Californian climate mutiny! Democrats side with Republicans to defeat Jerry Brown

BobtheBear says: “Now I say, trying to be reasonable, suppose that you are 75% sure of no global warming and that there is only a 25% chance of global warming (it’s not possible to be 100% sure of anything, unless one is an idiot, and they don’t count). Here is the question, are you willing to risk the welfare of the planet on your 75% probability that there is no climate change? … Why gamble the world, because you think you know something? It doesn’t make sense.”
I’m willing to go nuclear, and so are other skeptics. I recommend reading Prescription for the Planet to see one way this might work. I’d be happy to see inducements to insulate houses better, and to discourage certain sorts of waste. I’ve written a long article on how to encourage the use of electric-powered yard tools in place of gas-powered ones. Most of us also favor gov’t.-funded investments in breakthrough new-energy research, as urged by Bjorn Lomborg (sp?).
So it’s a straw man to say that skeptics are a do-nothing party. Most are a no-regrets party and/or a wait-and-see party.
To conclude, he wrote, “Why gamble the world, because you think you know something? It doesn’t make sense.” But we aren’t gambling. We know that developing countries won’t cut their emissions, which are growing so strongly that the West’s emissions reductions won’t make much of a difference–they’ll only delay doomsday by a year or two. So there’s no need to cut our throats sooner than that.

@Menicholas: You wrote:

What evidence is there that a few degrees of warming are any threat at all?
There is none.

Nonsense. A few degrees of warming would, eventually, melt a lot of ice in Greenland, warm the oceans, and lead to a few feet, or even yards, of sea level rise, which would be catastrophically costly.

Why should anyone think that warming would be anything but beneficial?
There is every reason to believe that it would be so.

See above. (Also, we don’t know enough to say, “There is every reason to believe that it would be so.” That kind of cockiness is 50% of what’s wrong with the Other Side.)

Why should anyone believe that there is a shred of evidence that increasing the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is dangerous?

There are plenty of shreds–look at SkS, etc. They’re held together with inferences, extrapolations, cherry-picking, dodgy data, etc.; but it’s an overstatement to say there are no shreds.

There is none, and in fact there is considerable evidence, likely enough to be considered proof, that more CO2 will be highly beneficial to agriculture and, in fact, a huge benefit the entire biosphere.

Except for sea level rise..

Many skeptics believe that any purported evidence that disaster is looming is entirely fabricated.

“Mostly” or “substantially” fabricated would be more accurate words. A lot of the evidence is ambiguous–how it looks depends on how you squint at it. Misinterpreting is what warmists are mostly guilty of, not fabricating.

Many, such as myself, bristle at the notion of anyone resuming to speak for the lot of skeptics while lending any credence to the notion that doomsday is nigh.

We don’t know enough to say doomsday is not nigh. We have to think in game-theory terms of likelihood times value-at-risk. The value at risk is multi-trillions. Modest-cost insurance policies are “no-regret” measures that most contrarians would accept, especially in the current environment, where the political climate is such that something must be done. (Other insurance measures that I’d have favored, although being skeptical of the danger, are the Montreal protocol against fluorocarbons and reasonable measures to curtail the excessive use of DDT.)

I think you had best speak for yourself, sir.
You darn sure do not speak for me.

I’m an old-timer here. I’m familiar with the thinking of most contrarians here. Their leading objection to moving to renewables isn’t that AGW theory is wrong, as you imply, but that such a move would be economically disastrous, futile (because developing countries won’t cut their emissions), and counterproductive (because industry would move offshore). People here would strongly prefer nuclear energy and funding breakthrough energy research to what alarmists are proposing, based on what I’ve read here. Most of them lack your absolutist, black/white mindset. (This blog’s guidelines deprecates postings from those sky-dragon types who think CO2 has no effect on temperature, which is another form of absolute-mindedness.) They’re reasonable, in other words. They’re willing to pay a reasonable insurance premium against an unlikely risk–especially if the only practical alternative is to pay a gigantic premium.
(Maybe Anthony should post a poll on our preferences on this matter.)

MarkW September 14, 2015 at 3:59 pm
RogerKnights, I know that the world isn’t going to warm up by more than 2C. I am quite confident that it won’t warm more than about 0.2C.

We don’t know enough about the climate system to be that certain. “Doubt is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is absurd.” (Voltaire)

Since neither of those is enough to worry about, I am quite content doing nothing.

The political situation demands that something be done. Some of those somethings, like wind and solar, are much more costly and risky than others, like advanced nuclear or some breakthrough energy source. If we try to turn the herd away from rushing toward the first something and toward the second, we may succeed in saving the world. If we tell the herd that they are wrong to get alarmed and stampede, we’ll get trampled.

MarkW September 14, 2015 at 4:03 pm
RogerKnights demonstrates that he is as much an alarmist as BTB.
1) 2C of warming wouldn’t even come close to melting the ice in Greenland.

It will certainly melt some of the ice, which is all I claimed. I wasn’t saying, as your statement seems to imply, that it will melt all of it.

2) He uses the fact that the nutcases at SkS believe somethings as proof that there is reason to believe the same things.

All I said was that warmists such as “the nutcases at SkS” do have “shreds” of evidence, contrary to my opponent’s overstated claim that they have none. Here’s what I said: “There are plenty of shreds–look at SkS, etc. They’re held together with inferences, extrapolations, cherry-picking, dodgy data, etc.; but it’s an overstatement to say there are no shreds.”

The Germans who lived in Russia during the later half of the 18-hundreds often said the same thing about the Russian Tsar. If someone happened to be asked where they’d been after visiting the outhouse, they’d often say, “I just dumped the Tsar!”

Sure, If I am not using it and it is not chnaging just walk on over to my house. Remember that I specified a solar changing system so it needs time during daylight hours to charge up.