What I’ve heard from reputable sources over the years is that the 6 + billion of us:

http://www.sustainablescale.org/images/uploaded/Population/populationgrowth.JPG

have an enormous impact:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/302/5651/1719.short
Quote…
Modern climate change is dominated by human influences, which are now large enough to exceed the bounds of natural variability.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/277/5325/494.short
Quote… Human alteration of Earth is substantial and growing. Between one-third and one-half of the land surface has been transformed by human action; the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased by nearly 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; more atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by humanity than by all natural terrestrial sources combined;…etc.

That seems to be the weakness of the sciences, and the source of a great deal of arguments and “scandal” about the true validity of studies projecting these kinds of specific environmental results due to warming. Not to mention determining the connection between dollars/world economic realignment with temp change and actual environmental impact.

what an idiot.

shcb, I heard the pine beetle destruction is unprecedented in BC and that the main cause is the -30 to -40 deg. that was lacking over a decade in the 1990′s to early 2000′s in BC, but I guess you’re the expert. ;-)

Bottom line, I think it is really hard to blame this outbreak on cars in China.

PS: Go Canucks!

Pine beetle kills may be relatively common south of the 49th, but what has happened in the past 10 years in Western Canada is unprecedented. In past, pine beetles have never been much of a problem in British Columbia because the cold winter climate would wipe them out.

In recent years (within the decade) the pine beetle has wiped out most of BC pine forests and is expected to kill up to 80% of the mature lodgepole pine in BC before the epidemic abates because they have eaten all the food they can access.

That has decimated the softwood forestry industry here, reducing it to a mere salvage operation of ruined (low value) timber.

That’s some bad weather effects… ;-)

Now to whether they are blaming the tornadoes on global warming/climate change (see how awkward that is) I certainly thought the article was blaming the tornadoes on AGW (so much cleaner) if that one isn’t the one JBC just added is. Here’s a part I like (from the new post) “or that the pine forests across the western part of this continent have been obliterated by a beetle in the past decade”. 30 years ago when I would backpack in the Flattops wilderness area we would walk around to all the dead trees surrounding the camp site and give them a good shove to see of they were going to fall on the tent because beetle kill had done them in 40 years before that!

Now none of this means AGW isn’t real, or it is. This is all just evidence. But this is where climate science and meteorology start to overlap and where I can see the models being similar, all these events are bits of a puzzle to a climate scientist and they are tools for a meteorologist. If an outbreak like this happens every 30 years that helps the weatherman or weatherwoman predict when the next big outbreak might happen and it is up to a climatologist to figure out what is causing a pattern, or if a pattern is broken what changed. I just don’t see that the pattern has been broken.

Is the beetle kill worse in the last few years or has it just spread to a less remote area (when I started backpacking in the Flattops there were no topo maps of the area, that is how remote it was). Are hurricanes and tornadoes really worse or are they just causing more damage because they hit towns? Are there more tornadoes because we have the technology to see them from hundreds of miles away now? After you ask all those questions you have to ask is it because the earth is warming, and after you ask that you have to ask if the warming is caused by humans.

When you toss all that together I just don’t see that there has been that much change in the last 30 years or so, not enough to say we are causing it.

As to your ““Oh golly it was cold today, guess global warming is a scam’…” comment, I agree, I cringe when someone on my side says it was cold in South Dakota this winter, global warming must be over as much as I do when people blame a hurricane on AGW. Either of those events may be important pieces of evidence or they may not. But a true scientist looks at them as just pieces of the puzzle until they become more than that.

Also, tornadoes are weather. Global climate change is climate. There’s a difference between weather and climate. I know that. It’s what I tell to people all the time when they say “Oh golly it was cold today, guess global warming is a scam”. The fact you would assume I would, as a “faithful”, yell that a piece of weather is simply more evidence, is funny.

I was watching a show on the Mississippi twisters on Discovery and Reed Timmer, who obviously knows a thing or two about tornadoes, said that this kind of outbreak happens every few decades, he also said they don’t know why. The last one was around 1975, (during the last cooling trend BTW). So I went and looked, just did a quick search of worst tornadoes and sure enough, about every 30 years since the beginning of modern weather observation (1860 or so). And he wants to know what motivates us. Golly, I don’t know, maybe real science.

when I substitute any religion for causal anthropogenic global warming, it fits really well into the same argument.

I’m with you on the doom and gloom stuff. I think scaring people works in some cases, for example, to make people give up some of their freedoms, but it’s not going to work with CC, or at least it hasn’t so far.

I actually think the rising cost of energy is going to be the major catalyst for action. Forget the whole science of it and just appeal to pocketbooks.