Were Russian security services behind the leak of ‘Climategate’ emails?
Is Russia behind the Climategate hackers?

That said, given the “hotness” of the material hackers of competence would have sought to upload the stolen e-mails to a remote server so that they could escape identification. Though then again, as Charles and I noted, Russia has reason to be interested in derailing the AGW bandwagon, so the FSB theory ought not be omitted as a possibility.

Re-”how can gas prices be kept down forever?” They can’t. Ultimately, it too is a limited hydrocarbon resource, just like oil. Solar is too little-developed, wind is only effective now because it is “subsidized” by the legacy of cheap oil, and neither can provide a reliable base load. I agree with you and T. Greer (and even many *intelligent* environmentalists, for that matter) that nuclear must be the future.

Climategate is, to clarify, (and IMO), and excellent demonstration of the manifold social barriers to thinking and acting pre-emptively. E.g. denial, or the “it’s too late anyway” attitude, or conspiracy theorizing*. This leads me to the belief we won’t do squat until the roof catches fire, not even minimal attempts at mitigation / preparation, as you suggest. In other words, more evidence for the validity of the “doomer” philosophy.

* No personal offense intended. I too was a “climate skeptic” until around 2006 (this was a reflection of my ignorance / lack of interest on the matter, not a position). It is only in the past few years that I’ve become acquainted enough with the science as to cardinally swing to the “AGW bandwagon”.

The “raving loon” (not Alex Jones, the British weatherman) seen in the RT video in the post does have one very effective talking point: that AGW is just a scheme by elitists to pull up the ladder behind the West and keep developing nations from getting rich the same way the West did, with fossil fuels. This may not be a theory that appeals to Anatoly or most Westerners, but it is likely to have strong resonance in India and China and perhaps even Africa when they start building Russian or Chinese designed gas fired plants for growth.

Your points 2-3 suggest it’s already more or less too late to do much except prepare for the consequences of major climate events.

Especially with 3, the man-made AGW skeptics are in full agreement with you that the Indians and Chinese really don’t take Copenhagen seriously but are quite happy to swap more “little pieces of paper” to humor the West.

http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/12/05/stampede/#comment-33

In fact, to bring it back to Russia, I saw that carbon credits is one of Ukraine’s most spectacularly growing industries, since it can claim credit for Soviet factories that have been shut down since 1991 and now ghost towns around said factories.

This from an AGW agnostic. But count me as a firm believer that Russia has warmed substantially since the first half of the 20th century. It’s just that Illinois had its coldest spring on record since the 1930s. All of this being regional/anecdotal, but still, there seem to be some offsets. None of which directly contradict AGW theory, or your ideas about Russia being a beneficiary of climate change in other places. In particular, so long as China doesn’t make a bid for Siberian waters for reasons you’ve previously outlined, they’ll have to make up for the pollution of their own domestic water table by importing more food from a warming Russia.

Again, I don’t think the major tipping point against AGW/Copenhagen consensus was Climategate. Climategate is merely the fallout from the global financial crisis, and guerilla push back against the financiers piling on the AGW bandwagon to sell useless carbon trading credits/medieval indulgences for the Church of Environmentalism to each other.

Cheers,
GD

1. The current atmosphere CO2 concentration (384ppm) correlates to the Pliocene 3mn years ago, when temperatures were 3C higher and the sea level was 25m higher. [No "hockey stick", no models even, involved; just paleoclimate].
2. This degree of warming is now inevitable; if all emissions were to stop today, as a rule of thumb, it would take around 30 years for half of that projected warming to occur as the Earth system moves towards the new equilibrium. [Consequences of heat diffusion / laws of thermodynamics].
3. Emissions aren’t stopping, but accelerating, and this will continue with the industrialization of China and India. [Economic growth as linchpin of the System].
4. Global dimming, which had hitherto partially shielded us from the rising temperatures, will start playing a much lesser role. The effects of CO2 are cumulative, soot and SO2 particulates are washed out of the atmosphere within months.
5. Beyond 2C of warming, the Earth will reach tipping points in which GW becomes self-sustaining. Such tipping points include the melting of the Arctic (reduces albedo), release of Siberian methane from melting permafrost, forests around the world turning from carbon sinks to carbon sources due to accelerated decomposition, the possible death of the Amazon rainforest, etc.
6. Though geoengineering may work, as you point out, there are also many arguments against it. It will probably be tried in the end, but only as a last-ditch throw of the dice that cannot be guaranteed to succeed.
7. Furthermore, innate human psychological features such as conservatism, denial, hedonism, and susceptibility to creeping normalcy and “landscape amnesia”, as well as the anarchic nature of the international system, means that the chances of any effective global action being taken in time is near zero.

I think one very intelligent thing America could do is go nuclear quickly. While this raises its own set of serious issues, it does move us towards reducing C02 emissions. That has to be a step in the right direction.

The bottom line is this- no one wants to screw up their economy and fundamentally change our entire lifestyle without being 100% sure that the problem is so dangerous that it requires draconian solutions. “Climategate” does undermine that certainty.

While we should not act like ostriches with our head in the sand and should take proactive emission reduction efforts, again nuclear can be a big one that still keeps our electrical grid reasonably intact, (as opposed to a lackadaisical business as usual approach), it seems to me that radical changes are not viable nor necessarily appropriate at the moment.

I am quite sure you will disagree and you have laid out an interesting case. However, I am not willing to walk all the way down that road until scientific ambiguity is closer to being eradicated than it seems currently be.

Whilst I don’t have much to add to the topic, I see that like myself you have a conflict between liking freedom and both realising that a strong state has merits and being intellectually playful about alternatives to democracy (I’m personally becoming quite attracted to the ‘enlightened despot’ idea

Anyway, I hope you continue to write in this vein and not get discouraged by those who get angry at departures from (neo, classical and paleo) liberalism.