Later, “Climate Change” got introduced as the politically “neutral” (read “right wing preferred”) term. So when I say “Climate Change” I mean it differently than perhaps some others do.

Thanks!

Certainly local effects are very very important. Climate change people have understood that for some time. A classic paper on this is a study (actually a series of papers, I think) by Nannan Noe-Nygaard on Scandinavian lakes.

She studied a set of nearby lakes and showed that some of them went up in lake level while others went down. The cause of the change in all cases was the same: A cooling or warming (can’t remember which) as the globe went into or out of an ice age. But the effects were mediated through different processes involving ground water, catchment characteristics, and sea level rise change.

Regarding: “I’d like to know _how_ we know this.” … Right. Read the post! Then read part II.

We don’t “know” anything regarding the link between climate change and moose, any more than you “know” that when you try to unlock the car you think you left in the parking lot earlier that you are really unlocking your car, or that when we see a “green” traffic light that we are not seeing some trick of the sun and shade making a red light look green.

But at some point one makes a decision to accept certain things as facts, certain processes as important, certain relationships as real, because one has to.

The people who work on moose in Minnesota think global warming is negatively affecting their survivorship. The exact mechanisms are in some cases quite clear, in other cases not so clear, and the relative importance of the mechanisms is not yet understood. But the temperature change is there, the mechanisms are not unkown, and there are all these dead moose.

global average temperature is of little scientific interest, in contrast to regional temperature changes

The average climate scientist thinks that regional temperature changes and other factors are very important. But global processes, including heat redistribution, drive the whole system. The pothole caused by the frost heave is important when you are driving through it on the highway and wearing out your suspension. But the winter temperatures that ultimately caused the pothole are fundamental to the fact that you are driving through the pothole. It might ALSO be important that they put down the wrong kind of pavement, or that there was an irregularity in the substrate, etc. But without the cold there would be no frost, without the frost, no frost heave, without the frost heave we would not be having this conversation. About the hypothetical pothole.

You say that we “already know” global warming is the cause of the moose decline. I’d like to know _how_ we know this. FWIW, I’m not trying to start an argument, and though I’m certainly ignorant on this point, that doesn’t mean I’m either stupid or politically motivated.

I think you mean disingenuous, but if not, thanks very much for the nice compliment.

But in fact, it is you who are being disingenuous. I’m not asking for a full proof of a causal connection. I’m asking for a specific local effect in NW Minnesota that might have been the proximate cause of moose decline. Local temperature does not appear to be it. Once you have that, maybe we can connect the proximate cause with atmospheric CO2.

Gerard is not being provocative. He’s being dishonest. Big difference.

Gerard: I totally get that you don’t see it.

And Greg, if you can actually present a defensible story about a causal link between warmer temperatures in northern Minnesota and the decline of the local moose population, you have a professional obligation to share that story with your scientific kin.