A good Economist piece on global warming.
The George Will “global warming has ended” moment shows up as that little dip towards the end, before it returns to trend. So, what effect will the new data have on that meme? Quite possibly none. People who tried to cast doubt on global warming in 2009 based on a few years one could isolate so that they didn’t show a discernible trend will now no doubt respond that a couple of very hot years don’t prove anything. Which underlines how often the conclusions one draws from data are determined by a combination of the hypotheses you’re framing, and at what point you start looking.
[….]The first time we heard a scientist authoritatively state that the evidence was in, and that global warming was real, was when James Hansen said it while presenting his research to Congress in 1988. That was a daring claim for Mr Hansen to make at that point. It was daring because it was very clearly falsifiable. If, after 1988, global temperatures had stopped rising, or had started to exhibit a lot of volatility—if there had been a decade-long cooling episode, such as the world saw in the late 1930s and 40s—then Mr Hansen would have been discredited. But that didn’t happen. Instead, for a decade and a half after Mr Hansen made the call, global mean temperatures kept going up and up. They bounced around a bit in the mid-2000s, and have now resumed rising again.
You know the drill: global warming isn’t happening, if it is happening then it’s not caused by human behavior, if it is caused by human behavior then we can’t do anything about it, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it, then that something is too expensive, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it that is not too expensive, then that something is not what Democrats are proposing. And Al Gore is fat, he flies too much, look at his electricity bill, and sometimes when he goes somewhere it snows there, which is very ironic.
david mizner
What is this “global warming” thing you speak of? If it were actually a danger, surely the fine United States Congress would be doing something about it.
S. cerevisiae
I am hearing the “it’s cold at my house where’s your global warming now, smart guy” line all the time because of this season’s La Nina. I just tell them to take the labels off that graph except for the years and take it to a stockbroker – he will tell you to buy. Weather is noise, climate is signal and the signal clearly shows a strengthening upward trend.
Dave
It’s all sunspots and it snowed last week. So there!
Bulworth
Is this graph from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)? These graphs, like CBO estimates, are just “garbage in, garbage out”. The game is rigged. I’m sure there will be a WSJ op-ed any minute to point this out. It’s snowing somewhere which proves this graph figure thing is bunk.
Sir Nose'D
Its a little colder today than yesterday. Therefore, global warming is over and Al Gore is fat and uses electricity!
But in other news, has anyone seen the report that parts of northern Canada were an average of 40 degrees warmer a full month?
Violet
But it’s cold! And New York City is getting more snow. How can there be global warming?
@S. cerevisiae:
Good tactic. I might use this.
Yutsano
Meh. Let the planet fry and kill us all. Life is infinitely more creative than our attempts to eliminate it all anyway.
Woodrowfan
but I’m wearing a sweater so it can’t be true! Exxon says it’s not a problem and why would they lie?
Kryptik
Lib conspiracies!! They just want to destroy American productivity with their Green Facism!! Oil now, oil forever, you’ll take our black gold away from our dead, patriotic fingers, you Greenie Pinkos!
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
Even the liberal Economist …
jacy
According to Ross Douthat, even if global warming were true, eventually our sun will go nova and the earth will be a cinder, so who cares?
Punchy
But cows emit methane, so it’s more a cow issue than human-related. Also, the British say “mee-thane”, so that’s funny and non-serious as well.
Cris
Not that I needed it, but I’m surprised “Al Gore is fat” isn’t in the lexicon.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
They don’t care because they don’t hafta care. The Rapture is nigh! Didn’t you get the memo? And if for some reason Teh Rapture ain’t so nigh, then the Mayans got us covered in 2012, even George Lucas says so:
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/32450
And if that’s not right, then the wingers are displaying classic Daffy Duck behavior from Ali Baba Bunny:
“Consequences, shmonsequences, as long as I’m rich.”
retr2327
Which underlines how often the conclusions one draws from data
are determined by a combination ofcan be manipulated by the hypotheses you’re selling,andjust by picking at what point you start looking.[….]
Fixed
Jeff Spender
Debating about anthropomorphic global climate change with a strident non-believer is like bashing your head in with a complete set of A-Team DVDs to the sounds of the Rocky III soundtrack.
Global warming is a misnomer, though we can see a trend in which various parts of the world will experience rising temperatures. Others will see a pattern of cooling. What really marks this phenomenon is the sharp increase in violent and serious weather patterns. More violent hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, floods, et cetera. What is underlying the ignorance of AGCC is the fact that people want to be ignorant.
After all, if I look outside my window right now, I see heavy snowfall. Therefore, AGCC must not be happening.
Good Zoroaster I hate anti-intellectualism.
jrg
I can’t wait until 30 years from now, when I’ll get to hear the wingnuts tell us that lack of action to reduce global warming was a communist plot to undermine ‘murica.
toujoursdan
The problem is that climate change is only one of many ecological and economic threats that we’re facing.
We’re also facing peak oil, industrial resource and commodity depletion, worldwide fresh water shortages, globally declining soil fertility due to the overuse of phosphorus based fertilizers, collapse of the fisheries, the extinction of 10,000-30,000 species a year, tropical and Boreal deforestation, ocean and groundwater pollution, unsustainable draining of aquifers and the explosion of new, drug resistant or expensive to treat diseases.
Technology may be able to cope with some of these issues, locally, but even with our wonderful technology we haven’t successfully turned around one of these threats, globally. So while the media seems to put an ever increasing, almost religious faith into the idea that technology and the free market will solve all problems and allow 9-11 billion people to someday live in First World comfort on a planet than can only sustain about 1 billion people in that livestyle, I have ever decreasing faith in our ability to cope with these threats.
The dirty little secret is that modern capitalism can only work in a growth scenario. Modern capitalism can’t work in a flat scenario, or while the population and consumption is in decline, and the economy is shrinking. In modern capitalism there is no rational reason to take a risk in starting a new business venture, new product or lend more money unless there is a enough growth in consumption to make a greater return in profit. That’s why all our statistics are oriented toward growth. But that unending growth demand will collide with the planet’s finite resources and its ecology at some point and lead to a collapse.
But civilizations come and go. There is no reason that we should assume it will be different for us.
Dave
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
That should be a category tag…
RP
What’s the story with the huge dip in the 1940’s? Was that caused by the destruction of a large chunk of the world’s industrial capacity during the war, i.e., less industrial activity = fewer emissions = less heat getting trapped?
Zifnab
And as we all know, nothing is worse for the economy than spending money. That’s why we have to give all our money to the rich people, via tax cuts. So they won’t spend it. And then our economy will sore.
Reaganomics!
Violet
I really don’t understand how “conservatives” have no interest in “conserving” anything. They just don’t. They sacrifice anything on the altar of the almighty dollar. Conserving? Forget it.
Someone needs to rebrand them as the wasteful, selfish party. They do not conserve. They waste.
Barkley G
Forgot to mention that if it is real and we can do something about it that is not too expensive, we can’t do it because it would lead to global socialism
pragmatism
man can’t affect climate. acid rain was jeebus crying because of teh libruls.
Dave
@RP: Possibly. Also consider the US arsenal was reduced as well. All those shipyards and factories were either shut down or returned to a pre-war footing. Also, it could have been cooling from the sheer amount of debris thrown into the air during the war. It’d be interesting to find out why.
fasteddie9318
Good news on the filibuster front…the Democrats wanted filibuster reform, the Republicans didn’t, so they’ve compromised on no reform.
But the Democrats didn’t come away empty handed! They managed to beat the Republicans into agreeing that around 100 offices currently subject to Senate confirmation will no longer be subject to it…that’s out of 1400 total offices, OK, but woo-hoo, right? Also too, they’ve extracted some very firm vague promises that Republicans will pretty please not abuse secret holds on nominees, maybe, if they’re in a good mood that day.
I’d be pissed, but with a nutjob-run House it’s not like the Senate was going to get any decent legislation to pass in this Congress anyway.
Roger Moore
@S. cerevisiae:
But we all know that past performance is no guarantee of future returns, so your stockbroker would be wrong to tell you to buy. Therefore global warming is a hoax.
El Cid
It’s not on global warming, but there’s an excellent HuffPo article about how the small business equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce — the National Federation of Independent Businesses — went from being an actual advocate of small business interests into the typical right wing economic pro-wealthy Republican Party lobby, of course screwing over their actual members in the process.
It has become so ridiculously a Republican hack group that Mary Landrieu characterizes them as ultra-far-right.
J.W. Hamner
The US is the only place where we’re dumb enough to make it a partisan issue and it’s beyond infuriating. Something that you need Big Government and taxes to ameliorate just doesn’t fit into the conservative world view… so they refuse to believe in it.
Tonal Crow
If you want to know more about climate change, or just to keep up on the latest denier arguments and why they’re wrong, please check out Skeptical Science. It features a long list of denier arguments, each paired with a basic rebuttal and often one or more more-detailed rebuttals.
Michael
OT-but thanks to Cole for doing enough tweaking on the site to make it finally workable for us Crackberry sufferers who occasionally look in during out-of-office times. It looks awesome and I don’t have to pound this stupid trackball 80 times.
El Cid
@fasteddie9318: I am so shocked. I believed that Senate Democrats would push through serious filibuster reforms. I also expect to the winner of several million dollar sweepstakes.
You fringe ultra-liberals fail to see how much damage Democratic Senators did by just talking about maybe doing something about it someday.
TooManyJens
@fasteddie9318: FUCK. I’m still going to call my Senators and Harry Reid again, just in case this is another of those “sources say” total lies.
This doesn’t even make sense:
The proposed reform didn’t even take that away, it just made it harder to do.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
El Cid
I posted this before but it seems pretty relevant.
I don’t care what their fancy “satellites” are supposed to tell them.
We know that some e-mails proved that the whole global warming thing was a “trick”, so there.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@retr2327: Which is, I think, why James Hansen is way more correct than all of the deniers after him. He made his theory public, stating, in effect, that the coming data will show my hypothesis to be correct. All of the deniers sit there and go “See, if you look under this rock you can find a new reason not to like the data.”
fasteddie9318
@El Cid:
This bit might not be far from the truth, because I fully expect to see the filibuster axed or at least severely curtailed on Day 1 of the Republican Senate in 2013. Hopefully the Mayans were right.
El Cid
@fasteddie9318:
This is an awfully cynical view of the Republican Party, which so respects the institution of the Senate that they want to return it to having Senators elected by state governments. Ordinary voters just have too much influence. We’ve got to insulate Senators from such a rabble.
Howlin Wolfe
@RP: It might not have been anthropogenic.
Tonal Crow
@RP:
The current hypothesis is that WWII and increased industrial activity caused large-scale production of sun-reflecting aerosols (such as sulfate-containing droplets) during this period. See http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-mid-20th-century-advanced.htm .
Scott P.
I’m curious what economic system you propose as an alternative to capitalism, but I’ll limit myself to pointing out that this is in error. My Toyota Corolla required less steel, less aluminum, and less electricity to produce than my father’s ’54 Buick, and goes farther and lasts longer while comsuming less gasoline. In every way it represents an increase in productive value while consuming fewer resources. Why can’t this be the form that economic growth takes in the future?
joe from Lowell
And if the Democrats are proposing to do something about it that’s not too expensive, global warming is a good thing for our cabon-starved planet, because God said so.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
There is no clearer example of the kind of short-term fixation that shapes right-wing strategy these days. “Après moi, le déluge”
Tonal Crow
@Zifnab:
Was that last word a Freudian slip?
Kiril
@RP:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11639-climate-myths-the-cooling-after-1940-shows-cosub2sub-does-not-cause-warming.html
Svensker
Was talking to a good old boy melon farmer from rural Alabama today who told me that Alabamans face melon growing competition from Wisconsin and Minnesota because of climate change: in the last 20 years Alabama has become too hot and Wis/Min have warmed up.
Would have loved to have him talk to my wingnut relatives.
Violet
@Svensker:
Gardeners know this. Things that didn’t grow before in places in the south now can because the climate is becoming more tropical.
Just Some Fuckhead
Could Al Gore’s ginormous body fat be heating up the universe?
rickstersherpa
I found this a great quote to from the Economist article:
“As to why George Will buys this stuff, I have no explanation. Maybe, in the internet age, we’re all effectively getting our memories wiped every week or two, and it’s as if we don’t remember the sequence of events; everything is presented simultaneously. Or maybe we selectively wipe our own memories of the sequence of events when they threaten to prove inconvenient to our interests or our ideological predispositions.”
Or as PKthug put it so succintly recently “the Upton Sinclair Principle.”
“Second, I’m surprised that Chait doesn’t refer to Upton Sinclair’s principle: it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. In fact, in general right-wing think tanks prefer people who genuinely can’t understand the issues — it makes them more reliable.”
kerFuFFler
@toujoursdan: Don’t forget about the population collapse of honey bees and its impact on agriculture! Otherwise, great list of crises.
Oh, and KO is losing his show, or did everybody already know that?
Brachiator
As Tonal Crow noted, Skeptical Science has great rebuttals to the wingnut denial about global warming. The site also has great FREE apps for the iPhone and other smart phones to dazzle or annoy those who insist on the path of ignorance.
As a related aside, apparently a sizable chunk of people still believe nonsense about an autism link to vaccinations (Nearly half of Americans still suspect vaccine-autism link).
I call this the persistence of stupidity.
MonkeyBoy
@Violet:
Maple Syrup production is badly being affected in the US. (USDA PDF). In 2010 Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania produced about half of what they produced just 2 years ago while production in Canada is sharply increasing.
Ecks
@kerFuFFler: Apparently America might have elected a black guy president, too.
The Grand Panjandrum
I blame all the recent cold temps on climate change deniers. If they would just shut up we could be enjoying a much warmer winter.
toujoursdan
@Scott P.:
Alternative economic system? Probably an economic system based on permaculture.
And not sure how the second point is relevant to mine. It’s great that your car company has saved both themselves and you money by using lighter, cheaper and slightly more efficient building materials (while rolling out gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks which blunt those efficiencies.)
Those car companies are still convincing millions of middle class Chinese, Indians, Africans, Middle Easterners, etc. that they should adopt the “glamorous” middle class American lifestyle, which means living in single family detached home with lawns in the suburbs and commuting 30 miles to work along highways.
So the overall amount of materials used globally to build cars is expanding at an increasing (rather than a decreasing rate), yet the amount of materials (or feasible substitutions) available remains finite.
Carol
@Dave: Millions of cars were off the road then too. Gas rationing in the States, shortages due to wartime devastation in Europe. People also were advised to ration everything from coal to steel, cutting down on domestic consumption as well. Thus, fewer emissions. Add the businesses that were slow or closed due to the Depression and you have that downturn.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Wow. UAH also thinks 2010 was the hottest/tied for hottest year?
UAH has GW skeptics Christy and Spencer on its climatology faculty, and one of those two is an “intelligent design” creationist, so it’d be hard for conservatives to argue that UAH is part of the Wiccan Pagan Global Warming Librul Conspiracy.
Brachiator
@jacy:
Heck, the Earth will be struck by either a meteor or the fiery chariot of the baby Jebus long before the sun goes supernova.
Ecks
@Carol: Sure, though I wouldn’t make TOO much of that, as people not driving to work as much was displaced somewhat by large armies driving around the continent. The reason they rationed gas was not to save it up in big storage vats, it was because the armies needed a lot of it. Tanks aren’t exactly gas sipppers,and it takes a lot of juice to carpet major cities with thousands of tons of airborne explosives overnight.
DBrown
While it is too late to stop AGW such that millions woun’t be harmed or displaced peak oil is near and prices for oil are still climbing (and we are not into anything like a full recover yet!)
As Salon says:
“The precipitous rise in oil prices has startled the experts. Not so long ago, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) was projecting a price range of $70-$80 per barrel in 2011, but as the year began oil was already trading above $90 a barrel and some analysts predict that it will reach $100 before the year is out. A few are even talking about the $150 barrel and gas prices at the pump of $4 or more. If prices climb above $100, global consumer spending could take another nosedive.”
Looks like CO2 will decrease whether we want it too or not; I doubt we have even ten years before peak oil nails us. Baby, the future – gobal warming, corp lost, heat waves, floods etc as well as increasing energy prices is here NOW. Pray that peak oil is more than five years off (I am!) We are f’ed.
Carol
@Ecks: Yes, the armies used a lot of it, but rationing doubtless helped keep things down too. Not having to do a lot of manufacturing for citizens, reusing what was there doubtless cut down on emissions as well.
Southern Beale
Last week a friend of mine listening to the local “classic Rock” radio station told me the DJ, after bitching about the snowy weather we’re having in Nashville, said, “We should find Al Gore & set him on FIRE.”
So, civility and all that. As I noted in my own weather bitch-fest last week, not too many years ago wingnut knickers were all a-twist because Lie-brul Hollywood dared make a summer blockbuster in which global warming causes super extreme winters, and in Hollywood fashion it wasn’t over a matter of years but a matter of days, and that’s totally not scientific and Al Gore is fat and yada yada.
So fast forward a few years and we have global warming causing extreme winter weather and they’re like “har har Al Gore is fat har har.”
I honestly don’t have time for these stupid assholes anymore.
catclub
@Carol: I would have put it down mostly to natural decadal variation with a small dollop of lower mankind generated effect.
please remember that there are decadal variations, but with larger ACG, those down cycles are being swamped, while up cycles would be amplified.
My understanding was that the overall human effect did not start to dominate the process until about the sixties.
Yet again, the me generation is to blame for a disaster!
Southern Beale
@rickstersherpa:
Yes I’m quite sure we’re all having our memories wiped every week. I blame microwave ovens. I can’t remember shit anymore. If it weren’t for Google I wouldn’t remember my own name.
Scott P.
You’re shifting the goalposts, now. You said that we cannot expect economic growth to consistently increase. I pointed out you can have economic growth without greater resource consumption. You correctly note that the world is currently experiencing economic growth with greater resource consumption, but that is neither here nor there. World population is currently growing, but isn’t expected to grow forever; peak world population is currently predicted for 2050 or so. You’re correct that resource consumption cannot grow forever, absent something like asteroid mining, but why should we expect it to? It’s not required for capitalism to continue.
catclub
@DBrown: “Looks like CO2 will decrease whether we want it too or not; I doubt we have even ten years before peak oil nails us.”
um,… ever heard of coal?
Svensker
@Carol:
If you read the Climate Skeptic link above, he explains the dip as coinciding with the rise of aerosols which helped cool the daytime temperatures. Decreasing use of aerosols because of bans around the world inadvertently fueled global warming while making the air cleaner.
Carol
@catclub: The sixties. As a young kid I remember the switch from buses and trains to cars. Once a car was something you drove to work and did long-distance travel in. Most kids walked to school or took the bus, and a two-car household was very well to do. Indeed, a lot of 50’s, 60’s car songs assumed that a teenagerborrowed the family car and rode the bus or walked to and from school. When I was in college, getting home was by Greyhound or by being picked up by someone. We bundled up in a station wagon. Once people stopped living close enough to walk or ride the bus, the curve really went upward.
catclub
@Herbal Infusion Bagger: “so it’d be hard for conservatives to argue that UAH is part of the Wiccan Pagan Global Warming Librul Conspiracy.”
I think you underestimate their abilities to argue from, for, and with counterfactuals.
They also yell at clouds, so claiming UAH is part of the WPGWLC is a walk in the park.
Carol
@Svensker: Interesting idea and okay, I concede to science on this one. But it’s worth noticing that the other low right after the beginning of the century also coincided with World War One-again, lots for the armies, but citizen consumption and production goes down as people use what’s already there.
Southern Beale
@Carol:
I’d say a two-car household was a rare thing indeed. We lived in the suburbs. My sister and I walked to school. My mom drove my dad to the bus stop and he took a bus into the Port Authority. She had the car for grocery shopping and doctors’ appointments. That was life in the 60s. You didn’t even THINK of getting two cars. You felt fucking lucky to have ONE car.
Tonal Crow
@Carol:
CO2 concentrations climbed a bit more slowly between 1930 and 1950 than before or after (http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/fig6-8.htm figure (a)), but they’ve still been climbing continuously since 1750. Scientists hypothesize that the 1940-1970 leveling is due mostly to increases in reflective aerosols (http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/fig6-8.htm figure (b)) most of which basically levelled off shortly after 1970. (See again discussion at http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-mid-20th-century-advanced.htm ) As other posters have mentioned, there may also be artifacts in the temperature record due to changes in how sea-surface temperatures were measured.
toujoursdan
No. I am not.
Correct. We are going to run out of resources and substitutions.
You said that manufacturing could be somewhat more efficient. I don’t deny that, but also note that this doesn’t lead to a decrease in resource consumption. More resources are still being consumed. “Growth” still depends on greater resource consumption. You’ve just diminished the rate of it.
You still have to gobble up resources to create that car. Those resources are still finite. Industrial resources are still being used up, albeit at a somewhat diminished rate because of efficiencies. But that has limits as well. You’ll never have a viable car made out of toothpicks that gets a billion miles to the gallon.
And this is where modern capitalism will enter a crisis phase (assuming we don’t go into long term depression because we’ve already run out of key resources and don’t have applicable substitutes.) Capitalism still needs growth to continue. You can’t rely on efficiencies forever.
Perhaps world population will stop growing at mid Century, but that isn’t going to cause resource consumption to drop. The reason why world population is growing at a declining rate is because the world population is adopting a western lifestyle, which makes it more expensive to have lots of kids. But each person in that family is consuming far more resources as middle class families than they did when they were poor. An American family of four consumes 50 times more than a Senegalese family of 20. So as that Senegalese family becomes more American, they may have fewer kids, but each person is consuming more finite resources.
Now I can’t fault that Senegalese family for wanting to climb out of poverty. If I was in that position I’d do the same thing, but it isn’t sustainable, we will hit limits and we will collapse.
Modern capitalism can’t work without growth. Negative growth takes away the incentive to invest, innovate, spend and risk. Again, IF we don’t go into implosion and long term depression due to the depletion of key industrial resources for which we have no applicable substitutes, an year 2050 economy with fewer people employed by shrinking business, spending less money on products and services is a deflationary economy. That is a toxic waste site for economists. Modern capitalism can’t cope with such a scenario.
Ecks
@Carol: Call it an “offset”if you will :)
“The sixties”
Never quite sure exactly what it was though.
Ecks
@toujoursdan: I find this analysis somewhat compelling. “Mature” industries can roll along in perfectly functional form, but they tend to become a lot less competitive, as a few players become dominant and squeeze everyone else out, and then build up strong barriers to entry (legal, resource intensive, or, failing all else, just overwhelming brand equity). So industries tend to settle out into oligarchal arrangements which rely to varying extents on varyingly tacit levels of collusion to stay profitable, without nearly the pressure that used to exist on ways of innovating better products. Without an expanding pie, as you say, it gets very hard for new startups, and the invisible hand gets awfully arthritic and clutches up on a small entitled group of rich overlords.
America is already at the point where lifetime socio-economic mobility is no better than Europe’s, although most Americans are convinced its still the wild west where any bright spark with a good idea and a work ethic could show up and establish solid businesses meeting large and basic unmet needs.
So there’s a reasonable prediction that resource growth will slow us down till we get a sclerotic form of capitalism that totters along until the next historical wave collapses it.
Svensker
@Southern Beale:
We had two cars and weren’t by any means rich — my mom had to work and powdered milk helped with the budget. But my dad loved cars, so along with the standard Ford/Buck/Chevy, we had a gorgeous 1951 Kaiser that dad loved to tinker with. Being in the front seat of that thing was like being in the Titanic – it was huge. My boyfriends all loved hanging out with my dad — if he liked them, he’d let them drive the Kaiser.
Fe E
@Ecks:
As a bit of an illustration of that I read a rationing education poster from WWII that stated that a typical (for the 40s) family car could drive from Chicago to LA on the gasoline that a single Navy Hellcat fighter burned in one hour.
So yeah, a thousand bomber raid would’ve used a bit of gas!
Ecks
@Fe E: The real irony in all this is that the US army, bastion of right wing thought, and the ne plus ultra of republican adulation, is now making concerted efforts to go green because they are worried about how much fuel is costing them (both in terms of price, and protecting fuel supplies in war areas), and they are doing a lot of careful planning because they fully expect global warming to create a lot of security problems they’re going to have to deal with.
When you’re an organization that is forced to ground yourself as firmly in reality as professional armies are in times of war, you don’t have time for silly political wishful thinking, you have to start coping with what’s actually happening.
chopper
@toujoursdan:
if that even happens. ironically enough, greater efficiencies in manufacturing etc usually lead to an increase in consumption of resources.
Barb (formerly Gex)
As always, XKCD comes to mind. There are times where this attitude would be a welcome relief from, you know, caring.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Scott P.: Uh, because the smaller amount of resources used for those things doesn’t offset the increased resource use caused by population growth. Frankly, if even a small percentage of the world’s non-American population started consuming the way the average American did, we’d be fucked.
Of course, if you are like the Republicans, you don’t really care that your lifestyle is only sustainable if you fuck over others. (Not saying that is your attitude – I mean the general “you”)
trixie larue
I think it’s a very odd coincidence that it snows when Al Gore goes somewhere. How does he explain that away so cavalierly?
Ecks
@Barb (formerly Gex): It’s like how you can make MORE total money by selling each of your cheeseburgers for LESS money.
1 ton of metal x a million cars is better than
1/2 ton of metal x 20 million cars.
gnomedad
@Ecks:
“Even the liberal U.S. Army …”
TaMara (BHF)
The planet will be fine. It’ll shake off this little human infection it has and its temperature will adjust accordingly.
goatchowder
Wait, I thought Michael Moore was fat. And Algore invented the internet. Right?
Maybe you’ve got your Rush Limbaugh talking points confused.
bob h
The little dips probably just reflect energy that is going into enhanced evaporation of water into the air, giving rise, lo and behold, to more snow and heavier rainstorms. But how could you get a republican cretin to understand that?