Climate Common Sense: Dill of the week

As an Aussie I am used to being embarrassed by our politicians but the cringe meter reached a new high when I saw the Trade Minister making a huge joke over the introduction of a tax which will strike at the heart of our economy and at vulnerable people. The minister should go back to his village because they are short one at the moment.

Not content with one abysmal performance he repeated it in Adelaide  and later in Canberra he did an encore .

Heartland Replies to the Union of Concerned Scientists

But really, we would rather get back to debating the science and economics of climate change. This is where we really excel and are clearly winning. The alarmists can’t prove that man-made global warming is a crisis. All they have to offer is fear, exaggerations, outright lies, and now attacks on the donors to their opponents. Give it rest, guys! Either debate us, or get off the field.

Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » Cost of Green

In its defense, the Navy Secretary said, “”Of course it costs more.  It’s a new technology. If we didn’t pay a little bit more for new technologies, we’d still be using typewriters instead of computers.”  Of course, the switch from typewriters to computers proceeded without government mandates (or taxes, as they are called now) and in fact was led by the private sector — the government trailed in this transition.  Further, people paid the extra money for a computer because they found real value in it (document storage, easy editing, font flexibility).  What real value is the Navy getting for the extra $22 a gallon?  How much better will this task force perform?  The answer, of course, is zero.

We Are All 'Climate Test Dummies' Now, Providing Data On How Humans Respond To Extreme Weather | ThinkProgress

We have turned ourselves into test subjects for the single most terrifying “crash” the world will ever know — the crash of a livable climate...

I expect that future generations will look at all this great CTD data we have accumulated and conclude that starting around 2010, global warming and Arctic sea ice loss caused a quantum jump in extreme weather

The Nation - ‘Climate Change mitigation must include children’

Environmental experts have advocated the need to develop strategic plans which emphasise the importance, not only of recognising children as key stakeholders in the policy-making process, but also of promoting environmental education for sustainable development as a means of enabling future leaders to find innovative solutions to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change and environmental degradation in their lives and communities.

Giant Wildfire Started During Bachelor Party | The Smoking Gun

JULY 2---The largest wildfire burning in Arizona was started during a bachelor party when one shotgun-toting celebrant fired a shell that promises to shoot “100 feet of fire, setting everything in its path ablaze,” The Smoking Gun has learned.

Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting: From the Big Bang to the Big Controversy (aka Climate Change) | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network

As he took the stage for his turn, Gieavar’s immediate remark was, “I am happy I’m allowed to speak for myself.” He derided the Nobel committees for awarding Al Gore and R.K. Pachauri a peace prize, and called agreement with the evidence of climate change a “religion.” In contrast to Crutzen and Molina, Gieavar found the measurement of the global average temperature rise of 0.8 degrees over 150 years remarkably unlikely to be accurate, because of the difficulties with precision for such measurements—and small enough not to matter in any case: “What does it mean that the temperature has gone up 0.8 degrees? Probably nothing.” He disagreed that carbon dioxide was involved and showed several charts that asserted, among other things, that climate had even cooled. “I pick and choose when I give this talk just the way the previous speaker picked and chose when he gave his talk,” he added. He finished with a pronouncement: “Is climate change pseudoscience? If I’m going to answer the question, the answer is: absolutely.”

The Rude Pundit: Reality Vs. Blindness on Climate Change - Democratic Underground

Here's a story that didn't get much play from late last week: Cracks developed in the walls of a pretty new subway station in lower Manhattan. Shitty construction, yes, always, welcome to the world of corrupt contracting and subcontracting and sub-subcontracting on the taxpayer's dime. But there's another reason that the CEO of Metropolitan Transit Authority says that leaks are visible at the South Ferry station, completed in 2009: "(W)hat's also happening is that the water table is rising."

Did you catch that? The guy in charge of the MTA states, as fact, that rising sea levels are responsible, in part, for the leaks in walls of the subway because, apparently, the original 2005 plans didn't take into account that New York Harbor would be a bit deeper in the coming years.

Effects of Climate Change Hit Home | Bob Keefe's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC

just like the equally bizarre blizzards that greeted me with a record six feet of snow upon my arrival to Washington in 2010, it’s clear, as you can read in this piece, that global warming plays a role in severe weather.

Think the Washington storms and Colorado wildfires are isolated incidents? Talk to the people still recovering from tornadoes in Joplin, Mo. or Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf of Mexico or the 2011 Mississippi River floods that killed nearly 400 people.