Don’t seem to be disappearing by the hand of man.
I’d almost feel sorry for that idiot Al Gore, if he wasn’t such a sanctimonious hypocritical carbon-belching schmuck.
[Early afternoon update]
As noted in comments, the former vice president has suddenly decided that he had better places to be than Copenhagen.
Ah, did you know he has canceled his Copenhagen trip? Obviously he can dish it out but can’t take it. Color me laughing.
I thought I had read somewhere that loss of moisture was at least partly due to local deforestation.
Rats and a sinking ship come to mind
I think hopes that Climategate will have any discernible impact are naive.
“Global warming may require higher dams, stilts
By SETH BORENSTEIN (AP Science Writer)
From Associated Press
December 03, 2009 5:31 PM EST
With the world losing the battle against global warming so far, experts are warning that humans need to follow nature’s example: Adapt or die.
That means elevating buildings, making taller and stronger dams and seawalls, rerouting water systems, restricting certain developments, changing farming practices and ultimately moving people, plants and animals out of harm’s way.
Adapting to rising seas and higher temperatures is expected to be a big topic at the U.N. climate-change talks in Copenhagen next week, along with the projected cost – hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it going to countries that cannot afford it.
That adaptation will be a major focus is remarkable in itself. Until the past couple of years, experts avoided talking about adjusting to global warming for fear of sounding fatalistic or causing countries to back off efforts to reduce emissions.
“It’s something that’s been neglected, hasn’t been talked about and it’s something the world will have to do,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Adaptation is going to be absolutely crucial for some societies.””
Business as usual as far as I can tell.
Jim, talk about adaptation is a victory, if it means they’ve given up on their goal of impoverishing us for negligible effects decades from now. I’m all for adaptation, if there’s something that we need to adapt to. But we adapt to it then, instead of paying out huge sums now for dubious results later.
Jim, talk about adaptation is a victory, if it means they’ve given up on their goal of impoverishing us for negligible effects decades from now.
Rand, I see no indication that they’ve given up on anything. I see no indication that Climategate has had any impact on their agenda. Indeed, I see little indication that they are aware of Climategate. To them AGW is a long settled issue and they are proceeding as if Climategate never happened.
Wow. Al Gore cancelling on a shindig of this sort and size with such late notice is pretty damning about his confidence in AGW post CRU leak.
Rand, I think this article in the online Wall Street Journal…
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704107104574572091993737848.html
…identifies an important point about this little episode.
Here’s the key paragraph:
“Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as “the precautionary principle.” As defined by one official version: “When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.” The global-warming establishment says we know “enough” to impose new rules on the world’s use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science’s traditional standards of evidence.”
As I’ve noted a number of times now in recent threads, there is no real-world evidence that positive feedbacks dominate the climate system (i.e. the mechanism that amplifies a less than 1C ‘molehill’ into a greater than 4C ‘mountain’). The last step of the Scientific Method — make a prediction and perform an experiment/observation to demonstrate/falsify it — has yet to be performed*, yet people are preparing to force major economic and social changes that will likely impoverish the global population and, worst of all, perpetuate human suffering in the third world.
*some would say it has because the predicted “hot spot” 10km above the equator seems to be missing and so appears to falsity the theory.
“Wow. Al Gore cancelling on a shindig of this sort and size with such late notice is pretty damning about his confidence in AGW post CRU leak.”
This does not speak to, in my opinion, that Mr. Gore himself has lost confidence in AGW. It speaks to Mr. Gore being very aware of the CRU dustup and not wanting microphones thrust in his face and being asked to comment on it.
Especially since Mr. Gore is a high-profile highly political spokesperson for “the cause”, it would do well, in his calculation, the “lay low” for a spell.
One of the reasons for the “precautionary principle” is purely selfish: knowing firm answers to many of our questions, instead of educated guesses, is firmly beyond our present science. So if we responded to the hints so far with that’s nice, but we need some nice solid proof the result would be that everyone would have to go back to the lab and blackboard for another 20 years before that even began to be possible.
Science often has a hockey stick graph of its own. You can get pretty far up a new trail of knowledge without too much effort — but at some point, the path starts getting very steep indeed, demanding immense cleverness and dedication and money to advance even small steps. That’s when a lot of people want to bail out and try something easier.
Perhaps climate science is there. The easy stuff has been done. Hints and broad plausible theories that could be drawn from cheap data have been. What’s left is to really nail down things — and that may be horribly expensive and slow.
The precautionary principle – Never do anything for the first time.
My view is that if the precautionary principle were used on itself, it’d never be implemented. By definition, it is employed exactly at times when we don’t know the relative harm of choices. That means we would be causing some degree of harm and some of that harm will be “severe and irreversible” (that is, meet the threshhold of the precautionary principle). So it is reasonable for proponents to first show the precautionary principle doesn’t do this sort of harm before we accept its use.
Pro tip: Because this process is a very suboptimal risk assessment, no one will be able to show that the precautionary principle passes its own test.
“The melting of the Furtwangler Glacier at the summit of the Kilimanjaro began 125 years ago. More of the glacier had melted before Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro in 1936 than afterward. The daily average temperature at the summit NEVER rises above freezing, not then and not now. Daytime temps are about 5C, and nighttime temps are about -20C. The cause of the melting is known to not be temperature related”
Dave Salt and Jim Davis’ comments are related.
I have heard from more than one person that the reason we NEED to address AGW, whatever the problems w/ the data, is the FACT that global warming COULD lead to human extinction. Get a positive feed-back loop going, and you could turn the Earth into Venus.
And since we don’t KNOW what the tipping point is, we must start now, since if it turns out to be at level X or at time Y, we’ll only have squandered the time between now and when we determined X or Y.
This from folks who pride themselves on working in the sciences (and, amusingly, regularly deride Republicans for being anti-science).
At some level, I suppose, it’s natural. If it’s got that level of danger, shouldn’t we do something about it? And when folks are positing threats below the level of extinction (as the Governator did the other day), isn’t it nonetheless worth doing something about it?
Note that none of these folks, however, are economists—nor have they ever run businesses. THAT is where the “precautionary principle” runs headlong into a brick wall. How much would YOU pay to kill asteroids? (Amusingly, most of these folks, but not all, think that’s entirely over-blown.)
Lurking, what bothers me about such things is how they transform ludicrous conjecture into “FACT”. A lot of bad things could happen. But do we really think it is possible for Earth’s atmosphere to sudden fill with several dozen times the current atmosphere’s mass worth of carbon dioxide? Of course not, yet that sort of thing is what is needed for a Venus-styled greenhouse effect to occur.
What’s really boggling to me are the people who angst about the extinction of humanity from global warming yet can’t coherently explain why they’re afraid. When you ask “How?”, they talk about sea level rising, shifting vegetation/crop patterns, and other relatively minor things. I don’t even know how you can reason with such people.
Karl:
Well, yes and no. They are very careful to note that this isn’t “fact,” but it’s what could happen. Never mind the problems that you note.
Still, to be honest, they’re actually less frustrating than the prating idiots whose response to ANY criticism is “There is a UNIVERSAL consensus that there is global warming. NO organization opposes IPCC. EVERY national and international climatological group agrees that it’s happening, it’s human, and we need to do something.”
Those are the folks who are human versions of broken records, whose certainty will never be breached.
But, it’s more than the precautionary principle at play. I cannot count the number of times AGW believers have said to me, essentially “whether it is right or not, reducing our dependence on and usage of fossil fuels is good.” They think it’s all upside: if AGW is true, they will have averted a major catastrophe, if not, they will have accomplished some good anyway.
People who think like this have no more than a child’s conception of how the economy works, and a complete lack of comprehension of how much pain and poverty and death would result from the do-good prescriptions.