Nor has he made any comment about the fire that broke out during the bushfires in Victoria a few weeks ago. Fires in the Hazelwood brown coal mine threw ash and toxins everywhere and sent the town of Morwell packing and is costing taxpayers heaps! For the past few weeks we've been told it "should be out in a few days".
Now that's all happening here in Australia so it's probably too far away for Anthony to notice. His own home state might benefit from an El Nino, but Anthony hasn't yet figured out an angle to write about the possibility later this year.
But he has come up with a dumb question. Anthony wrote about an email he got from an otherwise anonymous Robert B. (archived here). (It's okay to be anonymous at WUWT, but only if you're a science denier):
A pointed question
Posted on March 7, 2014 by Anthony Watts
Robert B. writes via email with a question that we’ve just never asked readers to weigh in on here before in post, though has been bandied about in comments. I figure it is about time to put it to rest by asking up front.
He asks:
What is the perfect temperature of Earth? I’m assuming that climate change-related taxes will be used to bring our planet back to the perfect temperature, and I need to know when that has been reached.
Okay - what's wrong with that question?
First of all, Robert B. doesn't seem concerned about tax breaks, concessions and subsidies for fossil fuels but he really, really doesn't like the idea of clean energy. What do you reckon - these wind turbines really are ruining the landscape, aren't they??
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| Source: @janpaulvansoest |
Secondly, he's under some illusion that if we cut carbon emissions then the surface temperature will suddenly drop. You'd think Anthony would set him straight, but then Anthony probably thinks the same. Either that or he knows his audience is too ignorant to know any differently.
Thirdly, Robert B seems to think that it's temperature that's the biggest problem. That is already bringing problems, but the bigger problem is the rate of change. We're already warming faster than ever in millions of years and are heading for ten times faster warming than in 65 million years.
From the WUWT comments
The usual. As silly as this one from A.D. Everard who says:
March 7, 2014 at 5:58 pm
Bloody good question. It should be put to all the active alarmist players. I’m sure the assortment of answers will delight us and confuse and outrage them due to disagreement. Could be a good show in it. Not likely to be a consensus, however, no matter how hard they try. :)
Do you think O’Bummer might know the answer?
There are quite a few who are money-conscious, like Mike Bromley the Kurd says:
March 7, 2014 at 6:00 pm
Nobody has that answer, and they spend billions of dollars insulting anyone who dares to ask.
And more than one alarmist, like edcaryl who says:
March 7, 2014 at 6:20 pm
The ideal temperature is about 0.5 degrees warmer than now, with a CO2 level at about 500 ppm. If we can keep the green crowd from ruining our economies, and the sun cooperates, we will achieve that in about 2050. Otherwise it’s Ice Age time.
While Catfish hasn't ventured beyond deniersville in years and says:
March 7, 2014 at 6:34 pmThe perfect temperature is about M30 Celcius as in Winnipeg for the past couple of months. We have 700 houses with no water due to frozen water lines and we have not heard from the AGW crowd about the last dozen years being the warmist in history.
So hasn't seen the temperature anomalies for the last dozen years or so and doesn't know that all were warmer than all but one year in the record, and four were as warm or warmer than that one:
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| Data source: NASA |
Overall I'd say the comments are no better than you'd expect from WUWT, except for one, from Leo geiger who says:
March 7, 2014 at 5:48 pm
It’s the wrong question, of course. No one cares what the “perfect” temperature for the Earth is, if there were such a thing.
The right question is what temperature is best for our human civilization? The answer is the range that has existed since human civilization started several thousand years ago, or at least changing at a pace that can be adapted to. Sea level rise, widespread changes in weather patterns that impact food supply, or any of a number of other changes that increased greenhouse gases might push outside that envelope are what policies are trying to avoid.
Policies aren’t trying to “bring back” temperatures anywhere. They are trying to keep us from sending them some place we can’t get back from.
