AGWers, Warmers, or Climate Activists always had the wrong conitations.

"Climate Realist" is a great term.

-David Ahlport

They lie because of the stakes. The problem is, to significantly reduce our CO2 emissions rapidly basically means the death of hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion people. Rapidly altering the global economy will have DIRE consequences for the poor. Environmentalists wish this fact away.

Victory in Pattani

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Flannery#Sustainable_wha ....

Anyway, it is fascinating that he is by training a mammalogist, but more recently has got into climate science in a big way.

In the New York Review of Books of May 1 (the issue containing Garry Wills's interesting comparison of Barack Obama's Philadelphia speech on race with Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union speech of February 1860), Flannery wrote a cute, favorable review of two books which have nothing directly to do either with mammals or with climate: "The Private Life of Spiders," by Paul Hillyard; and "Life in Cold Blood," about reptiles and amphibians, by David Attenborough.  Well, they certainly have lots to do with the biodiversity crisis.

(Flannery sadly predicts that this may be Attenborough's last book, seeing that he is in his eighties, and the kind of book he likes to write demand a great deal of physical exertion.)

As for the analogy: Mad Mac raises a good question.  Of course I trust Flannery more than Mac, regarding global warming.  But still, we may very well wonder if his analogy is quite valid.  It is indeed reasonable to predict that at a place in the mid-latitudes, a mid-summer month will be warmer than a mid-winter month.  And not only do we have a very long record to support that prediction, but we also understand astronomy, geology and climatology well enough so that we can explain why summertime warming happens.  (Or, if you prefer, read the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and the aetiological myth of the rape of Persephone.)

But are those data quite analogous to the ones that, say, James Hansen uses when he predicts the rate of the global rise in temperature?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

We can not say with any certainty whether the global climate will, in fact, be warmer in ten years from now, nor can we say with any degree of certainty how much warmer if so. Why? We have no historical record to follow and there are FAR too many variables.

Climate change is a THEORY - one that has a lot of proponents, and one in which the science seems very sound, but nevertheless a THEORY.

Seasonal weather change is a FACT.

Anyone trying to equate the two is simply not being intellectually honest.

Victory in Pattani

Most scientists who have studied the matter (not all, most) believe that climate change is a serious issue. But there is a lack of certainty in the issue that you are pretending is not a lack of certainty, and that is simply not accurate. Whereas with the seasons, what we have that provides guarantee is historical record. EVERY January it gets cooler. We don't have that for climate change.

Again, we DO NOT understand the nature of climate change with any degree of precision. We DO understand the changes of season with precision.

I do not need to understand the science (although I do) to understand the fundamentals of the arguement. They ARE NOT valid analogies. One has historical precedent, one does not. And it's that simple.

Victory in Pattani

Second, there is unanimous agreement, including the few credible skeptics like Lindzen and Christy, that adding CO2 to the atmosphere warms it.  

Why does everyone agree on that point?  For the same reason that we know that June is warmer than January in the Northern Hemisphere.  

The point of dispute between the few credible skeptics and the mainstream scientific community is not whether warming is occurring and whether CO2 is to blame, but on how much future warming we can expect.  

The skeptics say they are certain that future warming won't be large, while the mainstream scientific community says that it might be small, but it might also be large.

Your argument about uncertainty is well taken, and I think that it indicts the skeptical viewpoint.

I hope that clears things up for you.

Which people are going to die if carbon dioxide emissions are reduced? The people at the top of the economic ladder who emit the most or those at the bottom who hardly emit any?

Surly it is the other way around, these people will die if we don't curtail our CO2 emissions. And they will be the ones at the poor end of the economic ladder, even though they are not responsible.

So please tell me which billion people you are referring to and just what will cause their deaths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_condition.

Whatever that means, I sort of see your point about adding sunlight and adding CO2.  But the mechanisms by which each is added, as well as the timing in which it happens, are so different, that the two phenomena look totally unlike one another.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Let's take my area of expertise, Somalia. Some 30% of the food eaten there now comes from the United States. In the Somali civil war, they managed to so thoroughly destroy their own infrastructure that they can't even feed themselves. Their climate has always been marginal for growing much anyway. If the global economy comes apart, and the US is not longer able to provide food to the Somalis, roughly half of them will die. This will have serious affects in all of Africa, easily the hardest hit, but also in some areas of Asia and South America.

If doesn't matter a whit whether or not the people affected had anything to do with either the economic or environmental impacts that are causing their deaths, they'll be just as dead. Major shifts in economic policy that are made to fight climate change might have a very significant impact on the ability for people in the third world to survive. Now, a case can be made that the same is true if the climate changes enough to alter food production. Fair enough. But many here wish to ignore the former risk and only emphasize the latter risk.

Victory in Pattani

Your assertion that up to a billion people will die as a direct result of lowering CO2 emissions is fantasy. Talk about a strawman, you have just released one billion strawmen.

There is no doubt that there are problems with mal-nutrition in Africa and increasingly now in South America.

However these problems are not related to lower CO2. The main problems are that the best of the agricultural land has been producing cash crops rather than food for local consumption for the past 100 years in Africa, 20 to 30 years in South America.

The high agricultural subsidies given to farmers in the US and Europe are also a problem for poor subsistence farmers in Africa and South America.

There is now an even bigger problem and that is the control of the food chain by large multi-national companies who are using  monopoly status to try and control food production on a global basis.

It is time that the rich countries invested in appropriate technology so that these subsistence farmers can once again control the land in which they live and not be serfs to the developed world.

Only then will we see famine and malnutrition vanish from Africa and South America.

BAU in terms of carbon dioxide emission will only hurt them since it will most likely result in a poorer climate for their agricultural needs. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions can only help them.

I just don't understand why anyone can come up with the ridiculous position posited in your posts, perhaps you are involved with the carbon dioxide emitting industries?

Reducing CO2 emissions is going to cost and cost big. That money has to come from something. The first places to get hit will be aide money.

Large scale agriculture is NOT going to go away. Regardless of who thinks it should, that's irrelevant.

You have to think about what is in the realm of the doable within the political construct you are discussing. To make the changes you are suggesting  is not possible with all the competing factors in our government and economy today.

The global economy is under massive stress right now. Oil resources are getting tighter and tighter, and there is little reason to expect this to change. Thus additional burdens on it - such as shutting down coal fired power plants, are not feasible right now.

Bottom line: That which hurts the major economies and that which hurts G8 corporate interests directly impacts on the poor of the world. There is no way to avoid this. And yes, even without the issues associated with the environment, a good one billion people will be at risk in the next decade.

Victory in Pattani

More academically (and irrelevantly?), Rock is right to deplore that business about 100% certitude regarding any future event, such as seasonal temperatures in one or another region at one or another latitude.  The future, which exists only conceptually, not really, is not the sort of thing about which anyone can claim 100% certitude.

On the other hand, the same dear Rock is quite wrong to assert that "we all know" that God does not exist.  If such knowledge comes with the Gristmill registration starter kit, well, I seem to have missed it.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

I thought this was all covered in the 4th IPCC report.  Wasn't the estimate of it something like 2-3% of world GDP?  Isn't that about half of what we now spend on bombs and bullets?

Oh the costs they are so big.

You talk about 2 to 3% of global GDP like it was some small sum. In this current economic era, that's a huge sum. Where is it going to come from? Aide money, welfare and medicare type programs, etc. Who suffers the most from this? The poor.

Victory in Pattani

Translation:  I don't want to give up my destructive lifestyle, so I try to convince myself and everyone else that it can't be done.

"Large scale agriculture is NOT going to go away."

Translation:  I like agribusiness because 1) it provides me with cheap, convenient food, and/or 2) I support overpopulating the planet with as many people as possible, and only ecologically and environmentally destructive large scale monocrop chemical agribusiness can provide enough food for that, and/or 3) I profit from agribusiness and you'll take my money away only from my cold, dead fingers.

And I am 100% sure that "He made the stars, also."

Hence there never was, and never will be, and never could be a so called supernova producing something like the crab nebula and making winter warmer than summer, or a volcanic explosion making summer cooler than winter.

How do I know with such precision?

Ever seen a rainbow, smartasses?

Sir Isaac Newton did. He learned two things:

1. Optics
   
2. That God's promise still holds.

That's 100% certain.

What I desire doesn't matter a whit. I left the US and live in a remote province of Thailand. How the US changes it's agriculture or living standards doesn't mean a thing to me personally. I'm gone, I'm not going back.

I am telling you what is realistic and what is not. It doesn't matter if people like it.

Victory in Pattani

All the world's poor do not live in Africa, and third world countries are not the only ones suffering from economic changes.

Conflict stems from control of resources, and with current weapons of choice, that affects everyone, not just the poor.

Yes, we need economic and environmental policy shifts. You say we need fundamental changes; why can't that begin on the personal level as well?