When Goldstein writes, “This means that the 11 warmest years worldwide have been recorded during the last 13 years,” he is positing a fact not in evidence. That claim is in direct contradiction to all of the peer-reviewed climate studies that I have read.

Please refer to

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

and in particular

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif

I think you can see that Goldstein’s assertion (or the assertion of the Hadley centre which he cites) is quite reasonable. Are you disputing this data, sdk.pcola? Do you claim there is an error somewhere that these climatologists missed? Please cite the peer-reviewed climate studies you have read that support this notion.

1. The views on this blog are my own. I write about a lot of things, including executive moves (and deaths), the financial markets, various aspects of business life (information overload, meetings, presentations, etc.), high technology, sales education, the business of sports, the entertainment industry, the airline industry, and so on. So, in the scheme of things, if you don’t like my take on environmental issues, you’re welcome either to continue to provide a corrective, as you’ve been doing, or ostensibly you could just skip those entries. I have a hard time seeing how my commentary on the environment (or the Texas Longhorns, or Citigroup, or any other particular thing) affects your use of the Hoover’s product. We had a great database of company information long before I started writing this blog, and that hasn’t changed in the time that I’ve been writing the blog.

Put it another way: I’m a columnist. The fact that I regularly disagree with this or that columnist from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or the Financial Times doesn’t impede my enjoyment or use of the entire paper. I just disagree with that columnist. So, while I’d rather you agreed with me, the fact that you disagree with me doesn’t call into question the whole operation.

2. “Catastrophic climate change is pure bunk, and this article doesn’t alter that reality.” Maybe you’re right. Maybe. But as in the comment you left on the earlier post, you’re dismissing something “posit[ed as] a fact not in evidence” with a posited fact of your own. In other words: climate change *could* be no more than a big assertion advanced on ideological grounds, but you’re answering it only with assertions of your own. (I don’t presume to infer your own grounds, ideological, evidentiary, or otherwise, for making these assertions.) I welcome the injection of more facts into our discussion, and I pledge to you that I will do my level best to keep up my end by citing more hard facts in my posts.

3. You make a very good point with this: “Munich Re is in business to minimize their payouts, and as such, they must plan for all contingencies, weather-related or not.” It occurred to me after writing this post that different companies will take different approaches to (potential) climate change: At one end of the spectrum, a company like Exxon Mobil has a vested interest in no big upsets to the current status quo — i.e. no new regulations, no big changes in patterns of oil use, etc. No value judgment is implied; this is merely an observation about what would tend to benefit Exxon. Excluding alternative energy suppliers (solar panel makers et al.), reinsurers are probably at the farthest opposite end of the spectrum of caution as regards (potential) climate change. They probably don’t actually plan for *all* contingencies, but they do have a vested interest in hedging against anything that they discern as a likely-enough risk. So if Munich Re thinks that the evidence is pretty solid that there’s, say, a 10% risk of big losses from climate change, that’s enough for them to take action, but that same assessment would be far from enough to make Exxon to change its business practices. So, good point.

4. You write: “When Goldstein writes, “This means that the 11 warmest years worldwide have been recorded during the last 13 years,” he is positing a fact not in evidence. That claim is in direct contradiction to all of the peer-reviewed climate studies that I have read.” I respond: there are a lot of peer-reviewed climate studies that DO support the claim that many of the warmest years on record have happened within the past couple of decades. I’m with you, in that I’d love to see a proper reference on what Goldstein said (I understand why there’s no footnote in a newspaper article, but the academic in me still wants one), but we don’t have to look very far to find peer-reviewed scientific work that backs up this type of claim. An easy example is the third chapter of the 4th IPCC report (available for download here, which cites hundreds of peer-reviewed sources in putting forward its case for temperature trends.

5. The previous point leads me to this question: What do you make of the work of the IPCC? Their reports on climate change have been reviewed by hundreds of scientists and endorsed by many learned societies from around the world, so I’m prone to listen to what they have to say, but you may differ on this. I’d love to have your take on the IPCC and its work.

6. You write: “But don’t let some delicious alarmism get in the way of scribing truthful “news” stories.” Tell you what, why don’t we both drop the snark, since we *don’t* know each other and probably can’t rely on easy assumptions about each other’s ideological positions? I’m suspending my sarcasm; I hope you will, too.

7. One last question, regarding this: “the entire notion that is eagerly lapped up by the acolytes of Al Gore and his merry band of environmental scam artists…you are still engaging in fantastical blogging of an enormous waste of money and resources.” Here’s my question: How does it benefit these “acolytes” to engage in this enormous waste? I can see how Gore personally might benefit from demagoguery, because demagoguery (on whatever issue) can be lucrative, but I don’t get how scientists, policy makers, business leaders, and ordinary people who are concerned about (potential) climate change could benefit — financially, psychologically, or otherwise — from misplaced alarmism. To put it more bluntly: “Cui bono?” If climate change is a hoax, who benefits from promoting it?

“These events cannot, of course, be attributed solely to climate change, but they are in line with the pattern that we can expect in the long term…”

I would contend that they can’t be attributed at all to “climate change.” Munich Re is in business to minimize their payouts, and as such, they must plan for all contingencies, weather-related or not. Weather ≠ Climate. As the article relates, the most damage, value-wise, is not where the greatest damage necessarily occurs. Where storms happen matters most of all, and that gigantic California brush fire would have caused scant monetary damage if it had not happened where there were multi-million dollar homes.

When Goldstein writes, “This means that the 11 warmest years worldwide have been recorded during the last 13 years,” he is positing a fact not in evidence. That claim is in direct contradiction to all of the peer-reviewed climate studies that I have read. But don’t let some delicious alarmism get in the way of scribing truthful “news” stories.

Catastrophic climate change is pure bunk, and this article doesn’t alter that reality. Confirmation of your ideological biases aside, businesses like Munich Re will spend a little money to find ways that they can save even more money. What I find most offensive is that you perpetuate the myth of “Catastrophic Climate Change” under the imprimatur of Hoover’s, a company that I use frequently as a research tool. Ignore hundreds, if not thousands, of atmospheric scientists and physicists who dismiss the entire notion that is eagerly lapped up by the acolytes of Al Gore and his merry band of environmental scam arrtists…you are still engaging in fantastical blogging of an enormous waste of money and resources.