I made a copy of my comment for posting elsewhere with the title “RE: Joe Romm Can’t Take Harold’s Heat! It was foolish of you to whack it!

BTW: The deli is on West 112th street.

[JR: Post elsewhere all you want. This site is not for reprinting long-debunked disinformation.]

I taking such nonsense to the editors of the WSJ. I highly recommend that you stop buying phony baloney from that deli in NYC.

I just presented rock-solid, bullet-proof empirical evidence that GHG’s do not presently contibuted to any global warming. Moreover, all temp records should be analyzed by Anfrew M.’s method.

[JR: Yes, you have singlehandedly debunked the work of all the leading climate scientists in the world in hundreds of studies and real-world observation over decades -- NOT! Please take such nonsense elsewhere.]

As best as I can tell, the attitude in Russia is “Global warming? Bring it on!”

Well, strictly speaking, replace “correct” with “consistent with current evidence”.

There, did you see how I had to back down to a slightly weaker but much wordier position? Just then?

Refuting misleading statements is something many climate scientists try to do, but we do it in our spare time and without any real training in polemics, and with a much stronger constraint than the various fringe cases on the denial side have to work with.

See http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/ 2007/ 03/ bambi-vs-godzilla.html which I call Mamet’s Principle. As long as the public isn’t paying close attention, telling the truth is actually harder than lying.

Re: 50% reduction being enough — no, not at all. Woefully inadequate. While I’m glad to see that they call for immediate action, their 2050 goal is nothing short of dangerous.

One of the hardest things for serious advocates of mitigating global warming to do is to resist the tempatation to back medicore legislation or to cheer calls for inadequate measures.

The next denier tactic will be to embrace minimums and half-measures because they realize they are ruining their credibility with outright denial. Minimalist goals like these will feed their arguements. Moreover, the poltical dynamic is such that we’ll get one shot at getting this stuff right, and then it’ll go on hold for a decade or so.

If our target is 50%, we will hit feedbacks that will result in runaway global warming. The next two decades are critical — real cuts have to start now. We’re already seeing increases in atmospheric methane, which could be the bow wave of arctic methane gasing off.

The only conceivable glide path to peaking at 450ppm requires us to cut GHG by 80% against 2000 levels by 2050 (while crossing our fingers that we don’t trigger a positive feedback in the meantime).

Calling for anything short of that isn’t good news. It’s future fodder for deniers.

Is 50% a cut in emissions by 2050 enough? What will that leave the CO2 concentrations at?

if it’s a straight line reduction, starting in a few years, with no growth in natural emissions, ha ha, maybe no less than 460ppm? but of course they’re not proposing an unchanging plan; they want a commitment.