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I think the author of this piece is mentally ill, since a healthy person would not cherry pick the most distressing reports they could find, from among the nume

I think the author of this piece is mentally ill, since a healthy person would not cherry pick the most distressing reports they could find, from among the numerous bits of garbage that are always available, ignoring the other strong evidence that the doomsday they fear is very unlikely. It's pretty sad. The fallacies are so thick that I couldn't read all the way to the end. But here's one excerpt selected arbitrarily: "Grains, the basis of the world’s food supply, are reduced on average by 6% for every one degree Celsius rise above pre-industrial norms. We are now about one degree Celsius above and climbing fast; the oceans are warming twice as fast and have absorbed a staggering 93% of the warming for us so far. If that were not the case, the average land temperatures would be a toasty 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) above what they are now." Notice the implication in the first sentence that pre-industrial temperatures (or maybe lower?) were optimal for grain production. But pre-industrial" is a completely arbitrary point in time as far as optimal temperature for growing grains goes. Grains were first domesticated about 10,000 years ago, during the "Holocene climatic optimum", when temperatures were significantly higher than "pre-industrial" times. The bit that follows about the temperature being 36 degrees Celsius higher if it weren't for the oceans absorbing heat shows that the author lacks even elementary understanding of climate science. Of course, if the oceans stopped absorbing heat, so the atmosphere warmed more, the warming would stop when the higher atmospheric temperature produced sufficiently higher radiation of heat to space to counterbalance the greenhouse warming - which would happen long before it increases by 36 degrees (radiation increases as the fourth power of temperature (measured from absolute zero)). If you too are convinced that "climate change" will be catastrophic, and are making major life decisions, such as whether to have children, on that basis, please think again. If you don't, you will regret it greatly later in life.

acqq 7y ago
> Grains were first domesticated about 10,000 years ago, during the "Holocene climatic optimum", when temperatures were significantly higher than "pre-industrial" times. Your "significantly higher" 10,000 years ago is already less than what the global warming already produced, and even less less then what the global warming will produce in the future even if all countries do what they promised to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum#/media/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum#/med... Global temperature is now already higher than at any time in the Holocene and thus the entire history of human civilization. The paper: "Evolution of global temperature over the past two million years" defines "present" temperature not as what we measure today, but as an average of the last 10000 (10k, 10 thousand) years, and the temperatures were higher than that average only 100000 (100k hundred thousand) years ago, but only one degree. But compared to the last 10k years average, today we're already close to one degree above it. And if one adds up all the national pledges made in Paris to curb emissions, they would put the world on track to warm around 3 degrees Celsius or more (i.e. 2 degrees above the average of even 100k years ago). That will be more than what happened in the last 2 million years, if you look at the Figure 3.
Daishiman 7y ago
It's clearly you the one who prefers to live in ignorance. Literally every person that O know who works in climatology, environmental sciences or similar studies is shitting their pants over the current outlook in environmental degradation. If the consensus of the people whose job day in and day out it to study this claim that we are seriously screwed over, it would be unwise not to pay attention to them.
- radford-neal 7y ago
  But that is NOT the consensus view of climate scientists. The IPCC reports, for example, do NOT assign any non-negligible probability to the possibility of human extinction caused by climate change. They talk about bad effects, but nothing remotely close to that bad. For a recent example of a real climate scientist debunking a way overblown alarmist paper, of the sort that seems to prompt this sort of anguish, see the following blog post: http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/04/blueskiesresearchorguk-steffen-nonsense.html http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/04/blueskiesresearcho...

acqq 7y ago

> Grains were first domesticated about 10,000 years ago, during the "Holocene climatic optimum", when temperatures were significantly higher than "pre-industrial" times. Your "significantly higher" 10,000 years ago is already less than what the global warming already produced, and even less less then what the global warming will produce in the future even if all countries do what they promised to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum#/media/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum#/med... Global temperature is now already higher than at any time in the Holocene and thus the entire history of human civilization. The paper: "Evolution of global temperature over the past two million years" defines "present" temperature not as what we measure today, but as an average of the last 10000 (10k, 10 thousand) years, and the temperatures were higher than that average only 100000 (100k hundred thousand) years ago, but only one degree. But compared to the last 10k years average, today we're already close to one degree above it. And if one adds up all the national pledges made in Paris to curb emissions, they would put the world on track to warm around 3 degrees Celsius or more (i.e. 2 degrees above the average of even 100k years ago). That will be more than what happened in the last 2 million years, if you look at the Figure 3.

Daishiman 7y ago

It's clearly you the one who prefers to live in ignorance. Literally every person that O know who works in climatology, environmental sciences or similar studies is shitting their pants over the current outlook in environmental degradation. If the consensus of the people whose job day in and day out it to study this claim that we are seriously screwed over, it would be unwise not to pay attention to them.

radford-neal 7y ago
But that is NOT the consensus view of climate scientists. The IPCC reports, for example, do NOT assign any non-negligible probability to the possibility of human extinction caused by climate change. They talk about bad effects, but nothing remotely close to that bad. For a recent example of a real climate scientist debunking a way overblown alarmist paper, of the sort that seems to prompt this sort of anguish, see the following blog post: http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/04/blueskiesresearchorguk-steffen-nonsense.html http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2019/04/blueskiesresearcho...