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Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Man Bear Pig
What are we going to do about Trey Parker and Matt Stone?
Tonight they continued their bizarre denial of climate science with an episode mocking Al Gore with the metaphor for global warning being the ex-VP fear-mongering about "man-bear-pig." Apparently Al Gore is now warning about global warning, as he did for years before his entrance onto the national political scene, because he craves attention. This is despite multiple commentators lamenting that he didn't bring up the issue during the damn election of 2000 instead focusing on the damn "lock box." I've loved South Park for years with occasional blips when they've decided to be unnecessarily contrarian about things like global warming. These days I get the feeling that they are more interested in being contrarian than in using their show to satirize real problems. Granted, I loved their satire of the whole Mohammed cartoon issue, after all, over a year ago they represented Mohammed in a cartoon in their "Super Best Friends episode." No one set fire to a KFC over that, but they got censored on Comedy Central after that whole Danish row despite a history of mocking Mohammed in cartoon form. That's pretty kick-ass. So why are they so anti-global warming? They've had two episodes against it this season alone. It's a little frustrating when I read Science every single week and see the mounting evidence and these guys just continue to thumb their nose at science just like the creationists do. So, can climate scientists get together and just try contacting these guys to try to convince them they're being a little bit immature on the whole global warming issue? These guys have a big loudspeaker and they use it to spit out anti-environmental propaganda, not out of any malice, but out of their natural tendancy to be contrarian to the prevailing view of the world. If evolution ever becomes a majority opinion I swear they'll make an episode about how scientists are stupid for studying fossils. For the life of me I can't find my favorite proxy measurements of temperature over the last few thousand years via pubmed searches. The best I can find is this graph of multiple temperature proxies over that last few thousand years.  If anyone remembers the article, it was either Nature or Science in the last six months, please tell me. It was a measurement, by proxy, of global mean temperature correlated with CO2 emissions over several thousand years. It was really a beautiful piece of data, but I can't seem to track it down. In the meantime, let's ask ourselves, even if this is just a bunch of overreaction to climate fluctuation, do we really want to risk the one place in the universe hospitable to human life? Isn't the safest course of action to behave as if the Earth is relatively fragile, rather than assuming it can take endless amounts of greenhouse gasses being spewed into the atmosphere? found it  I shamelessly stole this from Stable Carbon Cycle-Climate Relationship During the Late Pleistocene, Urs Siegenthaler et al. in Science last year. The top curve is proxy data from ice cores of CO2 content of the atmosphere in the antarctic for the last 700 millenia or so. The deltaD is a measurement of Deuterium, a proxy for temperature at each time. Basically it shows a perfect correlation between CO2 content and temperature for 700k years. Examining {delta}D as a function of CO2, we observe that the slope during the two new glacial cycles compared to the last four cycles is essentially the same. Therefore, the coupling of Antarctic temperature and CO2 did not change significantly during the last 650 kyear, indicating rather stable coupling between climate and the carbon cycle during the late Pleistocene. Other data in the paper shows the nature of this linear relationship. They've been criticized by the carbon lovers (*cough* coal-company stooges *cough*) over the fact that the increases in carbon are followed by a lag between something like 200-1800 years between the concommitant temperature increase. The flaw in the argument though is that it's assuming that Siegenthaler et al. had the ability to resolve temperature differences from century to century, and I don't think their measurements had that high of a resolution. The other flaw is that it's correlative, but even so it's a perfect correlation over ~700k years, that's gotta make you wonder about the lucidity of the global warming deniers these days. Correlation is not causation, but 700k years of correlation really makes you think, do we want to find out if there truly is causation? Wouldn't that mean putting earth in the test tube and shaking it up with all of us on it? I personally don't want to find the absolute proof that this is causative, it means we all die. |
11 Comments:
I think you miss the point of their cartoon. I don't think they are denying Global Warming. They are trying to say that the incredible costs of trying to stop something that is probably unstoppable is too great.
Gore flooded the mine to stop manbearpig nearly killing the children. That was their point.
At least that's what I got from it.
11:27 AM, April 27, 2006
I think our two views are actually consistent, but by calling it "man bear pig" a mythical beast, they're clearly saying that it's all bullshit anyway. So not only are the costs incredibly high, but the issue isn't even real.
That combined with their anti-Prius episode, and their "Day After Tomorrow" parody, I get the feeling they're childishly being contrarian about global warming because they're just the type of guys that never want to be told to do anything (a kind of self-centered libertarianism).
11:33 AM, April 27, 2006
The NY Times had a nice 'state of the debate' article a few days ago. It was mostly about the inability of democracies to act in their long term interests, but the best part I thought was
"In 2001, a large team of scientists issued the latest assessment of climate change and concluded that more than half of the recent warming was likely to have been caused by people . . .[due to CO2]."
That percentage might be wrong (going with the Crichtons and nay-sayers here for a sec), but the real point was brought home in this sentence: "There is no serious debate any more about one thing: more of these gases will cause more warming."
As for South Park, I've long since noted that way up on my list of people I don't want to piss off are those guys and Oprah. That said, the fact that they had an episode in which two of the central characters were Oprah's vagina and sphincter totally blew my mind. Notwithstanding the fact that they are giant jerks, they really do have more cajones than I can possibly imagine.
-JE
2:16 PM, April 27, 2006
Yeah, I wouldn't want to piss them off either.
I just have a feeling I know the type of guys they are, and I'm a little irritated how they use their loudspeaker.
Most of the time when they're being contrarian I enjoy it, because I'm not Catholic/Mormon/Republican/Vegan/Hippy.
However, the reason they've mocked all these groups is because of the silly irrational things they do, like Catholics believing in bleeding statues, or hippies for thinking they change the world by getting stoned.
When you start screwing with environmentalism I'm just more sensitive because we're just starting to get everyone on the same page here, and these guys start flipping out because of the suggestion that we should expect people to modify their lifestyles to be more compatible with continuous life on earth. It doesn't seem to unreasonable to ask people to stop driving Hummers and maybe try walking a mile or two for once in their pathetic sedentary lives. But these guys have had a really negative reaction towards it and it makes me sad, because I usually like them.
Anyway, someone needs to get together a bunch of climate scientists, take these guys on a world tour of the most visible global-warming trouble zones, and try to convince them we're not making this up "to get attention."
5:27 PM, April 27, 2006
Rev. Dr. : I found this blog through technorati and this is the only post I've read of yours. I'm posting anonymously because I somehow forgot my password to blogger. I respect your opinion, but I still disagree.
The Prius episode was about the attitudes some people have towards others. It was the attitudes Prius drivers have towards Hummer drivers, but more importantly, it was the disrespect people of one ideology (any ideology) towards people of another. They were saying "Look, you are an evironmentalists but there are people who aren't, so don't walk around like you're better. Don't be arrogant." I think this is clear by the closing monologue where Stan (I believe it's Stan) explains that hybrids are good and it is something we should embrace, but the attitude that comes along with it isn't good.
Their day after tomorrow episode was a parody of the movie. Climate change isn't an overnight event but the movie makes it out to be. It was also saying how ridiculous it was to conclude that Katrina was caused by global warming. It again didn't refute global warming.. it instead questioned the intensity of the problem.
Manbearpig may point to them believing global warming is bullshit. You make a good point. However, it is always hard to say with the SouthPark boys because they always use metaphors which are absolutely ridiculous. To me, it is inconsistent with their other episodes to see global warming as bullshit. It is more consistent to use a ridiculous mystical beast to metaphor a real problem. It's just funnier when Al Gore is talking about manbearpig rather than a plain ol' bear.
7:36 PM, April 27, 2006
Oh, I forgot this part.
Self-centered libertarianism. You are completely correct. I'm one of those and I don't want people telling me what to do.
When we quote "Give me Liberty or give me death." We really mean it.
7:40 PM, April 27, 2006
Sorry, I'll never be a big fan of libertarians. It's the unwillingness to accept the need for laws and regulations that prevent massive public harm that always sets me against them.
Libertarians like Bill Maher are more my cup of tea. He doesn't realize it, but he's more of a civil libertarian, otherwise he wouldn't mock the government for failing on Katrina, Medicare, the poor etc., because a true economic libertarian wouldn't expect the government to perform these functions (or perform them well). In short, the myth of private enterprise being better than public endeavors is what sets me off, because I think it's just blatantly untrue, and no proof has ever been offered that suggests that in aggregate, private contractors and free enterprise do a better job than government. Just look at Halliburton.
Anyway, I agree with you that the South Park boys haven't come out and explicitly said, "Global Warming is BS" but this representation of Al Gore was pretty close. I don't know if you know this but Al Gore has a new movie, a matter of degrees that was being directly mocked in this episode. This movie is no "Day After Tomorrow", it's a balanced and apparently very entertaining documentary about Al Gores efforts in speaking around the country trying to raise awareness of global warming. Then here comes this episode, where Al Gore shows up and gives a talk on "man bear pig."
I don't know, attacking one of the more calm, reasoned, and well-informed proponents of environmentalism this way is starting to smell of a slightly dangerous anti-science streak in them.
12:34 AM, April 28, 2006
The fact that you draw a distinction between religions and environmenatalism is telling.
Both have their high-priests, doctrine, and blanket certitudes.
Recall that it was global cooling that was to kill us all back in the 70s.
But just as I wouldnt try to convince a dyed in the wool Muslim that its all a load a crap (a dangerous endeavor indeed) I wont try with the true believer, eco-chondriac either.
Just consider your a climatologist, you get a grant to study a problem, you live off that grant for say 5 years, and you cant report (with any honest scientific certainty) that any problem exists.
Is that what you report, knowing the funds will certainly dry up as a result?
Very briefly, Id like to know your feelings on H2O vapor and its proportional contribution to the greenhouse effect (an effect we would all perish without).
You seem like a nice enough person, but Ive been told all of my life, that were all gonna die because of something almost certainly linked to the U.S., and I have grown tired of the bit.
Thanks
Tom D.
Minneapolis, MN.
9:16 PM, May 02, 2006
The temperature profile that you show is Dr. Michael Mann's reconstruction called the "hockey stick" profile. Later scientific publications have discredited the mathematical methods he used.
The CO2 and temperature plot that you show has been studied for the correlation between CO2 and temperature. It was found that CO2 concentrations lag temperature by a thousand years or more: This means it more likely that temperature changes cause CO2 changes than the other way around.
In other words, it is still quite possible that global warming may be just like man-bear-pig.
11:46 PM, May 03, 2006
Tom,
That climate science came to the wrong conclusion in the 70s, that an ice age might be impending is unfortunate, but that does not mean one should never trust climate science ever again. This is where the superiority of scientific opinions to religious opinions is actually the strongest. We know science works, your TV works, your television works, we can track hurricanes and reasonably predict weather, etc. However, occasionally science comes to the wrong conclusions. The data is still correct, and the data from the 70s is in fact correct, the earth was undergoing a dramatic cooling, but the beauty of the field is what has happened since the 70s and how our understand of climate science hasn't been reversed by those findings but instead has been amplified.
In the 70s we were on the tail end of a cooling phenomenon known as global dimming. The cause was particulate matter from pollution sources increasing the reflection of sunlight back into the atmosphere. Paradoxically, it was the subsequent decreases in particulate pollution from the clean air act, installation of catalytic converters in every engine on the planet etc., that seems to have resulted in an end in a dimming trend that started with industrialization and continued for over a century.
The paradox was that particulate pollution was masking warming effects from increases in carbon since industrialization. Since this effect was unmasked, and the data set as shown in this post has been expanded over 750k years, we now see a dangerous correlation between carbon and temperature over nearly a million years.
In the end this data, and all climate data is correlative and based on modeling. We can not force the climate to do what we want, all we can do is study the experiment from inside the test tube. Now the data suggests we might be in for a world of trouble if we continue to dump carbon in the atmosphere, and the conservative argument would be that we should avoid seriously forcing climate systems as much as humanly possible since the risks are so great.
In terms of H20, I do not understand the problem you have with it. It is a greenhouse gas responsible for a majority of the warming effect, however, since its presence in the atmosphere is short lived and rapidly equilibrates, therefore large increases in H20 vapor don't represent a long term problem. Increases in C02 vapor and CFCs can last hundreds and tens of thousands of years respectively. That's pretty much all I know about the relative strengths of the different gasses.
12:50 AM, May 04, 2006
dude... its a freakin south park episode... trey parker and matt stone only wanna make fun of EVERYTHING...
10:22 PM, October 31, 2007
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