Pirate's Cove

The NY Times’ Andrew Revkin, a Warmists who has told us that Warmists should avoid over-the-top yammering, seems to really like this

Avoiding A Climate Inferno

The current issue of Science features a short, but forceful editorial by the journal’s editor in chief, the geophysicist Marcia K. McNutt, calling for humanity, after decades of delay, to get serious about cutting greenhouse-gas emissions linked to global warming.

“The time for debate has ended,” she writes. “Action is urgently needed.”

Wait, I thought Warmists were denying that kind of thing, the whole “settled science” and ending debate? No? Of course, that shows us that this is about politics, not science, because the debate over science never ends.

McNutt (who was just nominated* to be the next president of the National Academy of Sciences) points to studies showing that nations’ emissions-cutting pledges made ahead of Paris climate treaty talks this December are insufficient to keep the planet from heating up beyond the 2-degree Celsius threshold the world’s nations previously agreed to avoid. (Learn more about that seemingly simple, but very complicated, temperature target here and here.)

Why propose something that won’t actually achieve the goals? As the old saying goes, when the question is why, the answer is money.

McNutt frames her argument around morality as much as data, alluding to Dante’s 14th-century allegorical journey through hell in setting the tone of her piece:

In Dante’s Inferno, he describes the nine circles of Hell, each dedicated to different sorts of sinners, with the outermost being occupied by those who didn’t know any better, and the innermost reserved for the most treacherous offenders. I wonder where in the nine circles Dante would place all of us who are borrowing against this Earth in the name of economic growth, accumulating an environmental debt by burning fossil fuels, the consequences of which will be left for our children and grandchildren to bear? Let’s act now, to save the next generations from the consequences of the beyond-two-degree inferno.*

Well, there’s an easy answer: all those who believe in anthropogenic climate change should immediately give up all use of fossil fuels. If you think this is just more of my “strawman meme”, au contraire. Let’s look at the paragraph right before the Dante’s Inferno one

I applaud the forthright climate statement of Pope Francis, currently our most visible champion for mitigating climate change, and lament the vacuum in political leadership in the United States. This is not the time to wait for political champions to emerge. Just as California has decided to go it alone, every sector (transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, etc.) and every person need to do whatever is possible to reduce carbon pollution by conserving energy, adopting alternative energy technologies, investing in research, and capturing CO₂at the source.

She is specifically stating that everyone MUST do this. Who better to show the way than those who believe this is all mostly/solely Mankind’s fault?

*Andrew Revkin left the last line of that paragraph out, not sure why. I would think it would go better with his headline. And, yes, I understand that Revkin’s DotEarth article is from July 7, 2015. It showed up in his Twitter feed a couple days ago, though, and perfectly encapsulates the nuttiness of the Cult of Climastrology.