This is from MTR 1377 radio today. Our regular feature, “Quote of the Week” just doesn’t work here. Neither does decade or century. No, a whole new category all by itself is reserved for this quote from the newly appointed Climate Commissioner of Australia, Tim Flannery, noted zoologist and author of the book The Weather Makers.
Here it is, brace yourself:
If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.
Lest you think that is an errant remark out of context, here’s the follow up from Flannery:
Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.
Crikey! So much for the “think of the grandchildren” argument used by Dr. James Hansen.
Read the entire transcript and listen to the audio here
h/t to Lawrie Ayres and Scarlet Pumpernickel
What Flannery didn’t say was that not only would it take up to 1000 years for temperatures to start dropping, but that temperatures will continue to rise for up to 50 years even if we were to stop emitting CO2 tomorrow.
He’s certainly made Australia’s government’s job to sell a carbon dioxide tax to Australians a tougher one. Assuming of course Flannery’s words are repeated publicly and often!
Somebody answer this humble question:
What is it about the English speaking world that captures our imagination about man-made CO2 destroying the world. It isn’t happening according to script – but the play goes on in Britain, USA (less so probably because we never seem to “get it” anyway), Canada, and most acutely, Australia? Why are we so irrational.
Man-made CO2 seems to be accounting for just about nothing. No sea level rise. No increased storm activity. No unprecedented warming. No crises. No crises at all. All crises in fact, being as a result of poor political leadership.
Are we collectively mad?
Ya mean if we only cut 20% it will take 5,000 years?
I am just waiting for the fox to finally eat “that” chicken little. I think he annoys me the most, but that may change tomorrow 😉
In my country, the USA, biologists are just that stupid because science is funded by the NSF, which has declared AGW real and settled and funds AGW every chance it gets.
Who/what funds European and Aussie science?
Maybe the question is slightly misphrased. It really should be something like: What will be the effect on future temperatures if this tax is implemented? Flannery (and others) seem to think that Bolt is asking how much temperatures will fall from their current levels if Australia implements the tax.
“We can accurately predict the climate for the next 1000 years. If we are wrong, it’s because the effect of CAGW is worse than we
imaginedmodeled.”What a scam.
It should serve to show the masses just how fanatical the fanaticism has become. But probably won’t.
It is a long standing tradition in english speaking culture, going back to the Salem witch trials and beyond, where there is an inherent refusal to accept the idea that the world is capricious, random, and that nature is simply *natural* without persona. Nature, the untamed wilderness, is metaphorically a representation of the wild subconcious Id of the human psyche, what puritans saw as our Original Sin. It was the fault of man that Earth was not a Paradise, but instead was a barren wilderness that required man to labor to tame it in order to eke a living from the earth.
Any wilderness that was not tamed but was dark and bountiful with life was the den of the serpent, satan, which sought to tempt man’s baser desires to sin through pride, gluttony, sloth, lust, etc. When Earth failed to remain tamed, it was seen to be the fault of satanic influences, usually brought about by whoever seemed to be benefitting in spite of calamity. When blight, or frost, or flood, or storm destroyed crops, those who did not lose crops were seen as using witchcraft to benefit themselves at others expense.
The modern AGW movement is thus inherently influenced by these puritanical christian archetypes. Warming has to be happening because western capitalism is evil (even though it has complied with environmental regulations in the West and our environment is the cleanest it has been since the era of colonization) and the fat cats make a profit when the rest of the world is going to heck, so clearly they have to be doing evil to someone in order to earn that profit.
If you guys only knew how hard it’s been infiltrating denier agents into the top ranks of the AGW Team in order to discredit it from the inside with inane and ludicrous comments. Well done, Tim! Let’s all hear it for our Climate Commissioner!
Tony,
If we cease injecting soft drinks with CO2 will this help sweet Gaia? What about Pop Rocks? I love that candy.
Will it harm the environment if my eleven year old daughter makes a NaHCO3/vinegar volcano for her science project assignment?
Thanks for caring.
Your good friend in Charlotte,
-Lee
I don’t watch much television, and I tell people that there is enough strange stuff going on in my brain that I am fully entertained most of the time. But that pales in comparison to what must be going on in Flannery’s mind.
I spoke at the rally of 4,000 people in Canberra on Wednesday, and got a fabulous introduction from Angry Anderson.
But, I thought the planet has already started to cool? As there has been no “statistical warming” since 1995.
In fact i believe “there has been a slight cooling trend since 2002”? Quoting from Phil Jones himself?
Maybe he should have a chat with this Flannery fellow and put him in the picture as there definately seems to be a breakdown in information on this subject, in fact while he’s at it he should have a chat with our Osborne fellow too as there really seems little point in the UK’s enthusiasm for Green taxes now also.
GregO
Answering your humble question – I learnt some years back from friends in the ALP (Australian Labor Party) that this CO2 issue had nothing to do with mitigating the earth’s temperature but is all about “compelling ” us to live more sustainably, whatever that means. In this sense there is nothing irrational about it – it is simply the means by which the progressives are implementing their goal – essentially the destruction of the capitalist west, the link being that being industrious is synonymous with CO2 emissions.
You could view it as a tax on human productivity – the more effort we make, whether personally by physical exertion or by proxy when we use machines powered by hydrocarbons, the more tax we pay. It’s not taxing the air we breathe but taxing physical effort.
But it was never about the science – the progressives have simply prostituted science for their political goal, and it’s not a recent modern thing either, for the same group did during the early 19th century in England with geology.
I just set my hair on fire with the insanity!
Let’s go balls to the wall and DOUBLE emissions, just to spite the people 2000 years off! Take that, progeny!
The thing is, that the “world temperature” (whatever that is), has now been statistically “fudged” upward just about as far as it can be without being totally blatant (well it is pretty blatant already).
They HAVE to do this tax in Australia now, before the real facts become TOTALLY obvious to even the most ‘blind” of the warmists.
David Archibald says:
March 24, 2011 at 9:51 pm
I don’t watch much television, and I tell people that there is enough strange stuff going on in my brain that I am fully entertained most of the time. But that pales in comparison to what must be going on in Flannery’s mind.
I spoke at the rally of 4,000 people in Canberra on Wednesday, and got a fabulous introduction from Angry Anderson.
=========================================================
4000 people now, yesterday it was only 3000. Like those fishing stories, it just keeps getting bigger every time.
Angry Anderson thought you were his long lost twin brother.
I didn’t see you on TV David , what fancy dress outfit were you wearing?
The 3rd Reich was suposed to last a thousand years as well.
A quick correction please. It’s MTR 1377
Also, this will be timely to remind people of Bolts interview of the EU Climate Commissar Jill Duggan who was asked the same question.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/dont_know_the_cost_dont_know_if_it_works/
Don’t know the cost, don’t know what it will achieve. don’t know when it will achieve but trust us, we can change our climate by imposing taxes on you.
How stoooopid have we become? How ignorant, how gullible, how benign have we become as a society, to allow this sort of a scam to be perpetuated on us?
Is he apply, that the current warming we had, is by something happened 1000 years ago?
“The modern AGW movement is thus inherently influenced by these puritanical christian archetypes…”
I would hasten to point out, the writer of this claim probably knows LITTLE about Christianity, and even LESS about the Puritains. The term “Puritain” comes from the desire to “purify” the Anglican Church of it’s Roman Catholic influences.
I would sum this up in the comment: “Your lack of understanding of the terms you use…does not help add to any validity in your use of the language.”
To show that one does not need to resort to such distortions, but that the Enviromental movement CAN be described as a “neo-religion”, I recommend Michael Chrition’s 2004 Speech to the Commonwealth Club of San Fransisco.
Max
Ah, but long before then we all have to front up to explain to a very angry lady:
“I think that, within this century, the concept of the strong Gaia will actually become physically manifest.” – Prof. Tim Flannery on ABC Radio, 1 Jan 2011.
jonjermey at 9:47 p.m.
LOL!
Someone gave me one of Flannery’s books and I found it literally unreadable.
When I start to disagree with obvious errors of fact and logic in a book I start to make notes in the margins. If it gets hopelessly wrong, I write copiously in the margins, arguments in support of alternative positions. If it reaches the point where I start yelling at the book, it is time to put it down. Flannery is so broadly uninformed about the issues he purports to lecture us about the yelling comes long before half-way.
Utter, total, senseless, unscientific rubbish, page after page of sub-astrological wisdom and prognostications. I see from the quote that things have not changed one bit with passage of time and the copious gathering of lucre. You’d think by now he could afford a computer and an internet connection.
Australia, you are truly lost.
There is room for the wise among you in Canada, however. It’s getting colder; bring mittens.
Here here GregO…!!
We have gone a bit mad (humans, collectively), or as a minimum, are often silly enough to just follow the media mantra like so many “sheeple”.
Flannery, in a single interview, has unravelled a lot of Govt/media rhetoric and admitted that man made CO2 (and its reduction) has an almost negligable affect on global warming. By implication, you would also summise that man’s addition of CO2 to earth’s atmosphere, and therefore its impact on Global Warming, is also: negligable.
Alleluiah!! and from their own “pin up” boy.
Congrats to MTR 1377 and the true believers for helping to open our eyes and focus the debate on what really is damaging this planet and humanity. i.e, overpopulation, deforrestation, incorrect land use etc etc.