JoNova

The Green Blob must be hating this. It’s the worst kind of momentum shift…

In 2008 the main US Presidential contenders were all supporters or “the free market solution” for carbon (called cap n’ trade in the US). But in 2015 the political landscape cracked, and now they’re going out of their way to reverse that. It’s now seen as a bad thing to look like a gullible patsy for Big Green.

How times have changed.

U.S. Republicans Increasingly Sceptical Of Climate Alarm

Amy Harder and Beth Reinhard, The Wall Street Journal

GOP presidential candidates who had generally accepted the scientific consensus on climate change have said recently that it is unclear how much, if at all, humans are contributing to warmer temperatures.

Shortly after a conservative website on Wednesday posted 2008 footage of Sen. Marco Rubio backing a cap-and-trade program to combat climate change, his campaign roared back with a counterattack that included an entire web page aimed at debunking the video.

In media-speak, this is not so much about Republicans waking up to something, it’s Obama’s fault:

Mr. Rubio’s muscular response revealed how toxic the issue of climate change has […]

Experts say that climate change is the worst threat we face, except for the worse ones.

Scientists warn over super-volcano threat

Experts at the European Science Foundation said volcanoes – especially super-volcanoes like the one at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, which has a caldera measuring 34 by 45 miles (55 by 72 km) – pose more threat to Earth and the survival of humans than asteroids, earthquakes, nuclear war and global warming.

What could be worse than 1.5 degrees of warming?

[After] … a major eruption, the team said, millions of people would die and earth’s atmosphere would be poisoned with ash and other toxins “beyond the imagination of anything man’s activity and global warming could do over 1,000 years.

We are talking about an “extinction-level event”:

Experts at the European Science Foundation said volcanoes – especially super-volcanoes like the one at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, which has a caldera measuring 34 by 45 miles (55 by 72 km) – pose more threat to Earth and the survival of humans than asteroids, earthquakes, nuclear war and global warming.

But the UN and Obama will save us right?

There are few real contingency […]

Once there were no storms, the climate was perfect and everyone was nice to each other. Then people got air conditioners to make the climate even more perfect, and God was not happy. Along came droughts, floods and plagues and everyone got post traumatic stress disorder.

Humans are just not designed to live in a world where the seas rise 1mm a year. (What,we can’t run fast enough?)

The news on our mental health is dire according to a report from the National Wildlife Foundation (on climate change only the Experts are right, but in other fields, anyone can have a stab, right?).

In America, 200 Million People Will Suffer ‘Psychological Distress’ From Climate Change

So Grok hid in a cave and made it through an ice age, but the modern pajama-boy will have a panic attack if the world warms by one degree.

Hands up who wants a paleolithic health-plan? Their babies died of dysentery. They ate snake soup or they starved, but somehow the tough-nuts who survived evolved into Five Star Pansies.

“The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States,” examines the hitherto undiscussed effects of increasingly prevalent extreme weather, sea level rise, drought […]

Bit by bit, smart and influential thinkers are shifting. We’re seeing more and more of this type of exposition from people who are becoming skeptical. How much longer can the big bluff be maintained in the face of this kind of deep, considered and independent analysis?

Mike Van Biezen is a physics, maths and astronomy lecturer in the US. Until seven years ago, he accepted the premise that adding massive amounts of CO2 to the air would cause temperatures to rise. Then he noticed the slip in global temperatures from 1940-1980 and “could not ignore this subtle hint”. He did a lot of investigating over the ensuing years and has condensed that into ten very well written points. Like point 9: “It was so warm 4000 years ago that many of the glaciers around the world didn’t exist.” But things got so cold 150 years ago, people were afraid of glaciers and were asking “local bishops and even the Pope in Rome to come and pray in front of these glaciers in the hope of stopping their unrelenting advance.”

I also found point 7, and 10 particularly worth discussing. Point 10 is the one that he says captures the attention […]