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Koch Bros Study Finds Global Warming Is Real And Man-Made
bledri writes "The results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature are in and Richard Muller, the study's director (formerly an AGW skeptic) declares, 'Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.'
The study was funded by the Folger Fund, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (created by Bill Gates), the Bowes Foundation, the Koch Foundation, and the Getty Foundation."
Global warming is not just, it will be hotter in some cold place and a bit too hot for comfort in some hot place. It's perhaps better called Global Weirding. With more energy in the atmosphere more weird things will happen. Hurricanes, droughts, sea levels rising and the end of the Gulf Stream that warms much of Europe are most likely consequences. Some places that aren't used to it will get much more water and some that have gotten used to a lot of water will get less. If global warming happened over hundreds of years, our species and perhaps others could adapt or move to different locations. It's expensive to move population centers, e.g. Florida if low lying areas get flooded. The expected cost of accommodating changes on this scale dwarf the costs to the economy of drastically reducing our consumption of carbon. The US consumes a huge amount more carbon per person than the average country, but California has some very mild laws that have caused Californians to consume much less than the average American without making California a poorer state than the others.
Brittle infrastructure is a problem for the developed world and our comfort but pretty minor.
The big issue is migration, the normal response to climate change. Migration causes conflict. That worked OKish before we filled the planet, today mass migration will be a catastrophe that could push half the planet to war.
Sure, the species will survive. The well armed ones.
Now that carries some weight!
I hate to disappoint you, but no, it won't. There is some (shaky) evidence that conservatives tend to be much less strongly influenced by facts when dealing with political topics, and that education level does not change the outcome. Chris Mooney wrote a book about it, I haven't read it, but it seems that there isn't a silver bullet so much as a lot of studies suggesting, but not proving, the same thing.
Whatever the reason, the point is that it doesn't matter who funded it, the conservatives won't accept climate change, no matter how many facts or studies you perform. If you confront a conservative with a climate change argument, and show them this study, I guarantee that they will shift the argument to saying that Muller now says, yes there is climate change, but it isn't what caused Katrina, nor what caused the drought in the U.S., nor is what is killing polar bears. If you were to fund a massive to study to prove those things, they would shift the argument to something else.
It's utterly depressing, because it suggests that a lot of the political divide in this country is insurmountable (although it explains a lot about why we had to fight a devastating civil war in order to free slaves).
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!