Guest Post by Thomas Fuller
After the tragic events in Maryland on Wednesday of this week, where a man took three hostages and tried to make The Discovery Channel a vehicle for publishing his manifesto, there have been accusations and counter accusations in the global warming world about taking advantage of this to advance political goals.
In particular, Joe Romm of Climate Progress harshly criticized Anthony Watts for the title of his blog post alerting readers to the situation. Personally, I think Anthony’s choice was mistaken, but not malicious–I’ve made worse editorial decisions myself.
And this may be one of them. The deluge of catastrophic predictions regarding global warming and its consequences have reached almost everyone on the planet, and perhaps unintentionally have replaced Cold War bomb scares as the primary source of doomsaying.
The messages are well-thought out and prepared by professional communicators, with disturbing and graphic images of a post-apocalyptic scenario lifted from Mad Max, and with about as much connection to reality.
In March of this year, a couple in Argentina shot their two children before committing suicide over fears of global warming. On Wednesday, in Maryland, James Lee apparently committed ‘suicide by cop’ after taking three hostages in an attempt to force the Discovery Channel to alter its programming to suit his fears over the environment.
At what point will we call to account those who have preached ‘the end of the earth as we know it’ to countless people? How many people will be driven to desperation by those who distort the science?
The IPCC’s AR4, published in 2007, painted a future with global warming as a serious, multinational problem that we should face together. You may agree or disagree with their findings–I agree with most of it, not all.
But nowhere does the work of thousands of scientists in peer-reviewed literature say that we are doomed, that civilization is at risk, that there is no future for us.
That falls to several groups of committed lobbyists, scientists, environmentalists and politicians who began saying the IPCC report was too conservative almost the day it was published. The evidence they bring forward for that claim is nowhere near as robust as the science referenced by the IPCC.
They are scaring people to death. How many more lives will be blighted or destroyed before they understand that their propaganda has real world effects?
It’s hard to work up too much sympathy for Mr. Lee–he took hostages, threatened to detonate an explosive device, and pretty much guaranteed his fate. And his worries weren’t confined to global warming. He was equally concerned with overpopulation, another scare story put out by some of the same people pumping hysteria over global warming.
At any rate, what these people are doing is despicable, if not murderous.
Sea levels are not going to rise by 20 feet. Or 10. Or five. There is not going to be a climatic tipping point that pushes our planet into a spiral of ever-increasing temperatures. Global warming is not going to cause the extinction of half the species on this planet, or even 1%.
And it is long past time that respected members of the scientific community publicly acknowledge those facts and helped bring this debate back within the realm of reality.
My father met Jim Jones briefly before he moved to Guyana with his flock, and described him as intelligent and persuasive, able to talk reasonably about a multitude of subjects. We don’t need more smooth talkers preaching the language of despair. We can now see the results. In their zeal to communicate their fears of the effects of global warming that go far beyond the predictions of mainstream science, those who Anthony called ‘warmistas’ in his blog title and who I call alarmists and sometimes hysterics have created a library of disturbing words and images that can influence the vulnerable.
Are these people responsible for the tragedies in Argentina and Maryland? No. But did they act responsibly, caveating their predictions as personal fears instead of the verdict of science. No. They were trying to scare you. They succeeded too well.
It’s time to stop the hysteria.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
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It’s time to stop the hysteria:
You can start here:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/09/harry_reid_and_energy_legislat.html
This Greenpeace video of an angry kid is a fine example of doom saying:
Wearing my psychologist hat, Romm was claiming “messaging” was the problem. Not instense enough. So this guy understood the intense urgency. Hansen even writes about a wipe out bad world for his grand kids.
I read the terrorists manifesto and it lines up very accuraely with the “messaging”.
Fear of peak food. Over population is another fear. If the greenie weenies want to declare war and justice on skeptics, surely some will overdose on the koolaid and act out.
Read this guys manifesto. There isn’t anything uncommon in his beliefs. Was it drafted by the science is in peers?
By the constant drum beat of “all is lost” “repent!” the events of yesterday were
inevitable….
Very reasoned post…
Were there to be any truth at all in the scenarios painted in the name of AGW, almost all governments would classify the information and the populaces would be the last to know.
The very fact that they trumpet the nonsense throughout the media gives great comfort: we are safe in the knowledge that this is yet another tax raising scam and ultimately for the benefit of politicians’ post retirement opportunities.
And that is the definitive answer.
Tom,
While I agree with most of your essay, I think those that preach hysteria DO have some responsibility for events created by those who are influenced by that hysteria.
Tom,
You once wrote about the moral dilema of renouncing to some of our assets for the sake of conserving the planet.
Good to see that you also appreciate the moral hazard of disseminating hysteria and fear mongering. And the moral problem of falsely invoking science where there is no scientific evidence.
And just now another oil platform blew up just off the LA coast, so this will add to the hysteria and politics of green. http://www.wafb.com/Global/story.asp?S=13089364
Interesting though, that they excesses listed have all been from Warmist Believers, sold on Doom by the Establishment. While greedy, paid skeptics, deniers, and flat earthers have not lost their marbles, taken hostages, committed murders or even, if I may be forgiven – over stated their facts in the first place. We’ve just been saying, slow down there Nelly!
I’ve yet to have it explained to me how a longer growing season, animals having a longer season to mate and raise babies, and somehow warmer and longer growing seasons are a bad thing.
The rest of it is pure theatrics……..
This was the same thing Michael Crichton wrote about in his novel “State of Fear” which I know a lot of people are against environmentally, but there was also other ideas in there just kind of related to it.
He devoted a few pages to annalyzing the media headlines and advocates thereof on their “doom” thinking after the end of the Cold War. He talked about (which the novel name was based on) the culture of fear where media hypes up people’s fears…and just lets the fears take hold. He cautioned that this approach was going to have consequences…..
In addition, he advocated the abolition of all current environmental organizations and the creation of new ones that would work to understand and protect the environment in a responsible way. Its too bad this thought was not taken seriously because once the chicken little routine is done, environmentalism is on a collision course with angry Americans who will feel anti-green just because of this entire episode. This will be a true tragedy in the end.
Its a bad situation overall when there will be a large hole in true environmental organizations…we do need to be responsible with the environment, but that cuts both ways. Being honest in press releases and protecting the environment are both just as important issues.
Hadley has recently concluded that if you strip out El Nino and La Nina effects, the temperature change from 1999 to 2008 was a Big Zero K.
Global warming has landed, probably to be replaced by climate change, downwards. August in the UK was the coldest for 17 years. The night of 31st August was the coldest at Leeming RAF station [Yorkshire] since records began in 1947.
And if you look critically at IPCC data and assumptions, its predicted AGW forcing of c. 1.5 W/m^2 has within it an assumed 0.7W/m^2 from ‘cloud albedo cooling’ for which there is not experimental proof. Furthermore, look at NASA’s claimed scientific explanation of it, apparently believed by most if not all working in climate science: http://terra.nasa.gov/FactSheets/Aerosols/
‘The high aerosol concentrations in these clouds provide the nucleation points necessary for the formation of many small liquid water droplets. Up to 90% of visible radiation (light) is reflected back to space by such clouds’
It’s totally wrong physics which replaces the original partially correct optical scattering physics devised initially by Bohren as an approximation which cannot predict more than 50% albedo, and for thick clouds gives no droplet size dependence.
Has someone or some organisation been telling scientific fibs?
Repent: the end is near (and always has been).
Happen to write a similar posting entitled ” Defeated & Frustrated: Climate Activists Turn to Terror, Go Berserk” http://devconsultancygroup.blogspot.com/2010/09/defeated-frustrated-climate-activists.html
The very idea of this post is ridiculous and offensive (not to mention every bit as hysterical as you accuse AGW supports of being). Putting the actions of a madman at the feet of his particular delusion is inappropriate and illogical — it’s like blaming Jodie Foster for John Hinckley. Let’s continue to make this discussion about the facts and the science, and lose the hysterical rhetoric.
Thank you, Thomas Fuller, for articulating what many of us have been attempting to since this tragic fiasco started.
Here I will disagree because the actions of the followers should be placed directly at the feet of those who make the dramatic public statements and they should be held accountable for the actions of their followers. The Discovery Channel is not an innocent victim in this situation but helped promote the outcome!
Environ Mentalism & Warmism are religions like any other. You have to preach doomsaying at every opportunity to keep the flock interested and in fear. No matter the religion you cannot prevent what happened yesterday until the doomsday predictions stop and that is not going to happen.
Nice post. The “warmistas” certainly pour a lot of emotion into pushing their idea that the world is about to burn to a crisp. Look at the work by Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, James Cameron– all people who have a vested interested in appealing to your emotions.
Scientists should work by reason and analysis. I’ve seen too many scientists abandon the core principles of discovering how the world works and instead try and push some unsupported conclusion through research findings.
I remember when I was an undergraduate and we were analyzing samples in independent projects. My project was to determine concentration of phosphates released by dishwashing detergents. (A tedious project that ended up giving me a water bill of $120 for that month.) But one of my classmates was determining the concentration of nicotine in cigarettes. Her nicotine concentrations for several cigs were way off, and for 3 varieties the concentration was 0/cigarette. The conclusions she should have drawn was obvious. But instead, she showed a video of a congressional committee meeting with Rep. Waxman from California talking about the dangers of smoking, and her conclusion was the smoking was bad for you.
Now I’m not going to start smoking because her methods for nicotine determination were shoddy. Her premise, however, was laughable because it relied on an emotional argument instead of a scientific one.
There are many causes for people trying to generate biased research, from the nefarious such as political belief and attempts to generate funding, to the innocuous such as misinterpreting data and unknowingly working from a faulty premise. The rational investigator should understand the flaws and adjust research methods to discover the truth. Injection of emotion perpetuates the problem.
WUWT has made one of the greatest contributions for the sanity of mankind. The best we can do to stop these armageddonian prophecies is to take them and to treat them as they are: A JOKE, a monumental joke which is a menace also, as it can provoke death by laughing.
[snip]
As Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew and developer of modern advertising and media manipulation) indicated, you can “drive” the common consensus by appealing to the baser and primal instincts of the masses.
This is a publicity campaign and not a scientific endeavor. The driving force is simply the massive amounts of money that are available for impure scientific research. Impure in the sense that it is agenda driven, with conclusions used to shape both the endeavor as well as its interpretation.
Supporters include not only the scientists set to profit from the research but all of the financial sectors that no longer have “industrialized” profit centers. Those have slipped away into the Asian hinterlands such that money begets money rather than productivity. Carbon credits? Carbon exchanges? Same as derivatives and CDS and CDO etc. Those unfortunate individuals (the masses, actually) have been co-opted into this program of “save us from ourselves” which is the ideal manipulative tool to get those individuals to give up their values and rights without objection.
Climate-gate will doubtless go down in history as the definitive “bubble-burster”, before the bubble got moderately inflated. We should be thankful for that person or persons that were responsible for revealing the whole rotten mess. WUWT, Climate Audit, JoNova and other sites of “reason” must continue to stand firm against the onslaught, as the tide is turning in favor of rationality. Fear-mongering and “sky-is-falling” rhetoric eventually get exposed for what they are, if we continue to chip away at them.
The opposing skeptic cry which might produce hysteria is, “Don’t wreck the (any) nation’s economy on CO2 abatement.”
Skeptics can get mighty riled up about that, but somehow, it doesn’t seem exactly equal to CAGW hysteria.
Would you go into the Discovery Channel building with a gun and a bomb to stop the coal cars heading into power plants if you really believed that they were equivalent to the trains to Auschwitz?
DocattheAutopsy says:
September 2, 2010 at 9:07 am
You touch a very interesting point. We should investigate what was the real motivation behind that serie of prohibitions, which began many years before the Global Warming scam. What was its purpose?, why these were made and promoted by the very same people?. Were/are they so altruistic as to worry about our health?, don’t think so, “follow the money” and you’ll find the answer.
Some posters at Joe Romm’s were trying to link James Lee to “righties” because he wanted to stop illegal immigration. What was his reasoning? To prevent births of more humans; the Malthusian mandate. Isn’t population control a main tenet of radical enviros? Why yes it is.
Not all environmentalists are eco terrorists, but all eco terrorists are environmentalists 🙂