O woe is us ... but what if?

A new alarmist report that the buildup of greenhouse gases is going to eradicate the Arctic tundra, quoted in the New York Times.

If emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at the current rate, there may be many centuries of warming and a near-total loss of Arctic tundra, according to a new climate study.

Over all, the world would experience profound transformations, some potentially beneficial but many disruptive, and all at a pace rarely seen in nature, said the authors of the study, being published today in The Journal of Climate.

"The question is no longer whether we will need to address this problem, but when we will need to address the problem," said Kenneth Caldeira, an author of the study and a climate expert at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, based at Stanford University.

This coming mere days after scientists report that global warming may be as much as 30% caused by the sun itself.

Do you suppose with all that new land opening up in Alaska and elsewhere that just possible vegetation might grow upon it?

And that just possibly where a door is closed God opens a window?

The researchers ran a computer model that simulates both the climate system and the flow of heat-trapping carbon into the air in the form of carbon dioxide, then back into soils and the ocean.

Most simulations of the potential human impact on climate have been confined to studying the next 100 years or so, but in this case the scientists started the calculations in 1870 and let the computers churn away through 2300.

Gotta ask: What does starting a sequence in 1870 prove, unless you can show that it exactly correlates with the historical record?

Gotta ask this too: Isn't a computer model basically only as reliable as the suppositions and formula put into it by the programmers, who in this case already believe that man-made global warming is verging on catastrophic?

We once tried to build a rocket, many years ago, powered by a solid rocket fuel that we were absolutely convinced would deliver high yield thrust. We're lucky we lived through the first test and our fourth grade year.

That's the feeling we get from a lot of this alarmist environmental science: like we're flashing back to the fourth grade, and the fuse is lit. You can believe all you want, but the results may be something else altogether.