I know all about punctuated equilibrium. It's irrelevant. The reason why it's irrelevant is because using it as a defense of your arguments is like saying the Chernobyl meltdown is fine because it forces adaptation.
But there's nothing fine about forcing adaptation when it simultaneously causes a near term apocalyptic scenario and is harmful to the current majority of residents of the planet, and is furthermore, unintentionally the result of a single species' activities.
An apocalyptic scenario is indeed beneficial to future surviving species far in the future after the planet regains its productive natural systems. But that doesn't mean it's desirable.
I am right about the biodiversity thing. You are free to wear blinders regarding it if you choose. But I don't know why you would choose to do so unless you think it might hinder your current views. Read some papers on wolves and riparian zones, or water quality programs in the state of New York, or agricultural studies of multi-plant crop productivity, or methods of pollination, etc., etc., etc.
Can you state what my argument is? You don't seem to be arguing against it.
Actually, I haven't even begun to look at the modeling or data but so far the introductions to the IPCC documents seem pretty much in line with what I've been saying:
The AGW theory is plausible, but far from proven:
At the continental scale, it is
likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming
over the past 50 years averaged over each of the continents
except Antarctica.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/technical-papers/climate-change-water-en.pdf (page 15)
Where uncertainty in specific outcomes is assessed using expert judgement and statistical analysis of a body of evidence
(e.g., observations or model results), then the following likelihood ranges are used to express the assessed probability of
occurrence: virtually certain >99%; extremely likely >95%; very likely >90%; likely >66%; more likely than not >50%; about
as likely as not 33% to 66%; unlikely <33%; very unlikely <10%; extremely unlikely <5%; exceptionally unlikely <1%.
There is historical evidence of climate changes much more extreme and abrupt than what we have witness so far:
The importance of other sources of climate variability was
heightened by the discovery of abrupt climate changes. In this
context, abrupt designates regional events of large amplitude,
typically a few degrees celsius, which occurred within several
decades much shorter than the thousand-year time scales
that characterise changes in astronomical forcing. Abrupt
temperature changes were fi rst revealed by the analysis of deep
ice cores from Greenland (Dansgaard et al., 1984). Oeschger
et al. (1984) recognised that the abrupt changes during the
termination of the last ice age correlated with cooling in
Gerzensee (Switzerland) and suggested that regime shifts in
the Atlantic Ocean circulation were causing these widespread
changes.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter1.pdf (page 106)
Clouds remain an important unknown parameter:
The strong effect of cloud processes on
climate model sensitivities to greenhouse gases was emphasized
further through a now-classic set of General Circulation Model
(GCM) experiments, carried out by Senior and Mitchell (1993).
They produced global average surface temperature changes
(due to doubled atmospheric CO2 concentration) ranging from
1.9°C to 5.4°C, simply by altering the way that cloud radiative
properties were treated in the model. It is somewhat unsettling
that the results of a complex climate model can be so drastically
altered by substituting one reasonable cloud parametrization
for another, thereby approximately replicating the overall intermodel
range of sensitivities.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter1.pdf (page 114)
The other thing is that I realized I have been stupidly creating a false dichotomy between adapting to and mitigating climate change. Obviously both strategies can be used at the same time.
