Thursday, November 24, 2011

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).

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

“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.


This is FOI2011's statement. I don't see where he says he is speaking for all the skeptics.
Just on this hysteric verballing alone you fail.

Anonymous said...

No one would probably want the emails if the first place if they didn't try so hard to push a public danger message then hide global station data, code, and then try to cover there tracks with email deletions and using the IPCC to avoid the FOI requests. This is their own fault.

They claim this is big issue but then won't share the data.

Anonymous said...

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 a reason for inaction.

That's my view. I don't want to pay one cent in tax or carbon reduction or solar subsidy or windmills on the say so on green alarmistcatastrophists like yourself and confused, unclear climate scientists who engage more in pathetic academic bignoting and knobbling peer review than they do in empirical observation - which observations do not support 6, don't support 4 and barely supports even 2 degrees of temp rise, and they can't even say by when.

Basically my view is mitigation of a non-problem is bulls--t and all I will support is investing in adaptation and the market will take of that nicely. Climate scientists have been peddling their truly d-grade studies for two decades and we're none the wiser for their ineptitude and squabbles.

As for trying to tar every skeptic with being uncaring about poverty, way to win folks to your arguments. Tosser.

WB

bob said...

"As for trying to tar every skeptic with being uncaring about poverty, way to win folks to your arguments."

The HACKER tars every skeptic as being uncaring about poverty.

The HACKER argues that ethically we should give trillions of dollars to the starving poor, rather than spend it de-carbonizing.

"Skeptics" would call that "wealth redistribution and oppose it tooth and claw.

So yes by the Hacker's own argument you are uncaring about poverty.

"No one would probably want the emails if the first place if they didn't try so hard to push a public danger message then hide global station data"

Global station data has been available from source for years. Where do you think BEST got the data from? And we know what result they found.

If skeptics were really interested in testing the "danger message" rather than being bald faced liars they would have done a BEST analysis of the data themselves years ago to establish the facts for themselves.

"which observations do not support 6, don't support 4 and barely supports even 2 degrees of temp rise, and they can't even say by when."

Observations are consistent with all 3 options. You are just in denial.

Anonymous said...

David,
I think you will find your first impressions the best: climategate as a whole reveals that climate science is practiced by many people who are not being honest with the data, their methods or the public.
Also, your fallacy in thinking that skeptics don't care for the poor is a bit revealing.

J Bowers said...

"Also, your fallacy in thinking that skeptics don't care for the poor is a bit revealing."

Funnily, the latest tack from sceptical commenters in the UK is about how the developing world sees Durban as a way for them to get the begging bowls out and put the West on enough of a guilt trip to make them write big fat cheques.

Dano said...

Amazing how the bots swarm all over anything mentioning whatever keywords send them into action.

Best,

D

Anonymous said...

GISTEMP has data and code fully online. Giss Model E is available for anyone to try. CRU has put up ALL data. And still the pseudoskeptics complain about "data not available". It's quite simple: even when the data and code is available, the pseudoskeptics still don't do anything with it, other than repeat a FALSE claim.

Marco