Climate Change Mega Thread

[Omnitheo]

Given the fact that Antarctic sea ice is at its 3rd lowest point ever for this date, I'd say your definition of freezing over is a bit strange.

Arctic is at its 2nd lowest point ever for this date.

antarctic_sea_ice_extent_zoomed_2018_day_296_1981-2010.png

arctic_sea_ice_extent_zoomed_2018_day_296_1981-2010.png

Pure bs. What about the dinosaurs. Its been warmer before. It will be again.

Lowest indicated by ice core records which date back to the beginning of human history. The planet has been warmer before, at a time before humans existed, or the foods we eat. A number of factors were responsible for the temperature at the time, including Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. The earth maintained a roughly stable climate for hundreds of millions of years. This allowed time for the planet to develop a unique biosphere. Once those conditions changed abruptly (geologically speaking), the vast majority of those lifeforms died off, and it took millions of years for the biosphere to recover to a point that conditions were right for us to evolve.

Only within the last 10 thousand years have the conditions been ideal for our society to develop. We have lived in a roughly stable climate for the entirety of human civilization. We have built our human civilization around that climate, and when there have been even mild disruptions to that climate, entire civilizations have fallen.

Based on the Earth's natural cycles, we should not need to worry about any large catastrophic cycles for tens of thousands of years. However the earth's natural cycles are not what is currently driving change. It is our pumping of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. This is occurring at a rate far beyond what the planet can naturally accommodate, and thus we are driving change on a scale unprecedented outside of the 5 preceding Mass Extinction Events.

[Jflem1983]

So you agree then. Completely out of our control. Let those living on coconut islands be worried. Here in Canada. We will be just fine

[Omnitheo]

The sheer amount of CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere that is driving change is most certainly within our control.

An analogy to your argument would be recklessly driving a boat, letting water splash inside but not bothering to change your cruising habits or drain the boat because sometimes it rains.

[blue iguana]

Info to download John McLean’s audit contained within article. Comments are very interesting and contain numerous links.

UPDATE – BOMBSHELL: audit of global warming data finds it riddled with errors
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/11/ ... th-errors/
<snip>
Just ahead of a new report from the IPCC, dubbed SR#15 about to be released today, we have this bombshell- a detailed audit shows the surface temperature data is unfit for purpose. The first ever audit of the world’s most important temperature data set (HadCRUT4) has found it to be so riddled with errors and “freakishly improbable data”  that it is effectively useless.

This is what consensus science brings you – groupthink with no quality control.

HadCRUT4 is the primary global temperature dataset used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to make its dramatic claims about “man-made global warming”.  It’s also the dataset at the center of “ClimateGate” from 2009, managed by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University.
The audit finds more than 70 areas of concern about data quality and accuracy.

But according to an analysis by Australian researcher John McLean it’s far too sloppy to be taken seriously even by climate scientists, let alone a body as influential as the IPCC or by the governments of the world.
…
Main points:
The Hadley data is one of the most cited, most important databases for climate modeling, and thus for policies involving billions of dollars.
McLean found freakishly improbable data, and systematic adjustment errors , large gaps where there is no data, location errors, Fahrenheit temperatures reported as Celsius, and spelling errors.
Almost no quality control checks have been done: outliers that are obvious mistakes have
not been corrected – one town in Columbia spent three months in 1978 at an average daily temperature of over 80 degrees C.  One town in Romania stepped out from summer in 1953 straight into a month of Spring at minus 46°C. These are supposedly “average” temperatures for a full month at a time. St Kitts, a Caribbean island, was recorded at 0°C for a whole month, and twice!
Temperatures for the entire Southern Hemisphere in 1850 and for the next three years are calculated from just one site in Indonesia and some random ships.
Sea surface temperatures represent 70% of the Earth’s surface, but some measurements come from ships which are logged at locations 100km inland. Others are in harbors which are hardly representative of the open ocean.
When a thermometer is relocated to a new site, the adjustment assumes that the old site was always built up and “heated” by concrete and buildings. In reality, the artificial warming probably crept in slowly. By correcting for buildings that likely didn’t exist in 1880, old records are artificially cooled. Adjustments for a few site changes can create a whole century of artificial warming trends.

Details of the worst outliers
For April, June and July of 1978 Apto Uto (Colombia, ID:800890)  had an average monthly temperature of  81.5°C, 83.4°C and 83.4°C respectively.
The monthly mean temperature in September 1953 at Paltinis, Romania is reported as -46.4 °C (in other years the September average was about 11.5°C).
At Golden Rock Airport, on the island of St Kitts in the Caribbean, mean monthly temperatures for December in 1981 and 1984 are reported as 0.0°C. But from 1971 to 1990 the average in all the other years was 26.0°C.

[The Green Barbarian]

UPDATE – BOMBSHELL: audit of global warming data finds it riddled with errors
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/11/ ... th-errors/
<snip>.

and the response from the resident warmist enviro-lunatics, who only support the man-made climate change theory because the solution is "wealth distribution" and thus consistent with their backward communist beliefs:

[blue iguana]

Top Climate Scientists Warn Governments Of 'Blatant Anti-Nuclear Bias' In Latest IPCC Climate Report
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshe ... 587e439730
<snip>
Some of the scientists most often cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have taken the unusual step of warning leaders of G-20 nations that a recent IPCC report uses a double standard when it comes to its treatment of nuclear as compared to renewables.

“The anti-nuclear bias of this latest IPCC release is rather blatant,” said  Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “and reflects the ideology of the environmental movement. History may record that this was more of an impediment to decarbonization than climate denial.”
<snip>
“Such fear-mongering about nuclear has serious consequences,” the authors write. “As IPCC itself acknowledges, public fears of nuclear are behind the technology’s slower-than-desirable development.
<snip>
In fact, note the letter authors, which include Gerry Thomas, a Professor of Molecular Pathology at Imperial College London and co-founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, there is “higher radiation exposure from coal plants and the manufacturing of solar panels than from nuclear.”

The authors of the open letter aren’t the only ones finding evidence of anti-nuclear bias in the IPCC report. The day after the letter was published, physicist Jani-Petri Martikainen published an analysis showing that IPCC modelers restricted the role of nuclear by assuming a scarcity of uranium — something that has not been a concern since the late 1950s but has been a talking point of anti-nuclear campaigners since the 1970s.

In other instances, Martikainen finds, IPCC modelers assume uranium mining comes to a halt for an unspecified reason. “For some weird reason, humanity stops mining uranium even when the fuel cost is still massively lower than for fossil fuels,” Martikainen writes.

Such manipulations disturb climate modelers like Wigley. “There are a number of productive climate scientists who are ideologically opposed to nuclear,” he explained. “In some cases this stems from early associations with Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth (or similar organizations).”
<snip>
The letter signers note that the report raises concerns about nuclear waste, “without acknowledgment that spent fuel is safely contained, usually on site, nor any mention of the waste from other low-carbon energy sources, including solar panels, which contain toxic metals including lead, chromium, and cadmium, and which in most of the world lack safe storage or recycling.”
In addition to inputting future uranium shortages as an assumption, physicist Martikainen noted that IPCC modelers assume large cost reductions for solar and wind but none for nuclear, gross overestimates of efficiency (capacity factors) for wind, and gross underestimates of efficiency for nuclear.

Martikainen notes that if IPCC modelers removed the uranium scarcity assumption, “Nuclear power would end up dominating the energy supply. I have a feeling that resource constraint was introduced specifically for this reason. Modellers first did their calculations without the constraint and ended up with a result that they found distasteful.”

Concludes Martikainen, “I suspect that modellers worked backwards and set the resource limitation based on the maximum share of the energy supply they were ready to grant for nuclear power. Not cool.”

Other signers of the letter include a growing list of pro-nuclear non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from around the world, including Environmental Hope & Justice, Climate Coalition, Anthropocene Institute, Energy for Humanity, the Ecomodernist Society, Saving Our Planet, Mothers for Nuclear, Voices for Nuclear, Nuklearia, Ren Energi Oplysning, and Partei der Humanisten

Defenders of the IPCC report noted that many of the scenarios in the recent report call for the expanded use of nuclear energy, something the letter authors acknowledge.

“While many of the scenarios in the IPCC report call for the expanded use of nuclear energy,” the signers noted, “the report nonetheless repeats misinformation about nuclear energy, contrasts nuclear negatively to renewables, and in some cases, suggests an equivalency with fossil fuels.”

Climate scientists say including nuclear in the models is a poor excuse for the overall bias of the report. “This is a big deal,” said Wigley. “Dishonesty in any branch of the science that underpins the global warming issue taints us all. Dishonesty must always be exposed. If not exposed, lies can persist and damage the truth for a long, long time.”

Anti-Nuclear Bias Of U.N. & IPCC Is Rooted In Cold War Fears Of Atomic And Population Bombs
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshe ... 2c6ecd5dd6
<snip>
Advocates of nuclear power were surprised yesterday when a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attacked the clean energy source as dirty and dangerous.
They shouldn’t have been. In truth, the IPCC has been heavily biased against nuclear and toward renewables throughout its 20-year existence.
Consider:
In 2015, IPCC published a “Special Report on Renewables” that excluded nuclear, and has never published a special report on nuclear, even though it requires just 6% of the material inputs of solar and is more renewable than either solar or wind;
In report after report, IPCC attacks “nuclear waste” (used fuel) as a major problem — in truth, its radiation never hurts anyone — but never mentions wind or solar panel waste, which remains toxic forever;
IPCC falsely alleges that nuclear “cannot compete against natural gas,” a fossil fuel contributing to climate change, while promoting solar and wind, which make electricity expensive;
IPCC describes nuclear as a “mature energy technology” even though it is far younger than every other major source of energy including solar, wind turbines, hydro-electric dams, and fossil fuels;

Now, IPCC’s new report ignores research published in Science by climate scientist James Hansen showing the deployment of nuclear has been 12 times faster than solar and wind and instead cites a study by anti-nuclear author Amory Lovins attacking Hansen and purporting to debunk his study in a journal with an impact factor one-tenth as large as Science’s.

What gives? Why is an organization supposedly dedicated to solving climate change so opposed to the only scalable source of clean energy proven capable of rapidly replacing fossil fuels?
<snip>
While most poor nations have understandably rejected IPCC’s advice to stay poor, rich nations followed IPCC’s advice and poured about $2 trillion into solar and wind.

The result? The share of energy globally coming from zero-emission energy sources has grown less than 1% since 1995. The reason? The increase in energy from solar and wind has barely made up for the IPCC-encouraged decline in nuclear.

[Jlabute]

There is a rebuttal to the latest IPCC AR15 release.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/31/rebuttal-ipcc-sr15-climate-change-report-is-based-on-faulty-premises/


1) We are in the Meghalayan, not the Anthropocene. The IPCC SR15 report claims to view climate change through “the lens of the Anthropocene.” This term is popularly used to describe a modern geological period wherein humans are assumed to have a larger impact on the world than nature. On July 13, 2018, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) issued a statement that the earth is now in the Meghalayan, a period that began 4,200 years ago. In response to questions as to why the term “Anthropocene” had not been included, at least for the past 50 years of presumed human influence, the IUGS responded that the term “Anthropocene” has not even been submitted for consideration and that the term has only sociological, not scientific relevance. The IPCC should not use this ‘lens.’

2) All climate models (simulations) used by the IPCC run ‘too hot’ versus observations. The computer simulations project future warming (thus being the rationale for global warming climate policies) show significantly higher temperatures than what is being observed. Only the Russian climate model and satellite/weather balloon data closely match present temperatures in the lower troposphere. This suggests that most climate models ascribe too great an effect of warming (climate sensitivity) to carbon dioxide. This means the climate models should not be used to set public policy.

3) No temperature can be accurately measured to a precision of less than ±0.1°C. global temperature data is a metric of averaged and adjusted data from many sources, suggesting that a 0.5°C difference in temperature is moot and an arbitrary figure. It does not reference an actual measurement of earth’s temperature; people are being misled.

4) The IPCC claims, in its founding principles, to be policy neutral. However, the IPCC SR15 makes many recommendations regarding Carbon Dioxide Removal Systems (CDRS), most of which are untested and unvetted and proposed with no cost-benefit analysis. Such recommendations are contrary to the purpose of the IPCC and should be disregarded by policymakers. The IPCC should simply report on scientific findings.

5) Rapid decarbonization is impossible and unrealistic as proposed by the IPCC.The world runs on more than 80% fossil fuels for energy; all other forms of power generation, including hydro, nuclear, wind and solar are completely reliant on fossil fuels for their creation. Millions of people would die if rapid decarbonization was implemented. There is no suitable, equitable alternative to fossil fuel energy for modern society. Any official, international body of scientists who are recommending a course of action leading to mass deaths should be disbanded.

6) There is no clear evidence that the changes or warming since the mid-1800s are caused by human use of fossil fuels – though indeed there has been some warming and various perceptible changes in some natural features. Indeed, the range of climate change discussed falls well within natural variation since 1850. Likewise, global temperature records are incomplete, inconsistent, methods/placement of monitoring stations have changed, and temperatures are not monitored at equidistant places at the same time. The validity of the Global Average Surface Temperature is imprecise.

7) The proposed remedies of wind and solar increase carbon dioxide and cause warming. Rather than reduce fossil fuel use or aid in carbon dioxide reduction, wind and solar in fact require vast quantities of fossil fuels for productions, installation, and natural gas back-up – resulting in an increase in carbon dioxide. Wind and solar are ineffective, expensive and cause power grids to destabilize, putting society at risk, harming industry, jobs, and consumers through heat-or-eat poverty. The devices are made of bonded materials and are largely unrecyclable. Wind and solar are contrary to sustainability and environmental goals.

8) Extreme weather events are an integral part of climate. The IPCC’s AR5 report and their SREX special report on extreme weather both make it clear that human effects on climate are not deemed to increase extreme weather events; neither is an increase of carbon dioxide. The IPCC should clarify this with the media rather than allowing the press to engage in terrifying hyperbole.

9) Extremely disproportionate cost-benefit ratio should dissuade policy makers and citizens from following IPCC SR15 recommendations on carbon pricing.The cost of emissions reduction in 2030 is about 95 times the benefit assuming the climate sensitivity to CO2 from the climate models. When using the Lewis and Curry 2015 climate sensitivity estimate determined from measurements, the cost of emissions reduction in 2030 is about 210 times the benefit, however this estimate doesn’t account for natural climate change. Using the best economic model that include benefits of warming and CO2 fertilization of crops, and accounting for the natural warming from 1850, each $880 spent on mitigating a tonne of CO2 would prevent a net benefit of $8, increasing the loss to $888 per tonne of CO2 mitigation. Indeed, Dr. Judith Curry notes that carbon reduction efforts to ‘stabilize climate’ may be futile in the face of natural climate change.

10) The science is not settled. Anderegg et al (2010) revealed that 34% of IPCC contributing authors disagreed with the IPCC declaration on human influence on climate. Hundreds of other scientists have disputed IPCC findings on human-causation in peer-reviewed papers, books, blogs and videos. There is inadequate scientific review by the IPCC of the Nongovernmental International Panel Climate Change reports. There is limited review of natural forces of the sun and planetary dynamics, and natural internal variability like ocean currents, volcanic eruptions and tectonic activity and its correlation to earth’s magnetism (and thus solar influence). Reducing carbon dioxide from human industrial activity is a futile response to the continuous climate changes on earth; adaptation and investment in resilient infrastructure and response is a better use of public funds.

[blue iguana]

10) The science is not settled. Anderegg et al (2010) revealed that 34% of IPCC contributing authors disagreed with the IPCC declaration on human influence on climate. Hundreds of other scientists have disputed IPCC findings on human-causation in peer-reviewed papers, books, blogs and videos. There is inadequate scientific review by the IPCC of the Nongovernmental International Panel Climate Change reports.

For anyone interested, here is the link to the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC)
http://climatechangereconsidered.org

[rustled]

There is a rebuttal to the latest IPCC AR15 release.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/31/rebuttal-ipcc-sr15-climate-change-report-is-based-on-faulty-premises/

... Reducing carbon dioxide from human industrial activity is a futile response to the continuous climate changes on earth; adaptation and investment in resilient infrastructure and response is a better use of public funds.

Very interesting debate in the "comments" following this piece.

Thanks for posting.

[Glacier]

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/04/ ... tmosphere/

[Jflem1983]

Only takes the tiniest bit of critical thought to understand. Fossils equal huge instant change. There are no fossils of animals who die normal deaths. Just those caught in catastrophe. That being proven fact. How does one explain all the fossils . Some very stupid people seem to think. Weather patterns have changed due to human activity.

When we look back we see much more volcanic activity in the past. Much more violent weather . Both hot and extreme cold.

We see cold blooded dinosaurs the size of a bus.

Also wooly mammoth.

Yet still some very stupid people feel taxes are the logical answer to changing weather. For what it is worth. I am struggling to find the problem that has ever been fixed by taxes.

[blue iguana]

For me, it is important to understand the significance of possible errors/issues.

A Critical Lesson from the NASA Earth Energy Budget
https://objectivistindividualist.blogsp ... earth.html
<snip>
The mean radius of the Earth's orbit is 1.496 x 108 km, so according to the NASA Earth energy budget, 358.2 W/m2 of power radiated as infrared radiation from the Earth's surface is dumped into the Earth's atmosphere at a distance from the Sun which is minimally 5.83 times further from the Sun than is the Earth.  Measured from the Earth, rather than the sun, the distance that portions of the surface emitted radiation is absorbed in space varies from 4.83 to 6.83 times the mean radius of the Earth's orbit.

NASA has a most interesting definition of the Earth's atmosphere.  What is more, how does that energy absorbed in the distant portions of our solar system manage to return to the Earth's atmosphere in any way that might increase the temperature of the Earth's surface?  Of course it does not.  This NASA Earth Energy Budget is a complete farce, as are the many similar Earth energy budgets used by the UN IPCC reports to justify their claims that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will cause catastrophic warming problems for mankind.
<snip>
How could an atmosphere with an additional power input of 455.2 W/m2 direct 340.3 W/m2 of this power toward the surface and only 74.9 W/m2 toward space?  The asymmetry of radiation to the surface and into space in the NASA Earth energy budget was already a red flag.  This asymmetry is now worse.  Note also that the sum of these two radiative fluxes is now 40.0 W/m2 short of the 455.2 W/m2 of remaining energy flux into the atmosphere.

In short, the NASA Earth Energy Budget is based on nonsense physics.  This, we are told, is the settled science of the climate. Is it any surprise that computer models based on nonsense physics have been making wrong predictions of climate warming for 19 years now? Garbage physics in means no reality out.

A Summary of Some of the Physics Errors of the NASA Earth Energy Budget
https://objectivistindividualist.blogsp ... rs-of.html
<snip>
In light of these observations, is it not interesting that so many are claiming that the science is settled and that there is a scientific consensus that mankind is faced with catastrophic global warming resulting from his generation of carbon dioxide and the use of fossil fuels?

Given the errors in the science of climate change that I have pointed out here, one should wonder how accurate any of the NASA and the similar values used in the UN IPCC reports might be.
<snip>
This is a temperature lower than that found in the Earth’s atmosphere, so even a black body absorber cannot absorb such a large fraction of the infrared radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface as is implied by the NASA values in the Earth Energy Budget after we have eliminated the errors I pointed out in the bullets at the start of this post. The infrared-active gases can only absorb a fraction of what a black body absorber can, so they certainly cannot remove as large a fraction of the surface-emitted infrared as could a black body absorber.

I expect the easiest power value for NASA to measure accurately is the 12% surface-emitted radiation through the atmospheric window into space. But, I expect that their measurements of the surface absorption of solar insolation, the loss of surface energy due to convection, and the loss of surface energy due to the evaporation of water are not very well-established numbers. Clearly, the fraction of the surface-emitted infrared energy absorbed by the atmosphere cannot be as high as one-third. NASA has probably substantially underestimated the sum of the heat loss of the surface by means of water evaporation and convection.

Such is the sad state of the so-called settled science of man-made global warming and such is the foolishness of the scientific consensus on climate change, insofar as that exists.

https://objectivistindividualist.blogsp ... -nasa.html

https://objectivistindividualist.blogsp ... l-and.html

More in Blog Archive

[Ub2]

[blue iguana]

I didn't know that Dr. Peterson worked for the UN for a 2-year period.

Jordan Peterson on Climate Change
https://cliscep.com/2018/11/08/jordan-p ... te-change/

At two recent events, the topic of climate change has come up. The first was an interview for GQ magazine with Helen Lewis, who writes about the experience here. It’s been on youtube for a week and already has 2 million views, the second most popular video on the GQ youtube channel. 
<snip>
HL: OK, climate change. I saw you posting a link to a study suggesting that a lot of the way that it’s talked about has been over-hyped. What are your beliefs about climate change?
JP: Well, I don’t really have beliefs about climate change, I wouldn’t say. I think the climate is probably warming, but it’s been warming since the last ice age, so,
HL: But It’s dramatically accelerated in the last couple of decades.
JP: Yeah, maybe, possibly, it’s not so obvious, I spent quite a bit of time going through the relevant literature, I read about 200 books on ecology and economy when I worked for the UN for a 2-year period and it’s not so obvious what’s happening, just like with any complex system. The problem I have, fundamentally, isn’t really a climate change issue. It’s that I find it very difficult to distinguish valid environmental claims from environmental claims that are made as a secondary anti-capitalist front, so it’s so politicised that it’s very difficult to parse out the data from the politicisation.
HL: I saw there’s a line in 12 rules which says people stricken with poverty don’t care about carbon dioxide.
JP: Yeah That’s definitely the case.
HL: And I think that’s not an unreasonable point to make … However I don’t think that’s a reason not to tackle climate change…
JP: It’s partly a reason… coal generated plants stop people from starving, so yes its partly a reason, and it’s certainly the case that making energy more expensive obviously makes things more difficult for poor people, so yes it’s definitely an issue. And I would say it’s a conundrum for those on the left, what’s it going to be, clean air or hungry people?
HL: Or renewable energy?
JP: Oh good luck with that!
HL: Or nuclear power. I’d be fine with more nuclear power stations.
JP:  Yeah, well, it doesn’t look like we’re moving in that direction very fast… Well it worked for the French…
[Discussion of David Attenborough and population, omitted]
JP: This is the problem I have with much of the environmentalist movement, there’s a powerful stream of anti-human sentiment that motivates it, masquerading under the guise of virtue on a planetary scale…
HL: But that’s why I’m fascinated on where you come from on this, because the book is so much about things being in balance and harmony, right, well what over-population has done is got to the…
JP: Who says that we have overpopulation?
HL: Well I think it’s very difficult to see under the current model of fossil-fuel based capitalism… when we run out of fossil fuels…
JP: Yeah that’s not going to happen.
HL: Well it will happen.
JP:  Yeah, people have been saying that’s going to happen for 50 years, and now the United States is a net exporter of fossil fuel and no-one saw that coming did they? But it happened.
HL: You’re right that may be the case, but at the moment I would say that China is putting up new coal-fired power stations by the bucket load, it is entirely possible that the stuff that the developed nations did, that now developing nations did…
JP: They’ll get concerned about clean air when they get richer, that’s what the data indicate, once you get GDP up to about $5000 per year people start to become concerned with environmental issues.
HL: But that might happen too late, right?
JP: I don’t think so. It’ll happen too late for some things, it looks like we’re going to top out at about 9 billion, I think we can handle that… there’s every reason to assume that we can cope with that, especially given the rapid decreases in poverty around the world at the moment. There’s a bit of a bottle-neck, there’ll probably be some more extinction, what we’re doing to the oceans by over-fishing doesn’t seem very smart. But we’ve only been aware of our role as planetary stewards since 1960 I would say, and we’re not doing too bad for people who just woke up to the fact that that we’re actually a planetary force and
I don’t think that we are overpopulated I think all the people who made those arguments in the 1960s like Paul Ehrlich, I think he wrote the population bomb, predicted mass starvation by the year 2000, he was absolutely and completely wrong.
HL: We’ve been very lucky with things like golden rice, for example, and genetic engineering of crops…
JP: It’s not luck!
HL: Well, I agree, human ingenuity is a huge part of that, definitely.
JP: Right well and more people, more ingenuity. Bjorn Lomborg, who I really admire, the skeptical environmentalist, who’s actually gone a long way to try to figure out what we could do at a planetary level that would actually be useful and productive, his research has indicated the best possible investment isn’t carbon tax, isn’t cessation of utilisation of carbon-based fuel, it’s probably investment in early infant care around the world, especially in developing countries. Seems right to me, he’s done the analysis very carefully.

The second event
<snip>
“But the climate change issue is an absolutely catastrophic nightmarish mess, and the idea that that will unite us, that’s not going to unite us. First of all it’s very difficult to separate the science from the politics, and second, even if the claims, the more radical claims are true we have no idea what to do about it, and so, no.

Besides it’s even worse than that, here’s one of the worst things about the whole mess — as you project outwards, with regard to your climate change projections, which are quite unreliable to begin with, the unreliability of the measurement magnifies as you move forward in time, obviously, because the errors accumulate, so if you go out 50 years the error bars around the projections are already so wide that we won’t be able to measure the positive or negative effects of anything we do right now, so how in the world are you going to solve a problem when you can’t even measure the consequence of your actions, how is that even possible?
[Criticism of renewable energy, remarks on poverty reduction, praise for Bjorn Lomborg…]
You know there’s more trees in the Northern Hemisphere than there were 100 years ago, no-one knows that but it’s true and by a substantial margin. You know why in part? Because people burned coal instead of wood. Like everyone says, you shouldn’t burn coal, OK, fair enough, what do you want to do, burn trees instead? Because that’s what poor people would’ve done. ‘Coal isn’t good’ – well, it’s better than burning wood.

So these things are complicated, unbelievably complicated, so no it’s not going to unite us, and we’re not going to do a damn thing about it either, so it doesn’t really matter.

What are we gonna do? Are you going to stop having heat? Stop having electricity? You gonna stop driving your cars? Stop taking trains? Stop using your i-phones? You’re not going to do any of that. And no wonder. So… so… no.”

[Jflem1983]

Not much aware of Jordan Pederson. Guess he is a big name. Good for him to realize . Earth been warming for 25000 yrs. Takes guts