Thursday, August 30, 2007

Gibberish

George Monbiot, you may not be surprised to learn, thinks that we're all going to die unless we transform the world completely:

... the rich nations must cut the emissions much further than anybody else, you realize that we are talking at a minimum of a 100% cut, and it looks like it might have to go to 110% or 115%.

You laugh but we're talking about sequestration and we're talking about such things for example, as growing bio fuel and burying it, simply for growing as much bio mass as we can and sticking it back on the ground....something..... anything to stave off this catastrophe.
This based largely on a paper written by James Hansen of NASA, and published on the website of the Royal Society for Global Warming Alarmism, as I hear it's being renamed. Or did I dream that?

Anyway, Hansen's paper includes sentences like this:
We take 500 years as a practical definition of forever because it is long enough for large responses from both the ocean and ice sheets. Resulting climate changes would be, from humanity's perspective, irreversible.
What on earth does this mean: "from humanity's perspective, irreversible"? That it'll kill us all? That we can't think in terms longer than this? Humanity has existed longer than 500 years.

The science in the paper might be good - though it seems not to be so to me; it's cargo cult science at its worst, with not even a glance at some of the problems with his view that have been arising. I'll try to be more specific when I have more time.

But whatever the merits of the science, the plain English is execrable - absurdly overblown predictions of doom with no attempt whatsoever even to be intelligible, to make the meaning clear, let alone offer supporting evidence.

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