Normally I don’t go for anonymous guest posters, but this one is from the famous “zombie” of zombietime.com whose identity remains hidden so that he/she may continue to record the anarchy and socially bereft behavior that permeates the McKibbenesque protestor culture of America. Zombie wrote to me yesterday asking that I bring attention to the post, and I’m happy to do so. The text is below, but please follow the link to the evidence (dozens of scanned pages) presented.
The Coming of the New Ice Age: End of the Global Warming Era?
Guest post by “Zombie”
I just finished reading a terrifying new book about climate change. I learned this:
ā¢ Climate change is happening faster than we realize and it will have catastrophic consequences for mankind.
ā¢ Thereās very little we can do to stop it at this late stage, but we might be able to save ourselves if we immediately take these necessary and drastic steps:
– Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;
– Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;
– Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;
– Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;
– In general embrace all environmental causes.
You of course recognize these as the solutions most often recommended to ameliorate the looming crisis of Global Warming. But thereās a little glitch in my narrative. Because although the book I read was indeed about climate change, it wasnāt about Global Warming at all; it was instead about āThe Coming of the New Ice Age,ā and it isnāt exactly ānewā ā it was published in 1977.
The Solution Remains the Same
As many other pundits and analysts have pointed out, in the mid-to-late 1970s we endured a massive āclimate change scareā that was the exact opposite of the one weāre enduring now. Back then, the media and activists trumpeted the arrival of a new ice age, with the specter of ice sheets and glaciers covering half the northern hemisphere, and brutal winters in the remaining ice-free zones.
The fact that the media and popular culture and academia have veered from one panic-inducing disaster scenario to another one which completely contradicts the first one is funny enough in its own right. But reading The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age opened my eyes to an even more significant aspect of this serial crisis-mongering:
The āsolutionsā prescribed to solve both Global Warming and the looming Ice Age are exactly the same.
In both cases, proponents of the theory-du-jour say that in order to stave off disaster, we must reverse the march of civilization, stop our profligate use of carbon-based fuels, cede power and money from the First World to the Third World, and wherever possible revert to a Luddite pre-industrial lifestyle.
I realized: The solution (commit civilizational suicide) always remains the same; all that differs are the wildly divergent purported ācrisesā proffered up to justify the imposition of the solution.
Seen from this angle, the entire Climate Change field should be more properly reframed thus:
In order to weaken and eventually destroy the existing industrialized nations, we must devise an ecological ācrisisā so severe that only voluntary economic suicide can solve it; and if this first crisis doesnāt materialize as planned, then devise another, and another, even if they flatly contradict our previous claims.
I had long suspected that this is the most accurate characterization of Climate Changeology; but reading The New Ice Age clinched it for me. The true purpose of climate change disaster-mongering is to permanently cripple the First World, and to elevate the Third World, in order to create a planet with no economic inequality. The goal remains constant; the supposed imminent catastrophes justifying it come and go as needed.
Below, Iāll present scanned pages from the book so you can see for yourself.
The scenario weāre in reminds me of the classic Twilight Zone episode called āThe Midnight Sunā: At first we see the characters sweltering in increasingly unbearable heat as the Earth, knocked out of its orbit, slowly plummets into the sun. Just as they are all about to burn to death, in typical Twilight Zone fashion, the lead character wakes up ā she had in fact merely been having a fever dream about the world getting hotter; in reality, the Earth had been knocked away from the sun, and theyāre all going to freeze to death. Ha ha ā gotcha! Just as in the narratives spun by the climate change catastrophists, the Earth is doomed either way, even though the disaster scenario flips from one extreme to its exact opposite. Hot, cold, whatever; one way or the other, Mother Nature will wreak revenge on us for our hubris!
Ice Ages Are Making a Comeback
Turns out my choice of reading material (discovered recently at a rummage sale for 25Ā¢, in case youāre curious) was fortuitous, as climate change ā and ice ages ā are suddenly back in the headlines this past week. And the news is not good for the crisis-mongers.
First we learned that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is actually helping us stave off the next inevitable ice age by a few years. Yes, you read that right: the ārunaway global warmingā scenario is now off the table; a new ice age is coming for sure, and whatever human warming effects there may be will only make our descent into the deep freeze a little more comfy.
Then, in a different breakthrough, leading scientists announced the discovery of a heretofore undetected type of molecule in the atmosphere which spurs cloud formation and negates global warming effects. Thanks to something called āCriegee biradicals,ā the more we pollute, the more clouds form, and the cooler the planet becomes. Thus, the cumulative effect on the climate due to mankindās activity: zilch. So for the second time in a week, the entire Anthropogenic Global Warming theory was fatally undermined.
But wait! Weāre not done. Next up: A study out of Harvard proving that warming and cooling cycles are caused by orbital wobble and precession of the poles; and that the only reason the next ice age hasnāt arrived quite on schedule yet is due to our beneficial increase in carbon dioxide. Yes, thatās right: more data showing that another ice age is inevitable sooner or later.
A third nail in AGWās coffin in less than a week? Why wasnāt this front page news?
But brace yourself ā because those nails in the coffin were just the opening act. The next bit of news was the real blockbuster, a stake through AGWās heart:
Now we learn that the world has not warmed at all for the last 15 years, and that the entire recent āglobal warmingā hubbub was totally imaginary. Furthermore, the recent cooling is so significant that we may be headed for ā you guessed it ā a āmini ice age.ā
Still not enough for you? The coup de grace came from our own USDA, which released a new āPlant Hardiness Zone Mapā indicating that the mild global warming spike of a few years ago was actually good for plant growth and biodiversity. In other words: Even if we do experience warming, it makes the world a nicer place.
And that was just one weekās news. I wonder what next week will bring?
Now, youād think that this devastating barrage of body blows would basically bring an end to the whole Global Warming ācontroversy.ā
But no. Because, you see, true believers are nearly impervious to facts. In the midst of all this, the AGW activists and bullies continued their relentless quest to reshape the worldās economic landscape, as if they still had the upper hand. They even launched a witch hunt against ādenierā weathermen, threatening to get any TV meteorologists fired unless they present global warming propaganda during their forecasts. Meanwhile, Al Gore continued on his decade-long tirade, declaring that ācivilization is at riskā if the presidential candidates donāt cave into his demands immediately. And if you check the Web sites of any number of climate change nonprofits and organizations, theyāre all still in hysterical crisis mode about the coming calamity. To them, you see, news stories like the ones we saw this week may come and go, but Global Warming is forever!
Somethingās Gotta Give
āThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold,ā as William Butler Yeats once wrote. This disconnect between reality and hysteria canāt last forever. As impervious as Global Warmists may be to facts, theyāre highly sensitive to their social environment. Eventually, as the general public loses interest in humoring the hysterics, whose status is rapidly dropping from ācutting-edge hipstersā to āembarrassing kooks,ā the Alarmists will go into a huddle and emerge with a new crisis scenario so horrifying and immediate that something must be done NOW! And that something, as we learned above, will be the exact same something prescribed to solve the previous crisis.
We already saw the first half of this transition just a short time ago. For years, the crisis peddlers threw all their weight behind the phrase āGlobal Warmingā to describe the looming disaster. But in recent years as data crept in casting some doubt on their prognostications, the phrase āGlobal Warmingā was inconspicuously discarded and replaced with the more flexible āClimate Change.ā VoilĆ ! No matter what the weather did, it could be chalked up to āclimate change,ā because hey, change could go either way, right?
Needless to say, however innocuous āclimate changeā may have sounded, the activists said Trust us, itās way worse than mere āglobal warming,ā so the drastic solutions we proposed earlier are still required.
But the ever-growing mountain of evidence pointing to an eventual (naturally occurring) ice age phase in the distant future may trigger yet another huddle among the climate change crowd. Perhaps after a suitable wait, banking on everyoneās short memory, theyāll re-emerge from the huddle this time dropping āClimate Changeā for something ice-age themed, like āAccelerated Glaciation,ā or perhaps āMan-Made Chill Factor.ā
And you can guarantee that theyāll have a solution for this new crisis; and it will be the exact same solution they announced for climate change, and for global warming before that, and yes, for the looming ice age they worried about the previous time back in the ā70s: De-industrialize the First World, end civilization as we know it, and cede power to āthe global south,ā i.e. the Third World.
The Evidence
To prepare you for this eventuality, I hereby present scans from The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age, published in 1977 and written by āThe Impact Team,ā a coalition of authors from various fields.
Each scan below is taken from a page in The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age; click on any image to see the passage in context on the full page.
Under each passage Iāll make a few comments; but in general, the text speaks for itself.
Think of this as a warning from the past. Not a warning about looming ice ages, but rather a warning to ignore politically motivated disaster-mongers.
See the rest of the post and all the scanned pages here
The “not so new” book is interesting in that it illuminates the scare-mongering teams and the political agenda, but why is it not as obvious to those who hold the purse strings on public purses? They cannot all be gullible? But they will go along with it….if the ‘concensus’ of voters think its true. Keep getting the message out!
Isn’t scanning pages from the book and posting them on a web page a breach of copyright?
Just sayin …
P.S. I absolutely agree with your point about alarmism and scare-mongering.
Think of this as a warning from the past. Not a warning about looming ice ages, but rather a warning to ignore politically motivated disaster-mongers.
———–
I always ignore politically motivated disaster mongers. I also ignore politically motivated disaster ignorers.
Truthseeker says: February 2, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Isnāt scanning pages from the book and posting them on a web page a breach of copyright?
I don’t know where “Zombie” is, but excerpts (as opposed to the entire manuscript — something that college professors do) with attribution would be considered “fair use” under US copyright law.
Truthseeker:
Not sure what the copyright laws say, but there might be something in regards in an attempt to “profit” from said violations; there is also something about ‘fair use’ in an educational setting, or at least I think I’ve see something like that.
And as we all know, WUWT is ALL about education, right?
My best to all,
Mark H.
“I had long suspected that this is the most accurate characterization of Climate Changeology; but reading The New Ice Age clinched it for me.”
Okay, so you realized that just now, in the beginning of 2012. A bit late.
Dont you remember the attacks on the car industry back in the seventhies? The attacks on the family as an institution? The attacks on logic and reason in the Universities? The attacks on the right to own private property?
All attacks on the main pillars of the western civilisation. Grinding….grinding….grinding.
All part of marxist tactics. It is called Dialectism, me thinks.
This is exactly the point that James Delingpole makes in his new book, Watermelons. It was never about the climate, it was always about political control by an unelected elite. It’s like the Hydra, lop off one head and two more appear. Debunk one crisis and they will find two more.
The paper cited by Dr. D’Aleo on his site is interesting: http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/bicentennial_decrease_of_the_total_solar_irradiance_leads_to_unbalanced_the/ We live in interesting times. But yes, the followers of Ludd have not died, they went for Eugenics, then they went for ZPG, and now they are going for AGW. “Ah, the world would be such a happy place if everyone else dropped dead.” Personally I have little use for that sort of thinking myself.
Yes, but this time, they are right, fortunately for the low low price of everything you hold dear, thay can save your sinning, wasteful, uneducated, unwashed selves. Offer ends soon, don’t wait!!!
Truthseeker says:
“Isnāt scanning pages from the book and posting them on a web page a breach of copyright?”
There’s a principle called “Fair use” whereby if someone is reviewing a work, or analyzing it critically, they are permitted to reproduce portions of it (though not all of it). This instance is a clear case of “Fair Use.”
Furthermore, this book is long out of print, so the authors (if any are still alive) should be overjoyed that it’s getting some attention 35 years after the fact. To insist that references to the book be removed from the Web would be foolish, since it would then just remain back in unknown oblivion.
[Multiple screen names violate site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
I don’t think we should claim that the Harvard study is the third nail in the coffin. Read the final paragraph where they blame the fact that their theory isn’t working at all well now as being due to carbon dioxide.
In the scale of things, 100 years isn’t much out of 20,000. So why didn’t we see an approaching glacial maximum 100 years ago? Apparently carbon dioxide has turned the whole thing around from a maximum to a minimum in the last hundred years when world temperatures rose about 0.6 of a degree C. Wow!
There probably are other “orbital” reasons – they just didn’t get the right one.
Read it when it first came out, which is why I have always been highly suspicious of the whole global warming propaganda campaign, it just was the same record by a new artist.
Larry
My son brought home the book, LIMITS TO GROWTH, from a library sale. Written in 1972 by the
“Club of Rome” It argued its point in exactly the same pattern. It’s already too late. We have to do terrible, draconian things, to people and their liberty and freedom to keep it from being worse. We are all going to die!! We are either going to starve to death or die in the bread riots. There are too many people!! It was all very mathmatical. Lots of charts and graphs. But they are all nonsense.
But… I don’t think you are being thorough or entirely fair in your review of THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY… I was reading in the reproduced pages on your blog and I noticed they advocate degregulating gas and oil prices to encourage exploration and conservation. They advocated a free market solution; and they are quite upbeat about how much potential oil and gas might be recovered off-shore and from, thats right, shale formations. They even downplay the Santa Barbara oil spill and think the concerns about blow-outs are over done. I think it was around page 107.
Academics say most of the 1970s scaremongering abotu coming cold came from media outlets and not from scientists. They say more papers were published in the 1960s and 1970s that argued for coming warming rather than cooling, and this was overwhelmingly the case by the 1980s.
I remember seeing Leonard Nimoy telling us an ice age could arrive within 200 years on one of the ‘In Search of.. ‘ series, but I wouldnt describe Mr Spock (in real life that is) as a serious scientist.
Would be interesting to see a survey of such papers.
Yes – but fortunately this time around they will have significantly less credibility (even factoring in the apathy and short memories of folk).
And of course their real problem is that its going to be difficult to sabotage industry, energy production and quality of life if they no longer CO2 to point to as the culprit…
I note they say that the world’s proven oil reserves would only last another 35 years – in other words till 2012, as it happens – looks like they were slightly out on that prediction!
Can this be proof of a new:
“Theory of Perpetual eco-Motion”?
They are all watermelons: Green on the outside, but red (socialist) on the inside.l
Small selective quotes of books in print qualify as “fair use”, especially if the use can be classified as “news” or “educational”.
It is basically a book review, no different that a million other book reviews out there.
Larry
The BBC had a programme to support the crisis of ‘Global Cooling’ due to CO2 in the 70s . It was called ‘The Weather Machine’ I remember it well and I didn’t believe a word of it because I had been very interested in the subjects of Earth, the Universe and Everything since my schooldays.
When the alarmists switched to AGW the BBC switched with them. But young activists know nothing of this and the warmist industry have been busy airbrushing their own history along with airbrushing climate history and even physical laws.
Shades of Orwell’s 1984 and Winston Smith’s job of constantly rewriting history to fit what the government wanted the people to believe.
The more things change, the more things stay the same. ;->
In my last “open thread” post very near the bottom I demonstrated that GHGs cooled the planet while lleaving out the obvious implications of this: as the Earth becomes a cooler place over the next few decades,the alarmists would re-invent man-made CO2 as a cooling gas and demand the same and immediate response to the forthcoming cooling disaster. Global Government, lots more taxes to keep themselves prosperous, an end to modern industry and a re-distribution of wealth from the first world poor to the third world rich…..
The goal is an equality of inequality which is most easily accomplished by the imposition of Big Government and a controlled media.
At present, it is the armadillo that is sounding the alarm.
How did Dr. Mann miss Texas road kill as a temperature proxy?
Taxing carbon and pollution is a subtle way of taxing productivity. Back in the 70’s, the now-developed counties were hard at work creating their fortunes and burning fossil fuels in order to do it. But these developed countries no longer do as much of this, opting to offshore most of the dirty production to other nations. So who are the richest countries and most productive? You seriously cannot say the West is rich because they hold unfathomable amounts of debt. No, the rich countries are once again the most productive and polluting – the developing Eastern nations who also hold the most dollars and little debt. In fact the West owes them a lot of money. What better way to even everything up than by indirectly taxing their productivity? And what better way to force everyone to pay their productivity taxes than to say destruction of the Earth is imminent if they don’t?
Can’t believe I’m the first to see the OBVIOUS connection here … It’s Groundhog Day!!!
Lazy Teen says:
“I always ignore politically motivated disaster mongers. I also ignore politically motivated disaster ignorers.”
I won’t ignore the disaster. Just show it to me. Where is it, Lazy?
If the earth continues to cool over the next decade or so, we will probably see the same cast of climate mongers pointing to this book and saying that weāve known what the problem and the solution is since 1977!!! Stop the debate! Hand your liberty over to the government or weāll all be doomed!!!
“The true purpose of climate change disaster-mongering is to permanently cripple the First World, and to elevate the Third World, in order to create a planet with no economic inequality.”
Exactly. It is a mechanism by which fear of climate change is promulgated through the society and that fear is used as a lever to convince people to buy into a global socialist agenda of redistribution of wealth on a global international scale.
It feels rather satisfying to see others independently reaching the same conclusion. I think the jig ought to be just about up by now. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and exposing what is going on tends to inoculate against the fear.
It’s Fair use. Amazon have the first 10 pages of all books scanned and Google has almost book ever written scaned online
Ah good, so we once again confirm that your oft-proclaimed dislike of people not sharing their full name with everyone here extends only to those who you disagree with.
And please – the myth of a “global cooling scare” has long since been comprehensively debunked. There was no such thing. It was invented after the fact to try and discredit concerns about global warming.
Be interesting if someone could out the Impact Team authors. I did a couple searches but found nothing. Not worth the effort from a phone keyboard.
Nope. No dissenters here.
thingadonta says:
February 2, 2012 at 3:44 pm
Spock was had the late Dr. Schneider (sp) on the show explaining why we were going into an ice age. The late doctor changed his mind when the ice didn’t pan out.
What is going on ? Only because the Daily Mail writes something, that does not make it a fact. Someone reading it, making a rant out of it, which you subsequently post, still does not make it a fact.
Is this peer reviewed? Of course not, the author does not have any peers.
William Abbott says:
Back in the day, I was taking a chemistry course at a college and was to forced to read that book. We were then tasked with writing a paper about what to do. I did a lot of research and found the Army had isolated a yeast that could breakdown cellulose into ferment-able sugars. I calculated the amount of energy that could be obtained by fermenting our cellulose waste. I got the only F ever in my studies. I learned that with these people it is not about technological solutions, but deprivation. By the way I went on to graduate with honors from Johns Hopkins, in mechanical engineering.
I started reading this post about a “Terrifying new book” and thought … Really??? Being skeptical, I googled it myself and the first thing that came up was this 1977 book review by Steve Schneider, an actual climate scientist who thought The Climate Conspiracy was a mess. Excerpts from his review:
It has man of the trappings of an instant book. Since its āauthorā is āThe Impact Teamā, a group of 18 non-weather experts calling themselves reporters, writers, researchers, and āback-upā (whatever that means) people, they had to turn elsewhere for scientific credibility. They chose the wrong people….
Space doesnāt permit a detailed critique of the two CIA reports on climate … upon which the book leans so heavily for what it calls ātrue factsā. I must, however, mention that Professor Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin, whom the CIA and the Impact Team cite as the expert predicted most of the coming climatic disasters, has publicly repudiated much of the CIA reports; and they quote him as a principal source of specific climatic predictions.
After more about the book’s faults and mistakes (discredited publicly by many in the scientific community as sensationalist and technically innacurate … overstated cases shrieked out of instant books), Schneider concludes,
Instead of meeting its page one stated purpose: āto inform the public of the true facts about a topic ofter clouded by fiction, superstition, and alarmist misrepresentationā, The Weather Conspiracy leads the pack in clouding up further precisely what it is intended to clear.
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Schneider1977.pdf
Back then, Schneider was on the cooling wagon like many in academia then.
Here is Stephen Schneider discussing the book in Nature vol 270 22 December 1977
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Schneider1977.pdf
J Fischer says:
“And please ā the myth of a āglobal cooling scareā has long since been comprehensively debunked. There was no such thing. It was invented after the fact to try and discredit concerns about global warming.”
I lived through the 1970’s. The consensus at that time in the media and in academia was that we were headed toward an Ice Age due to coal and diesel particulates as well as aircraft-caused clouds. The only way to stop it was said to be elimination of our capitalist consumer economy and its dependency on fossil fuels.
It is the same thing now, just a new boogieman.
Global warming is so over. Gotta find a new problem to justify the “progressive” fight.
J Fischer says:
February 2, 2012 at 4:31 pm
And please ā the myth of a āglobal cooling scareā has long since been comprehensively debunked. There was no such thing. It was invented after the fact to try and discredit concerns about global warming.
==================
Sure, that planted Newsweek story from April 28, 1975 was the hardest piece to invent after the fact. But the PDFs are really convincing. Not to mention the book referenced here. Another excellent piece of after the fact invention.
Are your senses so fogged by your faith in AGW that you can’t see what is right under your nose?
Yep, I distinctly remember the big global cooling scare in the ’70s, that was the primary reason why I had difficulty believing Al Gore when he popped up a decade later. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Stephen Schneider was a contributor to this book.
Wish I could remember who it was lately that claimed the ENTIRE global cooling scare stemmed from a solitary Newsweek story………..
Do as I say not as I do to save yourselves (and make me rich in the process).
Re: Gneiss
You missed the following from Schneider’s review:
Not exactly the ringing condemnation you would have us believe. In fact it is clear that Schneider supports all the measures that this blog post is about. You will also note that at no point does Schneider claim that the danger isn’t cooling but warming.
Scott R writes,
“I lived through the 1970ā²s. The consensus at that time in the media and in academia was that we were headed toward an Ice Age due to coal and diesel particulates as well as aircraft-caused clouds.”
Many people lived through the 1970s, and perhaps you believed then there was a “consensus in academia,” but there wasn’t. That is an urban myth popular now as an argument against a scientific consensus that actually does exist.
Steve Schneider is a name often falsely claimed to be one of the scientists who suggested that an ice age was coming soon. Read his 1977 book review that I linked above, to find out what he really was saying. I’ll help, here’s another excerpt (emphasis added).
instead of pointing out that either scenario for climatic change [warming or cooling] could be troublesome since much of human activity, particularly agricultural, is tuned to the present climate, it insists on maintaining the shock effect of the dramatic (the subtitle reads āThe Coming of the New Ice Ageā) rather than the reality of the discipline; we just donāt know enough to chose definitively at this stage whether we are in for warming or cooling – or when.
According to the Mayans, the world ends in a few hours – so who cares about climate change?
I’m just pissed I’m going to miss my birthday. But then that was going to happen at some point in time.
Anthony, good post. A light hearted revelation / rememberance of the past hysteria.
Has me smiling.
In “The Coming Ice Age” no other than Stephen Schneider of “Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest” fame, was commenting on the threat of global cooling and his comments had more todo with social engineering than the global cooling event itself.
Russell C says:
“Wish I could remember who it was lately that claimed the ENTIRE global cooling scare stemmed from a solitary Newsweek storyā¦ā¦ā¦..”
Wasn’t it our friend Joel Shore? Or maybe Phil.?
thingadonta writes,
“I remember seeing Leonard Nimoy telling us an ice age could arrive within 200 years on one of the āIn Search of.. ā series, but I wouldnt describe Mr Spock (in real life that is) as a serious scientist.”
Or even an unserious scientist.
“Would be interesting to see a survey of such papers.”
Of course that’s been done (Peterson 2008). Here’s the USA Today report on the findings:
The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s ā frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds ā is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era.
The ’70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age.
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.
The study reports, “There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
“A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales.”
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2008-02-20-global-cooling_N.htm
The paper itself was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 2008.
Scott R says:
February 2, 2012 at 5:07 pm
“I lived through the 1970ā²s. The consensus at that time in the media and in academia was that we were headed toward an Ice Age due to coal and diesel particulates as well as aircraft-caused clouds. The only way to stop it was said to be elimination of our capitalist consumer economy and its dependency on fossil fuels.”
————————————————————^.^—————————–
Who are you going to believe: people who claim that never happened and was dreamed up by oil executives, or your lying memory?
It seems that it was a misunderstanding. A large number of high-profile publications and publishers decided there was an ice age coming because of free-markets and lack of central government oversight when in reality the scientific consensus was telling them (apparently) that the earth was warming dangerously due to free-markets and lack of central government oversight. Some of these media folk should explain to us how they became “educated” on the issue and when they realized that they were pushing the right cart down the wrong road.
About ten years ago, the print version of the Weekly World News had an article about an upcoming ice age. There was a sidebar on what “experts” recommend as a proactive response for the reader….
Move south and/or buy lots of sweaters!
I see there’s another ice age article on their online version…
http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/43321/scientists-predict-coming-ice-age/
but no relevant advice!
Oh, what to do?
William Abbott said:
February 2, 2012 at 3:43 pm
My son brought home the book, LIMITS TO GROWTH, from a library sale. Written in 1972 by the
āClub of Romeā
————————————–
āThe common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” – Club of Rome
(of which algore is a member)
He wrote his own book called the “Genesis strategy”: Climate and Global Survival by Stephen Henry Schneider and Lynne E. Mesirow (Paperback – Mar 1, 1977) It spends a good deal of time discussion famine due to weather etc.
Another similar book of the same genre was:
Climates of Hunger by Reid A. Bryson and Thomas J. Murray (Paperback – Jan 1, 1979)
These sort of books were very popular in the late 1970’s when it seemed every winter were reporting more and more severe winter weather in the north east such as this:
There were two back to back winters with these severe storms, January 28th 1977 and then just 2 days short of a year to the day later in 1978 a similar “storm of the century” blizzard hit.
http://www.ohiohistory.org/etcetera/exhibits/swio/pages/content/1977_blizzard.htm
then:
http://www.ohiohistory.org/etcetera/exhibits/swio/pages/content/1978_blizzard.htm
With news reports like these it was easy to sell books that played on severe weather and catastrophe. The storms were so severe and wide spread, that the national GDP dropped significantly from a 6%-7% rate of growth to -1% in the last quarter of 1977, the GDP only struggled to get to 3% in the first quarter of 1978. (source — http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/socasp/weather1/kocin.html)
Similar severe winter weather storms seemed to come every year during the 1970’s, Colorado had a very severe winter in both 1972 and 1973, January 10 ā January 12 1975, was also a year to remember in the north east.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Storm_of_1975
Larry
“The āsolutionsā prescribed to solve both Global Warming and the looming Ice Age are exactly the same.”
OMFG! You haven’t figured it out yet?
Don’t you get it. It’s a bunch of pacifist gone criminally insane, they’re trying to rob us all blind.
They’re not exactly gonna shoulder a rattling gun, going: hand over your money or your life Mister!
No, instead, they go: Don’t deny us all your money, or your children’s children’s leetle ones might be doomed. Alright do you get it! Hey, stop laughing! ā¦ Go’damnit, D E N I E R!
check out sydney temp, middle of summer, heater on, record floods in NSW and Queensland, bring on global warming
It’s been going on for even longer, as shown in Fire and Ice,
“Journalists have warned of climate change for (over) 100 years, but canāt decide whether we face an ice age or warming…”
Heavy snow has left at least 11,000 villagers cut off in remote areas of Serbia amid a European cold snap that has claimed more than 130 lives.
At least six people have died in Serbia, with emergency services expressing concern for the health of the sick and the elderly in particular.
Temperatures are below -30C (-22F) in parts of Europe and 63 people have died in Ukraine and 29 in Poland.
In Italy, weather experts say it is the coldest week for 27 years.
Emergency services in Serbia have described the situation, close to the country’s south-western borders with Kosovo and Montenegro, as very serious.
Carl Bussjaeger says:
February 2, 2012 at 3:08 pm
The fantastic Zombie is (I think) in the Bay Area of San Francisco. He/She/It has done many very well done photo essays exposing the craziness that is SanFran for a number of years, of all varieties. My being a fan of him/her/it goes back to the LittleGreenFootball days, when Charles Johnson was still sane. I heartily recommend scrolling through Zombie’s site for a view of the….people…that inhabit that area.
Many thanks to Zombie, and to Anthony for periodically showing us his/her/its works!
Roger;
Where’s Carnac when you need him??
LOL
Greg;
Frost:
Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 5:58 pm
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.
The study reports, āThere was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.”
Even better … isn’t it interesting that all the publicity was about the imminent ice age. Why was that? Put on your thinking cap and get back to us when you have it figured out.
Now, it makes sense now why Gore and others started claiming a consensus almost immediately. Also makes sense why there was an effort to control peer review. Could it be that they learned from their mistakes?
Let’s not forget Carl Sagan’s ongoing worries over “Nuclear Winter”. That was in the ’80’s, I think.
From my perspective the prospect of setting off a few nukes to raise some dust is a interesting feature to be modeled in the various IPCC general radiative and circulation ensembles. If it DOES start to get bad, do we have tools to tweak things back?
Climate Change Alarmism Timeline 1895-2009
http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/climate-change-alarmism-timelin/
150 Years of Global Warming and Cooling at the New York Times
http://newsbusters.org/node/11640
Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 4:55 pm
Ah, Dr. Schneider. We knew him well, especially for his note on managing hype, e.g. at http://www.c3headlines.com/global-warming-quotes-climate-change-quotes.html :
Apparently Schneider didn’t like Ross McKitrick, as documented in a Climategate Email, see http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/25/a-somewhat-late-response-to-schneider/
Scheider addresses the controversy – quite unconvincingly to my mind – in his book Science as a Contact Sport, page 214. Basically he defends exaggeration by noting that scientists are human beings who want to see the world become a better place.
Richard M writes,
“Put on your thinking cap and get back to us when you have it figured out.”
I apparently have a different learning style than most of you. Instead of posting sarcasm and conspiracy theories, I looked the book up and read Schneider’s 1977 review in Nature. I looked up Peterson’s 2008 BAMS study and read that too.
+1
I too lived in the 1970’s, graduating high school in the mid 70’s, and distinctly remember that the talk was a possible impending ice age. While there was literature that discussed the warming effects of CO2, it was seen mostly as academic because 1) it wasn’t happening and 2) it was test tube science in the day and hardly a mainstream scientific concern. Cold winters were happening and that reinforced the concern that an ice age was possible – like today, only opposite.
Those who claim the ice age scare was made up after the fact to cover up global warming are themselves making it up. They can spin what they want and fool younger readers but they’re not fooling those who lived through the 70’s.
[Mods – last post fell in the spam bin.]
More on Schneider from googling |schneider climate quote exaggerate site:wattsupwiththat.com|:
“I have cited many examples of recent climatic variability and repeated the warnings of several well-known climatologists that a cooling trend has set in-perhaps one akin to the Little Ice Age-and that climatic variability, which is the bane of reliable food production, can be expected to increase along with the cooling.” Stephen Schneider, The Genesis Strategy, (New York: Plenum Press, 1976), p. 90 http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/07/creating-an-agw-quotation-collection/#comment-675328
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/20/mcintyre-on-stephen-schneider/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/24/global-warmings-stephen-schneider-the-light-that-failed/
In 1981 Hansen was already telling the New York Times of 6 – 9F temp rises and 15-20 feet sea level rise in next century. As soon as the 1970s cooling was over, Schneider and Hansen pushed hard with the alarmism, against a background of disapproval from climate scientists still debating the net effect of human caused cooling (aerosol) and warming and all the complex uncertainties surrounding the assessment of these effects. In 1988 Hansen told congress he was 99% certain. These scientist alarmists only slowly won over the support of the environment movement during the course of the 1990s with alarmist rhetoric.
It was these scientists who used their apocalyptic scenarios to capture the attention of the environmentalists, not the other way around. And it was these scientists who first characterize all resistance as corrupt (Big Oil), anti-scientific, short-sighted, or ignorant. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/29/yale-to-greens-abandon-climate-change-focus-on-energy/#comment-355765
Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 7:07 pm
Well, keep reading. We’re not too impressed with Peterson either.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/22/ncdc-mr-watts-gave-a-well-reasoned-position/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/24/ncdc-writes-ghost-talking-points-rebuttal-to-surfacestations-project/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/29/mcintyre-on-the-ncdc-talking-points-memo/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/08/01/ncdc-changes-from-national-record-keeper-to-advocacy-group/
REPLY: I refer to Petersen as “patient zero”, since all surface temperature data in every database gets touched personally by him. – Anthony
J Fischer says:
ā the myth of a āglobal cooling scareā has long since been comprehensively debunked. There was no such thing. It was invented after the fact to try and discredit concerns about global warming.
OK, so what was in the journals of the time?
In 1971, Schneider and Rasool, who were then at NASA GISS, and with the help of their esteemed colleague James Hansen, published a paper in Science titled: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/173/3992/138.abstract (you gotta pay to read the whole thing)
Their conclusion? Human aerosols (dust, soot) will outweigh the carbon dioxide, and “If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”
The last five words are worth repeating…
…. sufficient to trigger an ice age.
Zombie had a great self-comment on his/her blog page.
“26. Zombie My prediction:
The next crisis will be called āClimate Stagnation,ā characterized by weather patterns that (gasp!) stay the same. Horrors!
With Climate Stagnation, ecosystems never change, so evolution canāt proceed, leading to āgenetic cul-de-sacsā; weather never varies over time, so you can never plant new types of vegetables in your garden and never take vacations in formerly inhospitable climes; and most distressingly of all, itās really boring.
In order to combat Climate Stagnation, everybody must hand all their cash to someone with a darker skin tone than themselves, and beg for absolution by not bathing, living in a cave, and only eating kelp and algae.”
LOL
So it seems from the 1971 article in the journal Nature that Schneider was not always so certain about the inevitability of AGW. The abstract does not indicate whether he thinks it is warming or cooling that is most likely though.
I would like to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels because I think they are as much a mug’s game as alarmism.
Cleaner air is of course a by-product of this, but whether burning oil defers the next ice age or speeds the Big Melt is not of immediate concern to me. A failure to develop a diversified energy economy is.
Rob R says:
So it seems from the 1971 article in the journal Nature that Schneider was not always so certain about the inevitability of AGW. The abstract does not indicate whether he thinks it is warming or cooling that is most likely though.
The conclusion… “sufficient to trigger an ice age” … gives a strong hint of what he thought was most likely. Essentailly, Schneider and Rasool figure that CO2 has a logarithmic effect, i.e, going from 400 ppm to 500 has a smaller incremental effect than going from 300 to 400. Or, to say, the CO2 effect levels off. There’s a chart in the full paper that has a 0.5C rise due to doubling CO2 to 600 ppm, and a small H2O feedback will raise that to 0.6C. Frankly, I find these numbers much more reasonable that later values cranked out by super computers programmed by warmers.
But a doubling of dust/soot in the atmosphere would COOL the planet by 2 degrees, and tripling the dust cools by 4 degrees, so aerosol cooling is exponential.
So he says if we double both CO2 and dust/soot, there’s a net COOLING of 1.5 degrees.
Here’s the final paragraph from the full article…
“However, it is projected that man’s potential to pollute will increase six- to eightfold in the next 50 years. If this increased rate of injection of particulate matter in the atmosphere should raise the present global background opacity by a factor of 4, our calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5Ā°K. Such a large decrease in the average surface temperature of Earth, sustained over a period of few years, is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”
The very last sentence is the most reasonable, but sadly quite wrong….
“However, by that time (2021), nuclear power may have largely replaced fossil fuels as a means of energy production.”
So, these guys made more sense 40 years ago than they do now.
Anyone else old enough to remember “Galloping Glaciers” and other climate alarmism from the 1970s? Maybe they think we all went senile and can’t remember that far back. What’s old is new again.
Stay warm / cool depending on your situation and healthy in all cases.
Hi, zombie, its me the one who knows.
Be cool.
Alarmism about chemicals poisoning the earth and our need to live as cavemen were similar but never broke the sarcasm barrier to be taken seriously.
Word is that the next time the carbon club meets the title of the meeting will include Sustainability. Climate and warming will be absent from the title, the agenda and the meeting.
Be aware that Sustainability requires the taxation of carbon dioxide, and sending money to large landowners, bankers and third world dictators.
Wait for it, is will be here in less than 3 months.
Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 4:55 pm
“I started reading this post about a āTerrifying new bookā and thought ā¦ Really??? Being skeptical, I googled it myself and the first thing that came up was this 1977 book review by Steve Schneider, an actual climate scientist who thought The Climate Conspiracy was a mess. ”
Well, it’s no wonder that Schneider would deride a book that outlays his battle plan. He was the driving force of the IPCC for years and kept all the lesser scientists in line.
1975 `Endangered Atmosphere’
Conference: Where the Global
Warming Hoax Was Born
Mead, Schneider, Holdren and Lovelock
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/highlights/Fall_2007.html
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/GWHoaxBorn.pdf
Schneider, Ehrlich, his wife and Holdren were from Stanford.
Schneider was part of the original Malthusian movement that started the CO2 scare, so he would have been critical of a book that outlines his battle plan.
http://inthesenewtimes.com/2009/11/29/1975-endangered-atmosphere-conference-where-the-global-warming-hoax-was-born/
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2010/03/aha.html
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2010/04/global-warming-origin-of-crime.html
Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 7:07 pm
“I apparently have a different learning style than most of you. Instead of posting sarcasm and conspiracy theories, I looked the book up and read Schneiderās 1977 review in Nature. I looked up Petersonās 2008 BAMS study and read that too.”
Oh, you’re a superior being! Next you will read the links about the Endangered Atmosphere Conference I posted; superior beings are like that; they’re reading all of that stuff… unfortunately, what they did there in 1975 was CONSPIRE… hope your superior intellect can handle that.
I used to own a copy of that book. It amused me greatly to refer to it when the global warming hysteria started.
Brutal cold snap here (the Balkans). Freezing temperatures (-10 to -15 Ā°C) for weeks and now it started snowing again! No end in sight. More people will die in the remote regions.
AT KEN MEVTHEN: The ānot so newā book is interesting in that it illuminates the scare-mongering teams and the political agenda, but why is it not as obvious to those who hold the purse strings on public purses? They cannot all be gullible? But they will go along with itā¦.if the āconcensusā of voters think its true. Keep getting the message out!
A large part of why those who hold the public purse strings go along with the scam is that they were planning to cash in themselves. Liberal pols from the president on down were invested in the carbon trading scheme.
ā¢ Thereās very little we can do to stop it at this late stage, but we might be able to save ourselves if we immediately take these necessary and drastic steps:
– Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;
– Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;
– Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;
– Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;
– In general embrace all environmental causes
Message to author:
“And how would you know?”
Ā”Hasta la victoria siempre!
This probably invokes a corollary of Godwin’s law (lore?), sorry.
SSDD.
Gneiss says:
February 2, 2012 at 7:07 pm
[Richard M writes,
āPut on your thinking cap and get back to us when you have it figured out.ā]
I apparently have a different learning style than most of you. Instead of posting sarcasm and conspiracy theories, I looked the book up and read Schneiderās 1977 review in Nature. I looked up Petersonās 2008 BAMS study and read that too.
Evidently your “different learning style” forgot to include the ClimateGate emails. There is no doubt what I stated is true. All you have to do is read their own words. Trying to invoke the “conspiracy theory” put down doesn’t work when these people use terms like “the cause”.
The facts are all there. You can ignore them or you can accept them. What will it be? Religion or science?
And in typical Communist fashion, when in disagreement with someone, simply repress and deny them. Don’t bother with facts or argument, they don’t matter. Everyone here seem to remember the Ice Age scare, there are entire books written about it, but yet you claim it was a fruad and simply did not exist! Unlike Stalin you don’t have the power to airbrush out the parts of history you do not approve of.
—
“And please ā the myth of a āglobal cooling scareā has long since been comprehensively debunked. There was no such thing. It was invented after the fact to try and discredit concerns about global warming.”
J Fischer says:
āAnd please ā the myth of a āglobal cooling scareā has long since been comprehensively debunked. There was no such thing. It was invented after the fact to try and discredit concerns about global warming.ā
Are you serious? My June 1975 Stuyvesant HS senior physics project was a plot of UK temps 1870(or so?) – 1972 and a projection of future temps and growing season. The database I used? The Royal gardeners at Windsor castle, Baltmoral, and one other royal estate. Staring with Victoria/Albert, the royal estate gardeners kept daily records of temps, rain and growing season cycles. All available at the NY Public library main beanch. Plotting that data with graph paper and straight edge, and using a simple — very simple– 12th grader’s algorithm I plotted temps until 2000. OK I was wrong, I projected temps being significant colder in 2000 than 1972. Hey– at least I wasn’t taxpayer funded!! Point is that my paper included as source material all the Global Cooling stuff in the media and science publications. Cooling was in vogue with many ‘malthusians’ because the shortened growing season was consistent with the Club of Rome scarcity/starvation scare. But cooling had NO VILLAIN! The coolists only cited natural variation. Where’s the research funding in that!! So the alarmists found Mauna Loa CO2 levels, some dubious physics and AGW was born. Read some history Fischer.
Alchemy says:
February 2, 2012 at 9:06 pm
I would like to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels because I think they are as much a mugās game as alarmism.
———————-
How so? and what’s the alternative?
Yep, I distinctly remember the big global cooling scare in the ā70s, that was the primary reason why I had difficulty believing Al Gore when he popped up a decade later. Wouldnāt surprise me in the least if Stephen Schneider was a contributor to this book.
Wish I could remember who it was lately that claimed the ENTIRE global cooling scare stemmed from a solitary Newsweek storyā¦ā¦ā¦..
No, it extended well back into the 60’s. I recall reading articles on the coming ice age in 1969, and it wasn’t quite new then, although it attracted the most attention in refereed publications a bit later than it appeared in less rigorous media:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
has references. I can’t remember the magazine where I first read about it, though — I don’t think it was Playboy or Popular Science — although I can still visualize the cover page and content of the article. It knocked around in stuff like this for a few years before “big boys” wrote articles and books and so on and it went mainstream.
Remember, global temperatures plunged in the early 60’s and remained low through the early 70’s, an inconvenient truth that the warmists are trying to write out of history by carefully washing and rinsing and kneading and baking the actual data. As the book excerpts say, arctic and antarctic ice increased by 10% in a single year back there, and of course the book is quite right about the high albedo of ice and its negative feedback (somewhat ameliorated because the polar regions aren’t major absorbers in the heat budget anyway).
One day, possibly in saner times, the world will look back at all this and Ph.D. dissertations will be written on the entire cycle as a nearly perfect example of cognitive dissonance, a.k.a. “adaptive preference formation”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Here’s wikipedia’s take on the seminal study in which the term was coined (by Festinger):
Perhaps the most famous case in the early study of cognitive dissonance was described by Leon Festinger and others in the book When Prophecy Fails.[5] The authors infiltrated a religious group that was expecting the imminent end of the world on a certain date. When that date passed without the world ending, the movement did not disband. Instead, the group came to believe that they had been spared in order to spread their teachings to others, a justification that resolved the conflict between their previous expectations and reality.
Does that sound at all familiar? End of the world prophecy, prophecy fails, massive cognitive dissonance, followed by a smooth transition to another world-ending prophecy so that they were right after all, in a way, in a way that they quickly make the only way that matters. Curiously, in the throes of CD people actually become more committed to their beliefs when presented with contradictory evidence, not less. I mean, in the Gospels Jesus is reported as saying, quite clearly, that he would return in the lifetime of at least some of his followers to bring God’s Kingdom to earth. This wasn’t supposed to happen thousands of years later, it was supposed to happen right away. I’m not talking about Revelations, I’m talking about the straight up supposed biographers, in the official if somewhat contradictory biography.
Obviously, this didn’t happen. Has that stopped Christianity? Has it stopped apocalyptic Christian Zionists? Did it stop Jehovah’s Witnesses, an entire cult devoted to an end of the world prophecy that failed to happen — twice?
Something in our brains is wired to favor this sort of anti-reasoned behavior, to a greater or lesser extent, in nearly all of us. A very few philosophies — scientific rationalism on the epistemological side, Buddhism on the ethical side — are more or less devoted to overcoming our inclination toward CD as a means of justifying irrational or unethical behavior by ruthlessly stripping away our self-imposed blinders, by using skepticism and the power of doubt to winnow the better, consistent ideas out from the worse, inconsistent ideas. CD is present on this site — never doubt it — as much as it is elsewhere in the world. CD is potentially present wherever and whenever a human transforms a “question” into a “cause”.
In a way, CD is a form of mental crutch. It permits us to avoid massive reorganizations of our worldview when we are presented with direct experiential evidence that our worldview is wrong. It is so very difficult to change the actual facts, so much easier to change our perceptions of those facts. Amazingly, we have a well-developed ability to selectively blind ourselves to contradictions, to live with an inconsistent system of beliefs. We can actually strengthen our beliefs in one part of our worldview that we thing we “understand” and that seems to hold together (if you don’t examine it too closely) in direct response to evidence that is is incorrect or inconsistent around the edges. In other threads on list, there are people who are prepared to throw out the laws of thermodynamics rather than confront the fact that they contradict some of their cherished core beliefs. Pure CD.
Zombie has the right of it, although it doesn’t really require a “conspiracy” to make the curious paradox he describes happen. In the United States, the so-called “Tea Party” has emerged as a lunatic fringe, one that actually still inherits institutionalized CD in the form of religious extremism from those failed prophecies of so long ago. Nobody “planned” this — it simply served as a nucleation of unsane memes of a certain sort that have knocked around in the population forever. Similarly, there is an as-yet unnamed lunatic fringe that we might call the “Tree Party” that is just as unsane and cognitively dissonant, nucleated around a hodge-podge of disconnected beliefs.
The litany of “remedies” that Zombie recites are some — but not all — of the core memes that are crudely shared by the Tree Party. The Sierra Club doesn’t want drilling or pipelines in Alaska or running down from Canada. The reasons for holding this position are diverse among its members — protecting wildlife from environmental disruption, concern about the impact of spills, concern that oil companies already have enough money that they exert tremendous political influence in our bizarre system of electing our government, where whoever raises the most money often wins, so that the real election takes place long before election day with cash-rich corporate entities dominating the “vote”. Note well, all of these are perfectly reasonable concerns. Wildlife is worth protecting as we have well-documented examples of driving species to extinction and the evolved genes of the world are a form of natural wealth. Oil spills are ugly and expensive and all too likely in a world where work is done by the lowest bidder (who has to cut costs to the bone to deliver on their low bid). And who isn’t aware of the eternal problem of the excessive influence of the very wealthy on political decision making — it’s an everyday adage: “Money is Power”.
The really interesting thing happens when these reasonable concerns become obsessions, become “causes”. The causes involved start to overlap and merge. CAGW (if true) would absolutely be a terrible thing, I think we can agree. So would an asteroid falling into the Indian Ocean. So would a gamma ray burst. So would an Ice Age. Note well that all of these are just “bets”, mostly bets we have no choice but to take, except for the “A” in CAGW. That’s a very important A, the same A that people managed to insert into the Global Cooling scare. Note well that religious beliefs are based on the idea that humans can influence the outcome of bets like this by “right action”. Pray to Jesus, and he will help you win the lottery or cure your cancer, even though the odds of either one are solidly against you. The “A” allows these concerns to become a religion, because they provide the illusion of control.
But now observe the synthesis. I love wildlife, think oil companies left to their own devices are all too likely to do things sloppily enough to create a mess I’ll ultimately have to pay to clean up (who do you think really pays for things like the Gulf Oil Spill?), and do indeed think that multinational oil companies function as global shadow governments that wield the kind of political power that only hundreds of billions of dollars can buy. The entire war in Iraq was arguably bought and paid for by oil money. Somebody comes along and points out that CAGW threatens wildlife, will create a huge mess that I might have to pay for, and besides, all of that oil is a political problem that threatens my freedom and the worth of my vote!
Suddenly my interest in assessing the actual probability of CAGW goes way down. Screw inconvenient truth, it becomes a convenient fiction, even for somebody that isn’t horribly unreasonable.
This becomes a link between my particular “Tree Party” spectrum of beliefs and the beliefs of Luddite neo-Jeffersonians, who dislike modern society altogether, since the remedies overlap their prior belief. It becomes a link to frustrated neo-Communists, who oppose corporations altogether quite independent of their supposed political power and who are still smarting (from the point of view of CD) from the global collapse of communism. It becomes a link to pure ethicists who do, quite reasonably, wish for the enormous inequity in the distribution of the world’s wealth and freedom to be reduced, and who are reasoning (whether or not it is justified to do so) that we are resource constrained so that the only way to increase the wealth of others is to become less wealthy ourselves. CAGW has nothing to do with this problem, of course, but one of the absolutely brilliant moves of the people who are pushing this agenda was to link them, the birth of the IPCC.
Suddenly the Tree Party has become a vast global network of humans, each pursuing a possibly narrow single agenda — or narrow cluster of agendas — but who have a clearly defined overlap, unified by CAGW. As long as CAGW — or CAGC, for that matter, or Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Pollution (CAGP) or any other CAG-fill-in-the-letter-of-your-choice — exists, CD will prevent people with the right spectrum of overlapping agendas from looking at it too closely, because it is such a convenient fiction.
The really sad thing about this is that it has been such a powerful link that it has long since corrupted the science. Scientists are human, and often have at least some of the beliefs in the spectrum I partially explore above. I certainly do. Our tendencies towards cognitive dissonant behavior and mental reworking of our Universe don’t magically go away when you get a Ph.D. Indeed, confirmation bias is the single greatest well-documented problem in science today, and not just climate science. It is even more prevalent, and arguably much worse in its impact, in medical “science”, for example. Scarcely a week goes by without yet another “scandal” coming to light where some poor sap with tenure at stake bent the data that fuelled the publications that got him or her tenure, or a publication that directly contradicts the “valid” conclusions of an earlier study. Because nobody understands statistics — not even most scientists understand statistics — it is all too easy to publish crap when one is really trying hard not to.
The moral of the story is simple. Whenever you hear the magic trifecta of terms “Catastrophe”, “Global”, and “Anthropogenic” (where the latter is any variant of “it is our fault/under out control, but only if we do…”), put your hands on your wallet and back slowly out of the room! Time for extreme skepticism. Since this happens routinely in every church, synagogue, mosque, or temple on Earth, you can start there. Only when you are safely away from it, far from the influence and arguments of glassy-eyed CD-contagious True Believers can you even think about objectively assessing the facts. Pascal’s Wager will be dangled in your face a thousand times if you stay, and this will sooner or later corrupt your judgement, just as it did Pascal’s. Sure the probability of disaster is small, but the asserted cost of disaster can be inflated without bound, so that no measures taken to avoid or further reduce this small probability can be too expensive.
Our real hope is that most people — I truly believe — are not idiots. Sure, one has to worry about Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons, because people are often ass-holes and will abuse the hell out of the commons if measures aren’t taken to regulate it (look at any roadside in the country for evidence — every McDonalds cup on the side of the road equates to an individual act of ass-holery on the part of an actual human being). But the same inclination to pursue personal interest that leads to dumping cups or trash on the roadway rather than carry it to a can also sooner or later leads people to do a reasonable cost-benefit analysis of the Pascalian wagers that they are constantly being offered. Jesus might send me straight to hell for littering, but overall, I bet he either doesn’t really exist or that if he exists he won’t condemn me to an eternity of horrific pain if I throw my freshly emptied beer can out of the window of my car to reduce the risk of being busted for driving under the influence.
The simplest way to proceed in the context of the current discussion is to snip the “C” off of the CAGW scenario. That’s well underway, with January UAH lower troposphere temperatures solidly under the 32 year running mean, and the trend solidly downward (although probably not “meaningfully” so, see nobody understands statistics). Overall, R-squared for the UAH-LTT data is visibly a very small number (statistically indistinguishable statistically from no trend at all), doubly so if one includes error bars on all of the data points, something that climate scientists seem allergic to doing (perhaps because they would be so large compared to the variation of the data).
Working on the “A” is also not unreasonable, as long as one doesn’t make the error of trying to completely erase it. As I’ve posted long and hard elsewhere, and will return to soon, there is no doubt whatsoever that the GHG-GHE is a factor in the dynamic flow of energy into and out of the Earth, one that raises lower troposphere and surface temperatures compared to what they would be (on average) in a GHG-free atmosphere. There is direct IR-spectroscopic evidence for it. However, very little beyond that fact is certain, this is not settled science, and hence the entire dynamic mechanism of the Earth’s heating and cooling is correctly open to the process of scientific enquiry, all the more so when models that predict catastrophe appear to be failing, when they have little predictive skill either forward or backward in time.
In the meantime, be assured. There will always be a CAG-X out there to propose Pascal’s Wager on, and there will always be overlap between X and some spectrum of people who believe passionately in some cause the remedies for X would advance. This not only isn’t finished, it will never be finished, not until humans actually evolve away from it, memetically if not genetically.
rgb
J Fischer says:
February 2, 2012 at 4:31 pm
“And please ā the myth of a āglobal cooling scareā has long since been comprehensively debunked. There was no such thing. It was invented after the fact to try and discredit concerns about global warming.”
_______________________
That is a totally untrue statement. Wishing it were so doesn’t make your statement true. All the Lefty sites and blogs made a big effort a couple of years ago to “debunk” the claim that there was any sort of widespread fear- mongering about “Global Cooling” in the 70’s, but they were dishonest in their efforts, just as YOU are in yours.
When books and TV series and numerous “scientific” efforts of the time are obviously linked above and you still make that claim, then you expose yourself as one who is not interested in the truth.
Nigel S says:
February 3, 2012 at 3:30 am
“Ā”Hasta la victoria siempre!
This probably invokes a corollary of Godwinās law (lore?), sorry.”
Nope. Not for leftisms.
WUWT:
This is being used by some alarmists to support their AGW dogma.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120201181218.htm
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeah, we invented a time machine and we went back in time to plant some articles on selected magazines and journals.
/sarc
One of the many themes of idiocy championed by the AGW political movement is the idea of a “rich West” and the poor rest-of-world.
This short video presentation by Hans Rosling:
is a very needed antidote to this obsolete idea that the white-skinned West somehow are an economic master-race who need political doctrines such as AGW to self-flaggelate their moral guilt for being so much richer and better off than everyone else. Its simply not true any more.
WAKE UP to the fact that there is no “West”. There is no north-south. In fact the “West” has had to go fatally into debt just to sustain our myth of superiority and now it is all falling apart.
We have reading comprehension issues, don’t we? The point of this wasn’t whether the global cooling scare was a massive consensus, a minor fad, or one guy. They point was (if you actually read), that the policy recommendation was exactly identical to the policy recommendation for every other enviro craze, which is to choose poverty. Why is self-selected poverty the answer regardless of what the question is?
You should be embarrassed that you presented that book. Full stop.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/02/terrifying-new-book-about-climate-change/#comment-883084
“The Weather Conspiracyā could really retard the efforts of those who seek to persuade society to anticipate and then hedge against the possibility of future climate-induced catastrophe ā a goal that seems common to me and the Impact Team”
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/3213/Dont-Miss-it-Climate-Depots-Factsheet-on-1970s-Coming-Ice-Age-Claims
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Try reading the comments here with that couplet in mind.
REPLY: And at the same time, read the comments on “Stoat – taking science by the throat” too. – Anthony
To a Mouse (William) Robert Burns.
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murdering pattle.
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An’ fellow mortal!
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
‘S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t.
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld.
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
From William M. Connolley on February 3, 2012 at 3:14 pm:
For me, I read about the passionate intensity of your Wikipedia editing and authoring to see the evidence of that couplet.
Justa Joe says:
How so? and whatās the alternative?
Fossil fuels are a mug’s game because the supply is so easily manipulated irrespective of the demand, and the extraction of fuels at the current rate, and in the current and future places, is problematic at best.
As we decided we could have money in the absence of a gold standard (and I know that remains contentious), we should have multiple means of storing and transporting energy (which is what oil is in chemical form) in order to ensure our future energy security as individuals and societally.
Examples are many: Iceland’s geothermal plants make energy lemonade from the lemon of living on top of a volcano-ridden rift in the Earth’s crust. Perhaps those foreclosed Phoenix suburbs could be covered in solar-thermal plants. Tidal bores? I see underwater Niagara Falls times one hundred.
The key is the embracing of diversification. Not all “alternative energy” sources make economic or even environmental sense, but many do, much of the time. Burning oil is easy, and even if we come to learn that more carbon is keeping us from a fresh round of glaciations, fossil fuels are arguably finite, and provably destructive should we choose to extract them in increasingly difficult places, like the deep ocean or the Arctic seas.
So the way to game the game? Add more players.
Alchemy says:
February 3, 2012 at 8:43 pm
“Fossil fuels are a mugās game because the supply is so easily manipulated irrespective of the demand,”
“fossil fuels are arguably finite, and provably destructive should we choose to extract them in increasingly difficult places”
Coal is a fossil fuel. Known reserves last for hundreds of years. All the other energy players want to abolish coal because it’s so cheap it’s wrecking their profits. It’s not difficult to extract. We don’t get it from politically instable regions.
William M. Connolley says:
February 3, 2012 at 3:14 pm
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Well, we know that you think of your point of view as being the NPOV.
Zombie … first let me say that you are my hero ! Your documentary photography of the sad, pathetic, underbelly of leftist movements are eloquent. So sad that the media sanitizes these movements, making them acceptable for family viewing.
Your characterization of the AGW movement as a call for the mass suicide of civilization is spot-on. This fanaticism reminds me of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple (a group embraced by leftist politicians). Al Gore, M.Mann, et.al. remind me of Jim Jones … a self-ordained preacher of doom, gloom, and paranoia. The end result of AGW’s assault on society is indeed mass suicide, by kool aid. The kool aid of Junk Science.
kenji says:
February 4, 2012 at 12:27 pm
Ye Gods! First Kenji Watts joined the Union of Concerned Scientists, and now he’s posting on Anthony’s blog!
Hey Anthony, aren’t you proud of your kid? Heck, most of us didn’t think he could even find the internet! š
William Abbott: My son brought home the book, LIMITS TO GROWTH, from a library sale.
JF: That book sold 10,000,000 copies, I wonder where the other 9,999,999 went? In the bin?
Truthseeker: Isnāt scanning pages from the book and posting them on a web page a breach of copyright?
JF:I guess the publisher could try and sue Zombie. But why bother, too hard.
Al Gore says āI think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, theyāre almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat. That demeans them a little bit, but it’s not that far off.
Interesting to know the furnace was also heated seven times more- Read the Scripture Daniel 3:19, and Isaiah 30:26 shares the light of the sun shall be sevenfold.
Isaiah 30:26
(Moreover the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun)
(and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold)
(as the light of seven days, in the day that the LORD bindeth up the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wound)
Read More: The End Of The World
http://www.raptureprophecy.net/the-end-of-the-world
J Fischer @ February 2, 2012 at 4:31 pm
says:
“Ah good, so we once again confirm that your oft-proclaimed dislike of people not sharing their full name with everyone here extends only to those who you disagree with.
And please ā the myth of a āglobal cooling scareā has long since been comprehensively debunked….”
Nice try but neither snipes work. Many of us are old enough to have heard the global cooling scare with our own ears.
Anthony gives his reasons and acknowledges the author instead of just stealing the idea and writing an article that parallels this one.
Zombie wrote: “the Alarmists will go into a huddle and emerge with a new crisis scenario so horrifying and immediate that something must be done NOW!”
Andrew30 spotted “new crisis scenario”: “Sustainability requires the taxation of carbon dioxide, and sending money to large landowners, bankers and third world dictators.”
Ehrlich, P.R., and A.H. Ehrlich. āThe Population Bomb Revisited.ā The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1, no. 3 (2009): 63ā71. http://www.ejsd.org/docs/The_Population_Bomb_Revisited.pdf
Page 68: “On the population side, it is clear that avoiding collapse would be a lot easier if humanity could entrain a gradual population decline toward an optimal number. Our groupās analysis of what that optimum population size might be like comes up with 1.5 to 2 billion, less than one third of what it is today. We attempted to find a number that would maximize human options ā enough people to have large, exciting cities and still maintain substantial tracts of wilderness for the enjoyment of outdoors enthusiasts and hermits (Daily et al. 1994). Even more important would be the ability to maintain sustainable agricultural systems and the crucial life support services from natural ecosystems that humanity is so dependent upon. But too many people, especially those in positions of power, remain blissfully unaware of that dependence.”
As you see above, the idea is not new. However, politicians of a certain stripe have begun to push “sustainable” as a policy goal. Czar Holdren is associated with Ehrlich.
In the long run (see Keynes), nothing is forever sustainable. Not the earth, nor the sun itself, give or take five billion years.