Medary.com

Oldthought:  Global warming will turn the Midwest into an arid Dust Bowl of drought, with a climate closer to the Sun Belt than today's Rust Belt:

If global warming continues unchecked, within 100 years its impacts will significantly alter the Midwest, with the Great Lakes climate resembling that of today's Sun Belt, a panel of scientists said Tuesday.

While shorter winters and longer growing seasons might sound like improvements, the climate-change consequences on balance will largely be negative, the researchers said.

In Ohio and the other Midwest states, they likely will include worsening summertime droughts and heat waves, intensifying storms, declining water levels and purity, increasing air pollution, and a greater risk of insect- and rodent-borne diseases.

Newthought:  Climate change will turn the Midwest into a flooded boggy marsh.

Floods like those that inundated the U.S. Midwest are supposed to occur once every 500 years but this is the second since 1993, suggesting flawed forecasts that do not take global warming into account, conservation experts said on Tuesday.

Who's right?  Well, this is climate change we're talking about.  It's so marvellously complicated that only true, certified experts can say.  Because, you see, they're experts, you can tell by the Ph.D. on their business cards and the fat, lucrative government and private grants they've been getting to study the ongoing calamity which is anthropomorphic climate change.  So, of course, from the IPCC's mouth, the answer is:  Both are!  Yes, both searing drought and devestating flood are predicted by the holy and infallible computer models.

Or so they'd have you believe.

Here's (once more) what I think.  Climate changes.  Always has, always will, despite the best and worst efforts of humans.  Is "global warming" real?  Yeah, there might have been a warming period, but now appears to have peaked around 1998.  (That's ten years ago).  Is carbon dioxide responsible for that warming?  Well, to take that view, you have to explain why CO2 seems to be a lagging indicator vs. global temperature, not a leading indicator.  I'm not aware that anyone has done so.  Also, the greenhouse effect of CO2 is not linear--if you double the CO2 in the atmosphere, you do not double the contribution to heat retention--the effect diminishes as you add more CO2.

Contrary to the popular view, the question of anthropogenic global warming is not settled.  The scientific debate continues--and the side with the "consensus" is also the side that with troubling regularity refuses to reveal their data and methods to the scientific community so that both data and methods can be objectively evaluated.  There is also a troubling myopia among the true believers that carbon dioxide and only carbon dioxide can possibly explain the climate changes we have thus far experienced--this is backed up primarily by computer models which are written and tweaked so that carbon dioxide explains the climate changes we have thus far experienced.  Anybody see the problem with this?

Science isn't supposed to work by press release and Congressional hearing, but by smart guys ripping each other's data and methods to shreds, until a true view of how are world works comes into focus.  I don't think that process has finished yet regarding Earth's climate system.  Until it actually does, moving this issue from science into public policy is dangerously premature.

Finally, if global warming is real, and the climate of Kansas City becomes more like Dallas, and the climate of Sioux Falls becomes more like Wichita, I don't see a downside for society as a whole.  Yes, lots of people will have to adapt, but history reveals that people are pretty good at adapting.