Global Warming Could Hit Rates Unseen in 1,000 Years

What crap.

Jim Hansen predicted 2.5 to 5 F rise by 2010. He was wrong.

John Holdren, Obama's "scientific" advisor, predicted "CO2 climate-induced famine could kill as many as a billion people before

Paul Erlich said that, by 2000, the UK will be a group of "impoverished islands" inhabited by "70 million hungry people."

The IPCC temperature rise projections are consistantly high by around

So we are supposed to believe that the models are better now?

Yes.

It doesn't look like a prediction as much as presentation of evidentiary results.

OK, believe it.

Have faith my son

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz suggested the Iraq war could be "on the cheap" and that it would largely "pay for itself". "Shock and Awe"

The Bush Administration (including W hisself!) argued that we would be bring democracy to Iraq and setting off a cascade of democracy throughout the middle east.

And, some other predictions (including photographic "proof"!) of WMD's.

Moral of story: we should only believe predictions from the righties!

Ah, but at least there's no COST to those failed predictions!

No, wait... um...

WRT AGW, exactly.

-unseen-in-1-000-years/

When? Did he figure in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation? It's only rec ently that the global warming people have started talking about the short t erm effects of the El Nino/La Nina alternation, and the much slower Atlanti c Multidecadal Oscillation seems to have the same kind of influence.

The recent comments about the heat going into the oceans rather than the at mosphere are essentially referring to the phenomena - the Argo buoys are st arting to give us data about what in going on in the depths of the oceans, but there are only 3000 of them, and a lot of ocean.

Yet. It doesn't take long for a famine to wipe out food crops, and people d on't last long after their food runs out.

Paul Erlich's book - "The Population Bomb" was published in 1968, a few yea rs before the Club or Rome's "Limits to Growth". The computer models of the period ran on rather primitive computers - the IBM 7040/44 which I used fo r some of my Ph.D. work at the time was built with discrete transistors. Th ey weren't regarded as reliable at the time.

This predates the IPCC by about thirty years.

The IPCC temperature rise projection have a roughly 3:1 range. You are pre sumably talking about the top ends of their potential range.

The information that the models are based on is a whole lot more comprehens ive.

The IPCC is very chary about talking about stuff that's hard to model - lik e the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets sliding off into the ocean (w hich a large chunk of the Greenland ice sheet did at the end of the last ic e age possibly causing the Younger Dryas), rather than sitting in place and melting slowly and predictably.

The real problem is that the models are too firmly based on the idea that t he world will carry on as before (though somewhat warmer) and blind to the possibility that something like the Younger Dryas might happen.

That's irrevelant, except to demonstrate that people are not very good at projecting the future states of complex, chaotic systems.

The human cost of cutting worldwide fossil fuel consumption by 80% could be extreme.

Like other societies, economies, etc.?

Yes -- and the HUMAN COST of a WAR OF CHOICE were "insignificant"... ?

I just want to make sure I know which group of deluded folks I should be listening to on which to base lifestyle choices, policy, etc. If he wears a flag pin in his lapel and a RED tie, I should believe him, right?

I just want to make sure I don't make any stupid choices that my *kids* will end up paying for (gee, how could I possibly sleep with that on my conscience?)

The human cost of cutting worldwide energy consumption by 80% would be extr eme. The financial costs of replacing fossil carbon fuelled energy sources with renewable energy sources wouldn't be trivial - through wind is close to gri d parity already, and scaling up solar generator production to take over fr om fossil fuel would generate enough economies of scale to put it close to grid parity too.

The human costs of the enterprise would be a lot less than the human costs of letting anthropogenic global warming get progressively worse.

Economists are notoriously wrong about predicting economies. Weeks before each major crash, the big-name, influential economists rarely suggest that anything is wrong. They'll miss the next one, too.

Now I have no idea what you are getting at.

Did you miss the massive heatwave and drought in Russia, that resulted in the loss of 2% of the planet's wheat crop in 2010?

Global warming is a GENERAL, not specific, warning, we knew only to expect this kind of thing. The next widespread crop failure will also come as a surprise. It'll just be extra surprising to climate change deniers..

Don't wait until experience (the only school for fools) schools you!

Unprecedented things ought to be expected: that's what climate models are good for.

Worldwide average, one person uses a ton of coal per year, and the cost is of finding other energy to replace that (about $200 delivered) fuel... then you figure that the benefit might be measured in lives lost to future generations, for centuries to come...

If shifting to nuclear power triples the cost of energy, could you really NOT afford an extra $400 per year? Can you (or anyone) afford to dry up glacier-fed rivers and flood coastal regions (like Florida and the Maldives)?

Gag me with a spoon.

Why are leftists so fundamentally ignorant? ...Jim Thompson

The future harm is conjecture; past predictions of climate catastrophe have been wildly, crazy wrong. Billions of people living in poverty are real, and the thing that will help them is affordable, reliable energy.

How do you get around? By bicycle? Do you have a refrigerator? Electric lights? A computer? Heat and a/c? Clean hot and cold water? Other people would like to have some of those things, too.

Oh, it's not that simple. Climate modeling is part based on history, treating climate/weather behavior as a black box, and looking at outcomes with known inputs. The problem shows up when those climate models take inputs of unprecedented atmospheric chemistry. Then, the models show wacky outputs. That doesn't mean that the models correctly predict those outputs, of course: anything unprecedented is beyond the scope of the tested input conditions.

So, the climate modelers have a better grasp than the null hypothesis (i.e. 'next year will be a lot like last year'), but not good enough to say 'ants will swarm like locusts'. The problem is, that black box has latches and nonlinear elements, and when the real weather does something unpredictable, it could (soften permafrost and) make methane belch out of craters in Siberia. Or, it could put a shunt across a Li-ion battery and explode something. Past experience that these things don't happen, doesn't apply (because the weather/climate is now in an unprecedented state).

There's one ray of hope: a warmer Earth did, a hundred million years before humans first walked, have green plants and oxygen atmosphere.

Not 'the thing', just 'a thing'; most energy cost is from things that AREN'T carbon-as-fuel. My hydroelectric power bill isn't low, and that doesn't come from the fuel being burned. The world coal product, in dollars, isn't such an essential part of the economy that replacing coal scares me. It oughtn't scare anyone.

And asked some questions that weren't answered.

Unless it's not. It probably isn't, with any reasonable definition.

And several thousand PPM of CO2. The plants loved it.

Living without coal scares the hell out of the billion-plus people in India. It wouldn't rattle your comfortable, hydro-powered lifestyle much.

Exactly. Two guys made political mistakes, ergo AGW. Q.E.D.

Cheers, James Arthur