A Global Warming Climate Change two-fer

First from Yahoo News:

Hey Deniers, Take a Long Look at the Faces of Climate Change
The impacts of a changing climate often seem so big, so complicated, and so global that they're often impossible to truly understand�much less slow.

The ability to miniaturize�to bring the impacts of things like rising sea levels and ocean acidification, the loss of snowpack and habitat loss�down to the individual, local level is hard, and an often overlooked story.

There are dozens of papers published each year focused on forecasting what the world will be like as temperatures and pollution continue to grow. But putting faces to the people and communities already being impacted�real people, experiencing real change�may be the best way to help us focus on what�s happening right now.

And this goes on and on and on and on for fifteen more paragraphs. The author -- Jon Bowermaster -- is a well-known climate changer. What is fun is the 490+ comments taking his 'logic' apart. Some examples:

The planet has been warming and cooling for centuries....that is a fact. The amount of rain and snow recently on the East Coast was worse during the same period in 1985...it is only a major news story because of the damage to the homes built on the ocean front, at sea level, that were beaches decades ago. Most of these idiots couldn't get flood insurance when they built, now they are finding out why!

And:

No one denies that the world climate is not static. Why don't you "believers" try an honest debate for once?

And:

Since the last ice age peaked 18,000 years ago, the earth has been warming. Nobody seriously denies this. The debate centers on whether this warming is natural vs man-induced. For example, I "deny" that it is 100% man-induced. Does that make me a denier?

Lots more at the site... Second up, we have this from Pete McMartin writing at The Vancouver Sun:

Global warming�s new frightening deadline
In April 2009, the science journal Nature published a paper entitled Greenhouse-Gas Emission Targets for Limiting Global Warming to 2 C.

Its subject was the end of the modern world.

At the time, it attracted little notice. It was a half-dozen pages long. For laymen, its technical content was impenetrable.

The purpose of the paper � researched and written by a team of European scientists headed by Malte Meinshausen, a climatologist with Germany�s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact � was to determine just how much time mankind had left before our burning of fossil fuels would cause catastrophic global warming.

The marker for what would be considered �catastrophic� warming was generally agreed to be anything above a rise of two degrees Celsius in global temperature.

Meinshausen is very much a peripheral character in the pro Anthropogenic Global Warming camp. Anthony Watts runs a website called Watts Up With That that although being a "denier" website, his authors review all the major published work and examine it for statistical accuracy (Micheal Mann's 'trick' to hide the decline) as well as to see how well the models presented track actual boots-on-the-ground measurement. This site has been in continuous publication since November 2006 and has been twice awarded Best Science Blog. I went to the site and searched for Meinshausen and got one hit for this article: Commitment studies belie �consensus� claim that a persistent high level of temperature forcing cannot cause continued warming in which a brief reference to a 2011 communication is made in re the IPCC AR5:

AR5 commitment estimates are higher still, presumably because they project 2010 GHG levels. From the Second Order Draft (p. 12-60):

�Constant emission commitment� is the warming that would result from keeping anthropogenic emissions constant and is estimated for example at about 1�2.5�C by 2100 assuming constant (year 2010) emissions in the future, based on the MAGICC model calibrated to CMIP3 and C4MIP (Meinshausen et al., 2011a; Meinshausen et al., 2011b) (see FAQ 12.3).

Meinshausen is a nobody -- worse, he is a blatant Malthusian. To base a whole hand-wringing column in a major newspaper on O.M.G., we have to stop using fossil fuels NOW to save the planet shows the lack of Pete McMartin's understanding. Only 20 comments but there are some good ones. Climate Change is not about the Earth's Climate, it is about making a few people very very wealthy.