BEST SERVED COLD

What has Bishop Hill been drinking? 
Having   swallowed   Mark  Steyn 's Heartland  Institute  rant on  wine  & palaeoclimate cork and all, the prelate has  regurgitated  views  even  sillier than Steyn's vintage :

"I will take global warming seriously when they tear down the Climate Research Unit, and sow a vineyard making an amusing little Chateauneuf du Phil Jones"

28 October : Cheers Gavin!- Josh 

...Gavin Schmidt said that there are "More...English vineyards now  than in medieval times."... Gavin implies that this comparison trumps the argument about English vineyards being proof that Medieval Warm Period was hotter... 

Hang on a sec! Surely you would not compare the two without mentioning the population size - the number of people buying and drinking the stuff - 
I mean that would be unscientific, wouldn't it?

Hang on a sec: isn't it more unscientific to forget climate change dictates where grapes can ripen, not who plants how many?

British  viticulture has spread north  far  beyond its Roman and Medieval limits, through grim Northumberland and on into Scotland,  attesting  to  hundreds  of  degree - days of  warming above and beyond the  Medieval  Not-So-Warm Period.

Word  of this  pleasant  change of climate  has reached  Buckingham Palace, where the Telegraph reports British  champagne  now  reigns:
"Ridgeview  Grosvenor 2009  was  served  at the state  banquet  to welcome Chinese president Xi Jinping Gordon Ramsay has listed not just one but  several  English  wines at his new restaurant in  Bordeaux, of all places. 
And  at  a recent  blind tasting.... English  wine  scored a  triumph over champagne, with two English wines (Hambledon Classic Cuvée & Nyetimber Classic Cuvée 2010) beating... Pol Roger &  Taittinger  to finish in first and second place."

If you want a nice place to sample northern wines at a picnic, try the twin summits of Matt Ridley's coal-based Northumbrian tourist attraction

FIFTY SHADES OF GREENSHIRTS

A  new BBC series casts a cold eye on a time Occupy and Climate Dividend marchers  would rather  forget:  the  Paleogreen  epoch.   

Postmodern environmental  activism's taste in crackpot economics less recalls  the  ice cream socialism of  Bernie Sanders and Ben & Jerry than  Ezra Pound's  embrace of the  Social Credit movement.

The history of the Greenshirts starts 10 minutes into this Beeb clip : https://youtu.be/lLLlIRezUks  

Biden Retreat Ends Existential Threat To English Language

Declaring for the Presidency , or possibly the  Chancellorship of the Time Lords last month,  Joe Biden characterized climate change as:

 "an existential threat to the future."

UPDATE 21 OCTOBER:
The future can rest easy : Biden has un-declared. 

PANGEADEMONIUM

Frustrated  social engineer 'Experimental philosopher' Jonathon Keats aims to suppress the vice of nationalism by performing plastic surgery on the face of the Earth.

Why, asks Keats,  should we leave the continents  free to drift  about aimlessly, when  communitarian  geoengineering  could  weld  them, and  us,  into  one  nation  indivisible,  on  a  single  supercontinent bounded by a single ocean?

While the  United Nations Environmental Program has yet to add an International  Panel on  Continent  Change  to  the  existing I P C C , Keats' plans to extend its hegemony are on view at  The Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.  

His Anthropocene workaround  entails taking a tectonic shortcut through the Neo-Hadean epoch:

'Powered by the heat below the Earth's core, nuclear reactors would cool magma in some places, while subterranean machines would heat it up elsewhere, moving continents around. The Pacific Ocean would disappear, bringing together the U.S., Russia & China.

"You have three countries that are looking at each other with a high degree of suspicion from across an ocean, that would literally be in the same place," he says. "I think that that changes things."

The new supercontinent would also bring the Global South upward. "It becomes a way in which to potentially alter the economic status quo," Keats says. "Because economics is such a crucial matter as far as how we address climate change, ... by bringing them into greater alignment, perhaps we no longer have this us versus them antagonism."

A trifling investment in dimensional analysis suggests a minor problem. While geoengineers merely aspire to change the color of the sky, bringing Pangaea back alive would require powering up mantle plumes generating magma flows on a scale exceeding the flood basalts that figured in the Permian-Triassic and Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions. The re-arrangement of the continents might entail melting about 10% of the Earth's crust and upper mantle - a volume roughly 100 times that of the oceans and atmosphere combined. 

Since magma is some three orders of magnitude denser than air and the upper mantle needs to be heated 1000 degrees Kelvin  to make it flow fast enough to revise the map within mankind's evolutionary lifetime, a lot of  surplus heat from the beefed-up geotherm  would end up in the oceans and atmosphere.

Dividing  the  ~ gigajoule - per - tonne  heat of fusion  of  that  much  incandescent rock into the thermal mass of the hydrosphere will, alas, boil the oceans dry, and then some. One worlders may applaud this side effect  as a feature, not a bug, since  absent the oceans, we'll end up on one continent by definition.

Beside Climate Truthers droning on about undersea volcanoes  as the true  wellsprings   of climate change, Keats fanboys should include cornucopians and the Club For Growth.  With nuclear power priced at fifty bucks  a  gigajoule, more or less, his proposal's start-up bill would come to roughly  $350,000,000,000,000,000,000 a head for each of seven billion prospective World Citizens, plus tax and tip.