[...] Have any of you had Chemistry 101 or Calculus? As a retired professor, I taught global warming starting in 1966; it was obvious even then what our addition of CO2 to the atmosphere would do, and now it is starting to show itself. … [...]

Judy, you’re spot on. Dr.’s Spencer, Christy, Lindzen, Michaels, Balling, Soon, Baliunas, and too many others to list have cast enough doubt on the claims of pending catastrophe – even as many/most accept that human activity has an effect on climate – that mankind would be crazy to stifle further economic development to “save the planet”. The planet will be fine.

If/when watermelon liberals (green on the outside and red on the inside) ever get around to putting humans before animals and Gaia, they might come to realize what we do: that only at a certain level of per capita income do societies have the luxury of wealth to be able to protect the enviroment. This goes for CO2 and energy, water, deforestation, air, and every other environmental metric that matters.

For you eco-socialists that want to argue this, plot per capita income on a horizontal axis and environmental conditions on the vertical axis, then plot the data for the world. Then, after your eyes bug out, Google “environmental kuznets curve”. If/when this makes you question everything you’ve been sold about environmental catastrophe, go buy Bjorn Lomborg’s “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and read it.

With 1-2 billion people on this planet living in poverty, without adequate clean water, no basic sanitation, energy poverty, and not enough to eat, to piss money away on carbon guilt is, ironically enough given the claims of eco-socialists and Al Gore, morally reprehensible.

It is always amazing to me how Warmists project their own intellectual shortcomings on to skeptics. …like tribal loyalty. I don’t belong to a tribe and I used to donate to environmental NGOs.

I have no doubt this conversation has been uncomfortable for Warmists, given that the skeptics present real data and Warmists rely on character assassination, spin and alarmism.

The bottom line is nothing is going to go extinct due to a 0.6 degree C temperature rise over 100 years given that the Earth has been warmer and for longer that the little bit of warming we had over the period from1977-2000.

The bid to geo-engineer the atmosphere to control a supposed problem that stopped 10 years ago is madness.

“Many factors cause climate change, but only a few are considered in the current scientific debate and most are based on estimated or inadequate data. Even fewer factors or data are part of the political debate including how the amount and nature of aerosols in the atmosphere affect the amount of solar energy at the surface and in the atmosphere. The proposal to add particulates to offset warming is the environmental equivalent of adding to the debt to get out of debt, only worse. Despite this politicians demonstrate their lack of knowledge of the science by proposing to play God. Maybe they should wait until there is enough space debris to block the sun and cause cooling”
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/10192

It takes a lot of hubris to think yourself better and smarter than all those eminent scientists. It takes even more hubris to do so when you haven’t even read what they have to say. I shall state the obvious: you really don’t know or care about the scientific issues. You have taken a stand for purely tribal reasons: your tribe rejects AGW, so you mindlessly reject it, too. You really don’t understand why you reject it, but your loyalty to your tribe compels you to do so. Like a parrot, you repeat over and over the veneer of terminology that you have learned. Instead of “Polly wants a cracker” it’s “UHI”.

Fortunately, the rest of the world has left you behind. Democracies all over the world are taking action to reduce CO2 emissions. You can rail at them, but you’ve already lost the battle. The irony here is that, by insisting upon your lost cause, you remove yourself from the table when it comes to discussion the truly debatable point: what we’re going to do about this problem. When you try to participate in that debate, the unspoken response to you will be “You claimed it isn’t a problem, so why should we listen to you now?”

I say none of this with rancor. I’m very much a rationalist about these things. If people deny reality, then reality eventually smacks them down. It’s the old hubris thing. If humankind does not dismiss your kind of tribalist thinking, then humankind will go extinct. That’s just the way things are. I don’t resent the way reality operates. If we’re doomed by our Pleistocene prejudices, so be it.

Based on current estimates of mineable coal reserves, if the earth continues to take up 1/2 of the CO2 we put out, we will be over 1000ppm before the known reserves are depleted; those are only the current estimates on known coal reserves and there is still a lot of exploration which can be done. There is also oil and natural gas to help push that number up.

Small changes in temperature are often trivial to adapt to – you simply do nothing. Unfortunately the changes are on a large scale and will interfere with crop production.

The expected behavior of warming due to CO2 alone (no feedback) is roughly the same change for each doubling of CO2; CO2 has been studied in such detail over many years and predicting its direct effect on the earth’s radiative balance is something that can be reliably calculated – so much so that the (unfortunately lost) Orbiting Carbon Observatory was relying on detailed knowledge of CO2’s radiative properties to estimate the amount of CO2 based on the amount of sunlight scattered from the earth’s surface and back to the satellite. What scientists were hoping to see with that mission were the large-scale distribution and changes in CO2 which are not currently possible to estimate well with ground-based instruments. Whenever you see estimates of air temperatures at high altitudes, odds are the estimates were derived from a satellite analyzing CO2 at those altitudes in a limb viewing mode.

I don’t know what problems you imagine there are with measuring SST from ships; for at least 20 years this has been done with instruments which point some distance away and to the side of the ship to ensure that the ship doesn’t affect the readings; a precision of about 0.05C would be somewhat trivial to accomplish with current technology and even 20 years ago 0.1C would not have been difficult to achieve. There are no buckets involved. I’m not familiar with Argos or what its objectives are; I’ll have to take a look now. There’s nothing magical about the earth though; if one part changes temperature, energy must have come from somewhere or gone somewhere.

I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say scientists have to rethink how GHGs work; there have been no fundamental changes in that branch of science for perhaps 60 years – about 25 years before the invention of the climate model(s). The work over the past 60 years has been largely to refine the information we have about various gases and such work continues today and for the most part is not done for the benefit of the climate scientists.

The warming is not currently catastrophic, but that’s no reason to presume it never will be. The ferocious weather common in sci-fi movies might never be seen but damage could be far worse due to failing crops and such – but Farmer Joe’s crop being ruined for the 30th time in a row just doesn’t make a good movie. Hardly anyone’s even remotely interested in the decades long and ongoing famines throughout Africa – it just doesn’t look cool on TV. Dorothy and Toto being plucked off the streets and thrown far away from the city sells though. So the monster hurricanes that Al Gore likes to talk about may not be what you need to worry about; there are far bigger problems which are more subtle.

There is no push to go nuclear for political reasons – who would want a nuke in their back yard? Governments are also very slow to react; it took about 20 years to sort out the ozone/CFCs mess – in that case it was fortunate that industry could adapt so rapidly, but that is not the case with curbing CO2 emissions. About 15 years have gone by now and the ozone hole is still huge, but then again we weren’t really expecting things to get back to what they were like in 1960 for at least another 50 years. The CO2 issue is even bigger and will take longer to resolve; no one alive today will live to see the hoped-for improvements. Since I expect CO2 to increase substantially before any action taken begins to make even the slightest effect, I suspect we’ll have an excellent record in the future to give us an idea of what could have been if nothing was done.

I wouldn’t expect Al Gore to become a hermit even though I think he really believes in what he says; even if he consumed a lot more power than a typical household, he’s still only an insignificant fraction of the population in that area. I don’t see reducing personal power consumption as a large part of the solution; industry still need all that power during the day and the power generators can’t really change their fuel consumption on demand. Industry just have to see what they can cut, and on top of that we need to encourage development of different technologies and also try a number of solutions.

I agree, UHI is localized; usually near the local official thermometer. Take a look at the rural record; there just isn’t much warming to worry about. If the world didn’t put their thermometers in large cities or adjacent airports, this problem wouldn’t be so bad.

There are problems with the SST measurements made off ships. Has to do with wooden buckets, steel buckets, canvas buckets and engine intake thermometers. But about 7 years ago they started the Argos ocean temperature monitoring system to detail what is happening with ocean temperatures. Down to a depth of 3000 meters. They got them in about five years ago. In that five years the oceans have cooled. How can that have happened if the world is warming? Can’t.

Can we adapt to a small increase in temperature? My bet is yes. Remember we’ve been through this before in the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period. During those periods the world flourished. It was the cooling of the Little Ice Age that caused devastation. Consider that CO2 is the best food crops can have. The variability of world temperatures over the past 4000 years has enough noise to mask what we are seeing now.

There is some discussion as to whether the effect of CO2 is a log or ln function, but most say log. If so, we have reached 70% of the amount of warming for a doubling of CO2. If that amount of warming is only 0.3 ºC to date, then the remaining warming amounts to only another 0.1 ºC. That would bring the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 550 ppm. Another doubling brings the ppm to 1100 ppm and a corresponding temperature increase of .4 ºC. No one knows what the sensitivity is of a doubling of CO2. Erasmussimo doesn’t know and neither does Pierrehumbert. It cannot be derived. With the recent temperature decreases in the ocean and the atmosphere, scientists are having to rethink how GHG’s work. There is more confusion now than ever before.

I really doubt that we have enough fossil fuels to get to 1150 ppm. Just not enough coal to be found.

If you believe that the current warming is catastrophic, then you would want to install nuclear plants everywhere. I don’t see a big push to go nuclear. So again, I don’t think people are really considering the AGW issues as catastrophic. Add to that Al’s insistance in not leaving his mansion, and you know it’s not too serious. Again, where is the AGW Ghandi?

I’ve wandered enough.

Cheers,