Oh puhleeze. The facts about carbon sinks are from a peer reviewed article:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7409/full/488035a.html
I just grabbed the first Google hit. You may mock MNN’s synopsis all you want, but the facts are there in the peer reviewed article.
Read again for comprehension. The study does not lead one to assume that we should drop the rise in tenperature observed. It is useless for your point and as mentioned I’m not questioning the paper, only your cherry pickness.
In general terms it is like seeing deniers going all “Yeah!!!” for the secuestration doubling, but they forget the “we humans have increased emissions fourfold at the same time” is also in the mix.
So real skeptics should be going “Yeeeeaaah ?! ??? ?” Wha? if they take into account the fourfold increase, but deniers just ignore what is inconvenient.
Hey, the good news is that it may be twice as long before we all fucking die!
It’s worse than the predicted average here in the central U.S. The coasts get off easy. If our national capital were St. Louis, we’d probably have taken action by now.
According to my cite it’s worse than predicted all over, at least on average. And the climate models I’ve seen show superproportionate warming in the midwest.
No worries, the midwest was a big opponent of carbon taxes in the early 1990s. A tax on C02 is a tax on coal, and the midwest uses a lot of that stuff for electricity generation. For that matter I don’t see a lot of green activism coming out of Florida.
I’m not making any generalizations on other topics, but I just wanted to mention that while Florida does use coal for electricity, it uses quite a bit less than the rest of the Southeast or the Midwest - about 25% of their total energy* generation comes from coal. A little more than half of their energy comes from natural gas. One of the reasons for this is the high cost of transport of coal to Florida (although the cost of transport of natural gas is also relatively more expensive and subject to interruption - from pipeline disruptions during hurricanes and from demand during cold winter days - which is why Florida tops the continental US** in energy coming from oil at about 4%).
*when I say energy here, I mean energy produced in the electric sector
** Hawaii and Alaska both use a butt-load of oil for electric generation
Darth: What I had in mind was that Florida is likely to face climate change impacts first. Adding energy into the atmosphere probably increases the frequencies of higher category hurricanes. And when Greenland ice hits a tipping point (30 years? 130 years? who knows?) the rise in sea levels would hit Florida especially hard.
No worries though. Florida extracts billions of dollars from the Feds in the form of FDIC bailouts and hurricane relief. I assume that will continue. Morally of course, they should be supporting carbon taxes or emissions trading. But such agitation tends to come from the richer blue states rather than the red or purple.
Worth noting that his taking offense comes on the heels of a study suggesting that climate change is occurring at a rate commensurate with the worst estimates … and what liberal thinktank funded that study? Why, the Koch brothers.