Climate change can bring on floods, droughts and just about any extreme weather condition. I look at the planet as being in a very delicate balance and anything that can disturb that balance probably will.

My main concern is crop failure. It would be ironic in the worst way if we started to have climate change induced crop failure at just the time that we want to start growing biofuel crops to slow global warming.

SJC:

Computer climate models are incapable to predict regional changes in weather and climate. Even Gavin at RealClimate admitted this. For example, Hansen’s crop of models predicted cooling in US SW and warming in SE. In reality it was exactly opposite:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2665#comments

Such things as ENSO events and especially currently shifting Pacific Decadal Oscillation (both unpredictable) have way more influence on US climate than Global Warming, which is non-existed in continental US: 1930s were as warm as 2000s in continental US.

PS. Snow pack in US SW is already 100-120% bigger than average for this winter. Try to model this.

And yes, Global Warming will bring us more floods in wet regions, more droughts in dry regions, good species will die, bad species will flourish, winter will be colder, summer will be hotter, and everything possible will be worse. Especially impacted will be our ability to recognize BS alarmism.

I don't know but when I read the background on Mr. Barnett and his "Science Express" venture - it begs believability. Like so much in these failed sims.

http://www.scienceexpress.net/

The naysayers are here and they are as always trying to downplay real scientific discussion on climate science.

One, climate is not weather. It is not a short term result of factors but an overall trend. The fact that say a gust of wind changes the outcome of a coin toss so that it favours heads doesn't change the overall mathematical probability that if done a large portion of times, the distribution will be be centered around 50% heads and 50% tails. The very fact that if you keep tossing coins in sets show how distrubuted some of the sets are. There is still a probability that you can get sets that are just heads or tails, that doesn't negate the underlying fact that over the long term, what the median is.

Two, this years' weather patterns for fall in winter were well known in advance. I heard reports in July/August that due to la Nina, NA would recieve above average rainfall in the NE corridor and other effects. It still doesn't negate the overall trends in climate.

As for the record snowpact. We'll will see how long it lasts. GW might dump more snow, but it might also cause that snow to melt more severly, leading to flooding in the spring and severe droughts in the summer.

Climate Audit is a blog. Not a peer-reviewed anything. McIntyre may have found a mistake is the GISS data but it doesn't mean he's a correct in his overall assessments of the science or that his views are correct. McIntyre is not a climatologist. His field of study was mathematics, philosophy, politics and economics. Entire respected scientific peer organizations support the view of man made climate change towards a scenario of global warming.

As for defining it as BS alarmism, no. That would be saying we're going to die or stuff like that on a contiuous basis. There are economic and social impacts from this. If not planned for, it could have impacts on the conditions in the SW US. What costs more, mititgation of the effects or causes? Not only that, who gets hit with the efects and do we have the right to impact others in this fashion? Look at the Colorado river. In the past, the majority of it was diverted to US agriculture before even entering Mexico. Fair it wasn't. Today, more water is sent down to rejuvenate the estuary and allow Mexico to have some use. In 2007 Lake Mead was at 49% capacity because of low snowfall since 2000, threatening water supplies in Nevada and especially Las Vegas. Since that water is also used in agriculture in the Imperial Valley, do you think that there is no strain to the social/economic fabric of the SW or the US in general?

The world is in a sort of balance. Do I think it's delicate? Not really. Life will go on. The question is, will it be congenial to humans and their social/economic structures as it stands now? Considering the amount of development on flood plains and exploitive practices on marginal lands, and our own blind approach to things and what may come, I'd say we will have to be much more proactive in the future or risk escalating costs.

Global warming is global and its effect will be felt in the US. The chief of fire operations for the federal government partially blames the larger fires (2007) in the SW US on GW creating conditions in which larger fires are possible. The last 10 years are the warmest on record. Picking something that happens in the US and trying to correlate that to the world ie 30's temperature spike is misleading.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/12/last-10-years-w.html

Finally, science express is the following link. Not the childrens site sulleny seems to think it is. The fact someone would link it up as the site to a scientific paper/podcast and not check it out, shows something I'm not going to say but is fairly obvious.

http://www.sciencemag.org/sciencexpress/recent.dtl

When you discuss the longer term we might say that we have an arid climate or a semi-arid climate. The difference between the two can be important.

If we go from semi-arid to arid, it could mean the difference between being able to sustain more people or fewer people. The effort to sustain more people may take more resources than we have. Water was taken from the Owens Valley to supply Los Angeles with water in the early 20th century. Such resources may not be available in the future.

What does this have to do with Green Cars? Well, if we reduce the emissions of GHGs from cars, fueling stations, tanker trucks, refineries, well heads, ocean tankers and the like, we just might have a greener world to drive our cleaner cars in.

Aym:

Your example with tossing coins has nothing to do with how computer Global Circulation Models of climate work. In essence, models predict weather in each greedcell over surface of Earth for consequent discrete time intervals over, say, whole century. Then it summaries results over Earth surface and century, and viola – you have global warming, cooling, or anything in between, depend on parameterization (real physical basis for most processes, like clouds, winds, ocean currents, aerosols, solar sensitivity,etc are not known). On coin-toss level it is analogous to predicting on big computer results of EACH coin toss of thousand players tossing coins for a year, and predicting that it will be exactly 987508648 heads and 978648767 tails at the end, plus-minus 3 tails.

Modeling of chaotic non-linear system of extreme complexity, like climate, is simply waste of electricity.

The only valid predictions could be done as prediction of behavior of particular already existed weather phenomena, like already emerged hurricane, weather front, or on seasonal level – El Nino or La Nina. Nobody is able to predict when and what will be next weather phenomena.

PS. Pier reviewing of scientific articles (not existed in climate “science”) is no more than spell check of scientific language. It says nothing about quality of research, or validity of results.

PPS. Rivers in SW do not attend GW seminars and do not know that global climate is warming. Their flow is result of LOCAL precipitation, and local climate, which have not changed over regular variability.

There are multiple simulations in progress at any serious lab they evolve by culling those which digress from the reality.
This is the same system used i weather modelling and yes they should expect surprises around the corner.
It has to be disconcerting that the surprises have such a record of appearing more of a fright than a simple change of direction.
This no doubt confirms the conspiracy theorists view that it's some kind of April fools joke.
The rest realize that the confirmations are compounding.
Like sitting in a train, waiting for a station, expectantly etc, the train isn't slowing down by the time you see the station and register * its way back there. The train driver though forgot the meaning of the word stop. Slow down.
Not my job, we're supposed to be driving this thing, see how fast we can go, why would we want to stop?
The train drivers and their captive passengers speed on.

Andrey,

when you link up to an article that basically wants to link up a single years weather and tries to dismiss a complete climate trend then it is analogous to taking a coin toss set of just heads and saying that that is the norm and that the 50-50 case is the anomaly. Not only that but from a comment Hanson made 20 years ago to a single years weather? That's fishing. It's about climate and that isn't the same as weather, and that article tried to obfuscate that fact. If that isn't BS I don't know what is.

Peer review gives a minimum standard to which things are done. Does it mean that just because it is peer reviewed it is correct, of course not. But then something that is not peer reviewed is just talk and has no checks on whatever outrageous claims can be made. No respectible scientific organization doesn't believe in most aspects of global warming. It's the same people and organizations that dismiss global warming for the last 10-15 years. The only reason you hear from them at all is a false sense of trying to be fair by the press to give both viewpoints as if the weight of that one dissenting voice should be equal to hundreds of other scientists who think otherwise.

GW isn't about how the earth is warming up. It's about how the climate works. Just because the effects are disturbing and point the finger at human activity in general and to the industrialized countries in particular, doesn't mean that it should be dismissed by people who seem to invest their own worth in the way things operate as it peresently stands. That's not objective.

The climate science that supports GW is peer reviewed and overall, supported. The anti-GW stance is that it is flawed but in the end, that stance doesn't support any science that helps explain how climate works. It is a negative argument against any explanation and as such is not scientific.

Anyone can take a position and create a logical premise to defend that position. The more complex and controversial it is, the more can be found. By taking the negative premise that GW is fake right off the bat, the only information getting through is the information that is trying to dismiss it and not any of the information that supports it.

PS
Rivers don't believe in the anti-GW stuff either. That's why lake Mead has dropped precipitously in the last 8 years and why fire conditions have gotten worse in the SW.

Aym,
well said!
As always the naysayers cannot offer an alternative model of any scientific merit.

Can any of you you anti-GW people really give a good "non-Al Gore" comeback to global warming? If there are any models that predict climate changes that don't have anything to do with anthropogenic CO2, I would be interested to read about them. It appears that no reliable science (eg blogs and ExxonMobil funded research do not count) has come out to disprove climate change.

JC:

You are grossly misinformed about what AGW skeptical scientists are saying.

Warming effect of GHG is accepted almost universally, most approximations (Lindzen, Shaviv, and many others) are in ballpark of 1-1.2 degree C per CO2 doubling (half of dreamed off by IPCC bureaucrats). The main difference are feedbacks. AGW promoters assume tripling by positive feedbacks, while serious scientists calculate and measure feedbacks to be negative, halving the effect of increased CO2. This also means impossibility of run-away warming.

Generally what real climate scientists are against in IPCC agitprop is wild exasperations of both effects and dire consequences of antropogenic climate forcing.