Global Warming: The Missing Headline

Talk about the danger of rising sea levels, at least in my experience, is usually accompanied by verbal images of Florida flooding, Manhattan and London under water, and similar catastrophes. If the IPCC figures are correct, the upper end of the range of what might actually happen is a rise of less than a meter over a century--considerably less than the distance between high tide and low. Popular talk about global warming, again in my experience, is usually put in terms quite a bit more apocalyptic than the IPCC's upper estimate of four degrees Celsius by 2100.

So far the only report I have seen is on CNN, but I will be pleasantly surprised if any newspaper headlines the story with "Global Warming a Wet Firecracker? International Panel finds temperature and sea level effects over the next century real but small."

Real but small? I suppose that a 3 foot rise in sea level isn't quite so apocalyptic as one would suppose from the frenzied headlines we do see, but calling it small is an understatement for some locations. Still, his point is worthy. The real dangers are being oversold for instrumental reasons by those who embrace an ideology that, in Brad Allenby's words, wants to "socially engineer consumption patterns, especially those of the United States". It is worth noting that these up tight prigs have been trying to do this using one hobgoblin or another to frighten the public into granting them control for a very long time.

It's deceitful but that's not what seems most important to me. The important bit is that the consequences of granting them control will be far more destructive than the threat we face from climate change. Worse, we will still have climate change. More people will die, and that after living diminished lives of emptiness and futility, prevented from achieving their creative and constructive potential by sour and miserly sociopaths who are infuriated by people having full, whole lives.

It's a drab shade of green they are peddling, even if they insist that it's really a bright shade. Down is up for them.

Update:

We're all gonna die . . . in a thousand years if humanity suddenly gets too stupid to continue the technological progress of the past.

. . . those advocating policies to blunt the growing human impact on the climate have long held out hope that a new threshold of substantiation, like the important conclusions of a major report, would break the public’s inertia. The incremental, “someday” issue of the climate would suddenly warrant a fast-motion response.

As it turned out, the panel’s scientific projections deflated some of the more dramatic possibilities.

The report includes the biblical risk of the world’s seas rising — everywhere — a dozen feet or more. Such a view renders a highly charged recent debate over whether seas would rise a few inches or a few feet in this century “lampoonable,” in the words of Jerry Mahlman, a veteran climate expert.

But the panel’s prognosis for sea level, while epic, is dispersed over dizzying stretches of time: a thousand years or more.

I see just the opposite. It is Mahlman and company that are “lampoonable” and those who have both a realistic grasp of the threat and the time frame that deserve our attention. The last thing we need is a "fast-motion response" for this slow-motion change. All that would do is create panic and all but preclude rational, effective response.