Weekend reading: Climate "Science" and the Damage Done

[Mark Rippetoe]

The Climate Wars' Damage to Science Quadrant Online

[Kyle Schuant]

The authour is Matt Ridley, a zoologist. He's landed aristocracy in the UK, and earns about 4 million pounds from open-cut coal mining on his property annually. It's important to mention the money he earns from coal mining, since he makes such a big deal of the money science and lobby groups get while pushing the other point of view. For example, he says,

"Most ordinary people who do not follow climate debates assume that either it’s not happening or it’s dangerous. This suits those with vested interests in renewable energy, since it implies that the only way you would be against their boondoggles is if you “didn’t believe” in climate change."

And he has a vested interest in mining coal. So... if people have vested interests in the outcome of the discussion, then we should ignore what they have to say, Ridley tells us. Okay, we can stop reading there.

I quite like Quadrant magazine, but they do publish some silly stuff. A decade or so ago they kept publishing this guy who was saying, "dude, there totally weren't that many massacres of Aboriginals by settlers, the Aboriginals just, um, well there weren't that many of them to start with, or they went for pizza or something, I dunno."

[aWalkingShadow]

Regardless of whether you believe climate change to be real/fake, or dangerous/harmless, I think that the bigger issue is what to do about it, especially regarding energy and fossil fuel usage.
I believe that a good plan of action is for humanity to develop renewable sources of energy and remove our reliance on fossil fuels as fast as possible, because fossil fuels are finite. Maybe they'll run out in 100 years, or 10,000, but they will run out. Since our economy is dependent on energy, if one day we found out fossil fuels had run out (or more likely became very expensive to extract over a short period of time) and we had no other major sources of energy, things would not be very good.
And if you're someone who thinks that there may be a small chance that climate change is real/dangerous, this offers an even greater incentive to move away from fossil fuels (and then there’s also air quality problems caused by the burning of fossil fuels. I think we can all agree that bad air quality is a bad thing).

So, it seems that part of the issue boils down to whether we should spend the effort to develop renewable energy now or later. And even if one doesn’t believe in climate change, I see no disadvantage to doing it now, given that we have to do it eventually.

[Joe Tandy]

What I remain unclear of, having worked in a greenhouse...
What that extra CO2 above what the generators were meant to introduce, heightened the temperature in the greenhouse.
In fact, when it got to circa 850ppm you could see rapid plant death thanks to the stomata clamping shut.

We know we produce C02, and we know that it had a greenhouse effect, and we know the levels are climbing.
What part of this is bad science?
Which part of this phenomenon do deniers of anthropological climate change disagree with?
Surely not the effect C02 has on an atmosphere... So do they deny the effect we have on atmospheric C02?

[wal]

Good article and a big read. Have you done an environmental survey on your Gym and worked out what contribution you make to the global co2 concentration. Do you realize they will tie a levy on your energy bill(maybe they already do) because you contribute to global warming? You can offset this by installing solar panels on the roof. Plant heaps of trees on your cattle property and sell the co2 offsets that trees produce.

Because Texas has plenty of sunlight, you could probably run your Gym on a 10 Kilowatt system during the summer and sell the leftover Kwh's back into the grid.

You need to know what the maximum demand of your Gym is during peak load times, ie mid summer mid winter. Do you have evaporatives (swamp coolers) on the roof for cooling, or do you have reverse cycle a/c? All this stuff could have been avoided you had a different President.

We voted out the co2 tax last election, but the present federal government is getting hammered by the UN, the Pope, Al Gore and the Greens and such of that ilk, for bucking the system. You need to find out if Jeb Bush and Hilary are green.

[Olsson]

I'll forward this on to Pope Francis before he continues to make an ass of himself.

[ud2o]

Which will be better? The comments you get in this thread, or your responses to them?

We shall see.

[LimieJosh]

Important context - Matt Ridley is an excellent British science writer not remotely connected with the political movement of American climate change denial. His book on the human genome, structured so each chromosome gets a chapter devoted to a genetic trait conferred by it that helps explains human behavior, is an excellent read.

[Gene61]

Ok. I'm joining the ranks of the "lukewarmers"! Persuasive.

[JLB0]

As a meteorology major at Arizona State some 10 years ago, I once went to a lecture outside of class for an assignment on campus that was titled, "Will Phoenix Fry?". It was an unbelievable rhetoric laden with emotions toward us "human offenders" and a slight peppering of the "urban heat island" effect- all of which would make Phoenix temperatures in the summer rise to unrealistic highs within the "near future". I remember I had a choice to go to other lectures that would have been more beneficial, but I just had to hear what the clown had to say based on the sensitized title alone- I'm sure that was part of his tactic for getting people to go to listen to his useless babbling anyway.

The idea that humans as a whole think they have a footprint influential enough to override something so much bigger, such as the Milankovitch Cycles, has always baffled me.