The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today [emphasis added]. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

…

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

If you ask a scientist if they’re sure that human activity is causing climate change, they should say no, because we can’t be sure. But if you ask them if we should continue pumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, they should also say no, because we’re essentially running an experiment whose end result we don’t know. So we should lean towards sustainable energy production and consumption. We don’t need to cause people immediate suffering in their economic lives, but we’ll need sustainable energy in the future, so why not start in that direction now?

Note the refreshing lack of alarmism.

Dude on Google+ commented with a list of links to why current models that predict global warming are deficient in several areas. This is actually orthogonal to the entire point Elon’s statement and my reaction to it.

Herewith my response (it’s been a slow morning and I had a little snark to burn off):

Dude, lighten up. If you had bothered to do a little googling instead of mindless knee-jerking, you’d realize that you are in fact preaching to the choir. I have read through the CRU source code, you know.

A few problems with your comment:

First, you have wilfully ignored the actual, you know, CONTENT of my post, viz: the perspicacious reader reader must infer that Svensmark et al. are just as Kuhnian-ly challenged as Briffa, Mann, et al. And most crucially, my statement that there is no pressing reason for immediate economic hardship does seem to have a TINY BIT OF RELEVANCE to the concept of “opportunity costs”. LEARN TO READ before you waste your own time and mine in mindlessly regurgitating talking points that don’t actually address what I wrote.

Second, burning hydrocarbons for power is STUPID, STUPID, STUPID even if there is no effect from atmospheric CO2, because they are far better employed as feedstock for plastics.

Third, burning hydrocarbons SMELL BAD and are a HEALTH HAZARD. Or have you never met anyone in your obviously sheltered existence with asthma?

Fourth, hydrocarbons are going to run out sometime in geological time anyway, so why not get in on the market early? If we as a civilization are ever going to level up on the Kardashev scale, hydrocarbons are just not going to cut it.

Fifth, you seem to have misapprehended a just slightly important bit of context: Elon Musk wants to LIVE ON MARS. Last I heard, there’s not a whole lot of oil on Mars. If you want to freeze on Titan just so you can have your precious hydrocarbons, go right ahead.

Sixth, living in a stinky blue cloud of 19th-century tech is JUST NOT VERY GEEKY. I’ll be exploring the solar system in my polywell runabout — fuelled by a bottle of water and a cup of Borax — while you’re dying choking on the vomitous excrescences of your Victorian explodey-machine.

Seventh, I am by political inclination a minarchist, and hydrocarbon power tends to incentivize natural monopoly and hierarchical control, whether by cartels, multinational corporations or increasingly overreaching governments. I am in favour of the devolution of all kinds of power, whether political or physical.

So to sum up, in the future, please try to hold yourself back with the small-minded knee-jerk reactions to people and topics you obviously have never actually bothered to actually, you know, INVESTIGATE. Instead, please try to decide on the actual MERITS of the PARTICULAR SITUATION, viz. a particular post by a particular person, as opposed to lapping up and regurgitating the context-less self-serving propaganda of your favoured political team.

Even if everyone you link to is actually correct — and as I note above, I am in fact inclined to think that they are — their conclusions ARE NOT THE SUM TOTAL OF ALL FACTORS. There’s a bigger picture, dude. Try to keep that in mind in the future.

The irony is that most of North America and Europe is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.

If you don’t think giving hundreds of millions of dollars to an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy with absolute power over the majority of the world’s economies is an inevitable recipe for corruption and tyranny, consider this:

Lord Monckton, an official delegate from the UK to Copenhagen, was barred from the conference hall, thrown to the ground and knocked unconscious by the police today.

His crime? Pointing out that the “evidence” for global warming “climate change” is suspect at best and completely fraudulent at worst.

I’m sure there are some who regard this as just a good start.

For some perspective on the mild uptick in temperature at the end of the twentieth century, watch this video:

Update: James Randi, the world’s foremost debunker of pseudoscience of all kinds, weighs in:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a group of thousands of scientists in 194 countries around the world, and recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — has issued several comprehensive reports in which they indicate that they have become convinced that “global warming” is and will be seriously destructive to life as we know it, and that Man is the chief cause of it. They say that there is a consensus of scientists who believe we are headed for disaster if we do not stop burning fossil fuels, but a growing number of prominent scientists disagree. Meanwhile, some 32,000 scientists, 9,000 of them PhDs, have signed The Petition Project statement proclaiming that Man is not necessarily the chief cause of warming, that the phenomenon may not exist at all, and that, in any case, warming would not be disastrous.

Happily, science does not depend on consensus. Conclusions are either reached or not, but only after an analysis of evidence as found in nature. It’s often been said that once a conclusion is reached, proper scientists set about trying to prove themselves wrong.

…

It’s easy enough to believe that drought, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes are signs of a coming catastrophe from global warming, but these are normal variations of any climate that we — and other forms of life — have survived. Earth has undergone many serious changes in climate, from the Ice Ages to periods of heavily increased plant growth from their high levels of CO2, yet the biosphere has survived.

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8, 1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)


That long string of numbers with some negative values in the middle and positive values at the end? Those numbers are multiplied by the real temperatures to hide a warm period in the 1940s, and exaggerate the temperatures at the end of the century.

This is scientific fraud, pure and simple.

Honest, the Emperor does too have clothes!

Now that it’s been more than 48 hours, I think I can make some substantive comments. Here’s the story:

Last week the following comment appeared on a blog post at the Air Vent:

FOIA said
November 17, 2009 at 9:57 pm e

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.

We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

The comment was accompanied by a link to a zip file on an obscure server in Russia. The zip file contained 157 megabytes of emails and documents that appeared to have been taken from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which just happens to be the major repository for climate research data for studying global warming. The emails span a period of almost 15 years, from 1995 or so to the fall of 2009.

After several days it is apparent that the emails and files are genuine. The CRU has admitted that someone stole their files, and has not denied their authenticity. The story is ongoing at Climate Audit (and its alternative mirror site), Bishop Hill, Watts Up with That, The Blackboard, and the aforementioned Air Vent, among many others.

What the documents contain is telling. They do not provide a perfect “smoking gun” — they don’t say “we made it all up” — but they do cast serious light on the science and politics behind the global warming movement.

Defenders at such bastions of academic freedom as Real Climate and Discover magazine are pooh-pooing the idea that lowly proles such as yourselves could ever interpret the subtle and exalted thoughts of real scientists, who are all shown to be as pure as the driven snow.

Questions of technical scientific interpretation aside, there are some demonstrably shady things going on:

• At the very least, they clearly reveal criminal conspiracy to destroy or deny data subject to Freedom of Information requests:
  

  If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does!

  Also see 1212063122.txt, 1106338806.txt, 1228330629.txt and 1219239172.txt. This is criminal activity, plain and simple.

• The emails also clearly reveal collusion to control the scientific peer review process, by rejecting articles critical of the global warming “team”, and then detracting from their critics by saying “they’re not peer-reviewed“:
  

  This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

  1051190249.txt:
  

  One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word ‘perceived’ here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about.

  1089318616.txt:
  

  I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

  This is nothing less than a subversion of science. The whole point of science is that members of one particular school of thought should not be able to prohibit the publication of dissenting views. Debate is the essence of science.

  The emails are a classic example of what Thomas Kuhn calls “groupthink” in science: a tight-knight group who polices their members for political reliability:
  

  Be a bit careful about what information you send to Andy and what emails you copy him in on. He’s not as predictable as we’d like.

• The “science” of global warming relies on complex computer models where the final output and predictions are the result of multiple layers of mathematical processing. This processing relies on many variables that must be tuned to make the models reflect reality. Except…
  

  I want to make one thing really clear. We ARE NOT supposed to be working with the assumption that these scenarios are realistic. They are scenarios-internally consistent (or so we thought) what-if storylines. You are in fact out of line to assume that these are in some sense realistic-this is in direct contradiction to the guidance on scenarios provided by the synthesis team.

  The dominant theme throughout the discussions of data processing (and the actual source code used), is of manipulating the data to fit a pre-conceived idea:
  

  I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

  This telling phrase has been explained as a mere slip of the tongue, but it is part of a bigger pattern:
  

  I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that … I don’t think it’d be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have.

  1254108338.txt:
  

  So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip.

  I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.

• These would be enough. But the very worst thing about these emails, as far as I’m concerned, even more than the criminal activity and the perversion of science, is that “the team” is NOT EVEN SURE THEY ARE RIGHT. They are pressuring global leaders to do irreperable harm to the economies of the world — which will devastate the developed world, and condemn the developing world to a century of abject poverty, all for something they are not certain about! They are well aware of problems with the data and the process at the IPCC:
  

  The fact is that in doing so the rules of IPCC have been softened to the point that in this way the IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science (which is its proclaimed goal) but production of results. … Essentially, I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes. I think this will set a dangerous precedent which might mine the IPCC credibility, and I am a bit unconfortable that now nearly everybody seems to think that it is just ok to do this.

  1255352257.txt
  

  The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

  1257546975.txt:
  

  We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.

  1255523796.txt:
  

  How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!

  The kicker from Phil Jones:
  

  I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.

  He would rather see the death and destruction he’s been predicting come true than for him to have made a mistake.