What Is The Earth’s Ideal Temperature?

By Paul Homewood

Nuttercelli is at it again in the Guardian:

In an interview with Reuters last week, Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said,

The climate is changing. That’s not the debate. The debate is how do we know what the ideal surface temperature is in 2100?

Pruitt’s goal is to sow doubt on behalf of his oil industry allies in order to weaken and delay climate policies. Shifting the ‘debate’ toward ‘the ideal surface temperature’ achieves that goal by creating the perception that we don’t know what temperature we should aim for. It’s in line with his boss’ recent ignorant tweet suggesting that “Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming.”

I spoke with a number of climate scientists who agreed that to minimize the risks associated with rapid human-caused climate change, from a practical standpoint the ‘ideal temperature’ is as close to the current one as possible.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/17/scott-pruitt-insincerely-asked-whats-earths-ideal-temperature-scientists-answer

I think we can take it then that Nuttercelli and his band of “climate scientists”, who include the ever reliable Stefan Rahmstorf, Katharine Hayhoe, Michael Mann and Naomi Oreskes (who is not even a climate scientist), would agree that they don’t want to go back to the cold climate of the Little Ice Age.

Yet, presumably if they had been asked the same question 200 years ago, they would have said the same as they are – let’s keep things the same.

But has it not occurred to any of these geniuses that people in 100 years time will be perfectly happy with their climate then, just the same as Katharine Hayhoe is now?

Why do they have so little faith in the ability of human kind to adapt to whatever conditions they are faced with at the time?

After all, people throughout the world have to cope with far greater day to day, and year to year, variability in their weather than the tiny amounts of warming they may have to contend with over many decades.

Floods and drought, hot and cold, rain or snow, people have always coped, and always will. Furthermore, human ingenuity being what it is, they usually end up better off than before.

It is economic and technological development that makes societies better off, and more resilient in the face of weather and other natural disasters. Not a return to the dark ages.