More Global Warming Bullshit

[sk]

Meanwhile this french computer model is still predicting hotness.

 

that is so distracting

[Billygoat]

and soooo fuckin' Hawt!

[sk]

yep

[Hugh Conway]

maybe in your world...

 

must suck not to remember what blowjobs are

[billcoe]

Global warming - todays artical:

 

link UK telegraph

"2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

 

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

 

 

By Christopher Booker

Last Updated: 7:40AM GMT 29 Dec 2008

Polar bear

Polar bears will be fine after all Photo: AP

 

The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".

 

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

 

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

 

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

 

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

 

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

 

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

 

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

 

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.

 

I must end this year by again paying tribute to my readers for the wonderful generosity with which they came to the aid of two causes. First their donations made it possible for the latest "metric martyr", the east London market trader Janet Devers, to fight Hackney council's vindictive decision to prosecute her on 13 criminal charges, ranging from selling in pounds and ounces to selling produce "by the bowl" (to avoid using weights her customers dislike and don't understand). The embarrassment caused by this historic battle has thrown the forced metrication policy of both our governments, in London and Brussels, into total disarray.

 

Since Hackney backed out of allowing four criminal charges against Janet to go before a jury next month, all that remains is for her to win her appeal in February against eight convictions which now look quite absurd (including those for selling veg by the bowl, as thousands of other London market traders do every day). The final goal, as Neil Herron of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund insists, must then be a pardon for the late Steve Thoburn and the four other original "martyrs" who were found guilty in 2002 – after a legal battle also made possible by this column's readers – of breaking laws so ridiculous that the EU Commission has even denied they existed (but which are still on the statute book).

 

Readers were equally generous this year in rushing to the aid of Sue Smith, whose son was killed in a Snatch Land Rover in Iraq in 2005. Their contributions made it possible for her to carry on with the High Court action she has brought against the Ministry of Defence, with the sole aim of calling it to account for needlessly risking soldiers' lives by sending them into battle in hopelessly inappropriate vehicles. Thanks not least to Mrs Smith's determined fight, the Snatch Land Rover scandal, first reported here in 2006, has at last become a national cause celebre.

 

May I finally thank all those readers who have written to me in 2008 – so many that, as usual, it has not been possible to answer all their messages. But their support and information has been hugely appreciated. May I wish them and all of you a happy (if globally not too warm) New Year."

 

Don't know about this. I had posted that the New Farmers Almanac had called for cooling for the next 80 years.

 

[Choada_Boy]

Global Warming will almost certainly blow a gasket when it reads this letter but I decidedly must make the case that Global Warming loves everybody so much, it wants to rip out the guts of everybody who doesn't love everybody as much as it does. What follows is a call to action for those of us who care -- a large enough number to make a cause célèbre out of exposing Global Warming's ballyhoos for what they really are. Although Global Warming is ever learning it is never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. The truth, in this context, is that on several occasions I have heard Global Warming state that cheeky toughies are inherently good, sensitive, creative, and inoffensive. I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a comment. What I consider far more important though is that what Global Warming is doing is akin to painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. I'll probably devote a separate letter to that topic alone, but for now, I'll simply summarize by stating that justice isn't served when Global Warming's crimes go unpunished. Let me express that same thought in slightly different terms: I never used to be particularly concerned about Global Warming's assertions. Any damned fool, or so I thought, could see that I am intellectually honest enough to admit my own previous ignorance in that matter. I wish only that Global Warming had the same intellectual honesty.

 

If Global Warming truly wanted to be helpful, it wouldn't sugarcoat the past and dispense false optimism for the future. In a rather infamous speech, Global Warming exclaimed that masochism forms the core of any utopian society. (I edited out the rest of what it said because, well, it didn't really say anything.) What I am getting at is this: If you intend to challenge someone's assertions, you need to present a counterargument. Global Warming provides none. If we let Global Warming sow the seeds of irreligionism we'll be reaping the crop for quite a long time. To put a little finer edge on the concept, when Global Warming says that ebola, AIDS, mad-cow disease, and the hantavirus were intentionally bioengineered by anal-retentive, jaundiced quidnuncs for the purpose of population reduction, that's just a load of spucatum tauri. Global Warming somehow manages to maintain a straight face when saying that people are pawns to be used and manipulated. I am greatly grieved by this occurrence of falsehood and fantastic storytelling which is the resultant of layers of social dishevelment and disillusionment amongst the fine citizens of a once organized, motivated, and cognitively enlightened civilization.

 

Sure, Global Warming can fabulize about how its musings prevent smallpox. That doesn't change the fact that it stands for rogue authority, social directives, and onerous laws that weaken personal freedoms. If you don't believe me, see for yourself. Think about it. A final note: Global Warming's indifference only adds to the problem.

[olyclimber]

ghastly climatology astigmatism

Go Web in 1898 stars battle

driving at? Forget it!

Everything to our topic Health world OFFBEAT

whats going on engine

Family Hold on in 1951 The thing is

Snowboarding Miss World

in 1814 in 1871 I am on a Spice Girls

don't feel well in 1979

Absent Without Leave Red Herring

[j_b]

Yeah, it snowed in Seattle last week and the temperature around my belly button was a freezing -1degC, which unequivocally confirms what the stooges for the fossil fuel industry have been saying about global warming. I also smoke 2 packs a day and I am fine, so there, take that you doomsayers. Did I mention that my heating ducts used to be covered with asbestos and I don't have lung cancer?

[Bug]

I like grapes............

[pc313]

[Bug]

Marketing.

Which side is being duped?

 

What I DO know is, after the 50's and early 60's

Lake Michigan was dead.

The river by my grandparents' house caught fire and burned twice in one month.

Acid rain falling on farms in the northeast was determined to have originated in the coal burning industrial centers of the midwest.

In Missoula Mt the smog was so bad in the early 60's that you could not see moving cars one block away.

The headwaters of the Clark Fork river around Butte and Anaconda were dead or dying from the smelter.

The Navajo in the Southwest were dying from radiation poisoning from the Manhattan project.

Teakettle mnt on the border of Glacier Park was dead from the Columbia Falls smelter.

The list goes on.

 

Who will profit in the short run? Corporations. It is their "fidutiary responsibility" to their stock holders.

Who will suffer in the long run? Who cares. I'm 49. I'll be dead by the time it matters.

I agree with pc313, Fairweather, Hugh, GW, etc. If we can make a buck today, why worry about the future?

Just think of how rich our parents would have become if those damned environmentalists hadn't forced Detroit and the steel industry to use sulphur scubbers.

Dang.

I could be living off the fat right now.

 

 

[j_b]

My proctologist is a scientist too and he said anthropogenic climate change was a hoax, so I am not worried. He also suggested that I keep my head up my ass to be unaffected by climate variability. Do you think it'll will work?

[pc313]

Personally i believe that are actions and bad choices in buissnes are speeding up the the natural climate change of 100,000 year cycle of earths weather patterns i.e. Ice age vs Green world and to pretend that were not on a fast track to sea levels rising would be a costly mistake for even a 10 foot rise would be unreal,and could happen in are life times!

 

In Hawaii most of the hotels are at less then 20ft. sea level as are alot of the worlds population,so if like me at 500 ft. sea level who cares? But all the rivers will back up and are tax dollars will be wasted on clean ups, the money could be better spent on changes now then a bail out later,even if the change is to prepare for the higher sea levels.

 

[KaskadskyjKozak]

 

SEE, OBAMA HAS FIXED THE PROBLEM ALREADY!!!!

[JayB]

When it comes to Global Warming, getting the science right will be the easy part. Deciding how to respond will involve moving into the realm of conflicting value judgments based on the same evidence, and determining how to allocate scarce resources that have many alternative uses in response to the science will be infinitely harder.

 

 

 

 

[KaskadskyjKozak]

When it comes to Global Warming, getting the science right will be the easy part. Deciding how to respond will involve moving into the realm of conflicting value judgments based on the same evidence, and determining how to allocate scarce resources that have many alternative uses in response to the science will be infinitely harder.

 

 

 

 

GLOBAL WARMING IS SO 2000. IT'S CALLED CLIMATE CHANGE NOW JAYB!

[j_b]

When it comes to Global Warming, getting the science right will be the easy part. Deciding how to respond will involve moving into the realm of conflicting value judgments based on the same evidence, and determining how to allocate scarce resources that have many alternative uses in response to the science will be infinitely harder.

 

There is little reason to think the science isn't already mostly right despite the continuing rhetoric of the denialists. Starting today, global greenhouse gas emissions have to decrease by at least 80% by the end of the century to avoid warming greater than 2degC, which implies we'll have to do better since we contribute already a disproportionate amount. Peak oil and the present severe recession combined with climate change represent an opportunity to rebuild the economy on a truly sustainable basis.

[Bug]

The way McSame scoffed at a energy conservation plan clearly revealed where the old boy republican stance lies.

Given the choice, McSame would continue burning, cutting, and consuming.

Funny.

With G senior it was "about the economy stupid".

With little G not only did he screw the lower classes but he screwed future generations as well. Only Laura and a few diehard lie swallowers still pretend that the GW presidency was not a failure.

Let's look at the list.

We have to dig our way out of a morass in Iraq.

We have to dig our way out of a morass in Afganistan.

We have to dig our way out of a morass in our debt to China.

We have to dig our way out of a morass in our inability to maintain automobile production.

We have to dig our way out of a morass due to the lack of oversight authority the SEC has AND how much they even use what they have.

We have to dig our way out of a morass in world respect.

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney has admitted to outing Plame and gets away with TREASON.

 

I say try and hang the bastard just like we did to Saddam.

The only question I have is, will Cheney find a way to pardon himself?

[j_b]

I am with you including for accountability in government, but I am against the death penalty even for someone like Saddam.

[JayB]

When it comes to Global Warming, getting the science right will be the easy part. Deciding how to respond will involve moving into the realm of conflicting value judgments based on the same evidence, and determining how to allocate scarce resources that have many alternative uses in response to the science will be infinitely harder.

 

There is little reason to think the science isn't already mostly right despite the continuing rhetoric of the denialists. Starting today, global greenhouse gas emissions have to decrease by at least 80% by the end of the century to avoid warming greater than 2degC, which implies we'll have to do better since we contribute already a disproportionate amount. Peak oil and the present severe recession combined with climate change represent an opportunity to rebuild the economy on a truly sustainable basis.

 

Maybe - but IMO the rougher things are in the present, the less willing people are to make sacrifices that might lead to a better future if doing so will their lives even tougher. No matter how how small the uncertainty is concerning the science, bankrupting the present to pay for the future isn't ever going to be a a viable way forward, so the path to lower carbon emissions is going to have to be paved with investments that create outputs worth more than their inputs within a time frame that will provide enough incentive to get them built. In practice, barring something truly revolutionary, that'll probably mean that we have to content ourselves with a series of incremental improvements in efficiency, gradually build solar/wind/etc capacity, and rely on conventional power sources until we transition to a technological state where we can generate the vast majority of our power without producing C02. Seems like after allow for incremental increases in solar, wind, increasing efficiency, conservation, etc - the gap is going to get filled with either coal, natural gas, or nuclear. I know which one will get my vote.

 

*NYRB article that you might be interested in reading.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494

[JayB]

Discussion in NYRB prompted by the original article:

 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21811

 

"The economics of climate change is straightforward. Virtually every activity directly or indirectly involves combustion of fossil fuels, producing emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide accumulates over many decades and leads to surface warming along with many other potentially harmful geophysical changes. Emissions of carbon dioxide represent "externalities," i.e., social consequences not accounted for by the workings of the market. They are market failures because people do not pay for the current and future costs of their actions.

 

If economics provides a single bottom line for policy, it is that we need to correct this market failure by ensuring that all people, everywhere, and for the indefinite future are confronted with a market price for the use of carbon that reflects the social costs of their activities. Economic participants—thousands of governments, millions of firms, billions of people, all making trillions of decisions each year—need to face realistic prices for the use of carbon if their decisions about consumption, investment, and innovation are to be appropriate.

 

The most efficient strategy for slowing or preventing climate change is to impose a universal and internationally harmonized carbon tax levied on the carbon content of fossil fuels. The carbon content is the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions that are emitted, for example, when people use a kilowatt-hour (kwh) of electricity or burn a gallon of gas.

 

To understand a carbon tax, consider an average American household, which consumes about 12,000 kwh of electricity per year at a price of about $0.10 per kwh. If this electricity were generated from coal, that would lead to about three tons of carbon emissions. If the carbon tax were $30 per ton, it would increase the annual cost of coal-electricity purchases from $1,200 to $1,290. By contrast, the costs of nuclear or wind power would be unaffected by a carbon tax because these forms of energy use no carbon fuels.

 

Raising the price on the use of carbon through a carbon tax has the primary purpose of providing strong incentives to reduce carbon emissions. It does this through four mechanisms. First, it will provide signals to consumers about what goods and services produce high carbon emissions and should therefore be used more sparingly. Second, it will provide signals to producers about which inputs use more carbon (such as electricity from coal) and which use less or none (such as electricity from wind), thereby inducing them to move to low-carbon technologies. Third, it will give market incentives for inventors and innovators to develop and introduce low-carbon products and processes that can replace the current generation of technologies.

 

Finally, a market price for carbon will reduce the amount of information that is required to do all three of these tasks. Ethical consumers today, hoping to minimize their "carbon footprint" (the amount of carbon they use), would have serious difficulties making an accurate calculation of the relative carbon emissions that result from, say, driving versus flying. With a carbon tax, the market price of all activities using carbon would rise by the tax times the carbon content of fossil fuels. Many consumers would still not know how much of the market price is due to the carbon content, but they could make their decisions confident that they are paying for the social cost of the carbon they use....

 

However, the major economic question remains: What is the appropriate price of carbon? It is at present infeasible (or at the least ruinously expensive) to prevent any and all future warming; yet unchecked warming poses serious threats to human and especially natural systems. We need therefore to strike a balance between the competing objectives of preventing climatic damage, maintaining economic growth, avoiding catastrophic risks, and not imposing undue hardships on poor people or future generations..."

 

Etc

 

 

Edited December 30, 2008 by JayB

[j_b]

There will be a lengthy transition period but you are posing the problem upside down: we have already heavily mortgaged the future and imposed hardship on poor people and our children because of unsustainable dead-ender policies. Every single penny invested toward business as usual will compound the problem, whereas money spent toward sustainability is likely to improve people’s life by creating real jobs and enabling stable communities. Generating “growth” via over consumption and speculative bubbles, while depleting finite resources secured through war is the reason for our current condition. The sooner we stop it, the better off we are today and will be tomorrow.

 

We committed the better part of 10 trillion dollars we didn’t have for stabilizing the casino economy and to control Iraqi oil, and those who advocated these failed policies now argue we can’t afford a fraction of that amount to get us a long way toward energy independence and sustainability. I suggest these people take a back sit and watch for a while until they have shown they could be trusted again. We don’t need “growth” to make billionaires. What we need is development to make everybody’s life better.

[Bug]

There will be a lengthy transition period but you are posing the problem upside down: we have already heavily mortgaged the future and imposed hardship on poor people and our children because of unsustainable dead-ender policies. Every single penny invested toward business as usual will compound the problem, whereas money spent toward sustainability is likely to improve people’s life by creating real jobs and enabling stable communities. Generating “growth” via over consumption and speculative bubbles, while depleting finite resources secured through war is the reason for our current condition. The sooner we stop it, the better off we are today and will be tomorrow.

 

We committed the better part of 10 trillion dollars we didn’t have for stabilizing the casino economy and to control Iraqi oil, and those who advocated these failed policies now argue we can’t afford a fraction of that amount to get us a long way toward energy independence and sustainability. I suggest these people take a back sit and watch for a while until they have shown they could be trusted again. We don’t need “growth” to make billionaires. What we need is development to make everybody’s life better.

 

[JayB]

There will be a lengthy transition period but you are posing the problem upside down: we have already heavily mortgaged the future and imposed hardship on poor people and our children because of unsustainable dead-ender policies. Every single penny invested toward business as usual will compound the problem, whereas money spent toward sustainability is likely to improve people’s life by creating real jobs and enabling stable communities. Generating “growth” via over consumption and speculative bubbles, while depleting finite resources secured through war is the reason for our current condition. The sooner we stop it, the better off we are today and will be tomorrow.

 

We committed the better part of 10 trillion dollars we didn’t have for stabilizing the casino economy and to control Iraqi oil, and those who advocated these failed policies now argue we can’t afford a fraction of that amount to get us a long way toward energy independence and sustainability. I suggest these people take a back sit and watch for a while until they have shown they could be trusted again. We don’t need “growth” to make billionaires. What we need is development to make everybody’s life better.

 

Hmm. Lots of passion there. It sounds as though if you read the materials that I linked, you'd be able to translate this set of convictions into concrete statements about the optimal discount rate and, by extension, the optimal carbon-tax schedule.

 

 

 

 

 

[Bug]

There will be a lengthy transition period but you are posing the problem upside down: we have already heavily mortgaged the future and imposed hardship on poor people and our children because of unsustainable dead-ender policies. Every single penny invested toward business as usual will compound the problem, whereas money spent toward sustainability is likely to improve people’s life by creating real jobs and enabling stable communities. Generating “growth” via over consumption and speculative bubbles, while depleting finite resources secured through war is the reason for our current condition. The sooner we stop it, the better off we are today and will be tomorrow.

 

We committed the better part of 10 trillion dollars we didn’t have for stabilizing the casino economy and to control Iraqi oil, and those who advocated these failed policies now argue we can’t afford a fraction of that amount to get us a long way toward energy independence and sustainability. I suggest these people take a back sit and watch for a while until they have shown they could be trusted again. We don’t need “growth” to make billionaires. What we need is development to make everybody’s life better.

 

Hmm. Lots of passion there. It sounds as though if you read the materials that I linked, you'd be able to translate this set of convictions into concrete statements about the optimal discount rate and, by extension, the optimal carbon-tax schedule.

 

 

It sounds as though you are convinced that yours is the only path to economic balance.

Perhaps if you were to branch out and consider the benefits reaped by countless innovative endevours over the eons, you wouldn't seem so startchy.

Don't get me wrong here. Your materials were really quite good and even offer one potentially viable solution to a shared perception of impending disaster.

What I think the approach is hindered by is the continued carbon-centric economic model. I know we cannot change the economic institutions over night but the first step to solving a problem is admitting that there is one. Our problem, as your linked materials note, is the heavy dependence on coal and oil based energy sources. The first step in this case is the admission that we are enrgy gluttons. There are huge changes that can be made to our energy consumption patterns that cost realatively little monetarily or by standard of living. Start at home with examples like Fairweather listed. The impact of those alone, promoted by government and utilized on a grand scale would be significant. Move on to the office, then light industry, and then heavy industry.

 

But don't let's get bogged down on one existing example.

Think.

It is what America is MOST famous for.

Edited December 30, 2008 by Bug