Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[macdoc]

Norway and Sweden have had a $50 a barrel carbon tax since 1991 - both nations rank at the top of human prosperity indices and Sweden is enroute to be carbon neutral by 2050.

It's not what taxes you pay - it's what you get for them.
In Europe where energy prices have been almost twice elsewhere - they get 6 weeks vacation, national healthcare amongst others and their economy is vibrant tho suffering from predator infestions via quants.

Of course others would rather fund fighter toys and over seas bases with their tax dollars.

A carbon tax will NOT be any sort of a major obstacle - hell - energy prices are way higher than in the past and economic growth continues apace.

It's just more economic fear mongering with no basis at all in reality.

One of the premiere venture capitalists of all time sees the Green Energy boom dwarfing anything we've seen in the past.
Price cheap dirty killer coal out of existence on to a level playing field that requires factoring in consequences like air and water pollution and then sit back and watch the economy boil.

Just requires politicians like Sweden and Norway and France have....low carbon industrial nations......

unlike, US, Canada and Australia - to name three villains of note.

Australia tho finally woke up and is putting in a carbon tax.
Maybe nuclear one of these days as well.

 

[CapelDodger]

I've provided a list of recent quotes in this thread.

I didn't ask for quotes, I asked for some sort of identification, names perhaps, or some defining feature, of "the alarmists".

I can identify "the deniers" easily enough : start from a few sites like WattsUpMyButt, ClimateFraudit, icecap, Cato Institute, AEI, or whatever hate-show Morano's fronting now and follow along the inter-links. You'll find most of them at Heatland Conferences and at NIPCC, and the rest are only a step or two away.

Prior to 2000 it's very hard to track down who was fear mongering and who wasn't.

It's even harder to define what is "fear-mongering" until after the event doesn't occur. It doesn't just mean some prediction which you find frightening.

This is just obfuscation. I can do the same thing and claim there was no hul-hoop craze. "Who was crazy for cabbage patches kids?" Just because you can't specifically identify who started the craze doesn't mean it never existed.

One of your more classic non-sequiturs. You could indeed claim there was never any hula-hoop craze, and nobody would be particularly surprised. They wouldn't think you were right either, because the hula-hoop craze was a big issue. A craze. Featured in film and photo-journalism, related to us by parents and grandparents.

I haven't asked you who started "the alarmists" on their fast-rising trajectory to prominence. I'd just like some definition of who they are.

And yet thermometers haven't changed nor has our understanding of CO2. Other than politicians championing a pet cause what change in the science of global warming led to the law of physics finally being understood? ($$$ )

Why do you obsess about politicians? I was talking about how the potential threat of AGW spread through the scientific community, which was not by "group-think" as you claim. I'm not talking about, say, the Cheney/Rove Administration in the US championing pet causes for ideological and personal interests. Lets leave politics out of it. Please.

Vice President Al Gore’s documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” rates better than any traditional news source, with 26% finding it “very reliable” and 38% as somewhat reliable.

Do please explain what relevance you think that has to anything.

Complete rubbish, even when they focus their attention and champion a cause they don't listen to the scientists.

Yes they do. The successful ones, anyway. The ones who shoot for the Moon and get there. Not all, obviously.

It remains the fact that AGW became a political issue because it had become an issue in the scientific world. So forget the politics.

Rubbish. The population is changing much faster than the climate. That's the real issue.

How do you scale population change against climate change in order to make this comparison? I'd be fascinated to know. What exactly are you comparing against what here?

Populations are where they are because that's where the populations they came from were. (North America is unusual, and its population isn't much anyway.) Dense populations developed where the climate suited highly-productive agriculture, and climate has not varied significantly since agriculture itself began. Now it is varying significantly, and very many people will ind themselves in the wrong place.

Yep. And now the only thing standing in the way of feeding them is the cost of transportation. What was once tragic has now become criminal.

The food costs money, and transport used to be cheaper, so why has it only now become criminal? Until the food and transport become free there'll be people who can't afford it. And even then, who'll bother to send it?

You really haven't, you've just become more sensitive to the weather.

I really am observing climate change, and will continue to do so with great interest. It's the Greatest Show On Earth.

You may think that everything's perfectly normal, AGW is just another thirty-year fad that's had its day, that there is global cooling or there soon will be, that every event is just weather and isn't climate change since those models didnt predict it ...

But what about when AGW is a forty-year fad, and the cooling still hasn't started, and predictions you'd found alarming have panned out? What will you think then about your present self?

The experience of your short life as a thinking being is by no means typical, so be forgiving when that time comes.

 

[dogjones]

tropics will be least affected - the band is already 200 km wider and growing.

Never heard this one before. 200 km wider compared to when? On what basis do you say this?

 

[Dinwar]

So we will have a diverse planet, just different.

That's the way it always is.

Peter Ward has an interesting book I"m currently working my way through on just this question: What will evolution do in the future? I think he raises a very good point: The single biggest factor in evolution for the remainder of human existence will be humanity itself. We fracture ecosystems, favor small wildlife compared to large (doesn't matter what we want, we tend to eliminate all large wildlife in any given area), and tend to favor weedy and disaster species (this one we literally prefer--our crops are disaster species). Add genetic engineering and you have humans playing the single most important role in evolution for the next few thousand years at least, and perhaps much, much longer.

 

[macdoc]

Concern and increasing urgency, 1950s and 1960s

Better spectrography in the 1950s showed that CO2 and water vapor absorption lines did not overlap completely. Climatologists also realized that little water vapor was present in the upper atmosphere. Both developments showed that the CO2 greenhouse effect would not be overwhelmed by water vapor.[8]
Scientists began using computers to develop more sophisticated versions of Arrhenius' equations, and carbon-14 isotope analysis showed that CO2 released from fossil fuels were not immediately absorbed by the ocean. Better understanding of ocean chemistry led to a realization that the ocean surface layer had limited ability to absorb carbon dioxide. By the late 1950s, more scientists were arguing that carbon dioxide emissions could be a problem, with some projecting in 1959 that CO2 would rise 25% by the year 2000, with potentially "radical" effects on climate.[8]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science#cite_note-aiphistory-7

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science

Likely before you were born 3b.....and a number of us here remember those early SciAm cautionary articles quite clearly....tho we always thought it was far in the future instead of RIGHT NOW.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

So we will have a diverse planet, just different.

I think that this is where some ecologists get it very wrong. They focus their campaign on the idea of "save the planet". The planet will be fine, pretty much no matter what we do to it. It's individual species that might not be fine. And, given that we're one of those individual species, that's reason enough to worry about the environment.

 

[Trakar]

Indeed. The more I read about BEST the more dubious I get, but if it's really bad it will be easy enough to demolish. And if it's going to give the deniers what they want it will have to be thoroughly egregious.

(An amusing outcome would be another confirmation of the "hockey-stick" which the deniers will have to condemn as part of the Grand Conspiracy ...)

Regarding Gil Compo (whose work the WSJ misrepresented), I mistakenly conflated the 20th Century Reanalysis Project with BEST.

http://www.lbl.gov/cs/CSnews/CSnews12511.html

There's a "Berkeley Lab Contact" listed but it's an entirely separate project. My bad .

No problemo, I just wanted to clarify my own position. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and accept what happens!

 

[Trakar]

To the extent I can measure the diagram, this appears to be a tie with the record 2005 February Sea Ice Anomaly.

If the graph is a precise rendition of the data, it looks to be a hair higher still, but it's lower than 2006.

 

[CapelDodger]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science

Likely before you were born 3b.....and a number of us here remember those early SciAm cautionary articles quite clearly....tho we always thought it was far in the future instead of RIGHT NOW.

Between Global Warming and the Cold War, the Cold War got all the attention back then. Now that's history and AGW isn't.

I first heard of AGW about 1970 but didn't pay it much attention, having been educated in the prevailing tradition founded on Hutton, Lyell and Darwin. Acid rain damaging trees downwind from industrial centres was one thing, but change the planet's climate? Without a general nuclear exchange? Get over yourself, humanity. You can screw up Los Angeles but Earth is too much for you.

Well we got over ourselves too early, it seems. We are mighty enough, although just how maturely we handle that is a very different matter.

 

[CapelDodger]

I'm sure London should be underwater by now, didn't Greenpeace predict in the early 90's that the Thames barriers wouldn't be enough to protect Londoners.

The probably didn't, but the barriers won't protect London forever simply because of glacial rebound. They were built or that reason (not because of predicted climate change) and with a certain lifespan before they get outflanked by high tides and storm-surges. It may be necessary to sacrifice much of South London for the greater good. Quelle domage.

Still waiting. I'm sure Professor LoveLock has gone into hiding since his predictions are worse than Mystic Megs. I could go on.

No doubt you could.

Just for the record, the Marxist position on AGW is that it's an imperialist conspiracy meant to deny post-colonial people the route to development and cornucopial enlightment travelled by the Western world and the much-lamented Soviet Union. Both Marxism and neo-liberal capitalism are firmly rooted in the 19thCE when limitations to what humanity could do (be it by the Workers United or the Free Market, each equally magical concepts) weren't envisaged. At a time when the Americas and Eastern Russia provided ever-increasing bounty it was hardly surprising.

So forget the communists. They're gone. Even in China. A new world was born when the Soviet Union whimpered out, and we can't live in the past, however much we'd like to.

 

[CapelDodger]

To the extent I can measure the diagram, this appears to be a tie with the record 2005 February Sea Ice Anomaly.

It's reaching that time of year when all eyes turn to the Arctic Ocean.

Not much noise about "Arctic sea-ice has recovered" this NH winter, I noticed. Not much about "Antarctic sea-ice is growing" last SH winter either. In fact denialism is very much on the defensive these days. No wonder they proposed negotiations in Lisbon, and not surprising they were turned down. Even the O'Donnell et al peer-reviewed paper on Antarctic temperature trends was turned into a farce, essentially by McIntyre.

As we know, given the noise in the system, a decade with little or no warming due to AGW is far from unexpected. The 2000's for instance, the Golden Decade of Denial. Even two decades in a row, but that's bloody unikely, and even less so when the Golden Decade ended in unusually low solar activity and a La Nina.

At my age I'm not counting on seeing-out this whole decade, of course, but the next few years is what the denialists will have to fend off and I'm determined to hang-on and watch them try .

 

[CapelDodger]

That's incorrect. There is a direct irrefutable correlation between cheap energy and economic stimulation.

There isn't.

There's a correlation between limited and hence expensive energy sources and retardation of economic expansion. When new energy sources become available economic expansion is driven by improving technological exploitation of said resource at both ends - supply and consumption.

The resource becomes cheaper (wages go down as well, so the term is relative), but not forever. Eventually the new resource starts hitting limits at the supply end and the second law of thermodynamics sets a limit at the other end. At which point another bottleneck ensues, until a new energy source emerges to let loose the bound Titan of economic expansion.

That's the way it's been so far, anyway. A good guide to the future, in my experience.

 

[Furcifer]

Likely before you were born 3b.....and a number of us here remember those early SciAm cautionary articles quite clearly....tho we always thought it was far in the future instead of RIGHT NOW.

Radical. Did it used to snow in the Summer in the olden days?

 

[Furcifer]

Norway and Sweden have had a $50 a barrel carbon tax since 1991 - both nations rank at the top of human prosperity indices and Sweden is enroute to be carbon neutral by 2050.

And they have stagnant economies. Norway 157th in GDP growth, Sweden 77th (a noticeable recovery from 2009 when it was 161st)

Color my unimpressed when a small country with a fairly centralized population density pledges to go carbon neutral.

If 1.3% of India goes carbon neutral they're doing better than Sweden and Norway combined. Think about it.

 

[Furcifer]

It's even harder to define what is "fear-mongering" until after the event doesn't occur. It doesn't just mean some prediction which you find frightening.

It's like porn, you know it when you see it.

I haven't asked you who started "the alarmists" on their fast-rising trajectory to prominence. I'd just like some definition of who they are.

The not-deniers and not-skeptics. How's that sound.

Why do you obsess about politicians?

They're bad for science.

I was talking about how the potential threat of AGW spread through the scientific community, which was not by "group-think" as you claim.

Clearly it is. Climategate demonstrated that. That's a broad brush to paint a group with, but it's prevalent.

It remains the fact that AGW became a political issue because it had become an issue in the scientific world. So forget the politics.

I've tried to, but alarmists won't address the science with any integrity or honesty. They make it political or personal.

How do you scale population change against climate change in order to make this comparison? I'd be fascinated to know. What exactly are you comparing against what here?

Slope.

The food costs money, and transport used to be cheaper, so why has it only now become criminal? Until the food and transport become free there'll be people who can't afford it. And even then, who'll bother to send it?

Maybe so, but if I worry about people starving today,not a harmless gas and what it might do in the future. AGW is a distraction from reality.

I really am observing climate change, and will continue to do so with great interest. It's the Greatest Show On Earth.

To each his own. (^that's alarmist)

But what about when AGW is a forty-year fad, and the cooling still hasn't started, and predictions you'd found alarming have panned out? What will you think then about your present self?

I'm not planning on it cooling.

 

[Dancing David]

The ecological movement is diverse, you have a wide variety of beliefs and attitudes. You have seperate ends of a very complex spectrum, those who want to decrease the damage done to the environment, those who want to reduce toxins in the environment, those who want to increase biodiversity and the preseravtionists.

I am a mix on whatever scales you want to use. I want to decrease toxins, I would like to see policies that encourage greater diversity in monoculture's edges and waterways, I would like to conserve and preserve as much as possible. But I am not crazy about it.

I think that the lack of spraying on roadsides is great for diversity, the water system in my county is a travesty, ditched upped and bermed. But it will be up to the owners of the land to want to re-establish the mixed riverine system, it should be encouraged, not forced. I think a deer slaughter would be a great thing, and I mean a real deer slaghter of 90% of the population, I use integrated pest managemnt in my yard. I would never spray with a True Green service, but I do use Round-Up in spots, I don't use insecticides on the lawn or shrubs but I sure do a foundation spraying on the house.

Global warming will trash eco systems if it continues, some species will benefit others will get trashed. We should try to encourage them all. The problem is that the systems are so pocketed and isolated in the USA, we don't have corridors, we don't have large pockets for transmission and continuation. Some some species will get scragged.

 

[macdoc]

And they have stagnant economies. Norway 157th in GDP growth, Sweden 77th (a noticeable recovery from 2009 when it was 161st)

What makes you think growth is any indicator of prosperity. It's not.
How 18th century of you.

 

[macdoc]

China gets it even if you don't

China, the world's biggest polluter, plans to "go green" in the next five years, emphasising energy efficiency and the battle on its choking pollution in its plans to revamp the economy, experts say.
China, the world's biggest polluter, plans to "go green" in the next five years, emphasising energy efficiency and the battle on its choking pollution in its plans to revamp the economy, experts say.

The so-called 12th five-year plan -- already approved by Communist Party leaders -- is expected to be reviewed and rubber-stamped by delegates to the National People's Congress, which opens its annual session Saturday in Beijing.
"We must not any longer sacrifice the environment for the sake of rapid growth and reckless roll-outs," Premier Wen Jiabao said Sunday, warning that doing so would result in unsustainable growth and the depletion of resources.

more

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-china-green-growth-years.html

 

[Reality Check]

Color my unimpressed when a small country with a fairly centralized population density pledges to go carbon neutral.

Then be impressed!
New Zealand is a small country. It has a "fairly centralized population density" (one quarter of the population in 1 city). It has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2020 (announced in 2007).

 

[Trakar]

The ecological movement is diverse, you have a wide variety of beliefs and attitudes. You have seperate ends of a very complex spectrum, those who want to decrease the damage done to the environment, those who want to reduce toxins in the environment, those who want to increase biodiversity and the preseravtionists.

I am a mix on whatever scales you want to use. I want to decrease toxins, I would like to see policies that encourage greater diversity in monoculture's edges and waterways, I would like to conserve and preserve as much as possible. But I am not crazy about it.

I think that the lack of spraying on roadsides is great for diversity, the water system in my county is a travesty, ditched upped and bermed. But it will be up to the owners of the land to want to re-establish the mixed riverine system, it should be encouraged, not forced. I think a deer slaughter would be a great thing, and I mean a real deer slaghter of 90% of the population, I use integrated pest managemnt in my yard. I would never spray with a True Green service, but I do use Round-Up in spots, I don't use insecticides on the lawn or shrubs but I sure do a foundation spraying on the house.

Global warming will trash eco systems if it continues, some species will benefit others will get trashed. We should try to encourage them all. The problem is that the systems are so pocketed and isolated in the USA, we don't have corridors, we don't have large pockets for transmission and continuation. Some some species will get scragged.

Largely agreed, at least with respect to what has occurred so far. If this were the extent of AGW, I frankly wouldn't give a rat's patootie about it. My concern is for the consequences we've already put in the pipeline, and the amounts we are amplifying those effects by continuing to add to that pipeline.
It isn't that some species will benefit and others will suffer, it's that most will completely disappear.