Science and the Dangerous Climate Question - NYTimes.com

Richard Betts, the head of the climate impacts section of Britain’s Met Office, recently left a comment on the “skeptic”* blog Bishop Hill stating that thresholds for climate danger, such as the much ballyhooed 2-degree limit enshrined in recent climate pledges, were not determined by science:

“Dangerous” is a value judgement, and the relationship between any particular level of global mean temperature rise and impacts on society are fraught with uncertainties, including the nature of regional climate responses and the vulnerability/resilience of society.

That’s a point I’ve made for a long time, and has been echoed by, among others, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford (read his reference to the philosopher David Hume). Gavin Schmidt wrote a valuable Realclimate post back in 2006 noting a variety of issues with “runaway tipping points of no return.”

...* The word skeptic above is in quotation marks because it’s a term that has been co-opted by those challenging science pointing to disruptive human-driven global warming, implying that those with different views are not seriously appraising evidence.

Mt Rainier - Up to six feet (almost 2 meters) of snow during next two days

Remember those words, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”? Four feet of snow (122 cm) on Thursday, perhaps another two feet (61 cm) on Friday.

When the BEST Ain’t Good Enough, Make Stuff Up » Climate Resistance

...BEST says nothing about any of these things, of course. Sceptics weren’t ‘denying’ that the world had warmed. The debate wasn’t divided between climate science and its critics. And ‘Climategate’ remains an embarrassment to those who refused to release data (or concealed it) and its methodology, as Muller explained. Science cannot end the climate debate, because the climate debate has very little to do with science.

Warmists say 10 years of non-warming proves nothing. Give them another seven years | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

Frustrated by a decade of non-warming, warmists set a date. In 2018 we’ll know if the climate models are right and man really is heating the world as they claimed