perpetual california drought

OK given that, and the facts that sea levels have been steadally rising, the over all temp is going up, CO2 does absorb strongly in the Near-IR, and we want to keep our nice planet, nice. What should we do?

George H.

If you really believe such nonsense I suggest you buy a boat. ...Jim Thompson

Huh, Ok which of my facts isn't true. (I live on the Allegheny plateau, >1k feet above sea level. land is cheap here, ~$1k/ acre, more cows than people.)

George H.

Certifiable is that the temperature "rise" is in the error budget of the sensors. ...Jim Thompson

OK I've got no direct links, but there is/was a skeptic professor at Berkeley (Muller) (I know Berkeley...) who looked at the temperature data on his own and figured it was real.

Mind you I don't doubt that there's plenty of "greenies" who know what's best for us and are happy to fake the data.

My first request for science (of all kinds) is to make public all the raw data.

I can find a link to Muller if you care,

George H.

The whole point about anthropogenic global warming is that the climate is c hanging, and that it's going to keep on changing until we stop pushing up t he CO2 content of the atmosphere.

There's nothing "wrong" with this proposition. It's inconvenient if you mak e a lot of money out of digging up fossil carbon and selling it to be burnt as fuel - which is the only "profiteering" going on - and an appreciable p roportion of the profits are being spent on persuading the gullible (of who m John Larkin is a prize example) that it isn't actually happening.

The fact that the climate is changing makes this a less safe world than we' d like it to be. The climate isn't changing fast enough to inspire panic, o r even a healthy level of fear, but rational people (and this classificatio n clearly doesn't include John Larkin) take it seriously.

"The Black Swan" doesn't talk about institutional wrongness. It talks about the natural human tendency to ignore the possibility that there are more t hings that can exist than those that get seen frequently.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb is interested mainly in risk management, and his book "criticised the risk management methods used by the finance industry and w arned about financial crises." He subsequently profited from the late-2000s financial crisis, and has recommended that society protects itself from ha rd-to-predict events. Anthropogenic global warming isn't hard to predict - in broad outline - but since the disasters that it brings on, mainly as ext reme weather events, are less predictable, even if they can be reasonably e xpected to be more extreme and more frequent than they have been, they defi nitely can be seen as "black swans".

In Europe, all swans are white. In Australia some swans are black.

Jim-out-touch-with-reality-Thompson isn't aware that the potential sea level rise is only about 10 metres, which while enough to destroy every port that we have got, isn't going to make boat-ownership obligatory.

NOAA's own data is more reliable. I have a graph somewhere. I'll post when I can find it.

Berkeley==s*it. ...Jim Thompson

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Sadly for Jim's credibility, it isn't. We hit that point around 1990, which is when anthropogenic global warming started going mainstream.

Jim is probably thinking about Michael Mann's "hockey stick" curve publishe d in 1998. The fossil carbon extraction industry hated it, and did their be st to discredit it. About a dozen research groups have thought up different ways of getting the same information since then, and they all seem to have pretty much replicated Mann's result. Jim is a trifle out of touch with re ality, so he doesn't know about any of this (though he could have read the Wikipedia article).

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As if airports can't afford properly placed Stevenson boxes. You do take An thony Watts too seriously.

It might appeal to collective neuroses, but it is actually all too real. Yo ur reaction is the neurotic reaction - you figure that if you disbelieve en thusiastically enough, the problem will go away. The fossil carbon extracti on industry is doing all that it can to encourage this unrealistic reaction , but it isn't a good idea (for anything except their short term cash flow) .

No he won't - he'll realise that he got it wrong (again).

Granting the reliability of Jim's opinions, this is a ringing endorsement - one of many.

Mind you, it's not what it was when H.S. Johnston was teaching there.

Design stuff, ski, cook, read, make love, enjoy life.

At a couple of mm per year average (more in some places, negative in others) we'll probably have another ice age before sea level gets very high.

As million-year-record, millikelvin-accurate thermometers?

John Larkin complains about mindless extrapolation, then does it himself.

Sea level rise is all about the water locked up in land-based ice sheets - the Greenland Ice sheet, worth about six metres of sea level rise, and the East Antarctic ice sheet, worth about another four.

If we could rely on them melting in place, it would be thousands of years b efore we had to worry about them, but the expectation is that they will bec ome mechanically unstable sometime in the next century of so, and slide off into the ocean, raising sea level immediately. That's what happened at the end of the last ice age.

This particular link has been posted here before, but John Larkin keeps his head firmly buried in the - currently dry - sand.

Some people can think about what's going on outside of the daily routine. J ohn Larkin clearly isn't one of them. If God showed up and told him to buil d an Ark, John would exhibit the kind of scepticism that he applies to eve rything that might disturb his daily routine.

You don't have to be Plato to understand that people do what they have an incentive to do.

People on the left sometimes demonstrate that they don't even grasp supply and demand, which is taught in grade school.

The kind of insight into supply and demand which is taught in grade school needs to be grasped with care, and an appreciation that it is a trifle over-simplified.

You need to have read - and understood - Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" before you have a useful grip on the subject.

People who believe in the perfection of the absolutely free market find it hard to swallow, since it does explain why real free markets don't work as perfectly as some economic theories would like.

I repeat: Given the simplicity of the /basic/ physics and measurements, some solid /broadbrush/ conclusions can be drawn. The principal uncertainty is with the details of the timing and detailed effects.