Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Sullivan spews this shit:

I found this op-ed highly persuasive. It occurs to me that the global warming debate is not unlike the WMD-terrorist debate, except the sides are reversed. Accrding [sic] to Ron Suskind, Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine" means that if there's a one percent chance that a terrorist could have access to a WMD, we must act as if it were a certainty - because the outcome, however unlikely, would be too disastrous to risk. On global warming, Gore expresses a not-too-dissimilar equation: if there's a small chance that human behavior could lead to environmental catastrophe, we should act as if it were a certainty - because waiting too long is too big a risk to take. Cheney wins because 9/11 provided stark evidence of the real risk we now face. Gore needs images of catastrophe to ramp up public demands for action. Hence the movie and Vanity Fair pictorials.

In both cases, however, the evidence is complicated and hard to pin down with absolute certainty. We know we are at much greater risk now from Islamist terror than we were a decade ago - but measuring how much, and where from specifically, is very hard. Equally, we know that global warming is real, but whether it has reached or will soon reach a dangerous tipping point is not a given. And in both cases, the entire argument rests a great deal on what we do not and cannot know. It seems to me prudent to take both risks seriously, but not so seriously that we abandon objective, empirical judgment. If such judgment had been in more evidence four years ago, the Iraq WMD intelligence debacle might have been avoided.

This isn't even about a 1 percent doctrine. Moreover, if there is a relationship to the WMD situation, the relationship is this: The administration has a small cadre of friends that are going over the heads of (analysts|scientists) to pick just the facts that they want. Only instead of science, where all the papers are out there for anyone to read, in the intelligence world they can just bury any results that don't conform to their predetermined view of the world. Instead they have to play up the "debate" aspect.

Unlike "Curveball", however, the administration can't come down from the mount with the truth, instead they have to recycle the same discredited talking points over and over. Strangely, this is almost exactly like the ID debates. As long as you can drag up one person who doesn't agree, you can say there is a "controversy".

Of course, the idea that "Absolute certainty" is something that is even common place in science is a load of shit on its own. Science doesn't purport to be infallible. Everything is a moving target in science. Moreover, while there isn't a laundry list of EXACTLY what is going to happen if the temperature rises by 10 degrees, what we do know is that that sort of thing in the past results in (a) mass extinctions and (b) big changes to the landscape. Either way, the results aren't going to be something we really want. While the bullshit about the medieval warming period gets brought up, without mentioning that it was caused by volcanic activity and was localized to Europe, people forget that the Norse lost thousands of people on Greenland and Iceland and lots of people in northern Asia died off when it ended. Humanity is built around a steady-state climate, if not weather. Given that 3.5 of the 6 billion people on this planet live within 20 miles of an ocean, it isn't hard to imagine any kind of change causing a serious problem. However, to somehow pretend that unless the scientists can tell you exactly what the path of the fire would be when you burn your house down means that burning your house down isn't a bad idea is ludicrous.