What Will the Climate Climb-Down Look Like?

Actually, it will be interesting to watch Charles Johnson at LGF climb down. He has flipped into insane raving anti-republican, pro AGW mode over the past two years. Things used to be rational at his site and investigative of the facts behind stuff, but he has taken too much of something a year or two years ago and has gone of the deep end. Oh well. I wish him a rapid recovery from his current state of mind.

Any young thrusting Journo’s out there, who can’t wait to knock well ensconced lazy environmental correspondents of their lofty perch?
Make a name for yourself.It will be like shooting fish in a barrel.

I would like to replay something brought out by Smokey near the end of the comments section in the recent “NPR Weighs in on Climate Change” article:
ice core data for the last 400,000 years
and an article by Frank Lansner from WUWT in Jan ’09, “CO2, Temperatures and Ice Ages”. Since when is a little warm weather worse than unrelenting cold that puts places like Chicago under a mile of ice?
It’s only a matter of time.

Harold, enjoyed your post and agree, in fact Im sure it has already started. Look at the rush to rename. Looking forward to Anthonys article on the temperature measurement stations as I think that will creat another big stir of the pot! Say Harold, is that a picture from the top of old army pass above the cottonwood lakes? It looks very familiar.

Another question is this: How will skeptics handle the collapse of alarmism? I, for one, am in no mood to be nice. My career, my social life, and my sanity have been harmed by vicious attacks by alarmists. I’m not going to forget that.

I seriously doubt most alarmists will ever admit doubt – its a religion to them and having doubt is like losing one’s faith. Media outlets will begin publishing more articles that express doubt, but these articles will not be by the established alarmists. For the most part I think that most people will just forget (eventually) there was ever a debate.
You will also see several types of deflection: Its Global Warming, no wait its Climate Change, no wait its Climate Disruption… And you will see more and more emphasis on things CAUSED by use of fossil fuels like Ocean Acidification, or amphibian die-offs. I am surprised that haven’t blame the bat die-off (White Nose Syndrom) on fossil fuels (or perhaps they have and I just missed it).
In any case, most media outlets have lost any chance at trust they once may have had. When I see something on CBS or CNN (which hardly occurrs anymore as I don’t tend to ever watch them) I just assume its total spin (i.e. wrong) until and unless I hear about from a channel I trust – then it may be worth looking into. I can hardly read news magazines anymore as they simply lack any factual news – everything is intermixed with opinions of the writer, staff, and organization. Whatever happened to reporting the facts and letting the reader decide?

Excellent post!
Indeed they’ll find a way to justify that global cooling was due to global warming…

Mr. Ambler says…
It is highly unlikely that any media outlet will be able to compete with The Huffington Post for awkward climb-downs on climate, after this particular debacle.
I strongly disagree with this very optimistic assessment. I expect we shall see many more awkward reversals. We’ll enjoy lots of fun. Prepare to make popcorn.

Sorry Anthony, Im obviously anticipating the results. If the maintenance, accuracy, interpretation of results, etc. is anything like the work we have previously seen coming from the alarmists then I expect your report to be somewhat damning to them. Im sure there are many of us out here eager to peruse it.

I think the climb-down is going to be a long, long process. There are SO many egos involved.
On the political front – I think attitudes will probably change when personnel change. It’s hard for people to admit they were wrong – particularly politicians.
The media might turn around sooner, but they’ll need a scapegoat. They’ll need to find someone to blame for misleading them.

Unfortunately, you give the MSM the benefit of the doubt about having the self awareness to be embarrassed. Keep in mind, they’re operating from the mindset that most people have the attention span of a gnat, and rarely, if ever, let the facts or the truth get in the way of the fashionable meme of the day. I doubt there will be so much as a published ‘whoopsies!” from all but a few of the major news outlets mentioned. Because the whole ‘kerfuffle’ is just so last week and all.

I am astonished that investigative journalists have not exposed the AGW scam. In the UK only the courageous Christopher Booker has championed the cause of science. One presumes editorial or owners’ control have prevented more balanced coverage. The BBC is of course beyond hope.

Instead of climbing down, perhaps they will try this method?
http://www.stealthsettings.com/images/TutorialHOWTOFLY_6ABA/HOWTOFLYSUPERMAN.jpg

Biodiversity is the new big one. Delingpole’s on the case already.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100060132/biodiversity-the-new-big-lie/
We already have the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 2020 targets and the usual power and money to go to the UN…

The liberal media had a similar problem when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. For decades during the cold war they had insisted that detente was necessary because communism and the Soviet Union were here to stay, were armed with nuclear weapons, and so had to be placated and accommodated. Reagan was an idiot and a fool to call the Soviet Union an evil empire, etc., — anybody who was reading or listening to the mass media back then remembers what the liberal and progressive party line used to be. Then current events — the way the Soviet Union so thoroughly lost the cold war — revealed this attitude and its associated policies to be complete foolishness. As I remember the basic response of the media establishment, it was almost complete silence on the editorial pages while events unfolded. During this time there was a brief era of objective news reporting. (After all, so many interesting and unforeseen historical events were happening.) Then, after a year or so of avoiding the subject, the establishment editorialists succeeded in pretending they had known all along that the Soviet Union would collapse and lose the cold war. They did not even touch on the issue of how they had given aid and comfort to the other side while the cold war was on — how, for example, the establishment media had led the charge in opposing the Vietnam war during the late 1960s and early 1970s and then in opposing the so-called Star Wars missile-defense systems during the 1980s. All that just disappeared from view, and it became vaguely rude and ill mannered even to bring this sort of stuff up in conversation. The changeover in the overall media narrative displayed how to use the Orwellian memory hole on a massive scale, and it was quite breathtaking in its way. By the time of Reagan’s death the media establishment had succeeded in convincing themselves that they had known all along that he was a great president. The liberal politicians and media establishment never had to accept any blame for how they had behaved during the cold war.

what means MSM?
[Reply: Acronym for mainstream media. ~dbs, mod.]

there will be no “climb down.”
I see two scenarios:
1) over the next 10 years alarmists manage to push through legislation restricting energy production and consumption, massively increasing energy costs and slowing economic growth. the trivial decrease in CO2 emissions will correspond with cooling temperatures and the alarmists will claim “victory” over how they “saved us all just in the nick of time.” the damage having been done, they will move on to the next crisis.
or 2) falling temperatures will result in cries of “thank gaia that natural processes have temporarily halted the man-made increase in temperatures. this buys us valuable time to get our act together before warming returns worse than before.” then proceed with scenario #1.
alarmists are incapable of recognizing as legitimate any view but their own. under no circumstances will they ever acknowledge ANY error for they cannot be wrong. their beliefs are not based on objectively measured facts or observations; they are based upon faith. those who are unbelievers are labeled as heretics, considered mentally damaged, and must be eliminated.
for, in the end, human nature has not changed. sacrifices to the gods, witch hunts, genocide, the atrocities of Hitler, islamic extremism…it’s all expressions of the same human nature of zealous beliefs.

A more interesting question would be when will the last pseudoskeptic cease to proclaim every snowflake as the start of the next ice-age? Will it be when the global mean temperature is a degree higher, perhaps in 2050? Or will they then have changed the argument to how wonderful Canadian podsols are for agriculture? Surely the last bleat that reality contradicts the second law of thermodynamics must come before the global mean temperature rises three degrees, perhaps by the end of this century.

Just remember: a man will forgive you for being wrong. We will never be forgiven for being right.

Watermelons will attach themselves to any anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation meme they can and will prostitute themselves for the price of support in that. They have no shame and will never give up. To them, winning an argument only requires them to slam a door behind them before returning with a different tack to start again. What drives them? Goodness knows, but they are the curse of my generation.
And the future fights? Watch out for biodiversity, habitat loss, species extinction, water resources. And the bogey man? Soaring human population.

Gareth Evans says:
October 25, 2010 at 11:25 am
“Biodiversity is the new big one. Delingpole’s on the case already.”
Guess the next Peace Nobel is booked. Who will do the Gore part?

@mkelly I am now officially a persona non gratia at LGF. Charles kicked me out for pointing out that the “witch doctor” picture of Obama was really a picture of a guy from New Guinea in his sunday best with Obama’s face photoshopped in and that native healers have added greatly to our knowledge of medicine. Anyway, I could care less about his comic book collection. I won’t diagnose Charles, but manic depressive does come to mind.

#
#
Wind Rider says:
October 25, 2010 at 11:06 am
“Because the whole ‘kerfuffle’ is just so last week and all.”
##
I think you nailed it!

I believe Al Gore and James Hansen have attempted to stampede people into giving them lots of money.
I predict that they will both be very unhappy.
Others have joined in that chorus.
I do not see any kind of graceful climb-down. Rather, I see the bottom dropping out.

Even though warmistas tend to shun this site (and others), the “participation” of such counter-intuitive but agendized individuals is also a harbinger of the “circling of the wagons” in the climate-control crowd.
Ensconcing oneself in a bunker (metality or other) only leads to desperate acts. We can expect the shrillness to continue for some time as the hand-wringers figure out a new angle of approach to the gravy-train of grants. It is all part of a game in which we are but pawns. Although, every once in a while, a pawn can take down a king in the endgame and win the match.

@richard telford
Richard Feynman, if he were alive, would place CAGW consensus firmly in the “Cargo Cult” branch of science.

The end will come when the majority of the population laugh at the global warming idiots every time they start talking.
People know when they are being taken for a ride. For example, last week the British Comprehensive Spending Review contained a hidden section of small print which put a carbon tax on electricity generators of 11%. This will have a major impact as the multi-billion pound tax is passed on to every consumer in the country, though, strangely, no ruling party politician, Government Minister, or civil servant even bothered to mention it. The tax, we were eventually informed, is to be used “to fight climate change”.
OK, so we have a new tax inflicted on us (by stealth) because of supposed “man-made global warming”.
Then, a few days later we are told this …
25th October 2010
“Britain braves coldest October night for 17 years as mercury plummets below freezing up and down the country.
“Given the unexpectedly cold nights Britain has been enduring over the last few days, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was January instead of October. It will come as no surprise then that the wintry conditions made last night the coldest in October for 17 years in some regions.
“Temperatures in West Freugh in south-west Scotland dipped to a bone-rattling -5.2ºC, falling below the previous record of -5.1ºC which was endured in October 1993. But it was even colder in Sennybridge, south Wales, where the mercury dropped to -6.4ºC, beating the -6.2ºC record set 13 years ago in 1997.
An cold autumn morning at Loch Leven
“Met Office spokesman Charlie Powell said: “Last night was the coldest in Sennybridge for 17 years and was very cold everywhere. It was well below freezing across the bulk of the UK.” The outlook for this week is marginally better, with temperatures picking up slightly, although it will remain cold.”
… You have to wonder how stupid these global warming eco-fascists think we are.

If a climbdown is to come then it will only be in the face of overwhelming evidence against AGW . . . . . what will that look like? Incontrovertible proof that the recent temperature record is inaccurate and there has actually been no warming? Or, a cooling trend that extends beyond 30 years? That’s quite a long sit, since at best we are only 10 years into something like temperature stability. However, it’s possible that the recent warming trend is natural and will continue for several hundred years more . . . how will that play out in terms of a climbdown . . . it won’t, because the proof against AGW won’t be visible in such a scenario unless our understanding of climate change is dramatically improved – which is possible . . . . In the absence of hard evidence that the recent temperature record is wrong, the road to an AGW climbdown looks long, winding and ill tempered to me . . . .

Correction:
“I have noticed the BBC has reduced…”

Ref Climbing Down. Take a long, hard look at Judy Curry’s “Climate etc” site. Current theme? Hard-working scientists of impeccable rectitude misinterpreted and abused by political influences, the Media and their own unworldliness.

Unfortunately, it matters what The New York Times has to say about climate. The paper’s collective knowledge on the subject may be sparse, but that hasn’t prevented it from carrying a vast amount of water for the AGW movement for a long time.

Let history not forget Judith Curry as part of the climbdown. It was not gentle though. :o)

it’s so, like, yesterday……..

They can go jump.

I really DO have a profound admiration for the Japanese.
Anthony, I believe you are a pretty well educated fellow, both in Weather, climate, and dare I guess CULTURE!
Now it is little remembered that over 1000 Japanese military officers “did the honorable thing” on the steps of the Imperial Palace in the month after the war was over. (Special guards eventually were posted to try to intercept the remainder as it was getting to be a problem, even health wise, all the “bio-essense” left in that small area…)
I would humbly suggest that the “Al Gore” side are going to “lose face” in a major way in the next year or two. A variety of things will “come together” to cause that.
I just wish that they had 1/2 the integrity of the Japanese military command, with regard the “proper thing to do” after such a major loss of face. Alas, they’ll probably just try to re-write history, as Arrianna did…and say, “Hey, we were just mis-understood! Did we say ‘Global Warming’…whoops, TYPO, we meant cooling..”

“Regardless of what you think about climate change, here are a bunch of things that are smart to do. It will save consumers money, it will save the country as much money going into foreign oil imports, so let’s concentrate on things that we just know are smart to do.”
The President of the United States: Monday, 25 October 2010
http://www.nationaljournal.com/whitehouse/complete-transcript-of-obama-interview-20101024

AGW gang, please do not climb down……Jump!

Here is exactly is what the climate climbdown will look like:
Did you hear that? It will be just plain silence. They will simply not say a word and try to behave as if nothing had ever been said on it. They will just go silent on the issue. The damage is done, we have a generation of children who have been indoctrinated that it is a fact. They really don’t need to say anything more at this point, they have won. Facts are beside the point.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for any mea culpas. This “climb-down” will be neither smooth nor easy (nor even civil), there is just too much money involved. Ask yourself this question: Will outlets like the New York Times and others risk alienating the few remaining readers they have on the left in order to attract new readership from a more independent or conservative market demographic? They might, but I haven’t seen this happen as their market and economic prognostications have fallen into ruin. On the other hand, they might end up like the buggy whip manufacturers; they still exist but when was the last time a representative of this industry was ever ask for his view of the larger economic issues.

Which part of ‘I get hundreds of these and haven’t read it’ don’t you understand? It seems very plain to me. Maybe you have gone a bit astray in finding something in a plain statement that simply isn’t there?
If you apply Occam’s razor you can do without your theory.

Frank Lee says:
October 25, 2010 at 10:48 am
Another question is this: How will skeptics handle the collapse of alarmism? I, for one, am in no mood to be nice. My career, my social life, and my sanity have been harmed by vicious attacks by alarmists. I’m not going to forget that.
Alarmism won’t collapse, there will be a swing to global cooling, and it will still be our fault, so the same stupid solutions will be put out there, except this time lowering CO2 will warm the planet so we don’t all die in another ice age. Or we could find something else to be alarmed about, not sure what it would be, but there must be something.
I’m not holding my breath waiting for any kind of climb-down by any side in the debate.

Gareth Evans says:
October 25, 2010 at 11:25 am
Biodiversity is the new big one
While climate models cannot possibly tell the future, many species are already extinct http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Extinct_subspecies – do you see the difference bewteen theory and practice? It would be sad to live in a world without a tiger…

Vuk etc. says:
October 25, 2010 at 11:44 am
“Humans are very adaptable creatures,”.
Yes, and journalists are VERY adaptable. They will be like vultures on the AGW carcass when the avalanche starts. Believe me. They will just sell it as yet another story.

The BBC as I understand has invested billions of pounds of pension fund moneys in green companies and carbon .They will start pushing biodiversity and ocean acidification,because their all caused by the same co2 bogeyman.

I do have a problem with a paragraph in the original article, but it’s possible that I am confused. You say:
“In every case, the ice-core data shows that temperature rises precede rises in carbon dioxide by, on average, 800 years. In fact, the relationship is not “complicated.” When the ocean-atmosphere system warms, the oceans discharge vast quantities of carbon dioxide in a process known as de-gassing. For this reason, warm and cold years show up on the Mauna Loa C02 measurements even in the short term. For instance, the post-Pinatubo-eruption year of 1993 shows the lowest C02 increase since measurements have been kept. When did the highest C02 increase take place? During the super El Niño year of 1998. ”
Now I can understand why the changes you mention might have caused those ripples in the CO2 record, but what is the mechanism which delays the impact of a temperature in 1200AD to a CO2 level in 2000AD? What are the physics involved? Perhaps you can understand why I’m struggling. It isn’t enough to say that the 2 variables are correlated – you are suggesting that the correlation is causal and that’s what makes me confused. I don’t think we know enough over 800 year timescales to know what is causal and what isn’t.

Matt: “Which part of ‘I get hundreds of these and haven’t read it’ don’t you understand?”
The bit where she doesn’t say “And I don’t even read the ones I publish”

I’ve been wondering if the end will come when the story about the biggest fraud in history is bigger than the story about some climate disruptions somewhere possibly causing some damage. Could be a Tipping Point there somewhere.

Good one RK. “their solutions were still correct” My Sister-in-law who lives on a disabled pension has had to suffer in a cold house all winter because of the increased power bills (with massive increases to come). With any luck she will die 10-15 years prematurely thereby reducing the drain on the planets resources.

The average man in the street doesn’t care that much. He may notice a slow trend towards ethanol blend fuel and political jabbering about CAGW but largely, this debate is yawn yawn, not affecting him today and is just the same noise as all political debate. This is a debate held on the fringes by zealots who care one way or another and scientists and financiers who look to make money out of it. Your local nightly news will not lead with it but may have the ocassional gratuitious reference given by some alarmist “expert” (we have Tim Flannery) dragged out to comment on the science. The only climb down we will see is when there is no longer any support AND there is someone to blame for misleading us (eg “the Team”). If you look carefully, it will begin with less zeal from the reporters who will quietly back out the debate and begin blame shifting to “experts” so as to demonstrate a level of deniability if/when the worm turns.

The only satisfying media “climb down” would be a small amount of time in free-fall followed by a catastrophic stop once they reach the bottom.

Give them another winter or two.
Nothing smarts quite like holding onto tools crusted up with plenty of ice.
Order them each a complimentary pair of Winter Fireball gloves along with the next article submitted.

Harold – After reading this post I went and read your blog at HuffPost and a few reactions. Interesting and well reasoned. You are on the right track and have done your homework, never mind those idiots who want to put you down as a musician. As a scientist I have found that nearly every problem you face in real life lacks a textbook solution and you have to educate yourself about it from the ground up. Most “climate scientists” in fact were never educated in climate science. Hansen was an astronomer on the NASA Pioneer Venus probe before he joined GISS. He just quit the project before the spacecraft reached Venus because “The composition of our home planet was changing before our eyes.” And now he wants to close all coal-burning power plants. My previously published work had nothing whatsoever to do with climate but Al Gore made me take up climate science and I guess I have been a climate scientist ever since “What Warming?” came out. That was late last year and you unfortunately did not get a chance to read it before you wrote to Huffington Post. There are a few things you missed that I suggest you put into your future arsenal of climate discussions. Your first problem is that what is written about the El Nino and La Nina is all trash. They have no connection with the PDO and are strictly a tropical Pacific phenomenon. They involve the two equatorial currents, the trade winds, and the equatorial countercurrent in between. The trade winds push the water west where it piles up near the Philippines and New Guinea. Return flow is via the countercurrent and is periodic because of wave resonance. The El Nino wave is a mass of warm water that runs ashore in South America, spreads out, and warms the atmosphere. The rising warm air interferes with trade winds and raises global temperature by half a degree. The El Nino wave then retreats, water level drops by half a meter in its wake, cold water from below rises to take its place, and a La Nina is born. As much as the El Nino raised the global temperature La Nina will now lower it by the same amount and a temperature oscillation results. The eighties and the nineties saw such oscillations. They have existed since the Isthmus of Panama rose from the sea and can be found in all global temperature curves if some idiot did not wipe them out with a running average. There can be irregularities and the super El Nino is an example. It was not part of the ENSO system and was probably caused by a storm surge that brought much warm water to the start of the equatorial countercurrent near New Guinea. As to the PDO I have reservations about calling it an oscillation. The reported period of thirty years is too long to be accommodated by any ocean basin. The length of the ENSO period is about five years and it involves the width of the entire Pacific basin. By that measure an oscillation taking thirty years could exist only in a basin five times as wide as the Pacific and I don’t see where it could be. The only thing that has the requisite length is the thermohaline submarine current starting in the Arctic, rounding Africa, and resurfacing in the Northern Pacific. I can’t imagine how it can oscillate but I can imagine how its flow could influence North Pacific temperatures. Be that how it may be, for me PDO is a pure hypothesis, not proven to be an oscillation. The second important thing to note is that Arctic warming has nothing whatsoever to do with the greenhouse effect. It started suddenly at the beginning of the twentieth century and has been going on, with a pause in mid-century, ever since. Carbon dioxide cannot start a sudden warming unless its concentration in the air takes a jump and this did not happen. What apparently did happen was a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the twentieth century that directed the Gulf Stream onto its present northerly course. A lesser amount of warm water enters the Arctic on the opposite side through the Bering Strait. Thanks to prevailing winds more than the usual amount of warm water came through the strait in 2007 and melted a large patch of sea ice on that side of the ocean while the Gulf Stream side hardly changed. Look at NOAA maps for September 2006 and 2007 and compare. Oh, one more thing about carbon dioxide. Miskolczi has found, using NOAA database of weather balloon observations that goes back to 1948, that the optical thickness of the atmosphere in the infrared was constant for 61 years and had the value of 1.87. Which means that constant addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for all these years has had no influence on the transparency of the atmosphere to heat radiation that carbon dioxide absorbs or the optical thickness would have increased, and this did not happen. Way beyond logarithmic! And as to that positive water vapor feedback they use in the models, Miskolczy also proved that instead of being positive the feedback is strongly negative.

Mark Wagner said on October 25, 2010 at 11:35 am
there will be no “climb down.” I see two (cooling) scenarios:
1) …the alarmists will claim “victory” over how they “saved us …”
or 2) falling temperatures will result in cries of “thank gaia that natural…”
I see #3, they will increase their numerical manipulation to show global warming (which amazingly mostly takes place where no one lives). Cooling episodes in the past have had hot summers albeit short. Every calving glacier will have a video camera with a live feed to every classroom, with no child left unindoctrinated.

Hadn’t seen it mentioned yet in this thread or the Sci Am thread from a couple days ago, but the bastion of CO2 alarmism that is Discover magazine has taken one baby step down too.
On page 21 of November’s issue is a page regarding “Urban Canyons” which discusses winds through cities, how planting trees may increase heat by restricting winds, and one breakout point on UHI effects. This is not an article, but a graphic. There is no introduction provided, and no discussion made of the graphic, it simply shows up as a “data sliced” piece.
There is absolutely no mention of the UHI effect on weather data stations, but hey, it is a baby step.
Discover will now be able to say, “yeah, we covered it.” Predictably, no baby step from the Bad Astronomer yet.

ROM says:
October 25, 2010 at 4:23 pm
. . . Will the AGW cult go away?
No, cults just disappear after all the believers are dead.
And as was once said, Science advances death by death and so it will be with global warming/ climate change.

The AGW cult now controls the highest levels of the US and UK governments, so it will continue pushing its destructive and repressive agenda as long as it holds power. The only solution is to kick them out. November 2nd looks to be a good start here in the USA, but even a full Republican Congress might only cause the Obama administration to dig in its ideological heels. True Believers don’t give up easily.
Since the mass media, the academies, the scientific societies, and important industries (like GE and some banks) are in the tank with the Climatist ideologues, it is going to be very difficult to reduce them to impotence. The secret is money. If the Republicans win the House and can hold together against the forces of Climatism masquerading as ‘environmentalism’, they can stop the flow of cash—all spending must originate in the House. But it will be hard: the pressures of politically-correct ‘environmentalism’ are formidable, and politicians are notoriously susceptible.
Help them withstand the Climatists—write and talk to your representatives, and let them know you are on the side of progress and growth, not neo-Luddite and neo-Marxist regression. And teach them about the fallacies of CAGW, that CO2 is not a problem, but if it has any effect on temperature, it is a solution: a warmer, well-fed world is a more prosperous, healthy, civilized world.
/Mr Lynn

Natsman says:
October 25, 2010 at 11:21 am
“Maybe someone should have a word in Cameron’s shell-like, as at the CBI conference today he has reinforced his position on “green” jobs, and ludicrously expensive (and poitless) windfarms.”
Isn’t it true that the Brits are rushing into a windfarm disaster that will make Spain’s disaster seem reasonable by comparison? Isn’t it true that the Brit disaster will kill any attempt to do something similar in another country?

Old alarmist scares don’t die they just fade away.
Impending Anthropogenic Ice Age
Overpopulation
Hetero Sexual AIDS pandemic
Rain Forest Destruction
Ozone hole
Dieing Seas
Saddam’s Oil Well fire Catastrophe (nuclear winter)
SARS
Swine Flu…etc …etc
Most all of these scares have not completely been expunged from society. Many vestiges of these scares live on. So it will be with CAGW.

The sign of the climb down are “precaution” followed by “uncertainty” followed by the actual “climb down.”

Larry says:
October 25, 2010 at 10:57 am
In my view this is unique because of the funding. When the funds were flowing freely a lot of people agreed for differing reasons. The funds dry up and the infighting will have to begin. It has been made profitable for a lot of big business to back this, but it is hard to see that financing being maintained for a long time to come. These are rational people, and when contracts start getting renegotiated – as solar contracts are starting to do so now – this may well be driven to a brutal legal conclusion.

Having worked in a number of hyper-aggressive environments (businesses) where the growth stopped, and the sharks began to feed on themselves, yes, I have to say I think you have a very good point there. I think we’re going to see quite a little feeding frenzy.

Nah.
I can’t see a climb down so much as a climb sideways. They’ll be crabbing across the landscape, pinchers held high in a threat pose, click-ity-clack.
We’ll go from Climate Change, to Threatened species, to habitat loss to ground water depletion to soil denuding to new diseases all the way around back to a man made ice age.
And then we’ll start all over again, the wheel of Dharma spins effortlessly, in a vacuum free of common sense or memory, combined with greed and avarice, we’ll have no end of this stuff.
On the plus side, the arguments will change content, but the same stupid and greedy [profound Self-snip [don’t even know where I heard that term]] ‘s will continue raping Mans collective awareness, all the while content to ignore everything they’re spouting and bask in the warm glow of hypocrisy.
Bidniz as usual my peeps.
But!
We’ll have the historical amplifier of WUWT, that Antony et al has created, so we can continue to point this moment in time, and remind those future kids, this has all happened before, and it can all happen again.
Kudos!

Suzanne says:
October 25, 2010 at 11:33 am
Frank Lee says:
October 25, 2010 at 10:48 am
Another question is this: How will skeptics handle the collapse of alarmism?

I’m not so sure ‘alarmism’ will collapse at all. It’ll just do what it’s been doing as long as I’ve been alive (since 1960) — it’ll shape-shift, mutate into another doom-and-gloom scenario.

TomRude says:
October 25, 2010 at 12:26 pm
ZZZ I recently read that it was not Reagan who won the cold war… soon he’d have lost it!

I thought Reagan merely (and mainly) broke with the long tradition of U.S. presidents acting as if we had to continue tolerating (and propping up) a corrupt and crumbling empire. But I could be wrong.

brc says: October 25, 2010 at 9:34 pm
“But there was a real problem. I know, because I worked on projects fixing those problems before Dec 31, 1999. ”
Yes, the ‘hoax’ was in the media presentation, as usual.
The masses did not understand, nor were they informed, about the difference between things that use ‘duration’ and things that use ‘time’.
Most critical systems use duration, and not time.
Most critical systems were never going to be affected.
Heartrate, beats per minute. (not heartbeats since some time)
Aircraft Fuel consumption, gallons per minute .(not gallons since some time)
Power station output, demand in next hour. (not MWh before some time)
Autoclave, bake for x minutes.(not bake until some time)

I read it somwhere that G.O.D. will follow G.C.D. (global climate disruption) which followed A.C.C. (anthropogenic climate change) which followed A.G.W. 9anthropogenic global warming). G.O.D. = Global Oxygen Depletion.
Well I always knew, somehow, that the globalists wanted to be become gods.
It will not be a climbdown, but a run to the next higher hill. Maybe Pachauri may not manage to reach it.

@Ian says:
October 25, 2010 at 7:17 pm
I am waiting for the following from George Monbiot.
————————————————————————
He can just re-name one of his old articles…
“I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/06/meat-production-veganism-deforestation
To:
“I was wrong about CAGW. Let them burn oil – but burn it properly”
So many “wrongs” to chose from..
“So was I wrong to call, soon after this story broke, for Jones’s resignation? I think, on balance, that I was”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jul/07/russell-inquiry-i-was-wrong

brc says:
October 25, 2010 at 9:34 pm
“Most people didn’t know that the Y2K bug only existed in BCD date calculations and only those that use two BCD digits for the year.”
————————————————————————————–
In 1999 the company I work for was still using a database with two-digit year numbering for intra-company record keeping. All managers were worried that our IT fdepartment would not be in time to change over to a Y2K compliant db. Time was pressing and we pressed the IT dept. Funnily enough, they kept the database, but formated the year numbering to text.

Sorry for the long post, but I don’t know how to compress it further.
The media never accepts blame. Look at a whole host of false alarms that they have peddled in the past, as if they were unquestionable truths, but then a few years later the same “news” outlets report the opposite as if that is what conventional wisdom was all along.
For example, the race into war with Iraq. Bloggers working on pocket change broke more scoops, ran more truth and exposed every lie and debunked every false claim as the drive to war was being ramped up. The mainstream media reported every lie and false claim verbatim as if unquestioned truth. The mainstream media never questioned the reliablity, the accuracy or the credibility of anything that came from Buch, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair, Straw, Hoon, et al. The media was a very willing accomplice in the drive to war.
The lie that had me laugh out loud and realise that the media are either utterly brain-dead stupid, or willingly complicit in the lies was when Bush claimed that they had found the mobile biological weapons labs. And they showed helium gas generators on the back of curtain sided trucks. I mean, come on. Could NOBODY in the assembled press have a neuron fire and wonder, HOW do they create the world’s deadliest biological weapons in a curtain sided truck? Not only HOW do they stop the deadliest germs getting out, but HOW do they stop the outside contamination coming in? It was ridiculous in the extreme. Not one of the assembled media questioned that assertion. When it was revealed that these were battlefield helium generators for weather balloons, sold to Iraq by the British, the media went very quiet. No admission of error, just shut up!
Now 7 years later, much of the media are critical of the false claims, but not in their own part in willingly and unquestioningly reporting those false claims. Although some commentators have written faux shock pieces claiming, “I’m shocked, I thought they were telling us the truth. Who could ever have thought that our leaders would lie about the need for war and the size of the threat we faced?”
This shows everything that’s wrong with the incestuous relationship between Government, agenda setters, opinion setters and the mainstream media.
The mainstream media gave up its role as honest watchdog long ago.
Thank GOD for the small army of bloggers who, over time and with a great deal of diligence, we can trust far more than the mainstream liars.
Thank GOD for Anthony and his team of moderators, keeping this site going. It is a daily blast of sanity in an insane world of lies and deceptions.

“The job of skeptics is to falsify hypotheses, and WRT the CO2=CAGW hypothesis, skeptics have done an outstanding job. No wonder Richard is miffed.”

But that is the problem. AGW as a theory cannot be debunked by empirical evidence as whatever weather we have can always be attributable to AGW. Even cooling trends will be attributable to AGW, or at worst, be considered a small, temporary time where climatic noise “hid” the rise in temperatures, but they will be back…
Any hypothesis without a null-hypothesis is not science. The AGW theory cannot be falsified. That is the whole problem that invalidates it as a scientific theory.

I suspect that the most common reaction will be to drop AGW down the memory hole and move on to the next scare. We are at war with the loss of biodiversity. We have always been at war with the loss of biodiversity.
The few journalists and politicians who do feel the need to explain away their previous positions will probably claim that they were poor trusting innocents led astray by evil scientists. People like Hansen and Mann are likely to end up as the scapegoats.

Douglas, I thought the same thing. A few years back I walked up to several high lakes till I came to the last one before the trail went down the other side of the peaks towards the Baker City side of those craggy mountains. The peak, in which the trail was scratched into, was nothing but gray, ground up to dust, volcanic debris, complete with the ice-cold lake at the bottom. I looked up, as in straight up, from the shore of the lake, and decided I had climbed high enough for that day. So I turned tail and headed back down the switchbacks to planet Earth and the soft underbelly of the Wallowa Valley.

Why the epidemic
of fraud exists in
science today
Jerry Bergman
The Piltdown hoax is one of the most famous cases of
fraud in science.1 Many Darwinists, though, claim that this
case is an anomaly, and that fraud is no longer a problem
today. However, the cases of fraud or deception in the field
of evolution include not only the Piltdown Man, but Archaeoraptor,
the peppered moth, the Midwife Toad, Haeckel’s
embryos, Ancon sheep, the Tasaday Indians, Bathybius
haeckelii and Hesperopithecus (Nebraska Man)—the missing
link that turned out to be a pig.2–8 Actually, fraud as a whole
is now ‘a serious, deeply rooted problem’ that affects no
small number of contemporary scientific research studies,
especially in the field of evolution.9 Scientists have recently
been forced by several events to recognize this problem and
try to deal with it.10
Most of the known cases of modern-day fraud are in the
life sciences.11 In the biomedical field alone, fully 127 new
misconduct cases were lodged with the Office of Research
Integrity (US Department of Heatlh & Human Services) in
the year 2001. This was the third consecutive rise in the
number of cases since 1998.12 This concern is not of mere
academic interest, but also profoundly affects human health
and life.13,14 Much more than money and prestige are at
stake—the fact is, fraud is ‘potentially deadly’, and in the
area of medicine, researchers are ‘playing with lives’.15 The
problem is worldwide. In Australia misconduct allegations
have created such a problem that the issue has even been
raised in the Australian Parliament, and researchers have
called for an ‘office of research integrity’.16
One example is the widely quoted major immunological
research studies related to kidney transplantation done
by Zoltan Lucas (M.D. from Johns Hopkins and Ph.D. in
biochemistry from MIT) that recently were found to contain
fraudulent data.17 Dr Lucas was an associate professor of
surgery at Stanford University. His graduate student, Randall
Morris, discovered that Lucas had written reports on research
that Morris knew had not been carried out. The reason Morris
knew this was that he was to have been involved in the
research! The studies were published in highly reputable
journals and, no doubt, many other researchers also relied
upon the results for their work. As a result of the modern
fraud epidemic, a Nature editorial concluded:
‘Long gone are the days when scientific frauds
could be dismissed as the work of the mad rather
than the bad. The unhappily extensive record of
misconduct suggests that many fraudsters believe
their faked results, so attempts at replication by
others represent no perceived threat.’18

Lot’s of papers have published sometime and then wished they hadn’t. I don’t see anything special about this case. I don’t see any connection with a “climb down.”

Don’t intend to ignite a Creation/Evolution debate here, but a couple previous comments reminded me that I don’t think the AGW consensus’s charge that skeptics are like Creationists makes quantitative sense.
For example, the age of the earth seems to be a fundamental bone of contention between Creationists and Evolutionists. It’s several thousand years. No, it’s several billion years. That’s a disagreement by a factor of a million!
But nothing I can think of in the AGW debate approaches such a dramatic difference. The expected warming from a doubling of CO2 is a few degrees. No, it’s a small fraction of a degree. The amount of warming that’s already happened due to anthropogenic CO2 is a large fraction of a degree. No, it’s a small or very small fraction of a degree.
Of course, bigger disagreements do appear when going beyond the basic physics–tipping points, how many species or humans will die from warming, how many $$$ should we spend fighting climate disruption. So maybe my argument is already falling apart! I guess I’ll shut up.

Gareth Evans says:
October 25, 2010 at 3:12 pm
I’m all for minimising man’s contribution to the extinction rate, but I’m not for another expensive propoganda exercise that has the sole intention of levering more money and power towards the UN.
The easiest one to fool is yourself. AGW might become the best example of (self) delusion in science. It is not so common that scientists deliberately are cheating – “religious and other emotional convictions drive scientists, despite what they may think their motivations are”.
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/805-agw-revisited.html
So, basically I think you are wrong when you state that the scientists behind AGW do it for the money and control over the world, that’s utter nonsense! I regard most climate scientists skilled and honest, you see the problem is not the climate scientists themselves but the topic they have started to investigate, and my take is that it will take many decades before they figure out that they cannot possibly ever understand it.

And yet, those dang ice caps keep melting, southern species continue their migration northward. I guess maybe they read the news they’ll get on board.

John says: October 26, 2010 at 4:01 pm
And yet, those dang ice caps keep melting, southern species continue their migration northward. I guess maybe they read the news they’ll get on board.
John needs a reality check. Antarctia ice is at record levels. Arctic ice has increased over the last 3 years. The range and extent of “southern species” was always uncertain, and no hard data exists on any “migrations”.

I’ve noticed that there are a few characteristics that proponents of AGW and certain Adventist faiths share. Adherents of the Jehovah’s Witness branch of Adventism have been described as “a zealous people who blindly proclaim an ever changing future catastrophe”. When the “end” fails to materialize at the proscribed time adjustments are made and life carries on. I believe it is niave to expect a climbdown or capitulation on the AGW issue. Peddlers of catastrophe are far more imaginative than that.

A number of posters here have mentioned the BBC’s new push on ‘biodiversity’. This morning they had a WWF spokesman on, along with Caroline Spelman (the relevant minister for eco-bollocks), both gushing about the current conference on the topic and the urgent need to tax and transfer many billions to save the planet (again). Both speakers slid smoothly between discussing the biodiversity issue and referring to the Copenhagen failures, with no reference at all to their being different scientific ‘problems’. It seemed completely accepted that there was no real difference between them at all.

True, Jon T. But as a geologist, my money is betting there will never be some big catastrophic event you’re dreaming of, except for the one you’re not even remotely considering–the next Ice Age. And it will come as if in the night, completely unexpected, blindsiding everybody–especially those falsely accusing CO2 of some magical, invisible “tipping point”. And before “warmers” know what hit ’em, they’ll be dragging around in waist-deep, ever-accumulating snows still yelling cluelessly “IT’S GLOBAL WARMING, DON’TCHA KNOW??”
Problem is, for that catastrophe, just waiting and seeing isn’t acceptable. Such people would make Saddam’s press secretary look like a verifiable saint.