Reply to: Burn them! (but capture the Carbon, okay?)

[Doggy Styles]

what the plague did was free peasants from bondage to the land.
Due to the massive lack of labour, the peasants could pretty much demand their own terms

Including free donkey jackets, because the world wasn't as warm as it is now.

[Spacecadet]

what the plague did was free peasants from bondage to the land.
Due to the massive lack of labour, the peasants could pretty much demand their own terms

[TimberWolf]

Just remember that booming populations can turn to bust.

Something will notice the resource.

50% of the population of Europe departed during the Black Death*.

Because the plague killed so many of the working population, wages rose and some historians have seen this as a turning point in European economic development.
Bubonic plague - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Boomed.

[Doggy Styles]

And in answer to the population growth question being addressed by environmentalists, George Monbiot points out that, in terms of environmental damage and pollution, economic growth (historically coupled with emissions rising), the holy grail of most politicians, is a lot worse than more (mostly poor) people.

If I was a cynic I'd say that conclusion is chosen as the one that best fits the argument of AGW believers.

'Poor' people in the third world cut down millions of acres of CO2-breathing trees every year, and burn a large chunk of them.

Oil-producing countries are full of 'poor' people.

The UK population has increased by nearly ten percent since 1997. Are AGW believers trying to tell us that they are mostly poor people whose extra energy use is insignificant?

[TimberWolf]

Briefly, cos I am tired, and I empathise with Dawkins' history teacher , and nobody actually, y'know, gives a sh1t....

The full global warming solution: How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm

And in answer to the population growth question being addressed by environmentalists, George Monbiot points out that, in terms of environmental damage and pollution, economic growth (historically coupled with emissions rising), the holy grail of most politicians, is a lot worse than more (mostly poor) people.



See also The Population Myth | George Monbiot

I will now be accused of being anti-progress and anti-prosperity.

Exponential growth, which as as you say the holy grail of politicians, is doomed to a spectacular fail eventually. But quoting that author's figures and dismissing population (not just growth) as almost irrelevant next to economic growth doesn't do you credit IMO. For one thing he hasn't factored in the poor getting richer. China and India are on the ascendency and Africa may be next. Even if population were to peak in 2050 at 10 billion (I have my doubts), this adds about 1% [assuming a constant rate of growth for the sake of simple arithmetic, from 6 billion to 10 billion in 44 years) to your 3% growth figure. This also assumes that that 3% global growth applies equally to poorer nations, who seem to be growing at the fastest rate (albeit from a lower base).

And growth aside, even in a static population, having a child in the west has a far greater carbon footprint than any amount of swapping to low energy light bulbs.

Population is the real and only issue here. Rising CO2 levels is but one small symptom of this greater problem.

[MarillionFan]

he does actuall post in the taxy stuff. credit where its due

He was talking to you cloth ears.

[EternalOptimist]

Or how about a post relevant to contracting

he does actuall post in the taxy stuff. credit where its due

[EternalOptimist]

I will now be accused of being anti-progress and anti-prosperity.

just anti free-thinking

pj, if it was against the law to think for yourself, would there be enough evidence to convict you ?

[Spacecadet]

ok pj, we have all heard the negative stuff. Now say something positive about somebody


maybe, even, possibly say something positive about somebodies ideas

Or how about a post relevant to contracting

[pjclarke]

Briefly, cos I am tired, and I empathise with Dawkins' history teacher , and nobody actually, y'know, gives a sh1t....

The full global warming solution: How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm

And in answer to the population growth question being addressed by environmentalists, George Monbiot points out that, in terms of environmental damage and pollution, economic growth (historically coupled with emissions rising), the holy grail of most politicians, is a lot worse than more (mostly poor) people.

if we accept the UN’s projection, the global population will grow by roughly 50% and then stop. This means it will become 50% harder to stop runaway climate change, 50% harder to feed the world, 50% harder to prevent the overuse of resources. But compare this rate of increase to the rate of economic growth. Many economists predict that, occasional recessions notwithstanding, the global economy will grow by about 3% a year this century. Governments will do all they can to prove them right. A steady growth rate of 3% means a doubling of economic activity every 23 years. By 2100, in other words, global consumption will increase by roughly 1600%. [...] So economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth. And, if governments, banks and businesses have their way, it never stops. By 2115, the cumulative total rises to 3200%, by 2138 to 6400%. As resources are finite, this is of course impossible, but it is not hard to see that rising economic activity – not human numbers – is the immediate and overwhelming threat.

See also The Population Myth | George Monbiot

I will now be accused of being anti-progress and anti-prosperity.

[EternalOptimist]

ok pj, we have all heard the negative stuff. Now say something positive about somebody


maybe, even, possibly say something positive about somebodies ideas

[pjclarke]

Bullsh1t? Actually, it is more that she is concerned about the overstatement of certainty in certain studies, which would be fair enough if she confined herself to an opinion, after all Professor Curry is indeed a distinguished climatologist and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. One would hope her opinion counted as an informed one. However climatology is a broad discipline and her specialist expertise is in atmospheric science and tropical storms. As she herself concedes at the start of the thread:

paleoproxies are outside the arena of my personal research expertise, and I find my eyes glaze over when I start reading about bristlecones, etc.

So it is interesting that she considers herself qualified to pass judgement on the work of people who have studied such matters as their life's work, and further to tacitly accuse them of dishonesty. She is on a bit of a one-woman crusade to build bridges between the 'sceptics' and mainstream science. Unfortunately she has taken some of the sceptics at face value and repeated some of their talking points without checking if they were well-founded, which if you are relying on Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill) is only going to lead to trouble and indeed the good Professor has learned the hard way that not everything you read on the internet, or in the Bishop's uniquely 'inventive' book, is true.

Gavin Schmidt of NASA is unimpressed, to put it mildly, with this latest 'contribution' to the debate ....

You have gone significantly over the line with this post. Accusations of dishonesty are way beyond a difference of opinion on how a graph should be displayed.

If you thought that a single, smoothed graph of estimates of paleo-temperature told the whole story of paleo-climate reconstructions is far more a failing at your end than it is the authors involved. How can a single graph say everything that can possibly be said?

Summary graphs are by their very nature, summaries. The graphs you pick out were summaries of various estimates of what paleo-temperature estimates from the literature were. It is therefore not surprising that they show only the reconstructions where the authors had confidence that the reconstructions were actually of the temperatures. [...]

Problems with modern divergence – which only applies to the Briffa et al curve in any case – are issues to be dealt with in the technical literature, as they still are. Try actually reading the papers on the subject, and perhaps you would be less confused. Start with briffa et al (1998): Briffa et al (2001): or D’Arrigo et al (2007):

But if you think that the divergence problem makes Briffa et al (2001)’s reconstruction unreliable for whatever reason, go ahead and ignore it. It doesn’t affect Moberg et al, Ljundqvist 2010, Mann et al 2008 or Osborn and Briffa (2006). And it doesn’t make Briffa dishonest.

[EternalOptimist]

I think what curry means by sample size, is that location and numbers are equally important.

for example, putting the thermostat for your front room central heating in the garage would be a bad mistake, because the temperatures vary , even over a short distance.

It is statistical complexities like this that SasGoru has difficulties understanding, so I have designed this little model for him

garage (cold) <> living room (urban heat island)

[BlasterBates]

What they were saying in 1922:

1922: 'Extraordinary warmth in the Arctic during the last few years' -- Polar ice sheet to melt down? | Climate Depot

sound familiar?

[BlasterBates]

Life really is too short to try and dam the torrent of BS flowing along this thread, but here are a few facts:

>> Some tree ring proxies in some regions, all in the Northern Hemisphere, do diverge from instrumental temperatures since about 1960. This was known as the ‘divergence problem’ and of course the nefarious ‘Team’ did their absolute utmost to ensure nobody found out about it. They did this by er, publishing widely on the subject in the academic literature (as opposed to the Daily Mail.) and the IPCC reports, and of course only a select few elite and trusted scientists have access to wikipedia or the internet.

>> There are of course, other proxies, and here is the abstract from the most recent comprehensive reconstruction, published in 2008



Tabloid Translation: we know about the problems, thanks, but the Hockey Stick lives with or without Tree Rings.

The latest research on the paleoclimate record and in particular the medieval warming period was presented at a conference in Lisbon last year amongst others by Phil Jones and Michael Mann.

According to Professor Judith Curry, a highly respected climate scientist, as far as I'm aware not a journalist at the Daily Mail, it was a heap of Bull Sh1t

Hiding the Decline | Climate Etc.

There was another Workshop in Lisbon this past year (Sept 2010), on the Medieval Warm Period. The abstracts for the presentations are found here. No surprises, many of the usual people doing the usual things.

and she laments:

I view paleoclimate as a really important subject in the context of understanding climate change. I have no interest in warmest year or warmest decade; rather we need to understand the magnitude and characteristics and causes of natural climate variability over the current interglacial, particularly the last 2000 years. I’m more interested in the handle than the blade of the hockey stick. I also view understanding regional climate variations as much more important than trying to use some statistical model to create global average anomalies (which I personally regard as pointless, given the sampling issue).