Quote of the Week – a warmer turns cooler

I’ve had a feud with David Appell ever since he brought my deceased mother into an attack article about me, which I retort in: David Appell denies he has any class . Maybe that was when he hit bottom, because since then he’s been steadily publishing articles that are starting to make sense to those of us that don’t fret fearfully about AGW, climate change, and weather is not climate unless we say it is. And, he’s even calling out people like Bill McKibben and Peter Gleick for their selective over the top rhetoric and dishonesty. The light bulb seems to have gone on for Appell, and it isn’t a twisty bulb.

He makes some good points here:

Quark Soup by David Appell: Bill McFibben on the Weirdest Weather

Bill McKFibben went on Democracy Now today to talk about the President’s attempt to make everyone happy on the Keystone Pipeline (or, at least, make everyone equally unhappy), and mentioned the warm weather in the US, calling it the “weirdest weather ever seen in this country.”

Personally I find such talk strange, since here in Oregon it’s been cold and rainy (and even snowed last night), but that’s another matter.

But weirdest weather ever? Weirder than the Dust Bowl years? Than any of various “storms of the century,” or 1972’s Hurricane Agnes, a June hurricane that swept away all our lawn furniture and precipitated a 20-year feud between my grandmother and my great uncle-in-law when she suggested, as we…

…

McKibben does this a lot, like with last year’s Hurricane Irene, which he attributed to warm water off the east coast. Yet the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season had a near normal number of major hurricanes, with an above average number of tropical storms with a near normal number of major hurricanes. Back then KcKibben picked off all the global hot spots:

“Last year was the warmest ever recorded on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice is near all-time record lows. Record floods from Pakistan to Queensland to the Mississippi basin; record drought from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas. Just about the only trauma we haven’t had are hurricanes plowing into the U.S., but that’s just luck—last year was a big storm year, but they all veered out to sea. This year we’re already on letter I—which in a normal year we don’t get to until well into October.”

Now he sticks to the US heat wave, with no mention of the recent deep freeze in eastern Europe. And if you want to cherry pick, Arctic sea ice is currently at it highest extent in several years.

But the one that really deserves QOTW notice is this one:

Are we really going to rebuild all of civilization to avoid the occasional heat wave and rising seas and some slightly stronger hurricanes? I was thinking about this last night, and the answer is clearly no. Yes, these aren’t the only impacts of climate change, by any means, but we get a lot of value from burning fossil fuels. A lot. There is as yet no viable substitute for them. I was thinking about my personal list of concerns, the big ones, and the honest answer is climate change is pretty far down the list, after health care, income (and so, the economy), clean local air and water, crime, and then things like war and terrorism and then hungry and poor people across the globe and animal suffering and probably a few things that aren’t occurring to me now, and then climate change. Sorry, but that’s the truth.

Welcome to lucidity Mr. Appell.

UPDATE: It seems we are back to the death threat thing again, so maybe now Appell will go soft on McFibben and get all bent out of shape when we aren’t all shocked like he did before? His issues was that I just wasn’t shocked and angry enough, but when you look at the charges and “investigation” as I did, there was nothing of substance there.

Steve Milloy writes on Junkscience.com

Death-threat-apalooza: McKibben ‘endured death threats’ for linking early spring to climate change

Following in the footsteps of whiners Katharine Hayhoe and Michael Mann, now 350.org’s Bill McKibben is claiming to have been the target of “death threats.” But maybe he’s just tying to distract from an allegation of racism?

It seems McKibben and other eco-groups aren’t so tolerant of minorities when it comes to saving Gaia. Pre-emptive note to Appell, I’m not shocked about that either.