Climate Climate & Energy

China and India have joined Kyoto, they just have different obligations, as is morally appropriate

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Why should the U.S. join Kyoto while India and China haven't?

Answer: The U.S. puts out more CO2 than any other nation on earth, including China and India, by a large margin. Considering the relative populations (a billion-plus each for China and India versus 300 million in the U.S.), per capita emissions in the U.S. are many times larger. This has been true for the past 100-plus years of CO2 pollution.

For the U.S. to refuse to take any steps until India and China do the same is like the fattest man at the table, upon realizing the food is running out, demanding that the hungry people who just sat down cut back just as much as him, at the same time.

‘Kyoto is a big effort for almost nothing’–Kyoto is only in its first phase

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: The Kyoto treaty, even if fully implemented, would only save us about a tenth of a degree of future temperature rise many decades from now. What a waste of effort! You can see for yourself here at the Junk Science website.

Answer: There are three big problems with this claim.

So says a Houston newspaper

So says the Houston Business Journal.

The problem is not how high the temperature may go, but how fast it is changing

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: The earth has had much warmer climates in the past. What's so special about the current climate? Anyway, it seems like a generally warmer world will be better.

Answer: I don't know if there is a meaningful way to define an "optimum" average temperature for planet earth. Surely it is better now for all of us than it was 20,000 years ago when so much land was trapped beneath ice sheets. Perhaps any point between the recent climate and the extreme one we may be heading for, with tropical forests inside the arctic circle, is as good as any other. Maybe it's even better with no ice caps anywhere.

It doesn't matter. The critical issue is not what the temperature is, or may be, or will be. The critical issue is how fast it is moving.

Better Not, Pout

North Sea fish population declines as water warms, says new study For the first time, those meddling scientists have found a direct link between warming seas and dying fish. A heated habitat leads to rapid population decline for the eelpout, a shallow bottom-dweller in the North Sea, according to a decade-long German study recently published […]

The former says nothing about the latter

“We found that there is just no way that the observed changes [in hurricane strength] [in sea-surface temperatures] could be attributed purely to internally generated natural variability.” (see correction at bottom of post) So said Tom Wigley — one of many people at NCAR with more expertise and peer-reviewed papers in the area of hurricanes […]

Some thoughts

Part of the confusion over Revkin’s article is that there isn’t one "climate debate." There are several. I’m going to taxonomize them in another post, but first I want to say something about the scientific one. This debate, as many folks have pointed out, is pretty much over. The denialists are wrong and they’ve been […]

Tongue Wrestling

In India, U.K., and U.S., climate change is cause for conflict Climate challenges erupted all over the globe this week. In India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a group of 5,000 scientists that the developing world “cannot afford to ape the West in terms of its environmentally wasteful lifestyle,” adding that India must invest in […]

Wallaby Darned

Australia says it’s warming faster than much of the rest of the globe They lost the Croc Hunter, were besieged by wildfires, got slammed by a cyclone, and now this: research from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology indicates that Down Under is warming faster than the global average. Our condolences, mates. While global temps have […]

Knock Us Over With a Feather

Exxon spent millions fostering climate-change confusion, report says Echoing recent claims made by Britain’s top science group and others, the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists has issued a report slamming ExxonMobil for paying big bucks to mislead the public about climate change. OK, they’re small bucks by mega-profitable Exxon’s standards; still, the “modest but effective” […]