If you keep an eye on global warming denier blogs, you expect to see some pretty stupid stuff. But every now and then they exceed expectation. Sometimes they even take it to a new level. This particular bit was featured by Anthony Watts, but it originates with Steve Goddard.
The stunning announcement is “Most Ice Gain Ever Recorded.” It refers to the fact that Arctic sea ice has increased since its September minimum by a larger amount than in any previously observed season (at least, during the satellite era). For this graph, the “gain” seems to be defined as the difference between each year’s Feb. 12 value and its preceding September minimum (based on satellite data from Cryosphere Today).
Anthony Watts calls this a “stunning rebound” and further opines “This continued growth of ice in the Arctic make the arguments for ice mass loss in Antarctica rather hard to believe.”
What’s really rather hard to believe is that these people can actually be that blinded by ideology, or gullible, or stupid, or all three. What’s really stunning is the vanishing of Arctic sea ice, during all months, all seasons of the year, at its annual minimum and its annual maximum.
This much is certain: they are not skeptics. Don’t call them that, and don’t put up with it when they call themselves that. They aren’t.
The reason the “gain” (difference from the last minimum) is so large is that the last minimum was so low. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of “rebound” or “recovery” of Arctic sea ice. Indeed the most recent minimum was astoundingly low:
Although annual maxima have also been declining, they haven’t done so as fast as annual minima:
So, even though Arctic sea ice is on the decline in all seasons, the difference between the annual minimum and the annual maximum has been growing. That doesn’t change the fact that Arctic sea ice is on the decline in all seasons. Yet Steve Goddard has tried to spin this into some kind of “rebound” and Anthony Watts has pushed it to the forefront. Judging by the comments to their posts, most of their followers think this somehow counters the fact that Arctic sea ice is on the decline in all seasons
This is so deliberately misleading, it’s a bit hard to believe they would sink so low. It’s so transparently stupid, it’s a bit hard to believe they would risk revealing their willingness to buy into such drivel.
There is absolutely no hope — none whatsoever — for any kind of “dialogue” with such blind ideologues. You can’t reason with some people. Two of those are Anthony Watts and Steve Goddard.
UPDATE
I original posted a mistaken graph of annual maxima for Arctic sea ice extent. It included 2013, which hasn’t yet reached maximum. A corrected graph has been uploaded.
Open Mind 
Ha ! I didn’t know it originated from Steve Goddard… The moment I read that WUWT post I thought… WOW that stupidity is Goddard-like, turns out it was !
No physics in that one, Yoda…
FYI, “Steve Goddard” is a fake name. He prefers to hide — now you see why.
Anyone know his real name?
Who cares? I’ll just continue to call him assclown.
I would certainly like to know who Steve Goddard really is. It would seem to me that a first step to figuring out who it is could be made by looking at a list of climate deniers who also have degrees in Electrical Engineering.
Other than making sure you aren’t seated next to him at a dinner party or that he is not your child’s science teacher, what use could this information be? S. Goddard is just another idiot in search of a village to call home.
I’m thinking a computer program that keeps flunking the Turing test.
Knowing Goddard’s true identity could be of no use, but it could also be important. There is no way to tell until it is known. There is also the factor that for some reason anonymity implies credibility for a lot of people. For instance a lot of people will trust a “secret government source” more than a well known white house spokesman.
Goddard would undoubtedly pass the deTuring test with flying colors, though.
He’s like a big arrow pointing off the cliff with a massive pileup down below.
L. Hamilton has produced a graph for all months until 12/2011 here. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v224/Chiloe/Climate/Cycle_Arctic_extent_6.png
An update to that cycle plot, showing decline in every month through December 2012, is here:
Lowess smooth version of that cycle plot, also through 2012:
Wow. Just wow.
What IS astounding is how much less ice there is than this time last year.
@Alex: Actually at the moment this is about 260 Kkm2 more sea ice (extent) than last year:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/plot.csv
Actually, according to PIOMAS there is 751 km3 less ice volume than last year, but things have improved somewhat in the past month.
PIOMAS February 2013
Sadly, I’m even more cynical, maybe just pragmatic, but NOTHING and no level to which the Wattites will sink surprises me anymore.
Tony Watts is pretty damn stupid to push this BS alright. A great example of blind ideology at work, or maybe he knows what he is doing and is simply lying for the heck of it. Either Tony’s lies are driven by his ideology, or he can spout lies at will because he is morally bankrupt.
Tony does not like being called a denier, but of late he has been behaving very much like someone in denial. If he despises the term then he ought to stop behaving like a denier ;) Time to call a spade a spade (although those of us following the laughable soap opera that is WFUWT have known it for a long time),
Anthony Watts is a denier
There, I said it and now he can have a hissy fit and stop around like a little boy. Meanwhile the Arctic ice volume continues its decline.
“Anthony Watts is a denier”
There’s been doubt in the past? Reasonable doubt? Somehow I missed that …
As predicted by Dr. Doom:
Double Recovery of Arctic Sea Ice
Oops. I mean Dr. Inferno…
Way back at the end of September 2012 the good Dr. Inferno was already pointing to the historic re-freeze in his blog science masterpiece ” Ice Age Alert: Unprecedented Arctic Sea Ice Freeze In Progress – Arctic Sea Ice Increases Past FOUR MILLION Square Kilometers For The First Time Since Records Began!”
http://denialdepot.blogspot.ca/2012/09/ice-age-alert-unprecedented-arctic-sea.html
I got sort of permanently banned from Goddard’s site last summer after continually throwing his words at him as the minumum got closer and closer. He started im march talking about the “normal” SIE maximum, and I made him take more and more ridiculous postions until right before the new record when he suddenly decided I was a liar for saying he would not make a prediction. I snuch in a comment on this issue a couple of weeks ago but he immediately banned me again. I think i may be the person whop has been censored from Goddard’s site mroe than any one. i am pretty sure it is 4 or 5 times in the last 3 years.
SUYTS ALSO used this graph and I jumped on him. . His acolytes attacked me as they always do.
I am fascianted with the new “explanation” that this is all doue to the AMO. When i challenge someone to point me to any denier that saw this coming before 2007 and was stating THEN that the AMO was going to lead to record low SIE, I get complete silence.
Apparently natural variation can explain anything
…after the fact….
I didn’t think Steve could surpass his “Lake Superior is cold so therefore no warming” post in which he was completely ignorant about lake stratification and dimictic lakes (limnology 101, learned in the first month). But he did it with this one, and did it by a long shot.
You forgot “it snows dry ice in antarctica”?
“Steve Goddard,” of course, also claimed that Venus was hot not because of CO2 but because of the high atmospheric pressure according to PV=nRT. And he wasn’t talking about “pressure broadening” of the absorption curves, it was just flat-out ideal gas, PV=nRT,
Of course, Tony Watts hosted that bunkum, too, and for weeks or months had people convinced.
I once asked Pielke Sr why he gave such uncritical, fawning support to Watts and he said that he didn’t, and that Watts had provided a lot of useful input into the climate discussion. I refuse to believe that he wasn’t totally aware that 90+% of Watts was unadulterated crap. I could only wonder whether Pielke’s being obtuse was deliberate.
Pielke has since closed his blog and I can only wonder if he’s working desperately to salvage Tony’s “game changing paper.”
There are still devoted followers of “the pressure determines the temperature” meme out there.
Rather easy to disprove, if you consider the altitude of Venus at which P=1 bar, where Venus is still hotter than Earth in spite of the difference in absorbed solar radiation. (Venus actually gets less solar absorption than Earth because of its high albedo; for both planets, the reflective clouds are above the 1 bar altitude.)
I spent a long time arguing with Goddard about the ideal gas model. He insisted that increasing pressure results in permanently increased temperature – somehow he was refractory to understanding that heat can be lost from the system (consider a bicycle pump or a SCUBA tank, for example), with a consequent readjustment of pressure. And of course an atmosphere is an open system, so the nature of its pressure at any point of altitude is somewhat different to that of a closed system.
If Goddard’s model of pressure permanently raising temperature was to hold, one would have a circumstance where one could establish a perpetual heat engine along an altitude gradient. The First Law of Thermodynamics would be most unhappy to hear that Goddard was trying to scam a lifetime of free lunches in that manner…
no, i think Goddard is right. that’s why basketball is such a fast-paced sport: the players need to throw the ball as fast as possible, or they’ll suffer horrible burn injuries.
i seem to recall him being responsible for the “CO_2 snow in Antarctica” lulzfest a couple of years back. oh the comedy ignorance!
Yeah. I sometimes suspect Goddard of being the ultimate Poe, but the truth is probably simpler and more prosaic than that.
Yep, over at Lewandowsky’s on the post about his new Recursive Fury paper the ideal gas law came up at #27. The commenter couldn’t quite explain how it led to his conclusions though (and perhaps it’s fair to say he couldn’t quite explain what his conclusions were, other than “CO2 can’t have much effect”.)
Watts is Pielke Sr.’s beard
I tried to submit following comment to the sea ice post at Watts’s blog:
“A lesson in how to spin an accelerating multi-decadal Arctic sea ice decline into its opposite in the “skeptic” universe. One can suspect some serious cognitive dissonance at work here.
The blog were this is coming from is called “RealScience”? It should be named RealSatire, instead.”
Not to my surprise, my comment got censored. It was deemed to be too insulting for the sensitive fake skeptic crowd over there (insults, libelous accusations, hate mongering, prosecution and persecution fantasies against climate scientist coming from Watts or the crowd, or labeling commenters who have opposing views, as “cockroaches” is often all OK there, though):
“[Snip. You can be insulting of WUWT on your own thinly-trafficked blog. But here you need to be polite, or one of the mods will snip your entire nasty comment. — mod.]”
(http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/12/sea-ice-news-volume-4-1-arctic-ice-gain-sets-a-new-record/#comment-1223767)
What a bunch of hypocrites.
BTW: Stealey is posting under its real name now. He burned “Smokey” and “D. Boehm”. I suspect even Watts got annoyed with Stealeys sock puppetry, after it got too much attention outside of Watts’s blog.
First I wondered whether I should laugh or cry. But then I laughed. :-)
So, to make Assclown’s a little more relevant, can we look at the numbers for volume? A recovery in volume might actually mean something.
My first run-in on WUWT (where I am viewed as a “warmist” by the way!) was with Goddard. He put up one of the Rutgers graphs showing winter snow extent increasing and claimed it was the beginning of a new ice age.
When I pointed out to him that to get an ice age you need snow and ice that is persistent through the summer, and pointed him to the Rutgers graph which shows a rapid decline in summer snow extent he said it was not important and that winter snow extent was all that matters.
The guy is capable of the most astonishing “double-think” and seems to be in a state of near pathological denial about the Arctic sea ice. I don’t think he is stupid, just weirdly able to ignore blatant evidence that he is wrong.
It is an unfortunate result of the extreme positions people take on the climate change debate that they end up defending the clearly indefensible. It happens in blogs such as this from time to time, but Anthony Watts would defend anybody who posts at WUWT regardless of how obviously wrong they are.
“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” ― Saul Bellow
“I don’t think he [‘Goddard’] is stupid…” No,he IS stupid. He has provided ample evidence over the years.
And then we have CryoSat-2’s results …
The obvious next step will be for Watts et al. to start reporting the annual winter “recovery” as a percentage of the area at minimum, rather than as some number of million km2.
In the winter of ’92/’93, the ice area grew by approximately 200%. In the winter of ’12/’13, the ice area has already grown by over 400% and we’re not even at maximum yet!
Just think of how massive the recovery will be when the 0.1 million km2 summer remnant clinging to the north coast of Greenland grows back to 5 million km2 in the following winter.
Just more ice to melt this year.
Come to think of it, has anyone ever done a trend of actual area that’s melted each year, as opposed to just the min/max area? Could that be informative in any way?
Yeah, pretty expected. And the full recovery is only possible after all september sea ice is gone. Now I would say this:
Alex
Around the time of the 2012 Arctic ice minimum a number of people predicted that that this (NH) winter, deniers would post something along the lines of ‘the fastest biggest recovery ever in the Arctic therefore AGW is a hoax’. This is so close I’d regard it as one of the many accurate predictions coming from climate bloggers.
Yep. This astoundingly ‘not even wrong’ post by Watts (and the usual lack of skepticism to it expressed by the peanut gallery over there) was pretty much predicted. As Tamino essentially says, there appears to be no lower bound to their collective stupidity.
I haven’t bothered to post there for about a year now, and never will again. Any reasonable post that doesn’t agree with their warped ideology just gets shouted down in the comments.
Reminds me of the joke about the guy who accused of killing his parents pleading with the judge to have mercy on him because he was an orphan.
I have to think that some time in the not so far future when the Arctic summer minimum is zero ice cover … that if so much as 1m2 of new ice reformed the following winter it would be trumpeted as a “stunningly infinite rate of ice recovery”.
Still we should welcome this new folly; even my 12 yr old can see through it.
Y’know, I really think I should start bookmarking the best of Anthony Watts’ posts; some of them are just so unintentionally hilarious that I’d rather like to be able to have his best work all neatly organized in a folder for ready access.
On another note, Dr. Inferno wasn’t the only one who predicted this response: http://hot-topic.co.nz/arctic-sea-ice-forecast-its-going-to-be-tough-to-stay-cool/ I’ve not been frequenting Watt’s blog lately, so I’m not sure if the last prediction there has been borne out.
better download them, they may try to hide the evidence when reality will smack so hard people will call them out. Unless there is a miracle and the Earth gets out the warming.
“The gain, it’s plain, stays mainly in the brain” — Professor Bloggins
Extent isn’t the best measure of melting as being “covered” in ice is defined by the NSIDC as 15% or more ice in a particular square. Wind spreading out the ice and maybe even melting some actually can lead to an increased extent.
Volume, on the other hand, would be a more direct measure. But until very recently that could only be modeled (PIOMAS) not measured directly.
This hilarious video of the “Downfall” of Watts and Goddard was made around the time of last summer’s Arctic sea ice minimum, but it still works today:
Goddard’s insanity is just like someone going on repeated crash diets, followed by binge eating. Lose 5 lbs, gain 8. Lose 6, gain 12. Lose 8, gain 15. Proudly proclaim “I’m losing more and more weight ever time I diet! What a great weight loss plan!”
So Steve Goddard isn’t even his real name? I’m so disappointed. With Tony Watts all so sensitive about posting under real names, “anonymous cowards” and all that. What’s really sad about this is the willingness of the crowd there to swallow it all, hook, line and sinker. Thinking of it, the number of people who can’t be reasoned with appears awefully large…
Here is what DeSmog blog says they know about “Steve Goddard”:
http://www.desmogblog.com/steven-goddard
Note that The Register’s 2008 article by this name does not indicate it is a pseudonym:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/15/goddard_arctic_ice_mystery/
First Smokey/dbs (or whatever) is uncovered to be a pseudonym and now Goddard? Are there any regular “blog scientists” over at WUWT (besides Watts himself) who are real? Do any of these guys appear at conferences?
Looks like theClimateScum and DenialDepot had Watts’ number:
“After a temporary decline in mid September that caused a lot of clamor and lamentations among the alarmists, the Arctic Sea ice has now made a stunning recovery to the levels it had at the beginning of September.” – http://theclimatescum.blogspot.com/2012/09/stunning-recovery-of-arctic-sea-ice.html
“Ice Age Alert: Unprecedented Arctic Sea Ice Freeze In Progress
Arctic Sea Ice Increases Past FOUR MILLION Square Kilometers For The First Time Since Records Began! IPCC big wigs will be in crisis talks with Al Gore tonight as Arctic Sea Ice unexpectedly froze past 4 million square kilometers for the first time in history according to Japanese Data [1]. The new data reveals the Earth to be in a Cooling Mode and undermines Anthropogenic Global Warming, which is revealed to be based on nothing less than the recently discredited Laws of Thermodynamics.” – http://denialdepot.blogspot.com/2012/09/ice-age-alert-unprecedented-arctic-sea.html
When the last living adult Dodo hatched her last viable egg, the headlines read:
“Dodo Population Doubles Overnight, Recovery Assured!
Mother Dodo and Daughter Doing Fine!”
exactly!
Although in many ways an excellent analogy, I would suggest that you need a talk with your mum on the subject of Where Eggs (and babies) Come From..
(Or just search the Internet on the subject)
(Actually, don’t)
The journalist wrote that headline with a dodo drumstick in his other hand.
I sure hope Intrade gets themselves legal for Americans again so I can go back to telling these dip-shits to put their money where their denier mouths are. Last year at this time, I was buying shares of “arctic sea ice extent for Sept to be below 4.3 million km sq” for less than $3 a share. I made a bundle on that one.
Of course when I go on the denier sites and challenge them to bet on it, they threaten to ban me. So, I guess they don’t really believe their own BS, since they’re not very willing to bet on it.
So Goddard is a real Poe (see his latest reply over at RealObama).
But in the meantime, Watts runs with it, hook, line and sinker.
Watts now invokes the Flying Spaghetti Monster (see his latest reply over at What’s Wrong With Watts?), AKA the Judge Judy defense, we don’t know what we don’t know what we don’t know …
From this, the real take away for Goddard is that every one of his 30/day posts are all Poe’s.
Meaning that he really likes Obama.
The take away for Watts has something to do with pyrite.
Links for the lazy?
There’s a great spoof of a hellfire preacher describing the End of Days, when the wicked confronted with everlasting hellfire will invoke the Judge Judy defence: We didn’t know We didn’t know We didn’t know ….
God in his infinite mercy will smile on them and say …
“Well, yez bluddy well know now …. “
I guess I always assumed they were doing some of this as a way of countering or providing equally silly examples to things that show up in the news and blogosphere all the time linking every recent climate happening or biological event to warming. I’m pretty sure they know that the reason the ice formed so quickly is that it is thin ice forming since last summer’s record minimum. They both posted the recent PIOMAS data that confirms the ice decrease is 75-80% since 1979-80.
The problem is, I don’t often see this ‘linking of everything to warming’. It’s something of a minefield for reporters, because the correct statement to come up with when, for instance standing in the middle of a flooded town* for the nth time this year is ‘We can probably expect more of this as global warming progresses’. If a reporter simplifies that to ‘this is a result of global warming’ then that’s an oversimplification.
The idea that something like this can be ‘countered’ by basically making stuff up, and setting out to mislead is crazy.
Look at it this way: If I call the Earth a sphere, I am technically wrong, but it’s an understandable simplification of ‘Oblate Spheroid’. This does not mean that the flat earth society has a duty to put out propaganda claiming that the Earth is flat, basing this on the number of Internet references to the world being supported by a giant turtle.
Andrew,
I am talking about people in the media, politics, and some who should know better with scientific training that try to link Sandy, or even worse, a heavy snowfall to global warming. It is possible there is a link but climate data is noisy and no one should be attributing single weather events either way.
I am definitely a lukewarmer. I have a background in science (PhD in Biophysical Chemistry) so I am well versed in all three basic sciences. I teach topics such as IR absorbance and pH and molecular evolution. And I see a lot of crap out there on both sides, not as much in the peer-reviewed literature, obviously, but people on both sides will make ridiculous claims. And this is not limited to climate science. In a research field I trained in, there was a concept called a “molten globule”. For about five years, hundreds of papers used this in their titles and abstracts, but it is a very vague term with little real meaning (in my opinion). It used to frustrate me to no end that people would throw this term into their paper just because it was a fad and they thought it would help get it published or help them get funding. Then over another 5 years, it slowly decreased in use and now it is not used much any more. It is still just as valuable now as it originally was – an interesting concept that contains a grain of truth- but does not really lead anywhere.
Bill –
I don’t think that there is a comparison there. It’s one thing saying that a particular weather event has been made worse by global warming, or is an example of something we expect to see more of under global warming, against simply making things up.
Indeed, I’d like to see sources where events like heavy snowfall or hurricane sandy are blamed directly on global warming without qualification or equivocation, even in the media.
As a more scientific example, I don’t see anyone claiming a charney sensitivity for CO2 doubling of over 4K, yet I see many ‘lukewarmers’ claiming a sensitivity of 2K or even lower.
Yeah Bill, I just saw that post on WUWT about the PIOMAS data too. Funny thing is, Watts would usually precede something (i.e. actual science) that goes against the grain of the BS he preaches with some snarky comments that diss what follows, but he didn’t. Not even in the post headline:
Ice loss model verification via satellite observations
Wait. Stop the presses. Watts is agreeing with what *models* are telling us?! Showed his true hand at the very end though, with this little nugget:
It looks to me like PIOMAS volume loss is, for the year 2012, 51% since 1979, not 75-80%.
[Response: The annual minimum volume has declined 75-80%.]
“Most Ice Gain Ever Recorded”!
This one tops’em all.
What next? “Air conditioning never cooled more than this Summer”?
Alexandre
My own favourite is the UK Minister for Health some years ago who boasted that there had never been so many people in hospital.
And from the BBC, showing that Watts and his crew are truly clueless:
The smaller relative decline in winter volume highlights an interesting “negative feedback”.
“Thin ice grows more quickly than thick ice in the winter. Ice acts as an insulator – the thinner the ice, the more heat can be lost to the atmosphere and the faster the water beneath the ice can freeze,” Dr Giles told BBC News.
“But even with an increased ice growth during the winter, we can see from the Cryosat data that it’s still not fully compensating for the deep summer melt.”
Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21437680
—
stevengoddard says:
February 13, 2013 at 7:36 pm
Obviously this was going to happen. The delta is the difference between the minimum and maximum. A smaller minimum means a larger delta.
The point of this post is that I am making fun of the idiots who only care about ice extent for two weeks in September.
—
His response to one ‘pandy’ who posted Dr Inferno’s prediction. He beat you to that one, Tamino ;)
/cRR
Goddard calling anyone an idiot is rather amusing. I recall his own prediction last summer that the big storm was calling to “halt” the summer melt. Some smart dude at work on that one…
“…an increased ice growth during the winter…”
An interesting phrase, in that it’s true in the sense that *re*-growth occurs more quickly with more (and more northerly) open water ‘available’; but false if interpreted to mean that there is year-on-year growth during the winter. As Tamino has shown repeatedly, it is very clear in the data that the winter sea ice metrics continue to decline.
(It’s not surprising, either, since it’s pretty clear that high Arctic winter temps show a long-term increase–even if the station data are sparse and there are homogeneity issues with the reanalysis quasi-data. There are, after all, two sides to sea ice mass balance: summer melt and winter accumulation. Warmer temps–be they ever so icy by temperate standards–mean lower heat fluxes and slower freeze rates, hence thinner ice to start melt season. Or so I have it modeled in my head, anyway.)
Why bother even discussing this rubbish? It only encourages them.
Unqualified people such as Watts et al do not care about being correct, only about being noticed. Much like naughty children who deliberately misbehave.
My advice is to ignore them and focus on more substantial issues. Or at least focus on what people with qualifications are saying (e.g. Lindzen, Curry etc.)
Hear hear!
Someone has to call them out on their daily misrepresentation of the science and outright lies. In fact, Watts is becoming more strident every week. Open Mind and other science-based sites like Skeptical Science perform a valuable public service in making these debunkings a matter of record. Also, SIWOTI:
http://xkcd.com/386/
“Ice-crystalarmism”
— by Horatio Algeranon
Greenland doesn’t melt
GRACE is just illusion
Glaciers on the belt
Are ultrapure confusion
We really needn’t worry
If sea-ice melts away
There really is no hurry
To cut CO2 today
Anthony Watts is a paid operative of the California GOP. This is a matter of public record. I’ve stated this before, and invited others to research it for themselves. Why so much debate over his motivations?
What public record? (Specifically.) An accusation like this needs solid proof.
Yes, you’d certainly want proof before smearing the good name of the Republicans by suggesting that they’d associate themselves with Mr Watts ;-)
Best (no pun intended) I could find:
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Anthony_Watts
Sourcewatch makes it easy to follow the trail, and provides plenty of links for those claiming bias. Very useful. Thanks Kevin
I’d forgotten about the banned video!
“Watts”
— by Horatio Algeranon
They label bulbs in “Watts”
Energy used per unit time
But brightness it is not
Especially on the clime
My comment will be number 89 on this topic. Wonder how many people are reading these comments and crossreferencing the claims on WUWT. Certainly will improve the hits on that site. Unfortunately I went there as well and noticed that they have increased their advertising revenue substantially. While Watts is away (hiding under the table or pushed out?), he has some other prominent clowns doing the dirty denial deeds. They must keep winning those blogging logies, cause the public prefers denial over acceptance. After all, even here, we would applaud a true scientific study, which proves conclusively that humanity is not causing any harm to the planet, so that we may continue to consume more electricity, use better computers, improve our networks and continue blogging.
So far, it looks like, mitigation ( i.e. running away ) remains the best plan of action.
Theo,
Given that it is GLOBAL warming, what planet were you planning on emigrating to? ;-)
My confidence in humanity actually doing anything to fix current the current climate fluctuations, is at an all time low. Our greed profile does not support that. Finding some alternative real estate, would be a handy achievement, but not likely in my lifetime. Sorry, I should have said (hiding) i.e. carving out a quiet spot to watch the proceedings. If more of those, who believe that global warming is real, started acting like me, it, in itself, might send a strong message to the rest of the population.
I do agree that visiting WUWT is not worthwhile for us commenters and responding there just increases their traffic. Your other point is difficult.
What I mean is, who goes first and how much in the doing without stakes? You? Me? Why should we do that while the rest of the population goes crazy over infotainment and lets advertisers lead them on? I don’t agree with those who say we don’t need to learn restraint and share, but I don’t see how that is going to play out in an ever more polarized population bent on blaming other people for their problems.*
I agree that heading north and finding some nice southern hillside for passive solar with a food garden as the heating unit is attractive, but will be only a temporary solution. When people get desperate, the ones with guns will take over whatever they can find.
This is a nice snapshot of the heyday of the problem:
(See the USA in your Chevrolet
America’s the greatest land of all ….)
Thanks, Susan, I enjoyed that link very much and the song, humming through my brain, provided a nice distraction from days of reading flood gauges and interpreting radar loops.
I am near the east coast in Aus and so far, this year, we have had the biggest heat wave followed by a record flood. Right now, less than 4 weeks later, we are at it again. Trying to predict, if my friends in town are going to sleep dry tonight. Considering the amount of water I am delivering, it is not likely.
My place is VERY remote and I hope that my arrows will prove to be more sustainable than their bullets :)