Is Global Warming Ruining Thanksgiving? (Sheesh)

Happy Thanksgiving! Let it be ruined by stuff like this:

The year 2011 has been one of the most extreme ever for weather disasters. Below, ThinkProgress Green discusses a few examples of how our increasingly dangerous weather, poisoned by hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution, is jacking up the costs of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

{Ironically, for all its complaints about the funding of climate skeptics, etc., the Center for American Progress, who runs Think Progress, refuses to reveal its own funders. What's good for the goose hen is good for the gander tom.}

I spent most of the hour between 3 and 4 a.m. last night trying to make sense of all this, which is not what I needed before a day notorious for its tryptophan. Look, I still think carbon dioxide warms planets, humans are influencing climate, and we continue to burn fossil fuels at our peril. That's hard science.

Will the world warm by 2°C or 4°C or 6°C, with accompanying changes? The truth is, no one is sure. And no one may ever be sure. And those uncertainties are not a reason for inaction. As I've said before, if we wait until science can predict the year the last glacier in the Himalayas will melt, and then wait to see if that prediction pans out, it will be far, far too late.

Climate scientists have been put in an impossible position – expected to provide the world with a definitive answer about an extremely complicated physical system, on which the welfare of civilization could depend, and which threatens the status quo with its extremely powerful, monied interests and the greed of us all, on a subject every blogger thinks they get an opinion on merely because they can make a spreadsheet. The scientists can’t win, and have been ruthlessly and unfairly attacked by people who make Galileo’s enemies look like choirboys. We need the scientists to do what they’re best at -- science -- without feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders.

The most dissembling piece in FOIA2011's files was the very first line of his very first file:

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”

Because we all know how the very greatest concern of all the skeptics, deniers and clowns is their overarching concern for the world's poor. Sure.

I think one of the most relevant comments on all this was by Ray Bradley in the New York Times, referring to this email:

In one of the e-mails, Raymond S. Bradley, director of a climate research center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, criticized a paper of Dr. Mann’s that used tree rings and similar markers to find that today’s climatic warming had no precedent in recent natural history. Dr. Bradley wrote that the paper “was truly pathetic and should never have been published.”

He confirmed in an interview that the e-mail was his, but said his comment had no bearing on whether global warming was really happening. “I did not like that paper at all, and I stand by that, and I am sure that I told Mike that” at the time, he said. But he added that a disagreement over a single paper had little to do with the overall validity of climate science. “There is no doubt we have a big problem with human-induced warming,” Dr. Bradley said. “Mike’s paper has no bearing on the fundamental physics of the problem that we are facing.”

I suspect everyone thinking about this issue -- everyone -- has lost perspective, at a time when the wheels seem to be coming off wherever you look. And that today skeptics/contrarians/deniers will give a deep, quiet thanks that their servers haven't (yet) been hacked.

My first rule is still the one up on the right: You can never ask too many questions. We need to keep asking them, including what it is we really expect from science, from scientists, and most of all from ourselves.

Now I'm off to spend the day with my 7-year old nephew and 4-year old niece. I hope you go do likewise (but with your own nephews and nieces, not mine).