National Climate Report Projects Future Weather and Economic Trends

"Climate-related threats to Americans' physical, social, and economic well-being are rising," says report.

Muuraa/Dreamstime

"Whatever happened to Global Warming?," tweeted President Trump yesterday as a cold front descended across the northeastern United States. In what might be thought of as a kind of riposte to the president's tweet, the Fourth National Climate Assessment report released today takes a longer range look at how global warming may affect the U.S. over the course of this century.

The Congressionally-mandated report finds that "the evidence of human-caused climate change is overwhelming and continues to strengthen, that the impacts of climate change are intensifying across the country, and that climate-related threats to Americans' physical, social, and economic well-being are rising."(emphasis in original).

Among other climate trends, the report notes:

(1) annual average temperatures have increased by 1.8°F across the contiguous United States since the beginning of the 20th century.

(2) the season length of heat waves in many U.S. cities has increased by over 40 days since the 1960s.

(3) large declines in snowpack in the western United States occurred from 1955 to 2016.

(4) the average length of the growing season has increased across the contiguous United States since the early 20th century, meaning that, on average, the last spring frost occurs earlier and the first fall frost arrives later.

(5) warmer and drier conditions have contributed to an increase in large forest fires in the western United States and Interior Alaska over the past several decades.

(6) And interestingly, the report adds that there is currently no detectable change in long-term U.S. drought statistics using the Palmer Drought Severity Index.

The report projects that unmitigated climate change could cause U.S. GDP to be 10 percent lower than it would otherwise have been by the end of this century. A rough calculation suggests that today's $20 trillion GDP growing at a 3 percent rate would rise to $226 trillion by 2100. With climate change it would rise to only $203 trillion. Basically Americans living at the end of this century would be about 10 times richer on average than we are now.

More analysis of the report's findings to come after I've had more time to delve further into it.

Comments

[DiegoF]

It is indeed silly to take a cold snap, even a record one, as evidence against global warming. It's no different from what the alarmists do e.g. for the wildfires, of course, but the difference is they have a narrative and thus are winning the P.R. battle. Until we have a systematic strategy in place for defeating environmental alarmism (exactly as the other side laid out painstakingly for decades for creating it--just as they did the secondhand smoke alarmism and so forth) we should probably cool it with the snide remarks, because we are just lobbing them soft serves that we are going to get pummeled on.

[Remember to keep it all polit]

The great majority of ordinary people don't worry about AGW. The alarmists are not winning them over. And neither are they winning the practical battle: Virginia just approved some ridiculously expensive offshore wind farms; people won't put up with much of that nonsense, and neither will budgets made up from other people's money.

[Rat on a train]

12MW at $25M per MW.

[Cy]

And it'll probably get shut down for killing off sea birds.

[MSimon]

12MW at $25M per MW.

What does the backup cost?

[soldiermedic76]

The wildfire thing is especially worth being pissed off about. The increase in wildfire is the direct result of mismanagement of public lands which banned logging and grazing in the name of environmentalism, increasing fuel load. No forests are not supposed to be so crowded with trees, it isn't natural and no, grasslands shouldn't have so much grass and plant litter. But since they, the greenies, mismanaged things and can't admit they were mistaken, they now use the problem they created to further push their agenda down everyone else's throats.

[Lucius Junius Brutus]

If fires burn away bolshevik californians, so much the good.

[Longtobefree]

For those with short memory spans, or who are just young - -

This is from so long ago I lost the citation:
Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, notable as a Democrat in the administration, urged the administration to initiate a worldwide system of monitoring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, decades before the issue of global warming came to the public's attention.
There is widespread agreement that carbon dioxide content will rise 25 percent by 2000, Moynihan wrote in a September 1969 memo.
"This could increase the average temperature near the earth's surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit," he wrote. "This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter."

Wrong then (1969), wrong now (2018). "Widespread" agreement does not constitute truth; see flat earth.
I was taught that carbon dioxide was necessary for plant life; has that changed?

[Oli]

They were pretty damn accurate about the carbon dioxide rise. As for the predictions what it could imply-- they were wrong. Then again, they used the conditional tense.

So, all in all, the "widespread agreement" turned out being correct. The alarmist implications didn't, but they usually don't. The US hasn't been overrun by a rapist caravan from the south either.

[Chili Dogg]

Oli, it is the alarmist claims that people use to push the scare about global warming. They do this to justify massive government involvement and actions. You cannot just write it off as, oh, the alarming implications are not usually true, so they don't matter. They do matter! There are the primary weapon the global warming people used to push their agenda.

[Oli]

Alarmism is the primary weapon of all politicians. No, it's not cool. But it's nothing specific to global warming either. And it won't change anyway, because politicians suck.

[Remember to keep it all polit]

There were cattle ranches in Greenland 1000 years ago. How many now? Methinks that's nice practical illustration of how today is NOT the warmest in recorded history. Yet whenever they want to show hot hot today is, they always pick some starting date in a cold era. The Thames froze in the 1800s, I believe. 1900 still hadn't warmed up as much as the Late Medieval Warming, and it has't yet today.

Every time I hear some bleating about dying coral reefs, I wonder if these yahoos know that corals are millions of years old, and survived the 4-500 foot sea rise of just 10-15,000 years ago.

On and on go the contradictions and the hypocrisy.

[Chipper Morning Baculum]

The sedimentary record is littered with dead reefs. Most of them died because the water got too hot to precipitate calcium carbonate. In most extinction events, the reefs are the first to go, because they can't move to a better place.

[JesseAz]

Ignorant and wrong.

[Chipper Morning Baculum]

Right, I forgot that in your eyes, the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

[Inigo Montoya]

In my view, the earth is a few billion years old.

There was a time where there were volcanoes and lava flows everywhere. There was another time, pre-dinosaurs, when the CO2 levels were far higher than today and you had these impossibly huge insects. There were other times (more than once), where massive glaciers covered everything except for a small distance above and below the equator.

Climate change is settled science, for sure. It has always been changing. It never stopped. Where the bullshit comes in is us thinking that we are "destroying" the planet and that only we can "save" it. We could all disappear tomorrow in a meteor strike, hell, the meteror could knock a good-sized chunk out of the globe and create a second moon, and the earth would bounce back and not bat an eye. It wouldn't know we ever existed.

From a geologic perspective, the human handwringing and pants-shitting is all hubris.

[CE]

It's a desperate search for meaning. People want an existential threat, so they can feel important fighting it.

[Earth Skeptic]

Bingo

[Cy]

Similar to hearing today's SJW try and claim some amount of suffering equal to civil rights era activists. Bunch of idiots trying to find something where it isn't because they feel like they need some kind of meaning. Go take an attractive person out for a nice dinner, go dancing, get blitzed, wake up and do it again the next day. We're living in a paradise, enjoy it.

[Sevo]

"Right, I forgot that in your eyes, the Earth is only 6,000 years old."

Gee, I forgot that in your eyes, mass murder is just what governments should do.
See, shitbag? Two can play 'stereotype', and I'd prefer the one you propose to the one you might well be.

[Last of the Shitlords]

"Right, I forgot that in your eyes, the Earth is only 6,000 years old."

Chipper, you're not an anti christ bigot, are you?

[Ben of Houston]

Yes, that is quite contra-factual. Coral reefs aren't stagnant. They move with the ocean. In fact, in a rising sea, they tend to grow. That's why we have coral islands sitting on top of rock mountains. On the other hand, in a shrinking ocean or cooling world, the reefs fall down to lower depths as the oceans expose the tops. It's happened for millions of years.

The idea that a coral reef is so fragile that despite living in the biome affected the least by climate change (any idiot knows warming is concentrated at the poles due to water's saturation effects), they are going to die precipitously from a fractional degree of warming is just absurd.

[Fuck you, Shikha (Nunya)]

I think we have reefs on top of mountains because of plate tectonics and lifted strata.

[soldiermedic76]

Plate tectonics are a extremely slow process in terms of biological time, though fairly rapid in geological times. Basically, plate tectonics are to slow to impact reef growth. Unless your thesis was to imply played tectonics are the reason seamounts exist for reefs to grow on in the first place. If that is the case, disregard my criticism.

[Ben of Houston]

Sorry, bad description due to writing while angry. I wasn't talking about coral reefs on top of current mountains (we are fairly close to maximum sea level as it is, due to there only being so much water in the world). I was meaning coral reef islands.

Coral ring islands are very common throughout the world, but especially in the Pacific. If you go down far enough in the ocean, you'll find that the coral island is actually a coral reef that was once around a volcanic island. As the seas rose after the last ice age, the rock island was swallowed by the ocean, but the coral reef kept growing towards the sun. The fish who live on the reef eat the coral, making sand, which piles up in the center. This is why the Maldives and so many other islands exist, and it's been known since the theory was first proposed by Darwin. The islands are alive and growing.

The primary danger to the South Pacific islands isn't rising sea levels. It's pollution, over-fishing, and coral mining, which prevent these natural processes from growing.

[commentguy]

No, on the whole the guyots form when the sea-floor volcano subsides.

[Ben of Houston]

Where'd you read that? I can see the possibility, but I haven't heard that perspective before. In the end, the conclusion is the same. The islands, if we don't actively mess up the ecosystem via pollution or overfishing, will rise with the sea.

[CE]

and yet there are new reefs today

[Earth Skeptic]

Actually, there are these things called coral larvae...

[Azathoth!!]

The sedimentary record is littered with dead reefs. Most of them died because the water got too hot to precipitate calcium carbonate. In most extinction events, the reefs are the first to go, because they can't move to a better place.

So, you're saying this happened multiple times?

And you're saying that the reefs came back?

So it wasn't an extinction event?

Ah.

[Longtobefree]

So Darwin was right? OMG!

[Rufus The Monocled]

Weren't the 1930s warmer?

[DiegoF]

It only seemed like that because of Vivien Leigh. Now that was one spicy tomato, Jack!

[Inigo Montoya]

Ever see a young Lauren Bacall, in a color photo, with that auburn hair? Or Rita Hayworth? Or Lana Turner? Or even a young Barbara Stanwyck? They had some very sexy women back then.

[Sam Grove]

Don't forget Lena Horne. A perpetual beauty.

[CDRSchafer]

Jane Russell. Before there was silicon implants.

[blondrealist]

Jane Russell - indeed. Lena, Lauren, Vivien, Lana ---- and more. Spicy indeed. Ah - and Sophia.....makes my mouth water.

[CE]

the 1970s were pretty hot too. seems almost like a 40 year cycle?

[Brett Bellmore]

Yes, but only according to what the thermometers read back then.

Now that they've riggedcorrected all those old records, today is warmer.

[Bill]

Shhhhhh! Why do you think they said since the 1960's?

[R. K. Phillips]

"Warmest in RECORDED history". See the clue?

[Oli]

You do realize that there are still farms in Greenland, right?

[Get To Da Chippah]

REPENT CLIMATE SINNERS! THIS TIME THE END IS REALLY NIGH!

[Rat on a train]

I already apologized to Al Gore.

[Inigo Montoya]

I hope you backed up that apology with a very large check. The upkeep on multiple mansions isn't cheap.

[Fuck you, Shikha (Nunya)]

Running the atmosphere killing air conditioning at a constant 68 degrees is hard on a pimp with multiple 10ksqft houses.

[Fancylad]

Cardinal Steyer: Dost thou, therefore, in the name of the Mother Earth, renounce CO2 and all its works, the vain pomp and glory of internal combustion, with all covetous desires of gasoline, and the sinful desires of automotives, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them?

Answer: I renounce them all; and, for Gaia's sake, will endeavor not to follow, nor be led by them.

[Fuck you, Shikha (Nunya)]

Is just no ok?

[Rock Lobster]

Of course not, brother, but you may purchase a(n) carbon offset indulgence to absolve you of your sins.

Act now to reap the virtue signaling points for your Social Credit Score?.

[soldiermedic76]

Until some cranky German monk decides to nail a list of protests to some door with his footwear.

[Rock Lobster]

Better kill him before he fucks it all up.

Or at least have some Democrat state AG indict him for heresy.

[soldiermedic76]

Oh, he will just flee to a state with a Republican (or possibly a Libertarian) governor, living in virtual exile while he writes long discourses until his eventual death. And then after his death, the new Holy Roman Emporer (sorry I mean Democratic governor from a neighboring state) will work to stamp out his hearsy and start three decades of war and famine.

[ejhickey]

"(5) warmer and drier conditions have contributed to an increase in large forest fires in the western United States and Interior Alaska over the past several decades."

recently , NPR has interviewed forestry experts from california who have stated the connection between the recent fires and climate change is tenuous at best.

[Sarah Palin's Buttplug]

Really? I saw some expert claim that the lack of snowpack run-off in those California mountain ranges made the forests dry and susceptible to fire.

Climate science ain't my thing but when it comes to listening to an actual scientist or some conservative jack-off I will go with the scientist every time.

[Rossami]

You'd better check your expert because California is, climactically, a desert. Has been for millennia. Or perhaps you should ask your "expert" about the measured snow-pack trends. (Hint: Despite the hysteria about snow-melt in the early 2000s, it measured at 185% of the long-term average in the spring of 2017.)

Or even better, perhaps you'd like to explain how you so casually write off the scientists interviewed by NPR with a partisan slur.

[Sarah Palin's Buttplug]

Bullshit. You are no doubt a fact-free conservative like them all.

https://goo.gl/WFkvz9

Dismal Western Snowpack Is a Climate "Warning Sign"
The potential for drought and large wildfires looms over the summer

By Chelsea Harvey, E&E News on May 14, 2018

The unusual conditions come on the heels of a dismal season for mountain snowpack in both the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. Snow in the Sierras had approached a record low earlier this spring, before a series of late winter storms helped bolster its levels?but even so, an early April survey by the California Department of Water Resources found that snowpack was still only at 52 percent of its historical average. And as of May 10, snow levels throughout California were at about 20 percent of their typical averages for this time of year.

Meanwhile, the Rocky Mountains have faced a similarly dry season. As of January, Colorado snowpack levels were among their lowest in decades. And as of this month, much of the Colorado River Basin was seeing snowpack at levels less than 50 percent?and in some places less than 25 percent?of their typical averages.

Now if you wingnuts will step aside capitalism can work like it should.

[Sevo]

Sarah Palin's Buttplug|11.23.18 @ 8:54PM|#
"Now if you wingnuts will step aside capitalism can work like it should."

As if you had any idea how 'capitalism' works, scumbag:
"Fire on the Mountain: Rethinking Forest Management in the Sierra Nevada"
[...]
"Dear Governor and Members of the Legislature,
A century of mismanaging Sierra Nevada forests has brought an unprecedented environmental catastrophe that impacts all Californians - and with it, a rare opportunity for transformational culture change in forest management practices."
https://lhc.ca.gov/sites/lhc.ca.gov/files
/Reports/242/Report242.pdf

Now, you can argue that climate change is an approximate cause of wildfires, but if that is true, it is even more important to address the proximate cause; mismanaged forests due to dim-bulb greenies and their D allies in government.
One of those idiots argued in the local rag this morning, that none of that would help, since what burned was largely private land. That twit was either as stupid or as dishonest as you, turd.
Try getting a permit for any sort of logging or clearing on "private land"; it took an acquaintance well over two years, and the cuttings had to be helicoptered out, since cutting a road would disturb the 'pristine' nature of the forest.

[Last of the Shitlords]

Progressives need to have their ranks thinned.

[Cy]

I support "Common Sense Proggy Control!"

[JesseAz]

Snow pack doesn't effect the environmental factors of dry brush fucktard. You think snow pack magically find fire gear and rushes to put out fires? How big of a simpleton are you? Snowpack will effect rivers, reservoirs and the like. Not the rate of drying on underbrush. Do you even bother to think your idiot talking points throgh?

[Sarah Palin's Buttplug]

Tell Scientific American that, you miserable Rick Santorum conservative jack-off.

[soldiermedic76]

Appeal to authority while disregarding other sources that contradict your hypothesis is not a sign of intelligence.

[NashTiger]

Malibu is nowhere near the Rockies or the Sierras

[Rat on a train]

Most of California has a Mediterranean climate. The deserts are mostly in the SE interior.

[Presskh]

Yes, and a Mediterranean climate is semi-arid, with winter monsoonal rains and dry summers. Fires are a normal part of the ecosystem in these climates and serve to clear out accumulated underbrush and renew the ecosystem. Allowing people to build in these regions is the real problem, if you're concerned about loss of human life and property. From a natural point of view, human structures are just more fire material and humans perishing in the fires is no different than other animals who also perish.

[Sevo]

Sarah Palin's Buttplug|11.23.18 @ 8:29PM|#
"Climate science ain't my thing but when it comes to listening to an actual scientist or some conservative jack-off I will go with the scientist every time."

No, you fucking liar, you listen to whatever proggy jack-off happens to be handy.
Oh, and fuck off.

[Fancylad]

Oh, and fuck off.
This. I'm so sick of his intellectually dishonest, cultist shit.

[JesseAz]

Your expert is a fucking idiot who doesn't understand biology then. The amount of moisture in the brush, the main fuel for the fire, is based on the thickness of the brush. Based on recent samples, a santa Ana or devil's wind can dry out the brush in under an hour based on sample survey of the brush from the current fire. Go talk to any forestry major. Snow pack has nothing to do with it. Firefighter will tell you the same. Snow pack doesn't matter for shit when the brush is dried from the steady inland winds that dry underground quickly.

[CE]

the Woolsey fire followed the same route as big November wildfire in 1970, from Agoura Hills to Malibu. Droughts are to blame more than warming.

[soldiermedic76]

The fact that it followed the path of a previous fire is proof of nothing. This is in fact fairly common in wildfire situations. Fire actually benefits plant growth, if aforesaid growth is not checked by grazing (by either or wild and domesticated herbivores) logging etc, the amount of fuel increases. Add in a cyclic event such as annual dry winds, and it is just a matter of time before you have a major fire event.

[soldiermedic76]

This is fairly well understood by anyone who has taken either a forestry or range management class.

[Presskh]

Totally correct, soldiermedic.

[NashTiger]

Not to mention - WARMER = WETTER. COLDER = DRYER.

The more of our Lithosphere is trapped in ice, the less is in the oceans and the atmosphere as rain. The more that is liquid, the more evaporates, and falls as rain.

this is not true across all localites, of course, but the Forest Fire myth is ridiculous propaganda

[Dances-with-Trolls]

Good. Fucking. Grief.

[Sarah Palin's Buttplug]

The AGW/science denial crowd stakes out a political position and then looks for data to support that position much like Dickless Cheney decided to go to war with Iraq then looked for evidence Iraq had WMD.

Both have failed.

[JesseAz]

You've already proven you know nothing of the science.

[bevis the lumberjack]

Please explain how snowpack in the mountains affects the degree of moisture in the brush in Malibu, Mr. Science.

Letting your politics influence your judgement of claims that somebody makes is something that you accuse the AGW Deniers of doing. Because politics. But I forget, you're an independent. LOL.

[Ben of Houston]

Actually, I've found a lot more denial of science from the alarmists. They ignore little things like contrary evidence, and all of the evidence that Earth has weathered similar or larger changes in the past. Let's not get into their denial about the mechanics of the electrical grid and reality of grid-scale storage (which for practical purposes, does not exist), which means that wind and solar power is both so cheap as to make fossil power useless and so expensive that it must be mandated.

Then there's the denial of mathematics when claiming that the Paris treaty was anything other than an unmitigated disaster, as China promised nothing, and India and Russia promised less than nothing.

[Rufus The Monocled]

Earf has a forever fever.

It needs, like, a really strong Tylenol.

[DiegoF]

More like a Midol, these days, I think.

[buybuydandavis]

"unmitigated climate change could cause" the Old Gods to rouse from their slumber and destroy us.

It could.

[Longtobefree]

Quite true.
The real question then, is will that occur before an asteroid plunges to earth and destroys us all?

[shamrock]

GDP Growth rates are not per capita so just because GDP doubles does not mean the average person is twice as wealthy. 80 or 90% of GDP growth goes to a very small percentage, so if GDP/capita doubles that does not mean the typical person is twice as wealthy.

[CE]

The typical person lives like a king compared to people just a few centuries ago

[Last of the Shitlords]

Progressives would like to use their AGW religion as an excuse to change that.

[Tony]

Even despite all the socialism?

What an interesting point of view, situational optimism. Funny how the upshot of it all is not to regulate the burning of fossil fuels. How amazingly coincidental.

[Fuck you, Shikha (Nunya)]

He said love like a king and not an actual king, but you already pointed out all of the socialism at issue.

[Earth Skeptic]

So, prima nocta?

[Gilbert Martin]

GDP is not a valid metric of economic prosperity in the first place because the GDP formula includes government spending.

Government actually produces no wealth on it's own so it's spending simply amounts to forced transfer payments that can never net to any value greater than zero.

As illustrated by Bastiat's parable of the broken window, money spent by government is taken by force from the private sector and therefore whoever would have otherwise had that money is prevented from deploying it as he or she sees fit and alternatively generating economic activity.

[Jerryskids]

I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who say it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.

The audit also said Solheim had not provided justification for 76 days spent in Oslo and Paris on official travel. After a request from a UN official to account for days spent in his home country, Norway, Solheim, emailed: "We cannot accept this question on holiday vs job ? we are not any longer living in the industrial age and they must stop treating me as if I am a 07 to 16 factory worker ? the other side of this coin is that they must stop asking this stupid question."

Some animals are more equal than others, eh, Erik?

[JesseAz]

What a weird a time science article from reason. Even the last IPCC report begrudgingly admitted a decrease in natural disasters.

1) we are coming out of the mini ice age. The MWP was still warmer. Glaciers keep uncovering tree lines much farther north than Curren treelines from 1000 years ago. Plants and food are being produced at great numbers with longer growing seasons. More people still die from harsh winters than warmer summers. The daily highs have not increased... Instead the night time lows are warmer... Which makes since if you understand the urban heat island effects.

2). In u.s. cities.. what a weird metric. UHI. MORE ASPHALT. More cars, more motors, more people..

3). The early 20th century was considered abnormally wet for the region based on historical data. Of course we have less snow pack in a non abnormally wet era... Not sure what the point here is except for ignorance of historical trends in the western United States.

4). This is a good thing.

5). Fucking ignorance. The underbrush, theain fuel fires, dry out in as short of time as 1h due to the Santa Ana and devil's wind flow. This is not due to global warming you fucking unscientific moron. The drying occurs in any climate based on the thickness of the brush. Average temps don't effect this. Likewise it is fire mismanagement, not allowing small fores to clear brush, that leads to the bigger fires.

What an awful article.

[Last of the Shitlords]

This sort of thing makes me embarrassed for Bailey. Who otherwise appears rational.

[Earth Skeptic]

All true.

But the problem with number 2 is the overwhelming trend of urbanization, as both cause and inflated effect of UHI. Delusional people still carry mental models of pleasant rural climates. And they can't possibly accept that they, and their millions of fellow sophisticated urbanite neighbors, ARE the problem.

[soldiermedic76]

It isn't just global warming that is the victim of urbanites delusions in regard to rural lifestyles. It is also why organic, anti-grazing, the anti-GMO and the anti-logging movements have such strength. The anti-grazing makes the least sense. At the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition it was estimated that there was between 10 and 20 million Buffalo and another couple million elk on the great plains. Yet grazing by cattle (in far fewer numbers) is considered unhealthy for the prarie region?

[Rational Exuberance]

The Congressionally-mandated report finds that "the evidence of human-caused climate change is overwhelming and continues to strengthen

That statement is bullshit. Humans contribute to climate change, they don't cause it. And there is little humans can do to stop it, and nothing humans can do to stop it without massive damage to human societies.

[Get To Da Chippah]

The report can find whatever Congress-scum want.

[Cy]

Exxxxxactly. Let no crisis go to waste. No crisis? We'll find one!

[Allan Walstad]

Does the report say by how much GDP will be depressed if we turn over still more control of economic activity to federal bureaucrats?

[Johnny B]

Let's see, if average income in 2100 is ten-times today, then on average people will be making 500,000 per year. So the bureaucrats in 13 agencies have a plan: Let's do something so stupid today so as to stop the rising tide from 200 years of economic growth, so that our ancestors can be only as rich as we are, rather than letting our ancestors make their own choices with their vastly higher incomes. Yea, I'm seeing that as a hell of a sales pitch.

[CE]

The report documents the weather/climate changes for the past century or so, but doesn't prove what portion (or if any) of the changes were caused by human activity.

It also fails to note that rising temperatures have always improved human flourishing and agricultural economies, such as that in the US.

People like warmer weather and shorter winters.

[Tony]

Jesus fucking talking points. Read something for christ's sake.

[Tony]

*Entire state is on fire*

It's cold today where I live, so science is fake mnehh!!

[Get To Da Chippah]

Try record-breakingly cold, dumbass.

[Tony]

Records being broken all the time is not a sign that everything's OK.

[soldiermedic76]

Or it could be the result of a fairly small pool of data.

[Tony]

There is science and then there are conspiracy theories. People are prone to conspiracy theories. It's nothing to be ashamed of as long as you work toward thinking rationally.

[soldiermedic76]

You really shouldn't lecture others about science. The fact is is that we have only a little over 100 years of accurate, measured temperature records. Additionally, the way we measure and the accuracy of measurements has steadily improved. No conspiracy needed to explain that we have a small pool of data and thus it isn't surprising that records are broken regularly. This doesn't prove anything. Nor does it disprove anything, it just is. Anyone who uses a record cold or a record high temperature to support their findings are equally unscientific in their approach. However, I doubt you understand the distinction I am making, because you hear anything that runs counter to your bias as heresy, because you are not interested in science but rather dogma.

[Tony]

You don't know what the fuck you're talking about and we both know it.

[soldiermedic76]

I know exactly what I am talking about. And it is obvious you don't understand what I am stating. Could you point to where I made a mistake? I doubt it. Because ublike you, I am an actual scientist, I understand data collection and power. Nothing I said is wrong. It just doesn't support your dogma. So, now like any fundamentalist you are taking it as a personal affront. However, you don't seem to grasp I neither disputed nor supported AWG in my statement. I simply refuted your assertion that breaking records is significant.

[Brett Bellmore]

"(1) annual average temperatures have increased by 1.8?F across the contiguous United States since the beginning of the 20th century."

After going back and adjusting all the numbers, anyway.

"(2) the season length of heat waves in many U.S. cities has increased by over 40 days since the 1960s."

This is known as the "urban heat island" effect. It's unrelated to climate change, the bigger cities get, the hotter they get.

"(3) large declines in snowpack in the western United States occurred from 1955 to 2016"

I should care about this?

"(4) the average length of the growing season has increased across the contiguous United States since the early 20th century, meaning that, on average, the last spring frost occurs earlier and the first fall frost arrives later."

Is is a positive change, and a very good thing.

"(5) warmer and drier conditions have contributed to an increase in large forest fires in the western United States and Interior Alaska over the past several decades."

Bad forestry practices, rather. As confirmed by your next entry;

"(6) And interestingly, the report adds that there is currently no detectable change in long-term U.S. drought statistics using the Palmer Drought Severity Index."

How do you get drier conditions contributing to fires without any increase at all in droughts?

[TLBD]

I think Bailey knows. He has orders, it seems.

[soldiermedic76]

For them to admit the fires (which usually start on public land) are the result of bad forestry would require then to admit they were the ones who caused the bad forestry to occur

[soldiermedic76]

Additionally, it should be noted that at the same time Clinton began closing federal forests to most all logging (for his green supporters) he also pushed through NAFTA. Suddenly, US timber companies saw their supply of timber decrease dramatically (especially in the Northenr Rockies, where most of the forests are federal) while having to compete with far cheaper Canadian timber (their timber industry is very heavily subsidized and thus they can sell at a much lower cost). The fact that we saw a contraction of the US timber industry during a historic housing boom at the end of the 20th century and the start of the new millennia is improbable without taking this into account. People on the coast wonder why the farmers, ranchers, and loggers here in Montana and Idaho (and other Western States) are not more upset about Trump and his trade wars with China and Canada need to look no further then actions like Clinton's that I just mentioned.

[eyeroller]

"The report projects that unmitigated climate change could cause U.S. GDP to be 10 percent lower than it would otherwise have been by the end of this century."

That's a meaningless stat, because carbon dioxide is directly connected to fossil fuel use, which has greatly increased GDP.

If we eliminated fossil fuel use in order to stop warming, that would have a much greater negative impact on GDP.

[TLBD]

10 percent less economic output 82 years from now. So what, 0.14 percent per year?

And how much will the alarmists "solutions" cost our economy? Guarantfuckingtee it is more than that.

[Earth Skeptic]

But those solutions come from Top People.

[Brett Bellmore]

If you believe they're capable of modeling the economy to 0.14% accuracy over the course of a century, which is totally insane.

[Rock Lobster]

Hey, if they can accurately model the climate, then ipso facto, they can accurately model the economy. Why do you doubt your betters, you filthy denier?

Complex, multivariate systems are really very simple and predictable. And capitalism is icky, at best. Settled science.

[Goody]

Honest question here that I have been wondering for a long time. Why is Reason, which is almost always skeptical of the government, not skeptical of government funded studies on climate change? They seem to accept the government's narrative and talking points unquestioningly. Leaving aside whether the climate is actually changing or whether people are contributing to that theoretical change, why are we not suspicious of government grants to look for something and then finding that something? It seems like it might lend itself to confirmation bias

[TLBD]

Reason is only skeptical if it has to do with drugs, war, Republicans, or child trafficking.

[AJ_Liberty]

Climate prediction is a nasty hard problem....and it hasn't gotten easier since its politicization. This shouldn't be about how we feel about this or that....but what we can no-nonsense reliably predict..and a sober analysis of costs and benefits. It's hard to do costs meaningfully if estimated warming effects are all over the place. I'm all in favor of continuing to reduce our carbon footprint....because it is also good to reduce pollution and become more energy independent of the Middle East. I'm also in favor of letting the market weigh costs and create relevant technology. If we went hard nuclear and converted our long haul transportation to natural gas, that would certainly buy us a bunch of time to evolve the next generation of power sources and energy storage (provided China, India, and Russia don't overwhelm the calculus). But nuclear comes with its own costs....and its hard to analyze those costs next to the costs of more carbon emissions....without better predictive models showing man's impact. How does this happen in this political environment?

[Sam Grove]

"...may..."

With just three letters, that's a pretty big word.

[Sam Grove]

From Wattsupwiththat

The Froth of the Fourth
https://tinyurl.com/y7tk29yn

[soldiermedic76]

I am an animal scientist, so please if I get this wrong, it is because it isn't my field of expertise, however, has anyone else been following the announcement that space temperatures are decreasing? It appears we are headed for a solar minimum of possibly unprecedented strength, possible a grand solar minimum front what I was reading that will surpass the solar minimum of the mid 14th century (which resulted in massive cold, crop failure and plague across the northern hemisphere). We should no in the next two years how accurate this prediction is. I wonder how that will impact their models.

[soldiermedic76]

I read this on, among other sites, NASS's own website. The last grand solar minimum resulted in around 40 years of significant global cooling.

[soldiermedic76]

NASA not NASS (National Agricultural Statistical Service).

[Longtobefree]

" I wonder how that will impact their models."

Not at all. The only thing that impacts their models is politics, and the resulting funding for more studies.

[soldiermedic76]

Wow, the amount of type errors always astounds me. The predictive software in my speelcheck and auto-correct is unbelievably bad. Why does it change words when I used the correct word/spelling.

[Longtobefree]

Because the "correct" words cannot possibly express other than left wing thoughts.
You are lucky that the spellchecker doesn't explode your device to save you from wrongthink.

[Freddie]

Climate change might very well be a leftist hoax designed to force us to trade our suburbs and Suburbans for a transit pass and 500 sq ft of living space in a Democratic People's Urban Housing Complex.
But those of us who advocate free markets and limited government must recognize our own biases. What if man-made climate change is for real? Barring a brilliant scheme to assign property rights to the atmosphere, some government intervention would be necessary.
For this contingency, we need Plan B. A carbon tax would harness market forces to find the optimal carbon reduction strategies. Libertarians and other free marketeers should accept a carbon tax only in exchange for cutting other taxes and abolishing the current tangled web of subsidies and regulations that attempt to micromanage the way we produce and consume energy.

[Old Smokin' Egg]

One of the most effective, albeit long-term approaches to climate change and other forms of anthropogenic environmental degradation is one that libertarians should support, whether or not AGW's a real and serious thing.

Total environmental impact is the product of per-capita impact and population size. We can build wind turbines and drive Priuses and shun plastic straws for all we're worth, but if the population continues to increase, we'll still be doing every bit as much total environmental damage. Conversely, if the world's population were reduced to a fraction of its current size, we could all enjoy First World lifestyles without doing permanent damage to the global environment.

At present, much of First World governmental activity is directed toward creating incentives for procreation. Child-care subsidies, tax breaks for families with minor children, parental-leave requirements, taxpayer-funded schools, and much, much more; all of it having the effect of shifting the costs of producing and rearing children from the perpetrators of said children to others, including the child-free.

Removing these incentives to reproduce would slow population growth, which should meet with wild approval from the people who're most concerned about AGW; and eliminating such government programs and subsidies should be close to the libertarian heart. So where's the support?

[Longtobefree]

A nice war would be effective then, no?

[Two Buck Chuck]

I'd bet money a good many wars in history were engineered for just this reason. 500 peasants need half as much wheat as a thousand, and if the fields are bigger than their appetite, the chances of rebellion diminish. Throw in a little gobbledygook about honor and defending the realm and give the survivors some worthless ribbons and your continued life in the castle is locked in for a few more years - as it that of your "enemy" in the next castle over.

[Hank Phillips]

A free market approach is better. You tell me how many joules of extra heat that nasty misanthropomorphic water vapor, methane and such are trapping and I'll tell you the diameters of orbiting mylar mirrors needed to reflect that unwanted heat away from the planet, and maybe even warm up Canada a little, for a fee. We've been orbiting mylar mirrors since 1960, back when NASA was still a space agency. Nowadays NASA produces problems whose only solution is a tax on everyone except Communist China. Why should Taiwan or These States be punished over pseudoscience and force-initiating looter fraud?

[Rockabilly]

In the future winters will be cold and summers warm!

[soldiermedic76]

I was talking to a rancher friend of mine about how the long term (90 d) forecasts can't agree on if we will have above average temperatures for winter or below. His response was the best "I'll tell you what thia winter is going to be like in April"

[NashTiger]

AHEM

Don't Tell Anyone, But We Just Had Two Years Of Record-Breaking Global Cooling

Inconvenient Science: NASA data show that global temperatures dropped sharply over the past two years. Not that you'd know it, since that wasn't deemed news. Does that make NASA a global warming denier?

Writing in Real Clear Markets, Aaron Brown looked at the official NASA global temperature data and noticed something surprising. From February 2016 to February 2018, "global average temperatures dropped by 0.56 degrees Celsius." That, he notes, is the biggest two-year drop in the past century.

"The 2016-2018 Big Chill," he writes, "was composed of two Little Chills, the biggest five month drop ever (February to June 2016) and the fourth biggest (February to June 2017). A similar event from February to June 2018 would bring global average temperatures below the 1980s average."

Isn't this just the sort of man-bites-dog story that the mainstream media always says is newsworthy?

[NashTiger]

[NashTiger]

Don't Tell Anyone, But We Just Had Two Years Of Record-Breaking Global Cooling

[mtrueman]

Don't tell anyone. Cooler temperatures after el nino events are a dog bites man story.

[Cloudbuster]

A rough calculation suggests that today's $20 trillion GDP growing at a 3 percent rate would rise to $226 trillion by 2100. With climate change it would rise to only $203 trillion. Basically Americans living at the end of this century would be about 10 times richer on average than we are now.

Um, it's late and all, but what am I missing with the math here that the diff between $203 trillion and $226 trillion gdp equals a 10x increase in wealth?

[MasterThief]

I'll give you the excuse of being tired. The GDP is projected to grow tenfold over 80 years. The projected difference in GDP isn't substantiated or otherwise put in context there.

[Wallace]

Anthropomorphic climate change or global warming is an end times scenario for a generation that prides itself on being particularly areligious. These folks would be mortified if they could see what they were doing which amounts to fanatically insisting "The end is near--Repent!"

They deal with dissent the way afficionacos of religion generally do--by condemnation (if you're lucky) or suppression (which they increasing get away with).

[Hank Phillips]

Unvarnished data shows no such thing. Only the tampered-with GISS dataset, blatantly massaged to cool the past in ways that would make the Ministry of Truth blush--shows a warming trend. All others, satellite RSS and USHCN thermometer stations, show a trend of zero to at most a degree or so this past century. Surely Bailey can look up newspaper weather reports for this past century--there are hundreds of papers online--and tabulate the published highs and lows in a spreadsheet and see for self. Alternatively, the Petition Project signed by nearly 32000 scientists has successfully kept the Senate from ratifying any carbon tax looting since Kyoto. All Ronald need do is find 1,030,000 people with real science degrees who claim humanity is causing temperatures to rise--data be damned. That would strengthen the claim that "97% of scientists" are congregants of the new Millerite brand of Luddism. Until then, fake data makes fake forecasts what even conservatives easily debunk as fraud. See realclimatescience.com, for instance.

[I am the 0.000000013%]

Regardless of the facts on global warming, the thing that is most telling is the solutions that are offered. More government control, more mass transit, fewer cars. At every level, the solutions that are offered are the ones that strengthen urban lifestyles and punish those who can't live in a rat warren.

If there was any real interest in solving global warming, we'd be pursuing modern fission reactors and letting fossil fuels die out on their own, either by making them noncompetitive or by having them run out.

Catalytic converters were a technological solution to a previous fossil fuel problem. It was developed at a time when the hysterics of the day were calling for an end to fossil fuel usage, virtually identical in tone to the hysterics today.

[Michael Cook]

Climate change deniers are only a click away. Watt's Up With That WUWT or the Anthony Watts website has an immense archive of organized reports, critiques, graphs, lengthy discussions and arguments, and data sets. You can get an education in data collection and analysis just reading through all the debates and the documented studies.

The bottom line is that the Climate alarmist (big government socialist) proposition that carbon dioxide is absolutely and certainly the main and the only significant driver of global warming, or extreme weather events, or vague, unspecified climate change. All other possible factors influencing climate, climate alarmists claim, are completely understood and have been ruled out by meticulous scientific research.

The chutzpah of this claim is staggering. That maybe 75% of the world's population have been propagandized into believing it by a sympathetic world media establishment inclined to recklessly write incredible headlines and distort or disregard any hard evidence or research findings that does not fit into their fashionable narratives and prejudices only serves to illustrate how far a bogus theory can advance when it has the media power to shout down, intimidate, and smear even the most reputable critics.

[NoVaNick]

All the climate change cult seems to want to talk about is CO2, and methane to a lesser extent, only because of fracking. They never mention the impact of halogenated fluorocarbons, used in air conditioning and refrigeration, which are thousands of times more potent greenhouse gasses, along with water vapor, than either of these. Why? Because, its not sexy, and does not require the peasants to repent their evil consumerist ways as much, even though if we only drove electric cars using electricity only produced by wind and solar, it would do very little if anything to change the situation.

[Azathoth!!]

Such hubris!

You are naked monkeys that live in the green scum that grows on the edges of the wet spots on a rock hurtling through space, your tiny lives have all been lived inside a single blink of an eye on the timescale your wet rock exists at.

And yet you waste that scant time squeaking about your effluvia and how it might damage your rock.

Sad.

[Two Buck Chuck]

Only a fool or a liar could argue that what plants breathe is a pollutant. And look here: Fools and liars.

[Tony]

Anything becomes a pollutant or toxin in large enough doses. You can't just drink all the water you want.

[Longtobefree]

I can drink all the water I want.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Get an education, Chuck. Backwater religious schooling and homeschooling involving substandard parents do not count.

[Mr. Dyslexic]

Humans - "Planet earth, why are we here?"

Planet Earth - "Plastic, assholes!"

~George Carlin

[ravenshrike]

"(1) annual average temperatures have increased by 1.8?F across the contiguous United States since the beginning of the 20th century."

I'm curious as to how they got that figure since even with a perfectly crafted and calibrated thermometer from 1900 to sometime after the 1940's you had an error bar of one degree. The vast, vast majority of thermometers used not being correctly calibrated and many not crafted correctly either.

In any case, any "cure" the left comes up with would be significantly more expensive than the 10% mentioned. Interestingly, if the billions wasted on CAFE had instead been shoved into Thorium breeder reactor research we would have less nuclear waste, less CO2, and energy prices between 50 and 1000 times cheaper.

[Plumber Kennesaw]

Yes, allowing people to build in these regions is the real problem, if you're concerned about loss of human life and property.

[jerryg1018]

Meteorologists are unable to predict the path of a current hurricane let alone weather decades into the future. Their computer simulations give a half dozen paths.

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