Bonmot,

It is disingenuous to select a part of my comment and misrepresent its content and main point. Therefore, I’ll post it below in two comments (because it exceeds the word limit). Hopefully, most other readers will realise how this demonstrates, not only that you intentionally misrepresented what I said, but also you do not understand what is important. You completely avoided the point of the comment which is that CAGW alarmists need to show the relevance of their scaremongering in terms of impacts.

<blockquote> When did the planet last warm 3 degrees C in a few centuries? And how did life cope with that?</blockquote>

I find these sorts of comments/questions unpersuasive because of the inconsistency in what the Alarmists claim are the most important impacts of warming. Here are some of the impacts people pick from:
• Rapid sea level rise
• Magnitude of sea level rise by 2100
• Extreme weather events
• Fatalities from hot weather events (they ignore the reduction in fatalities cause by less cold events)
• Loss of glaciers and loss of reliable fresh water supplies
• Reduced alkalinity of the oceans
• Polar bears drowning

And, on this occasion, you’ve chosen to pick on mass extinctions.

I find it frustrating that the climate science ‘consensusts’ has been unable to put it all together and state their projections of the net economic costs and benefits over time for any given temperature projection scenario. Without that I cannot take your cherry picked argument about mass extinctions seriously.

There are other reasons too why I find your comment/questions unpersuasive. The amount and rate of extinctions caused by CO2 is already, and will be in the future, negligible compared with the extinctions caused by habitat destruction from other causes. So your argument is a distraction and a diversion from what is important. Mitigating CO2 emissions would cause us to waste our wealth on polices for a cherry picked, but relatively unimportant, threat (when considered in proper perspective).

cont...

cont ...

Another point, comparison of present and past rates of warming are meaningless because we have temperature readings at much closer time scales now than we have for the past.

Furthermore, we know from Greenland ice cores that rates of temperature change were much faster in the past than now. Importantly, life thrived when it warmed but died out when it cooled. This shows life prefers warmer. I realise the Greenland ice cores refer to local temperature changes. But so what? Life responds to local changes not global changes. So the rapid local changes demonstrate that life prefers warmer and warming.

All in all I am far from persuaded that warming is a serious threat in the next 50 or even 100 years. On the other hand, the consequences for human well-being of the mitigation polices advocated by CAGW Alarmists – such as CO2 pricing and mandated renewable energy – would be very bad.

Furthermore, I am persuaded that we will cut emissions automatically without damaging the economy. It will happen faster when the ‘Progressives’ stop blocking progress – either because a significant proportion of them realise the damaging consequences of the policies they promote, or because they are sidelined by the majority of rational and objective people.

In summary, I’d urge you to put all the costs and benefits of projected damages together and time phase them – rather than pick out one scaremongering scenario at a time, each time loaded up with scary adjectives. It’s totally off-putting. I just dismiss this sort of comments as more nonsense.

Here, let me help you Peter:

http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/05/week-in-review-10512/#comment-248986

and;

http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/05/week-in-review-10512/#comment-249025

and;

http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/05/week-in-review-10512/#comment-249031

and Déjà vu;

http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/05/week-in-review-10512/#comment-249041

we get the drift.

You may have difficulty with the concept of a "squealing" planet, but just maybe you will look-it-up and factor that into your cost-benefit analysis.

___

Post/word limits may have got the better of you, but moving on:

Re: the "stealth war".

The comment is in response to this article:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/09/27/169856/stalling-science-threatens-every.html

For example, would it not be prudent to increase (or at least maintain) funding NASA research into Earth's climate system?

As it is, the US Republicans want to slash and burn this particular research. Why do you think that is?

Before you answer, consider your response in light of your comment above about politics, money and the humanities.

The idea that public funding of research is essential and superior, compared with private and entrepreneurial funding is critiqued here:

http://www.the-rathouse.com/2010/Kealey-EconomicsofScience.html

In particular, the vast public funding of climate science under the auspices of the exegenices of AGW has been a catastrophe with nothing but failed modelling to show for the billions wasted.

While this fraud on the public has been conducted a small band of independent, true scientists, have, without fanfare or funding and in the face of pig in the trough opposition from the establishment, produced compelling and cogent evidence against the deceit of AGW; here is a prime example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CM7IUkvT_Zg

AGW is establishment ideology supported by an infrastructure of parasitic bureacracies from the UN down and crony capitalism; so entrenched is this blight that I doubt whether a change of government, here in Australia and the US will be sufficient to eradicate it, at least in one term.

Oh, and this excerpt, Peter:

@ "Its so bleeding obvious, why can’t the Loony Left nutters understand it?"

http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/05/week-in-review-10512/#comment-248995

Peter, you could/should have included "Loony Right nutters" as well - sort of skews your biases, right?

Btw, here's an example of some good stealth spending:

http://berkeleyearth.org/donors/

with some not so unsurprising results:

http://berkeleyearth.org/results-summary/

Neither BEST 1 or BEST 2, Muller's supposed definitive analysis of temperature trends, are published and in fact have been rejected in their original form by peer review.

There are many faults with the BESTs but the primary one is their treatment of Urban Heat Island effect [UHI].

BEST eliminates UHI from consideration by the very construction of their “New Mathematical Framework” for analyzing temperature data [Described here in their methodology document “Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process”];

http://berkeleyearth.org/pdf/berkeley-earth-averaging-process.pdf

When you look at equations 1 and 2 (on page 7) of the linked document, you see that the only non stationary effect acknowledged on a temperature series is defined as Global Temperature Change. That is, any effect that doesn’t average to zero over a few years is defined as a change in Global Temperature.

Since, in the real world, UHI is non-stationary (populations continue to grow), the “New Mathematical Framework” guarentees that UHI will be considered to be “Global Warming”.

Therefore any temperature increase which is due to UHI will be erroneously classififed as being due to AGW by the BEST methodology