Giant lobsters?

I think the argument is that since there are more “cold related deaths” vs. “heat related deaths”, less cold would equal less deaths.

Well, um. MANY more people die of cold related problems than heat. There's no evidence at all that a warmer climate will cause more health problems than it prevents.

Ugh. Someone should put Barton in an airtight box to enjoy his own CO2 for about 4 hours and see how his opinions of its benefits have changed when he gets out...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmIG0lpk4p8

"The polar ice is melting, it suits me fine
We go to the beach, on the Northern Line."

-Marillion "Under the Sun"

Kinda sums up most short-sighted idiotic thinking concerning global warming: "but look at my tan!"

Less hypothermia? Fewer instances of frostbite? A steep decline in the number of snowball-fight-related injuries?

The tidal basin in DC becomes a malarial hotbed?

Steve Benen asked: "I can't help but wonder how these conservatives believe global warming will be 'benefit' humanity."

That's obvious. Global warming will kill off 99 percent of the human species, leaving only the richest and most powerful one percent to inherit the Earth.

Of course they will inherit a ruined, wasted, biologically impoverished Earth barely capable of supporting life. But the "top one percent" figure they will live in nuclear-powered domed cities with artificial climates, eating genetically engineered lab-grown sirloin steaks, so they won't care.

CO2 may be naturally produced by humans but then again, so are feces. The Climate Deniers are also great at producing that!

I would assume that much of the "warming will have benefits" argument is that the warmer climate will significantly increase agricultural productivity in temperate-to-cool zones, and that the added heat in warmer zones will not hurt growth. This of course ignores the likelihood of precipitation pattern changes, which (I believe) are expected to produce significant drought in areas which are now productive.

We make urine and shit also. Would the Senator also argue that these are harmless byproducts of our existence?

Do these people even hear themselves?

http://www.scidev.net/en/opinions/the-malaria-myths-of-climate-change-1.html

It's his rationalization for generating so much hot air. Hope his High SChool chem teacher smacks him on the knuckles for being an ass. More O2 stealing CO2 replaces the bonding to hydrogen ( ie Hydrogen Dioxide-water) and over abundance of CO2 cannot be scrubbed out of the atmosphere because of forest clear-cutting, ie transpiration/Krebs cycle. Nature had it all worked out till we fucked it up.

This reminds me of an episode of Captain Planet that I watched as a child. The villain was trying to create global warming because he owned property on Antarctica that he wanted to turn into a resort, and with the rest of the world becoming too hot, he would make boatloads of money on tourism.

Is that the kind of benefit we're talking about here? If so, I'd better go find my Wind, Water, Earth, and Air rings.

What's astonishing about the side-benefits argument of climate change is its utter callousness. Winters in Fargo are nicer so who cares about Dacca?

Denialism is three parts sociopathy, two parts greed, and one part dementia.

SA is worth repeating, maybe memorizing: Global warming will kill off 99 percent of the human species, leaving only the richest and most powerful one percent to inherit the Earth.
...
Of course they will inherit a ruined, wasted, biologically impoverished Earth barely capable of supporting life. But the "top one percent" figure they will live in nuclear-powered domed cities with artificial climates, eating genetically engineered lab-grown sirloin steaks, so they won't care.

He forgot to mention that the steaks will be from cattle fed on grain raised in Siberia year-round.

since ultimately, we are destroying the possibility of human (among other species) existence on this planet, i'd suggest that freezing to death is much more pleasant than dying of heat...

Men go and come but the Earth abides.

Yeah, CO2 isn't a threat to human health....until there's an overwhelming concentration of it to where there is a higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to a lower concentration of O2 in the atmosphere. For my fellow science peoples, this forces the equation from more aerobic respiration to less aerobic respiration due to Le Chatlier's principle.

Remember in the Apollo 13 movie when the astronauts were faced with high CO2 levels and the engineers on earth scrambled to create a jury rigged filter? Someone should ask those lawmakers if they saw the movie and what they thought of that scene. Maybe ask Gary Sinese as well - he's a righty I hear, but not sure if he's a denier.

You mean the kind of "callousness" that caused millions of people to die because DDT was effectively banned from Africa?

Simple minds require simple explanations. That's why Creationism is so popular: it explains the complex in easy to understand terms. Wrong, yes, but easy to grasp with the intellect available to the Believers.

The hoax of climate change is easily disproven. If agenda driven 'scientists' believe that CO2 causes warming, then ergo, there was no CO2 during the ice age. . .

More worrysome than CO2 is methane. AS the frozen tundra (Alaska, not Green Bay!) thaws, methane is released in alarming amounts.

There are vast amounts of methane in the sea floor, kept quiescent by the cold. If the water warms we won't have to worry about cow farts. . .

By this logic - the warmer, the better. Maybe we could go for 460 degees Celsius like on our neighbor Venus.

The tidal basin in DC becomes a malarial hotbed?

That's already happened, about 200 years ago.

Yeah, CO2 isn't a threat to human health....until there's an overwhelming concentration of it [...]

Of course. But you can't expect mathematically illiterate morons to understand things like proportionality, can you?

If you takes a very parochial or local interest, and see the world only from your regional point of view, then you can see global warming as having benefits. And because it is hard for many people to see the problem globally rather than locally, it's easy to understand how the "global warming is good" notion persists. Until the global dangers "hit home," then the overall public is not no going to passionate about it.

DAY... Speaking of methane, it too is colorless and odorless, and therefore perfectly harmless. (The odor comes from hydrogen sulfide and methyl mercaptan.)

Marc wrote: "You mean the kind of 'callousness' that caused millions of people to die because DDT was effectively banned from Africa?"

Nope, the kind of callousness that causes Ditto-Heads to tell blatant lies like that one.

I know that science is really scary to right-wingers, but maybe someone should explain to Barton what happens when CO2 builds up in a closed system. There are these thermodynamic (there is a scary word) laws that simply are true, whether you "believe" in them or not!

Remember in the Apollo 13 movie when the astronauts were faced with high CO2 levels and the engineers on earth scrambled to create a jury rigged filter? Someone should ask those lawmakers if they saw the movie and what they thought of that scene.

Yes, but later in that film the pod got so cold that ice froze up their instrument panel. You can't deny that if those astronauts had been breathing pure CO2 they wouldn't have had to worry about the ice!

Of course, it's also a well known fact that more people die each year from heat-related distress than from the cold.

As many people have suggested above, I'd really love to put these deniers in a sealed room and see how long the CO2-induced headache takes to convince them how incredibly stupid they're acting. Even better, put a smoker in there with them.

If the polar ice melts, there might be lots of OIL we now can access!! YAY!

SA is once again hallucinating about 99% of humanity disappearing. Other posters are worried about CO2 (measured in ppm) overwhelming O2
(measured in percent - i.e the atmosphere is around 15% O2).

Scientific illiteracy run amuck - and it ain't just among the warming deniers.

I am very certain that a) warming is happening
b) it is man- caused and c) it will be overall
negative.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of people, many influential, who think growing crops in Siberia and having open water ports there, would not be a bad thing. There might be some who wouldn't mind Canadian winters being less severe and growing more stuff there.

The interesting part is that the deep south in he US is scheduled for dramatic losses in either land (LA, FLA) or agricultural productivity if warming comes about.

They actually have more in common with those folks in Bangladesh who will lose their lands to rising water. But those are brown people, so their interests can't matter.

Someone should ask those lawmakers if they saw the movie and what they thought of that scene.

"USA! USA! USA!"

And not much else.

What's really disturbing is that I am a life-long democrat and (reasonably) liberal guy who despises the extreme right as much as you do.

And yet to you guys, everyone who disagrees on any one issue is automatically a ditto-head, a moron, etc. You guys are no better than the crazy right, IMO, and it's an embarrassment. What a f***ed up people we've all become.

The real risk of AGC is the unknown, like loss of honeybees - which might actually be catastrophic.

The conservative, precautionary principle argues for not testing the limits of the global climate system because of these unknown and unpredictable effects.

Many so-called conservatives have decided this principle is no longer necessary.

Unfortunately there are too many people who, when children, did not think through "What would happen if I do this?", and although the "this" caused harm, it did not kill them then. The lesson learned: feel free to do stupid things, it won't kill you instantly.

I'm pretty sure Rep. Barton is showing signs of brain damage, no doubt related to spending too much time in a high-CO2 environment.

Um, it's not the heat that'll kill ya, it's the drowning.

Sam Simple:

The earth is not a closed thermodynamic system.

This is usually the fallacy that Bible anti-creationists mention, "It is all getting worse because entropy increases."

They are still wrong because of the above.
Entropy does increase in a closed system, but the earth ain't one.

This bulletin brought to you by your personal physics pedant.

This is NOT a Republican talking point... instead it is a right wing fantasy come true.

Most of the dark-skinned people are living in a tropical paradise... a rise in global temperatures will end up with 'northern' peoples as a global hegemony. (Translation: Northern Canada/Northern Europe is the new paradise).

But don't expect them to admit this.

He forgot to mention that the steaks will be from cattle fed on grain raised in Siberia year-round.

Yes, because Siberia is such a high-quality growing area that it will EASILY replace the American Midwest. Who needs Nebraska and Iowa, anyway?
/snark

Sam Simple:

The earth is not a closed thermodynamic system.

This is usually the fallacy that Bible spouting anti-evolutionists mention, "It is all getting worse because entropy increases."

They are still wrong because of the above.
Entropy does increase in a closed system, but the earth ain't one.

This bulletin brought to you by your personal physics pedant.

Marc: And yet to you guys, everyone who disagrees on any one issue is automatically a ditto-head, a moron, etc.

It really depends on what the issue is. Anyone who disagrees that the earth is round, I'm sorry, IS a moron. Anyone who uses pat phrases that they heard on the Rush Limbaugh show to "prove" that the earth is flat IS a ditto-head.

Cat: Many so-called conservatives have decided this principle is no longer necessary.

This was never actually a "principle". It was just a line of pretty-sounding bullshit used by liars like Cheney as an excuse for various things (like invading Iraq). I agree it's bad enough when conservatives abandon their principles when convenient; it's worse when those principles don't even exist in the first place.

If agenda driven 'scientists' believe that CO2 causes warming, then ergo, there was no CO2 during the ice age.

Yes, ceteris paribus adding atmospheric CO2 causes warming.
No, your conclusion does not logically follow from your premise. And of course, it's just not true:

Ice-core data suggest that carbon dioxide levels at the coldest points of ice ages ranged between 172 and 180 parts per million, and the higher concentrations in the warm periods between those ice ages varied from 260 to 300 ppm. The new findings for the period between 800,000 and 2.1 million years ago show the same pattern, McManus says.

BTW, we are at about 380 ppm now.

Oh, and they're not "scientists," they are scientists.

Marc, you may not be a ditto-head. But you're just wrong.

Certainly, being sent to Siberia would acquire a whole new set of connotations...

Some of the comments here make sense, but the argument that CO2 levels will eventually become competitive with O2 in the atmosphere is a little bizarre. CO2 is a small fraction of one percent of the atmosphere even now, and if it were to double, it would still be a lot less than one percent. But if it were to double, the effects would probably be catastrophic in terms of global climate change, average warming, and,we might speculate, damage to lots of us due to its toxic effects at increasing concentrations. The remark above about Le Chatelier's principle and atmospheric changes driving a switch in metabolism from aerobic to anaerobic is an example of that famous quote, "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." For one thing, we function at times (and in parts of our anatomy) using anaerobic respiration (a fancy way of saying we derive muscle energy from glucose without the use of the oxidative electron transport chain), but eventually the products of that process such as lactic acid get converted oxidatively.

It's amazing to me how folks who never passed the first semester of college biochemistry are such self-appointed experts on all things under the stratosphere.

While it is true that the greenhouse effect from CO2 can be considered beneficial, there comes a point when the atmospheric concentrations are detrimental.

We aren't certain just how much CO2 our atmosphere can absorb before global warming becomes catastrophic to numerous ecosystems.

We do know that our oceans are losing their buffering capacity and increased C02 levels results in acidification.

Seems to me, if oceanic acidification is a result of too much C02 then it has direct impacts on the marine food-chain and hence human nutrition. Therefor we can argue that there already is too much CO2 in the atmosphere.

When you look at the Keeling Curve, you realize that global carbon-sinks aren't keeping up with increased CO2 emissions.

To say humans aren't responsible for the rises in global CO2 is akin to believing that the world is flat and only 6,000 years old.
(besides, if you don't believe in fossils, how can you be burning fossil-fuels!)

The interesting part is that the deep south in he US is scheduled for dramatic losses in either land (LA, FLA) or agricultural productivity if warming comes about.

If I were Canada, I'd be busy building a HUGE wall to keep the United States Of Dumb Fuckers out. I'd also be stockpiling it with some very advanced weaponry.

Learn French now, peeps.

Cat club and Bob G have it right, there is scientific illiteracy on both sides of the debate. Admittedly, most of it resides in denierworld, but using Venus as an example of where we may get to with global warming is a little... extreme.

However, while the belief that global warming may have some benefit to those of you in the frozen North, it will almost certainly have very dire effects on populations where rainfall diminishes and heat increases. Like here in Oz, for example, where our productive land is actually confined to just a few relatively small areas along the South and East coasts. Where almost all of our major cities are on permanent water restrictions. And where heat deaths have always vastly outnumbered deaths from cold.

I'd expect that US areas in roughly the same latitudes (Syd 33deg, Melb 37), such as Atlanta and St Louis etc (not to mention Texas and the like even further south) would be seeing or will see similar rainfall shifts and climate extremes.

So why are they the ones who seem most against the idea of AGW?