Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Ok -- I'll Bite

Rick says:

I am talking about the "precise contours of the problem", not the basic fact of anthropogenic climate change.  These contours are quite contested (and, again, I understand, as well as most other law professors do, what is and is not "largely uncontested within the scientific community").  And, they should be. It is unhelpful -- it is certainly not "Catholic" -- to suggest, as so many (not Eduardo) do, that to raise questions about the details of certain predicted scenarios (e.g., "the seas will rise ___ feet in ___ years causing ____ unless we ____") is to be anti-science, a capitalist tool, a Bush toady, etc.

I don't know anyone on who says this, and it sounds a bit like a straw-man.  On the other hand, I can come up with loads of examples of people who make light of the problem and continue to assert and reassert things that have already been repeatedly discredited.  Here's the illustrious Michael Novak, just a few months ago over at NRO:

It is too bad that Nancy Pelosi did not travel out to Greenland with Eric the Red in 983-986, when the climate was much warmer and Greenland was so named because of its lush meadows and fertile fields — before a new ice age began that over centuries made it seem more like Whiteland. Too bad Pelosi didn't see climate change THEN. People then were glad to see the last days of Global Warming, and dreaded the winters and white-outs to come The Apocalypse Then was the Coming Ice Age.

Look it up in an encyclopedia. Here is what Laura Nivers at the American Enterprise Institute found: 

How did a glacier-covered island get the name Greenland? In Norse legends written in the 12th century and later, it is told that Eric the Red explored the southeast and southwest coasts of Greenland in a.d. 983-986 and gave the country its name because people would be more likely to go there if it had an attractive name. Greenland was warmer in the tenth century than it is now. There were many islands teeming with birds off its western coast; the sea was excellent for fishing; and the coast of Greenland itself had many fjords where anchorage was good. At the head of the fjords there were enormous meadows full of grass, willows, junipers, birch, and wild berries. Thus Greenland actually deserved its name. Another attraction of Greenland was that Iceland and northwestern Europe, including England, had a grievous year of famine in 976, and people were hungry for food as well as land.

I get it.  We're not living through the early stages of anthropogenic global warming.  We're recovering from an ice age that plunged Greenland into its current (for the moment) icy state.  This appears to be a reference to the so-called Medieval Warm Period, a standard climate skeptic argument, and one that has been repeatedly debunked.

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