It's the CO2 Stupid!

As the Green Lantern over at Slate concludes in a very nice job of explaining why water vapor is a feedback and not a forcing of climate change to the warm side:

There are many skeptical assertions worth engaging, such as the questionable efficacy of carbon offsets and the potential for our species to endure moderate warming in exchange for greater economic growth. But the water-vapor argument is designed only to mislead, taking a kernel of scientific truth and blowing it up into a risible call to inaction. And so the Lantern vows to continue blathering on about CO2.

Repeating this tired canard is a feedback loop itself: stuck on stupid.

350 ppm

We are at 383 ppm of CO2 and climbing. At least we're homing in on the right number. Three hundred and fifty is the number every person needs to know. The tipping point is lowering.

Hansen's Warning

Many critics of anthropogenic global warming find the new report from the IPCC too radical, but experts like James Hansen and his team at NASA have found a flaw, and that is in sea level rise predictions. They are too rosy given what we know about the instability of ice sheets found in the evidence of Earth's history.

British columnist George Monbiot found this dichotomy last summer with chilling effect.

Reading a scientific paper on the train this weekend, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James Hansen at Nasa, it suggests that the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could be absurdly optimistic(1).

Hansen’s paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn’t fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees above today’s level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimetres but by 25 metres. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature(3).

It's a damn shame idiots like this get more readers than our smartest people. My advice is follow the former. Do it now.

And Then There Was One Little Piggy

Corrupt Bush administration natural resource cronies that is. Timber lobbyist Mark Rey threatened with jail time. Quite a crew this bunch, yep. Norton, Griles, Cooney, the list of industry shills is running out faster than the time left in this Bush family debacle dog an crony show. Like sands through the hourglass so go the shills of our lives. Good riddance!

Bush League Science

Now, he said, "decisions that come out of Fish and Wildlife ignore the science and fabricate evidence in the crudest, most unsophisticated way."

Now they're catching on. The list of industry lobbying lackeys dwindles as I write this. The clock is ticking. Why can't a scientist get a political appointed job? Because they'd follow the science where it leads.

A Shot Heard Round the World

"The people of Massachusetts took great risk, for the sake of themselves and their progeny, when they drew a line with the British at Lexington and Concord. It is time for a line to be drawn with the powerful special interests, who reap profits from our fossil-fuel addiction."

James Hansen of NASA nails the Massachusetts Senate for giving a pass to a coal fired power plant up for relicensing. Coal is a greater theat to our environmental health than anything else. It lays waste to our air, laces our fisheries with mercury, makes the planet hotter and makes our climate more volatile and prone to catastrophic local events. Utilities must be held to task and what better place than the Lexington Common?