APS and the Global Warming Scam

[Selene]

The marxist marches on:

Under the proposal to be unveiled on Monday, states will be given a wide menu of policy options to achieve the pollution cuts. Rather than immediately shutting down coal plants, states will be allowed to reduce emissions by making changes across their electricity systems – by installing new wind and solar generation, energy-efficiency technology and by starting or joining state and regional “cap-and-trade” programs, in which states agree to cap carbon pollution and buy and sell permits to pollute.

No chance of any corrupt transactions in that little 'ole rule...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/us/politics/epa-to-seek-30-percent-cut-in-carbon-emissions.html?emc=edit_na_20140601&nlid=53564225&_r=0

[Selene]

Now here is a perfect example of how corrupted the "Climate Change" scum work:

PBSG disclosed this information to Crockford ahead of the release of their Circumpolar Polar Bear Action Plan in which they intend to put a footnote explaining why their global population estimate is flawed.

“As part of past status reports, the PBSG has traditionally estimated a range for the total number of polar bears in the circumpolar Arctic,” PBSG says in its proposed footnote. “Since 2005, this range has been 20-25,000. It is important to realize that this range never has been an estimate of total abundance in a scientific sense, but simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.”

“It is also important to note that even though we have scientifically valid estimates for a majority of the subpopulations, some are dated,” PBSG continues. “Furthermore, there are no abundance estimates for the Arctic Basin, East Greenland, and the Russian subpopulations.”

“Consequently, there is either no, or only rudimentary, knowledge to support guesses about the possible abundance of polar bears in approximately half the areas they occupy,” says PBSG. “Thus, the range given for total global population should be viewed with great caution as it cannot be used to assess population trend over the long term.”

PBSG’s admission also comes after academics and government regulators have touted their polar bear population estimates to show that polar bear numbers have grown since the 1960s. PBSG estimates have also been used to show that polar bear populations have stabilized over the last 30 years.

Polar bear populations became the centerpiece of the effort to fight global warming due to claims that melting polar ice caps would cause the bears to become endangered in the near future. Years ago some scientists predicted the Arctic would be virtually ice free by now.

Polar bears became the first species listed under the Endangered Species Act because they could potentially be harmed by global warming. But some recent studies have found that some polar bear subpopulations have actually flourished in recent years.

“So, the global estimates were ‘…simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand’ and according to this statement, were never meant to be considered scientific estimates, despite what they were called, the scientific group that issued them, and how they were used,” Crockford said.

Read more at http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/05/scientists-admit-polar-bear-numbers-made-satisfy-public-demand/#xHX6MsWCOWPI0WTY.99

So we should be expecting all those Polar Bear tax frees to be returning their fraudulently secured contributions.\\

A...

I like the way this same story was treated here:

Posted on May 31, 2014 by John Hinderaker in Climate

The Settled Science of Polar Bears

Leftists decided that their global warming scam needed a poster child, and polar bears were selected for that honor. For some years now we have been exposed to mournful photographs of polar bears floating away on ice floes, or otherwise appearing endangered:

The theory on which polar bears are supposed to be endangered because their environment is becoming more benign has never been entirely clear, nor has there been data to support the claim that their populations are declining. Indeed, polar bears inhabit such remote and forbidding regions that no one has much idea how many of them there are. But no matter. Polar bears are cuddly–from a distance, anyway–and so they served the hoaxers’ purpose.

Like so much of the global warming fraud, the polar bear theme has unraveled. Thomas Lifson has the latest. A prominent advocate for the endangered polar bear theory has just admitted to an actual scientist that he made the whole thing up:

[P]olar bear scientist Dr. Susan Crockford…publishes the website Polar Bear Science. In it she documents how a scientist responsible for an alarmist lowball estimate of polar bear population is backing away from numbers that she has been questioning:

Last week (May 22), I received an unsolicited email from Dr. Dag Vongraven, the current chairman of the IUCN [international Union for the Conservation of Nature – TL] Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG).

The email from Vongraven began this way:

Dr. Crockford

Below you’ll find a footnote that will accompany a total polar bear population size range in the circumpolar polar bear action plan that we are currently drafting together with the Parties to the 1973 Agreement.

This might keep you blogging for a day or two

. [my bold]

It appears the PBSG have come to the realization that public outrage (or just confusion) is brewing over their global population estimates and some damage control is perhaps called for. Their solution — bury a statement of clarification within their next official missive….

The statement of clarification is an Emily Litella classic: oops, never mind!

Here is the statement that the PBSG proposes to insert as a footnote in their forthcoming Circumpolar Polar Bear Action Plan draft:

“As part of past status reports, the PBSG has traditionally estimated a range for the total number of polar bears in the circumpolar Arctic. Since 2005, this range has been 20-25,000. It is important to realize that this range never has been an estimate of total abundance

in a scientific sense

, but simply

a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand

. It is also important to note that even though we have scientifically valid estimates for a majority of the subpopulations, some are dated. Furthermore, there are no abundance estimates for the Arctic Basin, East Greenland, and the Russian subpopulations.

Consequently, there is either no, or only rudimentary, knowledge to support guesses about the possible abundance of polar bears in approximately half the areas they occupy. Thus, the range given for total global population should be viewed with great caution as it cannot be used to assess population trend over the long term

.” [my bold]

I love that phrase, “in a scientific sense.” Nothing about the claims made by the global warming hysterics should be taken in a scientific sense.

For a more comprehensive review of the polar bear fraud, along with many other topics, check out the Congressional testimony of Daniel Botkin, Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbara, President of The Center for The Study of The Environment, and author of Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century and the textbook Environmental Science:

Some of the [iPCC's 2014 report's] conclusions are the opposite of those given in articles cited in defense of those conclusions.

For example, the IPCC 2014 Terrestrial Ecosystem Report states that “there is medium confidence that rapid change in the Arctic is affecting its animals. For example, seven of 19 subpopulations of the polar bear are declining in number” citing in support of this an article by Vongraven and Richardson, 2011. That report states the contrary, that the “decline” is an illusion.

In addition, I have sought the available counts of the 19 subpopulations. Of these, only three have been counted twice; the rest have been counted once. Thus no rate of changes in the populations can be determined. The first count was done in 1986 for one subpopulation.

The U. S. Marine Mammal Commission, charged with the conservation of this species, acknowledges “Accurate estimates of the current and historic sizes of polar bear stocks are difficult to obtain for several reasons–the species‘ inaccessible habitat, the movement of bears across international boundaries, and the costs of conducting surveys.”

According to Dr. Susan Crockford, “out of the 13 populations for which some kind of data exist, five populations are now classified by the PBSG [iUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group] as ‘stable’ (two more than 2009), one is still increasing, and three have been upgraded from ‘declining’ to ‘data deficient’. . . . That leaves four that are still considered ‘declining’‐ two of those judgments are based primarily on concerns of overhunting, and one is based on a statistically insignificant decline that may not be valid and is being reassessed (and really should have been upgraded to ‘data deficient’). That leaves only one population – Western Hudson Bay – where PBSG biologists tenaciously blame global warming for all changes to polar bear biology, and even then, the data supporting that conclusion is still not available.”

To anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the Earth’s history, the suggestion that polar bears are threatened by a change in the planet’s average temperature of a degree or two–or five or six, if we pretend that the climateers’ models have any scientific basis–is ludicrous. Polar bears have been around, I suppose, for millions of years. Yet, in just the last 450,000 years–practically the blink of an eye–polar bears have lived through climate changes far more drastic than anything now predicted by the fraudsters:

This is from POWERLINE..a blog ... .http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/the-settled-science-of-polar-bears.php

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

It looks like Obama is going to let loose some climate change measures under his own steam in the near future.

Stay tuned because this is going to get interesting.

Michael

[Selene]

It looks like Obama is going to let loose some climate change measures under his own steam in the near future.

Stay tuned because this is going to get interesting.

Michael

Yep the EPA is releasing today a shitload of proposed regulatory changes to establish new standards to fight Climate Change and via Executive Order the Chief Executive will mandate this insanity.

[Selene]

Found this that further supports questioning the 97% claim about scientific consensus.

Abstract

Download this video

Transcript of this video

View all Environ. Res. Lett. video abstracts

We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.

Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature

OPEN ACCESS

John Cook^1,2,3, Dana Nuccitelli^2,4, Sarah A Green⁵, Mark Richardson⁶, Bärbel Winkler², Rob Painting², Robert Way⁷, Peter Jacobs⁸ and Andrew Skuce^2,9

Show affiliations

John Cook et al 2013 Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024
doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

© 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd
Received 18 January 2013, accepted for publication 22 April 2013
Published 15 May 2013

Supplementary data Tag this article Create citation alert PDF (501 KB)

View usage and citation metrics for this article

http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

We can at least get one thing right on the spin-doctoring from the AGW truther side. I caught the article below on a Facebook feed from Jerry Biggers.

I especially like this because it exposes the way an AGW truther argued against the finding (see the last paragraph in the quote), which was eerily similar to a lot of the arguing on this thread from the AGW side.

1.6%, Not 97%, Agree that Humans are the Main Cause of Global Warming
David Henderson
March 1, 2014
Library of Economics and Liberty

Mark Bahner, a commenter on my previous post on global warming and on David Friedman's post, has sifted through the data behind John Cook's statement that 97% of climate scientists who stated a position believe that humans are the main cause of global warming. Recall that Bedford and Cook lumped together those who believe that humans are the main cause with those who believe that humans are a cause.

. . .

Here are the categories that Cook et al state. I have added the numbers that Bahner found beside each.

1,Explicitly endorses and quantifies AGW as 50+% : 64
2,Explicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimize: 922
3,Implicitly endorses AGW without minimizing it: 2910
4,No Position: 7970
5,Implicitly minimizes/rejects AGW: 54
6,Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW but does not quantify: 15
7,Explicitly minimizes/rejects AGW as less than 50%: 9

So 64 out of 11,944, or 0.5%, take the view that humans are the main cause of global warming. But that includes all abstracts, including those that did not take a position. It would be nice to take the 64 as a percent of those that did take a position.

Unfortunately, in their data set, Cook et al put 4a, those that do not address the cause of global warming, with 4b, those that express the view that humans' role in global warming is uncertain or undefined. It would be nice to separate them, but we can't unless we have the even rawer data. So let's generously conclude that everyone in category 4 has expressed no view. That's a total of 7970, leaving a total of 3,974 that have expressed a view. The 64 who think the main cause is humans is, drum roll please: 1.6%.

1.6% is pretty different from 97%.

UPDATE: Commenter Dana Nuccitelli writes below: "This argument is wrong and has been debunked several times, i.e. here and here." But go to the articles and read them and you will see that the articles do not debunk my argument. Indeed, that would be difficult to do since my argument is based on Cook's own data.

Here are the links for the "here and here" in Nuccitelli's quote above. I did not include the links because the quote did not include them, but on scrolling down into the comments, they are given in the original.

One of the things that convinced me about taking Glenn Beck seriously (back when that was a highly unpopular thing to do in our subcommunity) was he constantly told people to not believe him, but instead, go look for themselves. And he gave links and sources without a lot of blah blah blah to intimidate average people. And even then, he constantly told people to find other stuff on their own.

I, personally, have not checked the data above. But I do give this report a lot more credibility than the spin folks simply because Henderson invites the reader to check his facts.

Now how hard is that?

Duh...

Isn't it something that it takes a friggin' blogger to do this among all those hifalutin peer-reviewed eminences. Maybe that's because the blogger doesn't want to put his mitts into our pockets and the keepers of the science flame can only exist if they do. I wonder what being a parasite feels like inside...

(Yeah... I'm mocking them. They deserve it for this crap.)

Michael

EDIT: My post crossed with Adam's.

[Ellen Stuttle]

It looks like Obama is going to let loose some climate change measures under his own steam in the near future.

Stay tuned because this is going to get interesting.

Michael

As in the "Chinese curse" which apparently isn't Chinese - see - "May you live in interesting times."

Ellen

[Brant Gaede]

It looks like Obama is going to let loose some climate change measures under his own steam in the near future.

Stay tuned because this is going to get interesting.

Michael

As in the "Chinese curse" which apparently isn't Chinese - see - "May you live in interesting times."

Ellen

Ah, it's the curse that lives in interesting times. Can't hardly believe someone spent "years" researching it. The Chinese anyway, do better with it than the Americans, English, French, Koreans, Russians, Vietnamese, Argentines, et al. Times have always been "interesting," even for the dinosaurs, because "interesting" is in our heads and as in our heads that's where the "curse" really comes from.

--Brant

using my "interesting" brain, which I've willed to science, headaches and all

[tmj]

ah cruel fate that I may rue the advancement(?) of science

[Selene]

ah cruel fate that I may rue the advancement(?) of science

Nah...he moved to Arizona...fact

He moved closer to area 51 ... fact

He "willed" his "alien" brain to the "state" that controls area 51...fact

Need we say more...

A...

[Wolf DeVoon]

EPA is releasing today a shitload of proposed regulatory changes to establish new standards to fight Climate Change and via Executive Order the Chief Executive will mandate this insanity.

(CBS Chicago, June 7, 2014) – With beautiful weather on tap for the weekend, lots of people will be boating on Lake Michigan. But after two deadly accidents on the water last weekend, the Chicago Fire Department is reminding people of the hazards of cold water. “There’s still a lot of cold water in Lake Michigan,” warns Ron Dorneker, deputy district chief for the Chicago Fire Department’s Marine and Dive Operations. How cold? In the middle, it’s just 38 degrees.

[Selene]

EPA is releasing today a shitload of proposed regulatory changes to establish new standards to fight Climate Change and via Executive Order the Chief Executive will mandate this insanity.

(CBS Chicago, June 7, 2014) – With beautiful weather on tap for the weekend, lots of people will be boating on Lake Michigan. But after two deadly accidents on the water last weekend, the Chicago Fire Department is reminding people of the hazards of cold water. “There’s still a lot of cold water in Lake Michigan,” warns Ron Dorneker, deputy district chief for the Chicago Fire Department’s Marine and Dive Operations. How cold? In the middle, it’s just 38 degrees.

Wow - shocking - a deep glacial lake in the Northern third of North America would have cold water in May and June - must be climate change.

The word "Michigan" originally referred to the lake itself, and is believed to come from the Ojibwa word mishigami meaning "great water".^[5]

See here is the climae change...

The Milwaukee Reef, running under Lake Michigan from a point between Milwaukee and Racine to a point between Grand Haven and Muskegon, divides the lake into northern and southern basins. Each basin has a clockwise flow of water, deriving from rivers, winds, and the Coriolis effect. Prevailing westerly winds tend to move the surface water toward the east, producing a moderating effect on the climate of western Michigan. There is a mean difference in summer temperatures of 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 5 degrees Celsius) between the Wisconsin and Michigan shores.^[14]

Hydrologically Michigan and Huron are the same body of water (sometimes called Lake Michigan-Huron), but are normally considered distinct. Counted together, it is the largest body of fresh water in the world by surface area. The Mackinac Bridge is generally considered the dividing line between them. Both lakes are part of the Great Lakes Waterway. In earlier maps of the region, the name Lake Illinois has been found in place of "Michigan".

The climate change consensus is established!

A...

[Wolf DeVoon]

Michigan and Huron have fairly substantial untouched oil and gas reservoirs, on the order of 10 billion bbls.

[Selene]

Michigan and Huron have fairly substantial untouched oil and gas reservoirs, on the order of 10 billion bbls.

Hmm might be a really good productive place to create wealth, jobs and energy...oops sorry

Where is my tallow candle and cave?

I have recently moved from Starnesville,,,

[Selene]

Oh my, it just keeps getting worse for mystical morons of metaphysics...Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace explained that:

‘President Obama seems to say it is sufficient to say the ‘science is settled’. It is hollow statement with no content.

On Kids: ‘Change the way our kids are being taught about this subject because if we don’t there will be a whole generation of people who are just blindly following this climate hysteria.’

Continuing,

Ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, warned “I fear a global cooling,” during his keynote address to the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Moore, who left Greenpeace in 1986 because he felt it had become too radical, is the author of “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist.” (Watch climate conference live here)

Moore noted that a cooling would adversely impact agriculture, and said: “Let’s hope for a little warming as opposed to a little cooling. I would rather it got a little warmer.” (Watch Moore video here at the Heartland Institute event)

Moore noted that “the U.S. is currently been cooling” and noted that there has been “no global warming for nearly 18 years.” He also mocked the notion that “everything is due to global warming.”

“If it warms two degrees, hopefully more in Canada in the North…maybe it would be a good thing if it did,” Moore explained.

Moore noted that carbon dioxide is a trace essential gas in the atmosphere and is not the control knob of the Earth’s climate.

“CO2 is the most important nutrient for all life on earth,” he noted.

“There are so many [climate] variables that we can’t control and when you do an experiment you have to control all the variables except the one you are studying if you want to get a clean result. There are even variables we do not even understand that we cannot control,” he said.

“So it is virtually impossible to think of doing an experiment where we would be able to tweeze out the impact of CO2 versus the hundreds of other variables at work. Which is why you could never make a model that would predict the climate,” he added.

Now obviously, this idiot is a doctor of chiropractic...right?

Wow, that sucks for climate change clods, he has a PhD! In ecology! Damn those facts. I know he is Canadian, however we who respect scientific inquiry have a big tent.

Moore obtained a Ph.D. in ecology from the Institute of Animal Resource Ecology, University of British Columbia under the direction of Dr. C.S. Holling.

http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/07/09/greenpeace-co-founder-dr-patrick-moore-i-fear-a-global-cooling-rips-obama-for-hollow-climate-claims/

A...

[BaalChatzaf]

The next big climate change is most likely to be a cooling down. Ice Ages are thick and frequent (in the cosmic time scale) since about 600,000,000 when the earth became a snowball.

It has turned out that the greatest advances in human culture starting with agriculture as occurred within a fairly long interglacial period. Historically we have existed in a fairly mellow climate for over 15,000 years, but that is not going to last forever.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Ellen Stuttle]

The Heartland Conference is over now. I would have liked to meet Patrick Moore, as well as see "the crew" (especially Fred Singer, of whom I'm very fond), but I didn't go. A fate just about worse than death, in my estimate, being dragged to Las Vegas.

Ellen

[Brant Gaede]

The next big climate change is most likely to be a cooling down. Ice Ages are thick and frequent (in the cosmic time scale) since about 600,000,000 when the earth became a snowball.

It has turned out that the greatest advances in human culture starting with agriculture as occurred within a fairly long interglacial period. Historically we have existed in a fairly mellow climate for over 15,000 years, but that is not going to last forever.

Ba'al Chatzaf

I can't wait. With a new ice age scientists will be able to bring back the woolly mamouth, cave bear and saber-toothed cat. (Neanderthals are more problematic.)

--Brant

[Selene]

I wonder where where the death worshipper has been on this debate...

To begin with, the 97% claim is bogus. It’s based on surveying the abstracts (preliminary summaries) of scientific papers related to the climate, and it has multiple problems. Some articles by skeptics are simply left out of the survey, a nice way of keeping down their count. Some papers mention global warming in their abstracts but do nothing to prove it in the actual paper itself, whereas other papers might actually undermine the case for global warming without explicitly saying so in the abstract. It’s almost as if you get more grant money by trying to tie your research to global warming, no matter how tenuously, but you risk losing it if you come out as a skeptic.

But the biggest problem with this statistic is that it just doesn’t matter. Before Copernicus and Galileo, there was a pretty strong consensus among scientific authorities that the Earth was at the center of the solar system. Up to the 1950s, the theory of plate tectonics, which is now the foundation of geology, was still widely considered a crackpot notion championed by a few lonely dissenters. The history of science is a long history of the consensus being proven wrong.

The point is that consensus by itself proves nothing, and acting as if it is crucially important is evidence that you don’t understand what the whole endeavor of science is about.

Here are your friends, death worrshiper:

It goes on to give an exact description of how the global warming crowd intends to win the debate by shutting it down.

A recent paper published in the journal Earth’s Future by Maibach, Myers, and Leiserowitz discussed the importance of public awareness of the expert consensus on human-caused global warming.

“Those who do not understand the scientific consensus about human-caused climate change are, in turn, less likely to believe that climate change is happening, human-caused, will have serious consequences, and is solvable (i.e., can be mitigated through concerted action)…. [A]s members of the general public come to understand the consensus, they more likely come to the conclusion that human-caused climate change is happening and harmful.”

The “consensus gap,” as we call it, is one of the key roadblocks preventing us from taking serious action to mitigate the risk associated with human-caused climate change. False balance in media coverage of climate change, giving the fringe contrarian view disproportionate coverage, is one of the main causes of the consensus gap.

Maybe you should all where "green shirts," I know how enamored by solid colored shirts you fascists are.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/07/the-mean-girls-of-global-warming/

[william.scherk]

I wonder where where the death worshipper has been on this debate...

Adam, I am pretty sure that you mean our alexithymic Naomi of Berwyn IL via Sarajevo, but I will answer for my own lazy posting habits on anthropogenic global warming. I have begged off privately from posts owed back to Jonathan in that other thread, and otherwise don't note on OL what I have been reading and remarking elsewhere. Here we tend to get het up and categorical and I think hasty when discussing or arguing any aspect of purported climate change. At best we capture each others' attention, and strike off towards discovery and end up knowing more at the end of the argument than we did starting out. Sometimes it's not so educational.

The overwhelming consensus at OL is that AGW is some kind of fraud/hoax/scam. It means that me or Naomi (and perhaps other silent OL members) are definitely outliers, and if you get het up about it, means we may be part of the scam.

At times we get so het up we call each other beeyotches and death worshippers.

So, I am going to claim the newest ad hominem for myself ('and your little dog, too!), since my basic take on the issue is near as a nose to Naomi's -- though I may use a different tone or offer a different angle when I get my lazy ass posting ...

The point is that consensus by itself proves nothing, and acting as if it is crucially important is evidence that you don’t understand what the whole endeavor of science is about.

Here are your friends, death worrshiper:

Ludenberg and Scherk, and their awful evul friends!

It goes on to give an exact description of how the global warming crowd intends to win the debate by shutting it down.

A recent paper published in the journal Earth’s Future by Maibach, Myers, and Leiserowitz discussed the importance of public awareness of the expert consensus on human-caused global warming.

“Those who do not understand the scientific consensus about human-caused climate change are, in turn, less likely to believe that climate change is happening, human-caused, will have serious consequences, and is solvable (i.e., can be mitigated through concerted action)…. [A]s members of the general public come to understand the consensus, they more likely come to the conclusion that human-caused climate change is happening and harmful.”

The “consensus gap,” as we call it, is one of the key roadblocks preventing us from taking serious action to mitigate the risk associated with human-caused climate change. False balance in media coverage of climate change, giving the fringe contrarian view disproportionate coverage, is one of the main causes of the consensus gap.

My country may be said to benefit from continued warming in our Arctic and sub-arctic. On average Canada is heating up at a greater pace than the global average. We apparently get continued northern march of arable land, ice-free Northwest Passage, increased agricultural yields (in some areas), and a extension of the boreal forest into taiga/muskeg lands. The damages assumed by sea level rise will not accrue for another century or so, and other water-based issues (eg, more water for more fracking/oilsands extraction) will play out in a scenario that will not crimp 'business' where the business is energy.

A pessimist would here list all the other knock-ons of warming in various provinces and territories (ie, methane, ocean acidification, fisheries, permafrost, forest stress/epidemics, yadda yadda), but won't. I think readers can imagine a scenario where Canada does warm over a couple three centuries, increases its population, shelters tens of millions of immigrants, rebuilds all its waterfront protections or evacuates floodplains and generally 'gets ready' for the wave rather than avoid it or pin Canada's emissions to an unattainable level.

OL readers generally may not be aware of how our Conservative federal government is dealing with its own estimations of global warming (yes, Canada is of the frabjous "consensus"). For at least the length of their reign, they will push energy development, growth, infrastructure along a spectrum of adaptation, not mitigation. If anyone is interested in the story of how the scientific consensus on Warming Canada is used by an ostensibly 'right wing' government, wave a white hanky or something, and I will put up a couple of links.

Maybe you should all where "green shirts," I know how enamored by solid colored shirts you fascists are.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/07/the-mean-girls-of-global-warming/

Can I talk you through a lowering of your thermostat, Adam? We know that Naomi is by consensus wrong wrong wrong beyond wrong on global warming, but this does not make her half as fascist as me. As far as I can recall she has no UltraGreenFascisti policy prescriptions.

Maybe Naomi is a bit like me, alarmed a bit and a lot at a lot of things, but with a sardonic appreciation of fate. Maybe she is a bit Stephen Harper, intent on wringing every economic benefit from warming that can be wrung. I can't remember Naomi the dethwrshippr even musing about the World To Come ...

Here in BC, over the centuries, some places may be ocean-swamped. We will either dike them out like the Ninth Ward or rebuild on sea-footings, and devise solutions elsewhere. Some habitats, species will suffer, some will not. I think of the times we live in as waiting times, waiting for more results of the human experiment --- increasing atmospheric contributions of 'greenhouse gases' -- with some intent on waiting a lot longer before accepting that climatologists are probably generally right about warming ...

How this experiment will continue to play out is what I imagine concerns OLers of a skeptical nature, regardless of our commitment to one side or other. Our very young children/grandchildren will see farther than we can, we here likely all dead by mid-century, but with what we can see so far, many require more time before accepting the very idea that humankind has appreciably altered climate.

Somehow my sunny, placid nature leaves me relatively unalarmed, whilst I am convinced that the experiment has given clear results already.

Did I mention it was lovely and Hot here in Vancouver? This is what the poor socialist starvelings are reduced to in the northern collectivist hellhole ...

Edited July 11, 2014 by william.scherk

[Selene]

Bill:

Have I ever called you any of those names in any of our arguments about the ecosystem of our planet?

I do not like her.

Her lack of intellectual discipline in argument is palpable.

A...

[BaalChatzaf]

alexithymic -- the story of my early life.

[Brant Gaede]

Climate change? Yes!

Colder?--We don't want to go there.

Hotter?--contra the next ice age?

AGW?--from a trace gas (0.037% of the atmosphere)? Plants love it. Animals love plants or love other animals that love plants (smack, smack!).

The global temperature has not gone up for 18 years now.

The issue matter is disappearing from public care and consciousness.

--Brant

about that Antarctic ice sheet falling off the continent in 200 years--we are doomed!

[BaalChatzaf]

Climate change? Yes!

Colder?--We don't want to go there.

Hotter?--contra the next ice age?

AGW?--from a trace gas (0.037% of the atmosphere)? Plants love it.

The global temperature has not gone up for 18 years now.

The issue is disappearing from public care and consciousness.

--Brant

Next stop either a little ice age or a big ice age. Either way we freeze our asses off.

[Ellen Stuttle]

[....]

A recent paper published in the journal Earths Future by Maibach, Myers, and Leiserowitz discussed the importance of public awareness of the expert consensus on human-caused global warming.

[....]

"The 'consensus gap,' as we call it, is one of the key roadblocks preventing us from taking serious action to mitigate the risk associated with human-caused climate change. False balance in media coverage of climate change, giving the fringe contrarian view disproportionate coverage, is one of the main causes of the consensus gap."

That's a hoot. I guess they mean that occasionally the mainstream media deigns to mention that there is a "contrarian" view.

Ellen