vanderleun [13 March 2009 05:00 PM]

"Soon we'll hit the "tipping point" of the climate crash. The tundra will melt, dumping methane into the air. Methane is 20 times worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. The polar ice cap will melt in the summer."

OOOOOgah, boogah.... terror, fear, trembling.... the end of days! Repent!

Yeah. Right. Next.

Tony Stubblebine [13 March 2009 05:22 PM]

A couple of questions...

Does anyone know of any good examples of a crisis that was successfully averted? Clearly, it's easier to pick out the ones we missed. I can only thing of one averted crisis, nuclear war with the USSR. What where the characteristics and best practices that helped?

At what point will climate change be severe enough that the global population considers it actionable?

I ask these questions because I think the climate change debate is reaching a tipping point. Somebody needed to sound the alarm, but alarmist messages often generate oogah-boogah responses like the person above. Eventually, we'll be able to drop the alarmist message and really focus on the practical and pragmatic. I want to start working on that.

vanderleun [13 March 2009 05:48 PM]

"In an age when environmental activists fly to distant locales to hold conferences about Climate Change in private jets or use high definition TV to broadcast their message, it is easy for some of them to forget how much of what they do depends on what they hate. For too many of them the current crisis is a sign from a God they do not believe exists to build a future they have no understanding of. Some part of me hopes they get it." - Belmont Club - The fatal hour

mezzrow [14 March 2009 01:01 AM]

In the fullness of time, we will look back on this as we now look back on phrenology and the consumption of radium water. Gracious...

"Want to understand what's going on just as well as I do? Listen to every lecture podcast from the London School of Economics."

Ah yes, the Oracle speaks. When do we learn that it works from the bottom up? And then they wonder why ammunition sales in the US are going through the roof. Must be all those Mexican drug lords, eh?

Thomas Lord [14 March 2009 03:01 AM]

seconding mezzro, and to Tim...

You (Tim) "guarantee" what now and who what? I mean, you seem to be offering some bet and I bet I can win against someone who thinks in your terms but first, for s- and giggles, let's nail you down. You're making some 70 year bet you say? How's that work? Where do I lay my money? Where's the market I can trade my betting receipt upon? Or is your point here something different... you're advertising your rhetorical confidence?

C'mon.... stick to basics, man.

Civilization is chaotic with, for 10K years or so, lengthy periods of quasi-stability. These periods have something to do with lifespan but not as much as you might like. Meanwhile, there are real things to think about. Bottom up, indeed. On my block-or-so there's a good acre and half that is currently unused - literally vacant - and it wouldn't take much work to turn it into increased food security around here. but there are infinite layers of BS standing in the way. From other experience, this situation is very common throughout the US.

Does London have any practical advice for that?

No, seriously ... maybe I should just start "taking use" of this land, squatter-style... but then, of course, i'd be arrested and my work forcibly undone.

Is there a podcast I can listen to that will fix *that*?

bottom up indeed.

"It's not a f-ing game" - J. Stewart

-t

p.s.: nice chart, though. It's a good quick very high level summary, in some sense.

JFSanders [14 March 2009 05:41 AM]

This is all tongue in cheek right? Like the Colbert Report done up in blogstyle. NOBODY should be this ignorant and still able to survive daily life. This is a testament to the ability of modern society to support a completely dead end. Hey, Bud! I think I found your missing chromosome over here... W A T!

Rick [14 March 2009 02:05 PM]

Kind of hard to keep up all the global warming hype when we've been cooling world wide since 1998 eh?

People are wising up. The tide is turning and all the fear mongering in the world won't stop it.

Maybe its time to start talking about global cooling again like in the seventies? This time the trend would at least be your friend.

vanderleun [14 March 2009 02:49 PM]

James Lileks observes: "“Climate,” after all, is the hard left’s version of what they thought the Patriot Act was for the Right - an rationale to expand the powers of the state. The difference is that we don’t have satellites intercepting conversations between cold fronts conspiring to strike the Crusaders where they sleep, but never mind. “Climate” is a physical manifestation of a sick zeitgiest. Climate is a hot June and a cold March. Climate is a dry December and a hot July. Climate is Silly Putty: it stretches, takes any form, and when you press it on the Sunday comics, it shows you the pictures in reverse. Which only proves your point!"

Curmudgeon [14 March 2009 09:18 PM]

People can't handle the truth. We've evolved to believe that things will get better by and by.

That's why so many believe in the unlikely existence of a higher power that cares about us as individuals. That's why so many with so little knowledge have faith in science to get us through.

That's why the our species will shrink in numbers in the coming centuries, and nothing can be done.

Read Jared Diamond's book Collapse to see the micro-level version of what awaits us.

Climate change will merely accelerate the problems that overpopulation and overconsumption have led us to. Even if climate change for some reason fails to occur, we will still soon exceed the carrying capacity og the planet, if we haven't already. The consequences are unthinkable, so we are not going to think about it.

Sceptic [15 March 2009 10:46 AM]

The trouble I have with tipping point theories is, they fail to explain how we are here today.

All the CO2 and Methane that is trapped in various ways was *not* trapped before plants grew. Before plants grew the earth didn't have less atmospheric carbon, or less atmospheric methane, it had more.

If it didn't runaway then, how can it runaway now?

In my view, climate change is bad, will impact our food supply and hence cause starvation. This is bad, we need to find alternatives to petroleum (CO2 trapped by plants millions of years ago) anyway. So we should concentrate on replacing oil and in the process we will fix the climate change problem too.

But runaway global warming scenarios? Nope, we are releasing a tiny fraction of the atmospheric carbon that use to be there, so that does not make sense.

Alex Tolley [15 March 2009 03:45 PM]

This blog is so wrong in so many ways.

Social systems like economics have no real similarity to natural systems like climate. Conjoining them to make a point makes no sense.

A silly statement:
"Economic activity" is another name for "primates burning stuff into the air."
Really? What were people doing for 20,000 years before the industrial revolution and fossil fuels became an important resource?

And:
We'll hear "The climate is self-balancing. We should de-regulate the climate." "A free climate is the most efficient climate,"

We've never heard that about the environment. What we hear is that protecting the environment costs too much money and sub-optimizes economic growth. No-one suggests that the environment is self-regulating, just that the trade-offs are unbalanced.

There are serious climate issues, but it won't have characteristics like the 1929 stock market crash and the economic aftermath.

Bruce [16 March 2009 12:05 PM]

What a load of liberal climate-change BS!

Tom [16 March 2009 02:26 PM]

Anyone remember when O'reilly used to have articles that were actually useful, or based on new technology (i.e. Ruby on Rails)?
I miss those days.

Kai [16 March 2009 03:29 PM]

Someone asked for an example of a crisis that was successfully averted -- war with the Soviets is one, I think another one was the Y2K problem. Those of us who worked on the Y2K problem can recall, in the early days the test results were pretty bad. But we worked and worked and tested and analyzed and worked some more and bit by bit we got the problem under control.

So yes, disciplined planning and execution can work. The Y2K problem didn't take care of itself. A lot of guys working hard for years took care of it. I'm proud to be one of them. I hope that someday we can say the same of how we licked Peak Oil and global warming as problems.

John Dowdell [16 March 2009 04:09 PM]

.

How would you regulate the solar cycle?

Seems like "the bubble" is more among those who are in denial about Al Gore's failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

.

Mike Perry [16 March 2009 11:12 PM]

Is OReilly intent on becoming the high-brow equivalent of The Onion? It certainly looks like it. Where do I begin?

I quote: "They campaigned for de-regulating markets. That's just gotten us into a bigger crash than 1929."

Note the absence of bloody splotches on Manhattan pavements. Our present economic crisis is not even remotely "a bigger crash than 1929." Although it's a different sort of problem, in magnitude of misery induced, it's not even up to the stagflation woes of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I know. I lived through them. In fact, Obama seems intent on adopting federal borrowing and spending policies that'll add inflation to our current recession, recreating the misery under Carter.

Nor is is the current credit crunch the result of "de-regulating markets." The primary cause, sub-prime loans, came from federal regulators forcing banks to make loans that made no economic sense apart from rapidly rising home prices. And behind those policies lie a virtually who's who of liberal Democrats, people love regulation and who received large campaign donations from lending agencies such as Freddie Mae.

I won't even get into the global warming hysteria, an echo of previous hysteria such as eugenics, a population explosion, resource depletion and, in the 1970s, a global cooling scare.

Psychologists claim that 10-15% of the population think and act clearly in any situation, that 70-80% essentially freeze, doing nothing, while the remaining 10-15% become frantic and irrational at any danger, real or imagined.

I've been in enough tight situations on mountains or with dangerous people (I was once a bouncer in a homeless shelter) to know I fit in the first category. The author of this article clearly seems to be in the last category. He needs to find a cabin on some remote mountain top and leave the rest of us alone.

Dom [17 March 2009 02:36 AM]

@John - Gore did sign it.

Broadsword [17 March 2009 05:34 AM]

Just what the hell is a "rapid prototyping machine"? Some sort of early typewriter capable of running 200 meters under 19.5 seconds?

Sceptic said "The trouble I have with tipping point theories is, they fail to explain how we are here today." That's easy. Before the earth evolved plants to take care of all the carbon dioxide, a plan was in place to evolve human beings capable of producing technology which could alter the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back up to one tenth the amount that previously existed before the plants evolved but not quite until humans evolved, including humans who absolutely knew by looking at records of the last three nanoseconds of historical records that in 50 years this system which has been evolving for the last 4 billion had a serious defect, which the humans evolved into existence would have to evolve out of existence to solve. "It is as clear as the sun."

Q: What caused the Dark Ages? A: The Y1K problem.

Frank Smith [17 March 2009 08:03 AM]

Given that there is no evidence of any major impact of humanity on the climate, nor even a credible mechanism for such an impact, this kind of article is several kinds of insane. Here is more modest, more thoughtful, more scientific overview:

http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/03/redefining-the-limits-of-global-warming/

Evil European [18 March 2009 05:53 AM]

Loving the deinal comments here. Totally missing the point of the article....ad homien and strawman attacks all over the place, but that would be expected.

Getting the flat earthers foaming at the mouth is a sign of being on the right track in my book.

climate_watcher [18 March 2009 01:07 PM]

This is simple. Republicans and Libertarians in the United States have consistently gone on record as opposing and disbelieving the scientists who have the knowledge and years of education to actually understand the basis of man made climate change. Those factions have elevated themselves to level of "expert" in climatology, although most of them hadn't even heard of the word five years ago.

When the Nazis were defeated, the world didn't worry about their "perspective- we just hung them, after a fair trial. What were they guilty of? Following the dictates of their conscience? Obeying the orders of the state they were members of? Believing in a certain ideology and living by it? Although those rationals for actions taken are normally considered exculpatory, the winners, that is, us decided, unilaterally- "you know what- those reasons aren't good enough for what you did. There IS no excuse for what you did. You're guilty of crimes against humanity."

And then we hung them.

And then we wrote history- our way, to reflect our values.

Guess what. The same is going thing is going to happen to those who have publicly decided through their lobbying, through their voice, through their actions that human caused global warming is not real. It's not going to be enough to say you genuinely believed in what you did. It's not going to be enough to plead you were only doing what you were paid to do. When hundreds of millions die because you elected to ignore reality, because you presumed to grant yourself the ability to make life and death judgments on topics you demonstrably have no credible understanding of, it's not going to be enough to say you were "fooled" or "misled" or you're "sorry".

History teaches us that our future society is going to deal with you the way societies deal with all ideologically driven mass murderers. And this mass murder is many times worse than what was done during WWII. You're destroying the earth itself. There is no excuse.

Of course, you can't imagine the government and society that will see you that way and deal with you like we dealt with the Nazis, but neither could the Nazis imagine that their 1,000 year Reich would ever fall or that they were criminals of any sort. In their eyes, they were honest, hardworking brave and respectable men who had medals pinned on their chests and families at home.

There exists a well documented record of which parties said and did what and which individuals said and did what.

The rest is a historical inevitability.

hurf durf [18 March 2009 05:09 PM]

Well, climate_watcher above just threatened my life; I'm a denyer and must be hung.

Come. Get some.

climate_watcher [18 March 2009 08:53 PM]

No one threatened your life. What I said was look at what does in fact happen in history. I also said that future society will judge deniers as murderers. You think some part of that is wrong? Feel free to share.

Are there other advanced topics in other areas of science you have detailed opinions of which you imagine to be superior to those of scientists? Perhaps you also practice medicine without a license? Some people call that murder, but in this case of course it's not an individual life at stake, it's billions of lives.

Perhaps you have opinions about string theory you'd like to lecture physicists on. No? Why not? Is climatology an "easier" subject for you to understand?

I mean, there are a lot of climatologists waiting with bated breath for YOU and Rush Limbaugh and the whole right wing Evangelical geniuses to present your deep findings which prove that they're all wrong and you're all right. I am sure that as soon as you take the stage in a fair debate with any one of them the auditorium will fall silent and ashamed that hurf durf and any other of his ilk was able to prove them wrong on the very topic they've spent 4 years of undergraduate studying, then another 4 years of grad school followed by their years as a post doc and finally years after that as a researchers. Think of the shame they'll all feel as it becomes apparent to everyone that you, hurf durf, with your degree from the Advanced institute of Conservative Studies (that is where you gained your deep knowledge of science is it not?) completely destroy their meticulously accumulated and hard won knowledge with your folk understanding and common sense arguments that you gleaned off your favorite right wing fruitcake webpage or, even better, thought of yourself as soon as you read something about global warming.

All that glory is waiting for you and your republican buddies, so just take what's rightfully yours already.

Think of the glory. Think of your place in the history in annuals of science. It's probably he most profound thing that's happened in science- a total laymen with no knowledge of, well anything connected to the subject really, publicly shames into silence the collective scientific world and proves global warming to be a hoax (and an attempt to instantiate world government also - I have that right, don't I, uh, Mr. Durf? I mean, that is what right wing blogs are saying...)

I myself can say with complete certainty that your achievement will be the BIGGEST thing in the annuals of science since Newton.

The sad thing is, really, what the deniers believe is in fact just exactly what I outlined above. Their folk theories are right, and the scientists are all wrong.

But like I say, why stop at climatology? Surely you can settle the issues around cosmology, particle physics and Fermat's last theorem. What you have no opinion on those topics? Why is that? Why do you have the opinions you have on climate change? It's not like back in the day when cigarette companies trotted out "studies" by actual MDs which proved that smoking had non link to lung cancer is it? I mean, you're not jus a tool that swallows whatever pap industry pukes out if they can find a way to wrapped in a conservative ideology of "freedom" (which is somehow being threatened) is it? I mean because we all know how the tobacco industry operated to get the conservative tobacco states and their populations all riled up over THAT issue. You're not being played for a.. a... FOOL are you Mr. Durf? No .. Mr. Durf is ready to take that stage tomorrow.. send him the ticket!!Let's get this matter settled once and for all.

Is anyone threatening you? No. Someone is observing what societies do in fact do and speculating what society will do in this particular case, given the unthinkable consequences of the actions of the moral idiots deniers are. But time will tell what does in fact happen.

The one thing I am sure of is there's a conference sometime this year that you, Our Savior, needs to be ready for!

Do you know what narcissistic personality disorder is? I mean, do you know?

charleywhiskey [19 March 2009 05:04 PM]

Tim Anderson’s name is not on the masthead as a member of the “Team” at Z Corporation’s website. Maybe rants like this were not good for business, though I’ve got to agree with him that arctic ice will probably continue to melt every summer. Of course it will re-freeze in the winter. Until climate-watcher’s comment above, I was not aware of the relationship of nazis to global warming.

vanderleun [21 March 2009 09:11 AM]

I'm sure there's a Z corps story there but it doesn't matter.

Anderson's very good at a kind of "Huck Finn" tech over at Instructables. His projects there are a kind of nouveau version of The Whole Funky Earth Catalogue.

Instructables Member: TimAnderson INSTRUCTABLES 72 RECENT is really a quite interesting tour of how to live on the cheap.

This essay above is a kind of standard white guy's plaint about there being too many people in the world and "I'll have no room to ride my horsey. Oh, if only everybody could learn from my instructables how to live "poor with style" what a bright world that would be."

At the same time, Anderson seems to have a continuing role at MAKE, so this is probably where to park some thoughts that don't really fit at either MAKE or Instructables.

I give him points for not connecting the Nazis to global warming, although that's a meme that's probably going around and we'll see it again from the Climate Cargo Cultists. Now that the "Science is settled" item isn't working they'll have to go more hard core to get the fear factor working for them.

John Dowdell [22 March 2009 02:27 PM]

("Dom", Gore made a symbolic signing after he made sure it was dead; even Wikipedia hasn't edited out this info. Main question remains "How would you regulate the solar cycle?" There are unwarranted assumptions on (a) climate change itself; (b) anthropogenic contributions; (c) knowing how to technically fix any such problem; and (d) assuming that the political process would effectively bring us to that fix. It's a belief system.)