When Life Gets in the Way
Miller-McCune has an article titled, “Why Isn’t Climate Change on More lips?” It starts off:
Eighty-three percent of Americans believe the Earth is heating up, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsons poll. Yet most live as though global warming isn’t taking place, even while knowing that it is.
The piece goes on to discuss an
array of denial devices created to protect us from fear. Along with social etiquette, cultural narratives and beliefs, and even jokes, they form a social shield allowing us to “look the other way” and lead our daily lives calmly, says University of Oregon sociologist Kari Norgaard.
The researcher studied this “collective denial” in a Norwegian village and wrote up the results in a recently published book called, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life.
Now I’ve discussed this phenomenon numerous times already, and the best article I’ve seen to date on it is this one in the NYT magazine, from two years ago. But I’m going to talk anecdotally about this supposed “collective denial.” Because I’m not sure that really explains why more people aren’t talking about global warming. I’ll use myself and my own social circle in NYC. Many of my friends are highly educated, successful professionals. Doctors, lawyers, Wall Streeters. They are mostly liberal. They are well read. They subscribe to The New Yorker, the NYT, The Economist, etc. They stay up on the news. They care about the world.
They just have no time for it.
Their lives revolve around family, job, and sports. That makes them roughly similar to most Americans, regardless of income bracket.
My friends never talk about global warming. I don’t even bring it up. (Why would I ruin the Giants game on Sunday, anyway?) We talk about our kids, whether to get the Nook or new Kindle Fire for X-mas, the last movie we saw. We’ll talk politics during election years, but we don’t ever seem to get around to talking about global warming.
Are we in denial? I don’t think so. Most of us (who don’t write about this stuff for a living) are just too consumed with our families and our jobs to worry about a slow-moving, amorphous threat that isn’t slated to materialize until later this century. We have more immediate concerns.
The climate change-concerned community lives in a bubble of its own making, which reinforces the graveness of global warming to those who live and breathe the issue every day. Well, the rest of the world lives in a bubble of it’s own making, too. It’s called life. Global warming hasn’t penetrated that bubble yet, and I’m not it sure will anytime soon.
Keith,
Another major reason which I have definitely seen/felt bring a real hesitancy to discuss ‘global warming’ or, more precisely AGW or CAGW, is that it was/is like talking about religion. Bound to get somebody – most people I know in fact – very, very upset. And I do mean very well educated people who seemed to have morphed into Jehovah Witnesses on this topic, making any actually rational discussion virtually impossible.
So, really, why bother bringing it up, or responding to it, even when time was available? For the few people I once did attempt to debate on this, our very last discussion on this topic was when Climategate 1.0 came out. I suggested that the cat was now out of the bag and that it was simpler and friendlier to just watch what happens rather than continue to argue about the details.
That is what is so great about blogs. You can get into these debates full tilt without all the personal heat and grief and bad feelings. The other great thing about them, on this topic, is what they did to open and explore this debate. The usual media would never have done that, for what I see as very obvious reasons.
I agree with EdG (#1) – it is like religion.
And like religion – nobody is sure which side is right.
Even the scientists disagree.
Only waiting until 2100 and taking measurements of the global temperature, sea level, etc. is going to end the debate.
I believe the constant doom-and-gloom of environmentalists going back to the 1950s may have desensitized people to global warming. Most of those predictions didn’t come true. So why take global warming too seriously?
OTOH, many may have given up. According to Gallup in 2007 an astonishing 55% of Democrats reported that they worry that human life will cease to exist on earth due to global warming.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/26842/americans-risks-global-warming-imminent.aspx
KK
The climate change-concerned community lives in a bubble of its own making, which reinforces the graveness of global warming to those who live and breathe the issue every day. Well, the rest of the world lives in a bubble of it’s own making, too. It’s called life. Global warming hasn’t penetrated that bubble yet, and I’m not it sure will anytime soon.
Nor am I, and I agree with your reasoning. You can see what stokes Romm’s fire.
Interesting post. I agree with most of what you say. I think, however, that one of the most obvious adjuncts to the idea that people are in a bubble called life, is that for all the apocalyptic prophecies, CAGW exists only in the future i.e. it is not real. It may become real, but until then most people are being quite rational in ignoring it.
I agree also with Huxley – we’ve had so many doom-laden predictions in the last 50 years that never materialised that yet another claim of ‘we’re heading for disaster’ is taken with a healthy pinch of salt. A decade and a half of scant warming hasn’t helped the ’cause’. A record lack of hurricanes too.
I suspect that a dramatic increase in hurricane activity with a concurrent resumption of rapid warming would burst quite a few bubbles surprisingly quickly. When CAGW becomes real rather than a scary story it’ll be taken very seriously – the fact that to many people that’ll be too late is just the way of the world.
There are many things in the world to talk about – fashion, politics, the economy, pop culture, sports, etc. For general interest to be stirred about a specific item I believe the conversation has to be promoted and driven by the devotees of the most interested sub-group(s).
Example – I used to live in Daytona and had moved back to NY. When Dale Sr died, I started conversations about this & many people had just a passing familiarity with the name, or else no idea who he was. When I told them it was going to be a big deal they laughed, who cares about some hillbilly driver? They were surprised when they found out that in their midst was a sizable % of the population that was Nascar Nation. It was a big deal for a while, of course it faded, but many people were surprised at how many cared & as a result Dale Sr is now part of the collective US conscience.
Connection to global warming? It was a big topic a decade or two ago, and the people driving the conversation were the environmentalists and the science/engineering community. Because it held so much possible impact on all aspects of society, there were many on the science/engineering side that spent a lot of time looking into this phenomenon. Who doesn’t want to be knowledgable about the biggest scientific story in our lifetime? Upon closer examination what many found was less urgent or convincing than what was originally advertised. One example is Crichton originally planning to write a book about the threat of global warming which later turned to “State of Fear” after he did his research.
So, the conversation still lingers at some level, but it will take the more literate science/engineering voices to force the conversation to a broader market. The environmentalists will continue to talk about it of course but they have a lot of other concerns, and many people have tuned out their “calls to action”; they think they’re doing plenty by recycling their plastic milk bottles. I believe the scientific case will need to become crushingly obvious to the science/engineering community to get the heightened attention most likely to drive the conversation to a higher level. We are not there right now.
good post. sad but true. Talking about global warming at dinner parties is taboo in the same way that talking about atheism or abortion are taboo. I’d suggest that they’re taboo not because they’re controversial topics where reasonable people can disagree, but rather because they’re depressing topics that make people feel lousy. IOW guaranteed atmosphere killers.
One small nit though. If you think that we won’t see serious impacts until the end of the century, you may be in for a nasty surprise.
“Are we in denial? I don’t think so. Most of us … are just too consumed with our families and our jobs to worry about a slow-moving, amorphous threat…”
I see that as a picture of denial. It’s not necessarily a form of denial that we should be pejorative about, it’s the sort of denial we all do about some aspects of our lives in order to cope. But it is denial. And it’s the biggest problem we face, but also, I think, a source for hope – it won’t take a huge shift in most people’s understanding for them to recognise the threat. People like this don’t need to unlearn anything, just shift their priorities.
“…that isn’t slated to materialize until later this century”
On the other hand I think this is possibly a level of denial we should be pejorative about. Although the median predictions are that dangerous consequences of climate change aren’t likely to emerge until later this century there is a real, and significant, possibility that there will be serious global impacts within the next couple of decades. This may not be the most likely scenario, but it’s significant enough to make anyone who faces up to it change their behaviour.
@7
“If you think that we won’t see serious impacts until the end of the century, you may be in for a nasty surprise.”
I didn’t read that anywhere in the post, but you’ll have to get KK for a specific.
I understand the problem to be that there isn’t any way that talk or persuasion or scary prophecies are going to burst any bubbles. We’ve had that for more than 20 years and we know, exactly, the result. I think Keith would agree that real, genuine ‘not-good’ global warming impacts would have a very different effect. And that is where you can say ‘sad, but true’.
“If you think that we won’t see serious impacts until the end of the century, you may be in for a nasty surprise.”
I strongly suspect that the (actual) impacts of AGW will be the least of our worries, and long, long before the end of this century. But it has and still does provide a nice distraction from what else is really happening.
When I was in Jr. High School I had several “activist” teachers who were pushing the population bomb big time. The population bomb was to the 70s what CAGW is to the 00s. It was all over the news, magazines, colleges, radio, etc. It was led by an international group of scientists (Club of Rome) and the UN was somehow involved. The scientists (those who must be believed) made all kinds of dire predictions. What to do? More control to the UN, put severe limiits on population, move to socialist economies, etc.
I’m sure I could assemble a great list but BBD and co would accuse me of not giving “context”. No worry, i was there and remember the context perfectly.
So, here we are again. Same cast of characters (re Ehrlich and Holdren it’s literally true!), same dire prediction that MUST BE BELIEVED because scientists said so, same prescriptions of UN control, population limits, redistribution to the Southern countires, etc.
Look, BBD, O’Patrick, et. al. the only ones in denial here are the ones who htink people are that gullible to fall for the same scaremongering in order to implement someone’s political desires. Will it warm a bit? Sure. Can you have my money and freedom? No way.
I don’t know that there is a politeness taboo on global warming lest tempers flare.
During most of the Bush administration, Democrats showed little concern about pushing divisive political comments into all sorts of social situations, even religious ones.
The terrible truth for the climate movement is that beyond the Gore boomlet for “An Inconvenient Truth” the American public is not really concerned about global warming.
That would change if the weather went wacko, as Anteros notes, but otherwise climate change is someday/maybe/possibly thing that is far down the list of here and now concerns of most Americans, probably Europeans too.
Yes, eighty-three percent of Americans believe the Earth is heating up, and it should be 100% because there is no controversy about the 300 year warming trend. Accurate thermometers began to be used around 300 years ago, and there has been an uneven but consistent warming since then. However, recent warming, since CO2 emissions became the major forcing after WWII according to the IPCC AR3 and AR4, is not unprecedented or even unusual when compared to that 300 year period. Even Jones of HADCRUT has admitted that. Yes, for a while, for that 20 year period of significant warming from 1978 until 1998, it appeared that the warming was caused by CO2 and might well be catastrophic. That was a tenable thesis 5 or 10 years ago. Now we have had 14 years of stable temperatures despite record highs in CO2 emissions and PPM. The catastrophic part of CAGW seems very unlikely now. The silly idea of cultural narratives, bla, bla, bla, protecting us from fear is a non-starter. The fear of CAGW has been nullified by empirical science- the temperature record. Sure, 14 years is a very short time. So was the 20 years of warming from 1978-1998 when the concern (and hysteria) began. Why don’t your friends discuss global warming? It’s not denial; it’s probably because most of them are scientifically literate.
It’s getting a tad unbalanced in here.
BBD,
You have previously expressed concern w/climate skeptics dominating comment threads at this site. I don’t share that. Given the diversity of posts, I sincerely doubt any one side will come to characterize this site in the comments.
As much as I might express annoyance with the debating style of individual commenters, I welcome the diversity of views that are often on display here. I also think you assign too much importance to a particular comment thread. There are many lurkers who never or rarely comment.
Because of the diversity of commenters (and when the bile can be kept in check), the threads are more interesting and constructive than the echo chambers at many of the other blogs with a climate change focus. The last week here has certainly borne this out.
Keith characterizes global warming as: “a slow-moving, amorphous threat that isn’t slated to materialize until later this century.”
This is a re-characterization of the “threat” following its unexpected non-appearance. It is a way of trying to keep the myth alive after its surprising (to believers) non-appearance. It is reminiscent of the reaction of believers in millennialist cults whose day of the apocalypse has come and uneventfully gone.
Previously, AGW believers were adamant that we were already seeing manifestations of global warming today. Kids growing up now would have less experience with snowstorms, ski resorts would be suffering from a lack of snow, etc. Since this line has lost credibility, global warming is now characterized as “slow moving” and “not scheduled to appear until later this century.”
Keith
It’s getting a tad unbalanced in here.
This was not a criticism of your editorial policy. Just an observation.
KK –
Agreed. One of the reasons I come here is that there are people who disagree with me who, for the most part, can remain civil. True also that some threads bring out enthusiasm from one side, some other threads the reverse. Those of us who like to inhabit the ‘middle’ [or can bear to..] just pick and choose the most interesting.
The only other blog that appears similar (in the above regard) is Lucia’s Blackboard but the emphasis there is often rigorously technical.
It’s all relative.
I found a comment over at Climate Etc. amusing. A guy from Japan said the MSM hardly ever mentions global warming there. Well yeah, when you have tsunamis and reactor meltdowns, the threat of AGW is pretty far down on the list of things to care about.
I think the public gave global warming a chance about 5 years ago, but found the threat lacking relative to the hype.
When you really examine the magnitude of the warming, 1C over the last hundred years, relative to how much the temperature changes every day, and every season, your first reaction is “so what’s the big deal?”
Obama talks about stopping the Sea Level Rise, but it is only going up 1 inch/decade.
Quite frankly this is simply not scary. At all.
This topic is unbalanced because there is not much for the orthodox to say.
It’s simply a fact that people don’t talk about climate change and the orthodox efforts to force it into the national conversation and national agenda have flopped.
It might be interesting if the orthodox were rethinking their approach — some of KK’s recent topics provide hints of that — but the impression I get is that the orthodox are confused about what to do next.
Tom Scharf @ 19
This one inch per decade is in contrast to the prophecies of both biblical flooding and the realities of the past. If we just take the average sea level rise of the last 15 thousand years (3 inches per decade) – how ‘unprecedented’ does the current situation look?
Some of this may turn on the answer to a simple question.
Have you seen a climatic change?
Not global warming but a noticable difference between say ones first and last decade.
Obviously one might have to be a bit long in the tooth and be living more or less where one was born, perhaps be rural or nearby rural, maybe have the sort of hobbies that take the suffix -ology, and be somewhere where the climate has done stuff.
As it happens that includes almost everyone I know well, so it is a natural topic for conversation. Global warming is then just the framework around an experience.
I should imagine that this would be common amongst oldtimers in some but perhaps not many places and some of those may lack a significant population. Perhaps the Canadian/Alaskan/Siberian tundra/steppe, the Sahel, parts of Australia and Europe especially the UK, etc. Whether it is true of cities like New York I don’t know and maybe it isn’t.
Similarly with (local) sea level rise, it is more toplical if ones walsk to the shore are getting shorter, as is the case in some of my locale, but might not be for those that have seldom or never seen the sea.
I suspect there is a strong parochial bias; local issues make for conversation.
Alex
I’m calling BS on all statements such as this:
“…it’s the biggest problem we face…”
Heart disease, cancer, HIV, malaria, obesity, auto fatalities, prescription drug abuse, meth, war, population, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, pandemics…and of course the worst thing of all: George Bush! (ha)
The fact is to most people AGW simply is NOT the biggest problem we face. Nor has it been shown to belong there as expert predictions are not worthy of trust (yet). This is just a quick list of “here and now” things that people worry more about. A more effective question would be to have people list their concerns in order, where AGW comes in dead last most often.
What’s going to really affect the people I really care about? What has already affected the people I care about?
Make no mistake. In practical terms the past two years have been a spectacular failure for climate movement.
It has lost political traction and is losing ground on almost all fronts. No real agreements to limit carbon emissions have been made. The Obama administration couldn’t push its cap-and-trade bill. All the green jobs/solar power/wind power hype has come to naught, or worse, to scandal. Climategate I and II have exposed all sorts of dirty laundry to the public and, if nothing else, have provided skeptics have much ammunition in the blogosphere battles.
What’s worse the orthodox have pressed hard about how crucial the crisis is with each passing year and now it seems clear that this setback is not just for the next year or two, but probably for most of the decade — given the severity of the economic crisis.
If the orthodox are correct that we have no time to waste, then losing this decade is pretty much game over for the mitigation vs adaptation debate.
The climate change movement will have failed in its primary objective of the past twenty years to implement mitigation policies and practices.
#19 Sorry to sound like a broken record but… crying wolf has inevitable consequences. I usually finish that line off with a reference to a poodle but I won’t this time. Or did I just do that?
Keith has done an outstanding job of running this blog.
As the sun continues to set on AGW perhaps he could increase the prevalence of non-AGW topics. Then its up to the rest of us to get engaged (comment) on those topics.
Alex @ 22
I’d be very wary of using that way of looking at the problem – for two reasons. Firstly people have been remembering their early experiences in erroneous ways since old people first started reminiscing. People ‘remember’ cold winters or warm summers – or anything you like – due to many factors, one of which is rarely reality.
The second is that you are only going to hear local variations, and those which tell you nothing about ‘global’ processes. How many of the BEST records showed cooling over the whole of their period of recording? 13,000 – individuals in these areas may extrapolate and say ‘Oo-er, the world is getting colder’.
I think the ‘weather’ and recollections of childhood are always topics of conversation, but I’ve not seen any evidence that this has ever been framed in the context of AGW.
Fred,
Well, thanks for your praise, though I vigorously disagree with you on the sun-setting part. (Wishing it and saying it don’t make it so.) I personally think interest and engagement will incrementally rise, with sudden pendulum swings back and forth, that have more to do with state of the economy, world, etc.
As for more non-climate change topics, well…I’ll continue to write on this subject, but stay tuned for an announcement next week.
I’ve read Keith’s blog many times, but my post above was the first here. I find Keith’s comments reasonable and civil, and that is usually characteristic of this blog. I’m sure many of us could have a good conversation and agree to disagree on on some things, but find agreement on much more. As a liberal, I too find many liberal friends who don’t follow the climate controversies horrified by my skepticism. My conservative friends are usually better informed, which I don’t think is true on most other topics. As an environmental educator, I’ve seen the tragedy of hysterical greens hijacking the conservation movement with their doomsday message. All the traditional environmental concerns- habitat preservation, biodiversity, ecological education- have been short changed in the mania to scare people about CO2. As a student of weather and climate- my favorite Christmas present in 1951, age 11, was the daily Department of Commerce weather maps- I was well aware of the warming during the 80’s and 90’s. It was when I first saw Mann’s hockey stick that I smelt a rat and began an in-depth study of the issues which continues to this day. With the leveling off of temperatures (not projected in the climate models), there has been less interest and less concern. Many people realize that “climate change” is an untestable, an unfalsifiable hypothesis and therefore a poor substitute for the testable hypothesis of global warming. Unless and until we get significant warming again, which will probably happen with or without CO2 forcing, but maybe not in my lifetime, until we get significant warming, I think the topic will die a slow death with the alarmists becoming more and more irrelevant. Huxley above- BTW, Darwin’s bulldog is one of my favorite activist scientists!- used the word orthodox which usually is used in a religious contest. Sociologists like Norgaard above don’t appear to understand the genuine climate science controversies or the temperature record. They might better write about how the apologists for IPCC alarmism have taken on the convictions of a religious orthodoxy. Now that would be interesting and controversial!
Keith,
Thanks for the heads up about next week’s announcement.
Regarding Norway, the following perhaps the following be born in mind:
This is just the result of a quick net search and should be authorative if not current:
From this site:
http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/md/Whats-new/Speeches-and-articles/ministers/erik_solheim/2008/climate-change-policy-in-norway.html?id=499623
Norwegian climate policy:
Norway started taking global warming seriously quite early with the adoption of a CO2-tax in 1991.
Since then, a range of additional policy instruments have been implemented to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions. Today as much as 70 per cent of Norwegian greenhouse gas emissions are covered by economic instruments setting a price on carbon.
Last summer the Government published a white paper on climate change where a broad spectre of national emission cuts is proposed.
This month, the Government has come to an agreement with the opposition parties on the further development of Norwegian climate policy. This agreement implies that more than three quarters of the members of the Norwegian Parliament support an ambition climate change policy:
Norway intends to cut the global emissions equivalent to 100 percent of its own emissions within 2030. This way, Norway will become a carbon neutral nation
Norway will undertake to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 30% of its own 1990 emissions by 2020
Norway will strengthen its Kyoto commitment by 10 percentage points, corresponding to nine per cent below the 1990 level.
I knew much of this, so I found some of the article a bit wierd. Ask many and they will say Norway leads the field on mitigation. That may not be quite true as the catch comes in the meaning of carbon neutral but they are probably in vanguard along with the UK and perhaps some others. I have not check to see if they got the bill mentioned passed into law.
Knowing that about Norway, I found a real disconnect reading the article and couldn’t see it as being at all similar to the USA.
Keith: Given what I have mentioned, would you have checked it out and made some comment about their stance on mitigation, especially as it might cast the rest of the content in quite a different light?
In global climate terms Norway can and I think does claim to be up there with the angels. I found this bizarre, but I would go so far as to say that any mention of Norway’s stance was left out of the article so as not to spoil a neat and tidy story. I am not a mind-reader and perhaps I glazed over somewhat bewildered by the content and missed it.
Alex
Wishing it and saying it don’t make it so.
Keith: That sword cuts in both directions.
While I don’t dismiss all of climate change, I doubt the claims of its certainty and severity.
If climate change turns out to be another tempest in the environmental teapot, I do worry about the repercussions for the credibility of science.
My impression is that a serious rot has set in among our elites — academic, scientific, financial and political — and we can’t depend on them to get the important things right as much as in the past.
To all and sundry –
O/T, but for when the bubble of life gets in the way of talking about climate change, how about popping over to the Blackboard to have a bet on the December UAH anomaly? I’ve entered a cracking bet, but could do with some of your quatloos. Roll up roll up! 🙂
@32
That’s a broad brush.
If I watched the 10pm news on TV, my faith in humanity would be crushed.
I tend to live by that trite saying (who said this?): I go to bed a cynic and wake up an optimist.
@34: It’s not that hard to build a case.
It’s clear that the political and financial elites let us down with this global economic meltdown. There has been much grade inflation in colleges and it’s not clear what academia is teaching or how well outside STEM courses.
And science, leaving climate science aside, I notice that physics has been taken over by the String orthodox and medical science has suffered several scandals and its studies turn out to shockingly unreliable. ( http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/ )
So we have an agreed. The planet has warmed the past 300 or so years.
Now of course comes the cunundrum, is this warming, if it continues, going to be very harmful?
To paraphrase one of the blog sages – “not even Kim knows”
The whole idea of massive destruction and upheaval, AFAICT, is from simulations that even the modelers themselves, when the microphone is off, have HUGE doubts about these scenarios.
If I look at the rise in temperature from the last 300 or so years, I would venture to say that the planet is far better off with this warming, then if the warming had never occured.
So from my perspective, the warming to hopefully come will be a blessing to my children and theirs.
I am so sick and tired of being told that I am asshole because I don’t care for my planet. Well no, I just happen to interpret things differently, and, well, think that I am right, and the alarmists are the assholes.
The problem is really human psychology. If the climate concerned community wants to spur action, then they should read up on cognitive psychology related to threat perception and risk estimation and formulate a strategy designed to deal with how people actually think. In short, humans have a tendency to discount threats/risks in the following cases:
1. When the potential danger to the individual is unclear. In other words, “how will it affect me?” For climate change, individual risk is an unknown – impossible to quantify and comprehend.
2. When the potential danger is not imminent – people tend to focus on the immediate at the expense of the distant. Procrastination is the default human behavior. There are a lot of dangers we know are coming that we are ignoring today – climate change is one of many.
3. Where the threat/risk is perceived as uncontrollable by the individual. Part of this is fatalism and part of it is reluctance to sacrifice if others don’t (game theory) on a global problem.
related to that is:
4. People tend to believe they have more control than they really do over our lives which causes us to underestimate risks. So on one hand, people believe they can’t control global warming and it’s long-term effects, but on the other hand, they believe that when and if those effects materialize, then they’ll be able to deal with them, no metter what they are.
And finally related to all the above:
5. When the cost of a solution is perceived to be very high.
People don’t want to endure a lot sacrifice when it’s not clear the proposed solution will actually work (and the solution itself isn’t apparent or understandable), when it’s not clear exactly what the risk is, when the risk isn’t immediate, and when there is fear that others won’t make similar sacrifices.
There is a lot of research on threat/risk perception in cognitive psychology, much of it related to international relations and war. It’s kind of surprising to me that many in the climate concerned community are either unaware of such research or ignore it favor of other explanations for a lack of action like blaming the media or tribal enemies (corporations, big oil, Koch brothers, Republicans, whatever). Worse than that, though, the climate concerned community seems to have embraced the whole “climate denialism” meme and is eager to put that label on those who are acting in accordance with normal human behavior (as detailed above). Is it any surprise, therefore, that people are reluctant to take a position or discuss the topic, even among friends and acquaintances?
Even taking cognitive factors into account and ending tribal litmus tests, there is no guarantee people will be convinced to act. People, policymakers and political communities often don’t act until a crisis is thrust upon them, even when clear evidence is front of their face. The history of warfare tells us that much.
@ 36 –
Very pertinent, but you will be perceived as encouraging denialism, excusing the delayers, and collaborating with fake sceptics…
Doug Allen #29:
“It was when I first saw Mann’s hockey stick that I smelt a rat and began an in-depth study of the issues which continues to this day.”
The stick that launched a thousand sceptics and burnt the topless towers of IPPCdom.
I don’t know how many found the stick to be incredible just out of the box. It jumperd out at me. I thought that people were going to have a tough time accepting it, and that included I.
I have tried elsewhere to explain that the stick was a PR blunder irrespective of its virtues. My reaction was “What are they thinking?”
It sort of went viral, for its time at least, and got way above its station.
I think it was meant to be the icing on the cake, but it didn’t stand up. Perhaps at that time people thought that they were pushing at an open door, policy wise. I thought it was more like leading with ones jaw, shouting “Go on, hit me!” And guess what, yeah they did. Perhaps the stick will turn out to be close or there abouts but that is not the point. It wasn’t really necessary, it up-ended many folks view of a (perhaps regional) well documented history.
If it had been presented when both the known regional and a global picture were accounted for it could have been different.
It felt like a poke in the eye, (I was rather fond of the MWP/MCO, vikings and all that.) That may be silly old sentimental me, and sentiment may have no place in science. But it does have in life.
As it turned out, Steve McIntyre did enough to cast considerable doubt on the povenance and rigor of the reconstruction. Given its iconic status it was going to take a bashing. But as luck would have it, rather than back away, it was heroically defended and much scientific capital spilled on a dodgy cause. I guess perhaps there were people trying to cut it loose but I didn’t hear them.
Alex
#28 Keith,
I look forward to that announcement too. I really like the two photos on the left hand side of your header… hint, hint, hope, hope.
And for those who are still fixated on climate change, wildlife/ecology and archaeology/anthropology are all intricately linked to that in one way or the other so still plenty of fodder there.
But methinks it is far, far too early to imagine the end of the great climate change debate so I would expect it will remain part of the mix no matter what.
Question. I missed the very beginning of your blog Keith. Did you start it with a particular ‘mission statement’ in mind? Those three photos up top were there from the time I first visited, suggesting a very broad look at a wide range of topics related to the environment.
I recall you saying that that was the idea so… I’d vote for that.
Keith:
I don’t know if you read my #31 above, if not it points to a suggestion that the using same material (plus Norways climate policy) the featured article could have run as:
Vanguard or Caboose:
Similar outlooks support radically different policies.
Either I am wrong about Norway or the article is somewhat hollow and risks being seen as preconceived opinion bolstered by selected facts.
Alex
DeNihilist @ 36 –
I erroneously labelled my comment @38 for you instead of Andy@37. However, as luck would have it – I think you are also correct!
You put it very forthrightly, but I agree that if you doubt the coming doom you will be called an asshole, ignorant, a denier etc etc. You don’t even have to doubt warming or its relationship to emissions of Co2 – if you’re not with the ’cause’ of spreading CAGW you’re part of the problem.
Any future warming may indeed be beneficial. I think that it will most likely be ‘not noticeable’. Time will tell.
Well I expect the world will be off on the:
“Request for Preservation of Records” letters with respect to the UEA investigations.
I see that the “gag” paragraph has been treated with contempt over at the Air Vent. So this isn’t going to go quietly. Not quiet as brutal as an NSL but not the best thing to find in ones inbox.
Alex
The problem is really human psychology.
Oh brother! I
The problem is that there is no problem, and the sooner we quit squandering resources on the no problem problem, the faster we’ll actually restore the economy.
Or put another way: people are smarter than you think.
The problem is really human psychology. If the climate concerned community wants to spur action, then they should read up on cognitive psychology related to threat perception and risk estimation and formulate a strategy designed to deal with how people actually think.
Andy @37: I have read several articles in which the orthodox incorporate the psychology you describe. Keith’s NYT link is one such.
The climate agenda always looked to an uphill struggle. Still, if the agenda were not so hugely expensive, difficult and risky, if it had been, say, only 100x expensive as the CFC fix, I believe they would have succeeded.
First paragraph in 45 is a quote from Andy.
I think it is amazing that people are arguing for “not noticeable”, etc.
In the 90s I predicted climate change would be noticeable by 2010, and I think that was about right. You really have to be very young, very migratory and/or very unobservant by now. Biomes are struggling everywhere. Odd events are challenging traditional adaptations everywhere. This is only the beginning, but it’s no longer just theoretical, the way it was in 1979.
As for Keith’s observations, I very much agree. This is an especial vulnerability for America where the s***-eating-grin is a survival trait. One simply is considered rude for discussing bad news or bad prognoses. This is not the only factor that reduces politics hereabouts to competing packages of arrant nonsense, but it contributes.
The general agreement that nothing can or will be done is certainly fed by the reality-denying position that nothing should be done. It will never be too late to stop making matters worse, unless we really do hit a major population collapse. That remains a long way off. Until then, those of us with some sort of grip on the big picture are ethically obligated to keep telling the truth and keep being party poopers.
In some ways, given the vicious opposition, it is impressive we got as close to heading off the disaster as we did. Of course that’s small consolation, as is the deep ridiculousness of our trajectory, which is at least good for a rueful chuckle now and then.
Tobis,
You are hallucinating, at best. Probably delusional.
Odd events are challenging traditional adaptations everywhere.
By odd, I assume you mean government subsidized green energy.
# 47 “Biomes are struggling everywhere. Odd events are challenging traditional adaptations everywhere.”
For example? And please keep this specifically in the climate change context in which you presented it.
And please define what what you mean by “odd” and “traditional” and “everywhere.”
Thanks.
I want to thank Keith also for tolerating a wide range of commenters and those he doesn’t care for – which I’m sure includes me.
The IPCC’s fatal mistake was the hockey stick. They hyped it so ferociously and it was so implausible that legions went skeptical. On top of that, Mann is the worst of the scaremongers – even worse than Romm. So when he is out and about spouting off and not one of the “orthodox” climate scientists will call him out (though they all do in private) the rat smell is over-powering.
Tobis:
The “bad news or bad prognoses” is for our our economy and society if it continues to listen to AGW “scientists” for guidance on energy policy and anything else of consequence. They should all be fired and forced into work that would contribute to society instead of continuing as suck-offs.
No shit eating grin here.
EdG @50 –
I noticed the same thing – “biomes are struggling everywhere”..
I don’t want to be gratuitously uncivil but it staggers my belief that somebody could say this and consider that they have a scientific frame of mind, let alone claim to be a scientist. In my opinion it is simply garbage – an unsupportable product of a doom-prone imagination. it is certainly not related to facts or evidence.
As I mentioned earlier, what terrible catastrophes were created by the last 6 degrees of warming? Oh, that’s right, none at all. But the ‘probably’ more than 50%, of half a degree C caused by mankind means that “biomes are struggling everywhere”.
Talking about being “obligated to keep telling the truth” is uncannily reminiscent of Paul Ehrlich circa 1968 – the most wrong person in the history of wrong (and doom-mongering) prophecies.
I don’t doubt MT that you are certain of your certain beliefs. However, the history of people with certain beliefs is that they make appalling prophets of the future. Strangely enough, ‘scientists’ with certain beliefs are, if possible, even worse in their prophecies than non-‘scientists’. But its the hubris in the certainty that is the barrier to understanding, not the alleged ‘science’.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/science/earth/01forest.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
@ 54 –
If a sensationalist article from a newspaper is what qualifies as evidence, I think we can safely dismiss the idea as bogus. Having wasted my time reading the article I can safely say that if an undergraduate tried to use that as a resource for an essay, I’d have them thrown off the course. It is worthless – not even wrong.
The only vaguely realistic sentence in the whole piece was this –
“Destruction by fires and insects is a part of the natural history of forests”
To sum up the whole of the fear-mongering nonsense, can you guess how much evidence was advance for an increase in destruction by fires and insects? Wait for it…… you’re right – absolutely none whatsoever. Why? because there isn’t any.
A remarkable similar period of fear-driven irrationality occurred over the same phenomenon in the 80’s, particularly in Germany. It turned out to be the most embarrassing episode for German environmentalism ever and ‘green’ scientists still aren’t trusted as a result.
Here is a survey of the science as the doom-mongering petered out against the realisation that forest die-back has been a feature of forest ecology since forests first covered the earth –waldsterben
Amazing that in such a short period of time the same ignorance could re-appear, and be grasped by the same frantic ideology for the same frantic reasons. It was rubbish then, and it is clearly rubbish now.
A newspaper article? I ask you.
@48 hunter:
You are hallucinating, at best. Probably delusional.
@50 EdG:
For example? And please keep this specifically in the climate change context in which you presented it.
Here’s a small sampling of recent papers discussing a the impact warming is already having and may have in the near future without emissions stabilzations. This is by no means supposed to be exhaustive, and there is a lot of nuance in the meat and potatoes of the papers. But the idea that the human influence (and particularly anthro climate change) isn’t having an affect that is both worrisome on its own and moreso in the context of unchecked emissions is unsupportable from my perspective.
Araujo, M., and M. New (2007), Ensemble forecasting of species distributions, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 22, 42-47, doi:10.1016/j.tree.2006.09.010.
Barnosky, A. D. et al. (2011), Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?, Nature, 471(7336), 51-57, doi:10.1038/nature09678.
Bartholomeus, R. P., J.-P. M. Witte, P. M. van Bodegom, J. C. van Dam, and R. Aerts (2011), Climate change threatens endangered plant species by stronger and interacting water-related stresses, J. Geophys. Res., 116, 14 PP., doi:201110.1029/2011JG001693.
Bartomeus, I., J. S. Ascher, D. Wagner, B. N. Danforth, S. Colla, S. Kornbluth, and R. Winfree (2011), Climate-associated phenological advances in bee pollinators and bee-pollinated plants, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi:10.1073/pnas.1115559108.
Botkin, D. B. et al. (2007), Forecasting the Effects of Global Warming on Biodiversity, BioScience, 57, 227, doi:10.1641/B570306.
Bradshaw, W. E., and C. M. Holzapfel (2006), Evolutionary Response to Rapid Climate Change, Science, 312(5779), 1477 -1478, doi:10.1126/science.1127000.
Brook, B. W., N. S. Sodhi, and C. J. A. Bradshaw (2008), Synergies among extinction drivers under global change, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23(8), 453-460, doi:10.1016/j.tree.2008.03.011.
Brown, C. J. et al. (2011), Quantitative approaches in climate change ecology, Global Change Biology, 17(12), 3697-3713, doi:10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02531.x.
Cheung, W. W. L., V. W. Y. Lam, J. L. Sarmiento, K. Kearney, R. Watson, and D. Pauly (2009), Projecting global marine biodiversity impacts under climate change scenarios, Fish and Fisheries, 10(3), 235-251, doi:10.1111/j.1467-2979.2008.00315.x.
Collen, B., L. McRae, S. Deinet, A. De Palma, T. Carranza, N. Cooper, J. Loh, and J. E. M. Baillie (2011), Predicting how populations decline to extinction, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 366(1577), 2577 -2586, doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0015.
Gienapp, P., C. Teplitsky, J. S. Alho, J. A. Mills, and J. Merilä (2008), Climate change and evolution: disentangling environmental and genetic responses, Molecular Ecology, 17(1), 167-178, doi:10.1111/j.1365-294X.2007.03413.x.
Harley, C. D. G. (2011), Climate Change, Keystone Predation, and Biodiversity Loss, Science, 334(6059), 1124 -1127, doi:10.1126/science.1210199.
Harte, J., A. Ostling, J. L. Green, and A. Kinzig (2004), Biodiversity conservation: Climate change and extinction risk, Nature, 430, doi:10.1038/nature02718.
Kiessling, W., and C. Simpson (2011), On the potential for ocean acidification to be a general cause of ancient reef crises, Global Change Biology, 17(1), 56-67, doi:10.1111/j.1365-2486.2010.02204.x.
Maclean, I. M. D., and R. J. Wilson (2011), Recent ecological responses to climate change support predictions of high extinction risk, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi:10.1073/pnas.1017352108. [online] Available from: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/07/06/1017352108.abstract (Accessed 18 November 2011)
Mayhew, P. J., G. B. Jenkins, and T. G. Benton (2008), A long-term association between global temperature and biodiversity, origination and extinction in the fossil record, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 275(1630), 47 -53, doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.1302.
McInerny, G. ., J. R. . Turner, H. . Wong, J. M. . Travis, and T. . Benton (2009), How range shifts induced by climate change affect neutral evolution, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 276(1661), 1527 -1534, doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.1567.
Parmesan, C. (2006), Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 37, 637-669, doi:10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.37.091305.110100.
Pau, S., E. M. Wolkovich, B. I. Cook, T. J. Davies, N. J. B. Kraft, K. Bolmgren, J. L. Betancourt, and E. E. Cleland (2011), Predicting phenology by integrating ecology, evolution and climate science, Global Change Biology, 17(12), 3633-3643, doi:10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02515.x.
Pelejero, C., E. Calvo, and O. Hoegh-Guldberg (2010), Paleo-perspectives on ocean acidification, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 25(6), 332-344, doi:10.1016/j.tree.2010.02.002.
Phillips, S. J., and M. DudÃk (2008), Modeling of species distributions with Maxent: new extensions and a comprehensive evaluation, Ecography, 31(2), 161-175, doi:10.1111/j.0906-7590.2008.5203.x.
Rosenzweig, C. et al. (2008), Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change, Nature, 453(7193), 353-357, doi:10.1038/nature06937.
La Sorte, F. A., and W. Jetz (2010), Projected range contractions of montane biodiversity under global warming, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 277(1699), 3401 -3410, doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.0612.
Svenning, J.-C., and R. Condit (2008), Biodiversity in a Warmer World, Science, 322(5899), 206 -207, doi:10.1126/science.1164542.
Thomas, C. D. et al. (2004a), Extinction risk from climate change, Nature, 427(6970), 145-148, doi:10.1038/nature02121.
Thomas, C. D. et al. (2004b), Biodiversity conservation: Uncertainty in predictions of extinction risk/Effects of changes in climate and land use/Climate change and extinction risk (reply), Nature, 430(6995), doi:10.1038/nature02719.
Thuiller, W. et al. (2008), Predicting global change impacts on plant species’ distributions: Future challenges, Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, 9(3-4), 137-152, doi:10.1016/j.ppees.2007.09.004.
#44 kdk33,
By “problem” I specifically mean the problem of convincing the general public to care enough about climate change to actively support climate change policies.
@ Anteros 55
Checked out a few of those papers yet? Thanks to TB for that.
Tobis,
Enough of the projections and data games.
Reasonable people know the difference between scary stories, which is what you offer, and reality. If I wanted projections and models,I would have asked.
That you, an allegedly sophisticated believer, still persist in confusing evidence and predictions is rather sad.
So Tobis,
I guess for you it is delusional?
and again Things, if what these papers are saying, that the warming, natural and anthro, are having a dire consequence on some populations of species, how is this not natural?
In the world of beasts, it has always been a struggle for survival and dominance. Jane goodal was shocked when she first saw that chimps actually hunted monkeys and ate meat. She was later mortified, when the community she was studying, broke into 2 sub groups and went to war, actually killing each other.
Nature is. Species arrive, some dominate and last, others find a niche, but mostly they get wiped out. In the end, every species time arrives and the last subject falls back into the cauldron.
We humans are part of this dance, called nature, and come hell or high water, we will follow the choreography.
Yes Anteros, i find it wondourous that my opinions and views are “wrong” based on the way i interpret things, but others whose opinions and views are based upon assumptions are right. What a wierd species we are!
@62
I can tie up a couple of your points – what a weird species we are, and….we will follow the choreography.
Being weird is indeed par for the course! [some more weird than others, though – species have to have a little variety to combat changing environments ;)]
It’s getting a tad unbalanced in here.
# 56 thingsbreak
Quite the list. Looks impressive at first glance. But looking closer, starting from the top, we see a pattern:
“Ensemble forecasting…
Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?
Climate change threatens endangered plant species by stronger and interacting water-related stresses
Climate-associated phenological advances…
Forecasting the Effects of Global Warming on Biodiversity…
Evolutionary Response to Rapid Climate Change
Synergies among extinction drivers under global change
Quantitative approaches in climate change ecology,
Projecting global marine biodiversity impacts under climate change scenarios,
Predicting how populations decline to extinction…”
It goes on. With more projections, predictions, theorizing, models and flow charts all fundamentally based on the Consensus climate predictions. Quite the assumption.
To return to the original point about ‘biomes struggling,’ they already are to the degree to which human activity has and is impacting them. And climate change and other non-human factors have always made them struggle, and evolve. So I was hoping for an evidence-based example of a biome struggling more now due to AGW. Apparently they’re everywhere.
If you can find one on that list we could discuss it.
# 54 Michael Tobis.
Your link leads to a version of the AGW Myth of the Mt Pine Beetle, one of my favourite AGW topics. It was one of the first things that told me there was something wrong with the whole AGW project.
Up way too late to go into all the details right now but the story is actually very simple. Mt pine beetles, like all species, need suitable habitat. That is mature pine trees with a thick enough cambium layer to breed in. No habitat, no mt pine beetle epidemics, no matter how warm winters are, period.
Where did all this habitat to support these recent epidemics come from? The short story is that Smokey the Bear – fire suppression – made it. (The longer story is more interesting.) Bottom line, these unnatural forests were the root cause of these epidemics and the warm winters simply accelerated and expanded them. They are not the simplistic AGW poster child portrayed.
The same fire suppression story – its fuel buildups – is also the real story under the AGW More Intense and Dangerous Fire story, including those brush fires in CA.
Moreover, the beetle story is obsolete. The epidemics have already killed off most of their available habitat so its mostly over now.
EdG –
That sounds like a little bit of the ‘life goes on as normal’ story. Some changes, some adaptations, some cycles, once in a while new things….. But life thriving in myriad ways in all conditions and ready to leap into any new niche like the Universe depended on it. On every step of the way of the last six degrees of warming, life has flourished and thrived and adapted. Funnily enough it did the same thing during the – more than – six degrees of cooling that preceded it. Corals have been around in their present form for, what, 200 million years, give or take? And we know that sea levels have risen 30 times the speed they are doing at the moment…
How do we get to ‘biomes everywhere are struggling’? Life is everywhere thriving.
If you start with two false premises – 1) that life/ecosystems are fragile, vulnerable, at risk, innocent and 2) that humanities impacts are necessarily bad because somehow you perceive humanity as unnatural or ‘fallen’ – then it is possible to misunderstand life and to ‘see’ bad things happening – even when they are not. If you start with those presumptions, of course when you hear about the new ‘catastrophe’, say CAGW, then you’re pretty much ready to ‘see’ it irrespective of strength of the evidence. Otherwise, how do you explain how all the previous catastrophes never happened?
Anteros, the ‘life goes on’ adaption you are talking about happened over much longer timescales than the warming we are currently experiencing.
OPatrick –
I appreciate that argument, which is why I included the sea levels rising 30 times current rates. We look at different parts of the same picture. I see overall life being able to adapt more quickly and more successfully than we can possibly imagine [I think of butterflies adapting – within a season or two – to buildings suddenly cleaned of their smog-colouring] Perhaps you see the isolated examples where something ‘dies out’ or something you particularly value is ‘lost’. I think life is change, so that’s why I don’t see some predicted climate change as necessarily a bad thing.
Then we’re back to “well it’ll be bad for humanity” and I think humanity is more adaptable than almost anything that has ever existed on earth.
#68,
On the contrary. ‘Life goes on’ adaptations go on at very short timescales. Yesterday it was cold and rainy. Today it is warm (for December) and sunny. The difference in temperature is more than double what you’re talking about. Sunny or cloudy, wet or dry, summer to winter, warm years or cold – on a local level the variability of the weather is vastly greater and faster than the multi-decadal fraction-of-a-degree drift that is being discussed. The animals don’t all die every time there’s a warm day.
Here’s a quote from history. Does it sound familiar?
“A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie, below the mountains, more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week. They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now. This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits. From the year 1741 to 1769, an interval of twenty-eight years, there was no instance of fruit killed by the frost in the neighbourhood of Monticello. An intense cold, produced by constant snows, kept the buds locked up till the sun could obtain, in the spring of the year, so fixed an ascendency as to dissolve those snows, and protect the buds, during their developement, from every danger of returning cold. The accumulated snows of the winter remaining to be dissolved all together in the spring, produced those overflowings of our rivers, so frequent then, and so rare now.”
That was Thomas Jefferson. Climate changes. It always has. It always will.
You might – arguably, depending on how you estimate the background fluctuations – detect global warming by averaging over continents and decades. You cannot detect it locally. That’s the equivalent of saying the last 10-15 years of static temperatures is significant, or that a cold and snowy winter means global warming is over.
If you go down that road, we’ll just have to start up the “Call Al Gore, I’ve got a foot of global warming to shovel off my driveway!” jokes, again.
what terrible catastrophes were created by the last 6 degrees of warming?
Taxes. The root cause of the currently predicted catastrophe.
BBD (14) and OPatrick (64) say:
“It’s getting a tad unbalanced in here.”
Nobody is stopping you from redressing the “imbalance.” Are you making a backhanded plea for censorship of views you disagree with and/or cannot refute?
On the subject of parochial climatic change, as mentioned by me and I think Michael Tobis and others, I am reminded that:
Keith tweeted on the 5th
@thirstygecko @DustyBowl My peers should (rightfully) be all over this. Can’t wait to see the coverage.
This being:
http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/~ed/publications/hawkins_sutton_emergence_2011.pdf
Time of emergence of climate signals (E. Hawkins and R. Sutton)
Has there been any coverage?
I think Keith is right to say people ought to be taking an interest. It address the question of when the projected changes should emerge from the noise at the regional as opposed to the global level. This is of importance both in terms of evidence for change and for predicting the onset of novel parochial meteorological conditions; circumstances that might present novel challenges to the local biome.
I did skim through it, apres tweet, and one salient is that although the most rapidly change regions are in the mid to high latitudes, so are the regions with the most natural variability (the actual metric is modelled but seems true in the real world). The paper suggests that the balance between these magnitudes favours emergence of the signal from the noise earlier towards the equator than the poles. My understand is that this is not in itself novel but the magnitude of the delay in emergence away from the equatorial (being several decades) is a new finding.
A possible weakness is a reliance on temperature, albeit not just the annual mean, the semi-annual is also considered. This could be the source of some conflict between what is noticable in terms of field observations of flora and fauna what is noticable in terms of the measurements at a co-located temperature station.
Phenological shifts seem to be very sensitive measures parochial environmental change, much more so than the evidence of individual instrumental metrics. Those whom I know to have an interest in phenolgy tend to be quite certain that shifts are occurring and that they are compatible with a warming trend.
This is where the paper could help us. Having little doubt that changes are occurring and that they are quite rapid and have been sustained for some decades may be evidence of the signal yet fail to indicate emergence if the criteria is for the parochial shift to be unprecedented. The case for the UK, based on fragmentary evidence is that they are not unprecedented in terms of magnitude, but may be of the order of once in millenium or a few millenia. In terms of rate of shift the question may more difficult to answere, requiring information concerning prior rates. Such evidence may be preserved in the sediments but I do not if this is the case.
I think that the paper, quite rightly but perhaps unhelpfully, does not discuss the difference between emergence at the regional, or as I have said parochial, level and emergence at the global level. An inability to currently detect the emergence of the signal in at a single point on the surface does not imply that it could not be detected globally.
Hopefully any overage of this paper will put it into a relevant context.
Alex
Anteros
“sea levels have risen 30 times the speed they are doing at the moment”
Is there evidence of sustained global sea level rises at 30 times the current rate which haven’t coincided with periods of significant environmental stress?
Fred
Are you making a backhanded plea for censorship of views you disagree with and/or cannot refute?
No, just pointing out a fact.
Here’s another. At #56, Thingsbreak provided a list of over twenty papers illustrating Tobis’ point that warming is already having an impact. These are, he said, a ‘small sample’ of the literature. There has been much wittering amongst the ‘sceptics’ here, but no reference to this comment or any of the studies it lists.
‘Sceptical’ debate at it finest.
Fred, I’m informing Keith of my opinion that the comments on this blog are not well balanced. He may disagree. Ultimately I think he should be responsible for the balance of opinions on his blog, though how he achieves that I don’t know.
BBD, I think you will find that EdG has dismissed thinsbreak’s list in comment #65, so that’s alright then.
Ultimately I think he should be responsible for the balance of opinions on his blog,
Are you sane? Keith is now responsible for what other people think?
Climate change is, these days, a business. It is a way for politicians, their friends and some scientists to get their hands on taxpayer dollars. Any pretense at “science” was jettisoned long ago.
Warming is not having “an impact”. There is no danger – at least that we can discern. Ordinary Joe’s know this – hence no action on climate. It isn’t warranted.
Sadly some well intentioned people, like Tobis perhaps, have become collatoral damange. Saving the world is a noble cause; the world just doesn’t need saving.
The psychological issues largely rest with those crusaders who aren’t quite ready to quit. Good luck storming the castle! (The Princess Bride).
AGW is a scam that hijacks climate science and pretends to be the science.
Here is a very small list of the hype AGW promoters have used over the last few years to keep the fear (and their money train) alive.
http://asiancorrespondent.com/71700/an-updated-history-of-last-chances-to-save-the-world/
Part of the scam is pretending a list of articles predicting and modeling future behavior is evidence of current catastrophe. Tobis’ list and the believer reaction to it, is typical of this.
Can always count on MT to stir things up 🙂 with ‘skeptics’.
@BBD
The dearth of susbtantive comments on TBs list is I’m sure noted by most lurkers.
@65 EdG:
Quite the list. Looks impressive at first glance. But looking closer, starting from the top, we see a pattern…
…It goes on. With more projections, predictions, theorizing, models and flow charts all fundamentally based on the Consensus climate predictions. Quite the assumption.
To return to the original point about “˜biomes struggling,’ they already are to the degree to which human activity has and is impacting them. And climate change and other non-human factors have always made them struggle, and evolve. So I was hoping for an evidence-based example of a biome struggling more now due to AGW. Apparently they’re everywhere.
If you can find one on that list we could discuss it.
You ignored multiple papers that describe the impact that AGW is already having on ecosystems. Why, if you’re actually interested in reality instead of promoting your agenda, would you do that?
Marlowe @ 81
The dearth of susbtantive comments on TBs list is I’m sure noted by most lurkers.
Let’s hope so. Although as O’Patrick reminds, I did miss EdG’s forensic rebuttal at 65, which was careless of me.
And one more time Things,
yes evolution is happening. perhaps with man’s help.
How is this un-natural?
Marlowe, Things, etc.
How aboot this, I accept that warming is happening. I accept that humans have a hand in it, even beyond CO2 (reference Dr. Pielke). I accept that from this warming both natural and anthro, some species are having a hard time to adapt.
But where the rubber hits the pavement in the way our views diverge, is that I see nature as a continous process. Creating and dissolving.
It appears to me that you see nature as a static thing. That what is here now should always be here now. So if humans are forcing a change to the planet, and certain species are disapearing, then we, humans, are bad or to blame or whatever. That somehow, sometime, humans have moved out of the realm of nature and therefore their actions are no longer natural.
I see it as humans can never be outside of nature, therefore whatever actions we partake in, is just a tangent of the ongoing natural process.
You feel guilty about our impact on the planet. I feel joyous that humans have evolved to a point to where we can celebrate ourselves and our nature. That everyday is not a struggle just to survive for a lot of us. That the possibility for this joy is there for all humans.
If species, including humans, do disappear because of our actions nature will not stop to weep but will continue on its never ending journey, evolving.
As a very wise Jew once said, “there will always be the poor among us.”
#82,
According to the IPCC, detecting and attributing climate change to AGW is difficult even using thermometers, which respond only to temperature, using thousands of datapoints averaged over continental areas. Do you seriously expect us to believe that anyone can find attributable changes in localised ecological systems, subject to many more influences than just temperature, and with far more noise?
This is an exercise in selection bias and the reading of entrails. It’s picking features out of random weather noise and natural population fluctuations and assigning significance to them.
A third of the weather stations in the world show a long-term cooling trend. You cannot attribute local trends to AGW. History reveals previous cases of local climate changes, with accompanying changes in ecology (like Jefferson above), you cannot attribute such changes to AGW, or assert that they are any different to the natural background.
If your list is supposed to tell us that wildlife is affected by the weather, then yes, of course, we know that. If it’s supposed to tell us that AGW is already threatening entire ecosystems, then we know from basic principles that it can’t be true. Otherwise the IPCC should give up on all its thermometers and watch squirrels instead.
Other than that, a list of references with no discussion is pure argument from authority. Without reading them, we can’t tell what they say, and have no reason to assume they’re true. I can point you to the index of any theological college for thousands of references claiming to demonstrate the existence of God – doing so is not an argument that requires any substantive reply.
@84 DeNihilist:
yes evolution is happening. perhaps with man’s help.
How is this un-natural?
I don’t consider that question at all a relevant one. Massive bolide impacts are “natural” in terms of not being caused by human actions. That doesn’t mean that they’re a nice thing to have happen if you’re alive while they hit.
@85 DeNihilist:
How aboot this, I accept that warming is happening. I accept that humans have a hand in it, even beyond CO2 (reference Dr. Pielke).
Uh, okay? It’s nice that you’re hypothetically accepting reality? And please don’t pretend that recognizing many other factors besides CO2 in anthro warming is somehow original to or the domain of Pielke. That’s inexcusably wrong.
I accept that from this warming both natural and anthro
There is basically no natural warming in terms of the last several decades. A small portion of the warming during the instrumental record, sure. But basically none of the recent warming.
some species are having a hard time to adapt.
Again. Okay, it’s nice that you’re considering accepting reality.
But where the rubber hits the pavement in the way our views diverge, is that I see nature as a continous process. Creating and dissolving.
It appears to me that you see nature as a static thing.
Well, you’re wrong, in terms of my views of nature.
That what is here now should always be here now. So if humans are forcing a change to the planet, and certain species are disapearing, then we, humans, are bad or to blame or whatever. That somehow, sometime, humans have moved out of the realm of nature and therefore their actions are no longer natural.
No. Whether or not you consider humans to be part of nature (I do) or not is irrelevant to the issues I’m concerned with. Again, consider a massive bolide impact. The issue is not whether something is caused by “natural” vs. unnatural sources, but rather that the changes are being made in a way that a normally equilibrating system can’t react fast enough to handle.
You feel guilty about our impact on the planet.
This is nonsense. Please, don’t try to mind read. It makes you look ridiculous.
I feel joyous that humans have evolved to a point to where we can celebrate ourselves and our nature. That everyday is not a struggle just to survive for a lot of us. That the possibility for this joy is there for all humans.
I also think it’s great that many humans don’t have to struggle to survive. I hope that we’ll advance enough as a society that none do.
If species, including humans, do disappear because of our actions nature will not stop to weep but will continue on its never ending journey, evolving.
I don’t really give a sh*t what you think “nature” will or will not do. Again, I am concerned with the life that is present now, and its survival and well-being.
@86 Nullius in Verba:
According to the IPCC, detecting and attributing climate change to AGW is difficult even using thermometers, which respond only to temperature, using thousands of datapoints averaged over continental areas.
You’re saying that as though living things are less abundant than meteorological stations. Does that make sense to you?
Do you seriously expect us to believe that anyone can find attributable changes in localised ecological systems, subject to many more influences than just temperature, and with far more noise?
Yes.
Parmesan, C. (2006), Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 37, 637-669, doi:10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.37.091305.110100.
Rosenzweig, C. et al. (2008), Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change, Nature, 453(7193), 353-357, doi:10.1038/nature06937.
Hoegh-Guldberg, O., and J. F. Bruno (2010), The Impact of Climate Change on the World’s Marine Ecosystems, Science, 328(5985), 1523 -1528, doi:10.1126/science.1189930.
There is basically no natural warming in terms of the last several decades. A small portion of the warming during the instrumental record, sure. But basically none of the recent warming.
Implying, of course, a complete understanding of climate, so predictions should be virtually foolproof…. oh wait.
silly, just silly.
“According to the IPCC, detecting and attributing climate change to AGW is difficult even using thermometers, which respond only to temperature, using thousands of datapoints averaged over continental areas. Do you seriously expect us to believe that anyone can find attributable changes in localised ecological systems, subject to many more influences than just temperature, and with far more noise?”
Camille Parmesan has an excellent talk on exactly this subject. First of all, it is important to understand that there is a two-step attribution: that ecological stresses CAN be attributed to climate change directly, and that the attribution in turn to anthropogenic forcing DEPENDS on the prior existence of the attribution you speak of.
Secondly, it is indeed easier to do these attributions in cases with larger geographic and temporal datasets. An example she gave was of a species of butterfly prevalent along the entire US west coast with a few populations in Canada and Mexico. All of the new colonies were in the northern extent of the range, and all of the recent extinctions in the south. Is this a “local” attribution? No. Is it compelling? Well, it’s damned hard to come up with an alternative hypothesis that accounts for these events thousands of miles apart, isn’t it? Of course, it could be some sort of coincidence (say, movement southward of a predator) but the fact is that the great majority of such shifts observed are in the sense expected by a warming trend.
So it’s like attributing a severe weather event. You can’t say the Joplin tornado was due to global warming, as it was local, and there have always been severe tornados. The Alabama tornado outbreak of last year is another story – this was a regional event with known precedents but no known equal. Globally, though, it’s a very clear signal that severe rainfall events are increasing, enough that you can do the attribution.
But still dwelling on attribution is a waste of time, I think. Those who remain unconvinced of anthropogenic climate change can’t be reached by statistical reasoning anyway.
I think we really should stop fussing over the rather artificial attribution question. You can’t add several watts to every square meter of the earth’s surface and have nothing happen. Keeping on collecting new evidence in pursuit of “proving” this plainly demonstrated fact is a waste of effort at this point. We have other scientific questions that would better use our scientific efforts, and plenty of observational ammunition for the use of anyone who cares to actually look.
@89 kdk33:
Implying, of course, a complete understanding of climate
No. That statement alone simply reflects that we have a sufficient understanding of and reasonably well-constrained observations for the main drivers globally-averaged temperature change. Nothing more, nothing less.
so predictions should be virtually foolproof”¦. oh wait.
No. There is significant uncertainty remaining about the exact value of ECS and therefore transient sensitivity. But more importantly the single biggest source of uncertainty about future temperature changes is what we choose to do in terms of emissions.
OPatrick @ 74 –
“Is there evidence of sustained global sea level rises at 30 times the current rate which haven’t coincided with periods of significant environmental stress?”
I think this is something that delineates our different world views quite well – hopefully while leaving them mutually intelligible. I was struck that you used the word ‘stress’, because it is so far from my understanding of the Universe. I would say ‘impetus for change’ or ‘encouragement of speciation’ or ‘stimulus for adaptation’ or even ‘clearing out of old wood’ Over the last million years there have been periods of rapid change and periods of relative stasis – it seems very odd to me to bemoan the times of change and to characterise them as stressful. I think more that the periods of change are times of the creation of novel forms and novel relationships, but I certainly wouldn’t judge them better than times of little change.
I think this is one of two reasons why I am not an environmentalist – I don’t feel the wish to somehow stop or bemoan any changes around us – change is what the Universe does. The second reason is that I don’t differentiate between change caused by human activities and other sorts – perhaps by glaciations or volcanoes or whatever. I sense that many people think that even if other changes aren’t too terrible, those caused by the activities of human beings must somehow be bad because they are ‘unnatural’. This doesn’t make any sense to me – change is change. Some of it we might like, some we might not appreciate.
I think there may be consequences of Anthropogenic warming that we think are negative – that is eminently debatable – but I don’t think any changes are bad simply because a human influence is relevant. I definitely don’t subscribe to the idea that the world is ‘supposed’ to be a particular way and that human beings are unnaturally altering that.
To go back to your original question and the idea of stress. The evidence from the past is that the periods of warming were at least an order of magnitude faster than the periods of cooling. The only difference I can see is ‘more change’ or ‘faster change’ or ‘more dramatic change’ during the faster warming. I cannot see the more rapid changes as being characterised by stress. That simply doesn’t make any sense to me – change or stasis are equally valid aspects of the world.
Instead of ”biomes everywhere are struggling” which to me just sounds ridiculous and like a five year old imagining a the suffering of a doll, I would see life racing to fill new niches, new opportunities and being ever rejuvenated. Except of course, our one inch per decade sea level rises are barely noticeable even by human beings.
No, I don’t see the rapid changes of the past being accompanied by stress to the environment, I just see rapid changes. life goes on – sometimes changing, sometimes staying the same. The staying the same is no better than the changing.
Sorry Michael, but may I just lift a sentence it and repeat it?
You can’t add several watts to every square meter of the earth’s surface and have nothing happen.
And again:
You can’t add several watts to every square meter of the earth’s surface and have nothing happen.
And again:
You can’t add several watts to every square meter of the earth’s surface and have nothing happen.
Sorry about that. But isn’t it astonishing how many people don’t seem to register this fact?
Keith – If you’re not seeing the shifting (im)balance, then the eventual results will sneak up on you, just like AGW will sneak up on the people this post is referring to.
As to this post, I generally agree regarding life’s focus for most people. Humanity is a social species, and for most, social relations dominate their lives. Add to it that your circle sounds to be doing a tad better than many in the country, who have a lot to worry about (maybe not, maybe you just didn’t refer to that aspect of their lives), and there is really no surprise that no serious action re AGW is taking place. The surprise would have been if we had (we meaning globally), but of course we had to try.
@92 Anteros:
I think this is something that delineates our different world views quite well ““ hopefully while leaving them mutually intelligible. I was struck that you used the word “˜stress’, because it is so far from my understanding of the Universe. I would say “˜impetus for change’ or “˜encouragement of speciation’ or “˜stimulus for adaptation’ or even “˜clearing out of old wood’
Much in the same way as someone firing you from your job, stealing your life savings, burning down your house, murdering your family, and breaking your legs isn’t “stress”. It’s just “impetus for change” and “stimulus for adaptation”?
Is it even possible for you to acknowledge that mass extinction events- however beneficial they may be in hindsight to the few “winners” afterwards- are not beneficial to the species that get wiped out?
Thanks BBD. I’ve been saying it that way for some time. I’m not sure whether I came up with it independently. In any case I believe the statement is attributable to Steven Schneider and should be so attributed.
Anteros
The second reason is that I don’t differentiate between change caused by human activities and other sorts ““ perhaps by glaciations or volcanoes or whatever. I sense that many people think that even if other changes aren’t too terrible, those caused by the activities of human beings must somehow be bad because they are “˜unnatural’.
I think what you are missing is that changes caused by humans are at least partly under our control. The Very Bad Thing for some is not that human impacts are ‘unnatural’. It is that they are to some extent avoidable.
OK, backreading: The New York Times is too informal, and the individual papers are too narrow, and the IPCC is broken. In fact, there is something bad to be said about every single piece of evidence. No matter how much evidence there is, no matter how broad and how deep. Clearly it is all a conspiracy.
No matter if you see forests dying with your own eyes at a rate that you never saw earlier in your life. No matter if your old snorkeling grounds are all bleached and dead. They all must be conspiring too.
How the heck is democracy supposed to work if significant fractions of the population perceive completely different worlds? I think we have to overcome this. But if one or more of the important groups systematically dismisses any evidence that upsets their worldview, it becomes impossible to repair democracy. Ultimately this sort of selective blindness is subversive.
BBD,
Actually it is not several watts, and it is only several watts when the sunshines, and it is a tiny number in terms of total watts that strike the Earth.
Your power supply probably fluctuates more- and will certainly fluctuate more if AGW crazies succeed in getting wind power really ramped up.
Since life is very adaptive on Eart, and the oceans are vastly alrger than the land and have vastly larger heat cpapctiy, actually your wattage clima, no matter how many times you repeat it, is not less misleading or more informative than it was the first time you made it.
Hunter,
Careful — you need to take of the tinfoil hat and put your ‘thinking’ cap back on. Remember when you forgot to fix that leaky faucet before you went on vacation and left the plug in the tub? How did that work out for you?
Thingsbreak –
Is it even possible for you to acknowledge that mass extinction events- however beneficial they may be in hindsight to the few “winners” afterwards- are not beneficial to the species that get wiped out?
I wonder if you thought about this before typing it…
It is nonsensical to ask whether something that wipes out a species is beneficial to that species – just idiotic. It is also idiotic to bemoan the extinction of species in general – it is an essential part of how we came into existence. If you see the phenomenon of life being threatened by a small rise or fall in temperature I think you misunderstand the robustness and flexibility of life in general. The thing that life does is adapt – that is the essence and soul of life.
hunter
You seem confused. Which is unfortunate, given your prolific commentary here and elsewhere.
A sustained forcing of a mere 3.7W/m2 is sufficient to heat the entire climate system up such that global average surface air temperature rises by ~3C.
Folks sometimes complain that the word denialist harkens to Holocaust denial, but to me it harkens to WWII/Nazi denialism. People today are fond of berating leaders of the 30’s for not stopping the Nazis when it would have been easy.
But that was the middle of the Great Depression. What would it take to convince a struggling populace to _invade_ Germany in 1936? Simply wasn’t gonna happen. I think FDR knew what was coming, Churchill certainly did. I don’t know if Neville Chamberlain saw it coming, but if he did, he wouldn’t have had any more success in convincing the British people to invade Germany than Roosevelt would have pre-Pearl Harbor. Or than the IPCC and UN have in motivating action on AGW now. America First was not a group of rabid fascists. It had conservatives and liberals. Basically people who did not want to go to war during the Great Depression.
So that’s basically where we are now. We have all these statements of supposed factoids from skeptics here. I do occasionally turn on Fox despite being a lefty, and saw somebody say that the fact that scientists decided that Pluto is no longer a planet is just another proof that we really don’t know enough. Those scientists were so sure that Puto was a planet, after all. On the other side is a list like what Thinsbreak posted. Compare and contrast as you will.
It is just about as obvious that AGW is not a serious problem as it was that the Nazis weren’t in 1936. Plenty of supposedly reasonable people had plenty of reasonable reasons to do nothing about it then, but today we just think they were stupid. Wasn’t it just obvious, weren’t the facts staring them in the face? But there was not really a shortage of people who saw WWII coming.
Anteros
I agree with others here that you grossly over-state the ability of ‘life’ to adapt to rapid environmental change. Grossly.
It actually breaks your argument, such as it is.
Good post, Keith.
#88,
“You’re saying that as though living things are less abundant than meteorological stations.”
I was saying it as if the spatial extent covered by individual living things was smaller.
#90,
Thanks. That’s a much more substantive argument. Or rather, three arguments.
First argument: The attribution two-step.
Leaving aside the point that the second step is strongly disputed…
A change in global average being attributed to a particular cause does not imply that any particular individual change making up that average has the same cause. Otherwise we could argue that because the thermometers showed a global temperature rise over a 25 year period, that every sunny day is caused by global warming. There are lots of factors at work. Which one contributed most to any individual event is unknown.
Second argument: the butterfly effect.
As I understand it, you have two point effects, some extinctions in the south, and some colonisations in the north. If we suppose the population range fluctuates naturally and that extinctions and colonisations are equally likely, that they both occur in the right direction for the hypothesis would have a probability of 1/4. (The actual probability would be a bit less, because there might have been no detectable change. But then the probability of researchers reporting it would probably be lower.) There are lots of effects that could affect butterflies, and conjunctions of such effects are not unlikely.
For example, suppose it actually cooled, leading a predator species (or a competitor for the same resources) more sensitive to temperature to move south? That would cause climate-related extinctions in the south and colonisations in the north from precisely the opposite effect!
The argument that it is in the right direction for the hypothesis is a case of ‘confirming the consequent’.
And one would really need to check for selection bias; the ‘bottom drawer’ effect. You would need to look at the actual climate records in the areas concerned – it’s noteworthy that the US does not have as large a trend as the rest of the world, and these areas could easily turn out to be in the cooling 1/3 rather than the warming 2/3rds.
Argument 3: I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto.
No known equal over what period of time?
And again, we have one data point, selected because it was an extreme, that could have many causes. I can think of no reason why global warming would cause more tornadoes; so far as I know they’re not strongly correlated to temperature. I have heard that the place with the greatest tornado density in the world is the UK, not noted for its tropical climate…
Yes I agree, there’s little likelihood that sceptics will be convinced by any of your arguments. And I agree that it would be helpful (to you) for everyone to stop fussing over local attribution. They make for good scary short-term media copy, but in the long run they’re damaging to your cause. Fortunately for our side, I doubt it’s going to happen.
@97
“The Very Bad Thing for some is not that human impacts are “˜unnatural’. It is that they are to some extent avoidable.”
This only makes sense if two other premises are added. Firstly, if the human impacts are beneficial, neutral or indeterminate then the fact that the impacts are avoidable is utterly irrelevant. Secondly, the receipts for the avoidance must exceed the payments of mitigation.
You obviously feel you have sufficient evidence to stand on both those premises such that everybody should begin making payments immediately. As you might have noticed, you are in quite a small minority. I accept that you believe very strongly that the premises are sufficient to carry your weight but persuading others is going to be mighty difficult. The only thing that will help that cause as far as I can see is your nearly-worst case scenario which is bugger all happens until some very bad things happen, which will appear to you to be a bit bloody late. I can’t see how the future can be much different given the evidence of the last 20 years.
NiV
You shouldn’t start your screeds with provocative nonsense. It makes you look daft:
Leaving aside the point that the second step is strongly disputed”¦
Strongly disputed by who, exactly? Pseudo-sceptics on blogs don’t count. A head count of Earth System Scientists would be more to the point. But I don’t think that’s going to support your claim, do you?
Anteros
You misrepresent climate sensitivity estimates. You misrepresent the rate at which species can adapt to rapid environmental change. You misrepresent the nature of human impacts. You misrepresent the calculus of mitigation.
The one thing you might be right about is this:
The only thing that will help that cause as far as I can see is your nearly-worst case scenario which is bugger all happens until some very bad things happen, which will appear to you to be a bit bloody late. I can’t see how the future can be much different given the evidence of the last 20 years.
All your misrepresentations contribute a little tiny bit towards this future being the one we get.
TB, NiV,
The ecology/climate change connection is a complex one. I touched on it here, playing off a recent commentary in the journal Nature Climate Change by Camille Parmesan.
BBD –
I’ve just seen your other comment. I’m intrigued – as far as I can see there isn’t any evidence suggesting life can’t lap up a small change in temperature with barely a nod of acknowledgement.
When you say rapid changes – do you mean like we have had in the last 100 years? 50 years? Because I seriously don’t think life has noticed. It is still yawning. Of course 4 degrees in a century would put the cat amongst the pigeons and indeed there would be dramas and many unexpected happenings. Many of which we would not like. The problem with that is the fact that it is mostly speculation – projections. You’d find me very interested if you convinced me that such a thing was likely, but I’d like to remain agnostic about that meanwhile.
Call me observationally obsessed but I see a ballpark 0.15C per decade and I’d have to be persuaded that this was going to increase markedly before I got worried about the future. It’s odd really – I’m about as ready as anybody I know to put the C in my AGW – I’m just missing some evidence – that I know you think you already have. Just the way it is, I suppose.
@111
arguments from personal incredulity are boring. Try again.
Camille Parmesan did an ~hour long video presentation on her work on US and European butterflies, poleward and upward migration, prairie grass root systems and much else.
Sadly I have not been able to find it again.
If anyone knows if the video is still out there, I would appreciate a link.
Alex
@ Alexander Harvey… The talk might be this one.
Re Me:
Although not perhaps the same video I think I have found the same lecture:
http://mediasite.austin.utexas.edu/UTMediasite/Viewer/?peid=64407096faae4d9d93b3073ca8de14371d
Camille Parmesan
Creative Conservation in a Changing Climate
Alex
Doug Allen @13:
“Now we have had 14 years of stable temperatures despite record highs in CO2 emissions and PPM”
This is just flat-out incorrect. So much for your ‘scientific literacy’, Mr. Allen.
rustneversleeps:
Thanks, I got there but it is appreciated 🙂
Alex
And KK, the ‘balance’ in this place’s comments isn’t much different from those on Revkin’s blog : endless noise and bluster and zombie arguments from ‘skeptics’ obscuring an occasional signal. And I’m thinking that will be the case whenever a blog is moderated not by scientists who actually know what they are talking about, but rather by people who are at least as interested in the ‘horse race’, if not more interested, as in the science.
@110 Keith Kloor:
The ecology/climate change connection is a complex one.
Agreed.
I touched on it here, playing off a recent commentary in the journal Nature Climate Change by Camille Parmesan.
Parmesan et al. were making the point that individual case attribution is tough. And it is! But if you have a plethora of, say, phenological responses spanning a large geographic area that correspond to known anthropogenic warming, however, it’s less difficult to make the attribution case. This is acknowledged in the Parmesan article.
As far as why nobody talks about it at the dinner table, I thought the earlier comparison to abortion was interesting. You don’t talk about it because you don’t know if the person next to you is an absolutist on the question. If so, it will be a boring talk because the absolutists on both ends of the spectrum have utterly failed to come up with a rational answer to “and we should do…”
They claim to have the answers, but finding it is like trying to pin Jello to the wall. On the AGW side they claim they want a “radical shift away from consumerism to communitarian political constructs.” But don’t dare call ’em communists or socialists. They think it’s the biggest deal evah, but not big enough to build a single one of the nukes you need despite babbling about it for 20 years.
I suspect it doesn’t come up at liberal dinner tables because no one is dumb enough to this is the ticket to reviving socialism from the dead, nobody is excited about admitting the Republicans have been right about nukes for 40 years, and listening to lectures from naive witless “activists” is like having teeth pulled (for an example, try reading a Susan Anderson comment at Andy Revkin’s blog).
TB,
Yes, that is true, for the phenological responses. Lots of interesting research and monitoring going on related to this.
@ 37
Excellent comment, Andy.
It has become clear, particularly in light of the mathematics of the hockey stick and the recent scandals in medical research relating to the inability to reproduce a large number of reported results, that something is amiss in R & D and academia.
I can say from my own experience researching the hockey stick issue, that I was appalled not by the fact that the statistics were misunderstood / misapplied, but by the continued defense of bad math by the community. And nobody seems interested in updating those 30 year old tree rings with current info. Search for the truth, hardly.
There is a litany of apparent sporadic correlations in nature that have been data mined and given lots of media attention with very little attention to how the direct causation actually works. Civil wars increase when temperature increases by 0.3C, therefore global warming causing global conflict, start counting the bodies attributable to global warming.
One of the not well understood characteristics of random data is that it isn’t random all the time, only over long time periods. There will always be periods of apparent increasing and decreasing trends. Dealing with this phenomenon is as much art as science.
Butterflies, beetles, frogs, etc are seen as being “linked” to global warming. The math probably supports trending, but this is a huge step from causation.
What about the other 100,000 species in the area, do they show similar trends? What about the same species in other areas? How many times have similar trends occurred over the several hundred years?
How many papers get published showing studies that resulted in no link found? Are we to believe that every study initiated resulted in a positive result? Negative results do not get published, academia is flawed in this respect.
So where is the big list of animals not affected by the recent global warming (or randomly improving)? Why does this list not exist? Wouldn’t proper science ask this question?
Is it not true that the overwhelming number of trends do not correlate with recent global warming, and that one would expect the sporadic number of positive and negative trends to balance out?
IMO environmental science is guilty of searching for the answer it wants and predominantly publishing and publicizing only results that fit the agenda (particularly with NGO’s).
A hundred years from now if AGW is shown to be inconsequential, how would one explain the vast amount of research done that purported to show something that ended up not being true? How could that happen?
I would find it encouraging if the social scientists asked themselves this question in addition to why the public has not embraced the climate change message. But they never do.
#98 Micahel Tobis
How the heck is democracy supposed to work if significant fractions of the population perceive completely different worlds?
That is how survival of species works. If we all perceived the world identically then the first thing to come around that we falsely perceived as ‘friend’ would wipe us all out.
Just read some history…see how often ‘Group-think’ has resulted in almost unimaginable death and destruction.
The crusades, WWI, WWII just to mention a few.
harrywr2
That is how survival of species works. If we all perceived the world identically then the first thing to come around that we falsely perceived as “˜friend’ would wipe us all out.
By the same logic, the first thing we can’t agree on because of the way we are – but is a genuinely serious problem – will bugger things up royally 😉
I think this is what is troubling MT. It certainly bothers me.
Notice how the believers show their true autoritarian colors.
They flatter themselves that they are the lucky ones who found the one cause that justifies pitching democratic rule out the door in favor of the solutions their faith provides them. How amazing: They not only found the problem, but the solutions as well, and they know it so strongly that the rest of us need to stfu and let them do the important work of saving us.
The AGW movement does not even rise to the level of a good B sf movie.
@100 Marlowe,
The leaky faucet in the tub is actually a good anaology:
If my drain is working, a drip will never flood my house.
CO2 impact is at best a drip and the drain is not getting smaller.
As to tinfoil, lsat I checked it is the believer community who has fabricated great conspiracies, sells apocalyptic spooky stories, scares children, makes nasty little 10:10 videos, and fllies around the world doing nothing, at great expense, regarding climate.- IOW you guys seem to have bought up all the tinfoil hats.
And I don’t do hats well any way. But thanks for the avice.
BBD, yes, harrywr2 has a point, but it works much better on a big, loosely coupled world than on a small, tightly coupled one.
Too many of us haven’t noticed the phase change, and so are tuned in to the wrong risks. And this does capture the problem with the “skeptics”. They are so afraid of misallocating their wealth that they will risk sacrificing much of the world on which their wealth depends to save the wealth. In the past, such a risk was unthinkable, and so the fear was adaptive. Now that the risk is possible, the way people think is lagging, and so they indulge in utter madness in the name of prudence.
Like I said before, at least it is funny in a sort of a way.
@126
Then I presume you have an explanation for all that heat that’s accumulated in the oceans, melted the ice caps, etc?
MT @127
An interesting summary. And uncomfortably persuasive.
In a rather weak attempt to add cheer, I will say this. Among the many horrors of engaging in the climate ‘debate’ nothing is worse for me than the dawning realisation that I am going to have to try to learn about economics. I was not a gifted student of the discipline at school and the prospect fills me with dread. Cruel and unusual punishments like forcing sceptics to learn by rote and recite Hansen’s papers in public places are trivial in comparison.
# 77 OPatrick writes:
“BBD, I think you will find that EdG has dismissed thinsbreak’s list in comment #65, so that’s alright then.”
I did not simply “dismiss” it. I just pointed out that few, if any, of those listed papers actually document anything from the real world.
@130 EdG, The believers are doing the equivalent of listing bible verses instead of arguing. That their verses don’t even support what they think they do is not as imporant as their being able to toss up a nice long sciencey sounding list.
# 82 thingsbreak writes:
“You ignored multiple papers that describe the impact that AGW is already having on ecosystems. Why, if you’re actually interested in reality instead of promoting your agenda, would you do that?”
TB, it was a very long list and it was very late when I scanned it. Hope you got the point of my initial comment. But I did invite you to pick one which you thought dealt with real world evidence so we could discuss the specifics in detail. That invitation is still open. So, please do.
My experience with these things is that when you get down to specific evidence they tend to fall apart.
An interesting summary. And uncomfortably persuasive
So, BBD, were you not presuaded before? Do you think anyone has changed their minds?
# 90 M Tobis writes:
“An example she gave was of a species of butterfly prevalent along the entire US west coast with a few populations in Canada and Mexico. All of the new colonies were in the northern extent of the range, and all of the recent extinctions in the south. Is this a “local” attribution? No. Is it compelling? Well, it’s damned hard to come up with an alternative hypothesis that accounts for these events thousands of miles apart, isn’t it?”
But MT, what you and others blinkered by the AGW story fail to understand that many species have moved north in synch with the ending of the Little Ice Age. This is best documented for some bird species because of the number of observers.
The number of observers and intensity of observation has also skewed our perception of less observed species. Again, to return to birds, there are so many birders now that ‘early’ or ‘late’ or ‘out of range’ species are far more likely to be observed, recorded, and reported. Same presumably for butterflies.
To analyze your butterfly story one needs to look at the specifics… so please post a link to that if you have one. Since many butterfly species are very specific about their ‘hosts’ there is likely some habitat change factors involved in that which may or may not have to do with climate.
No comment on the AGW Myth of The Mt Pine Beetle?
# 98 MT – I just saw that you did sort of respond to the facts about the Mt Pine Beetle Myth by evading them. Sigh.
Here’s another clue. The first major Mt. Pine Beetle epeidemic I was involved with was the one that hit Glacier National Park in the 1970s.
kdk33
So, BBD, were you not presuaded before? Do you think anyone has changed their minds?
I’ve been persuaded of many things. My views change over time as I learn. This is, as far as I know, is what is supposed to happen.
I went from being a staunch lukewarmer* to being a bang-in-the-middle 3C man. Am I fickle? No. Was I happier being a lukewarmer? Yes.
So why did I change my mind? Because the arguments for 3C are better than the arguments for 2C or 4C. But you have to look at them in order to see this. And that is not what ‘sceptics’ – as opposed to sceptics – do.
*Defined here as 1.5C – 2C for 550 ppmv CO2 – sorry for the nit-picking, but the goalposts keep moving 😉
Well gee Ed, who am I supposed to believe? You or those communists at the Canadian Forestry Service:
“The current latitudinal and elevational range of mountain pine beetle is not limited by available hosts. Instead, its potential to expand north and east has been restricted by climatic conditions unfavorable for brood development. We combined a model of the impact of climatic conditions on the establishment and persistence of mountain pine beetle populations with a spatially explicit, climate-driven simulation tool. Historic weather records were used to produce maps of the distribution of past climatically suitable habitats for mountain pine beetles in British Columbia. Overlays of annual mountain pine beetle occurrence on these maps were used to determine if the beetle has expanded its range in recent years due to changing climate. An examination of the distribution of climatically suitable habitats in 10-year increments derived from climate normals (1921-1950 to 1971-2000) clearly shows an increase in the range of benign habitats. Furthermore, an increase (at an increasing rate) in the number of infestations since 1970 in formerly climatically unsuitable habitats indicates that mountain pine beetle populations have expanded into these new areas. Given the rapid colonization by mountain pine beetles of former climatically unsuitable areas during the last several decades, continued warming in western North America associated with climate change will allow the beetle to further expand its range northward, eastward and toward higher elevations.
Could you at least try to offer something a little more challenging? Surely it’s not that hard.
“They are well read. They subscribe to The New Yorker, the NYT, The Economist, etc.”
non sequitur
“How the heck is democracy supposed to work if significant fractions of the population perceive completely different worlds?”
Why would you need democracy if everyone thought the same?
#137 – First, Can you imagine why the forest service might want to downplay the role that their forest ‘management’ has had in contributing to this problem?
It says “The current latitudinal and elevational range of mountain pine beetle is not limited by available hosts.”
This is very mushy language due to the term “available hosts” – unless you understand which specific tree species are viable hosts. In Canada that is almost entirely the lodgepole pine. It has ecological and stand characteristics which make it highly vulnerable in the absence of fire (or regular logging), most notably because it is effectively mass planted by fires – which pop open their cones – resulting in (often very large) large even-aged stands. When the trees in those stands all mature simultaneously, that provides a huge amount and concentration of suitable mt pine beetle habitat. When there are vast areas of that, due to extensive early burning combined with active fire suppression since, as what happened in BC and adjacent AB, you get the opportunity for the kind of hyper-epidemic scenario which happened there. (Because lodgepole pines were considered almost a ‘weed species’ to the forest industry before other species got scarcer, much of it was not logged; and this recent epidemic built up its inertia and numbers in a large provincial park).
The only other mt pine beetle hosts in Canada are the ponderosa pine (in the valleys of S BC) and the whitebark pine (in subalpine coast and interior mts in the southern two-thirds of BC and adjacent AB).
All make sense so far?
So the latitudinal and elevational range of this beetle is limited first by the range of those host species (more on that momentarily).
Now, given a period of warmer winters (warmer falls are the actual key factor but that’s an aside) plus suitable habitat – suitably large (mature) individual trees for mt pine beetle reproduction – one would expect beetles to infect higher and more northerly areas, as they recently did. But again, first you need that habitat which, again, was not natural due to fire suppression. No habitat, no expansion, no matter how warm winters are.
Still making sense to you? Ok, now we need to veer off temporarily:
“We combined a model…” (Oh, oh) “with a spatially explicit, climate-driven simulation tool.”
Still, there can be valuable insights from such an exercise. What did they use exactly?
“An examination of the distribution of climatically suitable habitats in 10-year increments derived from climate normals (1921-1950 to 1971-2000)”
That’s odd. Why not 1951-1970?
So, during those two selected time periods when we know it was warming, there was “an increase in the range of benign habitats.” Yes there was, as informed common sense would also predict.
That same common sense would also predict that “Furthermore, an increase (at an increasing rate) in the number of infestations since 1970 in formerly climatically unsuitable habitats indicates that mountain pine beetle populations have expanded into these new areas.r” The only mystery here is why they added “Furthermore.”
OK. On to the “money shot”:
“Given the rapid colonization by mountain pine beetles of former climatically unsuitable areas during the last several decades, continued warming in western North America associated with climate change will allow the beetle to further expand its range northward, eastward and toward higher elevations.”
True that, given suitable habitat (mature viable host trees), and given sufficient background mt pine beetle populations (more below), mt pine beetle range can and will expand WITHIN THE RANGE OF THOSE HOSTS with warmer winters (falls). Nothing new there. But based on what I just explained in this paragraph, here are the problems with it (pardon the repitition).
As usual, it is fundamentally based on the assumption of “continued warming“;
It fails to clarify that this potential expansion is limited to the range of its hosts and suitable (mature) stands or individuals of them. This allowed people who knew nothing about this to imagine, in the height of the hysteria over this, that this epidemic would spread across Canada, etc. In this case it could only go as far east into AB, and as far north into Yukon, as the range of the lodgepole pine does – at most. The lodgepole pines at the northern and northeastern end of their range are often not large enough to host beetles.
Second last point. When this hyper-epidemic in BC, spreading into AB, was happening, the vast amount of available unnatural habitat allowed these populations to explode into insane numbers. That obviously faciltated the spread as winds were carrying them over long distances to infect isolated patches and new areas. And there were so many beetles that they were desperately attacking even young pines and, more significantly to the scary stories, non-host species like spruce. What was never properly explained is that the beetles could not reproduce in those young pines or spruces and thus those tree attacks were dead end ‘collateral damage.’
Finally, this insect is always in these forest ecosystems, selectively attacking mature trees and mature stands. These trees have defense mechanisms which can usually fight them off unless they are weakened by other factors or, like in epidemics, they overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of attacks.
Whew! Long story. And that’s just the half of it. The symbiosis between these beetles and ‘their’ fungus is another interesting part. But enough for now except this:
We are now supposed to be more aware of biodiversity than ever but I sometimes wonder isf some people even understand that concept. This mt pine beetle story – the real one – provides an interesting insight into that with its host specificity. Anyone who claims or imagines that these beetles will kill ‘the forests’ of Canada or anywhere else – as was hysterically suggested at the height of this -just doesn’t get what biodiversity means in the real world.
Oh yes. Its an obsolete story because it is over. That untapped bonanza of habitat has now been tapped and killed and the warming isn’t following the models.
Pardon the typos. Wrote this toooo fast.
Ed wouldn’t a link to a journal article been faster than typing out your rant?
Ed you wouldn’t look so silly if you had simply said that there were other factors besides climate change that contributed to the unprecedented scale of the most recent outbreak. Heck even Safranyik agrees that forest management practices played a role:
“Mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopk. [Coleoptera: Scolytidae]) outbreaks have been observed in all pine species in western Canada. However, they have occurred principally in lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Dougl. ex Loud. var. latifolia) in the southern half of British Columbia and the extreme south-western portion of Alberta, with one outbreak recorded in the Cypress Hills at the southern junction of the Alberta”“Saskatchewan border. At least four large-scale outbreaks have occurred in western Canada in the past 120 years, as documented in forest survey records or detected as growth releases in tree rings. The Chilcotin Plateau in central interior British Columbia has sustained the most years of outbreak. Dendrochronological evidence suggests an outbreak periodicity of about 40 years in this region. The size of mountain pine beetle infestations varies with short-term changes in weather and long-term changes in host availability. Retrospective modelling suggests that both the amount of susceptible mature lodgepole pine and the area with favourable climate have increased during the past century. An age-class projection model using contemporary forest inventory data in combination with wildfire and harvesting statistics suggests that during the early 1900s, approximately 17% of pine stands were in age-classes susceptible to mountain pine beetle attack. Forest age-class structure is controlled by the disturbance regime. In unmanaged lodgepole pine forests, wildfire was the primary disturbance agent. With fire-return cycles of 40 – 200 years, the long-term average susceptibility to mountain pine beetle would be about 17% – 25% over large areas. However, during the past 80 years the amount of area burned by wildfire in pine forests in British Columbia has significantly decreased. While harvesting has also increased during this same period, the net disturbance rate is believed to have decreased. The reduction in disturbance rate has resulted in an increase in the average age of pine stands such that approximately 55% of pine forests are presently in age-classes considered susceptible to mountain pine beetle. Analysis and modelling of the historical distribution of a climatic suitability index and of outbreaks suggests that over the past 40 years the range of mountain pine beetle has expanded, as has the area that is climatically favourable for it. Thus, an increase in both the amount of susceptible-aged host and range expansion due to a more favourable climate have created ideal conditions for the development of an extensive mountain pine beetle epidemic. A better understanding of the effect of forest dynamics and climatic variation on mountain pine beetle populations and outbreak development will allow for management of lodgepole pine with regard to disturbance risk.”
Instead we get the typical ‘skeptical’ insinuation of gate-keeping and reliance on ‘models’. This kind of behaviour might play well at Watts place, but over here it makes you look like a crank.
How snarky Mr. Sullivan when you say-
This is just flat-out incorrect. So much for your “˜scientific literacy’, Mr. Allen. in referewnce to my statement-
“Now we have had 14 years of stable temperatures despite record highs in CO2 emissions and PPM”
Classic pot calling pan… Mr. Sullivan. Sorry, you can not have your own facts. If you read my post you will see that I am referring to the instrumental temperature record. Are you referring to higher CO2 concentrations at some much earlier period? If not, then you have some home work to do. If you learn to use Wood for Trees you can plot the 14 year (or otherperiods going back to 1850) temperature trend and the CO2 atmospheric PPM trend which will show exactly what I stated, whether you use data from NASA Giistemp, Hadcru, NOAA, or the satellites. Here’s a start for you if you don’t want to go to Wood for Trees-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Satellite_Temperatures.png
And here’s the CO2 data-
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
If you want to discuss the trends and have something constructive to say, please do.
@128
You mean this missing heat?
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL048417.shtml
Hint: quoting Hansen will never get you where you wish you could go.
# 141 Marlowe writes:
“Ed wouldn’t a link to a journal article been faster than typing out your rant?”
A “rant”? Just an explanation, in my own words. Any fool can cut and paste. Was too long as it is a complicated subject and I had to write it fast. Feel free to check to check the facts and interpretations for yourself. Nothing in what you pasted (next) contradicts anything I wrote.
# 142 Marlowe writes:
“Ed you wouldn’t look so silly if you had simply said that there were other factors besides climate change that contributed to the unprecedented scale of the most recent outbreak.”
This comment wouldn’t look so silly if you had read my first post on this (#66) where I had already explained that. briefly, because I wrote it when I was tired and ready to fall asleep.
What you pasted simply confirms what I said.
Marlowe goes on: “Instead we get the typical “˜skeptical’ insinuation of gate-keeping and reliance on “˜models’. This kind of behaviour might play well at Watts place, but over here it makes you look like a crank.”
If you don’t know that forest management agencies were and still are suppressing recognition of the role of fire in forest ecosystems you are simply ignorant of the facts and the history. That they do it is understandable because it is a complicated subject, particularly when they have a mandate to manage forests for wood production while not burning down the built structures now in and around them. It is gradually changing – as shown by the prescribed burning now done in some parks – but for the reasons I just noted it will always be problematic in practice. But that does not mean we shouldn’t understand it.
Models. Well, they are just models, and the one your post referred to it was founded on a dubious assumption of ongoing warming. In any case, I explained why that is not the root of this problem, and why it is mostly over, with or without more warming.
Marlowe goes on, unfortunately:
“This kind of behaviour might play well at Watts place, but over here it makes you look like a crank.”
I answered your question as clearly as time permitted. My point about gatekeeping is obvious to anyone who has looked into the history of this and to anyone (including myself) who has run into it directly. And I pointed out that models are just models and noted an obvious problem with that one (and all ‘forever warming’ models).
I fail to see any problem with my ‘behavior,’ or why it matters where I wrote this.
I am not the one calling people a “crank,” even while you seem to have no rational criticism other than pasting information which simply confirms my points.
It seems that you just don’t like being presented with information that doesn’t fit in your convenient box and can do nothing more than revert to stereotypes and name calling. I call that cranky.
Anyhow, hoped you learned something. It is all very old ‘news’ for me.
#142 Marlowe, Just read what you pasted again and found this detail which is not in entire agreement with what I wrote. So as it seems you would most likely jump on this to make a point I will clarify.
“Mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopk. [Coleoptera: Scolytidae]) outbreaks have been observed in all pine species in western Canada.”
I mentioned only three pine species (and the rest of this blurb confirms that, as I said, that the lodgepole pine is the main one).
The reason why I did not mention the other TWO pine species in mt pine beetle range in Canada – W White Pine and Limber Pine – is that outbreaks in them are so rare and insignificant as to be barely worth mentioning. Look at the range and stand characteristics of Limber Pine! More importantly – and I alluded to this towards the end of my #140 – attacks on those species are almost always a byproduct of hyperepidemic conditions when these beetles will attack nontypical hosts or even entirely unsuitable species (like spruce). But they are not sustainable or, in the latter case, even survivable.
(In case you don’t know, W White Pine has a much bigger problem – an introduced rust which now kills most trees in many areas as they mature.)
There is one more pine species in W Canada (to E Canada), the jackpine, which is effectively the boreal forest counterpart of the cordilleran lodgepole pine. During the recent mt pine beetle hysteria there was much moaning about how the mt pine beetle would soon spread to them and then across Canada. And, for reasons noted earlier, during that hyperepidemic stage a scattering of trees were attacked. But that is all that happened. Why? Because a) it is not a suitable host tree for several basic ecological reasons (which I will let you investigate); and b) for your AGW story, the climate where it grows failed to match the models.
Biodiversity. Different species adapted to different niches/habitats/environments, which in this case simply means different insects adapted to different pine species.
If the climate ever became warm enough for long enough to begin to match some of these modeled beetle doomsdays, fires would burn the forests before they had a chance to mature to become fodder for beetle epidemics. As they did in the pre-Smokey The Bear Era.
Ed, all data is interpreted. Marlowe just hasn’t realized this yet.
things, thanx for the compliment. { Origin of RIDICULE
French or Latin; French, from Latin ridiculumjest
First Known Use: 1690 – MW dictionary}
One may conceptualize fools in two camps: those of the natural fool type and those of the licensed fool type. Whereas the natural fool was seen as innately nit-witted, moronic, or mad, the licensed fool was given leeway by permission of the court. In other words, both were excused, to some extent, for their behavior, the first because he “couldn’t help it,” and the second by decree.
Scholar David Carlyon has cast doubt on the “daring political jester”, calling historical tales “apocryphal”, and concluding that “popular culture embraces a sentimental image of the clown; writers reproduce that sentimentality in the jester, and academics in the Trickster,” but it “falters as analysis.”[2]
Jesters could also give bad news to the King that no-one else would dare deliver. The best example of this is in 1340, when the French fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Sluys by the English. Phillippe VI‘s jester told him the English sailors “don’t even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French.”[3] – our good friends at Wikipedia}
Yes through ridicule I try to convey the truth, whether you give a shit or not 🙂
Were i live, we had a very healthy population of raccoons. I would watch out of my front window at night, seeing them prowling the garbage cans, hunting cats, or even once, coming into my house to eat the dogs food. Within about a six month period, over 80% of these wee beasties were wiped out by distemper. The have slowly been coming back, but during their absence, their niche has been spectacularly filled by skunks. I am now a fantastic dog deskunker.
Keith, do you know the rather wonderful poem by Larkin called “Aubade”? :o)
http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/philip-larkin/aubade/
EdG (#134) to Tobis-
Yes, EdG is correct about butterfly patterns of migration and colonization. Linking such patterns to AGW is ignorant and probably dishonest. Anyone with knowledge butterfly ecology would spot the ruse. All species are opportunists and colonize areas where they have competitive advantages. I have been reading academic papers as long as I have been an environmental educator, almost 50 years, about large numbers of species, mostly flora, colonizing habitats to the north. Some of the well known ones are Cardinals, Titmice, fire ants, etc. etc. Even Darwin in 1859 refers to the mechanism of such colonizations. As for extirpation, it is almost always because of habitat destruction. And habitat destruction is happeneing at faster rate because of AGW- not the warming, the tunnel vision of CAGW cheerleaders. As a conservationist, my principal criticism of the AGW hysteria is that the traditional consevation concerns of preservation and protection of fragile ecosystems and biodiversity is neglected because of the cause celebre, CAGW, which gets the attention, the press, and the money. The most egregious example is clear cutting tropical forests to create the monoculture of palm oil for biofuel.
@EdG
Marlowe confronted you with a paper from the Canadian Forestry Service to which you gave a long, well considered, insult-free reply. Marlowe responds by calling you a silly crank and that you could have just linked to a journal article. Nice.
@146
Ed I’m confused. Are you now admitting that changes in climatic conditions played a role in amplifying the outbreak? If so, then what exactly is the ‘myth’ you’re referring to @66?
@151
actually it was 2 papers. and i said that insinuations of conspiracy and failure to back up one’s claims with references to the relevant literature makes one look like a crank. Understand the distinction?
It’s not easy being green.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/freerange-hens-boost-carbon-20-20111216-1oyvp.html
#152 Marlowe writes:
“Ed I’m confused. Are you now admitting that changes in climatic conditions played a role in amplifying the outbreak? If so, then what exactly is the “˜myth’ you’re referring to @66?”
I’m confused too… by your choice of the word “admitting.” That would imply that I said something to the contrary. From my #66, where this all started for me here:
“Bottom line, these unnatural forests were the root cause of these epidemics and the warm winters simply accelerated and expanded them. They are not the simplistic AGW poster child portrayed.”
As to the Myth – or “the simplistic AGW poster child” as I called it there – you will find a prime example of that in the link M Tobis posted (#54) which prompted my response on this. That exchange goes back to MT’s #47 and my #50.
That myth was created simply by the omission of any explanation of the root background causes of these beetle epidemics (which is what I was trying to explain) and the loud and constant emphasis on only the climate factor. That convenient half story was repeated, with varying degrees of hysteria, constantly.
That is presumably why M Tobis presented it as an example of the ravages of AGW. He apparently bought that myth. Many people did.
So, yes, as you (and I) said, the climate definitely can and does play “a role in amplifying the outbreak.” But it can only amplify them to the degree which the underlying conditions permit. Again, from my #66:
“No habitat, no mt pine beetle epidemics, no matter how warm winters are, period.”
When winters – and again, fall is the actual critical period – are not warmer, there is no amplification. Just the opposite when they are colder than ‘normal.’
When you get beyond the hype this mt pine beetle story is actually a fascinating window on the dynamics of forest ecology and biodiversity, and the variable role of climate change (change is the only constant) on that. Because this story is so intricately linked to the natural role of fire in forest ecosystems, it inevitably leads back to the role of fire suppression and Smokey the Bear forest management. Needless to say, climate can also be a major factor in the frequency of fire. It can also contribute to the intensity of fires – if there is fuel. But in a parallel scenario, no fuel, no fires, no matter how hot and/or dry it is. The AGW story of ‘more extreme fires’ always seems to miss that fundamental point too. Due to fire suppression fuel buildups are now genuinely unprecedented in too many areas and the results, when there are fires, are entirely predictable. Not just in forests. The brush fires in southern CA are a classic example of this problem and its longer term origins. When the Spanish arrived there they found a landscape regularly burned by Native Californians. Fire was their primary land management tool. Maybe Keith will do something on that key historical and prehistorical background to all this.
Marlow Johnson @ 142 said:
Instead we get the typical “˜skeptical’ insinuation of gate-keeping and reliance on “˜models’. This kind of behaviour might play well at Watts place, but over here it makes you look like a crank.
He has a point. This isn’t a pop at EdG as I know exactly nothing about pine beetle infestations. But in general, the contrarian chorus is getting rather loud. Fine. It’s called Collide-a-scape for a reason.
But if ‘sceptic’ hand-waving, misrepresentation and occasional excursions into falsehood and fantasy are allowed to pass unchallenged a little more often than not, then what?
So please, let’s not take the easy path. Let’s stand up for the facts. For the truth. However tiresome it can be, on occasions. Don’t just leave it up to Marlowe, TB, Tobis etc.
# 150 Doug Allen
Sounds like we have somewhat similar backgrounds, of similar duration, which has raised similar concerns about the current priorities of conservation and environmental efforts.
I’d be interested to know how many commenters here have given up burning fossil fuels – driving cars, using electricity from gas or coal.
You can do it. You can do it now. It is perfectly possible to live that way.
James Evans
Or you can argue for more nuclear baseload and less coal. Energy efficiencies can be designed into new products rather than achieved by hair-shirt self-denial.
The one thing you cannot do is change the way atmospheric physics operates just because you don’t like the implications.
James Evans:
With the best will in the world, I doubt that I could stop using energy sourced from fossil fuels. I lack the resources to make my own electriticy or to force the services that I am connected to, such as the link by way of which I bring you this message, to not source their power from fossil fuels. I could purchase “green electricity” and hope to once the issue of whether it is actually resulting in additional green electricity production is resolved. That may happen soon although I would still worry whether the additional cost is simply resulting in my money holidaying in the Maldives.
Beyond that one can be minimal, do what one can to reduce fossil fuel consumption. I think we do what we can and that I can rightfully claim that I am not hypocritical. I think I can put a qualified tick in in your boxes. The qualification being the degree that I can act independently and that such action would not be perversely subsidising others to burn on my behelf or simply enjoy on their behalf whatever emissions I might be saving. Somethings are beyond my control and selecting the greenest option can be a baffling pursuit.
Not quite innocent on all charges, but pretty damn close.
Alex
@158
I spent most of my 20s being as thrifty and energy efficient as possible. I didn’t have a car (still don’t), and my personal possessions were entirely sourced from untrendy op shops. My job for many years was bush revegetation. I must have planted 1000s of trees.
That was all before I feel in love with a Turkish woman, and ended up flying to Turkey (the other side of the world) to live with her. With that one trip I imagine any carbon cred I may have accumlated over those years, must have just vaporised.
Now I work in computer graphics, making giant ads that project on buildings for corporations (big show coming up in New York soon for HP), the kind of stuff which would horrify my 20s, anti consumer self.
Life is funny.
@BBD 159,
You continue the central fallacy of the AGW believer: That your preferred interpretation of atmospheric physics is correct.
You believers are no more correct in your AGW claptrap than was the eugenics believer in his interpretation of evolution.