How About That Precautionary Principle Now - Road to the Middle Class

SOME YEARS ago environmentalists set up the Precautionary Principle as a dodge to stop economic development. You shouldn’t do anything, they insist, unless you are pretty certain that it is safe.

Now they argue that, since everyone agrees that global warming will melt the glaciers on Greenland and inundate the low lying areas of the world that we should cut back on greenhouse gas production in coal and hydrocarbon burning. It is the precautionary thing to do.

But what about the new research that links cosmic ray intensity with cloud cover? According to Steven Milloy two Danish researchers, Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, have established an experimental link between the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the earth and low-level cloud cover.

Their hypothesis was based on a strong correlation between levels of cosmic radiation and cloud cover -- that is, the greater the cosmic radiation, the greater the cloud cover. Clouds cool the Earth's climate by reflecting about 20 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space.

The hypothesis was potentially significant because during the 20th century, the influx of cosmic rays was reduced by a doubling of the Sun's magnetic field, which shields the Earth from cosmic rays.

A hypothesis is fine, but does it check out? Thank you, Mr Vice-President, I’m glad you asked, because I know you will be anxious to update your documentary An Inconvenient Truth with the latest science.

Svensmark published a paper last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in which he claimed that his team “had experimentally verified the physical mechanism by which cosmic rays affect cloud cover.”

Here is the press release announcing the experimental results. It shows that cosmic rays do indeed form minute aerosols of sulphuric acid as hypothesized.

But at RealClimate they are having none of it. They list five “missing steps” between establishing that cosmic rays create “ultra-small aerosol particles” and that cloud cover is controlled by the combination of cosmic rays and variations in the sun’s magnetic field.

The chaps at Junk Science are quite excited. They aren’t as vested in the “enhanced greenhouse hypothesis” as the chaps at RealClimate.

So the controversy continues.

Of course, whatever the science says the question is: what should we do about climate change? What is the precautionary thing to do?

Should we try to reverse anthropic changes like the increase in greenhouse gages over the last century? Or should we adapt to any changes in climate and sea level as they occur?

And anyway, how do anthropogenic changes play out against natural fluctuations such as earth orbit oscillations, solar radiation fluctuations, and anything else going on that we haven’t even noticed yet?

Mr President, are we safe?

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

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Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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