Crab season open – I’m dying to get out on the water, but m’lady has plans on top of plans concatenated inside of other plans. Sadly not those sort of plans.

This is the 332nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature.

Nothing to see here folks.

Funny, you usually love to use the term “Global Warming”. But here you’ve failed to mention the whole global aspect of climate. Odd.

;)

It seems Knarly is the only one that understands enough to at least be open to discussing this tactic of using monetary losses to somehow show an increase in severity, which of course has nothing to do with a discussion of climate changes.

b) based on what we do know, the overall picture is not as cheery as the oil and coal industries would like you to believe.

I think it is interesting that I previously asked about century storms and their frequency and intensity. So shcb immediately tracked down some data that (to no-one’s surprise) reinforced his opinion. Now with spreadsheet! But is this just for the North American eastern seaboard? Western hemisphere? Entire planet? I just asked the question, but regardless of the actual answer, shcb’s answer reinforces his previous bias. Whereas actual climate scientists might be able to give a answer (usually using metaphor, since you can’t say shcb’s F150 carbon caused this particular storm or that one) but in the aggregate, looking over historical records and looking into what we can surmise about the future… it aint pretty for the ACC deniers.

It seems these fellows were tasked with giving a detailed report on b) even though they knew a) really prevented them from accurately reporting on b) but they took the CIA’s money and did it anyway. I read a page around 45 where they are talking about the fact that we have gotten pretty good at predicting weather 3 to 5 days out and we at least think we are pretty good at knowing what happened in 100 year increments but that is about it, we aren’t very good at anything between those, and we are particularly bad at predicting decadal increments. So basically, we don’t have a baseline. Anyone that has done any research know the first thing you have to establish is a baseline. But in this case there are just too many variables that we don’t understand yet.

There were some other passages, in the preface I believe, that had similar thoughts. This seems like something the GAO would put out when under pressure from congress to form a report based on illogical parameters.

To your analogy, yes the wrench is careening in a gentle arc to the machine, we wish it weren’t, but it is. One fellow over there is yelling that it is going to be terrible! Oh my! Well, he may be right, but there are plenty of places that wrench might fall where it wouldn’t hit anything, there are guards that were put in place to protect other things that might just protect the spinning parts. It might hit somewhere and cause some minor damage, or it might cause catastrophic failure. We really don’t know. It seems there is a portion of this report that is saying that very thing, but the writers were tasked with telling management what is the worst case scenario for when the wrench hits the machine, so they did both. Now both sides can take out passages that fit their agendas.

In reality there is little we can do anyway, we can make some prudent actions like moving people out of the way so in case the parts start flying they won’t get hit and such but that wrench is on its way and we really don’t have many alternatives. We can jump up and bat it around like a hail Mary pass, but who knows, it might just knock it into a worse position.

b) We know beyond reasonable doubt that the consequences will be extensive.

How can those statements coexist?