Volokh Corrections #28 and #29: Adler should study environmental groups, Lindgren should review abstracts more carefully

Several weeks ago I was listening to Environmental Defense Fund's Insider Podcast where they described how their advocacy of "catch-shares" for commercial fisheries (allocating a percentage of fish caught to individual fishermen, instead of a quota) has created an ownership interest among fishermen that supports sustainable fishing. It was also a short time after the election where the California electorate preserved our premier climate change law, ratifying the way for the second-largest cap-and-trade market in the world to begin functioning in 2012.

About the same time, Jonathan Adler is writing about the "decline of the environmental movement" as it supposedly veers off course. Personally, I'm not surprised that environmental concerns played a lesser role than economic ones in the worst economy since the 1930s. Even then, climate legislation got further at the national level than it previously had in 10 years, California and other states move forward, the EPA will take its own actions on climate, and environmental groups continue to innovate. Adler could benefit from undertaking some research on these issues.

And more recently, Jim Lindgren complains about the pernicious effect of long-term unemployment benefits, quoting a study as finding "a 0.4% increase in the unemployment rate because of extending benefits for up to a total of 99 weeks." What he missed in the study is its main conclusion, that:

Analysis of unemployment data suggests that extended unemployment insurance benefits have not been important factors in the increase in the duration of unemployment or in the elevated unemployment rate.

Yes, it also found a 0.4% increase in unemployment from extending benefits, but that is minor in comparison to the real factors driving long-term unemployment. This makes clear the level of hardship Lindgren and friends would impose on people who are jobless and are sincerely looking.

There's also a bias in the study that suggests the 0.4% figure doesn't represent slackers. The study authors can think of two reasons why extending benefit durations could increase unemployment:

First, the extension of UI benefits, which represents an increase in their value, may reduce the intensity with which UI-eligible unemployed individuals search for work. This could occur because the additional UI benefits reduce the net gains from finding a job and also serve as an income cushion that helps households maintain acceptable consumption levels in the face of unemployment shocks (Chetty 2008). Alternatively, the measured unemployment rate may be artificially inflated because some individuals who are not actively searching for work or who are unwilling to take available jobs are identifying themselves as active searchers in order to receive UI benefits.

A third possibility is the rate is artificially inflated because people who would've given up in the absence of UI benefits accept the condition placed on receiving benefits, that they seek actively seek work and would accept jobs. They're not liars, and no one is being harmed by extending their benefits.

So just like Adler, Lindgren might benefit from studying the subject he's writing about more closely.

Volokh Correction #27: open air carbon capture not easier than capture at power plants

Jonathan Adler cites a Robert Bryce article criticizing carbon capture from power plants as too expensive and then thinks it supports open-air carbon capture because open air capture reduces the need to "pipe carbon great distances." That's a poor argument on a bunch of levels, starting with the likelihood that Bryce himself would disagree.

Bryce talks mainly the cost of reducing power plant output to capture carbon and the large volume of carbon to be sequestered, with piping given a secondary billing. If we're going to sequester under the ocean (or misguidedly, into the ocean as Roger Pielke Jr appears to like), then piping would still be necessary for open-air capture. The volume problem for open air capture is the same as at the power plant, and the energy cost should be a lot higher to remove CO2 when is much less than 1% of the atmosphere compared to power plant exhaust which I think is in the range of 30-60%.

I don't have much in the way of numbers to critique Bryce and Adler, but they have even less.

In general, I was unimpressed with Bryce's article - coal is cheap, and adding substantially to its price might still be in the range of feasibility. Adler's thought that the argument supports open-air capture (an option I won't rule out, btw) is even less impressive.

Volokh Correction #26: plenty of proxies don't use tree ring reconstruction

Jim Lindgren, normally one of the non-ridiculous posters at Volokh, screws up with a long quotation of someone else that begins

The bristlecone pines that created the shape of the Hockey Stick graph are used in nearly every millennial temperature reconstruction around today....

Of course, RealClimate shows three reconstructions from the year 1600 or earlier without bristlecones or any other tree rings, and multiple other reconstructions without the particular Yamal tree rings that Lindgren is now going on about. (Update: above sentence corrected from four reconstructions starting in 1500, my thanks to Glen in comments for spotting this.) I haven't followed the Yamal controversy that closely except to know that most people who have think it's nonsense. Maybe there's something new here, but I doubt it. (It appears to be all about the data not being available, refuted at Deltoid two months ago.)

Lindgren is pumping out the usual nonsense (by implication, not directly) that the climate consensus is based on a single piece of information, and that info is corrupt. He needs to get his head on straight before accusing other researchers of being ethically-challenged.

Lindgren earned a lot of credit by taking on his fellow conservative, the ethically-challenged John Lott. He's used up a bit of that credit now.

UPDATE: and Lindgren's repost about false Australian temperature data is, of course, wrong.

Volokh Correction #25: there already is a national energy efficiency standard

The Volokhs have been on jihad against legislation to fight the climate change they generally acknowledge to be a real problem, and I haven't been able to keep up with their nonsense. Here's one sample though: Jonathan Adler is horrified that something he claims is a national energy efficiency building code will result.

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers already works to develop energy efficiency standards, and the legislation could put some incentives behind adoption of revised standards. Many local building codes already apply state and national standards.

This is a typical, delayist nothingburger of a critique.

Volokh Non-correction #3, I think

Eric Posner sneaks some environmental common-sense into the conservative Volokh blog, eviscerating some simplistic arguments by John Tierney here and here, where Tierney argued that getting richer is virtually a universal solution to every environmental problem. I don't have anything much to add - it's pretty obvious that richer societies can afford to legislate stronger environmental protections, and yet another reason why richer countries should act first on climate change.

Some anti-technology environmentalism in the 1970s was misguided, from my distant viewpoint. The anti-environmental critique has never noticed how environmental groups have gone a long way since then. And the anti-environmentalists have gone nowhere.

Volokh Correction #24 (and Pielke Jr.): Chu isn't abusing science

Secretary Chu:

"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he said. "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California." And, he added, "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going" either.

I think Chu can be criticized for not choosing his off-the-cuff comments more carefully. He should know that people whose work generally aided the side that's trying to delay action to reduce emissions will choose to interpret him as saying there will be not a single occupied city or farm in California in 2100. Note they will also ignore his qualifier that devastation could occur only "if Americans [and others, presumably] do not act to slow the advance of global warming." In other words, a business-as-usual scenario that goes far past a doubling of CO2 levels in 2100.

Cue Jonathan Adler and Roger Pielke Jr. to go the literal route, ignore the qualifier and ignore the real point that California agriculture will be devastated and cities disrupted to the point where some will be virtually uninhabitable. The thread at Stoat covers basic points in support of Chu: the snowpack stores half the needed water, change from snow to rain lowers existing reservoir capacity, and building thousands of small new dams or a few giant dams is impractical and has its own environmental impacts. I'll add that we're also going to lose a lot of Colorado River water (something Pielke might have realized), that 5C degree increase (or more) will require more water for farming and landscaping than current temps, more people in many cities means more water demand, and that salt water intrusion will screw up coastal and Sacramento Delta agriculture.

I'll also add that skeptics should go to Fresno, Bakersfield, or God-help-you Barstow on a record-hot summer day, imagine it 5C warmer and describe whether people will choose to live there (remember we're talking about more than 2xCO2 levels). And it's not like those cities have pleasant, Phoenix-style winter climates.

But for a policy type like Pielke to say the off-hand comment by Chu is "exactly the same thing" as the abuse of science by Bushies is truly rich. I wouldn't complain all that much about Bush if that was all he did, instead of cutting access to contraceptives and sex education, shutting down stem cell research, and trying to reduce earth observation satellite programs.


Extra stuff: Adler provides a useful link here to California impacts. Note the effect of losing "chill hours" on agriculture, among other issues.

More extra: James says he likes this Pielke Jr. post. Let's see what James ends up posting about it.

Volokh Correction #23: RealClimate v. Volokhs on climate change - guess who wins

Zywicki at Volokhs is unimpressed with Biden's statement that climate change is "clearly" man-made when the IPCC gave it an over 90 percent chance of being true. Somehow he sees a huge gap in the two positions.

RealClimate says, "maybe he left out the kind of caveats and qualifications you'd attach to the attribution of the recent loss of (North) polar sea ice if this were an AGU talk instead of a vice-presidential debate. Overall,though, the statement gets to the heart of the matter."

Zywicki thinks Palin's confused response, what RealClimate calls a garbled attempt to reiterate her old denial of human caused warming together with McCain's position, is "nuanced." Right.

As Biden, RealClimate, and any normal human being could point out, you have to understand a problem, or know if there is a problem, before you can find a solution. Palin's position that you don't need to understand the problem makes no sense.

In other news, McCain was a lot stronger on climate change in tonight's debate than he's been in the past. Not that it matters though, since he won't be president.

Mucking my way through Pielke Jr. (and the Volokhs)

I haven't paid too much attention to Roger Pielke Jr. lately, as it's just too much work to sort through his stuff. I don't even know how to categorize him - not a denialist, exactly. Maybe just contrarian for the sake of it, a climate change nihilist.

But let's go through the exercise. Jonathan Adler at the Volokhs does his usual uncritical citing of RP Jr. to take potshots at Joe Romm who pushes for rapid action. This is how it works, by the way. Even if RP Jr. doesn't directly oppose attempts to mitigate climate change, he's used extensively by people like Adler who does.

RP says a new climate study doesn't support the idea of emphasizing how climate change makes weather more extreme. A casual reader might think RP is saying that weather won't get more extreme, so RP gets to send that message without actually saying it. To support his argument, he says the study finds in the US that

3. Despite increases in some measures of precipitation , there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows (high flows above 90th percentile).

Again a casual reader might think this means that things aren't getting worse. What RP leaves out is this compares high flows within a single period, not against the past. If total precipitation increases, the 90th percentile can also increase compared to what would have been a 90th percentile flood, fifty years ago. In other words, things are getting worse and it supports the opposite of what RP implies (this could be wrong, see updates below).

Another example - RP says the study (available here) emphasizes flooding when in fact "there has been no increase in streamflow" and is therefore ignorant or misleading (RP also says damage has decreased as a percentage of GDP, but he's ignoring the effect of flood control measures). TokyoTom valiantly tries to figure out in the comments what he's talking about regarding "no increase" in streamflow. RP says, "The report is not discussing flooding when it says it is discussing flooding. It is discussing precipitation. They are not at all the same thing, and implying that precip = floods is in error, and misleading." RP is accusing the study of doing what he just did - implying (not saying directly though) that streamflow is a proxy for extreme weather and it's not getting worse. Eventually RP cites to yet something else he wrote, but I'd had enough by this point.

UPDATE: Good grief, that was quick - Roger has a response in the comments. I'm not satisfied. And in somewhat related news, "Scientists studying variations in tropical heat and rainfall since the mid-1980s have found a strong link between warm periods and a rise in the frequency of the most extreme downpours."

UPDATE 2: Thinking some more about the comments, I did the same wrong leap from more extreme precip = more extreme flooding. It does ceteris parabis, but not over time with heavily managed and altered watersheds. Going back to the study itself, it's pretty measured on streamflow issues (p. 53), so I don't see the problem. More broadly, extreme events and their possibilities do motivate people, and is an important part of the economic analysis. They shouldn't be overplayed or downplayed.

Gristmill, Same Facts, and Volokhs are wrong

Gristmill's Gar Lipow is wrong to blame carbon trading for the recent defeat of an almost-okay clean air law in court. Lipow, who hates carbon trading, wrongly says the court used a "takings" argument to strike the law because it eliminates certain other kinds of pollution trading. The opinion that he never provides is here, and it doesn't making a takings argument. On page 43 the court rejects the idea that existing pollution permits in circulation are a currency (property right). On page 44 the court says the problem is not that EPA is prohibited from modifying permits, but that EPA hasn't cited a grant of permission to modify them. Nowhere does the court make or even accept "fairness" as a legal justification.

Whether the court's analysis is any good is another question. Two of the three judges (at least) are extremely conservative (we Californians remember Janice Rogers Brown), and even the plaintiffs didn't expect this outcome, so I'm doubtful. Might get overturned, but not before the end of the Bush Administration.

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Same Facts is wrong for saying of Sudan's tyrant that "Immunity and a comfy exile in a non-ICC state can be offered as part of a deal that ends the killing and lets the refugees return. The deal would have to be made by the UN Security Council under Article 16 of the Rome Statute, which allows it to suspend prosecutions, with such eventualities in mind." Article 16 suspensions are only for one year. While suspensions can be renewed, no self-respecting tyrant will count on that after he's gone from power, or repeat the exact same scenario offered to Liberian murderer Charles Taylor (now on trial after being given exile). I could've sworn I've written something about this but can't find it - the problem with the International Criminal Court is that no one can issue pardons that would help ease out the dictators.

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Volokh's Jonathan Adler is wrong for calling liberal lawprof Chemerinsky's federalism inverted. Adler ingenuously quotes another critic as saying "Mr. Chemerinsky sketches a vision of federalism that would empower government at all levels and delight civil plaintiffs and criminal defense lawyers of every description." They fail to realize the contradiction in claiming that delighting civil plaintiffs (against government) and defense lawyers (also against the government) is "empowering goverrnment." This freedom-is-slavery argument has got to go.

I'll take back half of the bad things I've said or thought about Todd Zywicki if this is true

Todd Zywicki is normally one of the worse authors I've criticized at the Volokhs, but if it's true that he helped the ongoing Department of Justice efforts to break monopoly power by full-service real estate agent syndicates, then he's done something significant to help the environment.

The full-service real estate agents, many of them organized into Realtors Associations, use their monopoly power to bump up commission money (by prohibiting discount brokers from making use of listings of for-sale properties), and then funnel some of that money into anti-environment, land use politics meant to increase sprawl, development, and real estate deals. I've encountered that problem in the course of my own professional work.

Of course many full service agents are just fine people, but their organizations are terrible for the environment, and are fleecing customers at the same time. A competitive market would have a lot less slush money floating around for political shenanigans.

Volokh Correction #22: Ignoring "self-defense" as a derived principle

A UN report says (at point 20) that rather than being an independent, self-evident principle, self-defense should be derived from the right to life.

David Kopel at the Volokhs says of the report that it "quite explicitly says that personal self-defense is not a human right."

I'd expect better from Volokh bloggers who aren't Zywicki or Bernstein.

My face on radio

Okay, not my face but my voice - Bay Area public radio station KQED released a two-minute commentary by yours truly yesterday on the flawed environmental review process in San Jose, where developers create the initial drafts of environmental documents that are supposed to neutrally evaluate the impacts of the developer proposals. More of a work-related thing for me than a Backseat Driving thing, but I'm posting it anyway. The link's here.

In other shocking news, the Volokhs have two non-wrong environmental posts in sequence. One on geo-engineering being worth a look (true, but worth nothing more than that right now), and another on the many problems of corn-based ethanol.

Understanding an Adler: Volokh Correction #21

I think the completely amoral climate denialists are easier to understand and deal with than the others. Steve Milloy, for example, can be understood as simply a person who gets off by serving the worst of all possible corporate interests, with no interest in telling the truth or doing something of benefit to anyone. It might be possible to go deeper in his psyche - maybe it's not really the money for him, it's the pathetic wisps of power that waft in his direction that gets him off - but it doesn't really matter. He's predictable.

I wouldn't quite put Richard Lindzen or Benny Peiser in that category, although both of them are clearly willing to deceive people and deserve little respect. The other shame for them is that unlike Milloy, they aren't complete disgraces in other aspects of their careers. It's too bad about what they've done to themselves, although they've done something worse to the rest of us.

Roger Pielke Jr. has his adaptation-is-more-important-and-everyone-except-me-is-screwing-up-the-science-with-politics viewpoint. I think he's guilty of cramming far too many square pegs into that round hole, but I expect the deception there is self-deception more than anything else.

And then there's my fellow lawyer, Jonathan Adler of the Volokh Conspiracy. He wrote an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to reject the states' request that EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions, using legal theories the court eventually dismissed. Adler follows that up with a presentation the US Senate claiming that a completely separate provision in the Clean Air Act allowing California to regulate air emissions in the state should, coincidentally, be interpreted not to apply to climate change, forbidding California from developing regulations that could also be used by other states under the typical federal concept of a "laboratory for democracy."

Warming Law takes apart his legal arguments handily, here. I'll add that his argument saying California imposes costs on other states by increasing the market share of energy efficient vehicles relative to gas guzzlers is ridiculous. First, changing the market share fits the classic definition of a pecuniary externality, recognized not to result in a misallocation of resources. Second, his attempt to make me feel guilty for buying a Prius because his friends will now have to spend more on the per-unit costs of spare parts for their Hummers somehow falls flat. I don't know, I just don't feel guilty. I suggest the real external damage is in the opposite direction from the Orwellian world that Adler lives in.

This despite the fact that Adler, as far as I know, acknowledges climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed. He's just doing everything he can to keep the federal system from trying out two solutions - something real at the California level, and his preferred dithering at the national level, and determining which works better. Fighting a competitive test of solutions is not a record to be proud of.

Volokh Correction #20 outsourced to Warminglaw blog

Warminglaw says:

Todd Zywicki, a bankruptcy professor at George Mason Law and blogger at the libertarian “The Volokh Conspiracy,” recently informed the world that while he has “no special knowledge” of whether global warming is occurring, if it is occurring he wonders why people aren't "buying up all the land 300 yards or so from the current beach, or wherever they expect the sea level to rise to in the future?” Todd goes on to ask: “Shouldn't Al Gore be cornering the market on coastal land twenty feet above today's sea level?”

Warminglaw then takes him apart. As I think one of the Volokh commenters notes (besides the issue of a 20 foot rise being exceedingly long term), near-beachfront property is still very expensive right now, while turning it into under-the-ocean property isn't so valuable. Guessing wrong on sea-level rise would have bad economic consequences.

Warminglaw finishes with this:

Why pick on Todd here at Warming Law? At the risk of ruining your day, dear readers, we feel compelled to note that Todd has lectured our federal judges on the economics of climate change at libertarian judicial seminars hosted by the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (for the agenda, go here and scroll down). One can just imagine the rigorous, balanced, and thought-provoking economic analysis he presents to our federal judiciary.

Zywicki has made many, many appearances here at Volokh Corrections.

Volokh Correction #19: there's more to doing the right thing than shouting about it

Todd Zywicki emerges from wherever he's been lurking to highlight a ridiculously one-sided column on "conspicuous virtue" - people allegedly buying expensive things for the ability to shout about the moral quality of their purchases. The column shows the usual hatred for all things environmental.

The column fails to realize that people could buy these things and not only fail to publicize their virtue, but not even consider themselves especially virtuous. It has no knowledge of the encouragement to reduce overall consumption, to buy second-hand, to use things until they wear out. And there's the usual critique of Prius-owners like me, who because we can't be saving money on gas overall, must be proclaiming our ability to purchase a modestly-priced car (and the 80-90% air pollution reductions are completely unknown to the author).

My opinion - I don't even care if the column's right about the motives behind a subset of the purchases which the author assumes to be the entire meaning of the environmental movement. If people do the right thing, I'm glad they're doing it.

UPDATE: fixed bad link

Volokh Correction #18: The Republican War on Science

When the Volokhs move away from legal analysis and libertarian theory into straight political posts, we often get something like this post by Jonathan Adler (who's one of the better Volokhs): a mix of one part wrong, two parts grossly exaggerated, three parts biased, and one part legitimate point.

Adler is criticizing Chris Mooney's book, The Republican War on Science. I won't critique all of Adler's post, but here are a few arguments:

One of the best examples of the politicization of science by the "left" — and one of the few that Mooney acknowledges — is the treatment of agricultural biotechnology, and the decision to subject such products to more stringent regulatory review than those developed with other methods. This policy has no scientific basis, as the National Academy of Sciences has stated many times.

Hardly a criticism of Mooney when he acknowledges the issue. It's only partly right, anyway. While the left has greatly exaggerated the public health dangers, the danger of contaminating wild relatives of cultivated crops with Frankengenes are real, as are the dangers of creating resistance to the few effective organic insecticides by artificially inserting Bt genes in agricultural plants. And before Adler completely dismisses potential health effects, he should consider the biotech industry position that because it's extensively, legally regulated, it should not be liable to common-law litigation claims in the event something "untoward" happens. If the industry was truly confident it wasn't creating a risk, it would waive that argument.

Another example would be claims by environmentalist groups that pesticide residues on foods pose a significant cancer risk, a claim which the NAS has also rejected.

Talking about alar, maybe? Adler's on shaky ground. Being vague about the subject might help escape specific criticisms, but it doesn't help persuasiveness.

A third would be seeking endangered species listings for the purpose of halting development.

What's unscientific about that? Ulterior motives might give you ground to suspect what a group says, but it doesn't make it unscientific. Pro-life people these days are all interested in the health effects of abortion - there's reason not to trust them or their own studies, but that doesn't by itself make the claim a war on science.

A fourth would be efforts to claim asthma incidence (as opposed to asthma attacks) are related to outdoor air pollution, when there is no data to support such a claim.

The massive increase in asthma, which Adler avoids mentioning outright, is a critical issue in modern public health. I think Adler's outright wrong in saying there's no data, the real issue is definitive proof. Something is going very wrong, and outdoor air pollution, especially the mostly unregulated small particle pollution, is a suspect.

A fifth would be the EPA's second-hand smoke study, which a federal court found was driven to reach a predetermined result.

If anyone cares to bet over whether second-hand smoke causes thousands of deaths annually, I'm open to it. As to whether one particular study on the issue was flawed, who cares. This was an interesting issue for Adler to light on - I've been trying to compare the state of science over global warming to other controversies, and considered second-hand smoke as a decent analogy. My amateur opinion of both fields though, is that we're even more confident about global warming than we are about second-hand smoke.

A sixth would be claims that the "precautionary principle" is a "science-based" approach to risk, when it acutally reflects a normative policy judgment about how to weigh and evaluate risks.

I don't know what he's talking about here - who couldn't figure out that the precautionary principle is a policy method for handling the risks established by science. To establish an abuse of science, Adler must demonstrate lies or deception. He hasn't. Some on the left have articulated a ridiculous version of the precautionary principle that involves proving a negative - but that's just stupid, not a deceptive abuse of science.

A seventh would be the compounded conservatisms that are embedded into many agency risk assessments, such as those conducted for the federal Superfund program.

Funny - sounds like a normative judgment about the appropriate level of risk - how's that an abuse of science?

An eighth would be molding "ecosystem management" to satisfy non-scientific normative preferences about how land should be managed.

Land management typically involves multiple goals. Adler needs to give specifics showing a widespread, leftist policy of using their land management goals in a way that abuses science.

And so on.

One of his better arguments.

In 1993, Princeton University physicist William Happer was fired from the Department of Energy because he disagreed with Vice President Al Gore's views on stratospheric ozone depletion.

Happer was a Bush I political appointee, so Clinton and Gore had every right to get rid of him. I don't recall if Mooney criticized Bush II for firing a political appointee, although maybe I missed that. Anyway, firing an idiot who denies the destruction of the ozone layer is a service to the country. Do I need to offer yet another bet over this issue too?

In 1994, President Bill Clinton rejected the finding from the Embryo Research Panel of the National Institutes of Health which declared that the intentional creation of human embryos for genetic research was ethical. Clinton simply banned any federal funding for such research.

How is a dispute over the ethical approach an abuse of science? Adler needs to get beyond whatever grievances he has and show deception.

Others include the witholding of agency analyses so as to prevent their publication at poltiically inconvenient times and the gross misrepresentation of scientific findings by agency officials in speeches and media appearances.

The first claim is standard practice, and not really a science abuse unless withholding is delayed for months instead of for the Friday media dump cycle. He doesn't substantiate the second claim.

If we are allowed to consider the plaintiffs' bar as a "left" interest — as corporate groups are considered to be on the "right" — then there are many more examples relating to all sorts of "junk science" tort claims, some of which my co-blogger David Bernstein has documented

This would be a legitimate point except that Mooney isn't attacking corporate lying but the Republican and Bush Administration's political support for their lies. Again, Adler needs to point to prominent Democrat and Clinton administration misdeeds to make his point (and before anyone talks about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and vaccines, I'd note that he isn't even an elected official).

It is certainly possible that the Bush Administration is worse than prior Democratic Administrations, but I don't think Mooney makes his case because he doesn't seriously examine the most serious charges against prior administrations, nor does he consider the broader institutional context.

Adler has not come up with any serious charges. As for institutional context, one point I might agree with is that one should consider overall funding levels as part of the determination of whether the Republicans are at war with science, so I'd disagree with Mooney's decision to exclude that issue from his consideration.

More fundamentally, it is hard to go from the avalanche of science-abusing anecdotes in Mooney's book to a definitive conclusion that the Bush Administration is far worse than previous ones. On the other hand, it's a very impressive avalanche, especially compared to what Adler has just put out. The number of Republicans who are revolted at what Bush has done to science is also indicative. Most persuasive was the one time where Bush and Clinton both took the same position at odds with the science, but Bush lied about the science while Clinton didn't.

So some legitimacy of the attacks on the left, little of which extends to the Clinton Administration, and very little in the way of substantive criticism of Mooney's book.

UPDATE: Welcome, Intersection readers, and thanks for stopping by. My main page is here, and my review of RWOS is here. And just to be a little contrary, I've got an occasionally-updated post linking to right-wing blogs when I think they've got the better argument, and one of them is an Adler post.

Volokh Correction #17

Outsourced to Tim Lambert via a lame, not-much-of-a-retraction by Jonathan Adler, regarding the claim that the IPCC is reducing its estimate of future global warming. Adler could try just admitting the report he referenced was completely wrong.

Volokh Correction #16

Jonathan Adler critiques a New York Times editorial about tomorrow's Supreme Court case over global warming. Let's return the favor.
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NY TIMES: The Bush administration has been on a six-year campaign to expand its powers, often beyond what the Constitution allows. So it is odd to hear it claim that it lacks the power to slow global warming

ADLER: This is a fair point about the Bush Administration, but it says little to nothing about the merits of the litigation.

BACKSEAT DRIVING: Fine, but the Times is just commenting about the oddness, it didn't try and make a legal point.
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NY TIMES: A group of 12 states . . . backed by environmental groups and scientists, say that the Clean Air Act requires the E.P.A. to impose limits on carbon dioxide...

ADLER: All true, but only part of the story. The EPA's position is also supported by several state intervenors, .... Nonetheless, the Times simply refers to "the states"...

BACKSEAT DRIVING: Times already made it clear it was 12 states, not 50, and referring to appellants as "the states" is a convenient shorthand. This is beyond nitpicking.

ADLER: It is also important to underscore that this case is not about the science of climate change.

BACKSEAT DRIVING: My recollection is that the Bush Admin. argued that the science is still unclear at the appellate level. I haven't read the current briefs, but I doubt they'd drop that argument, and if they did, I'll bet some crazy amici briefs picked it up.
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NY TIMES: [Bush Admin] contends that the court should dismiss the case because the [petitioning] states do not have “standing,” since they cannot show that they will be specifically harmed by the agency’s failure to regulate greenhouse gases.

ADLER: This is a fair characterization of the EPA's position, but it is also worth nothing that the EPA is hardly alone in this case...

BACKSEAT DRIVING: The standing arguments are the worst for reasons I laid out here (the argument is that because everyone is somewhat affected by climate change, the harm is too "diffuse" to be solved by courts, and should be solved politically instead). If this argument succeeds, it will be used to cut off legal redress for many other air and possibly water pollutants.
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NYTIMES: A plain reading of the Clean Air Act shows that the [petitioning] states are right.

ADLER: ...it is difficult to argue that the relevant provisions of the Clean Air Act have anything to do with global warming. The text of the Clean Air Act, read in its entirety and in historical context, clearly bears this out. Congress has repeatedly considered climate change policy, beginning in 1978, and has repeatedly refused to adopt regulatory measures in favor of non-binding programs of one sort or another.

BACKSEAT DRIVING: Drawing inferences from what Congress did NOT do is a weak argument. Congress could be relying on the EPA faithfully administering the law it passed. What Congress did not do years after the Clean Air Act passed also tells you little about what Congress originally intended. This isn't a meaningless argument, but it's pretty weak.

ADLER: To declare carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to be "pollutants" under the Clean Air Act is to require far more than the control of vehicular emissions....it would almost certainly place the EPA in the position of trying to set National Ambient Air Quality Standards for greenhouse gases....Yet the structure of NAAQS compliance, including localized State Implementation Plans, is wholly incompatible with a climate-wide concern such as global warming.

BACKSEAT DRIVING: Requiring state action on greenhouse gas emissions is hardly incompatible with addressing climate. States are already doing it.
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NYTIMES: Beneath the statutory and standing questions, this is a case about how seriously the government takes global warming.

ADLER: Not at all. This is a case about what authority Congress delegated to the EPA and the role of the courts in climate policy.

BACKSEAT DRIVING: First, courts can and do consider the policy implications of their potential rulings. While policy can't override legal arguments, it informs them - a ruling with terrible policy implications is more likely to be a misinterpretation of Congressional intent, for example. Adler knows this. Second, the Times is talking to the public, not the Supreme Court, and they're giving the Bush Administration the criticism it deserves for doing bad policy on global warming.
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NYTIMES: The E.P.A.’s decision was based in part on its poorly reasoned conclusion that there was too much “scientific uncertainty” about global warming to worry about it.

ADLER: I agree that if one concludes that the Clean Air Act applies to greenhouse gases, than the EPA's arguments for failing to regulate fall flat, but (again) this just begs the prior question.

BACKSEAT DRIVING: Adler ducks the issue that the Bush Administration is denying the scientific certainty of global warming. Contrary to his assertion, the case in large part is about the science and denialism.
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NYTIMES: The Supreme Court can strike an important blow in defense of the planet simply by ruling that the E.P.A. must start following the law.

ADLER: ...the ultimate question for the Court is whether it wishes to place its thumb on the scales of climate policy, or is willing to leave such important policy questions in the political branches where, as a matter of both law and prudence, they belong.

BACKSEAT DRIVING: He's got the issue backwards. The Clean Air Act delegates significant power to regulatory agencies, and then expects them to act. If Adler doesn't like it, he and his friends should ask Congress to change the law, instead of supporting the Bush Administration's attempt to ignore it.

Volokh Correction #15

Jonathan Adler claims that:

most so-called "denialists" or "skeptics" do not deny the reality of anthropogenic contributions to global warming nor are they skeptical about the basic science of climate change. Rather, most folks tarred with these labels are, to some degree or another, skeptical of the evidence for certain apocalyptic claims and the need for particularly dramatic policy measures and particularly vocal about their concerns.

Adler says his definition doesn't apply to Roger Pielke Jr., so I can't think of anyone it does apply to. Pielke Sr. seems to disagree with the basic science, although I don't follow him too closely. Monckton and some others think there will only be a tiny amount of anthropogenic warming and arrive at that conclusion by completely disagreeing with the consensus.

Adler's wrong. Or - congratulations, James Annan - you are a climate denialist!

Volokh Correction #14 and a Prometheus Correction

Two more erroneous posts at the Volokhs and Prometheus argue it's wrong to call global warming denialists by that name, because it reminds some people of Holocaust "deniers", which reminds Volokh and Prometheus of Godwin's law, which somehow means then that "denialist" term is an ad hominem attack.

I would agree that the statement, "Global warming denialists are wrong because they're similar to Holocaust deniers," is an illogical, ad hominem attack. Count on me to shoot that statement down if somebody somewhere decides to say it. Otherwise, denialist is a fair and accurate term. "Skeptic" is inaccurate, and "septic," while sometimes accurate, interferes with talking to the other side. I and many others didn't draw the Holocaust connotation, and I don't really care if others noticed the similarity.

Generally, I'm a reluctant convert to the idea that we need to influence language. I'd rather have it be a neutral process, but that's not the real world, and the other side is pushing the other direction. The key is to be fair, accurate, and ethical. Denialist fits that criteria.

(More relevant musings by Connolley here. Ironically, he's one of the few tagged with seeing the Holocaust connection, but he doesn't use the term, preferring "septic" instead.)

UPDATE: I should clarify that I don't see anything ethically wrong with expressly drawing an analogy between the two denialist classes, but it's just that such an analogy doesn't prove anything. As a science matter though I wouldn't draw the analogy myself because global warming, while proven, is not as completely undisputable as the Holocaust.

UPDATE II: Adler at Volokhs repeats the claim some use denialist as a parallel to the Holocaust. His proof is Connolley, who doesn't use the term, and Pielke who says he proved it sometime around 2001, but doesn't provide a link.