A Rhetoric of Irony
Posted by Eric Roston at 4/30/2008 11:03 AM and is filed under Global Cooling,Climate,willful ignorance,anthropocene,Books,History 
Steven Postrel is an assistant professor at the Cox School of Business at Sounthern Methodist University. Things have been hopping over at Tom Levenson's Inverse Square blog. Postrel has left some lengthy comments about the utility and logic of climate change mitigation activities. I'll be addressing these comments in short takes over the next few days.
The thrust of Postrel's comments is that adaptation is the way to deal with climate change. His argument is similar to that of many adaptation advocates who don't appear to have thought through what adaptation actually means (ie, what conditions are you going to adapt to? 2040? 2080? 2100? How do you know what they are? Okay, pick 2100, how do southwestern American cities adapt to possibly not having any water?). More on that later.
In the comments section, and in Tom's response to Postrel, there's been some talk about whether Postrel is engaging in argument, as he contends, or rhetoric, as Tom and Loveable Liberal contend, noting Postrel's use of the phrase "when pigs fly."
There are other reasons that betray Postrel's posts as well-educated (but under-informed) banter, rather than argument. Take this chunk for the moment. Postrel:
Also, global cooling actually isn't a thought experiment. Here Postrel betrays his rhetorical leanings, since he's proposing a hypothetical that a generation ago wasn't a hypothetical, but a provable natural trend. We now know global cooling was largely due to sulfate aerosol pollution, but at the time, both natural and unatural causes were "provable" (a word I stay away from as a practical matter). From Historical Perspectives on Climate Change by James Rodger Fleming:
Coming soon: Adaptation; and the land mine of climate change and cost-benefit analysis.
The thrust of Postrel's comments is that adaptation is the way to deal with climate change. His argument is similar to that of many adaptation advocates who don't appear to have thought through what adaptation actually means (ie, what conditions are you going to adapt to? 2040? 2080? 2100? How do you know what they are? Okay, pick 2100, how do southwestern American cities adapt to possibly not having any water?). More on that later.
In the comments section, and in Tom's response to Postrel, there's been some talk about whether Postrel is engaging in argument, as he contends, or rhetoric, as Tom and Loveable Liberal contend, noting Postrel's use of the phrase "when pigs fly."
There are other reasons that betray Postrel's posts as well-educated (but under-informed) banter, rather than argument. Take this chunk for the moment. Postrel:
"Just one of many issues to consider is the following thought experiment–if there were a provable natural trend toward cooling would anyone be arguing for increased CO2 emissions to balance and stabilize the climate? Answer: When pigs fly. Or if the world were warming up on its own, would anyone propose CO2 emission reductions as a reasonable policy response? Again: Not very likely."First of all, with the anthropogenic push underway for some time, at this point the world basically is warming up on its own. In many respects, scientists can no longer distinguish natural from anthropogenic forcings, and they don't need to (See Houghton, Richard. "Balancing the Global Carbon Budget." Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 35 (May 2007): 313-347. I would hope that governments would address natural warming or cooling, or any threat to the continuity of modernity. This also applies to meteors -- both natural and, uh, manmade I guess.
Also, global cooling actually isn't a thought experiment. Here Postrel betrays his rhetorical leanings, since he's proposing a hypothetical that a generation ago wasn't a hypothetical, but a provable natural trend. We now know global cooling was largely due to sulfate aerosol pollution, but at the time, both natural and unatural causes were "provable" (a word I stay away from as a practical matter). From Historical Perspectives on Climate Change by James Rodger Fleming:
"By the mid-1970s, global cooling was an observable trend. The U.S. National Science Board pointed out that during the last twenty to thirty years, world temperature had fallen, "irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade." The leading culprits in a global cooling were thought to be particulates from industrial sources, increased cirrus clouds due to jet airplane contrails, and the configuration of the Earth's orbital elements according to the astronomical theory of the ice ages."So my initial reaction to Postrel's comment was, This is strange. He is making up a theoretical event that has already occurred, and supposing that geo-engineering solutions to it would never emerge, when they had already been proposed. To extrapolate Postrel's logic, pigs must have dominated international airspace during the 1970s. More from Fleming (pp 133-14):
"Modest advances in cloud seeding suggested to some that weather modification techniques might be extended and applied to the climate... One widely discussed proposal involved damming the Bering Strait. The idea was to isolate the Arctic Ocean from the cold waters of the North Atlantic, pump in warmer water from the Kurishiro current in the North Pacific, and melt some of the glaciers. Most scientists believed a milder Arctic would favor the Soviet Union. Mikhail Budyko, a well-respected Soviet climatologist, proposed melting the ice by dusting it with soot from airplanes. Other Soviet scientists favored the use of underground nuclear explosions to cut canals and reroute the course of rivers, saving water and perhaps ameliorating the climate. The most outrageous proposal was that of Valentin Chernkov, who wanted to use rockets to construct of ring of potassium dust around the Earth similar to the rings of Saturn. Chernkov felt this would result in a "perpetual summer" and lead to agricultural improvements. Such uncontrolled experiments, of course, would have indefinite costs and unpredictable effects, and would be likely to generate unwanted side effects."So if as Postrel contends, he is deploying argument, not rhetoric, his argument appears to be missing some historical context that he might even use to his own advantage. (He emphasized a "provable natural trend toward cooling." A natural cause was only one explanation for which there was evidence. And my personal approach is not to talk about proof in science. You can't even have proof in mathematics after Herr Goedel. So I'm not sure what provability means anymore, except of course in its meaning synonymous with "testability," in which case it is central.)
Coming soon: Adaptation; and the land mine of climate change and cost-benefit analysis.
Trackbacks
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5/1/2008 8:34 PM
Carbon Nation wrote:
In the midst of the Steven Postrel flap, the journal Nature comes out with an intriguing study that tentatively predicts a change in ocean circulation patterns will cool warming trends in the northern hemisphere in the next decade. The study emphasizes the novelty of making such a prediction, and concludes, given a gazillion caveats, that global warming temperature signals could plateau for several years while the ocean's circulatory system undergoes a periodic oscillation. Blog entries should have pictures even when they have nothing to do with the content, or as in this case, make a visual case that is totally ... -
5/2/2008 10:34 AM
Carbon Nation wrote:
In the midst of the Steven Postrel flap, the journal Nature comes out with an intriguing study that tentatively predicts a change in ocean circulation patterns will cool warming trends in the northern hemisphere in the next decade. The study emphasizes the novelty of making such a prediction, and concludes, given a gazillion caveats, that global warming temperature signals could plateau for several years while the ocean's circulatory system undergoes a periodic oscillation. Blog entries should have pictures even when they have nothing to do with the content, or as in this case, make a visual case that is totally ... -
5/2/2008 10:07 AM
Carbon Nation wrote:
In the midst of the Steven Postrel flap, the journal Nature comes out with an intriguing study that tentatively predicts a change in ocean circulation patterns will cool warming trends in the northern hemisphere in the next decade. The study emphasizes the novelty of making such a prediction, and concludes, given a gazillion caveats, that global warming temperature signals could plateau for several years while the ocean's circulatory system undergoes a periodic oscillation. Blog entries should have pictures even when they have nothing to do with the content, or as in this case, make a visual case that is totally ...
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