Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
James Hansen and others say that we owe it to our Grandchildren to get this climate question right. Hansen says “Grandchildren” with a capital G when he speaks of them so I will continue the practice. I mean, for PR purposes, Grandchildren with a capital letter outrank even Puppies with a capital letter, and I can roll with that.
In any case Hansen got me to thinking about the world of 2050. Many, likely even most people reading this in 2010 will have Grandchildren in 2050. Heck, I might have some myself. So I started to consider the world we will leave our Grandchildren in 2050.
In a recent post here on WUWT, Thomas Fuller floated a proposal that we adopt a couple of degrees as the expected temperature rise over the century. He says in the comments to his thread that
I think we owe it to the people of the world to give them an idea of how much warming they can expect, so they can plan their buildings, businesses, roads and lives. They matter. They don’t care how much of it is due to CO2 or how much is rebound from a LIA due to forcings we don’t understand. They don’t. They probably shouldn’t.
We have temperature rises that we can almost trust from 1958 that show a trend of about 2 degrees for this century if things go on.
To start with, I don’t think we owe people anything more than the scientific truth as we understand it. And if we don’t understand it, as in the case of what the climate may be like over the rest of this century, we definitely owe it to the people to simply say “We don’t know”. Those three little words, so hard to say … so no, we don’t owe people a number if we don’t have one.
Next, predicting the future by extending a linear “trend” is a bad idea, because it puts a totally false air of accuracy and scientific reliability on something that we haven’t much of a clue about, except we’re very sure it’s not linear … As Mark Twain famously wrote of that kind of extrapolation:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.
And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
So extending linear trends is not a good plan, particularly in our current state of knowledge of the climate. The planet may be warmer in fifty years, or it may be cooler in fifty years, we don’t know.
But let’s set all of those difficulties aside. Here’s Fuller’s proposal graphically, using HadCRUT data. (As an aside, the trend 1958-2010 in the HadCRUT data is actually 1.3° per century, not 2°/century as Fuller states. So his figures are an exaggeration of the historical trend.)
Figure 1. A grapical representation of Thomas Fullers proposal that we decree that expected warming will be 2° over the 21st century. Image Source
However, Fuller’s proposal along with a comment from Michael Tobin got me to thinking. How about that two degrees per century, what if it actually happens? That two degrees has always been the big scare number, the tipping point, the temperature rise that would lead to the dread Thermageddon, the temperature where we fall into planetary immolation. So I got to pondering James Hansen’s statement about the Grandchildren, and also Fullers postulation of a historically unlikely 2°warming this century. Two degrees per century is eight-tenths of a degree by 2050, so my questions were:
What would I do differently if I knew for a fact that my Grandchildren would be eight-tenths of a degree warmer in 2050? Or alternatively, how would I feel if I knew for a fact that I had sentenced my as-yet-unborn Grandchildren in 2050 to live in a world that was eight-tenths of a degree warmer?
And you know, I couldn’t think of one single thing about buildings, or businesses, or roads, or lives, that I’d do differently for eight tenths of a degree by 2050. Not one thing. Even if I knew it was coming, I don’t know what that slight warming will do, so what would I do to get my Grandchildren and Puppies and business and bridges ready for it? How would I know what to do to prepare my buildings and roads and life for eight tenths of a degree of warming?
There might be some adverse outcomes from that eight tenths of a degree of temperature rise threatening my Grandchildren in 2050, but neither I nor anyone else knows what those outcomes might be. We’ll assuredly get an extra flood over here, and one less flood over there, it’s very likely to be drier somewhere and wetter somewhere else, in other words, the climate will do what climate has done since forever — change.
But anyone who says they can predict exactly where the floods and droughts might be in that unknown climate future is blowing smoke. And I don’t know if we could even tell if the average temperature changed by eight-tenths of a degree. Here’s why:
Let’s take a real look at what that means, eight-tenths of a degree. Here is the record for the GHCN climate station nearest to me these days, Santa Rosa, California.
Figure 2. GISS Unadjusted and Adjusted Temperature records, Santa Rosa, CA. Adjusted temperature is shown in transparent red, to show the Unadjusted underneath (blue). Bottom panel shows the amount of the adjustment.
Santa Rosa has pretty good record, mostly complete from 1902 to the present. Now, there are a number of issues with the GISS adjustments to this station. Before adjustment there is a slight cooling, and after adjustment that has become a slight warming. Who knew that the urban heat island might work in reverse? In addition, the adjustment in recent years is very rapid. Seems counterintuitive.
However, none of the details of the adjustment is my issue today. Today, I want to highlight the fact that the adjustment in the Santa Rosa record is about a degree in a century. So the uncertainty in the historical record is at the very least about a degree. And this is a good record.
Now, which one is right, the adjusted or the unajusted temperature? Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell. Why? Because an adjustment of a degree in a century is lost in the noise. We often see winters and summers that are three or four degrees warmer or colder than the preceding year or two. We see warm decades and cool decades. A degree is simply not enough change to notice. The oldest men and women living in Santa Rosa couldn’t tell us whether average temperatures were a degree warmer on average when they were kids than they are now. And our thermometers can’t do any better. We simply don’t know whether the ~ 1°C adjustment to the Santa Rosa record is valid or not.
My point is that the adjustment is almost a full degree. This is slightly larger than the predicted temperature rise in the scary stories about 2050 and the Grandchildren and the Puppies. And since the adjustment of nearly 1°C in Santa Rosa is so small that we can’t determine if the adjustment is correct, why should I be concerned about eight-tenths of a degree in 2050? We can’t even measure temperature to that accuracy in a site with good historical records, and I should worry about that unmeasurable change?? I don’t think so.
So no, I’m sorry. I refuse to be scared, even by Fuller’s exaggeration of a linear extrapolation of a cherry-picked trend. I have no problem if my Grandchildren have to face a world in 2050 that is eight-tenths of a degree warmer than it is now, more power to them. Without alarmist scientists armed with megaphones and performance-enhancing mathematics, how would we even know if it were eight-tenths of a degree warmer in Santa Rosa in 2050? Our scientists can’t decide if there is a 1° change in the Santa Rosa record, and yet we’re supposed to fear a smaller change by 2050? I think not.
And what catastrophes will eight tenths of a degree bring? We see decadal swings in the Santa Rosa record that are much greater than that, and there are no ill effects. Yes, I know there’s hosts of scientists out there telling me that awful things will happen from Thomas Fullers stipulated warming, but here is my question:
First, let’s assume that the AGW folks are correct, and that global warming will lead to global catastrophes of a variety of types, all the biblical plagues plus a host more. Increasing temperatures is supposed to lead to more extreme weather and terrible outcomes, a perfect storm of hundreds of bad effects in what I have termed “Thermageddon”.
Next, let’s note that the globe has been warming, in fits and starts but generally warming, since the Little Ice Age. Estimates of the amount of the warming are on the order of one and a half to two degrees C.
And finally, note that since 1958 (to use Fuller’s start point) we have had much faster warming for half a century.
So my questions are … where are all of the catastrophes from that couple of degrees of warming since the Little Ice Age, and from the half century fast warming since 1958? I mean, James Hansen would excoriate the Elizabethans because they bequeathed not only their Grandchildren, but their great-great Grandchildren, a warmer world. I don’t know how the Elizabethans slept at night, after wishing a degree or more of warming on their poor innocent Grandchildren. And puppies. But where are the catastrophes from the couple of degrees of slow warming since the 1600s?
Seriously, people keep saying that the problem with the climate is that we can’t do laboratory experiments. But for the past three centuries we have two excellent natural experiments. In the first we saw warming century after century, and yet we didn’t experience Thermageddon. Where are the catastrophes?
Then in the second natural experiment we have the much faster warming Fuller talked about since 1958, as shown in Figure 1. During that time the Pacific atolls have gotten bigger, and Bangladesh has more hectares of land. People are better fed than at any time in history. There has been no increase in extreme weather events. Where are the catastrophes resulting from those two natural experiments in slow and fast warming?
So no, I don’t worry about eight tenths of a degree warming by 2050. I sleep content, knowing that my Grandchildren might actually get to the point where they could measure eight tenths of a degree of warming and have a scientific reason to agree on the size of the adjustments … I figure they’ll be able to do it, they’ll be smarter and richer and more powerful than we are, with undreamed of technologies. Heck, they may find out that it actually did warm by eight-tenths of a degree between now and 2050. And by then they may actually have found out whether or not CO2 is the main planetary temperature control knob. And likely they will have a variety of other energy sources at that time.
But regarding the eight tenths of a degree of warming by 2050, I just don’t see what catastrophes that will cause in the real world for my Grandchildren. It certainly hasn’t caused catastrophes up until now.
But then people say, never mind the Grandchildren, what about the other species? Won’t their ranges change?
I’m at about Latitude 38 North. The global average temperature change as one goes north or south at that latitude is about one degree per hundred miles.
So under the Thomas Fuller 2°C assumption, the average isotherms will move 80 miles north by 2050. Again, this is lost in the noise. These kinds of changes have been happening in the climate since forever. The world generally doesn’t even notice. Eight tenths of a degree is just too small, it is dwarfed by the daily, monthly, annual, and decadal temperature swings.
Oh, people will say, but the warming in this case will be much faster than in the past, that’s where the problem will come in. But those people forget that all life adapts very quickly. It has to because the temperature changes so much and so quickly. When the temperature often changes by three degrees from one year to the next, either up or down, plants and animals must (and can) adapt to that change in a single year. The idea that plants and animals can’t adapt to eight tenths of a degree by 2050 doesn’t make sense, when they can easily adapt to a three degree swing up or down in a single year. And we have seen that in the rapid warming since 1958 that Fuller highlighted, there haven’t been any catastrophes, either among humans, animals, or plants. So the “fast warming causes catastrophes” claim doesn’t work either.
Final Conclusion? I’m sorry to be so contrary, friends, but I just don’t see that even Thomas Fuller’s exaggerated (by historical standards) 2° per century warming will bring any kind of problems or catastrophes. The IPCC’s greatest projected warming is said to occur in the extra-tropics, in the winter, at night.
And at the end of the day, you can call me a callow, unfeeling neo-Elizabethan brute willing to sentence his Grandchildren to a warmer world, but I’m not going to lose sleep over having less frigid December midnights in Helsinki Finland, or over Thomas Fuller’s possible (not guaranteed but only possible) eight tenths of a degree of warming by 2050. Warming has not caused catastrophes in the past, and if future warming does happen, there is no reason to expect catastrophes from that either.
I know mine is a minority view. But to change my mind, you’ll have to show me that warming in the past has caused catastrophes and huge problems. Until then, I’m not going to believe that warming in the future will cause catastrophes and huge problems, especially warming that we can barely measure.
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And if present trends continue I shall live forever and weigh more than the planet Jupiter.
The problem with this article is that it focuses on the global average temperature change that is projected for the future in a discussion of the consequences and compares that figure with the daily variation in temperature which is much larger. The average temperature change by itself is not what is causing the concern, so Eschenbach is responding to a straw man argument here.
The real problems associated with temperature increases are increases in catastrophic weather events such as droughts and floods, which result from the exponential increase in evaporation and water content in the atmosphere as a function of temperature. Eschenbach totally ignores this real argument which is based on the dependence of the vapor pressure of water, and is reflected in the results of weather and climate modeling. The projections are that droughts and fires such as were observed in Australia and Russia, and floods such as the recent incident in Pakistan will be more frequent. There is nothing benign about these events.
The fact that Eschenbach doesn’t feel the need to deal with this argument is appalling. Is it because has never encountered real consequences of global warming as described by scientists, or is purposely ignoring them because it is easy to do, and the cheerleaders who favor his point of view won’t notice.
Great post Willis, maybe you can leave a copy of it for the Bay Citizen, LA Times, etc.? Al is at It again.
Al Gore on Prop. 23
http://www.baycitizen.org/videos/al-gore-prop-23/#comments
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeDSC3Id4jo&fs=1&hl=en_US]
eadler says:
October 22, 2010 at 4:22 pm
“The real problems associated with temperature increases are increases in catastrophic weather events such as droughts and floods, which result from the exponential increase in evaporation and water content in the atmosphere as a function of temperature. Eschenbach totally ignores this real argument which is based on the dependence of the vapor pressure of water, and is reflected in the results of weather and climate modeling. The projections are that droughts and fires such as were observed in Australia and Russia, and floods such as the recent incident in Pakistan will be more frequent. There is nothing benign about these events.”
The conventional wisdom seems to be that the planet has already experienced significant warming over the last 150 or so years. Presumably you can provide a link to some observational data to show the ” exponential increase in evaporation and water content in the atmosphere as a function of temperature” over that time. I must have missed it, because most of what I’ve come across suggests that the weather is trending toward more average, not more extreme. The much ballyhooed weather events of recent times are not unprecedented, but are merely reiterations of similar events that have occurred before, mostly within our lifetimes, mine at least. They are examples of weather that is definitely not benign, but having spent over six decades in Minnesota I tend to expect weather that is truly benign to be the rarest of all commodities.
eadler says:
October 22, 2010 at 4:22 pm
The projections are that droughts and fires such as were observed in Australia and Russia, and floods such as the recent incident in Pakistan will be more frequent. There is nothing benign about these events.
The fact that Eschenbach doesn’t feel the need to deal with this argument is appalling. Is it because has never encountered real consequences of global warming as described by scientists, or is purposely ignoring them because it is easy to do, and the cheerleaders who favor his point of view won’t notice.
Your “projections” of more frequent droughts, fires, and floods are nothing more than baseless scaremongering. No, there is nothing benign about them, but then Mother Nature, or Gaia, or whatever you want to call it can be cruel at times. Add to that man’s insistence on living in areas more prone to those types of events and the consequences are magnified many times over. Often, it can be stupid practices like outlawing cutting down brush surrounding homes, such as in Australia, which cause the tragedy to be much greater than it would otherwise.
I imagine he didn’t address these “issues” because they are so patently absurd, and have been debunked countless times here and elsewhere.
As for not encountering the “real consequences of global warming”, what you really mean are the imaginary, much-hyped “consequences”, which are pretty much whatever you Alarmists say they are, including completely contradictory ones.
The kicker is that not only is there no evidence that our weather has become more extreme, or will become so, there is little evidence that our C02 has had much warming effect. There are far more powerful players at work driving the climate. We are but passengers.
Good article!
You missed a couple of potential capital G’s on “grandchildren”.
eadler says:
“The real problems associated with temperature increases are increases in catastrophic weather events…”
Gaia disagrees.
You should have picked Door #3. Thanx for playing, and Vanna has some lovely parting gifts for you on your way out, including Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat!
Our next contestant is a housewife from Boise, Idaho, Mrs Lulu Finklestein…
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OK, no more beer tonight.
click1
click2
click3
Eadler; What weather extremes are you talking about, A heatwave in russia or the floods in pakistan, give me a break. That is weather remember, as you warmist are so fond of saying so that argument is out the door. Now if you want an explanation of it i am quite sure Anthony can give you one as any meteorologist can do. When you have high pressure systems that sit over an area like they do here in Texas in the summer it gets hot you know 90s and WAY up. The same as when a low pressure sits over us it brings lower temps and rain. Your so called AGW extreme weather explained so go peddle you cr@p else wear or stay and learn instead of spouting off the warmist dogma. I prefer you stay and learn i hope others feel the same.
Willis
I agree with everything that you say.
The person worrying about fires in Australia should just start reading some history.
Also some mathematics and statistics.
Specially chaos theory.
Everyone, please do come to grips with the fact that climate is NOT normally distributed.
Extreme events occur (and have always occurred).
Chaotic systems have long fat right hand tails (that stretch far out to the extreme).
When you study some history, do read that the Murray river in Victoria was so dry many years ago that locals around Echuca used its dry bed as a main road, as it was far smoother than the bush tracks at that time.
In recent weeks SES voultareers frantically built sand bag walls to prevent the river flooding the town.
Drought, fire, floods are all extreme (but quite natural) events.
It’s just that the past does not jump out and grab youl like TV footage of people killed in recent Victorian fires.
Nevertheless, the past was as real then as the present is now.
Perspective and a deep understanding of chaos theory is required by anybody studying the climate.
That’s all.
Here’s an example of the apocalyptic climate change scenario recalling the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum that was current a few years ago. Perhaps they have moved on since then, but it is in Stewart Brand’s latest book, Whole Earth Discipline, that hit the shelves last year.
Steven Mosher says:
October 22, 2010 at 9:28 am
How many stars are there in the universe?
hmm. simply because we dont know a number exactly does not imply that we know nothing about the number or the likely range
OK so Mr Eschenbach and others have already batted this piece of silliness away but it is such a good analogy that I just had to lend my support to it.
Based on Hubble telescope observations there where believed to be (ESA figures)something like 10^11 to 10^12 stars in our galaxy, and there are perhaps something like 10^11 or 10^12 galaxies. With this simple calculation you get something like 10^22 to 10^24 stars in the Universe. But note that the error bars in this analogy for climate science already span two orders of magnitude!
More recently, however, astronomers have thought again. Hubble optical wavelength observations suggested that star formation had reached a peak at roughly seven thousand million years ago. There is now evidence that a lot of early star formation was hidden by thick dust clouds. Formation timescales have been reviewed and a whole different number of stars (with just about the same uncertainty) pops out of the equation.
So with stars as with climate – we don’t know. (not even approximately Mr Mosher)
Though it is less likely when counting the stars that the sign will go negative
grayman says on October 22, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Quite. On Christmas eve, 1974, I experienced the Cyclone that pretty much destroyed Darwin in Australia. In July 1984 I was in Boston for a week-long heatwave … seems that they have them regularly in that area …
Doesn’t seem like things are very different today.
Hansen wants us to think of the Grandchildren!
Well, what if he’s wrong. What would our children inherit?
Lower job expectations, lower living standards, probably shorter live expectancy all due to less freedom to inovate and adjust, if and when necessary.
I think I’ll trust my Grandchildren and technology to overcome whatever may happen. If we can affect climate as always mentioned we should be able to counter any future changes.
I love the statements, even if the hockey stick is right where are the changes caused by the last 300 years of warming, or even the tremendous rise of the last 50 years?
If you look at Fullers graph it only shows a 0.6-0.7°C rise in the last 150 years, that’s only 0.5°C per century at most!
Dude…now here you go applying logic to the issue! What are you thinking? It is warming (doesn’t matter if it’s at night, in the Winter, or in airport runways), it’s warming, so it must be us. We all know the Sun doesn’t do squat, the oceans used to but not this time around…no sir…cosmic rays, schmosmic rays, tis’ definitely us, I can feel it. This is bad. Warm is bad, cold is good, (except when it’s caused by global warming). We are doomed! Can’t you feel that 0.8C change?!? It’s cooking in here…or at least in the science of it. But hey, if you want to sell something, you have to create a market. Econ 101…0.8C bad, holocene optimum…no longer-optimum. May the AMO humble us all…and soon!
eadler says:
October 22, 2010 at 4:22 pm
eadler, thank you for your comments. I have dealt with the issue of extreme events (droughts, floods, and the like) here, as I mentioned above. I have also discussed droughts here as well. So the idea that I have not discussed and dealt with them is not true.
And again I say, show me the catastrophes. You say:
But we have seen three centuries of slow warming, followed by a half-century of fast warming, and your “real problems” haven’t materialized. So you can wave all of the climate models you want in front of my face, but your doomsday predictions of what warming will bring haven’t worked in the past. Droughts and floods haven’t increased, hurricanes haven’t increased, where are the catastrophes?
eadler says:
October 22, 2010 at 4:22 pm
The projections are that droughts and fires such as were observed in Australia and Russia, and floods such as the recent incident in Pakistan will be more frequent.
More frequent than what? Anecdotes don’t prove anything, eadler, nor does bald faced disasterizing according to the utterly simplistic argument that “anything’s possible”. You are simply falling for Climate Science’s unscientific, fear based Propaganda Operation. Life is always “iffy” regardless, and we’re all going to die. Perhaps you should deal with those very personal realities first instead of trying to make everyone else do very stupid things which have no bearing upon your own personal resolution of these facts of life.
Many children born today will see 2100, mind-boggling as that is.
The global temperature will conservatively be 3 degrees warmer by then.
I think you short-change them with this kind of apathetic plan-for-nothing approach.
If humans ever do really have the power to “destroy Gia” through accidental means then the real problem, manifested in “The boy who cried “wolf”, will be realized due to the CAGW actions now.
Willis
wrong.
“osh, thanks for your thoughts as always. It took me a couple of days to spot the logical flaw in your argument. I am talking about an estimated future planetary temperature trend. You are talking about a count. Counts are much easier to estimate than the future evolution of climate. For starters, counts are static. Also, they are a present value, rather than an estimate of a future event.”
I am talking about epistemology.
“And if we don’t understand it, as in the case of what the climate may be like over the rest of this century, we definitely owe it to the people to simply say “We don’t know”. Those three little words, so hard to say … so no, we don’t owe people a number if we don’t have one.”
We never have “a” number. Not a number about counts, not a number about trends. We have estimates. F=MA is an estimate. It happens to be a very good estimate, but I’ve never seen an experient where the results came out exactly as predicted. And still, if they did they most we can say is “if the laws of the universe stay the same over the next period of time when we test F=MA, we will get the same “certain” results.
The point is you want to say that we have a moral obligation only to pass on things we are certain about. taxes, death, and logic seems a might small inheritance to pass on.
In short, I think most if not all of our knowledge has an element of uncertainty, philosphical uncertainty, and that observation means I have a obligation to pass on what I think I know, the limits of what I know, how I figured that I knew it, and the things people should look out for to tell if trusting that estimate was wrong.
Ya know son, every year if we planted in the spring we had food for the winter. Now I can’t tell you exactly how much food, and I cant say for certain that things wont change. But if you need a good place to start your journey, pick up where I left off. Things might change, but I will give you the rules of thumb I found useful, knee high by the 4th of july ( give er take ). You see Willis there is all sorts of knowledge and know how and rules of thumb and educated guess that we rely on and that you yourself have passed on to others. Like the idea that just because the scietific method worked yesterday, it will work tommorrow. Not a certainty, but something that we pass on.
So on my view we cannot owe the future generation those things we know. The things we know cant change. we cant owe them what cant withhold. That’s a moral impossibility. We owe them our uncertainty. That’s the real gift. but if you like, just let your kids have only what you know with certainty. 2+2=4. Give them what they already know.
“Mosh, thanks for your thoughts as always. It took me a couple of days to spot the logical flaw in your argument. I am talking about an estimated future planetary temperature trend. You are talking about a count. Counts are much easier to estimate than the future evolution of climate. For starters, counts are static. Also, they are a present value, rather than an estimate of a future event.”
But, if you you really want to stick with your distinction between estimating counts and estimating trends. fine. Its roughly 14.5C today, average for the global. Unlike Thomas who estimated a trend for the next 90 years, I wont. I’ll estimate a series of counts. same difference.
Jim D,
“The global temperature will conservatively be 3 degrees warmer by then.
I think you short-change them with this kind of apathetic plan-for-nothing approach.”
You are making the common mistake of confusing pie in the sky fantasy projections based on a myriad of unproven assumptions with hard reality. Take a lesson in science 101.
Steven Mosher,
Why do you say ” just let your kids have only what you know with certainty”?
Are we talking about science here? As you well know, the science that is accumulated over time is an audit trail of research papers, theories, methodologies, results and conclusions. Nothing that Willis has said or proposed, changes this in any way.
Climate scientists will continue to produce their papers with all their variations, from sceptics like Spencer to hardcore warmists like Hansen. Nothing is being ‘witheld’ from the ‘kids’. To say that is to (willfully?) misuderstand what Willis is saying. IMO he is criticising the line that you should take out a figure – a 2C warming plucked from thin air – and give to the world as if it was fact.
If we follow that line, then you have to decide whose figure gets to be used. Why not Hansens or Lindzens? How can we say ‘this is the figure to use?’ This is politicising of science – perversion really – and is gravely to be regarded.
Jim D says:
October 22, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Many children born today will see 2100, mind-boggling as that is.
The global temperature will conservatively be 3 degrees warmer by then.
I think you short-change them with this kind of apathetic plan-for-nothing approach.
No, there is no proof whatsoever that we’ll be 3 or more degrees warmer then. There is nothing “apathetic” about wanting to bring science back into the discussion about climate. But you’re right, we probably should be planning for cooling in the coming decades, with possible LIA conditions by 2050. Despite all the breast-beating and wailing of the Warmists, it is in fact cooling that is more of a danger to mankind, and to all life. The best defense will be healthy, vibrant economies driven by science and technology, which is the opposite of what the climate bedwetters want.
The phrase “Think of the Grandchildren”, of course, is simply an Appeal to Emotion-type of logical fallacy, with the assumption being that unless you believe in the Sky-Is-Falling fairy tale you must be a callous monster who doesn’t care what happens in the future. The irony is that the Alarmists aren’t actually thinking about the Grandchildren at all. True Believers are never concerned about the actual consequences of those Beliefs.
8/10 degree: Willis if you want to check out now how your grandchildren will do in 2050 just make a trip to San Diego and see how others’ grandchildren are doing now.
Bruce Cobb says: “No, there is no proof whatsoever that we’ll be 3 or more degrees warmer then.”
I often see the appeal for proofs here. This is not mathematics. You can’t prove it will be 3 degrees warmer in 2100 any more than you can prove that tomorrow’s weather will be sunny. However, you can give confidence levels and that is what the IPCC does. As the decades go by, verification will bear their forecast out, and we have had two or three such decades already to show they are on the right track.