Violence is as violence does, except when it isn’t.
Some of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have advanced degrees from prestigious universities. They tend to fall into one of two categories.
The first, in which I often find myself, tend to be oblivious to the common, everyday warning signs that other lesser mortals routinely observe. These folks tend to climb too high on unstable ladders, make impulsive traffic-related decisions that provoke single-finger salutes from adjacent motorists, or generally walk around losing keys and bumping into things that other people instinctively avoid. Our excuse is that we were lost in thought about some important — to us — matter, and therefore weren’t paying sufficient attention to the world around us. Or, despite the fact that common sense would dictate otherwise, we really thought we could climb that ladder with a bag of nails and armful of roofing shingles, even though the soil holding the ladder was uneven, and the weight of the bundle we were carrying made us list dangerously to the left.
These are the benign educated idiots, harmless to everyone but themselves and occasional passing motorists who happen to get in their way. But for every yin in life there is a corresponding yang, and here everyone suffers when the professorial class makes its pronouncements.
Take, for example, a recent study reported by Reuters that found a “genetic link to violence, delinquency.”
Now this is a really bad thing — if true. If violence is genetically predetermined in certain individuals, then logic would demand that like all virulent pests, these deficient human beings be isolated from the rest of society. After all, if they cannot help but act violently because their genetic makeup commands them to, then why would any sane society allow them to walk around freely? No crime need be committed. They are a walking genetic time-bomb where the only question is when they will explode, not if.
Preemptively incarcerating these individuals is neither immoral, nor unusual. We routinely ban the possession of wild animals in domestic environments for the same reason. A lion cub may be cute and cuddly, but no amount of love and care will make it a big friendly pussy cat once it reaches maturity. It’s an inherently dangerous animal that belongs in a zoo, where it can be observed from a safe distance. So too with a genetically-disposed violent male, whose bars would be the nearest maximum security penitentiary.
I say “male” instead of “person” at this point because the first notable thing about the study is that it involved 20,000 adolescent males in grades 7 to 12. Girls were not included in the study; only young, hormone-exploding adolescent boys from the ages of 13-18 years old. While their female counterparts are presumably busy studying the collective works of Jane Austen, these malevolent genetic time-bombs were busy doing the same kinds of "violent" things I remember doing as a young hormone-infused male: fighting, showing off for girls, playing violent video games, setting off fireworks — you know, the same kind of things Osama Bin Laden probably did when he was a kid. And look what OBL grew up to become!
Now, to be fair to the study, they did define these genetic aberrations as more than simple juvenile male stuff. "Nonviolent delinquency” included “stealing amounts larger or smaller than $50, breaking and entering, and selling drugs," while "Violent delinquency” included “serious physical fighting that resulted in injuries needing medical treatment, use of weapons to get something from someone, involvement in physical fighting between groups, shooting or stabbing someone, deliberately damaging property, and pulling a knife or gun on someone."
Okay, this is really bad stuff. Well, some of it is. Find me one human being who hasn’t stolen “amounts larger or smaller than $50” (which means one penny to $1 million) from someone, sometime — your mother’s purse, a brother or sister, etc. I swiped a buck from my brother Tim to buy some candy when I was 13, so I fall into this category.
And what about selling drugs? I never got into the drug culture of the 60s, but I know plenty of people who did. They grew pot in their closets and sold it to friends. This is, according to the study, a prima facie indicator of genetically-induced delinquency. People who do this are not intrinsically different from the Colombian drug lords who sell heroin to school children.
And what about fighting? Find me a male who hasn’t been in a fight between the ages of 13-18, even if it’s only a shoving match. My fight in the seventh grade broke my right hand and chipped my adversary’s tooth. That’s “serious physical fighting that resulted in injuries needing medical treatment.” And while I haven’t shot or stabbed anyone, or pulled a gun or knife on anyone either, I did break a couple of windows on Halloween during “mischief night” when I was a kid. So, it looks as if I’m about 75% pre-disposed to genetically-induced violent behavior. If only I’d found Pride and Prejudice more interesting as a 13-year-old boy, I could have turned my life around.
Yes, even though male violence is genetically-based, the study indicates that it can be controlled by societal influences. If you haven’t noticed, the authors interchange “violence” (an act) with “delinquency” (an assessment of an action), thus covering all bases. This allows sociology professor Guang Guo, who led the study, to state that, "I don't want to say it is a crime gene, but 1 percent of people have it and scored very high in violence and delinquency."
Isn’t this interesting. A study of 20,000 adolescent males, using highly generous definitions of violence and delinquency, concludes that 200 males may have violence and delinquency issues. And from this we conclude what? We’ve already backed away from the “crime gene” theory, and now are left with the statistical indication that out of 20,000 males, 200 may have some "issues." And what exactly are these issues? As the study explains:
[S]pecific variations in three genes — the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene, the dopamine transporter 1 (DAT1) gene and the dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2) gene — were associated with bad behavior, but only when the boys suffered some other stress, such as family issues, low popularity and failing school. MAOA regulates several message-carrying chemicals called neurotransmitters that are important in aggression, emotion and cognition such as serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. The links were very specific. The effect of repeating a grade depended on whether a boy had a certain mutation in MAOA called a 2 repeat, they found. And a certain mutation in DRD2 seemed to set off a young man if he did not have regular meals with his family. ‘But if people with the same gene have a parent who has regular meals with them, then the risk is gone,’ Guo said. ‘Having a family meal is probably a proxy for parental involvement," he added. "It suggests that parenting is very important.’ [emphasis added]
In other words, 1% of males may turn into little creeps if they don’t have strong parental supervision and/or aren’t affected by other environmental stress-inducing issues.
This study has absolutely nothing to do with genetics, and everything to do with “environmental” issues. Put a normal kid in a stressful situation and deny him proper parental oversight, and he turns into a punk. Well, 1 out of 100 in this situation will. The remaining 99% will go about dealing with the unfairness of life as we all do, by persevering and getting over it.
It’s always difficult to remove personal biases from scientific studies. But in a world where Al Gore can assert that the Earth has a fever because this is what he wants to believe, the evidence be damned, then it’s a small step to announce a genetic link to violence that is neither genetic, nor causal in whatever relationship exists.
But hey, at least Dr. Guo got some good press for his efforts, which will undoubtedly help secure additional governmental funds for his next scientific inquiry.
Jackson-ic@hotmail.com
http://www.scifi-jackson.com/
Read more articles by Phillip Ellis Jackson
This research is pretty scary. It's telling us that 99% of the males are wimps. Or at least that some who are genetically disposed to act like men can be turned into Gandhi with regular meals with the family. I assume that when he says family he means Mother, because my father talked about the latest Heavyweight Champion and “Dropping the Gloves” at the dinner table.
I too had fights like the one you mentioned. Won two and lost one, but the loss was a TKO, so I don’t dwell on that one. With all these messages condemning violence I wonder how the coming generations will cope. I suspect that the liberal view of Utopia will fade away for a while and then return again in a never ending cycle.
Comment by Ivan Ivanovich | July 17, 2008
Phillip:
It has been a while.
I think you are not understanding the science.
To say that there is a genetic association with a condition does not imply that the condition is genetically determined, just that genes play some role, from minute to major.
There are diseases like Huntington's Chorea or Hemophelia where genetics is the key factor and people without the gene will not get the disease and then there are conditions like breast cancer where most cases are considered random or environmental, but a significant percentage are attributable to genetics.
An association only implies a statistical tendency. Given a big enough population one can generate associations that are so small that they are meaningless in terms of social significance or policy. That is often done, by scientists with agendas, or by drug companies trying to sell product, but I don't see this here, from what little you have quoted.
If you give me the citation, I could address the specific virtues or faults of this study as per sampling and definitions, but from the small piece you quoted, you seem to be saddling the authors with a conclusion that they are not claiming, that delinquency is genetically determined.
The author of this study, if he were trying to extrapolate this into some philosophical realm of how to deal with delinquency, could be taken to task, but he is only reporting an interesting piece of data, and you are the one attatching a lot of social significance to it.
As a physician who routinely surveys the medical literature, I don't find it unusual that there are biological correlates with anti social behaviour. This has been well studied with alchoholism. It does not imply that if you have certain genes or family tendencies, you will be a drunk, but just that you are at higher risk.
It does not make one less culpable for bad behaviours.
Genetics are a tool in trying to understand disease and often in developing cures for disease most of which would not have happened if basic scientists did not uncover how life works.
I was not a fighter in school. I was on the chess team and hung with the nerds. I did run a wild streak in my late teens and saw the insides of a few jail cells. I've had two daughters who became addicts, one in succesful recovery, the other still out there, and I do believe there might be genetic component to some of that, appear to be some risk taking genes, but like both myself and my daughter in recovery, free will, hard work, and amazing grace can prevail.
Comment by yonkel | July 17, 2008
[…] to my surprise on the present occasion I note that a libertarian writer seems very hostile to the study too. But libertarians often do seem to have little role for […]
Pingback by Study finds genetic link to violence, delinquency : Stop The ACLU | July 18, 2008
Yonkel
I took my first three week vacation in thirty years, but now I’m back.
For some reason the IC editors didn’t provide the link back to the Reuters article. Here it is: http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN1444872420080714?pageNumber=3&virtualBrandChannel=0
As for the “science”, it seems a bit of a stretch to assign any genetic correlation (direct, implied or otherwise) between a specific gene sequence and a behavior (violence and/or delinquency) that affects only 1% of a population of 20,000 males. I could find a higher correlation between violence/delinquency and freckles. And then to further mitigate the effects of any such genetic relationship by saying that they are virtually eliminated by reducing stress or having family meals means that the causal link is practically non-existent.
What Dr Guo appears to have done is find a statistically small link between some aspect of the human condition that is present in a very small percentage of violent or “delinquent” (a highly subjective evaluation) males. But contrary to what is suggested by the popular reports, this condition does not result in violence or delinquency. In fact, it’s so weak as to be irrelevant to those who have it once minimal steps are taken to help the hormone-infused young boy cope with the normal stresses of life.
Your point about a genetic disposition to alcoholism is well taken, having had one such person in my own family. Possessing the gene does not dictate that you will become a falling down drunk, but makes you more susceptible to it. But I contend that this is not what this highly selective, sex and age biased study found. I could do a similar study of 20,000 boys between 13-18 and find a stronger correlation between height and a tendency to violence/delinquency. I remember some really short boys from my childhood going the extra mile to prove their “manhood” to the taller, more physically powerful boys.
I’ve only commented on the Reuters report about the study, which included quotes from its author. It’s possible (even likely) that the study is entirely different than what has been represented by the press, which means I should have titled it “junk press” and not junk science. But I’ve also seen enough of these pseudo-scientific studies in my life to be highly suspicious about their assumptions, methodology, and stated or implied conclusions. I remember a few years back when the autopsies of less than 20 male homosexuals showed an enlarged hypothalamus, thus “proving” that homosexuality is genetic.
You hit the nail on the head when you stated properly that “To say that there is a genetic association with a condition does not imply that the condition is genetically determined, just that genes play some role, from minute to major.” Unfortunately, in an era where science has been politicized (think man-made global warming), this fact gets brushed aside and in the public’s mind any genetic link becomes cause-effect. If they are truly honest about what they do, it’s the responsibility of the authors of these studies to insist that their findings be placed in the proper perspective, not comment as Guo did "I don't want to say it is a crime gene, but 1 percent of people have it and scored very high in violence and delinquency." This is in the tradition of “I don’t want to say that an enlarged hypothalamus causes homosexuality, but one percent of the autopsies we performed on homosexual males had it.”
I guess I’ll end by saying that if there is indeed a “genetic link” (a neutral term) in 1% of the male population between that gene sequence in violence and delinquency, then it’s a pretty weak link — to the point of irrelevancy — if “people with the same gene have a parent who has regular meals with them, then the risk is gone,’ Guo said. ‘Having a family meal is probably a proxy for parental involvement," he added. "It suggests that parenting is very important.’”
No one would argue that any genetic disposition toward alcoholism could be eliminated (“the risk be gone”) just by having regular family meals. Nor could we “cure” homosexuality or a genetic tendency towards psoriasis the same way.
Take care, Phil
Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 18, 2008
Phillip:
Three weeks, thats a dream. My employees get it, but only if that could be I. I figure I am reaping justice for years of youthful time wasting.
I found the original article at:
http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/Aug08ASRFeature.pdf
and it is dense. I'm used to the medical literature which is straight and to the point, and this one reminds me of the Physical Chemistry course I dropped in college.
I couldn't understand how a whole course, let alone an entire science was based on an interest in the probability of finding an electron at a certain distance from the nucleus. It did not speak to me, as my Quaker friends say, so I switched to Biology and cutting up planaria, which seemed a little more sensible, though not as fun as history or basket weaving.
Anyway, without going into this study which is beyond my grasp, perhaps you can navigate it, I take it that your philosophical concern is in the "nature vs. nurture" debate and that you would agree with Julius Ceasar that "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves".
The trend in medical science, and particularly psychiatry has been the other way, that is in finding biological determinants of behaviour.
The Freudians, who invented science in the same way as good science fiction writers, and did not concern themselves with data or experiment, put everything into nurture. Schizophrenics were that way because they had "refrigerator mothers". Perfectly decent parents were led to believe that they had driven their children crazy, whereas currently most people understand that schizophrenia is a medical condition. People are not raised in a way to become that way. Same with homosexuality.
In medicine we thought that impotence was due to various psychological blocks and people went through years of counseling. Now we know that the blocks were primarily arterial and a good vasodilator is worth a dozen head shrinks.
Where I think we would agree is that, regardless of the biological determinants of behaviour, and specifically with anti-social or criminal behaviour, people are responsible for their actions. Having a gene that makes one more likely to be violent or a substance abuser, does not excuse one from the consequences of making stupid and/or immoral choices.
I recognize and disapprove of the trend to explain away bad behaviour as not the fault of the perpertrator, I just don't have a problem with science exploring biological corrolaries of behaviour from both the perspective of just understanding how humans work, and in the hope of discovering treatments for destructive behaviours.
Comment by yonkel | July 18, 2008
P
Insightful article, as usual.
It’s simple: Social Scientists are environmentally programmed, in school & on the job, to produce studies which back up a preordained conclusion & which studies, as you note, lead to further government-funded studies.
I think that 100% of MSM members who report these studies are products of J Schools, & thus know nothing about any substantive matter, but do know how to take a handout, usually an “Executive Summary” (press release) from experts & then change a few words so that it reads like it’s the reporter’s product in the newspaper or on the Telly, adding the words “A Harvard Study shows….”
But, the above occurs only when these MSM guys are programmed to accept such studies. If the study is from some conservative think tank, then every MSM member in good standing is programmed to consult a liberal “go to” guy, who will give them a handout “refuting” what the reporter has been programmed to realize are the obviously misinformed conclusions & the faulty parameters of such conservative study. The reporter will, of course, accept at face value this Lib go-to handout “refutation” & by changing a few words, transform it into his “report” in the newspaper or on the Telly. And, oh, yes, the reporter will be programmed to add the words “A Conservative Study purports to show….”
BTW, MSM reporters are also programmed to not read articles from something so obviously biased as The Intellectual Conservative; Liberals or insecure conservatives or centrists are also programmed to ignore articles written in such a déclassé publication &, a fortiori, to treat with appropriate disdain any comments from benighted conservatives who rely on such Radical Rightist stuff, which is always in disrepute & who the hell are you anyway….
Keep it up!
Regards
FI
PS When Obamessiah is President, a version of the “Fairness Doctrine” will be enacted which will mandate that you & other dissenters from conventional wisdom contact a Lib “go to” expert & see that his disagreement with such obvious prejudicial articles like yours is reflected somewhere prominently in your article .
Comment by From Inwood | July 18, 2008
Yonkel —
In earlier days I thought about a career in science, but couldn't do the math to get me through chemestry and physics. So instead I absorb it as a layman, but analyze it as a social scientist who understands how universities, research funding, the press, governments, and bureaucracies operate.
You've captured a lot of my reasoning. I reject the notion that "genetics made me do it". Certainly there are genetic-related issues (like autism) that can strongly influence behavior, but as a society we've gotten to the point where one hot day turns into man-made global warming, and one very tenuously-defined genetic trait leads to "violent and delinquent" outcomes.
I write more about this in my essays in the IC archives "The True nature of Human Morality", and "What kind of car would Jesus Drive to take his girlfriend to an abortion clinic?", where I discuss the role of genetics (or rather, lack of it) in providing content to human actions. Genetics can at at times inhibit or enhance certain traits, but they don't determine the content of human behavior in and of themselves. Human beings are more than the sum of their constituent parts. Even a genetically-disposed alcoholic can choose not to drink. It may be an infinitely tougher thing to do than for a non-alcoholic, and require occasional outside support and counselling, but human beings aren't animals and can choose their behaviors. Every dog will act instinctively the same in identical situations. But not every human with a genetic dispotion toward alcolohism will become a drunk. Genetics colors our lives at times by giving us certain advantageous and disadvantageous traits (intellect, talents, certain deficiencies etc.). But without the will to develop those talents we won't magically turn into concert pianists. And having a genetic "defect" or trait does not relegate every person with that gene to an identical fate.
As for the study I wrote about, a genetic influence that can be mitigated by a family dinner is no influence at all, particularlly when you control for the natural hormonal influences of the study group (males 13-18). The greatest cartoon I ever saw as a picture of a 50 year old man whose brain was speaking to him: "Dave, for the first time since you were thirteen, this head is now in control of your body".
My suspicion is that other things are at work in explaining the 1% "violent and delinquent behavior" of hormonal males 13-18 than the presence of a particular gene.
Take care, Phil
Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 19, 2008
Inwood: You reminded me of something I wrote in the first essay I ever posted at IC on the myth of man-made global warming. http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/07/31/an-even-more-inconvenient-truth-the-myth-of-man-made-global-warming/
Why would otherwise rational, intelligent people accept the notion that a car’s exhaust is heating the Earth to a dangerous level, but never once ask how this conclusion was derived, whether there are other factors that better account for this phenomenon, or whether the Earth is really warming at a rapid rate — or getting hotter at all?
The answer, I believe, can be traced to our shared value system, which provides a common frame of reference to address these and other issues. It is the shorthand, connect-the-dot reasoning we all engage in to navigate through daily life. Critical thought is only needed when the matter at hand is something unique, and we’ve been talking about – and worrying about — global climate change for at least 40 years.
These values and reference points are not bestowed upon us at birth, like Moses receiving the Holy Tablets. Rather, they are taught to, absorbed by, and reinforced within each individual through a life-long process that begins with our earliest years and extends throughout the remainder of our life. For example, we’re all taught from an early age that the environment is fragile. As children we write school papers on this subject and participate in community projects to “save the environment.” When we get older, we get our news from journalism school graduates who show us pictures of melting ice caps or drought-stricken farmland and talk about the importance of driving hybrid cars, practicing resource conservation, and signing the Kyoto Treaty.
As adults we happily segment our garbage to cut-down on environmental pollution, and set our thermometers at uncomfortably high or low levels to “save energy” — thereby reducing the nasty, dirty fossil fuel emissions needed to produce our electricity. The world, and our role in it, is put clearly in focus, as are the notions of “good” or “bad” behavior regarding our treatment of the environment.
This common frame of reference allows us, as a group, to make certain judgments that are universally accepted. Windmills are good. Solar energy is better. Conservation is best. The internal combustion engine, to quote Al Gore, is an example of man seeking to “artificially enhance our capacity to acquire what we need from the earth . . . at the direct expense of the earth’s ability to provide naturally what we are seeking.” By manufacturing “millions of internal combustion engines [that] automate the conversion of oxygen to CO2, we interfere with the earth’s ability to cleanse itself of the impurities that are normally removed from the atmosphere.”
No one laughs at the main theme of this passage which presumes to know intrinsically — just like the idiot savant — what man “needs” from the Earth, and what is an “artificial enhance[ment of his] capability” to acquire natural resources “at the direct expense of the earth’s ability to provide naturally what we are seeking.” No further justification is required to support these value-laden judgments, because they’re not seen as expressing anything controversial. They’re just obvious statements about obvious matters that are plainly obvious to any thoughtful, thinking individual.
From this basis it’s a logical conclusion that cars are “interfering” with the natural state of affairs of Mother Earth, which leads to an equally obvious policy objective to deal with this cancer. As for the finite-supply of fossil fuels that are mined, drilled, and otherwise gouged from the Earth to feed these poison-producing internal combustion engines, they serve only one purpose: to make Dick Cheney richer, and help George Bush justify an illegal, immoral war against Saddam Hussein whom we’re all glad is out of power, even though Bush lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction and ought to be impeached.
Because our schools, celebrities, TV anchorpersons and other opinion leaders accept these observations as fact, who are we to disagree? Since 1975 (my earliest memory on this subject) I’ve been told repeatedly that the world is running out of oil. There’s only so much dead-dinosaur juice in the ground, and it will all be gone in 20 years or less. Thirty years later, the same 20 year prediction is still being made. If we don’t switch to hybrid cars, solar powered electricity, or wind-driven generators, we’ll use up all the world’s oil by 2030, or 2040, or 2050, or [pick a date] sometime in the near future.
And when all the oil is gone, and coal is too dirty to burn, and nuclear power is too unsafe to produce, where will we be? Ergo, we need to start changing our lifestyles NOW! But At no point in this conventional-wisdom analysis does anyone stop and say, “but wouldn’t there be plenty of oil if we’re willing to pay $100 a barrel to recover it?” …
Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 19, 2008
If Al Gore had said those words in Detroit, during my tenure with the Big Three 40 years ago, he would have been hung by his feet from a lamppost like Mussolini. I suppose Detroiters would hesitate now, out of respect for the lamppost.
Aaron Lynch writes, in his book “Thought Contagion” about the power of Doomsday memes and their intersection with Belief in Hell memes. These ideas tend to reinforce each other leading hosts to proselytize so as to prevent their friends from becoming victims of fire and brimstone. Non-hosts on the other hand have no incentive to comment vigorously. This latest form of Hell and Doomsday is Global Warming and Environmentalism. He also explains that people do not acquire memes, but memes acquire people and that most memes, like genes, are good for humans.
One wonders if “Change We Can Believe In” is also a meme working in combination with the Doomsday meme. Well, I shouldn’t say “One wonders”, because as a host of the “Bullshit Filters Are Good” meme, I don’t wonder very much. According to Mr. Lynch this BFAG meme takes many years to acquire and this explains the out of favor idea of the wisdom comes with age meme.
Comment by Ivan Ivanovich | July 19, 2008
P
You ask, knowing the answer, of course, why rational people would accept conclusions without asking how such conclusion was derived.
To the point of the MSM, I’m always amazed at how many reporters seem to think that it is their raison d’être to report accurately, in as clear language as possible, what a PC academic study says but that they have no duty to point out, even for the sake of discussion, any counter-intuitive stuff in such study or, more important, that they have any journalistic duty to check on whether what the study relied on is factual.
A college & law school classmate of mine, both of us with a BA in English, seems to think that since I’m not credentialed in pure science or social science, I can’t debate him on such topics. Up to a point, Lord Copper. Both of us should be relying on our common sense or on other explanations of the phenomena noted by experts & conclusions therefrom. And our logic & rhetoric classes should have cleansed our minds of accepting post-hoc logic, as you detail here. And, golly gee, pure science is based on empirical evidence & not consensus.
He also once said to me something like: it seems that many conservatives think it's fun to stereotype academics as sissy Marxists, but this doesn't make it so, or funny for that matter. I replied that many academics think it's fun to stereotype conservatives as hateful, over-testosteroned, mean spirited, gun-toting, war-mongering, anti-environment, laisser-faire capitalists, but that doesn't make it so, or funny for that matter. Nor does it make for serious larnin’.
And you mention 1975, Funny, he doesn’t want to hear about the fact that The Best & The Brightest were singing out of the same hymnal about Global Freezing, & that he’d joined in the chorus.
Comment by From Inwood | July 19, 2008
Phillip et al:
You have been told by somebody that the wiring in your house is bad and that it is at risk to burn down along with yourself and your family. Prudent, conservative, fellow that you are, you seek more information and advice. And being a bit obsessive, you decide to get nine expert opinions.
Three of those people tell you that yes, your house is going to burn down. Three of them are not sure, but tell you there is a reasonable chance that this can happen, and the last three tell you there is no problem and no ills will befall you.
You probably grasp my analogy, because I see the global warming contrarians as belonging in the last camp, believing a minority position that carries great risk to the future.
I am a physician and not a climate scientologist, so I don't claim to know the truth regarding these issues.
There are many issues regarding medical treatments that there are differing viewpoints on. So if you trust your health and life to me, I am going to go with the concensus viewpoints and not the outliers, and I am not going to risk your life because of my own biases.
The concensus viewpoint is that global warming is real. To what degree human activity threatens the planet is debatable, but the concensus is between possible and probable and that is what I go by.
And because I am conservative, in the generic sense of the word, i.e.; prudent, careful, risk averse, I am going to be conservative in my actions.
I do not see any downside to using less oil and burning less coal and making less garbage.
Geopolitically we are in the midst of transferring trillions of dollars to the cast of characters including Chavez, Putin, and Ahmadeenijad. Our former enemies could never compete with us, but now we are handing it to them. I don't see how driving a gas guzzler does anything but help with this wealth transfer, regardless of its effect on global warming.
And in a spiritual sense, weather you be Christian, Jew, or whatever, I don't see those traditions attatching great virtue on consumption and waste. On the contrary, most religions caution about laying up treasures. And my grandmother, survivor of the depression, understood "waste not, want not".
Gore is an outlier and a bit of a "sky is falling" obsessive , but large concensus groups like the National Accademy of Sciences are not as political or biased. The NAS was supportive of nuclear energy at a time when that was contrary to the liberal position and they also support that fossil fuse use may put us at risk.
So, in the spirit of the older wiser little pig, I choose to build a house of brick and not straw. If I am wrong, the worst we have done is conserved our assets, if you are wrong, you may have squandered the future.
And fortunately the large majority of Americans as well as our two presidential candidates support a conservative approach and concern for the future.
Comment by yonkel | July 19, 2008
“You have been told by somebody that the wiring in your house is bad and that it is at risk to burn down along with yourself and your family. Prudent, conservative, fellow that you are, you seek more information and advice. And being a bit obsessive, you decide to get nine expert opinions.”
*** No. The first thing I do is assess who is making the assertion that my house is in danger.
1. Is it a person with a vast, proven knowledge of electricity and wiring, or is it a bunch of yahoos off the street offering their opinions? Think a real climatologist vs. Al Gore.
2. If it is a person with a vast, proven knowledge of electricity and wiring, are they offering a neutral assessment of the facts, or are they trying to sell me on rewiring my house using their company and services? Think a real climatologist, vs. a person with a direct personal interest in the outcome (an environmental interest group that depends on man made global warming to justify their existence; a research scientist who needs for global warming to be man-made instead of part of a natural cycle because the government doesn’t fund solutions to non man-made problems; a politician looking for votes by pandering to an environmental interest group, etc.)
3. If it is indeed a real expert, and not someone just offering an opinion or pursuing a personal agenda, then I ask the further question “just how do they know that?” If you start your trend toward man-made global warming by focusing on unusually cold years in the late 1800s as your starting point, and don’t have to tools to accurately measure global temperature until the age of satellites, then exactly how do you “know” the earth is warming at all, and that man is responsible for it? You really need to read my original article in the IC archives to understand exactly what is driving this so-called “debate”. http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/07/31/an-even-more-inconvenient-truth-the-myth-of-man-made-global-warming/
“Three of those people tell you that yes, your house is going to burn down. Three of them are not sure, but tell you there is a reasonable chance that this can happen, and the last three tell you there is no problem and no ills will befall you. You probably grasp my analogy, because I see the global warming contrarians as belonging in the last camp, believing a minority position that carries great risk to the future.”
*** No. Your premise is deeply flawed, because it’s quite likely that none of these people knows what they are talking about, and are in fact offering opinions not objective scientific analyses. Opinions are like the exit points of the human digestive system; everyone has one. Before I commit to drastic changes in social and economic matters, I require more than “it might be a problem”. In the 70s it was the coming ice age that needed immediate attention. In the 90s it was global warming. Each immediate threat couldn’t wait, and required drastic (and entirely opposite) change. Today it is no longer global warming, it’s “global climate change”. Hot cold, wet dry, it’s all a problem — and it’s all due to man. Moreover, these advocates deliberately mix “pollution/protecting the environment” with “climate change”. They are not the same issues. Recycling will not cool the earth, though it may clean up the local dump. And throughout it all none of these alarmists can tell me exactly what the sun and other natural elements (like volcanoes) contribute vs. man. Part of the reason is the sun and natural elements are not static. They change over time.
Tell me what the normal temperature of the earth should be, and tell me the extent to which non human actions warm or cool the earth, and tell me this trend over a geologically relevant period (which is NOT 100 or even 500 years — there was a little ice age in the 1500s), and then we can talk about the role man may play.
I don’t jump on a bandwagon and demand immediate action that “something” be done because “everyone” says it’s a problem. If so, we’d have deliberately accelerated greenhouse gas emissions in the 1970s to warm the earth against the coming ice age.
“There are many issues regarding medical treatments that there are differing viewpoints on. So if you trust your health and life to me, I am going to go with the concensus viewpoints and not the outliers, and I am not going to risk your life because of my own biases.”
*** Climatology is not medicine. You can test the effects of drugs on people, and understand how the human body functions with a relative degree of certainty. You know that giving X treatment will hurt or harm a person, and that it should take Y hours or days for the effects to be felt (immediate if it’s a high dose of arsenic, perhaps months of it’s a few milligrams of Proscar). Now tell me what the weather will be in Chicago in 6 month. Not just an estimate (“cold”), but temperature, wind conditions, condensation levels, etc. And then do it for the year 2051.
You have fallen into the false analogy that since medicine and climatology both involve “science”, they are fundamentally the same. Climatology depends on computer models filled with assumptions. Medicine does not. Change the models’ assumptions and you change the prediction. But giving anyone 1000 mg of arsenic will always have the same effect, regardless of whether it’s liquid, solid, mixed with food, given intravenously, etc.
“The concensus viewpoint is that global warming is real. To what degree human activity threatens the planet is debatable, but the concensus is between possible and probable and that is what I go by.”
*** Science is not “consensus”. Science is results determined through data and experimentation. There was a scientific consensus once that the Earth was flat. It didn’t make the Earth flat. It made the consensus “wrong”.
By the way, as I’ve frequently pointed out, one does not have to be a “scientist” (either a person with a science PhD, or a PhD in a relevant field; i.e. botanists commenting on physics) to have voting membership in organizations that proclaim this consensus. Again we get to opinions and vested interests. If science determines that global warming is natural and not man-made, then there is no research money to “fix” the problem. You really need to read my essay. I lived in this world for many years, and saw how government funds were allocated.
“And because I am conservative, in the generic sense of the word, i.e.; prudent, careful, risk averse, I am going to be conservative in my actions. I do not see any downside to using less oil and burning less coal and making less garbage.”
*** You have just merged the issue of man-made global warming into a concern about pollution. You have been successfully sensitized by the man-made global warming crowd to abandon any demand for real evidence that man is warming the planet (most of the so-called 1 degree temperature rise occurred from 1880-1940 — leveling off after that, and the earth has cooled by more than 1 degree in the last 5 years, wiping out that “rise”), and rely on the logic that “hey, it’s probably a good thing for the planet anyway”. As I just finished writing a friend a few minutes ago, if the day ever comes when Al Gore has to admit that the evidence does not support his man-made global warming hysteria, he’ll look in the camera and say sincerely “Perhaps I was wrong, but I did everything with the best of intentions. And besides, $25 a gallon hysteria-induced gasoline was good for the environment.”
If limiting unnecessary pollution is a good thing, and it certainly is, it should be argued on its own merits, not used as an emotional sop to pursue a global climate change agenda.
“Geopolitically we are in the midst of transferring trillions of dollars to the cast of characters including Chavez, Putin, and Ahmadeenijad. Our former enemies could never compete with us, but now we are handing it to them. I don't see how driving a gas guzzler does anything but help with this wealth transfer, regardless of its effect on global warming.”
*** Bingo! My comments above again. We’d have a much clearer way to address these very real issues if we didn’t insert junk science into the debate to promote a hidden agenda. Please read my original article.
“And fortunately the large majority of Americans as well as our two presidential candidates support a conservative approach and concern for the future.”
*** Public opinion is irrelevant to the truth. It’s simply that: an opinion. And unfortunately, even stupid people have opinions, and in America their voice counts. A year after the first moon landing, Knight Newspapers conducted a poll of 1721 U.S. citizens and found that more than 30 percent of all of the poll's respondents were "suspicious of NASA's trips to the Moon" with the number rising to over half in some demographic areas. http://www.bigmantra.com/man_on_moon/public.html
What the public thinks about man-made global warming is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the matter.
“So, in the spirit of the older wiser little pig, I choose to build a house of brick and not straw. If I am wrong, the worst we have done is conserved our assets, if you are wrong, you may have squandered the future.”
*** Please do whatever you want. Just don’t force me to buy into a hidden agenda that makes no sense, and benefits people like Al Gore who drives around in a SUV while insisting we ride bikes, and owns the “Carbon Credit” company we must patronize to assuage our guilt at living a decent lifestyle.
“Gore is an outlier and a bit of a "sky is falling" obsessive , but large concensus groups like the National Academy of Sciences are not as political or biased. The NAS was supportive of nuclear energy at a time when that was contrary to the liberal position and they also support that fossil fuse use may put us at risk.”
*** They must have overlooked the “opinions” of these random individuals wandering around the streets of America and the world.
• Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: “[T]he recent warming trend in the surface temperature record cannot be caused by the increase of human-made greenhouse gases in the air.” Baliunas and Soon wrote that “there is no reliable evidence for increased severity or frequency of storms, droughts, or floods that can be related to the air’s increased greenhouse gas content.”
• Reid Bryson, emeritus professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “It’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”
• Robert M. Carter, geologist, researcher at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia: “The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown.”
• George V. Chilingar, Professor of Civil and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California: “The authors identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate: (1) solar radiation …, (2) outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, (3) microbial activities … . The writers provide quantitative estimates of the scope and extent of their corresponding effects on the Earth’s climate [and] show that the human-induced climatic changes are negligible.”
• Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: “That portion of the scientific community that attributes climate warming to CO2 relies on the hypothesis that increasing CO2, which is in fact a minor greenhouse gas, triggers a much larger water vapour response to warm the atmosphere. This mechanism has never been tested scientifically beyond the mathematical models that predict extensive warming, and are confounded by the complexity of cloud formation - which has a cooling effect. … We know that [the sun] was responsible for climate change in the past, and so is clearly going to play the lead role in present and future climate change. And interestingly… solar activity has recently begun a downward cycle.”
• Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology, Western Washington University: “global warming since 1900 could well have happened without any effect of CO2. If the cycles continue as in the past, the current warm cycle should end soon and global temperatures should cool slightly until about 2035″
• William M. Gray, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University: “This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential.” “I am of the opinion that [global warming] is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people.” “So many people have a vested interest in this global-warming thing—all these big labs and research and stuff. The idea is to frighten the public, to get money to study it more.”
• George Kukla, retired Professor of Climatology at Columbia University and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in an interview: “What I think is this: Man is responsible for a PART of global warming. MOST of it is still natural.”
• David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware: “About half of the warming during the 20th century occurred prior to the 1940s, and natural variability accounts for all or nearly all of the warming.”
• Marcel Leroux, former Professor of Climatology, Université Jean Moulin: “The possible causes, then, of climate change are: well-established orbital parameters on the palaeoclimatic scale, … solar activity, …; volcanism …; and far at the rear, the greenhouse effect, and in particular that caused by water vapor, the extent of its influence being unknown. These factors are working together all the time, and it seems difficult to unravel the relative importance of their respective influences upon climatic evolution. Equally, it is tendentious to highlight the anthropic factor, which is, clearly, the least credible among all those previously mentioned.”
• Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: global warming “is the biggest scientific hoax being perpetrated on humanity. There is no global warming due to human anthropogenic activities. The atmosphere hasn’t changed much in 280 million years, and there have always been cycles of warming and cooling. The Cretaceous period was the warmest on earth. You could have grown tomatoes at the North Pole”
• Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada: “There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth’s temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century’s modest warming?”
• Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology, The University of Adelaide: “We only have to have one volcano burping and we have changed the whole planetary climate… It looks as if carbon dioxide actually follows climate change rather than drives it”.
• Frederick Seitz, retired, former solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences: “So we see that the scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities.”
• Nir Shaviv, astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “[T]he truth is probably somewhere in between [the common view and that of skeptics], with natural causes probably being more important over the past century, whereas anthropogenic causes will probably be more dominant over the next century. … [A]bout 2/3’s (give or take a third or so) of the warming [over the past century] should be attributed to increased solar activity and the remaining to anthropogenic causes.” His opinion is based on some proxies of solar activity over the past few centuries.
• Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia: “The greenhouse effect is real. However, the effect is minute, insignificant, and very difficult to detect.” “It’s not automatically true that warming is bad, I happen to believe that warming is good, and so do many economists.”
• Willie Soon, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: “[T]here’s increasingly strong evidence that previous research conclusions, including those of the United Nations and the United States government concerning 20th century warming, may have been biased by underestimation of natural climate variations. The bottom line is that if these variations are indeed proven true, then, yes, natural climate fluctuations could be a dominant factor in the recent warming. In other words, natural factors could be more important than previously assumed.”
• Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London: “…the myth is starting to implode. … Serious new research at The Max Planck Institute has indicated that the sun is a far more significant factor…”
• Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center: “Our team … has discovered that the relatively few cosmic rays that reach sea-level play a big part in the everyday weather. They help to make low-level clouds, which largely regulate the Earth’s surface temperature. During the 20th Century the influx of cosmic rays decreased and the resulting reduction of cloudiness allowed the world to warm up. … most of the warming during the 20th Century can be explained by a reduction in low cloud cover.”
• Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, Professor Emeritus from University of Ottawa: “At this stage, two scenarios of potential human impact on climate appear feasible: (1) the standard IPCC model …, and (2) the alternative model that argues for celestial phenomena as the principal climate driver. … Models and empirical observations are both indispensable tools of science, yet when discrepancies arise, observations should carry greater weight than theory. If so, the multitude of empirical observations favours celestial phenomena as the most important driver of terrestrial climate on most time scales, but time will be the final judge.”
Scientists in the following section conclude it is too early to ascribe any principal cause to the observed rising temperatures, man-made or natural.
• Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks: “[T]he method of study adopted by the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) is fundamentally flawed, resulting in a baseless conclusion: Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. Contrary to this statement …, there is so far no definitive evidence that ‘most’ of the present warming is due to the greenhouse effect. … [The IPCC] should have recognized that the range of observed natural changes should not be ignored, and thus their conclusion should be very tentative. The term ‘most’ in their conclusion is baseless.”
• Claude Allègre, geochemist, Institute of Geophysics (Paris): “The increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere is an observed fact and mankind is most certainly responsible. In the long term, this increase will without doubt become harmful, but its exact role in the climate is less clear. Various parameters appear more important than CO2. Consider the water cycle and formation of various types of clouds, and the complex effects of industrial or agricultural dust. Or fluctuations of the intensity of the solar radiation on annual and century scale, which seem better correlated with heating effects than the variations of CO2 content.”
• Robert C. Balling, Jr., a professor of geography at Arizona State University: “[I]t is very likely that the recent upward trend [in global surface temperature] is very real and that the upward signal is greater than any noise introduced from uncertainties in the record. However, the general error is most likely to be in the warming direction, with a maximum possible (though unlikely) value of 0.3 °C. … At this moment in time we know only that: (1) Global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. (2) Mid-tropospheric temperatures have warmed little over the same period. (3) This difference is not consistent with predictions from numerical climate models.”
• John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, contributor to several IPCC reports “I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.”
• William R. Cotton, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University said in a presentation, “It is an open question if human produced changes in climate are large enough to be detected from the noise of the natural variability of the climate system.”
• Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland: “There is evidence of global warming. … But warming does not confirm that carbon dioxide is causing it. Climate is always warming or cooling. There are natural variability theories of warming. To support the argument that carbon dioxide is causing it, the evidence would have to distinguish between human-caused and natural warming. This has not been done.”
• David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma: “The amount of climatic warming that has taken place in the past 150 years is poorly constrained, and its cause–human or natural–is unknown. There is no sound scientific basis for predicting future climate change with any degree of certainty. If the climate does warm, it is likely to be beneficial to humanity rather than harmful. In my opinion, it would be foolish to establish national energy policy on the basis of misinformation and irrational hysteria.”
• Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences: “We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 °C higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of CO2 have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that CO2 is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds). But–and I cannot stress this enough–we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to CO2 or to forecast what the climate will be in the future.” “[T]here has been no question whatsoever that CO2 is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas — albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in CO2 should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed.”
• Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville: “We need to find out how much of the warming we are seeing could be due to mankind, because I still maintain we have no idea how much you can attribute to mankind.”
Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 19, 2008
Yonkel:
Please don’t take anything I said above as a personal attack on you or your motives. You seem like a bright and decent guy, and I’m merely dissecting your ideas.
Where you err fundamentally in your reasoning is to ignore that “science” is being mixed with “policy”. The “science” that man is primarily responsible for global warming (or that “global warming” is indeed really happening) is far from being universally accepted by the scientific community. And when you put this into the policy arena which is rife with hidden agendas and personal interests that have nothing to do with the stated issue, there’s even more reason to step back and ask what may really be driving this issue — such as power, prestige and money, to quote my own article.
This same junk science approach that mixes pollution and climate change (oil spills and rising sea levels) also permeates the discussion on genetic links to violence and delinquency, to tie all this back into my original essay. Making actual policy based on an alleged genetic link to violence is as ill advised as it is to believe that man is the primary culprit for an alleged blip in the earth’s temperature, should such a blip have actually occurred.
Making dramatic shifts in our economy and society to accommodate a hunch is very bad policy. You said “So, in the spirit of the older wiser little pig, I choose to build a house of brick and not straw. If I am wrong, the worst we have done is conserved our assets, if you are wrong, you may have squandered the future.” Well, let’s assume it’s 1970 and the scientific consensus says the earth is getting colder. Following your ‘we must act now’ advice, we should have undertaken a massive effort then to warm the earth. You can’t use hindsight to say 40 years later that this was wrong, and we all should have “known” it was wrong and therefore not acted. The experts of the day were just as certain then that the planet was cooling as they are today that it is warming. Your motives may be pure, but acting on the knowledge we had in the 1970s would not have protected the future, it would have harmed it. That is, if the current theories about global warming are correct. If those are not, then acting on these will do equal harm.
It isn't an issue of having perfect knowledge before acting. But we need more than a hunch based on science mixed with personal agendas. If it has been warming since 1880 as the “consensus” says, and the clarion call has been loud since the 1990s that the earth’s seas will rise dramatically because of it, then where is the dramatic rise in sea levels? You can always point to one section of seacoast that has eroded. This happens constantly naturally. But where are the really big increases the global warming advocates constantly warn against — those measured in feet not inches. I’ll tell you where they are. They're where they’ve always been — at some distant point in the future.
So what is the real story here? According to http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/19.htm, “Over the last 100 years, the global sea level has risen by about 10 to 25 cm.” That between 4 and 10 inches.
Now my first question is, why is the margin of error on this assessment 150%? Exactly how hard is it to measure the sea level so you are not off by a factor of 6 inches? This isn’t science. It’s alarmist opinion masquerading as fact. In fact, the report continues “On this time scale, the warming and the consequent thermal expansion of the oceans may account for about 2-7 cm of the observed sea level rise, while the observed retreat of glaciers and ice caps may account for about 2-5 cm. Other factors are more difficult to quantify. The rate of observed sea level rise suggests that there has been a net positive contribution from the huge ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, but observations of the ice sheets do not yet allow meaningful quantitative estimates of their separate contributions. The ice sheets remain a major source of uncertainty in accounting for past changes in sea level because of insufficient data about these ice sheets over the last 100 years.”
Translation: we have no idea of what the non man-made influences were during this period of time, nor do we know what is really driving the present process, nor do we know whether the present condition represents a natural or artificial trend, or any real trend at all other than a minor blip in time. But somehow the scientific consensus since 1990 says that the coastal cities are in imminent danger of flooding. Yet in the last 18 years there’s been hardly an increase in sea level at all (maybe a couple millimeters). Do you really expect things to just up and melt all at once in 2030 to meet the prediction that we’ll have a several foot rise by mid-century to threaten our coastal cities? This isn’t science. It’s propaganda.
Changes in the earth are measured in millennia, not the span of a human being’s lifetime. To ignore this fact and “conclude” something from a few years of incomplete data is silly.
If a person wants to change their own life based on silly reasoning and data, go for it. But it’s more than silly if they now demand (which is what a policy action does) that I and the rest of humanity change too. It’s no justification to say that “things might be very bad if my hunch proves correct.” There are lots of silly hunches about everything from climate, to food, to the need to see a doctor if you’re sick vs. the curing power of good thoughts alone. Requiring society to dramatically alter its economy and living habits to accommodate a hunch is fascism as best, totalitarianism at worse.
If people want to clean up the planet and recycle, or take trains instead of drive cars, more power to them. But don’t insist that I do it too because it will “cure” global warming. Stopping oil spills has no more to do with climate change than the treatment for heroin addition has to do with reducing obesity. Both are serious health problems, but they do not automatically require the same solutions, no matter how earnestly one believes that the same cure will lead to “better health” in both matters.
Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 19, 2008
P
This has turned into a Global Warming thread.
You've refuted Yonkel thoroughly on that, but he & others might mull on the following:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=12403
which notes that the "Science Myth of Consensus Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate" & that there's really a "Considerable presence" of skeptics.
But, hey, scientists are supposed to keep trying ‘til they reach a conclusion based on facts. When they declare victory based on “consensus” then, they’ve moving into the realm of just another advocacy group without any scientific bona fides.
To your original point on PC surveys as junk science, Yonkel's electrician analogy is one which could be used by the MSM reporters when challenged for accepting PC surveys without question: All the experts we know agree. It's called the Pauline Kael Effect or the False Consensus Effect. OK, Yonkel hedges by saying, well, maybe not all agree, but then he simply marginalizes those who disagree. Same thing.
Comment by From Inwood | July 19, 2008
Inwood:
Phillip did not refute me as much as line up the arguments on his side. One half of an argument doth not the truth make.
One way of approaching an argument is to spend ones time hunting out those that agree with you and proffering their arguments. We have think tanks of the right and left, and I tend to avoid both. So if I want to research what the APS feels about something, I don't go to the Naderites or Greenpepeace or a skeptic site like you did for their viewpoint, but to the APS.
The daily tech citation took me to a page that judging from all the sidebar articles was obviously concerned with refuting global warming and it did this by addressing issues within the American Physical Society, which seems to be a reputable organization. However, if you actually go to the American Physical Society and search global warming, you get an entirely different picture. Yes there are letters and reports of valid skepticism,and I entertain some skepticism myself, but if you try to get to some official viewoint, the citation that comes up to me is the APS statement on climate change:
http://units.aps.org/units/dbp/newsletter/upload/dec07.pdf
which states: " The APS also urges government, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases."
As to my "marginalizing those that disagree". Firstly, the question is not necessarily a yes and no issue. Although not a climatologist, I am trained in science and science works in probabilities. Now Al Gore may be 100% certain that climate change is at the stage of imminent disaster and Phillip can give me 100 citations that there is 0% chance of any problems, however the bulk of scientists are probably in the middle range, as I earlier described what is my own position that the extent to which human activity threatens the environment is between possible and probable.
And Phillip, you are wrong that Medicine is a science of certainty. On virtually all new discoveries and treatments their are controversies and skeptics, and testing and experimentation offer varying degrees confirmation. That is why we routinely have concensus conferences to advise us docs in the trenches of the most prudent practices in medicine.
If you want to talk philosophy, yes perhaps there is absolute truth, but if you want to weigh scientific opinion, there is far from any agreement on many issues.
And, I don't see any problem with considering secondary benefits to an action. I am less interested in the conceptual issue of global warming than doing what is best for my grandchildren's generation. If preventing global warming required the human sacrifice of our first born, I would be less likely to support those efforts, than if it meant depriviving Ahmadeenijad of the resources to build his A bomb. I consider it my patriotic duty to get 40 mpg and it helps with the cash flow.
Comment by yonkel | July 20, 2008
Yonkel: Again, I encourage everyone to do what they feel is correct to save the planet. Just don't force bad policy on me that requires drastic changes in my life because someone feels strongly about an issue where the science is far from settled.
Speaking as someone who has been involved in actual governmental policy making, despite the salutary benefits which may or may not come from doing Action X, I can tell you that deliberately mixing “pollution” and “climate change” (replacing global warming, which replaced global cooling), is a very bad way to make policy. Policies — and their justifications — should stand on their own merits. If you really want to stick it to Iran and deplete their oil revenues so they don’t have the funds to build a bomb, start drilling in ANWR and off the coast of California and Florida.
I see you still haven’t read my original paper since you talk about 100 citations and 0% problems, so I won’t bother with any additional comments about junk science that’s used to promote political agendas like Man-Made Global warming. This discussion has prompted another essay, though, on the subject of facts, philosophy and policy, which I plan to submit shortly to IC. I’ll continue the discussion there.
Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 20, 2008
Phillip:
I did not read your original paper due to time constraints, though I know I did post on some prior global warming discussions so may have a handle on your thoughts. I know we drove the European views on Bush into the ground.
The "100 citations" is unnecessary and improper hyperbole on my part, but the opinions you listed in comment #12, and I did read them all, that you noted to be "random" were indeed not random, they were selected by you, and I would want to avoid these unresolvable arguments where we each keep quoting people who support our positions.
One wonders what drastic changes in ones life might be. I won't suggest you wearing a hair shirt or being forced to listen to the rock opera "Tommy" 20 times a day ( don't know where that came from, my concept of torture, perhaps), but perhaps driving a car that gets 50 mpgs by 2010 and recycling your bottles. People thought requiring catalytic convertors or unleaded gas were drastic and would ruin the auto industry. It didn't. Betting on fuel inefficient SUVs and trucks did.
I don't necessarily have a problem with drilling in ANWR and offshore and support efforts to increase nuclear energy, wind and solar. This is GWBs position, now, I just supported it earlier and would push it harder. If I were in Congress I would be supportive of a compromise where the Dems gave in on the drilling and nuclear issues if the GOP would bend a little more for greater conservation. McCain would be good for doing that.
Conservation would have the most immediate direct effect on gas prices, carbon emmisions etc. It worked in the 70s and brought prices down, but ever since, per capita gasoline consumption has increased. Market trends will ameliorate that situation some, though without some intervention I think growing Indian and Chineese consumption which is a fraction of US, will keep supply tight. Increasing supply is beneficial, though drilling won't produce returns for years.
I think there is also an illusion that if oil is found in America that it offers Americans a preferential reduction in gas prices . It does offer some geopolitical benefits, but Alaskan oil has no more effect on a global commodity prices as any other oil found elsewhere, and in terms of global reserves, I don't think the effect will be dramatic.Exxon is not going to sell any cheaper to Americans than the Japaneese, but again, no problem with increasing drilling though costs and risks need to be evaluated on a case by case basis. Drilling a mile off Miami Beach as probably not a prudent move, but I am sure there are places we could drill.
As to the "killing two birds with one stone" approach, my interest is in reducing consumption. If I want to do it for reduced carbon emmisions which you don't feel is important, but you would support it to keep trillions of dollars out of Putin, Chavez, and Ahmadinijad's hands, fine. We may not agree on theory, but we could agree on policy that would support both of our goals. I am more concerned about the future than winning an argument.
Comment by yonkel | July 20, 2008
Yonkel
You’ve hijacked this site about junk science in social science surveys to argue The Global Warming Theory as proven by consensus. OK, I get the connection, you want to throw more junk science in our faces.
You quibble over my using the word “refute”, by making it that our host must disprove that the Theory of Global Warming. Sorry, but the burden of proof is on the one who espouses The GW Theory & what Phil is saying, with mucho citations to mucho scientific people, and moreover to climatologists rather than calamitologists, is that The Global Warming Theory is still simply not proven. As was the case with last generation’s scare mongering, The Global Freezing Theory. Or, more precisely, not proven yet to the satisfaction of thinking people like himself & others who have reviewed & thoughtfully considered positions on both sides.
And of course I’m not saying that the APS has absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly, without question (you did note the word “skepticism”) disproved The GW Theory. I repeat: It doesn’t have to. As the old comic routine would have it “I’m dubious.”
And as for your electrical & medicine analogies, physicists & MDs have proven, respectively, that there is such as thing as electricity & cancer. QED, consensus building is a useful practical tool in approaching issues arising as a result of these proven phenomena. But no scientists, much less calamitologists have proven The Global Warming Theory.
Look, there’s global warming & there’s The Global Warming Theory, which has transmogrified signs of global warming or any anecdotal warming of any kind (God it’s hot today in Yankee Stadium; Derek Jeter looks exhausted) into another stick with which to enforce anti-capitalistic PC ideologies &, moreover, like some bad version of the Spanish Inquisition, to crush dissent.
Hey, put me down as favoring conservation & put me down against waste; I’m sure that Phil agrees. And I don’t know anybody who’s against “conservation”. Ah, but the devil is in the details. Even the most outspoken proponents of the Chicken-Little suicidal approach to conservation do not practice what they preach. They still live in luxury GW-inefficient homes & fly their jets, & use their gas guzzlers to get to places when they should ask themselves, as we did in WW II: “is this trip necessary”. And they favor Kyoto, which exempts the two biggest contributors to pollution & which is ignored by European signatories.
So, please spare me UWS Liberal elitist theorizing. It’s important for me to be able to type this my air-conditioned room in clear light after a warm meal of energy-intensive preprocessed goodies imported from afar by Whole Foods, no less, & sold in one of their over lit, over air-conditioned stores.
BTW, I’m using CFC bulbs & now I’m told that since they contain mercury, they present disposal problems. What am I to do?
Regards
Anxious
PS I'm not picking on your sincerity, just your impracticality & your unscientific acceptance of today's theory re temperatures.
Comment by From Inwood | July 20, 2008
Oh thanks Inwood!
I was just getting ready to reply to this thread when I saw and read Yonkel's last missive. At that point, I thought, he's going to keep this up until he get's the last word, so I'll let it go. So now, I'll chime in knowing the last word is still coming.
(A)Anybody that calls 9 electrician to confirm a diagnosis has his head on backward. What would he think of a medical patient who did this?
(B) I wish he would stop mentioning Putin in with Chavez and Ahmadeenijad (sic). Russia is not the USSR and Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev is the president. Yes, Putin is still involved, but overall our relations with Russia are good.
(C) This began as an article about genetics and violence. Why the obsession with GW?
(D) The yo-yo’s in DC are talking about Federal laws restricting drilling. Not one of them would suggest an oil derrick of Miami Beach and the state of Florida would have a say about that, so why bring it up. It’s a typical liberal trick.
Comment by Ivan Ivanovich | July 20, 2008
Ivan. In defense of Yonkel, who I think is a good guy and agree with on a lot of other things, I'm probably to blame for letting this drift into a GW thread. I tend to bring up the myth of man made global warming whenever I talk about junk science as a further example of the "junk" I'm talking about.
The problem is that even conservatives who care deeply about the environment tend to blend general planet-friendly policy options (like reducing unnecessary waste and consumption) with agenda-laden pseudo-crises like man-made global warming. You've got to look beyond fear and emotion when you're advocating a cure that would fundamentally restructure the economy and our standard of living. It's the same reason we fought Hillary Care in the 1990s. Good intentions do not outweigh good data, or a true understanding of all the implications that such a policy carries. [As someone in the medical community, I doubt that Yonkel would apply the same criteria to adopting Hillary Care that he assigns to embracing the man-made global warming agenda.]
Follow the money on MMGW, and we’ll all understand why it holds such appeal for the Left. Unless you really look at the underlying dynamics of this charade, as you and I and others have done, you don't fully appreciate the insidious nature of these so-called policy prescriptions.
Yonkel: As for drilling in the US reducing US gas prices, of course they will. Market forces will insure a drop in gas prices as more oil/gas comes on the market. And we won't have to wait until the new refined oil appears. Just the simple fact of being serious about getting this natural resource will impact the market price of oil.
Whether conservation is a good, bad or indifferent thing to do, however, and whether we should pump more R&D money into solar and wind power is another specific topic. Solutions to the problem of pollution are not the same thing as solutions to the problems of a presumed global warming. There may be some overlap of ideas, but you've got to appreciate the distinctions first before you insert one set of "solutions" into another problem's cure.
Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 20, 2008
So where are we?
Here's where I am, with all due respect to all commentators here:
Junk science is bad because it is a perversion of science by those who argue it & leads to faulty actions on the part of those who fall for it.
QED, there’s no scientific proof that crime is caused by genes, by an uncontrollable impulse, by poverty, or by all the other excuses offered in studies by social scientists who’d like to run a government-funded anti-poverty program.
BTW, The GW Theory, whatever its scientific underpinnings, is being sold as "we're all gonna die" from it, obviously a ridiculous unscientific perversion from the facts presented.
Conservation is good. (As long as it doesn't change MY life style.)
Preventing pollution is good. (As long as it doesn't change MY lifestyle.)
Respect for the Environment is good. (As long as it doesn't change MY lifestyle.)
Unilateral de-industrialization is suicide. (It will change my lifestyle & that of all Americans.)
Comment by From Inwood | July 20, 2008
Inwood:
I am not hijacking the site, good grief, I have posted on two or three topics in some number of months and in the discussion was with Phillip we wondered off to Global Warming. We are just blogging, the fate of the world does not depend on this.
I agree in general terms with you about people being responsible for their behaviours, I just don't have a problem with people uncovering information about genetics.
If they extrapolate that information to unjustified conclusions, then that is inappropriate. And, yes, I have often seen this done by people with agendas, right or left and abhor it. The most common misuse of statistics is to find small associations and then generalize to larger populations. The article cited did point out a small association, but I saw no hint of suggestion about people not being responsible for their actions.
So, I think there is badly done science as their is badly done Shakespeare, I just am unaware of this branch of Junk Science that exists. Most of the modern studies are very careful and fairly rigorous. Now, Freudian psychiatry, that qualifies for me as pure bushwah, but let me refrain here from rehijacking the thread on that.
The 9 electricians is what I would call a parable. I don't typically consult more than one. I may be politically incorrect, but am a bonafide cheapskate The point is that given mixed opinions on the presence of danger, one might choose the side of caution.
I do not support unilateral de-industrialization.
The last part of your piece, I am not sure if that is straight or satire, "Conservation is good (As long as it does not affect my Lifestyle)" but whatever your intent on that, I do believe in individual responsibility, that was part of Phillips message, nuh?
And what is QED. I'm an old guy.
Comment by yonkel | July 20, 2008
And lastly Phillip:
Thank you for the kind words.
Re oil, I do believe that increase of supply leads to a decrease in price. Adam Smith had that right. My point was just that US finds effect on price is related to its effect on overalll world supply which is small, compared to its effect on the country's supply which would be substantial.
At any rate, I will trade you two "drill where you will" cards for a 50 mpg mandate in 2010.
Morpheus is at the door.
Comment by yonkel | July 20, 2008
Yonkel
OK, our host has taken responsibility for hijacking this thread regarding GW. And he says that you’re a good guy. So peace.
But I’m reminded of one of those psychiatrist jokes, the one where the Shrink is working with a Prostitute patient & shows her inkblots. She says when viewing each one that it reminds her of sex. The shrink says “Um… can you elaborate?” The Pros replies, “I dunno, everything reminds me of sex.”
Everything reminds some people of GW, it seems :-) .
Or how ‘bout this variation of the clerical joke:
A rabbi, a minister, & a priest discuss their next Sabbath/Sunday Sermons.
I will tell my congregation that campaigning against Global Warming is a mitzvah, says the rabbi.
I will tell my congregation that those guilty of Global Warming are sinners in the hands of an angry god, says the minister.
I will tell my congregation that if St. Barbara, the patron saint of builders, St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters & engineers, & St Martin, the patron saint of businesses were alive today, they’d surely be against Global Warming!
(Drum Roll!)
And the nine electricians which you defend yourself against Ivan. I know, you were channeling that Dorothy Sayers Story: The Nine Tailors, which may be relevant here in that it involved long-lost village life. (Or maybe The Hon. Love Client Number Nine).
So along storytelling lines, of interest to GW theorists of a literary (but, of course, not of a scientific) bent is Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, in which, in the 1770s, he bemoans the effect on simple bucolic life by the equivalent of today’s agri-businesses & Big Steel.
When I read TDV in college I was glad that I could live to be more than 30 or 35, the average life span of the denizens of a village in the late 18th century, though, of course, some with good genes could live four score & seven….
If I may, then, the lesson for GW extremists (but I repeat myself) is that if the U.S. signs Kyoto (or some equivalent), which all the current signatories flaunt & which exempts the two biggest bad guys, the US, via lawsuits against those who are trying to make a living, will unilaterally de-industrialize itself.
So be aware that the remedy for the alleged ills envisioned by the GW Theory supporters, a theory after all, will be worse than the alleged ills.
Regards,
PS "QED" is from HS Geometry. I wasn’t trying to be snotty.
Comment by From Inwood | July 21, 2008
Inwood
I was already LOL at your Pro story when I read "a rabbi…" and that made me laugh more. I don't know if it applies, but I heard a good one yesterday on CSPAN. A guy was talking about imigration and he said "An old guy takes his grandkids to Ellis Island and he says 'This country was different when I came here. It was a miserable hell hole where everyone was happy.'"
On the QED question, I knew it had some significance, but in 1969, when I first sat down at a computer the Quick Editor was called QED and that fact overwrote my HS lernin, so thanks for reminding us.
And Yonkel
I offer peace also, but on matters of principle I'll only agree to disagree.
Comment by Ivan Ivanovich | July 21, 2008
A friend of mine just sent me this email (a news story today). It's another generic lesson in the need to recognize junk science for what it is.
The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming "incontrovertible."
In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."
The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton's paper an "expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and "extensive errors"
In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, "I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC's 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central 'climate sensitivity' question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method."
According to Monckton, there is substantial support for his results, "in the peer-reviewed literature, most articles on climate sensitivity conclude, as I have done, that climate sensitivity must be harmlessly low."
Monckton, who was the science advisor to Britain's Thatcher administration, says natural variability is the cause of most of the Earth's recent warming. "In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years … Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth."
Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 21, 2008
Inwood, Yonkel, Ivan and others:
I appreciate the way this thread has allowed ideas to be discussed, rather than substituting personal attacks for counter-arguments as I find too often in other threads. As Dennis Praeger often says, I value clarity over consensus. We’ll never agree on everything, so the debate — at least in my mind — is how one marshals support for their positions, and reacts to the substantive challenges of others.
Take care all, Phil
Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 21, 2008
"Girls were not included in the study; only young, hormone-exploding adolescent boys from the ages of 13-18 years old. While their female counterparts are presumably busy studying the collective works of Jane Austen,…"
Yeah, right. I've seen women at the office play some of the most vicious mind games you can imagine. It would be interesting to see how many "cousin Bettes" could be wrung out of a study of 20,000 females.
Comment by sedonaman | July 21, 2008
P
Here’s a U.K. news report laughing at another U.K. media "report" about stats which "prove" how Bad & Racist America is, but which report, unfortunately, gets the stats all mixed up! Other than that….
It's a reverse Lake Woebegone effect where all the Southerners are below average.
The headline reads "American inequality highlighted by 30-year gap in life expectancy"
The report itself explains that this 30-year gap is "between Mississippi, in the Deep South, and Connecticut, in prosperous New England." And, that there is "a staggering 50-year life expectancy gap" between Asian-American men and Black Americans.
See
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/07/20/brian-kalt-no-african-americans-don-t-have-a-life-expectancy-in-the-30s.aspx.
There's this old tale about the Irish biddy who was a real gossip monger, repeating anything bad she heard. Once when challenged about the truth of what she was peddling, she replied "well, it's true enough". SOP for the MSM.
Anyway, how can the media be expected to fact check when it's all mixed up in addition to operating from a pre-ordained assumption: AmeriKKKa is evil? Until, that is, when Obamessiah gets elected & then all such stories will disappear. There will be no hunger, no thirst, no poverty genes….
Comment by From Inwood | July 21, 2008
Sedona: Boy did you get that one right! The only difference between getting knifed by a woman and a man in a business setting is that with a man, you have more of a chance to see it coming.
Take care, Phil
Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 21, 2008
Ivan
That C-Span story is funny, but alas too true. Except that such stories will be forbidden when Obamessiah is elected.
Anyway, Michelle will explain that the US was a miserable hell hole until the Obamessiah got elected & made her feel good. Of course she had to give up that $300M "job", but she'll make that up when she contracts to write her memoirs after her 8 years as President following his 8 years.
Comment by From Inwood | July 21, 2008
Inwood — Obama is planning on being in power for 10 years, not 8. He'll preside over the 57 United States and work hard to keep another bomb from being dropped on Hawaii.
Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 21, 2008
Inwood:
The author of the article you linked to said, "What fascinated me was how a reporter could believe–let alone write–that black Americans have the same life expectancy as people in Swaziland …"
What a silly boy. Where has he been? Hasn't he ever heard of Dan Rather?
Comment by sedonaman | July 21, 2008
Sedonaman
Jane Austen wrote about the Audacity of Early 19th century English Society!
And she wrote about the mendacity of such society, and how bad it was to be poor. (Newsflash: in America no one of sound mind & body who applies him/her self need stay poor.) Anyway, Jane's genteel poverty doesn't resonate with today's welfare kids, male or female. And further, Jane had good genes & her characters did too so that they were able to get Col. Brandon & Mr. Darcy. Just like AmeriKKKa of the 1950s. Statistics prove that. Today's wymyn identify more with (avoiding)the plight of, say, Dreiser's heroines or those of other oppressed pre-Betty-Freidan women. But Jane did not go & get an education & become a lawyer engaged in "poverty" programs like Michelle, so Jane probably doesn't resonate with Michelle either.
Comment by From Inwood | July 21, 2008
Time for another list:
(A)I heard Obama say 8 to 10 years today when referring to his relationship with Middle-east leaders. Good catch Inwood!
(B)I'm all for 50MPG (voluntarily), but why is no one talking about 4 wheel drive? It's about the dumbest thing I've ever seen, everyone driving around on the parkways with AWD & 4WD stickers on the back. Somebody please tell these people we are NOT in the Outback.
(C)While on the subject of CAFÉ. How would doctors feel if the feds said they have to guarantee lower infant mortality and longer lives for all Americans or be fined?
(D) Don’t forget that girls can always cry if things don’t go their way.
(E) 50 year gap! My butt! That sounds like the report I heard on the radio about two airliners coming within 200 feet. Later I read the report and it said 200 feet vertically and a half mile horizontally. The worst part is that they don’t even give that Roseanne Roseannadana ending of “NEVERMIND!”
Comment by Ivan Ivanovich | July 21, 2008
Ivan:
Curious on your take on Putin. My grandparents came over when the czars were still there. Heres a joke:
A lady approaches her rabbi and tells him, "Rabbi, I have
a problem. I have two female talking parrots, but they only
know how to say one thing."
"What do they say?" the rabbi inquired.
"They only know how to say, 'Hi, we're prostitutes. Want
to have some fun?'"
"That's terrible!" the rabbi exclaimed, "but I have a
solution to your problem. Bring your two female parrots
over to my house and I will put them with my two male
talking parrots whom I taught to pray and read Hebrew.
My parrots will teach your parrots to stop saying that
terrible phrase and your female parrots will learn to praise
and worship."
"Thank you!" the woman responded.
The next day the woman brings her female parrots to the rabbi's house.
His two male parrots are wearing tiny yamulkes and praying in
their cage. The lady puts her two female parrots in with the male parrots
and the female parrots say, "Hi, we're prostitutes, want to have some fun?"
One male parrot looks over at the other male parrot and
exclaims, "Put away the prayer books! Our prayers have been answered!"
Comment by yonkel | July 21, 2008
And to be ecumenical about it:
John O'Reilly hoisted his beer and said, "Here's to spending the rest of me
life between the legs of me wife!"
That won him the top prize at the pub for the best toast of the night!
He went home and told his wife, Mary, "I won the prize for the Best toast
of the night"
She said, "Aye, did ye now. And what was your toast?"
John said,"Here's to spending the rest of me life, sitting in church beside me
wife." "Oh, that is very nice indeed, John!" Mary said.
The next day, Mary ran into one of John's drinking buddies on the street
corner.The man chuckled leeringly and said, "John won the prize the other
night at the pub with a toast about you, Mary."
She said, "Aye, he told me, and I was a bit surprised myself. You know, he's only been there twice in the last four years. Once he fell asleep, and the other time I had to pull him by the ears to make him come.
Comment by yonkel | July 21, 2008
Yonkel
Mine too, but my wife came over 9 years ago and she keeps in contact weekly. I admit I'm biased, but I think that the Russians have greater potential to be our friends than just about anyone in the world.
My dad's side is Scot/Irish, so I like your stories and everybody likes Rabbi stories. I think a certain portion of my support for Isreal is based on the humor of jews. If all these so-called oppressed groups would have a sense of humor they could pull themselves up. Rejection of Bill Cosby is a bad sign.
Thanks
Comment by Ivan Ivanovich | July 22, 2008