2012 shaping up to be warmest year on record for continental U.S.

I once half-wrote and then got too distracted to finish an essay outlining the Five Claims that AGW alarmists must prove to justify their hysteria.

I should dig it out somewhere, but from memory, it was:

1. That Global Warming Exists.
This is their strongest point (though it still remains fairly weak), so it’s the one they like to emphasize. Yeah, the temperature has gone up about one degree over the last century and a half, at least if we can trust the numbers coming out of a politicized field (which I don’t, but that’s a different story).

2. That Global Warming Is Extreme.
FAIL. The “Hockey Stick Graph” was proven to be bogus. The temperature rise is actually comparably mild compared to historical precedents. Nothing stays exactly the same. Up a little, down a little, up a lot, down a lot, over the centuries, millennia, epochs. And life goes on. Big deal. Variation is normal.

3. That Global Warming Was Entirely Human-Caused.
MOSTLY FAIL. Almost impossible to prove this, since we have no “comparison Earth” with no people on it as a control test subject. Mostly likely we contributed a little bit to the warming, but most of that happened long long ago during the Industrial Revolution, when there were no emissions controls of any kind, and we may have changed the composition of the atmosphere to some small degree on a centuries-long scale. But there’s nothing we can do about that now (even if we wanted to, which we don’t). But the other 90+% of the cause of the small warming we’ve seen is due to natural causes beyond our control.

4. That Global Warming Won’t Be Naturally Corrected Cyclically.
Again, FAIL. Even the Gaia Theory posited that the Earth’s ecosystem will ALWAYS right itself and naturally come back into balance even if put under great strain. So we could spew out coal smoke like in Pittsburgh and Manchester in the 1880s and do it for a thousand years, and come back a millennium later, and everything would be back to normal. Asteroids hit the earth and cause sky-darkening that wipe out the dinosaurs…and everything later returned to normal. The sun went through variations and essentially scorched the Earth in the distant past…and everything eventually returned to normal. That’s nature.

… and in my opinion, the most important:

5. That Global Warming Is Bad for the Globe, Overall.
MASSIVE FAIL. The don’t call it the “Greenhouse Effect” for nothing. What are greenhouses for? Growing more plants! As the temperature goes up, more rain fails, and over time more of the Earth will be converted to tropical rainforest. Arctic regions would become temperate. Greater biodiversity, more plant life, and thus more animal life, an explosion of species, and a boon to existing species. The ONLY species that might suffer under this scenario are a handful of purely arctic species who can only exist in freezing temperatures. (And even they can adapt, mostly: Polar bears do fine when on green land as opposed to ice floes.) But the alarmists try to focus on the few species that will suffer, and don’t want you to notice that the rest of the planet will BENEFIT from global warming!

Zombie on October 10, 2012 at 8:14 PM