What pandering, biasing, and still self-congratulatory nonsense.

This year’s Seavey Award hereby goes to everyone who is not affiliated with the IPCC, and you can tout that distinction with pride.

I wear my tinfoil hat whenever I go outdoors because it helps to increase the albedo of the planet. Unless everyone joins me NOW in this attempt to reflect more of that dangerous sunshine back into space, it will soon be too late!!!

It may also be necessary to apply silver paint to all the more heat absorbing portions of the planet. There are some incredibly large areas of the planet that are wastefully consuming all but the green portions of the visible light spectrum. Something must be done about this immediately!!!

Some brilliant cad is probably, right now, buying a house in the Hamptons with the money he made selling “carbon offsets”.

Excellent.

In higher probability, more modest climate shift scenarios, it isn’t obvious that a longer growing season would be undesirable, anyway, you know, for the 30 billion irresponsibly reproduced homo sapiens mouths to feed. Yes, one can presume better food production technology, but if one allows similar similar presumptions about energy/reflection/CO2 management technology/chemistry…

A likely consequence of increased warmth is increased biomass. It is odd that this has come to mean “bad”? Short-term biodiversity dips might occur, but what is your metric of biospheric happiness, anyway, and why? Why should it be “exactly as if Man were never around!”. The earth is still and will remain quite cool in Geologic terms.

Future generations of both humans and fruit flies might thank their lucky stars for elevated CO2 due to our industrial activities, if those turn out to have been instrumental.

–

As for Jacob’s compounding and timeliness, the alleged “sale on weather insurance” does not end tomorrow. Buying such insurance by reducing emissions right now doesn’t amount to a net saving of money — if, as above, we even want non-negative insurance”. Lately, “tipping point” terminology has been getting used to feed “compounding fear”, when in reality CO2 is almost “reverse tipping” — there is gradual band saturation around a total 2X pre-industrial CO2 levels and we’re near 1.4X now. The heat trapping effect goes up *less* with time under constant emissions/linear level rises, not more with each added unit. Even increasing emissions rates/quadratic rises are suppressed in their actual temperature effects. So, at least in our current estimation, the core effects probably compound much less quickly than human money.

This is typically backed up by simple estimations. For example, you could see

http://www.reason.com/news/show/116401.html

but even much more detailed combination climate-economic models yield similar qualitative conclusions.

So, shocker…after a major 10..15 year fear campaign, one can get people to sign off on spending 10..100X more than they should on insurance that they, uh, might not even actually need. Meanwhile, elsewhere in our story, we are casting the purchase of said insurance in terms of “carbon credit” transfers of wealth from industrialized to poor countries in quasi-world welfare system with who knows who is “minting the money” of the credits by whatever standards and with who knows what regulatory perversions and inversions.

I’d further point out the ambiguity that warming is even bad. Activists focus on very low probability disaster scenarios. If one takes such focus to heart, there are plenty of long-term cooling scares like comet/asteroids, a spike in volcanism, or a spate of nuclear terrorism…all conceivable at the

Note: I am as yet undecided. Four years in Rochester showed me the coldest winters I’ve ever experienced.

That being said, weather is just screwy, who the hell knows what’s going on?

One day does not a data set make, and — as with the zoology encyclopedia analogy — the only way political bodies like the IPCC manage to say with some grain of truth that many, many scientists “agree” there is global warming is by watering down what it supposedly is those scientists agree on to the point where it’s near-meaningless to say everyone agrees. _I, too, think we’re probably in a period of slight warming_, but that does not make me part of an imaginary consensus of people who believe said warming constitutes a crisis, must be tightly-correlated with sea levels and human industrial activity, etc., etc., down the whole Gore checklist, which is what is invariably implied when people — usually ones who have no idea what the underlying diversity of narrowly-focused individual studies on countless different climatological topics looks like — wave their arms and shout about the “consensus.”

Saying the overwhelming majority of scientists “agree on global warming” is, I promise you, about as absurd and meaningless an oversimplification as saying “half of Americans endorse the Edwards health plan” simply because half of Americans lean left or say they worry about medical issues.

…and that the “something” satisfies the right.

How many scientists would constitute an “overwhelming” number, and how close are we right now? Political preferences aside, do most scientists believe there is evidence of global warming, or don’t they?

By the way, walk outside today. Just saying.