beijing and Shanghai. But were realistic levels not dramatic enough? The U.N. climate panel expects only a foot of sea-level rise over this century. Moreover, sea levels actually climbed that much over the past 150 years. Does Mr. Gore find it balanced to exaggerate the best scientific knowledge available by a factor of 20?
Mr. Gore says that global warming will increase malaria and highlights Nairobi as his key case. According to him, Nairobi was founded right where it was too cold for malaria to occur. However, with global warming advancing, he tells us that malaria is now appearing in the city. Yet this is quite contrary to the World Health Organization's finding. Today Nairobi is considered free of malaria, but in the 1920s and '30s, when temperatures were lower than today, malaria epidemics occurred regularly. Mr. Gore's is a convenient story, but isn't it against the facts?
He considers Antarctica the canary in the mine, but again doesn't tell the full story. He presents pictures from the 2% of Antarctica that is dramatically warming and ignores the 98% that has largely cooled over the past 35 years. The U.N. panel estimates that Antarctica will actually increase its snow mass this century. Similarly, Mr. Gore points to shrinking sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, but don't mention that sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere is increasing. Shouldn't we hear those facts? Mr. Gore talks about how the higher temperatures of global warming kill people. He specifically mentions how the European heat wave of 2003 killed 35,000. But he entirely leaves out how global warming also means less cold and saves lives. Moreover, the avoided cold deaths far outweigh the number of heat deaths. For the U.K. it is estimated that 2,000 more will die from global warming. But at the same time 20,000 fewer will die of cold. Why does Mr. Gore tell only one side of the story?
Al Gore is on a mission. If he has his way, we could end up choosing a future, based on dubious claims, that could cost us, according to a U.N. estimate, $553 trillion over this century. Getting answers to hard questions is not an unreasonable expectation before we take his project seriously. It is crucial that we make the right decisions posed by the challenge of global warming. These are best achieved through open debate, and we invite him to take the time to answer our questions: We are ready to interview you any time, Mr. Gore -- and anywhere.
Mr. Rose is culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, in Copenhagen. Mr. Lomborg is a professor at the Copenhagen Business School.
posted by On the other hand at 7:16 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Global warming and bad science
Climate of Fear
By RICHARD LINDZEN
April 12, 2006; Page A14
There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?
The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science -- whether for AIDS, or space, or climate -- where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.
But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.
To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.
If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less -- hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.
So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear. An example: Earlier this year, Texas Rep. Joe Barton issued letters to paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and some of his co-authors seeking the details behind a taxpayer-funded analysis that claimed the 1990s were likely the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the last millennium. Mr. Barton's concern was based on the fact that the IPCC had singled out Mr. Mann's work as a means to encourage policy makers to take action. And they did so before his work could be replicated and tested -- a task made difficult because Mr. Mann, a key IPCC author, had refused to release the details for analysis. The scientific community's defense of Mr. Mann was, nonetheless, immediate and harsh. The president of the National Academy of Sciences -- as well as the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union -- formally protested, saying that Rep. Barton's singling out of a scientist's work smacked of intimidation.
All of which starkly contrasts to the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Sen. Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists -- a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.
Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.
And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming -- not whether it would actually happen.
Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.
Mr. Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.
posted by On the other hand at 7:27 PM 0 comments
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Name: On the other hand
Location: Houston, Texas, United States
Woodworkers measure real spaces, cut real wood to fit in the spaces. Unlike journalists, professors and economists, woodworkers try to do the same thing with ideas, words and images.
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