Thursday, August 06, 2015

"You can see it and you can feel it"

Starts about 15 seconds in:



"We can see it and we can feel it - hotter summers, rising sea levels, extreme weather events like stronger storms, deeper droughts, and longer wildfire seasons, all disasters that are becoming more frequent, more expensive, and more dangerous."
More backing for my argument that climate communication to the public should use the "can feel it in your bones" approach. Obama is talking about things people can experience directly and compare to their past.

I liked the next part too:
"Our own families have experienced it too - over the past three decades asthma rates have more than doubled and as temperatures keep warming, smog gets worse, and those Americans will be in even greater risk of landing in the hospital."
He's making clear that climate change is a direct risk to the listener and that person's family.

Two other comments on the Clean Power Plan:  first, nice piece by Simon Lazarus at Balkinization pointing out that the new standard for more active judicial review in the Obamacare case could affect review of whether the CPP is legal. One on hand it means less deference to agency interpretation, potentially bad for CPP since the agency interpretation is what makes CPP work. On the other, the new review pushes judges to interpret the law in a way that makes the law work, and the whole point of CPP in providing flexibility is to make the law work more effectively. So let's hope for the best.

Second, missing in the whole discussion of existing power plants is a reworking of the rule for new power plants. New coal plants would have to incorporate carbon sequestration. Good luck with that, although Clean Coal proponents keep talking about it. Their own talk can be used against them when they litigate on the basis that it's unrealistic.

73 comments:

Fernando Leanme said...

I like the warmer winters. Especially those cold nights in February when I no longer hear the gas heater warming up the pipes. We may also extend the tourist season until September 30, that should keep those rich British and Germans around. By the way, the extra tourism is helping the economy, and we are seeing dropping unemployment, 3 % GDP growth, and the stealth commies are steadily losing out in the polls. We have a saying around here: "Thank you Mr Tsipras, and say hello to Varufakkir".

Anonymous said...

I believe he means Varoufakis, but FL's willful ignorance remains Greek to me.

David B. Benson said...

Around here the unprecedented June heat ruined the barley crop and the wheat crop is of second and third rate quality.

Fernando Leanme said...

Wheel ism, it's my fill in spell checking thingamabob. Not only is it stupid, it works in multiple languages. Take your name, it insisted you must be Mr. Wheel. However, I can't figure out why it allowed the ism to survive. If you change your name to Aneurism, Plagiarism, or Modernism it would do better.

Non Paid Political Commerical Follows: I read the extreme food shortages in Venezuela may be in part to government hoarding of food supplies. They are said to plan releasing the food in mid November to create a feeling of wellness in the population and see if that, together with their overwhelming presence in the media, censorship, and shenanigans such as an Iranian style prohibition of candidacies by quality opponents, allow them to eke out a win.

Bernard J. said...

FL, if you like warm winters move to a place where winters are warmer.

It's logically fallacious - and completely and utterly indefensible - to overheat the entire planet for millennia to come just so that you have a couple of decades of mild temperatures in your little corner of the world.

That's ecocentricity to way beyond the point of insanity.

Anonymous said...

BTW, July was Spain's warmest month on record (if I'm reading this right)...

http://www.aemet.es/es/noticias/2015/08/climticojulio2015

Bernard J. said...

Erm, that was egocentricity...

I obviously write too much about matters ecological...

Fernando Leanme said...

Indeed, they say it was very hot all over. We had warm air coming from the Sahara fir two weeks. Now the temperature is slightly lower, but it's still working out nicely because it should warm the sea, and this will extend the tourist season into late September.

I asked my neighbor what he thought about the overall climate change issue. And he mentioned the winters didn't feel warmer, but the spring summer, and fall sure seemed to be. i suppose somewhere people feel their climate is worse at this point, but I bet the majority think it's just fine. People have a tendency to confuse a future problem, such as rising sea level many years from now, versus what goes on today. In 2015, as far as I can see, the world climate is fine.

Everett F Sargent said...
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THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Could Brian descibe to us the gut feeling of the difference between the temperature rise of 21 microdegrees/hr he has experienced thus far in his lifetime, and the ~ 30 microdegrees /hr that must materialize in the next decade if the mildest IPCC projections for 2050 are to pan out?

E. Swanson said...

Brian (and Eli),

To show how tough it's going to be to convince the RePub Tea Party crowd that now run the US Congress, consider John Christy's recent performance before the House Natural Resources Committee [Oversight Hearing on “The Obama Administration’s CEQ Recently Revised Draft Guidance for GHG Emissions and the Effects of Climate Change.” ]. Christy again presents a graphic in his prepared testimony claiming to compare actual temperature data with IPCC GCM model results. This is the same graphic previously presented, but which has not (to my knowledge) been published thru peer review. The fact that the satellite data is fabricated is, of course, not mentioned (where do those extra data points come from, John?). Also, the fact that some sort of simulation of the satellite measurements was applied to the GCM runs is also not mentioned (John, how do you convert monthly data at 3 pressure levels in the atmosphere to simulate MSU/AMSU measurements?). If you can stomach watching the hearing video (I fast forwarded thru some of it), you will observe that the RePubs lapped up what he had to say.

As our election cycle ramps up to fever pitch, expect more of this disinformation...

Aaron said...

And, AGW directly affects everybody's finances. Everything was engineered for another climate.

With AGW, roads deteriorate faster, and tend to damage all cars and trucks, increasing costs for drivers and truckers. Increased costs for truckers means increased costs for consumers. And, increased costs for road repair. Notice that highway taxes for road maintenance do not go as far they did? Do not blame electric cars, the fault is in changing weather patterns. AGW has become a real problem in highway funding. Congressmen that do not want to accept reality, pull the covers over their head like a child, rather than opening their eyes, and striding forth into the morning's light to solve the problem.

You house/apartment is more subject to storm /flood damage. It may not hit your house, but it does raise your insurance costs. That is the way insurance works.

Fire fighting costs are up. This is a direct cost to you. All fire fighting groups now have mutual aid compacts. A wild fire in Alaska or California raises all local, state and national fire fighting organizations's costs.

Storms beyond the original basis of design damage and raise the maintenance costs for all utilities. If your area gets too much or too little rain, over a period of time it will raise your water and sewage bill. This is no longer a hypothetical future effect. In many parts of the US and the world, it is happening now.

These days, funding that should go into new infrastructure, instead gets allocated for repair and maintenance. Thus, AGW means less new infrastructure. Less new infrastructure means more dependence on, and and repair of, older infrastructure.

Stopping AGW now is much cheaper than dealing with more AGW. Avoiding more AGW takes less government than dealing with the consequences of more AGW. This is one of those things like termites and dry rot, where dealing with the problem early is much, much cheaper and easier than waiting until later. The costs have started, and they will increase very rapidly unless we take important and urgent action and stop AGW.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Aaron observes that:

"AGW directly affects everybody's finances. Everything was engineered for another climate. "


A 1 C delta T corresponds to the difference in climate experienced on moving south about 100 miles. and a 4 degree delta T can be experienced within any of America's larger states.

As a matter of praxis, are different engineering standards presently mandated for the Northern and Southern parts?


Everett F Sargent said...
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Everett F Sargent said...
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Anonymous said...

Mr. Sargent, the last three comments on this blog are by you, and you are telling people to shut the F up? I think the record is seven or so. You may have some obsessions and possibly chemical dependencies that need to be addressed. Even I, the consummate math, science and engineering troll with a huge troll hat collection, am not that bad.

And I know when it is time to quit. Give the regulars here a break.

Barton Paul Levenson said...

FL: In 2015, as far as I can see, the world climate is fine.

BPL: I take it you don't live in California. Or Sao Paolo. Or Bangkok. Or Australia.

Everett F Sargent said...
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Anonymous said...

Ok, Everett, since you are now one of the regulars I can only assume you will eventually fade into the background like Fernando and to a lesser extent, myself. The problem I see is that you really have no point. If you wish, make your own future sea level predictions and we can all wait around to see how that works out. Self publish it, in a blog comment! On Rabett Run no less. Fame awaits you. My point is that nobody here has told you to shut the F up, you are free to perform your testosterone dance as long as you want. I myself prefer a good music video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iVDHiOEBvw

Brian said...

Russell - "microdegrees"?

I grew up in Rochester NY in the 1970s and I remember those winters. Other people have similar experiences to draw from.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Yes , Brian : microdegrees.

21 of them an hour is the average rate for the warming of the last 100 years, and even f you attrbute it all to AGW, at this rate , not even vice- presidential speechwiters are likely to be able to distinguish one decade from another for yet more decades to come.

Having some experience of thermal Wheatstone bridges and instruments built to be isothermal down to the microdegree level, I can testify that measurement and perception of anthropogenic temperature change remain in reality far removed from the realm of Presidential rhetoric.

Anonymous said...

You can't assess locally observed microclimate changes with globally averaged microdegrees. You should know better. Think snowmobiler snowline changes, that's how it first showed up, until 1980 or so when it became suddenly and obviously observable.

Bernard J. said...
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Bernard J. said...

Speaking of seeing and feeling, I am reminded that Dn Hertzfeld anticpated the scope of Rabbet Run almost two decades ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1n3JBQdN84

Everett F Sargent said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

"21 [microdegrees] an hour is the average rate for the warming of the last 100 years...."

Or, as Berkeley Earth suggested a few (cooler) years ago, nine-tenths of a degree total since 1950. More than 100% of it likely due to AGW.

Keep those eyes closed, Russell. Uncle Fred needs SOMETHING to smile about down in The Pit.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Apologes to Brian if I overstated his case-- I meant ~ 21 microdegrees per day, not perhour.

To rephrase the dimensional analysis , how many generatios does it take to boil a frog ?

E. Swanson said...

Russell Seitz said:

"...how many generatios (sic) does it take to boil a frog ?"

I don't know about frogs, but for "wogs", the important variable is going to be a dew point temperature above 35C. At higher dew points, our bodies can't dump the thermal energy surplus from normal metabolism, which occurs via sweating. Heat stroke soon follows and people (such as those tropical "wogs") start to die. This actually happened to hundreds of people this summer. Record high temperatures in Europe lately may well have added some others. Did you notice?

Bernard J. said...

"In 2015, as far as I can see, the world climate is fine."

There's your problem. You are frozen in time and space, with insufficient understanding or imagination to realise that it's not all about you, sitting on you couch this year.

There's a word for that.

Bernard J. said...

Hmmm, my post at 7/8/15 8:33 AM was actually submitted at ~ 7/8/15 6:30 AM. Is there a delay on some posts?

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Congratulations to E. Swanson on his rediscovery of hyperthermia
Will he please expalin why merica's demographic center of gravity has been moving south of its own acord for the past three generations?

I rather doubt the microdegree per hour anthopogenic forcing figures in it.

Blogger profile said...

Russell, how did you notice the 0.26mm per day growth of your body? That's 0.01mm per hour. Or less than 7x10-8 miles per hour movement of your head away from your feet.

Did you notice it by finding that your pram doesn't fit your body any more?

EliRabett said...

BJ: No, but Blogger is free.

Bernard J. said...

Point taken Brere Eli.

And it's well worth the price, to discover the existence of catastrophic body elongation! ;-)

E. Swanson said...

Russell Seitz said...
...please expalin why merica's demographic center of gravity has been moving south of its own acord for the past three generations?

Easy to do. Having been raised in Atlanta, I recall the days before there was A/C in houses and cars. With the vast expansion of the electric generation and distribution system, it became possible for Yankees to survive in the heat and humidity, thus the migration away from the Snow Belt states took off.

Remember that climate is the statistics of weather, not just the average temperature over the entire globe. The extremes of both high and low temperatures may trend upwards, thus the chance for heat waves would increase, even though the average exhibits only a slow upward trend. If the the THC slows or stops in the Nordic Seas, the regional cooling around the high latitude North Atlantic would tend to mask the warming in other regions. In the end, it's extremes in weather which tend to cause fatalities, not the average.

Susan Anderson said...

Quite a host of irrelevant and uninteresting comments. I do like being able to click on "said" and ignore those whose main purpose seems to be to derail the discussion.

But ... how about we acknowledge that the climate has changed noticeably, and that stranded assets have occurred.

As to sequestration, I do wonder if people bother to think about what they are talking about sometimes. Has anyone thought about the scale of what would be required?

So how's about we all get weaving and think about clean energy, really clean energy?

Jeffrey Davis said...

I suppose there's some pedantic humor in noting that you can't actually feel the tiny increases in temperature as it's happening. You also can't feel -- I'm told -- bedbug bites. Or cells metastasizing.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

E. Swanson

If Sherman could march south without AC, citizens of the former Confederacy should be able to beat an orderly retreat in the face of isotherms headed North at the literal snail's pace seen today and projected for the century to come.

E. Swanson said...

Russell Seitz said:

If Sherman could march south without AC...

Minor quibble, [quoting from the History channel]:
"General Sherman’s troops captured Atlanta on September 2, 1864.
..
"From November 15 until December 21, 1864, Union General William T. Sherman led some 60,000 soldiers on a 285-mile march from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia. The purpose of this “March to the Sea” was to frighten Georgia’s civilian population into abandoning the Confederate cause."

It took Sherman from May to September to "march" from Chattanooga to Atlanta. The March to the Sea was in late Fall, when the weather was cooler. Sherman didn't march thru Texas, Arizona or Southern California, which have experienced large growth in population after A/C became common.

Meanwhile, back on today's Earth:,

Middle East swelters in heatwave as temperatures top 50C

Egypt heatwave leaves 61 people dead

Heck, what's a few more degrees C added on top these extremes?

Kevin O'Neill said...

Russell, it might be time to consider whether you've gone emeritus.

Population of the confederate states was about 9M. More than a third were slaves.

Today: Texas 27M, Florida 20M, Georgia 10M, North Carolina 10M, Virginia 8.3M, Tennessee 6.5M, Alabama 4.8M, South Carolina 4.8M, Louisiana 4.6M, Arkansas 3M, Mississippi 3M.

I count that as just over 100M. No chattel slaves that I know of.

Compare and contrast.

Blogger profile said...

Russel, given that you think noticing change requires noticing the hourly change averaged overall, and that even the fact that you (one hopes vigorously) have noticed that you're not as small as you were when a child but (again hoping vigorously) never noticed the hourly change in your height EVER, what the hell is anyone else supposed to do with your analogies?

You have already proven you cannot manage one iota of thought to them but use them merely to hear yourself speak and put no thought into considering them yourself.

You display complete contempt for all around you, thinking yourself some godlike intelligence for which you need not bother with rational thought and logical progression because you opine your own intelligence so outshines everyone else that there is no possibility for argument with your jovian pronouncements.

Or, in short, you're so bloody dumb that you can't see how dumb your argument was.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

The point, Kevin,& BP, is that demography refuses to cooperate with your narrative .

Stoking the fires of existential threat inflation has not stopped people from moving south in droves, electively experiencing far larger increases in thermal stress than any IPCC scenario projects .

Moreover, they seem to be living longer in consequence. Sure , warming makes the the hottest places even hotter, but technology and tropical medicine has turned places Victorians feared to tread - the British lost far more troops to hyperthermia than gunfire in Indial-- into thriving new centers of commerce.

What matters about the reality of microdegree per hour rates of AGW is that they mean no one is likelty to live long enough to experience the first of the " several degrees ' you fear.

Contending that the coming century will see less change than the last in how developed economies make hot places habitable amounts to technology denial.



Y

Bernard J. said...

Russell, the problem isn't effect on the human body of the change in average temperature, it's the bit that happens at the tail of the gaussian curve.

There's also the matter of how changes in mean temperature affect ecosystems, and very much how changes at the tails of the normal curve affect them and their component species - like it or not, humans are very much tied to the vicissitudes of ecology across the span of food, disease, and ecological functions. In fact, I think one or two people might even have written books on the subject...

And it's not as simple as just stepping from the sun into the shade, especially when that shade (or water, or space, or remaining productive agricultural land, or...) is actually on someone esle's side of a fence.

But naturally you know all this. Your orneriness is of course artistic licence...

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

History tends to be more ornery than the mamnifesto writing classes might prefer. No one doubts Biotremes will of course shift orth and uphill as temperatures rise, but that dynamism poses a threat to the status quo: rearranging the status quo is what evolution does in the first place , and I am puzzled by the presumption that what we are doing to climate slowly will somehow outstrip what our ancestors did rapidly by homogenizing global flora and fauna in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Blogger profile said...

"The point, Kevin,& BP, is that demography refuses to cooperate with your narrative"

So you haven't noticed any change in your height from when you were a baby???

Is this

a) because you're only 18 inches tall
or
b) because you really are that dumb
?

Demographics shows we HAVE noticed the change in climate since "we were young".

Despite not noticing the hourly temperature change rate, just like they all have noticed (apart from you, of course) that they are taller than when they were born, despite never having noticed the hourly gain in height.

I guess, though, if you're so dumb you haven't noticed you don't fit in a baby carriage any more, you're dumb enough not to notice the change in the weather too, and too dumb to notice that others have noticed the change.

Blogger profile said...

"Your orneriness is of course artistic licence..."

No, not artistic license, it's the attempt of a venal liar to get out of paying their dues.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

"Demographics shows we HAVE noticed the change in climate since "we were young"."

Is that supposed to be a fact ?

The reality is that America's demographic center of gravity has followed a global trend in shifting south into the sunbelt "since we were young."

While my height has doubled since I was one, my capacity to sense changes in temperature has not.

Please examine the matter before vituperating further.

Blogger profile said...

"Is that supposed to be a fact ? "

Only because it is a fact.

"While my height has doubled since I was one,"

Did you notice the 2 billionths of a mile per hour rate your head rose? Don't tell me you've gotten taller if you didn't feel the speed of your growing!!!!

"my capacity to sense changes in temperature has not."

But your ability to use your brain hasn't. Still at the one-year-old stage. Sad face.

And your willingness to admit your error is, if anything, worse.

Never mind, gramps, think of it like this: other geriatrics got to experience their second childhood. You got to keep the same capabilities for your entire life!

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Behold the phase transition from anonymous coward to a bore in a snit.


I call McCarthy's law.

Blogger profile said...

Sorry, what? Just because I don't buy your BS doesn't make it a "snit".

You really are merely demonstrating your lack of adult competency and providing yet more evidence that you really DO only operate on the emotional level (not to mention the educational level: really? "No need for thermometers, we can just check where people live to get the temperatures!!"???) of a pre-mobile infant.

Since you don't like the use of thermometers to gauge the temperatures, and do not wish to know about the progress of technology since the 18th century, please prove that this isn't the case:

It is well known that old people "feel the cold" much more than young people and it is also known that the population is aging, and that the combination of both of these facts mean that the move south is purely due to the old people being cheap and getting housing in the south so they don't have to pay for heating.

Please also prove that your idiocy is not due to the known fact that it is known that the brains of older people do not repair damage as fast as the damage occurs and therefore are mentally impaired.

Please note that further complaints should not be created merely on unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks but on the content of the conjecture, as this is not a valid argument against the conjectures. And complaints or counterarguments should likewise refrain from any querying of rubbish correlation because such ridiculous correlation has been posited by yourself several times and remained your sole claim for why the climate has not changed, ignoring any other factor and the existence of actual thermometers, designed to measure the temperature and metrology, designed to make measurements consistent through time by consistent calibration.

Please also note that my description of your mental state is not ad hominem attack against your argument of "People is moving south! Cooling!" but the conclusion of stated evidence and supported BY said evidence of mental deficiency of yourself here on this thread. If you wish to counter this, you will need to provide better evidence of the reason for the stated evidence of your mental retardation to be explained by an alternative scenario.

This is how ACTUAL argument is done among adults.

Only children argue like you do.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

McCarthy wins as usual.

Blogger profile said...

So your reasoning is due to Jenny McCarthy?

Or are you still working out words, like a baby babbling random words whilst they are learning the language?

If there are any words in my post you didn't understand, let me know.

If you can't manage to post anything other than baby talk, then you really don't know what's going on in the world today any more and you should, for your own safety, check yourself in to the nearest home for the elderly.

Unless you bring your game up to par for an adult you will have ruined any capacity for people to consider you a valid poster and must therefore either be so mentally incapable or morally corrupt that you are not an honest broker.

Because at this moment there is no difference between stupidity and malice, because you are either incapable of being educated or incapable of being humane. In either case, your entire personae is redundant and irrevocably broken.

Two options:

1) Raise your game
2) Prove you are irremediably incapable

Last chance, gramps.

Last chance.

Tom said...

Blogger profile, please post more often. Here.

Most sincerely,

Tom Fuller

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Having ranted past a thousand words without adducing a single number, it comes as no surprise that BP's's got the wrong McCarthy too.

Blogger profile said...

Old man, you have provided no more numbers than I have. The aging population is known and well documented. The low metabolism of older people is a centuries old medical fact.

Moreover, Mexicans are moving North, not South. Proof of their numbers can be found easily.

Since these are two phenomena that are just as solid as your Jenny McCarthy Reasoning demographic factoid but point to the opposite proposition, your factoid is proven wrong.

Moreover, since you posit the number of words posted to be indication of error, your total count of words is vastly higher than mine, therefore your position is proven vastly more incorrect.

This makes three points of fact against your proposition.

Barton Paul Levenson said...

I don't think RS's contention was "people are moving south, therefore there's no warming." Rather, it was, "people are moving south, therefore a little warming won't matter." Which is just as specious, of course. We're talking about changes in mean global annual surface temperature. A 5-6 K change in Ts is all that stands between us an an ice age. A 1 K change in Ts is enough to move agricultural growing belts hundreds of miles. Unpredictably on a regional basis.

Blogger profile said...

BPL, nope. Doesn't match. People moving south despite it warming would mean that people are moving to areas that will kill them. 3000 died in the European heatwave in, what 2008? How many died in Russia a few years later in their heatwave? California is having problems because of it getting hotter.

So, no, his argument can't be "despite warming, people are moving south, therefore warming will not be a problem".

Moreover his responses have been likewise Jenny McCarthy reasoning (ie nonexistent) posted merely to reply without answering, accuse without admission.

In short, there is no causal link between "getting warmer will not be a problem" and "people moving south" and his snide "have you felt the microdegrees per hour" comment indicates that he doesn't think that it is warming at all.

The problem is that you're not a soulless monster with no care but your personal comfort, so you don't think this is evident in others.

BPL, unfortunately there really are people who would not care one whit if the earth burned if they were to do without their comforts for one minute to stop it.

Russel is one.

Bernard J. said...

"No one doubts Biotremes will of course shift orth and uphill as temperatures rise, but that dynamism poses a threat to the status quo: rearranging the status quo is what evolution does in the first place , and I am puzzled by the presumption that what we are doing to climate slowly will somehow outstrip what our ancestors did rapidly by homogenizing global flora and fauna in the 18th and 19th centuries."

Russell, you've dropped a few logical fallacy petards worthy of the Watts side of the argument.

Going backwards, the "homogeniz[ation]" process is not something that ceased after the 18th/19th centries: it's ongoing, accelerating, and a damned wicked problem. But it's not the only problem, and global warming/climate change exacerbate its effects as well as being direct threats in their own right.

And what we are doing to the climate is not slow in evolutionary terms. It's a sudden and sharp perturbation to the evolutionary progress of individual species right through to whole ecosystems. Evolution doesn't adapt at these scales, it responds after the event.

Evolution doesn't so much "rearrang[e] the status quo" as optimise it. When changes to the status quo occur (comets/asteroids, volcanoes, sudden (decades-millenia) release of sequestered radiatively-active gases, other large-scale events...) evolution is the process whereby niches are filled after being created, or being vacated through the extinction of former occupants. A lot of evolution of nascent species occurs at such times, but this doesn't mean that there is any 'good' in the extinction process that preceded it.

You have it a bit cart-before-horse.

Dynamism is not fractal in an evolutionary sense. A little bit of change enhances the evolutionary optimisation of diversity, but a lot of dynamism harms diversity. The explosion of new species evolving after a catastrophic purturbation is not an indication of the desirability of dynamism but of evolution's ability to fill the gap afterward. Cold comfort to the extinct species though.

On our scale, in our experience of the universe, tipping the climate as we are threatens a lot of the biodiversity on which we rely, and directly threatens our ability to live successfully in many currently habitable parts of the planet. A nihilist could say that yeah, give the system 10 million years or so and the biodiversity will return - but this argument isn't being made in a nihilistic context, it's shaped by our understandings and our responsibilities as participants in a civilisation organised on principles of mutualism, care, and perpetuation of maximum benefit to the living agents in the contemporaneous period.

People who want to take themselves down for whatever reason in whatever fashion they choose should be allowed to only to the extent that they don't bring others down in the process. If they don't want to participate in society with that principle in mind they can go outlaw, with all the attendant penalties that follow. But when it comes to playing silly buggers with the thermostat, well, it behoves us to not make glib generalisations about the intricacies and subtleties of the processes of the only known biosystem in the universe. Doing so leads to incorrect conclusions, and thus to poor decisions.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Recalling that the subject is what rate of warming constitutes an existential threat? I wish Bernard J whould read the ingredients list on his Koolaid:

How upon many species has the human territorial and demographic expansion of the last century depended?

Millions? Thousands ? Tens?

Whatever the President's speechwriters may see and feel, the first degree of AGW has not put a dent in human population or longevity, and while the tails of disaster incidence curves have thickened in the four decades since Jim Hansen turned uo his rhetorical thermostat to declare the 'climate crisis' still in progress on PBS, , the signal of anthropogenic forcing remains so immersed in the decadal noise of the climate system that we can't get CO2 sensitivity to emerge and converge s a parametric modeling constant.

Encouraging as it is to see climate modeling transition from infancy to adolescence, both it and systems biology have a long way to grow before they become as compelling as some environmentalists presume- so great is their scope that they may instead be farther from closure than the hard sciences. I doubt the realism of predicating policy centuries hence on what we do not yet know.

As BP's crapulence conceals neither his hostility to numbers, or inability to count, pehaps he should rejoin the Bishop's like-minded cohort.

Blogger profile said...

"Recalling that the subject is what rate of warming constitutes an existential threat?"

When did let the thread discussion topic ever constrain you, Russel? Moreover, that's not the subject either. It's how people can feel the change in the climate.

"Millions? Thousands ? Tens?"

If you don't know even to five orders of magnitude, I suggest you stop demonstrating your lack of education and find a different tack to try lying on.

"the first degree of AGW has not put a dent in human population or longevity"

So how did you work out how many people would have been alive without AGW to make this comparison of equality?

Or is that claim just empty rhetoric, cooked up to pretend that you're not an immoral monster so totally wrapped up in your own comfort that you will do anything to ensure you can refuse to help anyone else?

"and while the tails[sic] of disaster"

Spellcheck.

"since Jim Hansen turned uo his rhetorical thermostat to declare the 'climate crisis' still in progress on PBS"

He's been far closer to the truth than you have been. But then again you don't care about finding the truth, you merely want stasis while you are privileged.

"the signal of anthropogenic forcing remains so immersed in the decadal noise of the climate system"

This comment so clearly encapsulates your malice it's only necessary to wonder at the lack of any validity to climate change and quote it.

There is no way a human mind could claim this. This can be the result only of a person who lies knowingly, brazenly and with malice for all else on the planet for the betterment of themselves.

It truly is insane by any humane viewpoint.

"we can't get CO2 sensitivity to emerge and converge s a parametric modeling constant."

Yes we can. But not only from there do we get it. Facts that you discard utterly because you have no care for truth or honesty. It means nothing if doing so merely RISKS your privilege and status.

"I doubt the realism of predicating policy centuries hence on what we do not yet know."

Your openly displayed and brazen dishonesty destroys any validity in this comment. Indeed your display has shown that even if you do not doubt it, you will still claim you do, because you do not care about the truth on iota.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

"This comment so clearly encapsulates your malice it's only necessary to wonder at the lack of any validity to climate change and quote it."

Actually, I'm parphrasing what Jerry Mahlman said in the NAS report, Global Change and Our Common Future:

"Until such decadal-scale fluctuations are understood or are predictable, it will remain difficult to diagnose the specific signals of permanent climate change as they evolve. "

You dont appear to have seen my compilation of CO2 duoubling sensititvity estimates either.

Blogger profile said...

"You dont appear to have seen my compilation of CO2 duoubling sensititvity estimates either. "

Unless you're saying that your estimates are believed to be wrong by you yourself, your claims regarding their incalculability would be wrong.

If you're claims of incalculability are intended to be correct, then you've just claimed you are not competent to do the work by your own admission.

In either case, yes, I haven't seen them. I look to people who are intellectually honest and I find enough evidence collated in the IPCC reports. In either case, it is not a problem not to have looked at your attempts either.

And your blatant lies indicate you are not a reliable source of quotes of others either. Or interpretation of them.

And perusal of the book you claim to have quoted does not conclude what you conclude from the same statement paraphrase.

So yet more Jenny McCarthy reasoning.

Blogger profile said...

Your response also did not defend or counter my post, but preferred to gallop off on the stagecoach of irrelevance.

In future I will do less work to show your duplicity and substantiate my claims, since such effort is going to be wasted. I'll just say "Jenny reasoning".

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

As trolls go, this one seems the beau ideal of what John McCarthy had in mind when he wrote:

" Those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to talk nonsense."

Blogger profile said...

Jenny reasoning.

Still.

You'd address them if you were allowed. So it must be me forbidding it, right.

Barton Paul Levenson said...

Here are 61 estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling, including the crazy ones.

http://bartonlevenson.com/ClimateSensitivity.html

The mean is 2.8 K, and the sample standard deviation is 1.50.

Barton Paul Levenson said...

Sorry, that should have read "2.86 K."

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

In many disciplines, the failure of the mean value of a critical parameter to converge after sixty iterations would be cause for humility.

Not the Climate Wars.

Bernard J. said...

"Recalling that the subject is what rate of warming constitutes an existential threat? I wish Bernard J whould read the ingredients list on his Koolaid:"

Russell, there's no need to look at the label on a bottle of 'sports' drink - the scientific literature will do. I believe that you have some small experience with such searches, so I will leave it to you to seek out the work of my colleagues in the field of ecology and thermal envelopes.

You seem to be forgetting that there are two basic parameters relevant to the argument that you are trying to pose. The first is the rate of warming, and the second is the period over which this rate of change operates. Of course a change in mean global temperature is not going to have serious consequences over sufficiently short intervals of time, but the problem is that this rate will be sustained for long enough that species and ecosystems will not adapt. It's a matter of simple numbers and of ecophysiology.

If you disagree it would be interesting to see your actual calculations, with reference to the relevant ecological and physiological literature.

"How upon many species has the human territorial and demographic expansion of the last century depended?

Millions? Thousands ? Tens?
"

This is an interesting question, depending on how you contextualise it. At face value the number would be somewhere between the orders of thousands to millions for direct dependence, and once ecosystem fucntions are included the indirect number would be closer to the order of tens/hundreds of thousands to millions, than to thousands.

But in another frame humans can be demonstrably shown to be profoundly and inextricably dependent on very small numbers of species. For example, a single species - Prochlorococcus marinus - is estimated to be responsible for about 20% of all oxygen production on Earth. If, hypothestically, it was to fall over tomorrow and its niche was not successfully filled, at some point in the not-too-distant future it might become difficult to draw a breath, especially at altitude or with exertion. Or take the examples or rice, or corn, or any of a small number of other grains - if there was an epidemic that afflicted one of these staples the effects on large sections of humanity would be profound. And this isn't a hypothetical challenge: we already have examples of societal suffering from collapse of crops from disease or climatic extremes.

Warming the planet is essentially the same as loading a few more bullets into the chamber in a game of Russian roulette.

It might be hard for a city-bound person to grok, but humans are very much dependent on a healthy ecosystem, and just because changes to the health of the biosphere might be imperceptible to an old smoker, it doesn't mean that shifts aren't occurring that could and would directly challenge said smoker's children and grandchildren.

Blogger profile said...

"I believe that you have some small experience with such searches"

Enough not to do so when he knows he's going to be wrong.

Just uses Jenny McCarthy reasoning and pretend it's logic.

Blogger profile said...

"the failure of the mean value of a critical parameter to converge after sixty iterations would be cause for humility"

Why here?

Do any of them indicate the threat of AGW nonexistent?

No, you don't want humility, you want abdication.

Because your comfort, both material and mental rely on there being no problem, no agw, no need to change a thing. Especially no need to change. Doing so would be like admitting you were wrong.

Barton Paul Levenson said...

RS: In many disciplines, the failure of the mean value of a critical parameter to converge after sixty iterations would be cause for humility.

BPL: Who says it's not converging? Look at the chart.