I've discovered an interesting blog, Down to Earth, self decribed as the science and engineering of ecosystems, landforms, land-use, natural hazards, and water resources. It's authored by Daniel Collins, an environmental engineer and geoscientist, currently a postdoctoral researcher at UW-Madison.

It has an initial feel, to my mind, similar to Transect Points, Philip Small's soil science blog, but seems to be updated more often. Philip is in the field or something, and may perhaps blog more this winter. Just a guess.

But, Down to Earth is a little bit cozy with the dark side, the confederacy of dunces. That's pretty common. I'm the odd ball on that. As an example of what I mean consider this post, Courting Procrastination, that links to WorldWhingeing and Andrew Dressler with approval. An example of the problem (for me) comes from Dressler.

1. Is the Earth warming?
2. Are humans to blame?

   ... The bottom line is that we are virtually 100% certain that humans are contributing to the present warming, and we think it's likely that humans are contributing most of the warming over the last few decades. However, no one credible argues that humans are responsible for ALL of the warming.

3. Will the effects of climate change be beneficial or disastrous?

   Clearly, some people will benefit from warming, while others will suffer. . .

4. Can we do anything about it?

   I don't know. I think the problem is largely political, but I'm hopeful that we can get our act together in the next decade to make the technical and societal changes necessary to stabilize atmospheric CO2 around 550 ppmv (double pre-industrial levels). If we fail, then we move on to other options (like geoengineering), but I think we have to at least make a legitimate effort to to reduce emissions.

The answers to the questions are sane and balanced, except for number 4. The idea that climate change is a political problem simply blinks reality. The fantasy that "we" can "get our act together" is levitate-the-pentagon level confusion about cause, effect, societies etc. Dreamy idea, wrong species, and bad physics.

As Herb Gintis noted:

. . . two basic cultural transmission mechanism lead humans to accept statements that they do not personally subject to scrutiny for factual validity. One is conformist transmission, whereby people see what the majority are doing, and copy it (Boyd and Richerson, 1985, Henrich and Boyd 2001). When there is much to learn and the cost of testing is high, this is a fitness enhancing strategy for a large fraction of the population, especially when the costs and benefits of different behaviors do not change rapidly over time. The other is the transmission by socialization, through which new members of society are induced to accept norms and values that they choose to follow. Norms and values cannot be scrutinized for truth value, since they have none. . .

. . . advanced intellectual sophistication is not a counterweight to any of the above assertions. Think of our own society, where the most educated classes have believed such things as (a) autism is cause by poor mothering, (b) fat is bad for you and carbohydrates are good for you, (c) colds are caught by sitting in a draft, (d) second hand smoke is so bad for non-smokers that smokers have absolutely no right to smoke in public. And so on. Not to mention whole ideologies, such as Freudian psychology and Marxian political theory.

It isn't emissions that need to be reduced, it's concentrations.

We hypothesize. . . that widespread underestimation of climate inertia arises from a more fundamental limitation of people’s mental models: weak intuitive understanding of stocks and flows—the concept of accumulation in general, including principles of mass and energy balance. . .

People of good faith can debate the costs and benefits of policies to mitigate climate change, but policy should not be based on mental models that violate the most fundamental physical principles.

Politics is not just stupid, it's ineffective, the wrong tool for this task. Disregard the political views of these blogs, but pay attention to the science bits. They are not so politicized that they mangle and amputate the science, as some clearly do.

Update: Greater Detail

However, instead of interpreting Pacala and Socolow’s work as offering a trajectory of future emissions that keeps open the possibility of stabilization below 550 p.p.m., Sweet has (mis)interpreted it to mean that seven wedges are “required to stabilize global carbon dioxide at double their pre-industrial value”. He seems to have confused some proposed first steps with an act that can deal with the entire challenge. This confusion leads to a dramatic underestimation of the challenge of stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations at less than twice their pre-industrial value. Sweet suggests incorrectly that breaking the carbon habit can be achieved by implementing 7 of Pacala and Socolow’s 15 proposed stabilization-wedge policies: “If the reader accepts only half what [Pacala and Socolow] propose, the problem of greenhouse gas stabilization can in principle be solved.”

For their part, Pacala and Socolow recognize that what they have proposed is only a start, writing that even after the successful implementation of seven of their wedges by 2054, “fossil fuel emissions must decline substantially”. But by how much? According to Pacala and Socolow, by about an additional twothirds over the subsequent 50 years. Kicking the Carbon Habit has thus confused stabilizing emissions with stabilizing concentrations — a common error that may have been encouraged by Pacala and Socolow’s potentially misleading terminology of ‘stabilization wedges’ and “solving the climate problem for the next 50 years”. The effects of this confusion lead to a misunderstanding of the practical challenges in stabilizing carbon dioxide levels.

In reality, stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions at current levels, as suggested by Pacala and Socolow, would result in a continued linear increase in atmospheric concentrations because carbon dioxide emissions would still far exceed their rate of removal by the oceans and land. Upon completion of the seemingly herculean task of reducing projected global emissions by more than 50% by 2054, by successfully avoiding seven wedges, we would still face the challenge of reducing the remaining level of emissions by another 64% over the next 50 years. To put the stabilization challenge in stark terms, under Pacala and Socolow’s most optimistic assumptions for stabilization at 550 p.p.m., the world will need to reduce its projected business-as-usual emissions by about 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon over the next century. Seven stabilization wedges worth would achieve 175 gigatonnes, leaving a considerable gap, even if the total business-asusual emissions have been overestimated by a factor of two or more.

This is from the review of Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy by William Sweet. I think this error is common, even pervasive among activists and activist scientists who haven't given policy careful thought. The shift from thinking about emissions to thinking about concentrations might have many benfits besides being accurate, since it becomes more obvious that emissions are just one part of the issue.