Climate Change is a Fact

It is hard to argue with that statement which was made by Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post. My agreement can be seen in the title of my blog: Change is what the climate does. He also says "The spike in atmospheric CO2 is a fact." No argument there. Joel is worried about climate denialism  "and all other forms of anti-scientific thinking, and solution-deferring, and the covering of the eyes in hopes that it will create invisibility."

It leads him to make a statement that is in dispute.

"The dramatic high-latitude warming is a fact."

Not so fast.  A paper published in the Geophysical Research Letters in the Winter 2009/2010 issue challenges that view and reports "Northern Hemisphere winters have recently grown more extreme across the major industrialized centers," and reporting that "record cold snaps and heavy snowfall events across the United States, Europe and East Asia garnered much public attention during the winters of 2009/10 and 2010/11 (Blunden et al., 2011; Cohen et al., 2010)," with the latter set of researchers suggesting that "the occurrence of more severe Northern Hemisphere winter weather is a two-decade-long trend starting around 1988." We can now add the winter of 2011/2012 which was particularly harsh in Europe, Russia, Asia, Japan and Alaska.

How is this possible if the CAGW theory of human induced CO2 is correct? Did the CO2 take a vacation from these areas and head for warmer climes? Did they stop trapping heat? The eastern US and southern Ontario were warm last winter (2011/2012). Did the CO2 go there?

Another statement is laughable.

"Models show the greatest warming spike down the road still, decades hence." Models have been shown to be unreliable and to overestimate the contribution of CO2 to any warming that has occurred.  If they can't predict now then there is no reason to put any faith in their ability to right themselves in the future. Garbage In Garbage Out.

He tries to blame Chinese pollution for the 'pause' in the warming trend and seems unaware of this study.
"The warming trend has flattened out in the last decade but probably only because of air pollution from Chinese coal-fired power plants or some such forcing we haven’t fully discovered (smog is hardly the long-term solution we should be seeking)."

The following comes from the article: "the thermometer is stuck at 100 for two weeks and all-time temperature records have fallen in much of the country, and all this coming after a bizarrely winterless winter:"

Joel thinks that two weeks of 3 digit temperatures and the setting of all time temperature records is grounds for belief that global warming is real. However, it has happened before and when CO2 was at a lower level that it is now. History can make a fool out of you. The 1930s contained the most record high temperatures in the US. The trend for record setting high temperatures has been down since then.

Joel is a control freak and wants to micromanage other people. He fears other people's freedom.

"Seems to me it’s not the heat, it’s the temerity that’s our real problem – the temerity to think that we can go, quickly, from about a billion people to 7 billion, on our way to 9 billion, with dramatic increases in resource usage and energy consumption and carbon emissions and so on, without it having dramatic consequences for the planet."

Humans are the problem. CO2 is a cover for that secret belief.

"My suspicion (and others will recoil from this) is that the planet in the future will have to be managed the way you run a nuclear power plant – lots of engineers, risk assessors, government oversight, a public-private partnership of sorts, with a steady eye toward low-probability but high-consequence events. "

Micromanage. CO2 is a cover for that.

This isn’t the Thoreau view of nature, and it will incite objections from those who say we need to just pull back and stop putting so much stress on natural systems. But I think we need more science, more research, more engineering, more innovative solutions, and most of all more political leaders who understand that individual choice and free markets, though essential to modern society, by themselves will not protect the commons from long-term exploitation."

Freedom must be controlled.

The "anti-scientific thinking" and "the covering of the eyes in hopes that it will create invisibility." appear to be traits that Joel possesses. He is projecting his denialism onto those who do not share his views.

Or maybe the heat has gotten to him. It is summer after all.