Slate‘s Emily Yoffe shows just how successful the Denyers’ disinformation campaign has been. Here is what she wrote in the Washington Post today:
Since I hate the heat, even I was alarmed by the recent headline: “NASA Warns of 110-Degrees for Atlanta, Chicago, DC in Summer.” But I regained my cool when I realized the forecast was for close to the end of the century. Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it’s supposed to be a sign I’m in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August 2008 (or 2007 for that matter).
There is so much hubris in the certainty about the models of the future that I’m oddly reassured. We’ve seen how hubristic predictions about complicated, unpredictable events have a way of bringing the predictors low.
It’s also hard to believe assertions that the science on the future of our climate is settled when climate scientists can’t agree about the present – or the past (there is contention about the dates, causes and even the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that followed).
Sad that a smart writer like Yoffe would buy into 4 or 5 major Denyer talking points by my count, including the infamous: “we can’t predict the weather, therefore, we can’t predict the climate” — a favorite of Michael Crichton’s.
These myths are all debunked here, a valuable resource I will comment more on later in the week.
Note that Yoffe is right that “hubristic predictions about complicated, unpredictable events have a way of bringing the predictors low” — but that could just as easily apply to predictions (like hers) that we don’t have to worry about climate change. I’ll stick with the predictions of climate scientists, especially since they have so far underestimated climate impacts and feedbacks.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Polar cities in the far distant future to house remnants of humankind
who survive the apocalypse of devastating global warming? The casual
reader might think I am an alarmist or a mere scare-monger, but I am
neither. I am a visionary.
Polar cities are proposed sustainable polar retreats designed to house
human beings in the future, in the event that global warming causes
the central and middle regions of the Earth to become uninhabitable
for a long period of time. Although they have not been built yet, some
futurists have been giving considerable thought to the concepts
involved.
I know, I know, the very thought of “polar cities” sounds like some
science-fiction movie you don’t want to see. But it might be
instructive to think about such sustainable Artic and Antartic
communities for the future of humankind. If worse come to worse, and
things fall apart, perhaps by the year 2500 or the year 3000, we must
might need polar cities. And perhaps the time to start thinking about
them, and designing and planning them (and maybe even building, or
pre-building them), is now.
Here is more food for thought, from an entry in Wikipedia:
“High-population-density cities, to be built in the polar regions,
with sustainable energy and transportation infrastructures, will
require substantial nearby agriculture. Boreal soils are largely poor
in key nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, but nitrogen-fixing
plants (such as the various alders in the Artic region) with the
proper symbiotic microbes and mycorrhizal fungi can likely remedy such
poverty without the need for petroleum-derived fertilizers. Regional
probiotic soil improvement should perhaps rank high on any polar
cities priority list. James Lovelock’s notion of a widely distributed
almanac of science knowledge and post-industrial survival skills also
appears to have value.”
Oh, I know it’s fashionable to mock global warming alarmists and doom
and gloom futurists with no credentials except a keyboard and a blog,
but there’s a method to the madness of thinking about polar cities.
Maybe, just maybe, if enough people hear about the concept of polar
cities and realize how serious such a possibility is, maybe, just
maybe, they will get off their tuches and start thinking hard and fast
about how we humans are causing climate change by our lifestyles and
inventions and gadgets and need for cars and airplanes and trains and
ships and factories and coal-burning plants across the globe — and
then maybe it won’t be fashionable to mock global warming alarmists
anymore.
The future does not look good. But we can do something now. No, not
building polar cities now. That’s for the future to decide. What we
can do now is stop what we are doing now and start planning in a more
sane way for the future of the species. If we even care. I do. We must
stop all human acitivity that is responsible for emitting carbon
dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere. Now. It’s getting later earlier
and earlier, I tell you.
see what Hank Cox says here
http://blog.nam.org/archives/2007/06/heat_mongering.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXsuXs6kcO0
The first link above isn’t right, and I confess I don’t get the video.
POLAR CITIES ENVISIONED TO SURVIVE GLOBAL WARMING
Webposted: July 1, 2007
Environmental activist Dan Bloom has come up with a solution to global
warming that apparently no one else is talking about: polar cities.
That’s right, Bloom envisions future polar cities will house some 200
million survivors of global warming in the far distant future (perhaps
in the year 2500, he says on his blog), and he’s lobbying on the
Internet for their planning, design and construction — NOW!
“Sounds nutty, I know” the 58-year-old self-described “eco-dreamer”
says from his home in Asia, where he has been based since 1991. “But
global warming is for real, climate change is for real, and polar
cities just might be important if humankind is to survive the coming
‘events’, whatever they might be, in whatever form they take.”
Bloom, a 1971 graduate of Tufts University in Boston, says he came up
with the idea of polar cities after reading a long interview with
British scientist James Lovelock, who has predicted that in the
future, the only survivors of global warming might be around 200
million people who migrate to the polar regions of the world.
“Lovelock pointed me in this direction,” Bloom says. “Although he has
never spoken of polar cities per se, he has talked about the
possibility that the polar regions might be the only place where
humans can survive if a major cataclysmic event occurs as a direct
result of global warming, in the far distant future. I think we’ve got
about 30 generations of human beings to get ready for this.”
Does Bloom, who has created a blog and video on YouTube, think that
polar cities are practicial?
“”Practical, necessary, imperative,” he says. “We need to start
thinking about them now, and maybe even designing and building them
now, while we still have time and transportation and fuel and
materials and perspective. Even if they never get built, the very idea
of polar cities should scare the pants off people who hear about the
concept and goad them into doing something concrete about global
warming. That’s part of my agenda, too.”
For more information: http://climatechange3000.blogspot.com
GOOGLE: “polar cities”
WIKIPEDIA: “polar cities”
BLOG SEARCH: “polar cities”