The Daily Tech is on the story now. It amazes me how the warm mongers continue to live in denial about this. They don’t seem to understand how devastating it is to their credibility.
[Update a few minutes later]
I notice now that the article is about a week old. But it’s still a good run down.
[Update a while later]
This follow-up post addresses the desperate defense of “taken out of context.”
[Sunday morning update]
“A sequel as ugly as the original.” Extensive thoughts from Steve Hayward.
I’ve become more optimistic over the last couple of years that Climategate was the turning of the tide. It may well turn out that there is a human-caused global warming problem for which some sort of serious mitigation effort is required. But hopefully by then we’ll have put the current hysteria behind us and be able to make rational decisions.
It was the crack in the dyke and no amount of finger sticking can stop the deluge of skepticism.
This Phil Jones is really a piece of work:
These people know they are losing (or have lost) on the science. They are now going for the process.
No, YOU’RE going for the process. Because you know the “science” just isn’t there. Your process is “extreme events” and “stable climate”, skip the “science”.
I also suspect that as national measures to reduce emissions begin to affect people’s lives, we are all going to get more of this.
Hey shithead, climb out of that spider hole. People’s lives have been affected by your zealotry for a decade and more.
If you haven’t read “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, you ought to. Climate hysteria (and Y2K, and satanic ritual child abuse) fit the same template as the cases Mackay collected up through the mid-1800s.
Recently, I was arguing with someone who said the economics didn’t matter, that the threat from climate change was so great that we had to do something now. Even pointing out that we would need to employ economics just to figure out how to best do it bounced off his reality deflection shields. There was to be no thinking about economics!
Recently, I was arguing with someone who said the economics didn’t matter, that the threat from climate change was so great that we had to do something now. Even pointing out that we would need to employ economics just to figure out how to best do it bounced off his reality deflection shields. There was to be no thinking about economics!
Replace “climate change” with “asteroid impact” and you’ve just described numerous space advocates.
I wish you’d name them. Tarring all asteroid deflection advocates with the same brush is just annoying. Most of the sensible advocates are only calling for some more robust funding for ground-based telescope time and some recognition of the scientific value of infrared space telescopes.
I wish you’d name them.
A Google search that includes a phrase like “all eggs in a single basket” will satisfy your curiosity.
Tarring all asteroid deflection advocates with the same brush is just annoying.
Not as annoying as having words placed in one’s mouth. I didn’t say “all”; I didn’t say “most”; I said “numerous”.
Most of the sensible advocates are only calling for some more robust funding for ground-based telescope time and some recognition of the scientific value of infrared space telescopes.
Indeed. Most sensible space advocates realize that talk of space settlements is premature in the extreme.
Jim is quickly getting into troll territory.
He loves to dance on the line.
I wouldn’t get too worked up over it, Trent. I’m sure we could find someone here who thinks we should have the USS Enterprise up there tractor-beaming asteroids and bringing the Federation to the stars. And that it wouldn’t cost that much.
Ignorance or dismissal of economics is quite common in such beliefs. The usual manifestation however is of blind optimism. It is usually assumed that things will just fall in line and global CO2 emission reductions or a pricy asteroid deflection system will end up not being that expensive (despite the obvious signs to the contrary). They often in addition assume that various technological advances needed will somehow pay for the costs of the scheme, such as the delusion that “green” technologies will on their own rescue the US from its recession.
But what I noted here is a thorough repudiation of anything having to do with economics. I’m reminded of Middle Age religious “philosophers” in Europe and the Middle East who dismissed philosophy and rational thought on the grounds that it led to consideration of blasphemous situations such as whether God or Allah existed.
And by “someone here”, I mean crazy person on the internet, not the readership of Rand’s fine blog.
“how devastating it is to their credibility”
What credibility?
I want to know why the solution to global warming, getting rid of cars, is exactly the same as the solution to global cooling back in the 70s.
It’s the popular misconception sure.
Fundamentally, the argument of AGW mitigation is that it is somehow worth more to humanity to maintain a static temperature range than it is to continue the ongoing process of removing the last vestiges of our dependence on the natural world. In a hundred years it won’t matter if the average world temperature is one degree higher because humanity will have dealt with any problems that may result. Even if global warming is true, it’s irrelevant to a technologically sophisticated society.
The difference in average temperature between 60 degrees N and the equator is about 48 degrees F, and the distance is roughly 4000 miles, or 83 miles per degree F. If the next generation adopts the mitigation strategies currently used 83 miles closer to the equator, they should get along fine.
Equatorial countries use intensive technological solutions to the climate problem, like wearing T-shirts and flip-flops, leaving their windows open, and sipping foo-foo umbrella drinks. Such solutions could be applied further from the equatorial regions, perhaps saving millions on lives.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOMr-uSMdoE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQTW5ZCB3IA
The closest I’ve found to a sensible answer to that question.. and most of the time I’m either yelling “bullsh*t” or “what? we can’t adapt over a 90 year period??” at the screen. I’ve never read or seen *anything* to suggest why I should care about climate change. It’s baffling.
I don’t get it either. For generations the response to weather changes was “adapt or suffer” (or die). Suddenly the threat of one teeny-tiny degree of change and everyone flails about shrieking about doom. The hysteria wasn’t that intense when it was glaciers heading south everyone was worried about. I actually had a guy I worked with tell me that the world was doomed because it didn’t snow in Wisconsin for Christmas nowadays like it did when he was a kid. I mean, what?
By the way, why would a rise in global temperature a few degrees be such a bad thing? I mean yeah, maybe for someone living in a hut in Bangladesh, but they’ve lived with flooding in that part of the world for thousands of years. But making winter shorter and the warm seasons longer would benefit a lot of the world, wouldn’t it? I mean, I’ve only lived in Virginia a couple of years now, and let me tell you what I’ve discovered about Real Winter: it’s fucking cold.
That’s because there is no sensible answer to why we should care. The climate is always changing, and we know a drop in global temperatures is bad, leading to crop failures, famine, mass migration, and massive ecosystem destruction (glaciers don’t support any species). Yet the AGW crowd issues dire warnings that any warming is even worse.
That means that by pure coincidence, against all odds and logicc, the Earth’s climate was absolutely optimal when the current crop of climate scientists were in high school. And not just slightly optimal, but with megadeaths occuring with the slightest change, even though decade by decade the temperatures jump all over the place. And this is true everywhere.
Phoenix Arizona? Perfect climate.
Bangor Maine? Perfect climate.
Kandahar Afghanistan? Perfect climate.
Lagos Nigeria? Perfect climate.
Krasnoyarsk Siberia? Perfect climate.
Riyadh Saudi Arabia? Perfect climate.
Kharkorum Mongolia? Perfect climate.
It defies logic and reason.
By the way, why would a rise in global temperature a few degrees be such a bad thing? I mean yeah, maybe for someone living in a hut in Bangladesh, but they’ve lived with flooding in that part of the world for thousands of years.
For most of those thousands of years there weren’t all that many people in Bangladesh. Now there are 150 million, with tens of millions living within inches of sea level. A few degrees of global warming could easily create a humanitarian catastrophe there on the scale of the 1974 famine.
The same is true throughout the developing world. There are 1-2 billion people living on the brink of death by flood, starvation, drought, or disease, and the sort of climate change predicted by the IPCC would be devastating to them. We in the US and other rich, northern countries may not be directly affected as severely, but it’s awfully callous to write off the concerns of the poorest residents of the planet so that the richest can keep spewing out CO2.
It’s one thing to say that we don’t know whether CO2 emissions are causing climate change, or whether the changes required to reduce such emissions would yield benefits that outweigh their costs. But to argue that it doesn’t matter whether we heat the planet, because we live in rich, technologically advanced countries with cold winters — that’s ethically bankrupt.
For most of those thousands of years there weren’t all that many people in Bangladesh. Now there are 150 million, with tens of millions living within inches of sea level. A few degrees of global warming could easily create a humanitarian catastrophe there on the scale of the 1974 famine.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, Jim, but whether its AGW or not, most will tell you in the last 500 years, the overall global temperature has risen. Much of the growth in population in Bangledesh has occurred during that same time period. Its almost as if natural results suggests global increase in temperature is better for the regions growth. Whether or not an once a year flood is a catastrophe has more to do with % variation in population levels.
Jim,
There aren’t tens of millions of people living within inches of sea level or they’d spend all day running back and forth to avoid the tides.
Two parts to that. There aren’t billions of people about to get wacked by the latest storm or they’d already be dead. For example, floods in Africa (which is subject to intense rains and flooding), kill about 750 people a year. That’s up from a hundred people a year who were killed there in floods in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but researchers have said the increase is due to urbanization patterns, not climate. Even if the problem got four times worse, it would take 300,000 years for the problem to kill a billion people.
African droughts are a worse problem, but in almost all cases the problem is war and socialism, not rainfall, which people can compensate for by shipping food. How many Texas villagers starved to death in the hundred year drought they suffered this year? I would guess zero.
Second, environmentalists really cared about disease killing off people in the third world, why did they ban DDT, allowing malaria to kill tens of millions of African babies? Yet malaria isn’t linked to climate, as all the malaria researchers like to point out. Back in the little ice age it was endemic up in New York.
What’s ethically bankrupt is rich Westerners saying we won’t allow the developing world to have cheap energy that made the West rich, that they must die in droves from floods because they don’t have heavy equipment to build flood walls. That they must die in droves in famines because they don’t have enough trucks to transport crops, and we won’t send them food because we blew all our aid money on solar panels to save them from droughts.
As Bjorn Lomborg wrote, spending money to combat CO2 is the worst possible way to help the third world.
Its almost as if natural results suggests global increase in temperature is better for the regions growth.
The warming over the last 500 years was very slow compared to what is forecast for the next 100, and was accompanied by other developments (e.g. the Green Revolution) that made possible enormous population growth. That growth has used up much of the extra resources (e.g. fresh water, arable land) that were lying around before. So now we have billions of people who are vulnerable, and a climate expected to change more quickly than ever before. It’s naive to assume that faster climate change is necessarily all for the best.
Jim, that’s just baffling. We’re talking about a 1 degree increase over 90 years. They can move further inland over 90 years? I simply can’t figure out what it is you’re imagining is going to happen here.
The warming over the last 500 years was very slow compared to what is forecast for the next 100
And we should have confidence in that forecast because…?
Note that this comes with the tacit assumption that Bangladeshis are far too ignorant to understand their predicament. Of course, they need big daddy western academics to come in to tut tut and point out they’re “living inches from the brink of death!”. I can only imagine how gracious they will be to have foreigners come in and tell them they are doing it wrong. Never mind that there are probably any number of socioeconomic reasons for people to live so close to the water and they are willing to accept the risks of flood and tsunami to continue to do so. Sort of like how Americans understand the risks of death and injury driving to work and back every day in a 2 ton steel box hurtling along at several hundred feet per second. But I take that as with all “fixes” prescribed by the liberals it is usually more along the lines of bringing everyone at the top down. Rather than addressing potential issues by promulgating an environment that lifts everyone at the bottom up as the prescription to fixing this problem.
That growth has used up much of the extra resources (e.g. fresh water, arable land) that were lying around before.
The growth has increased those things. That were lying around. Before.
I’m not sure what’s been used up, but I can guess.
^^^
The green revolution wasn’t about using more water and land, it was about using better crops. The same amount of labor, on the same amount of land, with the same amount of water, produced much more food. Common measures of this revolution are graphs of crop yields in bushels per acre, which dramatically increased.
Ironically, part of this increase across the globe is due to enhanced levels of CO2, which is plant food.
We’re still not quite getting through.
The billions of people you worry about are probably going to be less vulnerable, since we know global cooling is disastrous and we’re hoping to head the other way. Secondly, the best way to avoid vulnerability is to have an advanced economy and technological infrastructure, but the policy elites and green lobby want the world to plunge back into the 1800’s to solve the CO2 problem. If we do that, even people in Boca Raton and Martha’s Vineyard will be vulnerable to starvation and disease, at least the one’s who don’t have a pipeline to all the global warming funding.
As to rates of climate change, the current warming (back in the 80’s and 90’s when it was really swinging up) wasn’t unusual either in its magnitude or its rate. We had much more rapid temperature jumps in the 1800’s and the 1920’s, and such rapid fluctuations go all the way back through the records. We’re nowhere near as warm as we have been at many points during the current interglacial cycle.
And if rates still worry you, you’re talking about changes in temperature amounting to less than 1 degree F per decade. In North America the temperature can change more than 100 degrees F in a single day. For those keeping score at home, you currently, blissfully ignore temperature swings that are 365,000 times faster than the one that keeps you awake at night, tossing and turning.
CO2, which is plant food.
Be careful with that stick George, we wouldn’t want to accidently poke them in a kidney or something. After all, we’re “messing with the carbon cycle” (my personal favorite).
And anyway, it’s “CO2->Extreme Events”. Don’t change the subject.
We alarmists have good intentions, so we hold the moral high ground. Holding the moral high ground allows us to lie, cheat, obfuscate, and hoodwink policymakers, media dunces, and the general public.
All of this ClimateGate hooplah! is just an attempt to knock us off the moral high ground, but it will not work. Why? Because we have good intentions. Our good intentions give us . . . .
Hayward:
In particular, there is much discussion about the political pressure to tune the climate models to isolate and emphasize the effect of carbon dioxide only, even though there are other important greenhouse gases and related factors highly relevant to a complete understanding of climate change. Carbon dioxide was emphasized because it is the variable that the policymakers made central to their monomaniacal mission to suppress fossil fuels
Dead. Bang.
From the linked article:
Some professors and experts even tried to reach out to Professor Mann, warning him of the danger of turning science into religion by purposefully ignoring evidence. Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office writes:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary. I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
Even Tom Wigley, a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research who was implicated in the first CRU email scandal for suggesting the removal of an editor who allowed peer-reviewed skeptical studies to be published, seemed to agree on this extreme instance:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC.
It seems “Climate Studies” belongs to the same politicized arena of academia as “women’s studies”, ethnic studies and political science. Indeed, Climate Studies is very politicized science which, truth be told, is an oxymoron.
As far as I know there is no statute of limitations for a RICO prosecution. Actively destroying e-mails being requested via FOIA constitutes a cover-up. These guys have been committing a fraud upon the citizens of the US for decades. I predict a nice stay at Club Fed, perhaps in the same wing that the terrorists are being held. Cheers –