The Long Hill Institute Looks at AOC and her Green New Deal

The column below appeared in the March 2019 Sturbridge Times Town & Country Magazine

We’ll Need a Lot of Green For This Deal

By Richard Morchoe

The young congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez popularly known as AOC has made quite a splash in the new Congress.  She and others aligned with her have come up with a set of proposals called The Green New Deal.

Her program could be termed secular millenarian as she wants to stop the world from ending while solving all our problems from healthcare to unemployment.

How bad is the situation?  According to AOC: “...we're like, 'The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change...?"

That her words display the usual illiteracy of generations after mine (“we’re like” might mean “we think” or “we believe,” but who knows?) should be expected.  

To be brutally bipartisan, the President will often use similarly ridiculous locutions.  

But, we digress.  The question is, who believes the dire prediction and the necessity of her program?  The agenda she is proposing consists of the following:

1. Upgrade all existing buildings
2. 100% clean power
3. Support family farms
4. Universal access to healthy food
5. Zero-emission vehicle infrastructure
6. Remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere
7. Eliminate unfair competition
8. Affordable access to electricity
9. Create high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages
10. Guaranteeing a job with a family sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement

There was one part not mentioned above that I was completely behind.  A line on her website called for supporting "economic security to all those who are unable or unwilling to work."  The Congresswoman had me at “unwilling.”  As soon as the bill was signed, your columnist would be in sloth mode for good.  Unfortunately, when people noticed that, her team did not so much walk as run it back.

It is an ambitious agenda that will take more than 12 years.  If one truly believes we have only that dozen, the reasonable course of action would be to borrow as much money as possible for the short duration left and party like it’s 2031 (i.e. 12 years hence).

The question is, is she right?  Are we really on the way to the end of existence?  We referred the question to our official think tank, The Long Hill Institute for the Study of Climate Change (LHIftSoCC for short).  After a brief deliberation, followed by a well-earned siesta, they announced a finding as follows, “Heck if we know.”

Clearly, this was not satisfactory and it was necessary to insist on some elaboration.  The institute told us that almost everyone who opines about climate change is utilizing “argument from authority.”  What that means is that just about all the partisans of human caused climate change are using the writings or publications of experts.  The opponents do the same thing.

The appeal to experts depends on both the intelligence and honesty of the savants if it is to be trusted.  AOC got the 12-year number from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which the Guardian called the world’s leading climate scientists.  Their names and credentials were not listed, but we can give them the benefit of the doubt and agree they are not dropouts from East Overshoe Junior College.

I was then stung by an accusation from the Long Hill Institute that I too used argument from authority.  Of course, they were correct. Your columnist has little access to the scholarly data and his ability to understand it limited in the sense of being non-existent.

Because the coverage of climate change is so one sided in the mainstream media, one has to search to find people who disagree with the accepted narrative.  Some of them are a bit sketchy with dubious credentials.  Thus, we have Richard Lindzen.  Lindzen is a distinguished senior fellow in the Center for the Study of Science. He is also emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT, where he was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor, beginning in 1983. Prior to that he was the Robert P. Burden Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard University.

He has other achievements, but once you know he taught at a diploma mill like MIT, who cares?

Lindzen is attacked by the proponents of the idea of human caused climate change mercilessly for disagreeing.  No matter, he is fun to listen to.  When he gets into the science, he loses me the same way his opponents do.

What’s your average walking around citizen to do, or rather believe?

Again, I must emphasize the science escapes me, but as mentioned above, it also does not adhere to almost everyone else.  I do suspect those who must use ad hominems and call their opponents names such as “deniers.”

The former Boston Globe writer Ellen Goodman started the ball rolling in 2007: “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”

In that Globe column, there was no science from the lady.  She, like the rest of us, utilized the work of others.  Goodman did make one statement that did seem original, “The certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as certain as scientists ever get.”

That is a bit embarrassing.  Scientists agree on the certainty of scientific laws 100%, always.  They don’t meet at conferences and say, “ya know, I’m gonna give the law of gravity a 75% today and if I’m feeling real good, a 90% tomorrow.”  Now being a generous soul, I’m not going to call Ellen out as a denier.

Again, let me emphasize that I am not a denier, I’m a don’t knower.  I trust Professor Lindzen more than others, but it is only a hunch.  As to climate change itself, I should be shocked if it did not happen, just the causes might be in question.

There is an area of the environment where I feel confidence in my opinion.  As a beekeeper, I’ve seen the struggle to keep our little friends become more difficult every year.

The link between the Monsanto pesticide glysophate and declining bee health is convincing, but here I am still taking my stand based on science promulgated by others, with the addition of personal experience.

So, I have to cut AOC some slack, though her program is impossible.

Your columnist, is however brave enough to offer AOC a bet in a sly way and is willing to wager a significant sum that we will not be dead due to environmental causes by the end of 12 years.

If I win she has to pay.  If I lose, she won’t be around to collect.

The Official Long Hill Institute Position on Global Warming

The Long Hill Institute position on Global Warming is, we don't know and you probably don't either.

The general consensus of the American bien pensant class is that it is not merely a thing, but a huge big thing that can only be cured if vast sums of moolah are thrown at it.

The Long Hill Institute has decided that unless we are willing to send a trusted staff member to become a certified climate science, we should not opine too heavily on the subject.  We did not dispatch a staff member to study the subject in depth because no one volunteered and if they did, they would not have been trusted anyway.

As the sky is falling narrative is the preferred media explanation of most everything, we leave you with a couple of alternatives to consult for the balance we cannot provide.

Richard Lindzen is an atmospheric physicist and was the Alfred P. From 1983^[1] until his retirement in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at  a post-secondary school called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  We aver he may not be a wild eyed nutcase as most deniers skeptics are characterized.  You can read about his views here.  He has been called a disinformer.

As to the famous 97% consensus, economist David Friedman rebuts that claim.  Is he right?  Up on Long Hill, we were lucky to get to the end of the article as we are on full dilettante mode.  If a respected academic wants to question the statistics, well there are two sides.

Below is the article that explains our position.  It appeared in the October 2009 issue of the Sturbridge Times Magazine.

WHAT DO I KNOW?

I tried to get my wife to take all the family’s money and put it into Mega-bucks tickets. My rationale was that I had always said it would be a cold day in July before I ever won any money. Well we had a lot of cold rainy July days this year. August, however turned out sultry hot.

 Still it is a summer like none that I remember. We have had rainy spells, but little as soggy as this year. The weather occasioned a debate on talk radio. The hosts generally take the position that the low temps prove global warming a hoax. Some callers will argue the other side, a few even positing the cold spell as evidence that warming is true.

 Which side is right? Beats me. My cousin in usually waterlogged Seattle tells me they are experiencing the warmest Spring and Summer ever. Well, that settles, exactly nothing. The only thing that is certain is that true believers on either side of the argument will not be swayed by anything said by the opposition.

Why not? Well why should they? What can one know? Unfortunately, not much in the modern world. The problem was best expressed by George Orwell over 60 year ago,

“Somewhere or other—I think it is in the preface to Saint Joan—Bernard Shaw remarks that we are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the MiddleAges,and as an example of modern credulity he cites the widespread belief that the earth is round.The average man, says Shaw, can advance not a single reason for thinking that the earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth-century mentality.”

Orwell then went on to prove the point that he himself had no reason to believe the world was round even though he accepted that it was. Of course we who are living now can point to pictures from space and all that, but we have to admit that few of us have made a study of it and are taking it more or less on faith. His closing paragraph sums it up:

 “It will be seen that my reasons for thinking that the earth is round are rather precarious ones. Yet this is an exceptionally elementary piece of information. On most other questions I should have to fall back on the expert much earlier, and would be less able to test his pronouncements.And much the greater part of our knowledge is at this level.It does not rest on reasoning or on experiment, but on authority.And how can it be otherwise, when the range of knowledge is so vast that the expert himself is an ignoramous as soon as he strays away from his own speciality? Most people, if asked to prove that the earth is round, would not even bother to produce the rather weak arguments I have outlined above. They would start off by saying that ’everyone knows’ the earth to be round, and if pressed further,would become angry.In a way Shaw is right. This is a credulous age, and the burden of knowledge which we now have to carry is partly responsible.”

 In truth, with my own unaided reason, I could not have figured out the Earth is round. As a child in elementary school, I did have my primitive sense of wonder piqued when Columbus was explained. Unfortunately, they explained it wrong. Columbus did not come up with something shocking in the world is round idea. Most scholars already believed it. Chris thought the circumference of the globe smaller than it was. He had made a mistake that gave us the New World.

So how does this connect to Global Warming. At a family gathering the various members were talking about the question. I won’t say discussing. Neither side answered the others’ questions other than to state a fact. My techie son asked a relative how they would explain that Mars is heating up at the same rate as the Earth. A statement was made in reply, but no answer. How do people become so doctrinaire over something even experts disagree about?

It is time to quote true experts on human nature. No, not Nietsche or Freud, but Gilbert and Sullivan:

That every boy and every gal

That's born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative!

Fal, lal, la!

Yup, we’re born that way. I accept it and am waiting for my application to the Flat Earth Society to be approved. They have my solemn undertaking to agree with their official Global Warming Policy no matter what it is.