Comments on: Frankenstorm, the Not So Black Swan: Climate as the New Risk Variable

By: Mary Brown

Mary Brown — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:23:49 +0000

As an Atmospheric scientist, I can assure you that climate change has been tiny, Frankenstorm was long overdue and that extreme weather has NOT been increasing. Tornadoes? No Change. Hurricanes? No trend. Heat waves? A bit worse but mostly due to urban heat islands unrelated to the greenhouse effect. Cold waves, heavy rain, etc? No significant trend. 25 years ago, climate scientists were obscure and unfunded. Now, they drive an enormous industry and are treated like save-the-earth rock stars. The reason that there is so much resistance in the USA to climate change legislation is that there is a huge group of scientists like me that I like to call “lukewarmers”. We recognize that the earth has gotten warmer and that global warming is very real but the changes have been small, the forecasts have no proven skill, much of the science is not understood, the hysteria is dramatically over-hyped and most of the proposed “solutions” will produce negligible mitigation at enormous cost.

By: Aknauta

Aknauta — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 01:19:52 +0000

Well written by sadly wrong.

Hitler and the Nazi’s were the precursors of the green movement:

“We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought. ” http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html

The same thrust by today’s left-wing is still the same old fascist story. If you want to read about the truth in the “Global Warming” story (there really is global warming and global cooling, of which we are in now) then I suggest you read widely and a good start would be to go back a ways to the beginning by reading

Fascist Ecology:
The “Green Wing” of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents in the link above.
Written by Peter Staudenmaier

http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html) and the operati\ve menthodology was the use of state power to form a political

By: mutant_dog

mutant_dog — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 19:49:50 +0000

Granted, anthropogenic climate change is real. And granted, Republicans refuse to permit policy changes to address that, while Democrats generally are in favor of such actions. Let me be clear, “talking your book” and the like are plausible partial explanations for the phenomenon; Yet I submit this is a minority contributor to the effect.

Simply put, addressing climate change means making energy more expensive, which in turn will eviscerate the economy of any nation which unilaterally implements ameliorative policies. Energy is at the root of all economic activity. Republicans know and care more for the economy than Democrats do, most Americans believe; and it is as stewards of the economy that they oppose making everything more expensive, and thus globally uncompetitive.

The only solution that does not kill off the economies of the “good actors” must be global and without exception or carve-out; no “catch up clause” can be tolerated. This stipulation is not likely to be aggreable to the newly developing nations of the world (who are incidentally the source of much incremental CO2 emission), absent formidable suasion.

By: mememine69

mememine69 — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 12:26:45 +0000

Exaggeration isn’t a crime, yet.
You can’t have a little crisis outside of Harry Potter movies leaving a “climate crisis” a virtual comet hit of an emergency. NOTHING could be worse.
But the entire world of science never said it will happen, only could happen and it’s been 26 years of research, mostly into effects not causes.
The science agrees we could be at the point of no return yet there does not exist one single IPCC warning of “crisis” that isn’t peppered with maybes and “could bes” and “likelys” etc. Help my house could be on fire maybe? We demand that if the world of science is going to condemn our children to the greenhouse gas ovens of a climate change crisis, at least be clear and say it will or will not happen. Maybe isn’t good enough. Real planet lovers don’t want this misery to be real and are glad, not disappointed the scientists legally exaggerated “crisis”.
Climate change crisis is real alright, really not a crisis.

By: Doly Garcia

Doly Garcia — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 10:34:19 +0000

I wish things were so easy as a bunch of real-estate owners deciding to push in favour of climate change. For that to happen, a number of things need to happen first, and they might not be easy:
1. They need to recognize that the risk has increased. We are talking about very variable events here. People who are already convinced that climate change is not real will need rather overwhelming evidence simply to recognize that the risk has increased.
2. They need to accept that it’s man-made. It may be easier, psychologically, to accept that the risk has increased but that it’s part of God’s plan. Hey, maybe we are at the End of Times. In which case, nothing needs to be done about fossil fuels.
3. They need to do 1 and 2 publicly. You would expect that intelligent people would realise 1 and find out that the argument for 2 is rather straightforward (we are talking 19th century chemistry here, not snazzy new computer models). Problem is, if you have been loudly defending otherwise, changing position publicly is hard. So you may backpedal very softly, and try to find solutions that allow you to save face.

I’ve been involved in energy activism for a while, and I’ve learned the hard way that people don’t change positions easily, and if they do, they often manage to do it while pretending that they didn’t. There is a rather discouraging study where they took 50 people who all admitted to believe a common myth. Then they gave them tons of information that overwhelmingly proved it was a myth, including people in positions of respected authority saying so. Only one changed his mind and accepted he was wrong before. Seven said that they had always believed the correct thing (in spite that they were selected because they said before otherwise). Five simply refused to talk about the subject. The rest continued defending their previous beliefs with various weak arguments, including the very common “OK, maybe I got the facts wrong, but the actions that were justified with these facts were still right”.

By: Further reading | FT Alphaville

Further reading | FT Alphaville — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 08:30:15 +0000

[...] – Climate as the new risk variable. [...]