Alarmism or Not? Joe Romm and the 'Crying Wolf' Dilemma

Guest post by Robert Bradley Jr. of Master Resource 

“This notion that the environmental movement — or any other major play in the media landscape — is pushing non-stop apocalyptic messages like a broken record is one I debunked ….”

– Joe Romm, April 29, 2012

“CONCLUSION: Unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases threaten multiple catastrophes, any one of which justifies action. Together, they represent the gravest threat to humanity imaginable.”

– Joe Romm, November 15, 2010

“Now that [James Lovelock] has dialed back his doomism — alarmism is a wholly inadequate word for Lovelock’s (former) brand of unjustified hopelessness.”

– Joe Romm, April 23, 2012

“… the alarmists have ‘won the day’ scientifically.”

– Joe Romm, January 11, 2012

Confused? Even dizzy? It is not your fault.

The alarmists’ alarmist Joe Romm is trying to soften a bit to have it both ways. But if Obama is a new oilman, just about anything is possible in this election season where the Hard Left is running to the middle on climate alarmism and energy policy.

Obama’s Energy Surprise

President Obama became an ‘oil man’ in Cushing, Oklahoma on March 22, 2012–and an all-of-the-above energy man too. Remember this?

I’ve come to Cushing, an oil town — (applause) — because producing more oil and gas here at home has been, and will continue to be, a critical part of an all-of-the-above energy strategy. (Applause)

Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. (Applause.) That’s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.

So we are drilling all over the place — right now….”

It was Obama’s Worst Speech Ever, fussed Romm at Climate Progress.

Romm on Lovelock

But now it is Joe Romm, already having been scaled back at Climate Progress, who is trying to nuance himself as … the the non-catastrophic catastrophist.

Here is his post from April 23 in response to the news that a famous scientist James Lovelock was backing away from climate alarmism, a shift that was noted across the blogosphere.

James Lovelock Finally Walks Back His Absurd Doomism, But He Still Doesn’t Follow Climate Science

By Joe Rommon Apr 23, 2012 at 7:10 pm

Famed scientist James Lovelock has always been in a category of one when it comes to global warming. See for instance my June 2009 post, “Lovelock still makes me look like Paula Abdul, warns climate war could kill nearly all of us, leaving survivors in the Stone Age.” That’s mostly because he doesn’t follow the scientific literature.

Now that he has dialed back his doomism — alarmism is a wholly inadequate word for Lovelock’s (former) brand of unjustified hopelessness — the media and the deniers are just so excited….

Doomism, Inc.: Lovins, Holdren, Ehrlich, etc.

Romm then takes Lovelock to task:

Memo to Lovelock: Gore never asserted billions would die or anything close to what you’ve been saying. And unlike you, he always believed — and still does — that it’s not too late. So if you finally admitted you were wrong, that’s awesome, but don’t try to claim you were just saying what others were. You weren’t. Not even close.

Well, those who have been following Dr. Romm for years can call this ‘the kettle calling the pot black’.

Romm’s many ‘stunner’ or ‘stunning‘ news posts talk about how anthropogenic climate-change was worse than thought. He has surrendered to a ”hellish vision” of the world under business-as-usual. He also admits to being too optimistic in the past–and that climate change is worse than he previously thought (which was pretty darn bad). And this Rommdoomism:

Warming of 7F is certainly not the worst-case in the scientific literature (see M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F “” with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F and “Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year “” and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!“).

Off camera, he seems worse. In one private email he called me a ‘sociopath’ for my labors questioning climate alarm and related activist energy policy. (James Hansen got a cc of the email as well, and Joe has never apologized to me for his resort to what the Left calls hate speech.)

Now if a new leaf has been turned over at Climate Progress, maybe Dr. Romm can evaluate these quotations from these heavyweights:

Amory Lovins (1975):

“Present energy policies however tacit and ill-constructed they may be, are quickly destroying the options that mankind, living and unborn, will need for millennia.”

John Holdren (1981):

“Too much fossil fuel means flirtation with a CO₂-induced climate change potentially catastrophic for world food production.”

Paul Ehrlich on John Holdren (1986):

“As University of California physicist John Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”

There are many, many more quotations from Romm’s intellectual brethren–the Climate Hawks as he calls them–that could be called out just as Romm did to Lovelock.

Will it be done in the cause of consistency and a challenge culture?

I wish.