I returned from my impromptu trip to Northern California to find a recommendation from a friend. It’s an article on the possible benefits of climate change, which is tempting to classify with the denialist literature, but the author, Robert Matthews, admits warming is occurring and seems to accept (though he doesn’t say so specifically) that the cause is anthropogenic. He then tries to accomplish two things: to discredit literature suggesting that climate change is a bad thing, and to make the tired claim that “technology will save us” from those few consequences that are bad.

The friend who referred me to the article knows that I’m a reasonable person, and I assume he knows that I wouldn’t make the claim that all of the effects of climate change will be negative. As such, I genuinely tried to give the piece a chance, but I was struck again and again by the gross omissions and inaccuracies. Since my opinion was solicited in a public forum, I feel compelled to offer it publicly here. I deliver my bitchslap in the extended entry.

They have found that a hotter planet brings with it many benefits, and that humans can adapt perfectly well to it.

Humans can, but other organisms can’t, which has the potential to disrupt whole ecosystems in difficult-to-predict ways, altering (probably not in a good way) our ability to extract essential ecosystem services such as resource production, waste decomposition, filtering pollution from water and air, nutrient cycling, and local climate stabilization (can you say “feedback loop?”).

"If you could vote for a change in climate, you would always want a warmer one," says Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London.

The above statement is surprisingly idiotic coming from someone who should be an expert in the field. No matter what reasonable measure of environmental quality you choose (two prime examples would be maximizing biodiversity or resource yield), quality will deteriorate at extremely low or high temperatures. There will be an optimum window of quality, probably containing lesser variation, not a constant gradient of quality.

According to Prof Stott, times of historical prosperity have often been tied to unusually warm periods, such as the so-called Medieval Warm Period between 1100 and 1300. In contrast, the Little Ice Age between 1450 to 1890 was characterised by famines, pandemics and social upheaval. "We should be glad we've left that behind," he said.

At best this is intellectually dishonest. If Stott actually possesses the historical understanding of changing climate cycles in recorded history that he is fronting, he must also be aware that we are pressing toward what will be the warmest period with which humans have ever had to cope. There is no historical precedent that can provide us with a forecast of the social or economic costs of expected climate change.

Even the frightening prospect of rising sea-levels caused by the melting of the polar ice caps - widely regarded within the climate-change lobby as one of the most devastating consequences of global warming - is now under serious scrutiny. Millions of people, from those living in the coastal cities of the West to the inhabitants of Pacific islands, are at risk, we were warned.

But then the early claims of 5ft rises started to give way to far less dramatic predictions; the most recent estimate, published last year by the International Quaternary Association, puts the figure at a sea-level rise of somewhere between 8in and zero. A recent study found that sea levels around the allegedly threatened Maldives have actually fallen.

I wasn’t able to find the statistic that Matthews attempts to cite from INQUA, but I did stumble across a very interesting graph of historic sea-level rise over the last 120 years on Wikipedia. In addition I’m inclined to point out that we’ve observed a significant amount of melting already, and more warming is already a foregone conclusion. I think it’s fair to go on to suggest that the previous means claims of zero sea-level rise are unfounded.

"Economic studies clearly show it will be far more expensive to cut greenhouse gases than to pay for the cost of adapting to a warmer planet", says Professor Bjorn Lomborg, of Copenhagen Business School and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, whose critique of the climate change debate has incensed environmentalists.

While Bjorn Lomborg, hero of denialists everywhere, has already been pretty thoroughly discredited by the scientific community, I still feel compelled to point out that any reasonable economist should see that this cost-benefit projection is utterly hollow. We have no idea what sort of adaptation costs to expect were we to ignore the problem, especially in light of the uncertain nature of denialist “technology will save us” arguments.

Overall, the article ascribes to one of the most common misperceptions about global warming – that the use of the word “global” implies a uniform effect. “Global” in this case means nothing more than that the mean temperature of the Earth is increasing. Local effects are extremely unpredictable. I’m actually surprised that Matthews commits this fallacy – unpredictability is a keystone argument against mitigating emissions, yet Matthews’ arguments rely almost exclusively on the idea that the climate change is somehow predictable or reliable. Warmer temperatures might encourage agriculture, but temperatures will not be warmer everywhere. Changes to precipitation – often a more important determinant of quality for agricultural systems than temperature – will vary similarly.

As I said in the beginning of this little tirade, I don’t claim that every single effect of warming will be horrific. Many things will change, some for the better, but most for the worse. The proportion of positive to negative consequences will also vary depending on the degree of warming, most probably becoming more negative with greater levels of warming. Global warming is not a binary situation, but a gradient, and the sooner we can start to significantly cut carbon emissions, the better able we will be to cope with the consequences that we’re already facing.