naked capitalism

now here man says:

And science moves quickly, nowhereman: yer link is 8 years old.

dunkelblau says:

Yves, yes but WHY were Iceland’s women “only marginal players in the power structure”?
Perhaps they are not paragons of virtue, and they simply ran into the glass ceiling.
Or perhaps they failed to rise not because of discrimination but because they
were determined not to sacrifice their virtue? My admittedly limited understanding
of Nordic culture suggests to me that the latter interpretation is more plausible.
And as for “playing it up”, I suspect that any investment banker who has remnants of
a conscience would love to be involved in an undertaking where doing the right thing
garners public accolades.

rickstersherpa says:

I almost became a geologist, before I was tempted away into law. When you have a science that is impacting on lots of money and cherished beliefs, you really can’t keep the politics out of it. Especially, when the libertarians and neo-cons do have a half-truth that their political adversaries on the Left tend to want to believe the worse about human caused global warming and ignore the variability of the Earth’s climate and the liklihood that current period remains part of an Ice Age, at least until we showed up. But we have shown-up.

And we are putting CO2 and other global warming gases into the atmosphere at the rate equal to 16 new volcanoes erupting annually.

Now, dear deniers, the Earth’s climate is a complex thing, but the remarkable thing about it over the last 2 billion years, since the transition from predominately CO2 and water vapor to Oxygen and Nitrogen, has been how stable the system has been. Just like the porridge in Goldilocks, it is not to warm and not to cold. But there have been a few major disturbances during that time and each time they have been surprisingly fast changes and changes driven by changes in Co2 levels, from Snowball Earth, when CO2 feel to low, to the the Permian extinction event when it apparently rose to high.

Getting back from deep time to near time, the Earth has been cooling since India began to slam into Asia in the late Miocene, primarily through the uplift of the Himalaya, which by chemical weathering removes CO2 from the atmosphere. See http://www.palaeos.com/Cenozoic/Miocene/Miocene.htm

Eventually, this reduction of CO2, along with the isolation of Antartica, the circumpolar current, and the isolation of the Artic by continental drift, left the Earth vulnernable to ice ages when the amount of solar energy it received fell by a few percent as the result of the permuatations and oscillations in its orbit of the sun and spin on its axis. But one of the results of widespread glaciation is that in covering exposed rock. Thereby the glaciers reduce CO2 capture by chemical weathering, CO2 starts to increase in the atmosphere and that, along the eventual increase of solar energy during a new stage in the orbital and axial cycles, causes the glaciers to retreat. But we are still in an Ice Age. At least we were until we came around.

Now, we ourselves are a huge natural force; our human mind has created a technolgy that pumps the equivalent of 16 average volcanoes worth of CO2 a year into the atmosphere. Nothing like this has been since the end of the Permian when the Deccan and Siberian traps were created in two of the largest volcanic events of since the Cambrian occurred. Since this was also the worse extinction event in the history of life on this planet, a human experiment to see if the result can be repeated is probably not a wise idea. The fact remains, geologically, that the biggest driver of climate has been CO2 level; when it rises rapidly, Earth’s climate rapidly warms; when it falls, the climate cools.

The stolen e-mails appear to be arguments about the last 1,000 years of temperture data, which for the most part is derived from indirect evidence and is based on inferences and starting points, and the inferences and starting points can be shaped by the particular scienctist political beliefs. A scientist who does not want to accept human caused global warming can probably find lots of nit-noid matters to dispute, especially if they ignore the human caused countervailing effects of increasing sulfur dioxide and particulates, the cooling effect of which can, for a short period of time, off-set the CO2 and other heat trapping gases.

Libertarians believe every autonmous human being should be free to do as he or she likes, preferably for profit, as long as he or she is not harming another. Hence their hatred for the idea that human beings can adversely affect the environment because by definition, human being pursuing their personal profit while dumping adverse materials into the environment means harming others and that makes such behavior subject to regulation either under system of ethics based on cost-benefit anaylsis if one is applying strictly utilitarian ethics (but still allowing State interference where the costs outweigh the benefits) or an imperative for the State regulation to prevent harm if one is a Kantian or religiously based in his or her morality (”what thou does to the least of thy brothers, that thou doest to me”).

This hack into a facility and theft of property (something libertarians usually frown upon, but “ends justify the means” I guess), will give Faux News and the right wing blogosphere lots of talking points the next few weeks, but it does not change the physical facts. And the fact remains, far more people have made fortunes as climate deniers as global warming advocates (Gore made his money by his media investments and speeches, not his environmental activism, which appears to be a loss leader.)

Jack says:

Greenland glaciers are far greater in extent than a few hundred years ago. Mt. Shasta glacier is growing in CA. Global temps have stopped warming for 11 years.

Ice is growing in the Antarctic. Ice in the Arctic experienced a minimum in 2007 but is also growing thicker and in extent.

Stick to economics, Yves. Your climatology is way off base ( to put it gently).