Or, "So long, and thanks for all the fish."

Mistaking political realities for physical reality, as discussed in Blowing Smoke, or mistaking media and activist rhetoric for reality, as discussed most recently in Try Again, gives a skewed and dysfunctional view. One symptom of this is an oscillation from overshoot to undershoot as those seeking to differentiate themselves and so get attention - either as votes or product sales - try to grab headlines.

Wasn’t it surprising how the media communicated the findings of the latest IPCC reports? . . .

a competition among media reports was launched exacerbating the consequences of climate change, one overbidding the other. The logical consequence of this is that sooner or later we end up at a point which cannot be topped. Where to go from there? The answer is what we are just experiencing now. The same media (in part the same journalists) announcing ‘the end of the world’ on the title page (see the article in DER SPIEGEL) a few months later go for the opposite, blaming ‘climate hysteria’ and providing a platform to those who didn’t get their word in the discussion so far. The effect is always the same: The headline is assured, the paid circulation again high, and the public remains confused and can’t really do anything with the progress of scientific knowledge.

Perhaps that should be exaggerating rather than exacerbating, but the point is still clear.

The role of scientists is not neutral in this discussion. It is too tempting to provide the media with provocative statements. Only the ‘expert’ with the most spectacular message attracts the attention. For the privilege to appear in public, scientific facts are not clearly separated from expectations, but often intermixed. Minor uncertainties are reported only to avoid describing major ones (BioScience 57(3), 227-236, 2007). . .

It is tempting also, and especially among ambitious scientists, to distinguish themselves from others by over-interpreting their own findings and/or using exaggerated terminology. But sooner or later, somebody will avail of the opportunity to unveil the overstatements, which at the end of the day goes at the cost of the reputation of the entire scientific community of the relevant field.

That's Gian-Reto Walther, a respected expert in climate impacts on certain flora, especially alpine summit flora in the European Alps. He has set himself the daunting task of doing real-time climate impact studies rather than depending solely on models and hand waving. His findings are significant and unambiguous, but the implications are subject to interpretation, as in the article he pointed to.

Biologist Josef Reichholf discusses the benefits of a warmer climate for animals and plants, large cities as centers of biological diversity and the myth of the return of malaria. . .

Personally, I'm even looking forward to a milder climate. But it will also not pose any major problems for mankind as a whole. . .

Biologically speaking, we are children of the tropics. Wherever man lives, he artificially creates tropical living conditions. We do this with warm clothing, and with heated offices and homes. A tropical temperature of about 27 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit) constantly prevails underneath our clothing. . .

Many species are certainly threatened, but not by climate change. The true danger comes from the destruction of habitats, such as the rampant deforestation of species-rich tropical forests. Particularly as a conservationist, I believe that focusing on the greenhouse effect is very dangerous. The climate is increasingly being turned into a scapegoat, to deflect attention from other environmental crimes. A typical example is the misleading debate over catastrophic flooding, which is in fact caused by too much development along rivers and not by more extreme weather events, which we can't change anyway. . .

Many species have already fled from the countryside to the cities, which have been transformed into havens of biodiversity. We are also seeing another interesting phenomenon: Major cities, like Hamburg, Berlin and Munich, have formed heat islands where the climate has been two or three degrees warmer than in the surrounding countryside for decades. If higher temperatures are truly so bad, why do more and more animals and plants feel so comfortable in our cities? . . .

. . . there is much to be said for the argument that warming temperatures promote biodiversity. There is a clear relationship between biodiversity and temperature. The number of species increases exponentially from the regions near the poles across the moderate latitudes and to the equator. To put it succinctly, the warmer a region is, the more diverse are its species. . .

OK, I agree with Walther, the contradictory statements of scientists are confusing, even after I apply a filter to smooth out exaggerations and media-speak. And, biologist Josef Reichholf in the Spiegel interview is certainly entertaining.

SPIEGEL: But there are certainly animals that live in very limited niches. For example, how would polar bears survive global warming?

Reichholf: Then let me ask you in return: How did the polar bear survive the last warm period? Perhaps Knut at the Berlin Zoo is an exception, but polar bears in the wild don't exactly survive by sucking on ice. Seals are the polar bear's most important source of food, and the Canadians slaughter tens of thousands of them every spring. That's why life is becoming more and more difficult for polar bears, and not because it's getting warmer. Look at the polar bear's close relative, the brown bear. It is found across a broad geographic region, ranging from Europe across the Near East and North Asia, to Canada and the United States. Whether bears survive will depend on human beings, not the climate.

This is true, but it seems that climate change adds insult to injury if nothing else. It makes hard times harder for the bears and many other species as well.

SPIEGEL: Is there really no plant or animal species that isn't at risk of extinction because of a further rise in temperatures?

Reichholf: I certainly can't think of any. There are a few flatworms that can only exist in icy cold springs. These creatures do in fact appear to be disappearing in places where the springs are warming up. But this could also be a coincidence, because the closest relatives of these worms tolerate a much broader temperature spectrum.

SPIEGEL: Conversely, should we be worried that malaria, as a result of global warming, will break out in our latitudes once again?

Reichholf: That's another one of those myths. Many people truly believe that malaria will spread as temperatures rise. But malaria isn't even a true tropical disease. In the 19th century, thousands of people in Europe, including Germany, the Netherlands and even Scandinavia, died of malaria, even though they had never gone abroad. That's because this disease was still prevalent in northern and central Europe in previous centuries. We only managed to eliminate malaria in Europe by quarantining the sick, improving hygiene and draining swamps. That's why I consider it virtually impossible that malaria would return to us purely because of climate change. If it does appear, it'll be because it has been brought in somewhere.

SPIEGEL: Why has it become a dogma that we should be afraid of warmer times?

Reichholf: It's a mystery to me. . .

I'd enjoy reading a point by point rebuttal that was as casual and witty as Reichholf's interview. I might end up just as confused, but I think I'm in good company. Bad company seems to be those who are not confused, who have no uncertainty, the ones who climb the local mole hill and proclaim it a mountain from which they deliver sermons.

[A]round the world, honeybees are vanishing en masse, leaving their humans engaged in a furious attempt to figure out the meaning of their exodus. Entire colonies are following the Shakespearean stage direction, "Exeunt omnes." They're flying off and not returning. Commercial beekeepers open their hives and find them empty except for a queen, a few immature bees and abundant honey and pollen. The rest of the bees are simply gone, leaving behind not even dead bodies. . .

If what you're searching for is an entire spectrum of moral lessons regarding the evils of human behavior, this crisis is even better than global warming. If you hate globalization, then you will doubtless see its evils as patent in the disappearance of the bees. Pesticides? Genetically modified foods? Those, too, are convenient hypotheses in the absence of contradictory information. Even cellphones have been offered as an explanation. If you're driven crazy by them, then so must be the bees. Isn't it obvious?

Uh, no. I must be slow.

"My favorite theory, which I throw out, is that the bees are out there creating their own crop circles, working very hard, physically pushing the crops down with their little legs. It fits. It explains the loss of bees and crop circles at the same time. At taxpayers' expense. I want credit for it." - ARS Bee Research Laboratory head, Jeff Pettis

Granted.

"From an ecological standpoint, it is opening up the possibility for local pollinators like the mason bee to come back." Honeybees, after all, are an introduced species. They were brought here by European explorers and settlers. The Indians called them "white men's flies."

[Naturalist Barry] Lopez sees local people creating local food using local means in a turn to self-reliance and resiliency, away from a global system that uses water in the desert of Arizona to create cotton to ship to China to be made into T-shirts to be sold at malls in Maryland.

But maybe this is over-thinking the situation. Bill Joy thinks the collapse of the bee colonies is a harbinger of our increasingly complicated world coming apart.

"I think that we will see many more such 'era of limits' mysteries, some of which turn out to be difficult to impossible to unravel, as causal wires of which we are unaware, many of them nonlinear, are tripped" . . .

My pet theory is that the threats we obsess about are analogous to those faced by previous generations, but they look novel to us because we have not had the opportunity to use hindsight bias to demystify them, as we have for previous threats. In future people will wonder what we were confused about, why we didn't see wrecks coming, and applaud themselves for their clarity and insight, just as we do about older problems now. We are confused and don't have the answers, and this is proper since we not only lack full information, these are complex systems that don't evolve in a neat linear fashion.

Update:

Randall points to another example of climate hysteria reaction.

[C]urrent climate models predict that evaporation will increase slowly and rainfall will hardly rise at all—in part due to a potential decrease in global winds. This is not borne out by the satellite data. "We found that when averaged over the world oceans,'' [director of Remote Sensing Systems in Santa Rosa, Calif. Frank] Wentz says, "the winds have slightly increased over the last 20 years by about 0.2 meter per second (or 0.4 mile per hour)."

In addition, the satellites reveal that evaporation and precipitation are increasing much faster than the models predict. "The observations suggest that maybe global rainfall will increase at a higher rate—three times higher according to these results—than climate models predict," Wentz says. "The additional rain may be beneficial for some of the drier areas and pose a significant climate risk for other areas of the world."

If the climate warms just two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—as predicted by the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report—13 percent more water vapor will be in the atmosphere at the end of this century, the scientists note. Rainfall will likely increase by a similar amount. "Where that additional rain falls is the sixty-four-million-dollar question,'' Wentz says, "and I don't think anyone can say that with any confidence."