Climate Conversation Group

The mighty Merz Glacier. When sea ice fills this area after a piece is knocked off and floats away, why and how is the freezing of the water influenced?

A story in the NZ Herald a few days ago talked about giant Antarctic icebergs:

A massive iceberg struck Antarctica, dislodging another giant block of ice from a glacier, Australian and French scientists said.

The end of the mighty Mertz Glacier had been repeatedly hammered by the 97-kilometre-long iceberg as it moved in the ocean currents. Note that there’s no mention of global warming to explain this “breakup” of ice.

This event was driven entirely by mechanical forces …

… until the final paragraph, when the article talks about oxygen levels and quotes “a leading climate expert”, Steve Rintoul:

Oxygen levels being fed into the world’s ocean currents are now changing “and the overturning circulation currents will respond to that change,” Rintoul said. Observing what happens “will … allow us to improve predictions of future climate change.”

One wonders whether Rintoul is accurately quoted.

It is understandable that the overturning circulation might transport water of differing oxygen levels around the oceans, but it is incredible that differing oxygen levels might affect the overturning circulation.

I do not understand how observing the effects of oxygen on the overturning circulation might have any effect on our predictions of “climate change”, much less allow us to improve them.

Further explanation is required, and it ought to have been obtained by our beloved Herald before publication of this nonsense.

Welcome to Hell, eco-style. The infamous Banning Pass, near Palm Springs, California. This is not a manipulated image — there are as many windmills on the actual landscape as you see in the photo. But the loveliness of the landscape, far out to the blue hills in the distance, is obliterated by these whirring, pulsing monsters. Whether moving or still, intrusion is too gentle a word for them. I’m all for the freedom of the landowner, but this is a failure of reason on a gigantic scale.

A good man learns from experience; a wise man from the experience of others. The following story describes actual experiences with modern windfarms. It has a Canadian focus, but can instruct us too if we listen. Let us do what we can to prevent these mistakes from occurring in New Zealand.

This story is about windmills proving a disaster, both financially and for energy security, but they are disasters in the literal sense, too. These monstrous machines in our landscapes can cause enormous damage when they fail, which they do quite frequently, adding even more to their great expense, not to mention that people have died. We have pictures of some of the failures. Here’s a site that actually supports wind power, claiming they reduce “carbon footprints”, whatever they are, but loves looking at accidents. It makes chilling viewing. Here’s a sample failure:

A catastrophic windmill failure in Germany, with
total fire destruction and loss of blades. Large quantities
of oil can be seen spilling down the tower.
This is a “carbon-free” energy source?

See more on our new page of wind turbine failures.

Wind power is a complete disaster

From the National Post, Canada, April 08, 2009, by Michael J. Trebilcock

[subheads, emphasis, added]

There is no evidence that industrial wind power is likely to have a significant impact on carbon emissions. The European experience is instructive. Denmark, the world’s most wind-intensive nation, with more than 6,000 turbines generating 19% of its electricity, has yet to close a single fossil-fuel plant. It requires 50% more coal-generated electricity to cover wind power’s unpredictability, and pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen (by 36% in 2006 alone).

Flemming Nissen, the head of development at West Danish generating company ELSAM (one of Denmark’s largest energy utilities) tells us that “wind turbines do not reduce carbon dioxide emissions.” The German experience is no different. Der Spiegel reports that “Germany’s CO2 emissions haven’t been reduced by even a single gram,” and additional coal- and gas-fired plants have been constructed to ensure reliable delivery.

Indeed, recent academic research shows that wind power may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions in some cases, depending on the carbon-intensity of back-up generation required because of its intermittent character. On the negative side of the environmental ledger are adverse impacts of industrial wind turbines on birdlife and other forms of wildlife, farm animals, wetlands and viewsheds.

When the government picks winners look out for havoc

Industrial wind power is not a viable economic alternative to other energy conservation options. Again, the Danish experience is instructive. Its electricity generation costs are the highest in Europe (15¢/kwh compared to Ontario’s current rate of about 6¢). Niels Gram of the Danish Federation of Industries says, “windmills are a mistake and economically make no sense.” Aase Madsen, the Chair of Energy Policy in the Danish Parliament, calls it “a terribly expensive disaster.” Read more… »

The Wellington offices of NIWA. Yes, the anonymous building in front dominates the image. No, I don’t know whether it belongs to NIWA.

NIWA blundered in not keeping track of some important records that justify the country’s warming since the 19th Century, even if it inherited the problem from its predecessor in the Met Service, or the early behaviour of Jim Salinger, who did the work. It blundered again when, instead of being honest, it attacked the CCG and the NZCSC when we asked to know the Schedule of Adjustments.

Now NIWA has admitted in writing that it lost the original data. This settles our original question for the moment and sets them free to go about repairing the situation. Their general counsel, Tim Mahood, made the admission a few days ago, and here’s the letter to prove it.

The NZ Climate Science Coalition had asked NIWA under the Official Information Act last December for the details of the adjustments. This is the original request.

Finally, here’s the hard-hitting letter the Coalition sent back to Mr Mahood, setting out the defects in his official OIA response the day before. Have a look at it — it’s dynamite.

Now we’re waiting for them to finish re-creating the adjustments to the NZ temperature record and to post them on their web site. They told us today it should happen this month. We’re on tenterhooks and can’t wait to have a look at it.

A month ago, when Hot Topic was berating us as unscientific and demolishing our case against NIWA, how many people thought our request was unjustified? How many thought NIWA could do no wrong? How many will apologise to us? Yet who has proved truly scientific? Who has helped to actually improve New Zealand’s temperature record?

For that will be the long-term result of our efforts. What a wonderful thing!

Having (no doubt painfully) admitted to losing Salinger’s working documents, NIWA is now free to pick up what old records it has and work on them afresh. Without the confession the old records must have languished untouched, their taudry reputation defended less and less vigorously by an organisation tarnished by its neglect of verity. A new spirit of honesty will invigorate the place, for truth sets everybody free. The result must be a more accurate dataset and more confident predictions for the future.

I wonder what Hot Topic makes of that?

The shrewdly-woven fabric of the great climate change narrative has begun to tear. Remarkably, its resistance to tearing is proving non-existent. The rifts widen daily as exaggerations are piled upon naked lies and climate theories and snake-oil remedies are dissolved to expose the venal money-making schemes that lie at their root.

The IPCC is doomed, Pachauri faces removal

As much as I would like to focus on local facets of the climate change dreamland it is nevertheless impossible to ignore the continuing revelations from abroad that are tearing at the fabric of the “Grand Narrative”, to use Philip Stott’s term at the Clamour Of The Times.

These tectonic changes will demand alterations to or even cancellation of our own ETS and other responses to “global warming”, so we need to know about them. New Zealand needs a dialogue to debate the implications. Read more… »

This is a good summary of the Himalaya glacier story. Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings, at The Times Online, go through the details and discuss the implications.

The IPCC tell us constantly that they use experts in every field to assemble its reports. It’s scandalous that any of their teams might be led by a person who could know so little that this kind of school-boy error is possible.

Their reputation is getting worse by the day.

Pachauri – climate prophet for profit

Is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), dealing with us (his global constituents, as it were) honestly?

Richard North, in a blog piece called Pachauri: How much is this man getting?, says:

What we are seeing here … is an interesting modus vivendi — three different payments to support the chairman of the IPCC, yet each payment is made by a different organisation to a different organisation — one in the US, one in the UK and one in India. No one knows what the other is doing — except Pachauri, of course.

Why were these payments made in such complex fashion? Apparently his United Nations salary is not publicly disclosed — why not?

On January 6, 2010, in an article entitled Pachauri: the smoking gun, Dr Richard North describes how

TERI Europe was engaged in the production of a report for which it must have attracted funding in the order of £70,000 and incurred considerable expense, yet it shows an income of £9,000 and an expenditure of £5,000.

Even if there is a substantial discount on the SI2 report, it is simply not credible that TERI Europe could have operated that year with an income so low, or spent so little. On the face of it, we are very much closer to showing that this organisation has indeed been guilty of false accounting, and misleading the Charity Commission. Read more… »

Andy Reisinger – powerful global links to climate profits

Dr Andrew Reisinger, Senior Research Fellow, New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute (CCRI), sits at the right hand of God. The god, that is, of the IPCC — Dr Rajendra Pachauri. Andy is head of the Technical Support Unit for the Synthesis Report group of the IPCC, and from that exalted position controls what the world’s national leaders get to know about climate change.

For he was responsible to his “core group” co-author Rajendra Pachauri for co-ordinating the drafting of the Synthesis Report for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). The SR is “the concluding summary of the IPCC’s most recent assessment of our current knowledge on climate change,” as Andy’s cv puts it.

That sounds like proper influence to me — real, transformative power. For what comes out of the IPCC’s Assessment Report (or more particularly the summary of it) goes straight into the ears of national leaders around the globe and they will act upon it. They don’t read the actual reports, so they won’t spot the differences between them and the summary. Neither will they fault the summary for themselves, because they are not scientists.

So they are necessarily at the mercy of the authors (or manipulators) of the Summary Report. Much has been said elsewhere about the politically-motivated alterations that were made to many of the IPCC reports. The reports are meant to represent the best of current scientific knowledge, but in practice they are watered down, uncertainties are grossly understated, certainty is claimed where it doesn’t exist and what the scientists said has even been reversed — without their approval.

The mother of all conflicts — of interest

Read more… »

First published in Macleans, December 13, 2009.

by Colby Cosh. Photograph Andrew Tolson.

The private emails and logs leaked last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia can’t tell us whether industrial activity is really heating the earth’s atmosphere and endangering civilization. But they have settled the identity of the Great Satan of climate science. Torontonian Stephen McIntyre, a gentle, persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003, is mentioned more than 100 times. Read more… »

UPDATE: 1 Jan 2010. I found the “flourish commerce” phrase used by Pears Soap, certainly a more salubrious context than the one I knew it from, but this is the only image I could locate. It’s not legible, but it is there (the evidence is overwhelming; 48,000 national science associations can’t be wrong).

The inside of my grandparents’ white porcelain toilet bowl had the inscription, for the regular edification of we young boys controlling our aim: “Flourish commerce, and let the country live”, enlivened by the stirring sight of New Zealand’s and Great Britain’s crossed flags, in colour.

Written probably in about the 1940s, such frank promotion of commerce was non-controversial in the days before so-called “social welfare” had smuggled its obfuscating tenets into every area of life, until nobody knows where wealth comes from.

These days, forgetting what wealth is and how it’s made, we consider even schools and universities to be centres of production, in the same category as pig farms and steel mills, and we burden their transactions with a Goods and Services and every other sort of tax.

We failed to destroy our own productive capacity

It is fiscal misbehaviour bordering on the criminal to thus reduce funds needed for education, but nobody seems even to notice, much less to complain.

In the Christmas Eve edition of the Herald, Brian Fallow, Economics Editor, pontificates sadly over the failure at Copenhagen of developed nations to destroy their own productive capacity. Read more… »

First published at the National Post: December 21, 2009, 2:33 pm

There’s trouble over tree rings as the Climategate emails reveal a rift between scientists. For Part 1, go here.

By Terence Corcoran

In the thousands of emails released last month in what is now known as Climategate, the greatest battles took place over scientists’ attempts to reconstruct a credible temperature record for the last couple of thousand years. Have they failed? What the Climategate emails provide is at least one incontrovertible answer: They certainly have not succeeded.

In a post-Copenhagen world, climate history is not merely a matter of getting the record straight, or a trivial part of the global warming science. In a Climategate email in April of this year, Steve Colman, professor of Geological Science at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told scores of climate scientists “most people seem to accept that past history is the only way to assess what the climate can actually do (e.g., how fast it can change). However, I think that the fact that reconstructed history provides the only calibration or test of models (beyond verification of modern simulations) is under-appreciated.”

If temperature history is the “only” way to test climate models, the tests we have on hand — mainly the shaky temperature history of the last 1,000 or 2,000 years — suggest current climate models are not getting a proper scientific workout.

Two scientists, one British and the other American, straddle the initial Climategate battle over recent global temperature history. Later, the same two scientists appear to abandon their internal disagreements and join forces to present a united front to fight off critics and put down skeptics. Read more… »

This summary from the National Post of the Climategate emails and what has been discovered in them is the best I have seen. It is especially pleasing to hear Terence Corcoran’s moderate tone. The contents of the released emails and computer code throw strong doubt on the conclusions of the science of global warming. Everything needs further examination and there are signs this re-examination is happening, in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, Britain and Russia. — Richard Treadgold

First published at the National Post: December 18, 2009, 8:13 PM

The scientists seem to have become captive to the IPCC’s objectives

By Terence Corcoran

Now that the Copenhagen political games are out of the way, marked as a failure by any realistic standard, it may be time to move on to the science games. To get the post-Copenhagen science review under way, the world has a fine document at hand: The Climategate Papers.

On Nov. 17, three weeks before the Copenhagen talks began, a massive cache of climate science emails landed on a Russian server, reportedly after having been laundered through Saudi Arabia. Where they came from, nobody yet knows. Described as having been hacked or leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, the emails have been the focus of thousands of media and blog reports. Since their release, most attention has been focussed on a few choice bits of what seem like incriminating evidence of trickery and scientific repression. Some call it fraud.

Email fragments instantly began flying through the blogosphere. Perhaps the most sensational came from a Nov. 16, 1999, email from Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), in which he referred to having “completed Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” in temperature.

Direct evidence of scientific skulduggery

These words, now famous around the world as the core of Climategate, are in fact the grossest possible over-simplification of what the emails contain. The Phil Jones email and other choice email fragments are really just microscopic particles taken from a massive collection of material that will, in time, come to be seen as the greatest and most dramatic science policy epic in history.

Whether the emails, containing more than 2,000 pages and links to thousands more, are smoking guns and direct evidence of scientific skulduggery is in many ways a secondary issue. The Climategate emails are an unprecedented and unparalleled record of attempts by scientists to crack the mysteries of the world’s climate. They are at the heart of a massive effort to understand the world’s climate history and create models and systems to predict climate hundreds of years into the future. Read more… »

Scenarios are not science

Guest post by Barry Brill

December 21, 2009

Pity the politician in 2010: climate change policies pose an unknown but potentially strong temptation to cross party lines — a bit like abortion brought out single-issue voters a few decades ago.

Some political leaders have a messianic urge to save the planet; others have an ideological aversion to intrusive state controls. A few (perhaps) have studied the science in depth, and all have glanced regularly at fickle opinion surveys. But most are stuck with the muddle in the middle, anxious to do whatever will deliver the best outcomes for the country and their constituents.

Many would begin with the risk-averse approach …”we have to rely on the relevant experts in dealing with highly complex issues. Our official advisers tell us there is a significant risk that human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing to the recent global warming trend.”

Obvious policy implications of this ‘luke-warm’ stance are solid efforts to improve energy efficiency and to encourage promising new technology — perhaps low-emission fuels. A key consideration for any such programmes is that they are likely to deliver net benefits in any event — even if the warming stops or the causation becomes suspect. Read more… »

The NZ Herald on Saturday ran an Associated Press story headlined Global warming a tough sell for human psyche. The reporter finds experts to say how hard it is for people to accept man-made global warming (although the reporter doesn’t refer to acceptance, he calls it getting “excited”).

So the difficulty in getting people to believe in global warming is caused just by psychological factors?

I wonder if the Herald would mind, just briefly, going over the actual evidence for dangerous man-made global warming again?

It might refresh our memory. Facts usually make my mind up, but what about the Herald?

Scroll down to a guest post from Christopher Monckton

Copenhagen finally exposed the world-government desires of the global warming devotees.

It is now in the open. United Nations officials, environmentalists and sundry politicians have spoken over increasingly over the last year of the “need” to govern all nations’ decisions relating to the use of fossil fuels in order to get the climate under “control”. There has been the occasional leaked report discussing how to achieve such governance.

But with the release of the actual wording of the Copenhagen Treaty all camouflage and obfuscation has been put aside. What has been revealed is a naked grab for power, which—thank the gods—has been thwarted.

Even now I shrink from talking about it, since it seems simple-minded, or even paranoid, to give credence to just another conspiracy theory. But too many people have expressed a desire for world government, from the French President to the leader of Greenpeace, to disbelieve it any longer. Lord Monckton expressed the issues and the dangers in his superlative style in a speech he gave to the Minnesota Free Markets Institute on October 14.

Now, immediately following Copenhagen and with a newly sore head from police brutality, he writes in the SPPI blog this summary of the agreement and his view of its likely effects. He finishes on a note of hope, but watch for the unstated sting in the tail.

*************************

From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen

The mountains shall labour, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”. Read more… »

A mound of email arrived in my inbox over the last few days. Much of it relates to our attempt to get from NIWA the actual adjustments they have made to the national temperature record.

My first priority is to make an informal response to NIWA’s posts on their web site and to the parliamentary answers we’ve received. It’s important that the people who have trusted NIWA know just how they are pulling the wool over our eyes (or trying to) and refusing to cooperate. In fact, they are being far more obstructive than any publicly-owned utility has a right to be, and you deserve to hear the details of it.

A scientific study is under way right now to make a more formal response to NIWA’s obfuscation, but that won’t be finished until some time in the New Year.

My thanks to everyone who has contributed information or suggestions, but their sheer number means it’s taking longer to review them. Which means I’m also unable to follow up for now the new connections we’ve just made with the network of Climate Realists, run by the excellent Neil and Esther Henderson, of Gisborne. But we’ll get there!

The new interest in us, but more importantly in the evidence-based doubts about the truth of dangerous man-made global warming, is wonderful.

So that’s the reason I haven’t posted anything about NIWA’s completely inadequate answers to us. But it will come soon.

The Carbon Sense Coalition, highlighting the hypocrisy which surrounds the global warming circus, today called for the “climate conspirators” attending the Copenhagen carnival to walk home.

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, added: “Right now, over 15,000 green hypocrites, mostly funded by the world’s suffering taxpayers, have winged their way in comfortable carbon-fuelled air travel to Copenhagen’s best VIP accommodation. There they will be seeking ways to forcibly reduce our carbon footprint while doing nothing about their own.

“Top-rated airlines are booming as prominent people top up their frequent flyer carbon credits. Concierges are smiling as limousines glide in, full of exalted envoys with their entourage of minders and courtiers, all with lights blazing, air conditioners humming, kitchens cooking, champagne bubbling and caviar disappearing.”

Mr Forbes said that the global warming industry would also be there, creating scares, talking about drowning polar bears and melting ice, demanding handouts, seeking exemptions, defending paper credits and pushing for subsidies and special deals.

He said, “There will be battalions of largely gullible and fawning media, many also from government media monoliths touring on the tab of the taxpayer. We are told that Australian taxpayers have sent 114 official delegates there, all concerned to reduce our consumption of carbon fuels.”

“If they are fair dinkum,” he fumed, “they should all lead by example, use “green energy”—and walk home.”

Can’t say we disagree with too much of that, really. Drop a note to your MP and let him/her know what you think of this junket.

The Carbon Sense Coalition opposes waste of resources and pollution and promotes the rational and sustainable use of carbon energy and carbon food.

It’s been a busy day and it’s close to its end. I check out the NZ Herald for the first time and see a headline: “Tiny Tuvalu outgunned by oil giant”. Curious, I click on it. Now I’m furious. That was yesterday, it’s taken until now to finish researching and writing this damned rebuttal and adjust the images and I’m still furious.

There is no justification for a high level of alarm over future sea level rise and no reason to blame human emissions of carbon dioxide.

The “oil giant” is Saudi Arabia, apparently anxious not to have its oil exports reduced too much. “Outgunned” means opposing votes squash Tuvalu’s motion for developed nations to more aggressively curb their emissions. So Tuvalu’s leaders are distressed, thinking their island nation will soon disappear beneath the waves.

Activists claim that sea level rise is already making life difficult for islanders on Tuvalu and on Kiribati, another set of low-lying Pacific islands to the north-east of Australia.

They quote damaging effects such as fortnightly “king tides” attacking the coastline, wells contaminated with sea water—even one village in Kiribati abandoned to “waist-high water”. It is very distressing. Read more… »

Steve O’connor is a senior geologist who has studied paleoclimate for 40 years. He lives in the circulation area of the Taranaki Daily News, which today published some astonishing comments from one Trotter. I am, unfortunately, unable yet to confirm the Taranaki Daily News item or give a link to it, but I am re-publishing Steve’s letter anyway, because it is the best summary I have read of the central anxieties arising from the global warming scam.

UPDATE 14 Dec 8:30 am: To give you just an outline of Trotter’s complete abandonment of evidence-based science, his denial of the right to free speech and his denial of evidence-based doubts of man-made global warming, here are the concluding comments from his Dominion article, titled “In the war for nature, the deniers are traitors”:
“There will, of course, be people who whisper that the enemy isn’t really our enemy … In 1940, England was full of such whisperers. The British ruling class, in particular, was riddled with defeatists, Nazi sympathisers and traitors. Back then people called them “Quislings” and “Fifth Columnists”. If, therefore, the battle against climate change has to become the moral equivalent of war, with all the sacrifice that war entails, then climate change denial must become the moral equivalent of treason. Over the top? No. The stakes really are that high.”

It is sobering to reflect that, a mere 65 years after World War II, which killed so many of our finest young men as they defended the freedom we still live in against the oppression from without of the advancing fascist barbarians, we are about to subjugate ourselves from within. For the remaining vestiges of that freedom are about to be crumpled in the unelected fists of the most devoted, socialist, totalitarian, “environmentalist” bureaucrats the world has ever produced, justified solely on the grounds of non-existent evidence of man-made climate control.

A menacing interpretation

When I first encountered, a couple of years ago, this menacing interpretation of the approaching “carbon crisis” I scoffed. It was alarmist nonsense; outlandish that anybody would do such a thing; an imaginary conspiracy from the paranoid—surely the movement is based on the science of the enhanced greenhouse effect? Read more… »

Last Sunday the NZ Herald reported on a Kiwi woman, one Emily Hall, now a Greenpeace activist in the UK, who was in a boarding party that recently attacked what used to be called a collier—a vessel used for transporting coal.

The Herald’s story contained no censure against Greenpeace’s overt lawlessness. It was a sympathetic treatment of Hall’s experiences with Greenpeace and her and its tactics of rebellion against the Establishment in the name of the environment.

But the story incorrectly described carbon dioxide as “poisonous”.

There was nothing wrong with describing the ship’s load as “dirty” coal, since either handling the stuff or burning it inefficiently results in a mess, although modern methods of burning powdered coal, combined with smokestack “scrubbing” of most of the airborne pollutants, is thermally efficient and allows us truly to describe coal as “clean”.

But labelling “carbon emissions” as “poisonous” is just plain wrong. Carbon emissions is a euphemism for carbon dioxide and there is nothing remotely poisonous about that. Neither is it “dirty”, regardless of Greenpeace’s clumsy propaganda attempts to link it with the visible pollutants that come from coal.

Describing this clean, invisible plant food as poisonous simply attempts to justify Greenpeace’s hostility towards carbon dioxide, and thus legitimise an attack on a vessel and its crew going about their lawful business.

The Herald ought to stand aside from the campaign to wrongly vilify carbon dioxide for the activists’ political purposes.

So, it’s official: the possibility of a replacement being hammered out for the Kyoto Treaty now appears remote.

It will be “physically impossible” to have a detailed deal to tackle climate change by this December’s summit in Copenhagen, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said on Wednesday in Bonn.

The “four tough nuts”, as he termed them, were proving extremely difficult to crack because, he said, the “delivery on four political essentials”, on which success in Copenhagen would depend, was turning out to be “impossible”. Read more… »

All responsible citizens are ‘environmentalists’, but that is no reason to yield to mass delusion. more…

Now that most scientists agree human activity is warming the Earth, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, we’ll reach a “tipping point”. more…