“Save money and cut CO2 into the bargain” – note the order in which this is written.

Geoff, I like your phrase “enlightened self-interest of democratically elected scoundrels”! It’s one of the (many) ironies of this whole debate that some see heroic collective action as the only way to avoid catastrophe (one comment I’ve read recently is that we need a “World War II scale effort to save humanity from self-destruction.”) However, I think some of us see self-interest as being one of the factors that will probably restore a measure of sanity to the world. A bit like individual lemmings deciding to put their own interests first and edge back from the cliff, rather than marching over it in lock-step.

I have posted elsewhere, sorry can’t remember where, thta it will be very difficult for the hysterics to maintain this level of hysteria for 9 more months; especially given the economic situation.

Expect to see a change of tack: no longer will global warming policies save the planet; now, they will save your job. No one will mention global warming; it will be climate change and the change in your pocket and energy efficiency … amazingly, at the same time these people insist on policies to make your energy more expensive.

The current consensus appears to be that global warming concerns will be swamped by the economic crisis, and all those wind farms, anti-air-travel campaigns and other green initiatives will fade away in the cold light of economic reality. An alternative scenario is that politicians, incapable of effective action on the economic front, go all macho in Copenhagen, and try and outbid each other in supporting extremist “environmental” programmes.

It was interesting to see your account of the lineup of countries for and against the absurd “Embers” icon; with democratic NZ, GB, Germany and Belgium for, and autocratic China, Russia and Saudi Arabia (plus the USA) against. I place my hopes in the enlightened self-interest of democratically elected scoundrels like Sarkozy and Berlusconi, whose interest in politics is limited to their own political survival, and who can therefore be trusted (!) to do the sensible thing and keep the CO2 flowing.

On the one hand, this year we have Stephen Schneider telling us that “Risks of global warming have been underestimated”, James Hansen warning us that “Only in the past few years did the science crystallise, revealing the urgency. Our planet is in peril…” and biologist Chris Field predicting that “warming is likely to accelerate at a much faster pace and cause more environmental damage than had been predicted.”

This I would have expected. December 2009 is when the climate talks in Copenhagen will take place. If Copenhagen is a washout, the chances of success for Kyoto 2 will be reduced accordingly. For proponents of catastrophic AGW, this is surely the time to ramp up the dire warnings – they have just nine months or so now to press governments (and the populations who vote for them) to sign up. The clock is ticking.

However, in February we heard the relatively sensible words of the Hadley Centre’s Vicky Pope, warning of the dangers of “overplaying natural variations in the weather”. And now there’s Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee saying that we might not have much warming for the next 30 years, and NOAA’s Isaac Held saying that “the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29469287/wid/18298287

So: a rather mixed message. Now of course the last two, Swanson and Held, are also warning of rapid, even “explosive” global warming coming back after the hiatus. And Vicky Pope is still saying that “the implications of climate change are profound and will be severe if greenhouse gas emissions are not cut drastically and swiftly over the coming decades.”

But – global warming back in 30 years’ time? For cash-strapped governments everywhere, who have already thrown billions into propping up the banks and face problems of rising unemployment, protectionism, shrinking economies and even civil unrest just around the corner, 30 years might as well be 3000 years.

I think the next few months will be interesting.

Don’t count on it. We have a year to build up to Copenhagen

(Sorry for the triple posting. I should read th whole thing before commenting).

In fact, the reds are taking over the world, it aoppears.

I wish I had the gall to write such a blathering line. Most regular mortal folk only have small problems like money, housing, love affairs, etc. My goodness, wouldn’t a big problem be rather a relief to them.

At first glance, the two five-bar electric fires seem to be suggesting that its going to get hotter. (Except that the IPPC doesn’t do predictions, according to one of its lead authors). What it’s really saying is that the results of a given amount of heating (whatever that may be) willl be worse than we thought (in a hundred years time) – a fact they’ve apparently discovered in the two years since the last IPPC report .
In fact the message of both graphs is broadly the same: at 5°C temperature increase, it’s going to be reallly bad; at 1°C increase, nothing much will happen. Remember that the IPPC thought that temperatures a century from now would probably be between 1 and 5°C warmer than now (They couldn’t be more definite). Which the chart translates (reading from top to bottom, red to white) into: maybe bad things will happen, maybe not.

In the abstract of the article you refer to, the eleven (!) authors state:
“In presenting the “embers” in the TAR, IPCC authors did not assess whether any single RFC , a value judgment that would be policy prescriptive”.
Of course they didn’t. They left the value judgements to the journalists. They spread the petrol over the undergrowth. They left it to others to drop the cigarette end to start the forest fire.