Bill Clinton Praises His New Climate Change Hero
Excerpt:
I happened to be sitting next to Dr. Muller last week, and although he was whisked backstage by some big secret service staffers after Clinton’s speech, he agreed to answer a few Fresh Dialogues questions by email about his research and how he feels about hero worship by number 42.
You might be surprised to learn three things about Dr. Muller:
1. He says Hurricane Sandy cannot be attributed to climate change.
2. He suggests individually reducing our carbon footprint is pointless — we need to “think globally and act globally,” by encouraging the switch from coal to gas power in China and developing nations. He’s a fan of “clean fracking.”
3. He says climate skeptics deserve our respect, not our ridicule.
Muller said he hopes that Berkeley Earth will be able to coordinate with the Clinton Foundation on their mutual goal of mitigating global warming.
h/t to Marc Morano. Full story here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blackberry/p.html?id=2278509
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I can’t say I disagree with his points. While we’ve had our issues, it is nice to see #3 pointed out. – Anthony
I’m not skeptical about climate change. I’m skeptical about the motives and objectivity of human beings that promote climate change as a means to political change.
I am skeptical that people that seek to save the earth will in fact do so. Every crusade in history has blinded people to the harm they are doing in the name of the noble cause. The modern day Climate Crusaders are no different.
Actual climate change in the past 100 years has been much too small to measure except with ultra sensitive modern machines. All of which were built with fossil fuel. Show me a single weather satellite built and launched to space using only wind power or solar power.
Show me a single solar powered climate conference, or a climate conference where the delegates arrived using wind power. Yet 1000 years ago conferences were lighted and heated by the sun, and delegates arrived in sailing ships. So we know it is possible.
Why, if the Climate Crusaders are so concerned about the climate, why do they not use the proven technology of the past and stop producing CO2 themselves? Why do they label those that are skeptical of their motives “deniers”, as though we are denying the word of god?
For this is the true meaning of denier. Not a holocaust denier, but one that denies the word of god and the righteous that act in god’s name.
Robert of Ottawa says:
December 12, 2012 at 4:18 am
The many people in this thread with similar opions are watching the wrong hand: If Mueller is getting cozy with Bill Clinton, just whose initiative do you think that is? Think as many negative things about Dr. Muller is you like, but don’t believe for an instant he is even close to the manipulator and prevaricator Bill Clinton is.
In any kind of partnership with these two, Muller will be the sock puppet/fall guy and Clinton will be the beneficiary. To Clinton, the science doesn’t matter in the least; the goal is to achieve a political result and if real science doesn’t support the goal, phony science is perfectly acceptable.
In fact I suspect Clinton’s definition of “real science” is whatever supports his political goals.
Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen,
You are incredibly naive about the UN and human nature.
Peter Miller says:
December 12, 2012 at 1:37 am
Does the man believe CO2 is causing global warming to the point CO2 needs to be controlled or reduced? If so, nothing else he says matters (for he then contradicts himself and becomes the consumate politician–willing to say anything and everything to achieve his ultimate goal).
Beware wolves in sheep’s clothing. And don’t castigate the rest of us for seeing through his charade.
Though I disagree with Muller on some things, I have always felt he had a fairly balanced view of the world. He says things which upset the climate skeptics, but he also says things which upset the climate alarmists.
@ur momisugly Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen:”The fear of UN as a world government (via climate policies) expressed by some, is unwarranted, based on ideology rather than understanding..”
You must be kidding yourself. We have political leadership today who claim they support Global Governance and hand over all powers to the UN the moment the time is right. Just listen to the first speech made by the current “NON ELECTED” President of the EU. In the mean time we have more UN rules interfearing with our lives than many of you know. In fact, Agenda 21 rulings are already closing down entire roads and rural area’s. Please wake up and activate your gray cells.
Muller’s BEST was fatally flawed. He compared temperature change to absolute city size and concluded there was no UHI. He ignored change in city size as a factor and has not published the necessary correction. Why? One answer might be that such a correction shows that there is an UHI and publishing this is would not be in his BEST interests..
Consider this: Which is more likely to show an UHI? A town that has grown from 100 to 100,000 citizens, or a city that has remained static at 1,000,000 inhabitants? Muller’s study assumed the later should show more UHI than the former, and found that this was not the case, thus concluding there was no UHI, and thus GHG must be the cause.
What he did not consider, at least not for publication, was that his assumptions themselves were wrong. If there is a UHI, then a town that grew 1000 fold would show more change in temperature than a larger city that remained static in size, regardless of absolute size. Why has he not shown that comparison?
He’d make a great politician. He’s certainly no scientist. He does throw cold water on some of the more outrageous Alarmist claims, and says skeptics should be respected, not ridiculed. So very good cop – bad cop of him.
Muller’s Point 2 (must think globally about CO2): I think Muller said as much at the same talk as he said that the hockey stick, (some years ago?) with its filtering of two grafted graphs, misled not only the public but academics. I think he had graphs of coal, oil and gas reserves, production and consumption, by country, to illustrate .his points.
Gixxerboy says:
Muller is talking sense. Why are so may on here talking rubbish? Nearly everything he says is reasonable.
Well, if one is to come to a conclusion about nearly everything he says, one has to follow everything he says – out of both of his faces. He says a few things of minor importance that skeptics will like, to seem reasonable and gain acceptance for the big-ticket items that are the goals of his agenda. He’ll give you hurricane Sandy, so you will accept that “We need to act.”
Maybe he still sticks to the conventions of ‘global warming’ but, surely, most so-called ‘sceptics’ would agree that the world has warmed. And some of that is due to human causes. And some of that is due to increases in CO2?
According to Muller, 100% of ‘global warming’ over the last 250 years is due to human CO2.
That is what you are buying into, when you roll over for Muller’s Clintonesque sweet talk. It is the contents of the package, not the wrapping paper, that is important.
Bloody hell, cut the man some slack.
No. Lying politicians operate on ‘slack’. Last thing you do is give it to them.
Muller is playing his part in the kabuki.
Bad Warmist says: “Sceptics are stupid. Hurricane Sandy is all our fault! We need to act.”
‘Good’ Warmist says: “Sceptics are right. Hurricane Sandy is not our fault. We need to act!”
Sorry. I wasn’t born yesterday. They’re both bad warmists.
It’s all about diplomacy and politics. Agree with whoomever you are speaking to at that moment, even if you don’t believe a word of what he says. I think that sums up Muller
O/T but in the last 24 hours our windmills here in the UK have generated the princely total of 0.6% of total electric output.
It will be fun when we have to rely on them for most our power in a few years time.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/just-enough-to-boil-the-kettle/#more-2109
Tom Rude;
CBC is pushing rising sea levels also. They are saying one meter over one hundred years.
Metro Vancouver dike upgrades to cost billions
Improvements needed to protect Lower Mainland from rising sea levels
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/12/11/bc-vancouver-dikes-rising-sea.html
But the Vancouver tide tables say otherwise;
Mean Sea Level Trend 822-071 Vancouver, Canada
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_global_station.shtml?stnid=822-071
However in view of the significance of the 16 years lately, I would like to elaborate on RSS. The slope for 15 years and 11 months from January 1997 on RSS is -4.1 x 10^-4. But the slope for 16 years and 0 months from December 1996 is +1.3 x 10^-4. So since the magnitude of the negative slope since January 1997 is 3 times than the magnitude of the positive slope since December 1996, I believe I can say that since a quarter of the way through December 1996, in other words from December 8, 1996 to December 7, 2012, the slope is 0. This is 16 years. Therefor RSS is 192/204 or 94% of the way to Santer’s 17 years.
is concerned) before this event. In other words, the entire timeseries from 1979 to the present is inconsistent with any sort of picture of gradual warming driven by a steadily increasing concentration of CO_2. It is consistent with a system that is multistable — has many limit points that correspond to a kind of “dynamic equilibrium” — that can be jarred from multidimensional orbits around one locally stable attractor into orbits around another locally stable attractor, where the unusually strong ENSO event sufficed to force such a transition.
Or, one could simply look at the temperature curve itself, note that almost all of the increase over the entire satellite era occurred in one single event — the 1997-1998 El Nino, and that it was flat (as far as
Really, there is no other particularly good explanation of the data in terms of single variables (as Bob Tisdale is fond of pointing out, and pointing out, and pointing out — because it is true). Of course when you take into account additional variables such as CO_2 and/or solar state, you can come up with other explanations. Perhaps increased CO_2 caused the emergence of the second attractor, and perhaps its continued rise is destabilizing the currently stable attractor. Perhaps the prolonged period of high solar activity in some way caused the emergence of the second attractor with little help from CO_2, and now that it has gone down to the lowest level in 100 years an attractor at a cooler temperature is emerging and we’ll either smoothly decay or “jump” down to it. Perhaps attractors are “dense”, with nearly equal probability of jumping up or jumping down all of the time, but with the direction of the jump strongly dependent on the perturbation that causes it plus e.g. the phases of the various decadal oscillations. All we can see is that over the 33 years of good data, the first fifteen of them exhibited almost no warming, then there was a comparatively huge jump, and the last fifteen of them have exhibited almost no warming, strongly suggesting that Koutsoyiannis’ picture of Hurst-Kolmogorov punctuated equilibrium is the right statistical framework for describing the climate, although perhaps not the local noise of the time-evolution through the Poincare’ cycles bound to an attractor.
As for the 17 years, or 15 years, or whatever — bullshit. It is completely, totally meaningless as a number barring assumptions that are impossible to justify and according to the data, rather likely to be wrong concerning the correct statistics and corresponding dynamics of the process of climate evolution. The hypothesis of carbon dioxide driven global warming with high feedback/climate sensitivity could be dead right, but the nature of the dynamical evolution could be one of 5-20 year flat stretches bound to a currently stable attractor (plus substantial noise) followed by a dynamically driven jump to a strictly warmer attractor following the CAGW doomsday scenario curves. Or, it could be dead wrong and CO_2 could be a minor, easily overcome modulator of the probability of upward or downward transitions in a phase space of nearly equally balanced attractors, where the upward or downward transition probability is much more strongly influenced by the dynamical heating or cooling potential of the decadal oscillations and/or solar state (through mechanism unknown) or steady by very slow orbital variations or hundred year cyclic variations in the thermohaline circulation or aerosol levels or…
The best that can be said is what can be said from the entire data set. That treats everything interior as noise (in the specific sense that we profess complete ignorance of the causes of the variation), and suggests a warming rate of roughly 0.1 C/decade, projecting 0.9 C more warming by the end of the century, all things being equal. The uncertainties are great enough, however, that they embrace 2 C over the century or 0 to slightly negative numbers over the century (still from the 33 year baseline).
Is this a naive estimate? Sure, it assumes a monotonic linear trend for a temperature series that is neither linear nor monotonic across one single full century in the known climate record. Does this estimate account for what is “natural” warming versus anthropogenic warming? How could it? Warming doesn’t come with a label and we cannot directly measure either the precise amount of warming caused by CO_2 increase nor the hypothetical feedback amplification and we do not know the baseline of what temperature would be doing without the additional CO_2. It is a maximum ignorance — or maximum entropy, if you prefer — estimate based strictly on the satellite era data.
If we were to use data from outside of that era without the bias of presumed knowledge, without Bayesian priors, we’d do little better. Indeed, we’d do almost infinitely worse. If we go back forty years we get perhaps the greatest rate of warming. If we go back fifty to sixty years we get less. If we go back 140 years we get little change from the 33 year linear extrapolation (certainly within its probable error bounds). If we go back 300 years we get the same. If we go back 700 years we get a very small rate of warming. If we go back 1000 years we get a very very small rate of warming. If we go back 2000 or more years, we get net cooling for almost all starting points (with two or three localized exceptions) until we reach a point where we get consistent, strong, and then very strong warming. Go back 100000 years and we get anything from (by now very small indeed) warming to equally ignorable cooling. And so on, into the past.
We can explain almost none of this quantitatively! Assertions that we can are bullshit too — prove it, and predict the five million, or fifty million year climate record. We haven’t a bloody clue — not one that we can check — for why ice ages punctuate the climate record back as far as we can see, separating eras where almost without exception it was far warmer than it is today, even when the Sun was very likely somewhat cooler. The current ice age is happening with a much brighter Sun than the one that shown down on the Precambrian era or the Ordovician-Silurian transition. We have hypotheses as to why these ice ages happened, as to why the world remained warm with a significantly lower insolation, but we really don’t have a hell of a lot of data to support the hypotheses or any reliable way to test them. They’re right up there with the debate about dinosaurs and whether they were warm or cold blooded, warm nurturing parents or lay ’em and leave ’em egg parents who would cheerfully eat their own young, scaly lizards or feathered lizards, colorful or drab. All we have to go on (for most of this, for most species) is rare, indirect evidence drawn from the handful of species that actually left fossils that we have actually been fortunate enough to find.
Dinosaurs could have built artifacts and cities and had a bloody civilization that lasted a thousand years and the reshaping of the Earth a dozen times over in between might well have erased every recognizable trace of it. And so it is with the climate, which we infer, in part from that selfsame incomplete fossil record.
Skeptics, to be completely fair, need to not engage in wishful thinking and imagine that the last 16 years disproves GW, AGW, CAGW, or that it proves that the world is about to cool, or start the descent into an ice age, or whatever. It does nothing of the sort. It “proves” absolutely nothing but that for reasons we do not fully understand, the world has not warmed or cooled much for 16 years but rather fluctuated in a way that cannot be distinguished from “no linear trend”.
CAGW supporters, to be equally fair, need to not engage in wishful thinking and imagine that the last 16 years supports the hypothesis of high climate sensitivity leading to catastrophic warming. It does nothing of the sort. Indeed, it is, or should be, quite worrisome to them in the specific sense that it should be causing them to question or doubt their hypothesis and consider modifying it (which is not worrisome at all, of course, quite the contrary — it would be excellent news). In particular, every year the temperature remains flat should be pushing them to consider two changes — the obvious one of reduced climate sensitivity within their existing model(s), and with a correspondingly larger explanatory role for natural fluctuations and trends in the past, and the less obvious one of recognizing that climate dynamics is not a linear or even trivially nonlinear process but rather that the “average global temperature” is a one-dimensional projection of a complex and chaotic dynamical process that appears very much to be dominated by locally stable attractors that emerge and disappear according to internal non-Markovian dynamics that we are almost completely clueless about but that appear to be more than capable of “erasing” any trivial linear or nonlinear trend driven by a single variable so that no single variable can explain even local dynamics as more than an accident.
In other words, everybody needs to stop claiming knowledge that they just don’t have. That way we could stop pretending that we have a friggin’ clue as to what the climate is going to do in ten years, or twenty years, not with enough certainty to justify literally betting the health, safety and happiness of countless people in the world on the arguments either way.
Here’s the bottom line: We should, as a civilization, take moderate measures to hedge our bets against the worst case warming scenarios without panicking and spending trillions of dollars on it. Reasonable measures absolutely include doing more billion dollar research on the question (hey, at least the results here are immediately useful to the extent that the research succeeds, unlike, for example, the answer to the question of whether or not the Higgs Boson exists — so far) and on non-Carbon based energy resources. Just in case. After all, if the thermal record tells us anything, it is that we have time — the extrapolated linear trend is not something to panic over, and some fraction of that warming is almost certainly not anthropogenic.
The seas may disastrously rise, but they aren’t doing it yet. Crops may fail, storms may lash humanity, but there isn’t a clue that either one is happening yet. The arctic may melt, but it has melted before in the 1930s and it wasn’t disastrous (the polar bears somehow muddled through) and there is no disaster up there — yet. None of these things will happen overnight even if warming resumes and the CAGW extreme of the AGW hypothesis proves correct. And frankly, even if it were correct, there is damn all we could do about it with our current technology that wouldn’t count as a “catastrophe” for most of humanity in its own right — we’d be choosing between catastrophes, not avoiding one. Surely mere common sense suggests searching for technologies that might permit civilization to continue of the worst case scenario proves correct and the choice really is stop burning carbon or die in appalling numbers, while at the same time refusing to buy in to the assertion that it is true without some very hard, impossible to ignore, evidence.
Which simply does not, at this time, exist.
In twenty years we’ll know more. In fifty years y’all that are younger than I am will know more. It might take, however, seventy or even a hundred years for us to get to where we really understand the climate well enough to predict it on a century-plus timescale or to “steer” the climate in a predictable way by deliberately altering (for example) the chemistry of our atmosphere or deliberately turning Panama into a deepwater open connection between the oceans by means of a few thousand nuclear bombs that both dig and cool by blasting dust into the atmosphere nuclear winter style. In the meantime, doing stuff like that or spraying an orbital curtain in between us and the Sun is just crazy talk — I mean, what could go wrong?
rgb
A BEST-Clinton alignment sounds on the face of it like the feedback loop of Gore and his non-profit for profit setup in which the nonprofit activity drives for-profit opportunities in speaker fees at a minimum. It goes to show that there is still plenty of money to be made while global climate indicators move sideways or opposite the stated goal.
CO2 in my opinion is a harmless trace gas, yet essential and necessary for life on earth. Anyone trying to lower the 0,039% of CO2 in the atmosphere is an enemy of life. We need more of it to feed the world, not less.
Ah, please, surely we don’t really need this sort of hyperbole. Someone interested in lowering the 400 ppm CO_2 in the atmosphere is not necessarily “an enemy of life”, and while your opinion may be that it is a harmless trace gas, you could easily be mistaken, and people that disagree and think otherwise, especially when and where they have an actual physically supported argument as opposed to an opinion stated as fact, are not “evil” or seeking World Domination.
There may well be some people seeking World Domination on the back of the CAGW hypothesis. There were and continue to be plenty of people seeking or continuing to hold onto substantial parts of World Domination on the back of the beliefs of people raised not to question them concerning the existence and probable deity of a legendary figure who might or might not have lived 2000 years ago, or the religious philosophy written down by a real figure reportedly taking dictation from an angel 1300 years ago, or the religious society established by a real figure who claimed to have found golden tablets under the direction of a different angel just a few hundred years ago. That doesn’t reduce the sincerity of the people that without the faintest shred of concrete evidence continue to accept those incredible beliefs.
Personally, I think the exploitation of those beliefs are a greater risk to civilization than the CAGW assertions, by far — the latter can be falsified and if you are correct, will be falsified in due course, whereupon the peasants can descend with their pitchforks and torches or not as seems fitting. The former are killing people literally ever day by the score, with a risk of killing people by the hundred, or thousand, or even million, hovering perpetually in the wings. If rationality is a standard worth pursuing in public affairs, we could start with the enormous irrationality of religious beliefs that threaten one with an eternal (but non-verifiable) catastrophe as the reward for disbelief or non-compliance and the huge waste of public wealth and diversion of political power enabled by the collection of irrational belief systems. Talk about ongoing real-world catastrophes — look no further.
rgb
RobertInAz says:
December 11, 2012 at 7:55 pm
….. there are a number of inappropriate ad hominem attacks on Dr. Muller in this thread. Sad. He appears to be one of the more responsible alarmist voices and this many here do not appreciate how important his voice is.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You have GOT to be kidding.
The guy is a Machiavelli. He screwed Anthony and then LIED about being a ‘skeptic’ !
I would not trust him to take my dog for a walk.
You can find the links to the continuing saga of the BEST scandal here:
http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/categories.html
However the damage has been done. The popular perception is Muller as a skeptic, funded by the Koch brothers, looked at the surface station data found nothing wrong found no Urban Heat Island effect and is now convinced CAGW is real. As a prominent Professor his take on –
– are going to trump anything Anthony publishes peer-reviewed or not and that was the WHOLE POINT of the exercise. It was a PR move and nothing more and it worked beautifully.
The (Self-snip) has the morals of a mink in MHO and I can not believe that others can not see through him too.
Of course he thinks that “individually reducing carbon footprints is pointless — we need to “think globally and act globally”. The global warming cult is really all about a UN ruled socialist paradise. For socialism, individuality and personal accountability poses a threat to the socialist way of doing things, i.e. by surrendering all your thinking to the will of the collective and blindly following the group think dictates of the benevolent nanny state. The minute that the peasants start thinking and acting for themselves, is the moment when the door is opened to possible skeptical thoughts, and next comes the challenge to power as skeptical peasants expand their questions.
Many of the posts here are by right wing extremists. These people are far to the right of 90% of the pieces that get posted on this site. I wish they would find some extremist, out of touch with reality, site to vent their misconceptions. Dr. Muller is a good man and someone who is on the the side of those who question mainstream climate science, as do people like Judith Curry. I think Andy leans strongly towards the views of these very rational people, because Andy is rational. In the end this site is a beacon of rationality. I just wish that the extremist clowns that unfortunately dominate the commentary on this site would migrate to some other site and leave those reasonable thinking people that effectively counter this climate nonsense to fight it effectively.
rgbatduke:
I agree with all of your post at December 12, 2012 at 8:46 am. I write to add comments of my own on some of the points you make in that post.
In response to consideration of “the significance of the 16 years lately”, you say
Yes, as you say, “the entire timeseries from 1979 to the present is inconsistent with any sort of picture of gradual warming driven by a steadily increasing concentration of CO_2. “
But so what?
The recent 16 years of lack of warming (at 95% confidence) is “ruled out” by the climate models which are accepted by supporters of the idea that “CO2 is the climate control knob”.
Those supporters will not agree the time series is not consistent with their views until their statements of what would falsify their opinion are fulfilled. The ‘16 years’ does that.
We have already seen those supporters trying to “move the goal posts” but that is not relevant to explanations to others (e.g. research funders) of the inconsistency of the ‘16 years’ with the models.
Politicians are responding to the assertions that “CO2 is the climate control knob”. As I have repeatedly, said that response is an error which has potentially catastrophic consequences. For example, in the St Andrews Uni. debate
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=2938
I said this
I understand you to be making the same point – except that you ignore the risk of cooling – when you write
In my opinion, this point needs to be made much more often. We need to be aware that climate changes in unpredictable ways and to make reasonable precautions against effects of all such likely changes.
Richard
@ur momisugly Garymount and Cam-S, indeed and no surprise here. None of these “information” outlets would dare mention real measurements. SFU Deborah Harford is completely out of control and the reporter is ever so happy to print her baseless rambling as an argument of authority.
R. de Haan says:
December 12, 2012 at 7:28 am
“You must be kidding yourself. We have political leadership today who claim they support Global Governance and hand over all powers to the UN the moment the time is right. Just listen to the first speech made by the current “NON ELECTED” President of the EU. In the mean time we have more UN rules interfering with our lives than many of you know. In fact, Agenda 21 rulings are already closing down entire roads and rural area’s. Please wake up and activate your gray cells.”
Exactly right.
All those pretty trees and gardens planted along new construction and those prominently marked bicycle lanes you never see used…Agenda 21. I saw three lanes reduced to two lanes just to add a bicycle path, when there are parallel roads 1 block away with no traffic and sidewalks galore. Agenda 21. And controlling the internet will another control. Sooner than you expect.
Unprecedented restrictions in zoning…Agenda 21. Huge apartment complexes constructed…not a problem. Agenda 21. Build a new home on your ranch…good luck. Fail the housing industry, turn property owners into apartment dwellers. Agenda 21. 9-11, a crisis, Patriot Act, Agenda 21 Utah’s NSA Data Collection Center collecting 100% of every digital transmission. Search engine data, cell phone data, texting data, collecting data by pinging those cute little chips in your electronics everywhere you go, etc,..all of them…globalliy. Agenda 21. Makes Orson Wells “1984” a reality. Drones in your neighborhood coming soon. Facebook, twitter, Share this, share that. …World better wake up. …and no, I am not paranoid; old enough to see the changes and recognize what it means. When they say they are collecting an “enemies list” you better listen…it’s everyone.
It appears that Richard Muller got his knuckles badly rapped for authoring “Nemesis: the Death Star”, back in 1988, and returned contritely to orthodox mediocrity.
The academic cabal learned from its frontal attack on Emmanual Velikovsky, and turned to the more effective weapons of neglect and quiet sniggering to defeat the ideas of Muller and the Alvarezes. Of course, Muller’s book wasn’t a best seller like “Worlds in Collision”, and Muller was never an independent thinker such as Velikovsky, who managed to provoke Carl Sagan to public outburst of venomous lunacy.
Looking for superheros to save our bacon is always a bad strategy, but choosing one with patently clay feet is ridiculous.
I understand you to be making the same point – except that you ignore the risk of cooling – when you write
I don’t ignore the risk of cooling, I just consider cooling back to the temperature range of the 20th century unremarkable and non-risky. A LIA-scale dip would be a problem, but historically that too seems “unlikely” and likely to proceed at slow enough of a rate that we could cope with it. I’m opposed to chicken-littlism in either extreme. It’s a weird modern version of apocalyptic religion.
So sure, we could melt like an ice cube in the summer sun, we could freeze down into a snowball with full resumption of glaciation, but these extremes are unlikely until empirically proven otherwise. “Likely” variation is on the scale of what we have seen in the century scale past, over century scales, and on the downhill side for 0.3 to 0.5C that is simply not catastrophic or even “interesting” from the social or economic point of view. On the uphill side another 0.5C will probably cause some actual damage, but it will have benefits as well. Damage might outweigh benefits.
By all means, let’s prepare for cooling as well as warming, but invest our money proportional to the best estimated probability of associated damage and the likely timeframe that damage might occur in. That would probably make it 10 to 1 in favor of ameliorating warming as there is lots of time to cope with temperatures as cool as they were in (say) 1950. By not actually “coping” — simply returning to an older normal.
rgb
joeblack25 says:
December 12, 2012 at 9:39 am
Many of the posts here are by right wing extremists.
Allow me to stop you right there. First of all, as has been amply pointed out many times before, this is an issue which cuts across all political spectrums. So your acusation is a complete red herring, in addition to being an obvious ad hominem, which carries no logical weight. The rest of your “argument” falls on its face, being based solely on emotion, not fact. We can only base our criticisms of “Andy” on what he has said, not on whether you think he’s a “good” or even “rational” man. His “goodness” is neither here nor there, so we’ll just say that yes, he is. So what? His rationality is questionable, based on what he has said, as are his motives.