The Solar Thaw

I have been watching the south-facing snow banks along the street, wondering when the snow would begin to melt back wherever dust and dirt catches the sun. Today was the first sign of it this year. I think it takes a certain combination of sun angle, sunny days, and air temperature, so the date varies.  I have a picture of an advanced stage of the thaw from March 15th, three years ago,  here.

Root Shift

Wayne at Niches has another post up about the ongoing drought in the southeastern U.S., and some disturbing comments about the response (or lack thereof) from his students - and even from his biology students. I replied that I think the message about climate change and personal change has been watered down too much, in an attempt to make the necessary changes seem "easy." I suspect that many people equate "easy" with "unnecessary."

Then I found myself writing about my root shift idea. It's high time I mentioned it here. From my comment at Niches:

I am working on a concept called “root shift.” This stresses the fundamental change that needs to be made: to shift the roots of our living (our food, our shelter, our clothes, our entertainment, everything) away from fossil fuels and onto a sustainable base. This shift won’t happen if we wait for governments to force it or corporations to donate it; it must come from us, from the grassroots. What is stopping us from making the shift? What is stopping me, a person who knows far more than enough about the need for it? (Another root shift image: the branching tree of evolution, lopped off by our current extinction event, and future biodiversity starting over from just a few surviving roots...) What do I need to know about the roots of my own being, my attitudes, my habits, and so on, to make a real shift? I want to answer that, and more. I have bought a domain name (rootshift.org - sorry, right now it just directs to Garth’s website) and I’m waiting for “Wikis for Dummies” from the library. I want to build a collaborative website that will bring together tools for change. The “root shift” concept will be central, and all content will have to measure up. Being “good for the environment” is not enough. We’re not talking about tweaking trends, here, we’re talking about reversing them. If an action can’t contribute to the root shift, it’s a distraction. And I suspect that what’s more important than the actions is the spirit - finding enough peace with oneself and one’s neighbours to stop “needing” so much, to begin to love one’s own home place, to choose life.

UPDATE: I have created a web page outlining the root shift concept, which you can view at rootshift.org.

Chris Mooney's "Storm World"

If you're perplexed by the conflict over global warming, wondering how to decide who to believe, or wondering how "the other guys" can be so earnestly stupid, you might find some food for thought in Chris Mooney's book, Storm World.

If you're thinking, aha, Mooney, that's the guy who wrote The Republican War on Science, so that's where Laura's coming from - think again. I haven't read that book and probably won't, since I have very little faith in politicians of any stripe, either as people to rely on or as people to blame. I have my own work to do, walking the walk.

I recommend Storm World not as support for a position, but as context for thinking about positions regarding global warming. Mooney does an admirable (and surprisingly entertaining) job of chronicling the scientific debate around hurricane formation, hurricane intensity, and how global warming could influence hurricanes. Without hiding his own opinions, he illuminates the perspectives of numerous hurricane researchers and the way those perspectives have changed through time with ongoing research and debate. Although he disagrees with Bill Gray, he is refreshingly sympathetic towards this prominent hurricane scientist, who has devoted his retirement to convincing people that there is no global warming-hurricane connection. Mooney is also refreshingly critical of environmental activists making claims that are not supported by current hurricane research.

Overall, Mooney reveals that much of the actual discussion among scientists is not nearly so polarized or conclusive as media coverage suggests. More importantly, he takes us inside the research processes of actual scientists and shows how their quite different perspectives legitimately emerge from their work. This book may not make you any more certain about who to believe. In fact, it may well make you less certain, and that could be a good thing.

Good News? Not Yet.

Once in a while I see some talk about how increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere cannot be causing any global warming, because carbon dioxide only absorbs infrared radiation in certain narrow bands, and all the radiation in those bands is already captured by the current level of carbon dioxide. Sounds like good news! But I've always seen this argument buried among numerous other good news arguments, and somehow as I checked out each one and wound up disappointed, I never quite made it down the list to check out the saturation argument.

Until now. Here's a fine summary, and a fine example of the work of Spencer Weart. He is the author of The Discovery of Global Warming: A hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change. If you haven't dipped into that website yet, well, I wish you would.

Permanence

A glacier and a group of polar bears - those are the two remaining images on my sheet of "Permanent" postage stamps.

The irony is not lost on me.

The glacier stamp will travel with my registration for an event at the Calling Lakes Centre, almost 125 miles away. When we travel by car (1996 Geo Metro) to that event and back, the car will release about 100 pounds of carbon dioxide. It will release water vapour, too, but the carbon dioxide is more important as a greenhouse gas. The reason? Water condenses out of the atmosphere as rain or snow, whereas carbon dioxide is a more permanent addition, building up and driving change.

The event is an Enneagram workshop at the Calling Lakes Centre. Perhaps I will learn how to transform my preoccupation with environmental information into real action (or non-action - staying home with even greater resolve than I do now). Perhaps Garth will gain some insight into his frustration with all that.

Will the 100 pounds of carbon dioxide from our travel to this event be offset by future changes in our lives?

Falling Faster

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that climate change might happen too slowly for humanity to experience much conscious suffering because of it. The losses would be real, and enormous, but spread over several generations so that rosy stories of the old days would be dismissed as exaggeration or fairy tales.

Then Tim sent me an article about the arctic meltdown happening far faster than the climate models have predicted. That's an ironic twist. For years, the willfully ignorant would trot out old stories about early models overstating global warming predictions because they didn't account for clouds. Well, who knew? Errors can occur in more than one direction!

Sorry for my bitter sarcasm. I usually try to tone it down, but I'm past the point of patience.

My children have started bringing me news stories about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. James brought me this one, about carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rising faster than expected. That could cause problems for the models, eh?

Wayne, at Niches, has been writing about drought in the southeast U.S., and when he looks at a period longer than just this year, he sees that they are in their worst drought in 100 years. In his October 26th post, he has a whole round-up of news about things worsening faster than expected.

And today, I hear that the the domino effect is underway in the Canadian boreal forest. It used to be counted as a carbon sink, with tree growth removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Climate change was supposed to make it an even better sink, by accelerating tree growth. Instead, with less snow and hotter summers, there are more forest fires, so the forest has become a carbon source.

I guess it's encouraging that my kids are bringing up the subject now.

I'll feel better when they start suggesting that we walk.

Falling Slowly

Does it matter? Sometimes I picture a future world where there are debates about whether the rich farmland, large cities, and rainforests seen in a few old pictures ever really existed, or whether they were imagined by prophets dreaming of heaven.

Via Contrary Goddess and Sharon (jewishfarmer):

ENVIRONMENT: Warming May Trigger Agricultural Collapse

The study referred to in the above article is reported in detail in William Cline's new book, Global Warming and Agriculture: Impact Estimates by Country. A look at the Peterson Institute's "In Brief" overview of the book shows that the more optimistic estimates of future agricultural production rely heavily on carbon fertilisation offsetting the negative effects of high temperatures (not to mention a fortuitous escape from all sorts of other harmful effects such as water shortages and severe weather events). Carbon fertilisation? I must look for an update on the dark side of that issue: hidden hunger.

Yes, the fall may be too slow for many to notice. And if so, the emotional suffering may be much less that we would expect, because few will know what has been lost. Even as they starve, people may not know that there was ever much hope of anything else.

Two Pet Peeves

I'm sure others might draw a very different web; I know there are places where the arrows go both ways, and there are numerous other influences and outcomes. But this highlights my own pet peeves about the way the world is.

And for all you quick-on-your-feet bloggers who attended the SaskBloggers BBQ/picnic, this is what I wanted to say when I had all your attention and then had to say I lost my train of thought.

Now that I look at it, I guess I've probably said it before.

Clearing the Air

I've often wondered about Dr. Tim Ball. What exactly is his background, and how did he end up with such a radically different perspective on climate change than other climatologists?

From some legal documents published on DeSmogBlog, it appears that he uses a radically different definition of climatology.

Ah.

The Latest from Percy Schmeiser

Through the Environment News Service (see sidebar), I just happened upon an intriguing new video:

Soil: The Secret Solution to Global Warming

from an intriguing new (to me) website:

Quantum Shift TV

In fact, Internet TV is new to me, and I haven't been able to get past a download hitch at about 10 minutes into the video. The first nine minutes had some frustrating questionable generalizations, and some familiar faces whose pronouncements I take with a few grains of salt, but the overall direction seemed plausible and I wanted to hear some more. Any tips on getting the entire video to download?

Frost and Drought

I may have lost some tomato plants last night, even though I had them covered. No big problem - I knew it was a gamble, and I went ahead and set some out because I had lots of extra transplants to keep as replacements. But it got me thinking about last frost dates.

We had some very early warmth this spring. Farmers were out seeding in late April, and I would say that's about a month ahead of the traditional seeding time for this area. The ground dried out, and I got worried about drought. Then it started to rain, and I don't trust my cracked gauge, but Mom says they have had 5 inches in the hills since May 9th, while the average for the whole month is only 2. But before all that happened, at the end of April, I was gardening with drought in mind. I refused Garth's offer of rototilling and in fact refrained from digging the beds at all, to conserve moisture. As I started planting early vegetables, I went to fetch water from the ditch near our yard and found that it was already dry. I took my bike and trailer and hauled a tub of water from a vernal pool over on the east side of the 604. I was worried, but full of hopes that my earliest-ever garden planting might help get plants well established before a summer drought hit hard.

Last year I talked to many people in this area who said the crops turned out better than they expected, considering how dry it was in the latter part of the summer. One farmer friend agreed with my speculation that the early spring and early planting had allowed the crops to get a better root system established, so they weathered the drought better than in former years.

But as my tomatoes show, early planting is a gamble. I don't know much about frost tolerance of the common field crops in this area, but I know there are times when fields have to be reseeded because an early crop was killed by frost. As our springs get warmer, and droughts become more frequent (as predicted due to climate change), farmers may try to adapt by planting earlier. But what about frost? How are the last frost dates changing?

I pulled out my CD of climate data for Western Canada and checked what was available for our area. Carlyle had max/min temperature data from 1922 to 1996 (with one year missing, 1962). I plotted last spring dates with temperatures less than or equal to 0ºC.

Now, where is my old statistics text book? I vaguely remember a lot of cautions about interpretation and testing where time series are concerned, but to me this graph seems to confirm my suspicion that last spring frost dates have not simply moved earlier. They have become more variable, with earlier dates contributing almost all the new variation, but late dates still occurring frequently.

What does that mean for adaptation? In my garden, I can plant things in succession, I can hold back extra transplants as replacements, and so on. But in a farm operation with thousands of acres under cultivation, what is to be done? Can farmers absorb the costs of having to reseed fields one year in six, say, or one year in four? Can they choose their planting dates strategically and be prepared for reseeding operations, or do they have to get it all in as quickly as possible and get back to their off-farm jobs? I wonder.

I also wonder about spring weather patterns in terms of soil temperatures and growing degree days and the overall shape of the warming. My second planting of peas has not appeared yet, and I think it's been ten days. Did the recent cold and cloudy spell chill the soil and rot the seed? How does this spring compare to the springs we used to get? Was a steady warming more the norm? I will have to ponder how to analyse my climate data for that.

UPDATE: Oh, yeah, and speaking of adaptation, I forgot to mention that whole area of adaptation that most people never think about, where there will definitely be problems: adaptation by every other species except human beings and their little collection of manipulated plants and animals. Are we already seeing the effects? What about that die-off of poplar in the hills in the '80s? The experts blame insects, but the locals say it was a combination of drought stress and a late frost. What about the decline in bees across North America? Insects can adapt fairly quickly because of their short generation time, but pollinators are closely co-evolved with plants, and some plants take a long time to reproduce. These changes are happening incredibly rapidly when compared to previous evolutionary history. Can genetic adaptation keep up?

Adaptation

I may have said this before.

If we humans are so adaptable, why don't we adapt our own lifestyles, now, instead of waiting until adaptation is forced on us and on all those other living things that aren't so adaptable?

Viral Bits

Kate (smalldeadanimals) has a post up about the media and blog buzz over Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion's French citizenship. I was intrigued, not by the political topic, but by the illustration of the way bits of news (or not-news) "go viral" in the blogosphere.

This phenomenon has nagged at me for a couple of years now, as I watch little dust devils of commentary swirl up whenever Kate mentions anything to do with climate. I just sneeze and move along, but many people who breathe that stuff in seem totally lacking in immunity to the infectious bits.

Kate quotes Ezra Levant discussing the virus-spreading quality of the Internet as a good thing: whatever is interesting catches on. I would agree - if only the infection caused those infected to pursue their new-caught interest with vigour, openness, and balance. Instead, infection seems to produce a sort of reverse immunity, with greater susceptibility to future infection if newly encountered viral bits resemble the old. Such familiar-looking bits will produce a new round of inflammation and vigorous replication of viral bits from previous infections. Meanwhile the generic rejection response for totally unrecognized foreign bits goes into overdrive, preventing any infection by novel bits that might serve to balance the system.

If people actually responded to something "interesting" by exploring further, finding deeper and wider information that allowed them to view the interesting bit from very different angles, then an infection would be a good thing. It would strengthen and invigorate the mind.

There is, of course, a problem with this viral infection analogy: we associate immunity with health, but a mind that rejects any foreign matter is unhealthy indeed. It is liable to be hurt by all those things that it refuses to know.

Here I can see the value of the viral spread of ideas on the Internet. If there is unhealthy immunity at the level of news outlets (rather than at the level of an individual mind) - if news outlets are rejecting publication of stories that are foreign to established ways of thinking - then the blogosphere provides a new channel for healthy infection.

But what is a healthy infection? Are some of the infections unhealthy? Here I see the power of the viral infection analogy. Mentioning a virus brings to mind several qualities: something harmful; something that relies on encoded information; something that operates invisibly until symptoms suddenly erupt; and something so small as to seem a mere fragment.

A virus does harm by injecting a tiny snippet of misleading information into the workings of a cell. I call it misleading, because it leads the cell astray to serve the purposes of the virus. An infected cell drops its normal activities and instead produces copies of the virus - both its information code and its injection apparatus - until the entire cell self-destructs.

The healthy cell was a marvel of sophisticated harmony, with a host of interacting functions derived from an enormous store of information. Yet the injection of one tiny snippet of new information brought the whole thing to ruin.

Can the whole body of science around anthropogenic global warming be brought to ruin in a similar fashion? Some would like you to think so.

In a recent CFRA Ottawa radio interview, popular climate-fear-soothing geologist Tim Patterson talked about the way science can be totally changed by a single study. Michael Crichton makes the same point in his speeches, and uses the same example: the sudden shift in geological sciences when the idea of plate tectonics became accepted. Crichton and Patterson use this example to belittle the idea of a "scientific consensus" around anthropogenic global warming. They imply that the whole idea of global warming caused by human activity is just as vulnerable as the old idea of fixed continents. They hint that their own contrary voices are on the verge of bringing a major new enlightenment to science.

Their example has great power, and I am sure they know it. Crichton's audience can easily identify with his story about noticing the apparent fit between South American and African coastlines, and about a schoolteacher dismissing his observation. What an apt example to use when you are belittling scientific consensus! It suggests that scientists of the day were ignoring contrary evidence that was obvious even to a casual observer; and thus, it affirms the value of casual observations that seem contrary to a global warming trend.

Crichton and Patterson would like you to think that the scientific consensus about global warming is on the verge of self-destruction, as a healthy infection of new ideas works its way through the scientific community. However, I suspect that their own opinion is somewhat different. I suspect that they are well aware of the strength of the scientific consensus and do not expect it to collapse from within. Instead, they hope to spread enough infection through public opinion outside the scientific community, so that climate change research will be starved of public support, at least to a degree and for a time.

Why do I doubt their sincerity? I have spent some time following up the bits of contrary evidence that these authors and other skeptics present. I have explored the topics they raise by seeking out published research by other authors. I have seen the way the skeptics select examples and omit context. I have learned enough of the scientific background to recognize some of these deceptions immediately, rather than after plowing through reference papers.

Through all of this, I have begun to recognize not only the deceptions, but the techniques behind them. One key technique is to inject deceptive information where it is least likely to be challenged, and most likely to be repeated. For example, both in his radio interview and in a parliamentary hearing, Patterson has talked about the Ordovician period, 450 million years ago, when CO2 levels were much higher and yet there was an ice age. However, in his research papers submitted for publication, he doesn't mention this example. Presumably he doesn't mention it in the friendly discussions he claims to have with other scientists, because he knows he would be laughed out of the room. During the Ordovician, the distribution of land masses was totally different (plate tectonics again), ocean circulation was totally different, and there weren't even any land plants yet. Naturally the relationship between atmospheric composition and global temperature was a bit different back then!

But in the blogosphere, often unnoticed, Patterson's fragment of detail about the Ordovician goes viral, as do numerous other bits of disinformation. And fast-paced blogs like Kate's, where these viral bits propagate, are much more interesting than my tedious, several-days-late rebuttals. Then when the symptoms appear, in the form of public complacency about climate or even outright hostility towards reducing CO2 emissions, some people wonder how it happened.

Counter-Intuitive Bad News

Here's a new finding that goes the exact opposite direction from what the climate optimists have been saying. You've probably heard the argument that CO2 is plant food, so rising CO2 means more plant growth, which means more food for humans and everything else, and at the same time, controls the rise in CO2 levels. You probably already know some problems with that argument: plant growth is obviously not controlling CO2 levels, and CO2-fertilized crops may actually be less nutritious.

But here's the new problem. Satellite studies indicate that microscopic plants in the ocean grow slower when the ocean gets warmer.

That startled me. From my biology background, I know that most biological processes speed up with temperature. Heck, just from living through a cycle of the seasons here, I know that plants grow faster when it's warmer. So why do these tiny plants in the ocean grow slower? From the news release at Oregon State University:

When the ocean surface warms, it essentially becomes “lighter” than the cold, dense water below, which is loaded with nutrients. This process effectively separates phytoplankton in the surface layer - which need light for photosynthesis - from the nutrients below them, which they also need for growth.

Well, so what? Aren't trees more important than these phytoplankton that we can't even see with the naked eye? Back to the news release:

Despite their microscopic size, ocean phytoplankton are responsible for about half of the photosynthesis on Earth, a process that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converts it into organic carbon to fuel nearly every ocean ecosystem.

Ouch.

Bad news, yes. Or is it? I'd say it's better than no news. If phytoplankton dies in the ocean, and nobody hears about it, it still dies. How about using this news as fuel to fire up your determination to walk instead of driving. Try a toboggan for the groceries, with a picnic cooler on it to keep the bananas and lettuce from freezing on the way home. Or grow some sprouts instead of buying lettuce, and check out those new garden catalogs for some fruit trees and berry bushes to plant next season. Insignificant? Consider this: a lot of people say our food in Canada travels an average of 2500 km to get to a dinner plate, and I've heard some estimates as high as double that.

And pass the word along to a climate optimist. Gently. They don't like to hear this stuff - and can you blame them?

Global Drought

Well, adaptationists? How do you propose to deal with this?

I suppose all the extra deserts will provide plenty of room for extra refugee holding stations . . . and cemeteries . . .

I should stop reading the news.

Sand dunes are pretty, I suppose.

I like sandhills better, though. Drought turns sandhills into sand dunes. Sigh.

That reminds me, I have some pictures from our September mini-vacation to the Spruce Woods area in Manitoba. I should post those soon, just to lift my spirits. Yes.

CESD Report 2006

Today the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development released her much-awaited report for 2006, assessing the Canadian government's response to the challenge of climate change.

While politicians and bloggers are busy using it for mud-slinging, I thought you might be interested in looking at the report itself.

If You're Trekking to the North Pole...

...you might want to bring a dinghy.

More meltdown here.

Hello-o-o . . . Ottawa . . . Calgary . . . coffee row . . . Hello?

Thinking of Switching

All you Beta Bloggers out there - have you tried using the new "labels" function? Does it apply only to new posts, or can you go back and add labels to old posts - and if so, do you have to go into each post and republish it individually, or is there a way to do this in a batch?

I just noticed that I haven't updated my subject index since 2005/09 - yep, that's a year ago. I'd really like to give people a chance to look back through my thoughts on, say, climate change, but updating my subject index was always tedious and I just can't face doing a whole year's worth the old way.

By the way, my recent posts (June to September '06) on climate change are here:
Climate Change Is Good for Me - Part Two
Climate Change Is Good For Me
The Sporting Mind (2nd Edition)
Klein's Breath in the Grand Scheme of Things
Climate and Energy News Coming Thick and Fast
An Enormous Step Forward
Not for Gore's Sake, but for Your Sake (Updated)

Climate Change Is Good For Me - Part Two

Well, well. More evidence that climate change is a good thing.

Depending on how you look at it, of course. Is civilization a good thing?

I'm reading "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess" (which, strangely enough, I don't seem to have mentioned here before), and Shlain is discussing the same time period. I may have more to say later.

Climate Change Is Good For Me

They've extended the ice-core record back to 800,000 years, and still no challenge to our modern triumph: the highest atmospheric CO₂ levels in the entire record! And beyond! Way beyond! Hooray for civilization!

I did a Blogger blogs search for reaction to this news, and found Tim Denton's cheery response, as well as an even cheerier post of his from a couple of days ago, in which he has the arrogance to suggest that (gasp) humans may be contributing to global warming! But wait - his arrogance goes even further: he is so certain about the future of Earth's climate, he can assure us that this anthropogenic global warming is a good thing. The larger trend is global cooling, you see, so this warming event is a pretty fine human accomplishment.

I'm so relieved. But, Mr. Denton, I have such a long habit of worrying, please excuse me, but I still have a couple of questions.

How do you know we're increasing the CO₂ at the correct rate? I mean, sure, it's colder now than it has been at various times in the past 15,000 years, but how do you know just exactly how much higher the CO₂ should be now than it was then, to correct for the mystery factor that's been making it colder? Wait a minute, I'm confused. I thought you said that the global warming hypothesis doesn't fit the facts, and you mentioned those warmer times . . . Were you saying that there is no link, after all? But then, how can you say that our global warming is good?

Oh dear. I wanted to believe your good news. Give me a minute to spell out the implicit points of your argument here, and see if I can understand it.

During time period A (shortly after the last ice age), temperatures were higher than they are today.
During time period A, CO₂ levels had not been significantly elevated by humans.
Therefore, CO₂ levels being elevated by humans did not cause the high temperatures of time period A.
Therefore we should not expect CO₂ levels to have any significant effect on temperatures.

Umm, Mr. Denton. Isn't that argument analogous to this one:

Car A was in an accident.
Car A was not travelling over the speed limit.
Therefore travelling over the speed limit did not cause Car A's accident.
Therefore we should not expect speed to have any significant effect on car accidents.

I'm sure you'll agree with me that this argument is false. So, now I can happily accept your larger argument, that CO₂ is leaching out of the atmosphere causing global cooling, and humans came up with their Industrial Revolution just in time to turn this around. Maybe, to clear up your minor confusion about the global warming hypothesis, you'll be glad to hear my alternative interpretation of those earlier warm times. You see, things moved slower then. CO₂ levels increased and decreased over centuries and millenia, instead of just decades. So you see (I hope you're following this), it could be that the current temperature just hasn't caught up to the current CO₂ level. If I may be so bold, I'd say we have only barely begun to see the scope of our accomplishment here. We're going to set that global cooling trend back a lot more yet! Good news, I know.

But I'm such a worrywort, Tim, my friend. What if - what if it's true what I hear, that the sun is kind of slowing down and giving us less light and warmth, and - what's that you say? Oh, yes, I know, that makes global warming a good thing, but, but - what if we're doing it all too fast, kind of like burning up your whole firewood supply in the first few days of winter? What if we run out of carbon-based fossil fuels before this solar dimming spell turns around, and then - oh dear, I hate to think of it - and then we don't have all that petroleum to fuel our economy to keep the research going to find another solution - oh please, Mr. Denton, tell me you've got this all figured out.

Oh, I'm freaking out here. Let me take a break, go for a walk, breathe deeply . . .

Ah, that's better. Now, you'll be happy to hear that I can be an optimist too. I just realized that I've been worrying too much about this whole thing. I really was wrong to think that human activity could disrupt natural cycles so badly. Sure, CO₂ levels are way outside their natural range for the past 800,000 years. The way I see it, we've moved them so fast that the temperature has barely begun to catch up. But here's the good news. The temperature may never catch up! We're about to run out of cheap oil (if we haven't already), but we're still very determined to burn it as fast as we can, so it's probably only a few more decades - or years, even - before oil is suddenly ridiculously expensive, and our CO₂ emissions will drop like a stone. We won't run out of oil, but as soon as we run out of cheap oil, our economy will collapse and we'll leave lots of oil in the ground. Fertilizer will become ridiculously expensive; food production will plummet; people will die and be buried and thus create billions of little carbon sinks; forests will spring up on the abandoned farmland; and lo, the crisis will be over. We could have been cautious and tried to conserve our fossil fuels and spread this CO₂ peak over a few centuries, but no, we made it a harmless little blip.

The Earth will go back to its 40-million-year-old cooling trend, moving slowly enough for us to adapt, research or no research.

And it's all thanks to you and your friends! You climate-change skeptics have been so effective with your bold rallying cries (Damn the tornadoes! . . . go ahead . . . full speed!) that you've completely foiled the dangerous plot of the petroleum conservationists. You knew that we might get all worried about Peak Oil, and actually tackle it successfully, so you created a wonderfully clever diversion with all the noise about climate change. You had us all looking very nearly straight at the scary short-term problem, but not quite. And so we missed it, and it will play out as it should, and in the long run, the world will be safe.

Oh, Mr. Denton, you're my hero.