Climate links
The folk running Arts & Letters Daily now have a Climate Debate Daily site. While proponents and dissenters both argue about the science, among the proponents there is also a “dissenters are bad people” line going (for example here).
Attempting to put together a list of agreed facts.
Both total deaths and death rates from extreme weather events have been declining.
A nice simple and transparent procedure for various proxy records other than tree ring data produces a very different climate record than the infamous “hockey stick”.
Threatening folk with an apocalypse not quite so dreadful: If the environment is headed for a meltdown, at least we have a map, and on it, with climate warming at a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit per decade, isotherms are moving poleward at less than half a mile per year. If the world is on the road to hell or extinction, it definitely is not in the fast lane, for delicate as ecosystems may be, few creatures have been seen to perish of shock when shifted from Northern to Southern Rhode Island.
… if the IPCC’s models are more than Big Science’s answer to Second Life, we face a biogeographic shift of a handful of degrees [Latitude] per century. The realistic question is not how the world will cope with sea levels in the fourth millennium, if and when Greenland turns green, but what an informed electorate makes of the prospective transformation of Connecticut into New Jersey or Massachusetts into Maryland.
The Chair of the IPCC seems to think we should pay some attention to recent observational data. Finding evidence of an anthropogenic cause for surface temperature measurements the IPCC suddenly got all denialist.
A nice separation of the warming effects of CO2 and the catastrophist positive feedback claims. CO2 levels are already close to saturation point (pdf) on the narrow wavelengths that it traps heat, so even massive increases will have little effect on atmospheric temperatures. (Hence CO2 levels in the atmosphere have varied hugely more than average temperatures over geologic time.)
David Suzuki engages in a bit of rhetorical overkill and then takes it back. But the idea that climate change is too dire a threat for all this free speech and democracy business has supporters.
Climate change is apparently too important to be left to normal science: Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists - and politicians - must trade (normal) truth for influence. If scientists want to remain listened to, to bear influence on policy, they must recognise the social limits of their truth seeking and reveal fully the values and beliefs they bring to their scientific activity. Apparently, it really is about showing how “socially concerned” you are.
It snowed in the Holy Land, clearly a sign of apocalypse.
Attempting to put together a list of agreed facts.
Both total deaths and death rates from extreme weather events have been declining.
A nice simple and transparent procedure for various proxy records other than tree ring data produces a very different climate record than the infamous “hockey stick”.
Threatening folk with an apocalypse not quite so dreadful: If the environment is headed for a meltdown, at least we have a map, and on it, with climate warming at a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit per decade, isotherms are moving poleward at less than half a mile per year. If the world is on the road to hell or extinction, it definitely is not in the fast lane, for delicate as ecosystems may be, few creatures have been seen to perish of shock when shifted from Northern to Southern Rhode Island.
… if the IPCC’s models are more than Big Science’s answer to Second Life, we face a biogeographic shift of a handful of degrees [Latitude] per century. The realistic question is not how the world will cope with sea levels in the fourth millennium, if and when Greenland turns green, but what an informed electorate makes of the prospective transformation of Connecticut into New Jersey or Massachusetts into Maryland.
The Chair of the IPCC seems to think we should pay some attention to recent observational data. Finding evidence of an anthropogenic cause for surface temperature measurements the IPCC suddenly got all denialist.
A nice separation of the warming effects of CO2 and the catastrophist positive feedback claims. CO2 levels are already close to saturation point (pdf) on the narrow wavelengths that it traps heat, so even massive increases will have little effect on atmospheric temperatures. (Hence CO2 levels in the atmosphere have varied hugely more than average temperatures over geologic time.)
David Suzuki engages in a bit of rhetorical overkill and then takes it back. But the idea that climate change is too dire a threat for all this free speech and democracy business has supporters.
Climate change is apparently too important to be left to normal science: Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists - and politicians - must trade (normal) truth for influence. If scientists want to remain listened to, to bear influence on policy, they must recognise the social limits of their truth seeking and reveal fully the values and beliefs they bring to their scientific activity. Apparently, it really is about showing how “socially concerned” you are.
It snowed in the Holy Land, clearly a sign of apocalypse.