Hal Lindsey is that You?

Armageddon: only sex sells better.

I've mentioned that when it comes to global warming I am a "Lukewarmist."

Yes, I think global warming is happening.
Yes, I believe that humanity is at least partially responsible as the driver of this phenomenon.
No, I do not think the alarmists know as much as they think they know.

I say this because science is about making predictions and testing the validity of our theories upon whether, how, and when those predictions pan out.  Climate science has a pretty poor track record in this department.

Essentially, it becomes a battle against fundamentalists.  Fundamentalists who believe they are doing what is necessary to save our souls planet.

Tom Hartsford over at Real Clear Science describes the problem better than I can in this recent article.

Predictions are made by building models using the smartest simplifications we have thought of and running them on the most powerful computers ever built. Basically, it's the best we can do right now. 

But there is a major failure of science going on. 

The failure is the lack of transparency and honesty about how feeble these models are and how much we should stake on their all-too-fallible forecasts. Thus the same problem continues: climate science has once again botched a prediction that its models were underequipped to make. 

It seems that there can be no moderate and honest discussion of this issue. Skeptics are singled out in creepy enemies lists. Actually, we're now supposed to call them deniers, as though they were disputing the existence of HIV or the holocaust. Numerous scientists, as well as senators,anti-vaccination Kennedys, and clickbait purveyors have even called for the imprisonment and legal prosecution of those who disagree with them. 

Climate science acts like it is fighting a holy war. There are only those who are just and those who must be silenced and stopped at all costs. Anyone who mounts reasonable logical, empirical, or skeptical challenges to the orthodoxy must be ruined, not by counterfactual evidence, but by vicious attack.

The problem is not with the science per sea.  It is a problem of thinly veiled hubris.

What is, has been

and will be again.

Evidence that Earth’s first mass extinction was caused by critters,

In the popular mind, mass extinctions are associated with catastrophic events, like giant meteorite impacts and volcanic super-eruptions. But the world’s first known mass extinction, which took place about 540 million years ago, now appears to have had a more subtle cause: evolution itself.

“People have been slow to recognize that biological organisms can also drive mass extinction,” said Simon Darroch, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University. “But our comparative study of several communities of Ediacarans, the world’s first multicellular organisms, strongly supports the hypothesis that it was the appearance of complex animals capable of altering their environments, which we define as ‘ecosystem engineers,’ that resulted in the Ediacaran’s disappearance.”

One creature's poison is another's energy source

The earliest life on Earth consisted of microbes – various types of single-celled microorganisms. They ruled the Earth for more than 3 billion years. Then some of these microorganisms discovered how to capture the energy in sunlight. The photosynthetic process that they developed had a toxic byproduct: oxygen. Oxygen was poisonous to most microbes that had evolved in an oxygen-free environment, making it the world’s first pollutant.

Now I am still a "luke-warmist" when it comes to the whole climate debate but even if I am wrong, I'm thinking we'll leave behind some cooler fossils than those plain Jane Ediacarans.  

Say it ain't so Joe!

The BBC travels to coffee producing areas of the world and asks about the impacts of climate change on our favorite caffeinated beverage.  Their findings are more predictable than tomorrow's weather forecast.

Where farmers once enjoyed stable, mild conditions, the temperature now seesaws between cold that stunts growth, and heat that dries the berries before they can be harvested. Then there are the hurricanes and landslides; sometimes, the mud can swallow up plantations. As one farmer put it: “The weather is very strange. Strange things come that we didn’t see before.”

Concerning climate change I would place my own position as among the so-called "Luke-Warmers."  Yes, there is evidence for human generated climate change.  As for the apocalyptic conclusions of some climate change true believers, I remain unconvinced.  The data set available to us is small, I have seen more years of weather than we have satellite measurements and the models scientist have offered have yet to provide predictions born out by observation: the gold standard of science.

To paraphrase the eternal words of Nick Fury, " Until such time as the world ends, I will act as though it intends to spin on."

So about coffee color me yet to be convinced.  The BBC article contains the standard line of logic of most climate change stories to hit the internet,

Using the latest figures for climate change across the globe, Bunn’s calculations predict that the land suited to farming Arabica could drop by as much as 50% by 2050. Classic coffee-producing regions, such as Vietnam, India and most of Central America, will be hit particularly hard.

Again, up until this point those predictions have not proven themselves reliable so I am skeptical about accepting conclusions based upon those models.  



Climate change is real I just don't believe we know enough to claim the apocalypse is upon us. I am fairly confident that it will impact my life and the life of my children.  I know government response to mitigate the threat will impact my life and that of my children. It will have it's own unintended consequences: some of those might be deadly in their own right.

I do not know what percentage of blame for the climate goes to the human contribution of warming gases to the atmosphere and what percentage goes to natural variability.  Either way, I know we do not have some natural right to steady coffee production and the data record for coffee bean cultivation is, in climate terms, shallow.We're living in the Anthropocene.  No matter how those percentages hash out, we are responsible to react.  I am more optimistic about the possibilities of adapting to climate change than mitigation.  Giving up coffee is an easy adaptation.  Until then, I will worry about problems closer to home.

So while I sit this morning with my cup of french press and cruise the internet, I have 99 worries, but the price of coffee is not one of them.

Frankly, there are 100 things I could do today to make my local ecosystems more resilient to the problems created by the Anthropocene, but nothing I can do to help the coffee growers of the world, except maybe continue to buy their product.

I don't know how much we'll talk about climate change in this blog, as such.  I am fairly confident that you will find what we are doing, however, those one hundred things you can do to adapt to a world which changes from human influence.