Climate: The Worm Turns Some More

[Valin]

Power line:

 

Steven Hayward

1/16/13

 

The other day I took note of the fact that, as I have long predicted, the media is losing interest in climate change in large part because the climate campaign long ago became an unimaginative crashing bore. Moreover, as also long expected, we’re starting to see the “counter-intuitive” narrative start to appear—namely, that moderate warming might have net benefits. (Actually the IPCC reports have implied this all along, but the notorious Summary for Policy Makers, which is all most journalists and politicians ever bothered to read, always leaves this out or obscures it.)

 

And so here’s another one. Remember how the polar bear became the charismatic megafauna of the threat of global warming (even though there are credible claims that polar bear numbers have increased in recent decades)? Well, there a new article in the scientific journal PlosOne that concludes most arctic species will benefit from global warming. Here’s the abstract:

 

(Snip)

 

To me the most important part of this article is the late underlined bit, which makes the point I’ve been trying to make for a long time—the main driver of species contraction is not climate but changes in habitat and/or habitat fragmentation. But to climate fanatics, everything gets reduced to climate.