Nightmare visions: Our probable future
Johann Hari reviews James Hansen’s new book Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity:
I started reading James Hansen’s new book, Storms of My Grandchildren, at the edge of a vanishing Arctic. I sat on a bare brown Greenland hillside listening to the ferocious crack and crash of the dying glaciers in the distance. As I watched the corpse of the ice sheet float by, broken into a thousand icebergs, it seemed the right place to begin the leading NASA scientist’s explanation for what I was seeing. Since the year I was born, 1979, 40 percent of the Arctic sea ice has vanished. If we don’t change our behavior fast, Hansen says I will live to see the day when it is all gone, and the North Pole is a point in the open ocean, reachable by boat. He stresses these are only the starting symptoms of a planetary fever that will remake the map of the world—and the capacity of human beings to survive on it. I finished reading the book at the Copenhagen climate summit, where the world’s leaders gathered to offer a giant shrug.
Professor Hansen has been driven into a strange situation, and produced a strange book. For one-third of a century now, this cantankerous scientist has been more accurate in his predictions about global warming than anyone else alive. He saw these disastrous changes coming long before others did, and the U.S. government has tried to censor or sack him for his prescience. Now he has written a whistle-blower’s account while still at the top: a story of how our political system is so willfully, deliberately blind to environmental realities that we have no choice now but for American citizens to take direct physical action against the polluters. It’s hardly what you expect to hear from the upper echelons of NASA: not a call to the stars, but a call to the streets. Toss a thousand scientific papers into a blender along with All the President’s Men and Mahatma Gandhi, and you’ve got this riveting, disorienting book.
How did such an implausible American story come to pass? Hansen was born into a dirt-poor family in Iowa, to a farmer who left school in the eighth grade. But he was whip-smart and rose through university science departments, where he spent a decade studying the atmosphere of Venus. But then he noticed a more interesting story was happening right in front of him: “The composition of the atmosphere of our home planet was changing before our eyes, and it was changing more and more rapidly.” Yes, we had known for more than a century that human beings were releasing warming gases into the atmosphere. Every time we burn a lump of coal or a barrel of oil, we unleash in one sudden burst greenhouse gases that took millennia to accumulate. But Hansen believed the effects were now becoming plain—and could be dangerous.
After studying the evidence, in 1981 he made a number of predictions for what a warmer world would look like by the early 21st century. He said that the Arctic ice would be retreating dramatically and the fabled “North-West Passage” would open up, making it possible to sail through the Arctic. It has happened. I have seen it. Yet he was derided at the time as “alarmist” by the political class, and the Reagan Energy Department responded by slashing his research budget.
This set the pattern for his career: Hansen makes scientific warnings that are correct and need to be known by the public, and he is punished for it. In 1988, he famously testified before a Senate committee, …
Do comment:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html#ixzz0dUx6pwXe
gorgo
24 January 2010 at 6:27 pm
After a completely unexceptional warming at the end of the twentieth century the global mean temperature has been steadfastly refused to rise. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen steadly for the last decade but the golbal mean temperatures have remained flat.
This is a direct refutation of the catastrophic phrophecies that Hansen has been making for the last thirty of forty years. Hansen enjoys a certain unwarranted credibility at the moment but when it is generally recognized that he is just another green scaremonger, and that cannot be very far away, the name Hansen will b e a term of abuse, like Nixon or Carter or Stalin.
warwick
24 January 2010 at 10:19 pm
@warwick: Could you fill us in on your scientific background and credentials? The first decade of the 21st century was the hottest ever recorded. See this story.
The reason I ask is that quite a few people who have no knowledge of climatology at all regularly make pronouncements on the Web.
@gorgo: I did see that article. I’m not sure what point you’re making, though.
LeisureGuy
25 January 2010 at 8:58 am
“@gorgo: I did see that article. I’m not sure what point you’re making, though.”
Just that where there’s some bullshit, there’s usually more bullshit. Apparently you’re unwilling or unable to smell any of it yet. In time.
gorgo
25 January 2010 at 1:48 pm
Should I point you to the piles and piles and piles of bullshit from the climate deniers?
I agree that they should not have hyped the fate of the Himalayan glaciers. That’s too bad. But that’s only a tiny smidgin of the picture, whereas climate deniers are routinely caught in lies. I know you want to believe them, but perhaps you could apply the same standard to them.
This post, for example, might get you started—unless, of course, you really, really want to believe the deniers.
LeisureGuy
25 January 2010 at 2:38 pm
Just noticed this discussion. Gorgo’s link misrepresents its source. It’s part of a long chain of misrepresentations that its author has been committing.
I’m not apologizing for the problems with the glaciers (and they are problems, albeit blown out of proportion), but citing abject lies and the lying liars that tell them doesn’t help your case.
Brian D
27 January 2010 at 11:29 am
Dear Leisure Guy,
asking me to prtoduce “scientific background and credentials” is a very amateurish bluff on your part. Hundreds of thousands of folk with no “scientific background and credentials” add their voices every day to the tumult proclaiming that the end of the world is at hand from man made global warming – they are called “journalists.” And politicians. And religious leaders. And run of the mill green activists.
If all climate scientists held the one opinion in regard to this matter then it would be reasonable to accept that opinion. But there are many different opinions, with hundreds of the most eminent climate scientists in the world declaring that the effect of present carbon dioxide release, from human activities, has an effect that is so small that it cannot be distinguished from the noise of natural variation.
What can be detected, at once, because of its smell, is the religious zealotry of the green extremists who are the main drivers of the anti-industrial campaign. It the same extremism that drove the Erhlichs, with their totally discredited prophecies, and the Club of Rome, with their cult-like and foundationless doomsaying.
Are you saying that only people with doctorates in climate science are entitled to join this debate? If so you are a fool. The doomsayers have made certain predictions, based on their theories. Anyone can see that those predictions have not been fulfilled.
The doomsayers predicted that global mean temperatures would rise, calamatously, if carbon dioxide concentrations rose. The CO2 concentrations have risen significantly in the last decade but the global mean temperatures haven’t. The global mean temperatures have plateaued.
To carry on that we have had the hottest decade is simply obfuscation that is designed to distract attention away from the fact that the global mean temperatures have not risen, that the doomsayer predictions have failed.
Hansen is attempting to assert his own authority as a researcher. But hundreds of other researchers disagree with him, diametrically. To claim that “the science is settled” is a lie that would not be out of place in old-style Soviet propaganda. In fact, the whole scaremongering campaign about carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and agriculture is a political and green/religious phenomenon. Because greenery is the religion of the day politicians realize that endorsing it is a cheap source of votes. But that doesn’t make it any less disgusting.
warwick
27 January 2010 at 5:05 pm
Well, it’s hardly a bluff. You apparently are unaware of the number of people on the Internet posting on subjects of which they know little, sometimes offering “expert” advice that differs notably from the advice of experts.
For example, of publishing climatologists, 99% support AGW, 1% do not. I would call that a consensus. Of publishing scientists in general, 89% support AGW, 11% do not. (See this post.)
So I admit that I go along with the crowd, particularly if the crowd has demonstrable expertise in the subject under consideration.
Thanks for commenting.
LeisureGuy
27 January 2010 at 6:09 pm
More bullshit you can’t smell…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7004936.ece
gorgo
28 January 2010 at 5:39 pm
@ gorgo: I think this post raises the question I would ask: Why are you so sensitive to the 2 or 3 problems with climatologists while seeming to be very comfortable with endless problems on the part of the deniers?
But I think I will find out. I just got a copy of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. I bet you would find that book highly educational were you to read it. But of course I understand an important part of your denial is not learning the facts about it.
BTW, could you tone down the fecal references? I find it easy to write without them. Give it a go.
LeisureGuy
28 January 2010 at 5:49 pm
“Why are you so sensitive to the 2 or 3 problems with climatologists”
Because those problems (and others I need not link) are with individuals and/or institutions that are *foundational* to the entire global warming religion/enterprise/industry/scam. You’ll deny that, of course, but you know it to be true. Deny and spin away, LG, deny and spin away.
NOTE: no fecal references were made in this post.
gorgo
29 January 2010 at 4:44 pm
I appreciate your restraint. But in looking at the activities of the deniers, I do detect strong influences (like the coal and oil industry) with lots of money working to influence the debate for what obviously are reasons of self-interest. That is, if you look equally closely at those fighting the testimony of the evidence, I think you’ll find plenty that you would object to.
That is, I am not recommending that you stop scrutinizing those who support AGW, particularly with the thousands upon thousands of peer-reviewed studies, from all over the world. Scrutinize away, and in particular read their responses to those who object to/deny the science.
But also scrutinize the deniers equally: look at their arguments (and the sources of their support). I think you’ll be amazed. If you do it, of course.
LeisureGuy
29 January 2010 at 6:04 pm
Dear Leisure Guy,
your line of argument is deteriorating.
It seems that if you cannot find empirical evidence to support your claim that human sourced releases of carbon dioxide are in the process of making the planet uninhabitable then you are attempting to gain traction from ad hominem attacks on those who refute the scare mongering.
When I was an adolescent there were people who used to attack communism by pointing to the Godlessness of communists. As a boy I could see that this was a flimsy argument; whatever the merits or faults of a centrally organized society, the failure to recognize the authority of the Pope is irrelevant. And now as a man I find the ad hominem attacks on the top flight climate scientists who refute the climate doomsaying to be just as contemptible.
The primary motivation of doomsaying, in my view, is the kind of belief system that finds expression in the writings of Suzuki and the Erhlichs, the belief that humankind (civilized humankind) is essentially evil and is destroying the globe by means of the technology that underpins modern life..
This view doesn’t stand up when it is scientifically analysed. Bjorn Lomborg and his team of statisticians refuted this claim, item by item, in the seminal book, “The Sceptical Environmentalist.” The response of Green extremists to this book was not to respond intellectually, item by item; the response of the green extremists was to personally attack Lomborg.
The “End of the World” view appeals to many deeply ingrained myths in the human psyche. There is the Oedipus myth, that scientific humankind (the father) is raping and murdering the mother (earth). Greens see themselves as killing the wicked father (technological civilization) and rescuing the mother, (earth) with whom sexual communion (all the Gaia worshipping nonsense) is to be achieved. This world view was present amongst the French Revolutionaries, who idolized the “Noble Savage” and other juvenile conceptions of a beneficient “nature.”
It was a very cunning move to have carbon dioxide declared to be a “pollutant.” The green mindset sees pollution everywhere. It is the sperm of the evil father, (the technological society) that is raping mother earth. A cool look at the facts shows that the air we breathe and the water we drink and the food we eat are becoming better and less polluted day by day, especially in the advanced, democratic (Western) countries of the world. But green ideologues NEED to believe in all-encompassing pollution to maintain the rage against evil father. The extreme green view, as put forward by Erhlich, Suzuki, Gore and Hansen, is essentially juvenile. It is the outlook of a Holden Caufield who refuses to grow up.
warwick
29 January 2010 at 7:47 pm
I’ve noticed the asymmetry of sensitivity among denialists, and you exhibit here one aspect: great sensitivity to ad hominem arguments against climate change deniers while going on at some length with ad hominem arguments against the supporters.
Bjorn Lomberg’s arguments were addressed in detail in a special issue of Scientific American. You can start here and then explore other links on the same page. Lomberg, BTW, is a political scientist, not a climatologist or even someone with a real scientific background.
Your Freudian analysis is interesting, but you probably know that Freud’s theories are pretty much exploded. He did succeed in focusing attention on the mechanisms of the mind, but modern findings have demolished his theoretical structure, and even in terms of treatment, cognitive behavioral therapy has been demonstrated to be much more effective than psychoanalysis.
But I do understand the impulse to understand the mindset of those with whom you’re arguing. As noted above, I’m just now reading Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives in an effort to understand the mindset of denialists.
So far as scientific arguments, yours are (I fear) not very strong at all. And consider that only 1% of publishing climatologists disagree with AGW, while 99% agree—and those are the people who understand most about the climate. I’ll go with their position, not yours.
Thanks for commenting.
LeisureGuy
30 January 2010 at 8:57 am
Warwick,
You do not need my support but if you want to start psychoanalyzing the fanatics, I offer the idea of thanatos to explain them much more simply and directly. They love death. They may or may not long for their own personal deaths, but they clearly worship the possibility of mass human death as a just and necessary goal to “save the planet”. It’s the same thinking that has caused them to outlaw the use of (iirc) DDT on the basis of questionable studies, when it’s use would have prevented millions of deaths in Africa alone over just the past few decades. They’d rather feel good about banning a useful chemical while ignoring the lost lives that chemical might have saved. Numerous similar examples need not be cited; we’re all well aware of them. Global warming is just their latest scare tactic (and a recycled one at that).
However, because global warming fanatics are invariably elitists with ultracomfortable lifestyles, at least when compared to the masses they see as a burden to the earth, they are also hypocrites. As such, they seek to impose the death they worship not upon themselves or their families but upon faceless strangers. Since so few will come right out and admit as much (Singer is one who has been honest enough to describe the real end goal), instead they incrementally seek to make life for the mass of humanity less and less comfortable and – hopefully – less and less desirable, thus more easily justified as expendable (“Those poor, poor wretches, they’re all better off dead.”). I believe this partly explains how Gore and all the rest can preach about the threat of carbon with a straight face, while personally pumping out far more of this alleged pollutant than entire communities.
That’s the best explanation for them I’ve been able to come up with, anyway. Simple hypocrisy isn’t enough – it’s the love of human death, just not their own.
gorgo
30 January 2010 at 11:19 am
LG,
For the record, I came here as a fellow wetshaver who, like you, appreciates the old ways. I have found your observations on the hobby to be well thought out and very interesting. I’ve had you bookmarked for some time, and only recently came across your beliefs on global warming.
I do want to ask you this, though: at what point would you seriously begin to question everything you’ve been defending on this thread and others? How much corruption and fakery among the climate intelligentsia will need to be revealed before you at least meet us halfway with “You know, maybe we DON’T know what we thought we did”? Lots of true believers have already begun to question the state religion based only on what’s been revealed so far…more is sure to come. At what point will they finally reach your personal BS meter’s tolerance threshold and you say “Wait a minute here…”? At this rate it WILL happen; will you admit it when it does? Thanks,
gorgo
30 January 2010 at 11:32 am
I guess denialists just cannot resist ad hominem arguments—gorgo’s response to warwick is an excellent example: lots and lots about the character and personality of those who defend AGW on scientific grounds, but no arguments based on science.
I would certainly begin to question AGW if, say, may 50% of publishing climatologists disagreed with it (and if we actually saw global temperature trending downward over a decade, say, and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere—a well-established greenhouse gas, there’s no doubt about its action—started to drop.
But in fact 99% of publishing climatologists find the scientific evidence of AGW, based upon thousands and thousands of peer-reviewed studies, to be totally conclusive, whereas the opponents generally have zero climatological credentials, get support from industries with a vested interest in continuing to pour CO2 into the atmosphere, and are caught in lie after lie. So I guess I don’t believe them. YMMV, obviously.
LeisureGuy
30 January 2010 at 11:38 am
BTW, the “corruption and fakery” among climatologists is as nothing compared to the extensively documented corruption and fakery among denialists. I am bemused that you are so sensitive to the one while totally ignoring the other.
LeisureGuy
30 January 2010 at 11:43 am
BTW: I also believe the theory of evolution, another scientific topic with lots of deniers.
LeisureGuy
30 January 2010 at 11:48 am
See? More leaks out…
“The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7111525/UN-climate-change-panel-based-claims-on-student-dissertation-and-magazine-article.html
gorgo
30 January 2010 at 4:29 pm
LG, you really need to rename yourself The Black Knight.
gorgo
30 January 2010 at 4:57 pm
The Telegraph story is not news—it seems to be the same “scandal” reported in the same paper earlier. And one invalid study doesn’t negate the thousands of other studies—if it did, I could point to lots of invalid studies from deniers.
BTW, it seems as though my comments on problems among the deniers (corruption, fakery, and invalid arguments that in some cases amount to lying) are being ignored. Doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?
LeisureGuy
30 January 2010 at 5:19 pm
Hi gorgo,
thanks for your analysis which points to the love of death amongst the AGW promoters.
I think that it is good to make a distinction between the hired – gun scientists and the green extremists; it is the green extremists who really are the main motivating force behind the “industry is evil” campaign.
The green extremists, and their biologist bedfellows like Suzuki and the Erhlichs, certainly do have a preoccupation with human death. They are never so happy as when they are talking about the deaths of millions of humans. And very many of the green extremists relish the prospect of the extinction of the human race, which they describe as a plague or a virus. I have no insight into this mental illness but it is very easy to spot in the green literature. Perhaps it is an extension of the “nature is good and humans are bad” fixation.
Delayed adolescence, on the other hand, is so prevalent that it needs no special insight. Contrary to what Mr Leisure Guy seems to think, delayed adolescence is not a concept devised by Freud. Shakespeare portrayed it beautifully in Hamlet. And anyone can see it in action, anywhere. It is particularly noticeable amongst lefty political types who are in an unending rage with “big business” and other figures that clearly represent grown up male power. You klnow, I love Paul Simon’s songs, but he clearly encapsulates this visceral hatred of grown up male power when he sings about the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires.”
My father, at one time, used to work a small landholding with a horse-drawn plough. That was already a great improvement on tilling the soil by hand but it was not a great extension of the power of one man’s sweat. Today that same amount of sweat can be used to control the power of great tractors and refined oil and thereby produce thousands of times more food than my father was able to produce.
Power is good.
Power enables us to live better, longer, healthier lives.
Power gives us leisure and the opportunity to read and travel and educate ourselves.
In former times, when the only power available was the sweat of human brows and the straining of horses and oxen, only the very rich, who were mostly hereditary aristocrats, had leisure and enough wealth to travel and read and educate themselves.
Surely this is the essential greatness of the USA, that here is a country where ordinary folk have leisure and the opportunity to travel and learn and even participate in the government of the commonwealth.
The green extremists would destroy the power that has made the USA the greatest country of all time. (I am an Australian citizen, by the way.)
The green semi – extremists would like to see us living in the poverty that prevailed in the medieval times. In their utopia there would be a huge bureaucrocacy controlling every aspect of our lives and preventing any individuels from from ever rising above the common poverty.
The green extremists would like us all to die.
The politicians know that there are votes to be had from mouthing green platitudes.
The national science academies are made up of scientists who are employed by governments and universities financed by governments; they do not particularly want to destroy the power that has rescued us from grinding drudgery but they know which way the wind is blowing, they know where their career opportunities lie and they are just as much the willing servants of the state as were the scientists in the employ of the old Soviet Union. That is why the scientists that reject the global warming nonsense, and they are legion, are mostly either retired or those with such tenure that they cannot be sacked.
warwick
30 January 2010 at 6:54 pm
Warwick, thanks for defining the difference between the literally insane greens who could never be trusted, and the now-compromised scientists who can no longer be. Well said.
Why otherwise intelligent people, who are old enough to have lived through several such media-created This Time The End Of The World Is Certain scare scenarios before – and saw them come to naught – can continue to buy into this even now…well, it can only offer those of us on the outside an uncomfortable glimpse of their collectively fear-driven psyche.
I pity them now, during the heady days of their deluded faith, but will despise them on the day this whole sham is exploded once and for all, but they either instantly switch pet causes from Eurasia to Eastasia (“I never really believed in climate change, but THIS NEW THREAT, however…”), or pretend the whole thing never happened and ignore requests to explain their earlier proselytizing. It’s usually one response or the other for unwillingly disillusioned cultists and I expect no different from this bunch.
Of course, I’m assuming that they’re really True Believers…we must remember there are also those who *say* they believe in global warming but don’t; those who are really interested in nothing less than growing the State at the expense of individual liberties, and will use any false means to whip the masses into fearful surrendering of their rights and lifestyle.
gorgo
31 January 2010 at 2:02 am
[quote]BTW, it seems as though my comments on problems among the deniers (corruption, fakery, and invalid arguments that in some cases amount to lying) are being ignored. Doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?[/quote]
The deniers, as you call them, aren’t the ones jockeying for grants.
gorgo
31 January 2010 at 2:03 am
The deniers are funded by coal and oil companies jockeying to continue pumping CO2 into the atmosphere because that’s how they make their money. The money trail is quite obvious.
And in the above, I see both of you relying almost totally on ad hominem arguments (the psychology and character of those who accept scientific findings), with no arguments based on evidence or fact. And yet you say you reject ad hominem arguments. That’s one thing that puzzles me.
LeisureGuy
31 January 2010 at 8:28 am
Aha. I just had an insight. I had wondered why the last few comments from the commenters above were completely ad hominem arguments against global warming scientists (all the psychological analysis, etc.). I just figured it out.
No scientific arguments (the additional heat is from the sun; the whole thing is distorted by placing measuring instruments too close to cities; and so on) were offered because those arguments have been forcibly and clearly refuted—for example, in summaries like this one at Grist and this one at Skeptical Science.
With scientific arguments refuted, the only thing to fall back on is ad hominem arguments, which are in full display above.
LeisureGuy
31 January 2010 at 12:33 pm
This is no ad hominem:
http://www.petitionproject.org/
gorgo
31 January 2010 at 4:41 pm
[quote]The deniers are funded by coal and oil companies jockeying to continue pumping CO2 into the atmosphere because that’s how they make their money.[/quote]
First, let’s see the money trail showing that link. We already know how scientists can be corrupted by the need for grant $$$, don’t we.
Second, if the coal/oil companies weren’t doing exactly that, you wouldn’t be blogging and I wouldn’t be reading it. You have considered that, haven’t you? Or are you totally off-grid, powering your computer with a little wind-powered whirlygig? No? Solar? No? How about nuke? (if so, good for you)
gorgo
31 January 2010 at 4:44 pm
Ah, yes, that petition. It’s a fraud, did you know that? Google “petition project hoax” or “petition project debunked” or some such and get the facts about this petition. Here’s one post that debunks this pitiful effort.
But if you are impressed by numbers of names, consider this:
89% of publishing American scientists (actual scientists, in other words) support AGW, 11% do not.
99% of publishing American climatologists (those who are best situated to evaluate the evidence and the claims) support AGW, 1% do not.
Doesn’t that mean anything to you at all? Those who best understand science and scientific reasoning support AGW.
Source of those figures, and at the link you also find the distribution by specialty of those who signed the petition project. Turns out that 49% were engineers, not scientists.
Here are a few items showing the flow of cash from oil & gas industry to fund slowing down action on global warming (and we’ve seen this movie before: it’s exactly how the tobacco industry slowed down action on cigarettes for a generation):
“Oil & Coal Interests Launch “CO2 Is Green” Misinformation Campaign …”
Foes of global warming have energy ties
Oil companies funding Friends of Science
Patrick J. Michaels and his PR operation
New Oil and Coal Fronts Greenwash Global Warming
Exxon Keeps Funding Anti-Global Warming Lobbyists
I could go on and on. Exxon’s profits from the sale of oil run into billions of dollars per quarter—sometimes above 10 billion dollars. They will continue to spend a lot fighting the fact of global warming so that they can make more money. That’s what companies do. They don’t care about your welfare or mine; they exist solely to grow profits. Why don’t you believe that they would fight scientific findings, just as the tobacco companies did in the past?
I really don’t understand how deniers such as you can look at the facts and not see what’s happening.
And while some few scientists have been caught “cheating”, it’s always an extreme anomaly (like the Korean who faked his cloning results) and punished severely. That doesn’t change the thousands and thousands of studies coming from uncorrupted scientists. Or do you simply disbelieve all scientists at all times?
LeisureGuy
31 January 2010 at 5:08 pm
BTW, when action finally must be taken, I’ll probably be getting electrical power from technologies developed in China, which is surging ahead in this field while the US is grid-locked by deniers. China is investing heavily in green technologies because they know that in this coming century that will be where the dollars are.
LeisureGuy
31 January 2010 at 5:10 pm
Leisure Guy,
do you not understand that the main rhetorical device from the AGW scaremongers has always been, “The science is in; all the serious scientists agree; the world is heating at a dangerous, catastrophic, rate, and only a lunatic fringe of flat earthers believe otherwise.”
Now, if you do even a little bit of research you will find that there are hundreds of top flight scientists who have publicly and unequivocally stated that they do not agree, that they see nothing unusual in the mild warming of the late twentieth century and that there is no cause for alarm.
As gorgo states, it is foundational to the warmists position that no serious scientists disagree with the orthodoxy.
And if it can be seen that this is not only false but obviously false, as obvious as the Eifel tower, then the warmists are already covered in the stench of wilful misrepresentation.
Then, when we see that other rhetorical devices that the warmists employ, like the infamous hockey stick, are also frauds, like the tricks employed by snake oil salesmen, then we have very good reason to take everything they say with many pinches of salt and listen carefully to the sober spokesmen for the realist side.
It is not a matter of “the alarmists got a thousand dollars here and the realists got a thousand dollars there;” it is a matter of the central burden of the alarmists position being that only flat earthers disagree with them. Once this is exposed as nothing but a bluff for the suckers, then attention must be given to the meat of the alarmists prophecies, such as the central statement that if the concentration of CO2 increases then the global mean temperatures will increase. And for the last eleven years or so this prophecy has fallen in a heap; the concentration has increased but the global mean temperatures have not increased.
This is enough to topple all the fancy sales talk of the scaremongers. What Gorgo and I have been doing is simply exploring the the question, “How can people with such great reputations, scientists supposedly devoted to truth, no matter how uncomfortable the truth might be, go along with this giant three card trick?”
That is why we are exploring persistent patterns in human behaviour; such as the refusal of many very intelligent people to grow out of adolescence and accept that mature people have to accept and learn how to properly deal with power.
Such as the fascination that many otherwise intelligent people have with death, mass death. I have phrased it as a choice between growing up and acknowledging the realities of the world, the realities of strength and weakness; the superficial appeal of trusting in Gaia or organics or everything natural and the realities of the life transforming qualities of internal combustion engines in tractors, artificial fertilizers, synthetic medicines, and building with steel and concrete.
Shakespeare phrased it as “To be or not to be.”
It could also be phrased as “a choice between growing up and embracing reality or persisting in the sweet fantasies of childhood.”
We are not, Leisure Guy, throwing mud to see if your heroes can be more effectively smeared than ours.
We are not outsourcing our judgement to heroes, as you seem to be doing.
We have been exercising our own powers of understanding and we have informed that understanding with our experience of the real world, where it just doesn’t do to follow like sheep when a group of people say, “You don’t have to think about this, we are the experts and we can make your decisions for you.”
We have decided, after using our own powers of reasoning, that here is another con trick being carried out by a mixture of the transparently dishonest, like Al Gore, and others who believe their own propaganda.
Now we are trying to understand how it can have happened.
Just as it is worthwhile to attempt to understand why a superficially attractive theory, like communism, which declares that all shall live as equals, in brotherhood, with the waste of competition eliminated, has turned out to be the most horrible slavery and impoverishment wherever it has been put into effect.
Leisure Guy, were you never aware of the millions of Catholic adolescents who say, “Well, I can’t really decide if the there is a God and if the Catholic church is the organization that He has set up here on earth, but I’ve listened to Jesuits talking about it and they are much better read and have a far deeper knowledge of philosophy than I do. I’m going to go along with them.”
That seems to be your approach.
I see the Green religion as having a much greater attraction than Marxism. It allows its adherents to see themselves as heroes, fighting the evil Earth destroyers. It promises a transcendental Communion with Nature, such as the natives peoples are alleged to have had.
It presents itself as a battle like that between David and Goliath, or Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham.
The left leaning political parties, like the American Democrats, think that they can use the greens for their own ends.
I would not be at all surprised if the Greens get the upper hand and the leftists end up dancing to the tune of the Greens.
warwick
31 January 2010 at 11:28 pm
I did research and I did find that hundreds of scientists disagreed with AGW—but then thousands of scientists do agree with it. And as I’ve pointed out several times, not only 89% of publishing scientists support AGW, but also 99% of climatologists, who have the most appropriate expertise to judge the claims. I realize that you’re placing your bet on the 1% who disagree, but that strikes me as long odds.
I’ve never said that no serious scientists disagree with AGW, just that their number is quite small compared to those who agree. I’m sorry that this fact can’t seem to get through to your mind.
You’re wrong about the last decade: warming has slowed (for reasons that have been explained), but still the latest decade was the hottest in history. Warming is continuing, along with anomalous weather events driven by the warming climate. These are regularly reported in the news.
My approach is not faith-based, as you would have it, but evidence based.
But since you’re interested in the psychology of those who avoid taking in truth, no matter how evident (e.g., those who will not accept evolution), you might well find the book I referenced above of interest, since it specifically explores the mindset.
LeisureGuy
1 February 2010 at 8:53 am
Dear LG,
let’s look at this statement from your last posting on this topic;
“I’ve never said that no serious scientists disagree with AGW, just that their number is quite small compared to those who agree. I’m sorry that this fact can’t seem to get through to your mind.”
Really, this is very disengenuous of you. Whether you said, or didn’t say, that no serious scientists disagree with AGW theory is irrelevant. That is a very tiny fact. The huge fact, the Empire State Building of facts, is that the scientific bodies, the big guns in the field, have been proclaiming for more than fifteen years that no serious scientists disagreed. I have heard this hundreds of times, on the radio, from the mouths of eminent heads of departments of climate change and the like. I have read it, hundreds of times, in the press, as you have also.
Sometimes the statement takes the form that “only people with a flat earth kind of mentality disagree” and sometimes it takes the form that “the number of skeptics in the climate field is rapidly dwindling – soon there will only be a few die hard eccentrics left.”
But it takes only a few moments of googling to see that very serious scientists, scientists with towering reputations, have always been skeptical. And many have been dismissive.
The point of this is not, as you insists over and over, that x scientists are skeptics and 10x scientists are believers; the point is that the believers, the chief advocates, the people who run the realclimate website for example, have been spreading an outrageous lie. If their theory were so solid they would not need to prop it up with lies. If they had any integrity their would refuse to lie about it.
They lie about the number and quality of dissenters.
They construct frauds like the hockey stick graph, which they have now quietly dropped.
They destroy and conceal data, as has been shown in the case of the CRU at the University of East Anglia.
They publish obvious lies, lies that they were told were obviously phoney, like the lie about the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers.
Since the people at the very centre of the promotion of the AGW scare story have been shown to lie extensively, and about crucial matters, it is really very adolescent to say, “There are still more of them than there are opponents so I’m going to stick with the larger side.”
Size isn’t everything, LG.
And you do not understand that the AGW theory states that increasing the concentration of CO2 will result in a continuing increase in global mean temperatures. That is why it is alarming. That is how they base their predictions of catastrophe.
They do not say, well, there will be an increase of something like .6 or .7 degrees, which is what we have seen, and which has stopped. They claim that there will be an increase, a continuing increase, an increase that will make the globe virtually uninhabitable.
This continuing increase has failed to materialize.
The AGW proponents deal with this by shifting the goalposts, wriggling and squirming. But still, if you make a comparison between what they predicted and what has happened, their predictions have been invalidated.
No-one ever said that no climate change was happening. Climate is always changing. You cannot attempt to prop up the AGW theory by pointing to changes in climate. You have to establish that the global warming that is happening is much greater than the warmings that have happened without human involvement and that the warming is catastrophic.
This has not been done. And as time passes and more research is done it becomes apparent that there are a myriad of influences on climate, that CO2 is a very insignificant influence, and that our understranding of the matter is so inadequate that it is foolish pride to think we can make the sorts of predictions that Hansen and others come up with.
Certainly, there is no justification for denying us access to inexpensive power.
Certainly, there is no justification for denying developing countries access to inexpensive power.
warwick
1 February 2010 at 4:43 pm
You’ll probably want to Pentagon to know that global warming isn’t happening, since the latest QDR includes quite a bit on that topic.
LeisureGuy
1 February 2010 at 4:53 pm
The Pentagon? More appeals to authority, when the only thing approaching TRUE authority on this matter – pro-warming scientists – have been proven corrupt? Citing the Pentagon is absurd.
gorgo
2 February 2010 at 4:55 pm
You missed the point, I”m afraid. It wasn’t an appeal to authority, at least not in the usual sense of the term. I meant merely that the military tends to be hard-headed and pragmatic and don’t waste time on pointless strategic studies. So I was merely saying that here is another large group (besides scientists (89 to 11) and climatologists (99 to 1)) that is convinced of the reality of global warming.
It’s weird that you equate the tiny, tiny minority of pro-warming scientists who were involved in the (illegally) hacked emails and the totality of all scientists. Not only that, but it is close to insane that you consider that one incident as invalidating tens of thousands of independent studies, while completely ignoring the corruption and complete dishonesty of the anti-warming group, revealed time after time. That side you see as somehow more credible.
But here we are again, arguing ad hominem and I know how you despise that sort of argument. So let me present a simple and succinct summary of the evidence for AGW: an argument from evidence. Here’s the post.
Naturally, I anticipate that you will respond with a reasoned argument on how the evidence to which I linked is consistent with non-warming. (If you can’t, then the evidence wins and AGW is the only viable theory.)
LeisureGuy
2 February 2010 at 5:16 pm
Here’s an even more succinct summary of the argument and evidence for AGW.
LeisureGuy
2 February 2010 at 5:19 pm
@warwick: I suddenly had a vision and can now confidently predict one bit of your future: At some point, the obviousness of AGW will hit you and you’ll change your mind to support it—and, moreover, you will work out how you were right to wait until that point to change it.
LeisureGuy
3 February 2010 at 1:54 pm
Lo, the heavens opened and the Lord hath revealed unto me a great vision wherein I can see mine enemies humbled before me. Mighty is the Lord, in whom we believe totally, even though the men who trust in their own wisdom do mock.
Yea, the time will come when the unbelievers will be cast down and their wailings will be heard throughout the land. The Lord hath given to me the gift of vision and phrophecy, and this gift is greater than intelligence, commonsense, experience and similar idols of the unrighteous and the unbelievers.
It is not by wisdom or commonsense that one will be saved, salvation comes by belief in those set in authority over us.
Hear me, tremble, know that the Lord will not be mocked. Know that the IPCC will not be spurned.
Here speaketh the Lord, “Just as I have caused my servant Gore to prosper mightily, so shall the unbelievers know the torment of a mightily warmed world, even if the laws of physics have to be suspended. I can suspend or enforce as I please, so make cerain you do not incur my displeasure, nor the displeasure of the United Nations, my servant.”
Amen
warwick
3 February 2010 at 4:23 pm
Good one. I was betting that you would not have a response on the evidence. Falling back on parody is cute, but of course it’s pretty obvious you have no rational answer.
LeisureGuy
3 February 2010 at 4:29 pm
I know, he’s bought and paid for by BIG OIL, but all the same…
http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Honolulu-Magazine/February-2010/May-Cooler-Heads-Prevail/
gorgo
4 February 2010 at 1:39 pm
I must admit that I’m suspicious of your claim that Big Oil is funding A. Kam Napier. Could you provide a link?
So far as I can tell, he’s just a magazine editor with no particular scientific expertise who seems to follow the denialist line. He links to quite a few conservative sites, which (so far as I can tell) oppose the idea of AGW based on ideology (much the same as they oppose the idea of evolution, the idea of gay marriage, the idea of contraception, and quite a few other ideas).
I would love to see a rational argument that can explain the evidence collected in, say, this post without concluding that the simplest explanation (Occam’s Razor) is AGW.
LeisureGuy
4 February 2010 at 1:57 pm
Obviously, Jones himself is now paid off and controlled by Big Oil, and is saying what only Big Oil would want him to say.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html#ixzz0fWRsdTRR
gorgo
14 February 2010 at 9:19 am
oh no…more people bought off and lying for Big Oil…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece
“The story is the same for each one…The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
Such as thermometers mounted above black pavement and next to mechanical heat sources (but feel free to disregard that – Big Oil paid me to write it).
gorgo
14 February 2010 at 10:29 am
Some people don’t have to be paid by Big Oil: they’re simply ignorant and cannot follow scientific arguments. I wouldn’t take those articles too seriously.
First, do you doubt that Big Oil does in fact spend hundreds of millions fighting the findings on global warming, mostly covertly through front organizations? If so, I can refer you to many instances of Big Oil (and Big Coal) funding the fight.
Second, take a look at this post and watch this video:
LeisureGuy
14 February 2010 at 11:24 am
The situation now is that the people at the centre of the Global Warming Scam, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, The IPCC, Mann with his corrupt hockey stick, Phil Jones and the rest, have been exposed to be not men of integrity acting in the traditions of the scientific method but as political advocates, concealing and destroying data, distorting data, and lending their weight to whatever extreme green scare campaigns that will increase their funding and their influence.
They are the prostitutes of the scientific world and their corrupt and malevolent lives are now being exposed, not by the mainstream madia but by conscientious individuals funded by their savings and their retirement funds.
But do take note of who says what in the Global Warming scare campaign; in the years to come, when the whole scam has been totally exposed, it will be good to see these people denied employment in any reputable scientific or policy body. It will be good to read stories and see movies where these charlatans are exposed as the kind of propagandists who painted such glowing pictures of life the Soviet Union, at the same time as millions were dying in the gulags and ordinary people lived lives of poverty, repression and squalor.
warwick
14 February 2010 at 5:39 pm
mmhmm. The denialists, of course, are absolutely pure in their motives and arguments.
Don’t forget that most of the scientific research on AGW has been done at other institutions, independent on all those mentioned above.
And you never did respond to those posts at the links I gave. Is it that you simply cannot follow what he is saying? (I really don’t have a good fix on your level of scientific knowledge.)
LeisureGuy
14 February 2010 at 6:09 pm
I cannot be bothered replying to links. If you are able to condense and present an argument yourself, or present a set of data and interpret it in a relevant way, then that is a different matter; that shows I’m dealing with a real human and not just a cut-and-paste robot.
As for “level of scientific knowledge,” what level of scientific knowledge does it take to see the significance of the statement, first by Richard D Lindzen, of the MIM (Mass Inst Tech) that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995. And do you think it would be beyond the grasp of the most neanderthal, knuckle dragging, sister shagging, hillbilly to see that when Phil Jones endorses this statement, about the lack of any statistically significant warming, that heck, the sumpin that we were told was goin on aint goin on at all.
warwick
14 February 2010 at 6:26 pm
Refuse to click a link = head stuck firmly and voluntarily in the sand.
Your refusal to click a link is, however, the clearest example I’ve seen of “willful ignorance.”
LeisureGuy
14 February 2010 at 6:55 pm
LG,
Jones now admits there has been no statistically meaningful rise in global temps in 15 years.
What is the impact of that statement on the AGW industry as a whole? Serious question.
(note: before you yell “ad hominem” again, the label “AGW industry” is not an ad hominem but an apt description, given the multiple billions of dollars spent on and governmental regulations caused by belief in AGW over the past few decades)
gorgo
15 February 2010 at 5:15 am
According to what I’ve read, Jones’s interview was badly done, but certainly the IPCC has blundered. Here are a couple of brief responses I found in Mother Jones: one on fixing the IPCC, and one on the problems. You’ll note that, regardless of the problems at the IPCC, the consensus among scientists about what is happening has not changed.
LeisureGuy
15 February 2010 at 8:34 am
Aha. Gorgo, read this post regarding the Daily Mail articles.
LeisureGuy
15 February 2010 at 11:42 am
hi LG,
you claim that because I refused to play along with your ‘read my links’ kind of warfare I have my head stuck firmly in the sand, and that I am wilfully ignorant.
But don’t you see that this ‘read my links” style of of discourse is just the kind of discussion that ignorant people engage in?
Someone who hasn’t taken the time, and expended the effort, to master the opposing arguments can simply say, ‘Read this link.”
And then his opponent can say, ‘Well, you read this link.’
This is not intelligent discussion; this is just a combat through authorities.
A catholic might say, ‘Here, read this book by this brilliant Jesuit, if that doesn’t convince you that there is a God and the Catholic Church is his appointed representative on earth then you are being willfully ignorant.’
And then his opponent replies, ‘ Now you read this book, The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. If you have a scrap of intelligence you’ll see that God and the church are just primitive superstitions.’
This is kiddie discussion. Surely you can do better than that.
Did you never learn how, after reading a book, to grasp it’s essence and then incorporate that essence into your own deliberations on the matter?
This ability is one of the main functions of education; were you never exposed to education?
Many folk who never received much formal education nevertheless took the trouble to teach themselves this skill; did you never consider that this is a skill worth acquiring?
In relation to the admissions by Phil Jones that there has been no measureable increase in Global Mean Temperature since 1995, you produce a link that accuses the most vigorous Jones opponent, Mr Rose of the Daily Mail, of being a duplicitous interviewer. But were you not aware that Jones made the same admission in a BBC interview? You should be aware. If you want I can direct you to this information.
Really LG, the the AGW ship is badly listing. Its fuel of public support is being exhausted and its protection of media spin has been holed below the waterline.
If you want to go down with the ship you have the freedom to do so, but you should be aware that many of the senior officers are showing signs of abandoning her.
The green extremists will be there to the last; like all fanatics their dogma is more important to them than anything else.
But you are not a green extremist so you can reconsider the matter, leave this collapsing rust bucket of green extremist ideology and say, ‘Well, the media and many of the foremost scientists told me it was all built on solid principles.’
You can say, ‘I didn’t know that those scientists who supported this crackpot belief were hired guns who were interested in the cash, the glory, and being on the side that seemed to be winning.’
You can say, ‘I know now that the science was never settled, but the media never gave more than a passing, sneering reference to the unbelievers.’
Why continue as cannon fodder in what is not your fight?
warwick
16 February 2010 at 4:34 pm
You’re a very energetic guy, Warwick. But I see no reason to accept your assignment to study up and then write an essay in my own words, when I can provide a link to a cogent, succinct post (with graphs) by an expert in the field. Your refusal to click the link provides all the information I need about your willingness to look at the evidence with an open mind. And with that evidence, I certainly see no reason to continue the discussion with you.
LeisureGuy
16 February 2010 at 4:44 pm
Sure LG, if you don’t want to hear anything more from someone who has actually given the matter some independent consideration that’s fine by me.
But don’t think that by putting your fingers in your ears the sound of the bells will go away.
Soon you will need to cover both your eyes and ears.
So long and good luck.
warwick
16 February 2010 at 5:14 pm