Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Canceling the AMO | Climate Etc. (judithcurry.com)

I was plowing through this today, a SUMMARY, not a primary paper, and reflecting on how challenging it is to read even a summary of some work in climate to understand it, and yet "civilians" form hard and fast opinions on the topic, based primarily on their politics.  How many would try and read and understand even an overview like this?

A man's got to know his limitations.

One of the biggest reasons why many folks dont believe in climate changes is the many times in the past gloom and doom forecasts will happen by a certain date and the date comes and goes and it never happened

A thing I found is that the "gloom and doom" forecasts were NOT made by scientists, but by folks like Al Gore who misrepresented what scientists actually said.

In every case.

youre correct but MSM doesnt care who predicts it and they say it over and over until folks take it as fact

Old-growth forests as global carbon sinks | Nature

My guess is none of us are climatologists.  Many of us here are at least technically trained and can manage statistics a fair bit and analysis.  I think we also realize that to the extent we are experts, others are not, unless they have equivalent training and experience.  And that takes a LOT of effort.

So, I'm hesitant to form much of an opinion on a topic like climate change because I am aware of my rather severe limitations in so doing.  I do try and read up on it because I find it interesting, but very very complicated and full of terms I don't know.

Ergo, I'm not going to assume it's a hoax, or it's real, or that the models are great, or terrible, or in between.  I can manage the analysis that shows it's too late to do very much about it.  That part is obvious and starting to get more attention even in the media at times, but it's mostly hidden as yet.

Our inability to build more nuclear power reactors also suggests to me this is not a technical endeavor, but is political, and folks often are more interested in politics and throwing money at it than solving the problem in real terms.

The problem with climate science is that the people who understand the climate know very little about economics or social policy, and the people who know about economics or social policy know little about climate. 

I've said this before. The question of what, if anything, we do about CO2 relies on multiple chained statements of logic.

• CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and more CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the Earth's temperature.
• The Earth's temperature has been rising for the last 170 years, and has shown a marked rise since heavy industrialization started in the mid-20th century. 
• Human burning of CO2 is causing more of it to be in the atmosphere. 
• Ergo, human activity is causing the Earth to get warmer.
• Rising temperatures are bad. 
• The Earth's climate will not modulate temperatures on its own--i.e. any natural negative feedback reactions (cloud cover, more precipitation, etc) to the rising temperature that offsets the CO2 greenhouse effect are not powerful enough to contain the temperature rise. This is saying that low "climate sensitivity" factors are wrong.
• On the contrary, there might be positive feedback loops (permafrost melting/rotting and releasing more CO2, increased particulate matter on glaciers and the ice caps causing them to absorb more thermal energy rather than reflect it, etc) that will either magnify the known greenhouse gas effect of CO2, or possibly destabilize our climate entirely. This is saying that high "climate sensitivity" factors are right.
• The economic effects of warming are bad. 
• The economic effects of warming are WORSE than the economic effects of dismantling our carbon-based energy economy too quickly. I.e. it's saying that we can't use the economic growth of the next half-century or so to simply "live with" the warming because we'll have enough wealth in society at that point to deal with the harmful economic effects. 

At this time, #1 through #4 are basically settled science. Most of those who are serious climate skeptics (i.e. actual people in the debate, not us) agree with that. At this time, #5 through #9 are not established, but all of those who are serious climate alarmists assume that they are--or at the very least we should stop emitting carbon due to the precautionary principle. 

Where the actual SCIENTIFIC debate is happening is on points #5 and #6 -- what is the level of climate sensitivity? Will there be natural cooling effects that offset the CO2 warming? Or will there be positive feedback loops that exaggerate the warming and make it even worse than the CO2 itself would have done? 

That's the important work, because it gives us a better idea of how much warming there will be. 

BUT, it still doesn't answer the question of "what should we do about it", because absent a dire cataclysmic outcome (i.e. Earth's climate destabilizing such that agriculture can't support more than say, 500M humans), the question of what we do about is economic, not scientific.

and it also doesnt answer the question of why should the US jump through hoops handcuffing itself when much of the rest of the world (China) dosent give a rats ass one way or another

Well the former is certainly more likely than the latter.  So that's fun.

When 1 million or 5 million or 20 million Bangladeshis are displaced, the economics of the thing aren't going to seem very important.

And there you go. You just *assumed* that this will happen. 

The discussions of widespread displacements are expected to occur gradually, over several generations. Even if everything the climate alarmists say is true, it's not like one morning we're just going wake up to have to deal with 20M Bangladeshis who are out of their homes. 

And you know what the world has done for most of human history? Dealt with displaced populations. Often times it's due to war, their own despotic governments, or famine. Why is there a "Little Saigon" near me in Westminster CA? Because people fled post-war Vietnam. Why is Miami full of Cubans? Because people fled the early Castro regime. Why is Boston so Irish? Because of the potato famine. 

You think that with economic growth over the next 20-50 years [or more] we can't handle 20M displaced Bangladeshis? 

That's why this is an economic argument. Because sometimes the cost of fixing a problem is less than the cost of dealing with a problem, particularly when the cost of fixing it is bad now and impairs our ability to deal with something that's a) far away and b) not assured of happening.